Movies...confuse me...
Okay, so there are these three movies I continuously get mixed up:
The Fountain (Hugh Jackman and a Fountain of Youth)
The Illusionist (a magician tries to win the heart of royalty…I think)
The Prestige (Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale play rival magicians)
So, I was renting movies, and I decided on “The Prestige,” directed by Christopher Nolan, since I’m waited for The Dark Knight in 2008, and this has most of the same people.
Now, as the story went along, I loved how convoluted it is. Jackman’s character has just died, implicating his rival, Bale. Bale, in jail, is reading Jackman’s diary, which is an account of how he was pursuing Bale by reading Bale’s diary of his magical tricks, hoping to steal his secrets. Make sense?
The two of them are trying to perform a trick where the magician enters one door, and exits another. So most of the movie, you’re wondering, “well, what’s the trick?”
Allow me to diverge: pulling off a twist ending is hard, because if you give too few hints, it seems random and cheesy, while if you give too many hints, you guess the twist.
Okay, so Bale’s character has perfected this trick, right? And Jackman is obsessed with the secret. At first, Jackman cheats by using a cheap way of doing the trick: he uses a body double. And we’re wondering, “Well, how does Bale do it without a body double?”
Anyway, Jackman goes off to find Telsa, a scientist working with electricity (this is Victorian England), on the hint that he has helped Bale with the trick. And here’s where the shit gets weird:
Okay, so eventually we find out that Jackman is after a teleportation device. Like Star Trek or something. Impossible, right? Well, yeah, thy don’t get a teleportation machine, but…
Telsa, by accident, creates what amounts to a cloning device. In Victorian England.
Me: no way. No bloody way did science fiction just come in here.
(Addendum: apparently this stems from the fact that Telsa, in that time period, did indeed believe in the possibility of teleportation and a number of other things, only to be rejected by the current scientific community).
When Jackman does the trick, he has been creating a clone of himself to finish the trick, then killing the clone. Every night, he kills himself, hoping that he will be the one to kill, not be killed (because, after all, the clone is also him).
And Bale?
By comparison, he looks fairly mild. Throughout the movie, there’s been this running idea of him having two minds about everything. Sometimes he loves his wife, sometimes his mistress. Sometimes he’s a good husband, sometimes he’s not.
He is a twin.
Bale, the magician, and his prop guy are actually twins, but the second on stays disguised as the prop guy all the time (wait…no, they switch, but one of them is always the prop guy) so no one will ever find out he’s also using a body double for the trick. One of them loved the wife, the other, the mistress. And when one of them gets his fingers shot off…the other one chops his off to keep them identical.
Now, this second revelation comes before the cloning machine bit, but still…
WTF? Okay, maybe I could buy the twin thing, but…cloning???
I love the movie until this part, which just left me going WHAT. THE. HELL.
I was also able to watch A Streetcar named Desire, which depressed me. Then I remembered it was a Tennessee Williams, and it all made sense. Marlon Brando was surprisingly attractive. I mean, granted, in my mind, Marlon Brandon is primarily Superman’s father and The Godfather, so…Yeah, that’s depressing.
The Fountain (Hugh Jackman and a Fountain of Youth)
The Illusionist (a magician tries to win the heart of royalty…I think)
The Prestige (Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale play rival magicians)
So, I was renting movies, and I decided on “The Prestige,” directed by Christopher Nolan, since I’m waited for The Dark Knight in 2008, and this has most of the same people.
Now, as the story went along, I loved how convoluted it is. Jackman’s character has just died, implicating his rival, Bale. Bale, in jail, is reading Jackman’s diary, which is an account of how he was pursuing Bale by reading Bale’s diary of his magical tricks, hoping to steal his secrets. Make sense?
The two of them are trying to perform a trick where the magician enters one door, and exits another. So most of the movie, you’re wondering, “well, what’s the trick?”
Allow me to diverge: pulling off a twist ending is hard, because if you give too few hints, it seems random and cheesy, while if you give too many hints, you guess the twist.
Okay, so Bale’s character has perfected this trick, right? And Jackman is obsessed with the secret. At first, Jackman cheats by using a cheap way of doing the trick: he uses a body double. And we’re wondering, “Well, how does Bale do it without a body double?”
Anyway, Jackman goes off to find Telsa, a scientist working with electricity (this is Victorian England), on the hint that he has helped Bale with the trick. And here’s where the shit gets weird:
Okay, so eventually we find out that Jackman is after a teleportation device. Like Star Trek or something. Impossible, right? Well, yeah, thy don’t get a teleportation machine, but…
Telsa, by accident, creates what amounts to a cloning device. In Victorian England.
Me: no way. No bloody way did science fiction just come in here.
(Addendum: apparently this stems from the fact that Telsa, in that time period, did indeed believe in the possibility of teleportation and a number of other things, only to be rejected by the current scientific community).
When Jackman does the trick, he has been creating a clone of himself to finish the trick, then killing the clone. Every night, he kills himself, hoping that he will be the one to kill, not be killed (because, after all, the clone is also him).
And Bale?
By comparison, he looks fairly mild. Throughout the movie, there’s been this running idea of him having two minds about everything. Sometimes he loves his wife, sometimes his mistress. Sometimes he’s a good husband, sometimes he’s not.
He is a twin.
Bale, the magician, and his prop guy are actually twins, but the second on stays disguised as the prop guy all the time (wait…no, they switch, but one of them is always the prop guy) so no one will ever find out he’s also using a body double for the trick. One of them loved the wife, the other, the mistress. And when one of them gets his fingers shot off…the other one chops his off to keep them identical.
Now, this second revelation comes before the cloning machine bit, but still…
WTF? Okay, maybe I could buy the twin thing, but…cloning???
I love the movie until this part, which just left me going WHAT. THE. HELL.
I was also able to watch A Streetcar named Desire, which depressed me. Then I remembered it was a Tennessee Williams, and it all made sense. Marlon Brando was surprisingly attractive. I mean, granted, in my mind, Marlon Brandon is primarily Superman’s father and The Godfather, so…Yeah, that’s depressing.