In my backpack are three DVDs: Breaker Morant, Spy Game and The Bourne Supremacy. I didn't feel like watching any of them. Instead I watched two pay per view movies in my luxury hotel home away from home. The first was that miserable excreta called 'The Marine'. I thought I had seen every cliche, but they even saved one for the final scene. The second was the utterly brilliant 'The Prestige'. It goes one step further to making Ricky Jay my idol.
Without saying more than a bit, I confess that in my profession which is business intelligence, I find James Baldwin apt. He said that the cost of professional success is intimate knowledge of the corruption of the profession. Business Intelligence like all intelligence professions, traffics in truth, in fact versions of the truth. Over my career I have come to appreciate the arts of complexity, theatre, logic, credibility, integrity and their opposites. This is why I find Ricky Jay to be something of a patron saint.
He is in just about every great thriller of our age from 'House of Games' to 'Heist', and here in 'The Prestige', he appears off to the side. Yet you know something of his genius is contributing to the great turns and complexities of this film's plot.
I'm easily impressed by decent films. I can suspend disbelief and do so willingly. It's rather like my ability to sleep on airplanes. There are occasions when I slow down enough to be a bit baffled, but when that happens I blame it on poor craftsmanship. I enjoy a good surprise so I don't try to get ahead of the plot. The Prestige did play slightly clunkily with time and there were moments when I wasn't sure who was reading whose diary in what time period (there's a lot of that in this film), but in the end the revelations were fresh and dazzling. In fact, the film was made more delicious by my suspicions that certain deceptions were occurring which may not have been. I do get that way sometimes.
The Prestige does not disappoint. It is a thrilling mystery of the first order, and its secrets are delicious. They too go to the very last moment in the last scene. Unlike Travolta's 'Basic' however I didn't care about understanding the final deception. I was quite satisfied by the whole without that resolution... but maybe I'll come back to it.
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