Olivia Wilde (l.) stars in «The Incredible Burt Wonderstone» with Steve Carell and Steve Buscemi (r., in character
as stage magicians Burt Wonderstone and Anton Marvelton).
As stage magicians and confidence men know, our brains have a tendency to «make up their minds before we do» — see things as we think they should be, rather than as they are.
Magic in the Moonlight stars Colin Firth
as a stage magician who sets out to prove that a young medium, played by Emma Stone, is a fake.
The answers lead the duo to a film historian (Michael Stuhlbarg), who has yet another sad story to tell — that of the filmmaker Georges Méliès, who sold everything after seeing a demonstration of Auguste and Louis Lumière's revolutionary invention of the motion picture camera for the chance to transfer his experience
as a stage magician to create visionary films.
Not exact matches
In one of the core texts that many modern
stage magicians read while in training, Professor Hoffmann's Modern Magic, the wand is described
as an ideal prop for distracting the eyes, for granting an excuse to close the hand and hide something within it, and to provide the illusion of having real magical power.
That was Peter Vincent, which Roddy McDowell played perfectly
as an aging horror TV host in the original, and here has been reimagined
as a Vegas
stage magician played by David Tennant.
Angier (Hugh Jackman) and Borden (Christian Bale) are aspiring
magicians as the film opens — apprentices, along with Angier's wife Julia (Piper Perabo), in some hack's tired
stage act.
Morgan Freeman's character talks
as if he is a
magician that is never off
stage,
as if he's always performing.
This was one of my most anticipated films of the year — Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale
as rival Victorian - era
stage magicians, with Scarlett Johansson caught between them and David Bowie
as Nikolas Tesla!
As magicians and their assistants prance around
stage, the music blares to amplify the excitement and drama.
In a 2005 review for artnet.com, Jerry Saltz described Burdin
as a «sort of traveling
magician - maniac - minstrel, [who] lives, makes art, and
stages performances in his van.»
Think of Pollock's «action painting»
as a performance, Rothko's canvases
as stage curtains or
magician's mirrors best viewed half a room away.
In his longest piece, 21 Grams (2010), which took him four years to produce, he shows a
magician performing on an empty
stage as men in top hats gather in an ominous town square.
To do so, he constructed a veritable «midcentury studio» using authentic equipment
as well
as actors to produce carefully
staged, black - and - white photographs that painstakingly emulate the period's obsession with drama, «caught - in - the - moment» crime - scenes, curious and exotic artifacts,
magicians, fashion, dance, gambling, and technology.
In the early 1970s, at age sixty, Randi moved from a career
as a
magician (his
stage name was the Amazing Randi) to a life focused on separating myth and illusion from reality
as a co-founder of the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal.