It’s commonplace to refer to the magic of movies, but, as arts, movies and magic have little in common. Movies ask us to suspend our disbelief. Magic courts our disbelief. Puzzling over how a movie did what it did is, at best, a subsidiary pleasure of watching a movie. Puzzling over how a magician does his tricks is more often than not the only pleasure of watching a magic show.
Magic, in the sense of a magician’s performance art, does not hold up well when transferred from stage to fictional film. An effect that is astonishing on stage becomes pedestrian on screen. (There’s a reason nearly every kind of celebrity in America has been in the movies, except magicians. We know how the tricks are done in movies.)
The trick, so to speak, that any good movie about magic must pull off is to create a reality so believable that we’re willing to buy into the magic. We need to be so engulfed in the film’s reality that we watch the magic tricks like the spectators in the film, not the spectators in the film’s audience. Like sports movies, movies about magic must be totally convincing just to be good.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by myownworstcritic 
