The Illusionist (No Spoilers)

I've always had a fascination with magic. As a kid I noodled around with those cheap magic kits, playing with the cups and balls and decks of cards, though I never had the dexterity or the patience to get really good at it.

When I lived in Manhattan, I used to go see Penn and Teller perform, and try to figure out how they did their tricks. The fun thing about their show is that they demonstrate how they do about one-third of the tricks, I could figure out another third, but the last third had me baffled. And it all worked.

Despite this, somehow I missed both The Illusionist and The Prestige in theaters, though I finally just caught up with The Illusionist on DVD. It does a lot of things very well, chiefly in its handling of the allure of magic -- both Paul Giamatti's and Rufus Sewell's characters are obsessed/intrigued by how magician Edward Norton does his tricks. Writer-director Neil Burger does a good job filtering a lot of the story through the perspective of Giamatti, a police inspector investigating Norton's character, whose awareness of the mysteries of what is happening and what isn't pretty closely mirrors the audience.

The tricks here are well-done as well, a string of intriguing illusions that both flesh out the story as well as driving it on certain levels; one waits in anticipation to see what the next trick will be.

The film isn't perfect. The actors' odd European accents are distracting at times, while Norton's accent ebbs and flows. Norton's character is also a bit too much of a cipher at the heart of the tale; there aren't enough real depths to his character. But given the nature of the story, this still sort of works; he's a magician, and we're not supposed to know all his secrets.

All-in-all, worth seeing.

There's also a contest for people to submit videos of magic tricks, if anyone has any ideas in that arena.