There are plenty of movies about two guys trying to outdo one another, but none quite like “The Prestige” (2006). Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman play a pair of magicians who duel to the bitter end. And I do mean bitter. And I do mean end. The first half is tedious and non-sequential, which is, as usual, more work than art (something filmmakers refuse to understand). Once the time sequence gets a little straighter, the pace picks up. False climaxes are layered with macabre worthy of Poe. And then you get blindsided with the oldest trick in the storyteller’s book.
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In “The Gift” (2015), Jason Bateman once again has a stick up his butt, except this time with a twist. (Sorry about that visual.) Speaking of which, there are several visuals you’ll feel sorry about – not that it’s a bad movie or anything, you’ll just maybe feel like you need a shower afterwards. So, like I said, Bateman has made a boatload of money over the past several years playing uptight, middle-aged middle managers. Same character, over and over and over, always in comedies. Except this is a psychological thriller, not a rom-com or a bro-com or a road movie.
On Halloween, I watched the creepy (not scary, creepy, and by creepy I mean ubercreepy) “Transcendence” (2014), a cinematic treatise on the moral struggle behind man’s quest to create artificial intelligence, starring Johnny Depp. (Side note: You know how pissed you get when tech support asks you if you’ve turned the machine off and turned it back on? OK, well, if your balky machine is designed to create an AI program capable of self-awareness and emotion while also scarily regenerating tissue, reanimating the dead and taking over the voices of others, that on/off thing actually works.) Like I said, ubercreepy.
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