Hi! Matt the marketing shill here. Jonnell (the girlfriend) received an E-Mail this morning offering free tickets to a screening of "The Illusionist" tonight. Since my only job for tonight was laundry, I quickly agreed to go. The movie is coming out this Friday.
The first interesting thing was they had a live "pre-show". They hired a magician, "Neil Tobin, Necromancer" to do a cute "guess the word in the book" trick with an audience volunteer. It was a fun little thing to see before the movie. He has a gig every Friday at the Excalibur nightclub called Supernatural Chicago. If you like magic shows, I'm guessing his show is pretty good.
Whatever, on to the movie. The Illusionist stars Edward Norton and Paul Giamatti as an illusionist and a police inspector, respectively, in turn of the century Vienna. Jessica Biel, played the love interest to Norton. Rufus Sewell played the bad guy, the prince of Vienna. Norton, Giamatti and Sewell were very good. Biel was the designated eye candy and really wasn't asked to act much, but she did just fine.
The visual effects were very good. Norton did a great job as the brooding illusionist. Giamatti was even better as an ethically conflicted policeman. Whoever thought up Norton's (CGI produced) magic tricks should get a bonus, they were excellent. Overall, it was a well made, good looking movie. For some reason, the people in charge of the screening put a bunch of roughly 12 year old kids behind us and the movie kept them mostly quiet, which is amazing for a non-action movie.
To me, this is a fall movie, not a late summer movie. It is too good to be a late summer movie. I hope it isn't lost underneath all of the hoopla over the release of "Snakes on a Plane".
