The Prestige (Christopher Nolan, 2006)

[Jeff]

This one has jumped up near the top of my most anticipated list for 2006.

David Bowie Joining Nolan's Prestige
comingsoon.net
November 20, 2005

Rock star David Bowie (Labyrinth) is in talks to play inventor Nikola Tesla in The Prestige, a thriller from Batman Begins director Christopher Nolan, says The Hollywood Reporter.

Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale and Michael Caine also star in the story of rival magicians in early 20th century London. The Tesla character is based on the real-life Serbian-American who discovered the rotating magnetic field.

The script, on which Nolan is working, is based on Christopher Priest's 1996 novel and was adapted by Nolan's brother, Jonathan, who also wrote the short story on which Nolan's breakout movie, Memento, was based.

The movie is scheduled to shoot in January with a budget in the $40 million range, adds the trade. Disney will distribute the film domestically, and Warner Bros. internationally.

[Jeff]

According to Variety:

Scarlett Johansson has signed on for the lead female role in Christopher Nolan's The Prestige alongside Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, Michael Caine and David Bowie.

Could I have possibly been so drunk that I don't remember being hired as casting director for this movie?

[Antoine Doinel]

Trailer

I have to say, I really liked the trailer. If Nolan has proven anything with Batman Begins is that he can really steer mainstream fare into intriguing territory and this looks fantastic. My only gripe is Scarlett Johansson who looks awfully miscast here. What the hell is that accent she's using?

[lord_clyde]

Is Bowie in the trailer? I couldnt spot him.

[The Invunche]

2 minutes 4 seconds into the trailer. Guy with mustache says "Nothing is impossible".

[miless]

I think that it is interesting that Nikola Tesla is going to be portrayed in a movie, as many filmmakers have attempted to create bio-pics on the famed inventors life (one of them was David Lynch!)... He was a fascinating guy (it is rumored that he died a virgin due to his fear of human contact... he would fain hand-ailments to avoid hand-shakes and one woman reportedly tried to kiss him only to have Nikola recoil in terror) He also presumably dreamt up the AC generator down to the last bolt and built the thing from his mind without ever testing parts of it to see if it would work (and the finished product did, indeed, work)

off topic a bit, I know, but Tesla was a terribly interesting man (and for some reason David Bowie seems perfect for the part)

[Antoine Doinel]

[Matt]

Very smart, that poster. Fooling people into thinking it's an erotic thriller instead of a period piece about magicians.

[exte]

So is the rivalry real or dreamt up? I never heard about this aspect whenever I've learned about Tesla. And who exactly is portraying him? Bale, right? Not Bowie...?

[chaddoli]

BOWIE

anyone know why his name isn't being mentioned in the ads?

[Via_Chicago]

Tesla (portrayed by David Bowie) is, as far as I've gathered, only a side character, who wanders at the periphery of the film, giving each of the two dueling magicians (portrayed by Bale and Jackman) the technical means of showing up the other, and hence, fueling the rivalry.

[Antoine Doinel]

New trailer (with an awful voiceover) here

[Simon]

No comments on this yet? Saw this over the week end and had a good time. Nolan plays with time in the narrative structure a lot, you have a guy reading a diary in a flashback and then you have a flashback within a flashback as the diary content is read. Sounds a bit messy but Nolan manages to make it flow, and it allows for some nice narrative tricks.

So no masterpiece for sure, seems to be lacking the thematic depth that you could find in Memento beneath the surface, but an enjoyable ride.

[MichaelB]

I think that it is interesting that Nikola Tesla is going to be portrayed in a movie, as many filmmakers have attempted to create bio-pics on the famed inventors life (one of them was David Lynch!)

Another was Ken Russell - and I dimly recall an announcement that Jerzy Skolimowski was planning a Tesla film to be shot in 3-D (this was during the stereoscopic revival of 1983-4 - another project announced at about the same time was a Martin Scorsese-directed 3-D Little Shop of Horrors...)

[Barmy]

Is it out?

[Matt]

It is not only out, but was the #1 movie this weekend.

[Antoine Doinel]

No comments on this yet? Saw this over the week end and had a good time. Nolan plays with time in the narrative structure a lot, you have a guy reading a diary in a flashback and then you have a flashback within a flashback as the diary content is read. Sounds a bit messy but Nolan manages to make it flow, and it allows for some nice narrative tricks.

So no masterpiece for sure, seems to be lacking the thematic depth that you could find in Memento beneath the surface, but an enjoyable ride.

I pretty much agree with everything said here. I really wanted to love it more than I did, but it was quite an enjoyable - if somewhat predictable - romp. There are some terrific sequences, and David Bowie is a delight.

[Barmy]

Evacuate the film set now!

They're some of Hollywood's biggest names, yet virtually every movie they make is a disaster. Joe Queenan looks at the stars puckering up to give a film the kiss of death

Saturday November 11, 2006
The Guardian

Lost in transatlantic crossing... Scarlett Johansson in The Prestige

The release of Christopher Nolan's confusing, morally incoherent film The Prestige raises a number of troubling questions. One, why are we being subjected to two films about love-crazed turn-of-the-century magicians (The Illusionist is the other)? Two, is Christopher Nolan ever going to make another movie as good as Memento, or was Memento just a fluke? Three, and this is by far the most important question of all, why does Scarlett Johansson keep getting work?

When Johansson appeared in the charming little film Ghost World five years ago, she seemed like a breath of fresh air, a relief from a freshly spawned legion of new starlets like Neve Campbell, Denise Richards, Christina Ricci, Mena Suvari, Rose McGowan and the pathologically perky Jennifer Love-Hewitt. Like Reese Witherspoon, Johansson did not possess the vixenish looks of the competition; if anything her appeal derived from being somewhat ordinary looking. As opposed to many young actresses, who seemed like the girl next door, Johansson looked more like the girl next door to the girl next door. Her understated acting style worked to perfection in Ghost World and Lost In Translation, where her radiant normality stood in such sharp contrast to the macabre artificiality of a Jessica Simpson, the calculating beauty of an Anne Hathaway, the pouty seductiveness of a Lindsay Lohan. As had long been true of male actors (Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, Gene Hackman), but was far less common among women, Johansson's appeal as a movie star derived largely from the fact that she did not look like a movie star.

Somewhere along the line, though, people who should have known better began to cast Johansson in roles for which she was not suited. And once the actress was asked to play anyone other than a twenty-something Yank born and raised on the east coast in the waning years of the 20th century, it became apparent that she wasn't much of an actress. Period pieces have been especially unkind to her; she cannot pull off the tarty English accent in The Prestige, and her cheesecake shots in The Black Dahlia make her look like a blind convent girl marauding through Marilyn Monroe's lingerie drawer.

Basically, her acting repertory consists of staring intently at the person she is speaking to, keeping her lips spread apart, and hoping no one will notice that she is no threat to Meryl Streep, and not all that much of a threat to Hilary Duff .

Because Johansson has made so many movies in such a short period of time, and because most of them have been so bad, and because several of these movies have been outright disasters at the box office, it's starting to look like the actress is the kiss of death.

Listless and vacant in The Girl With The Pearl Earring, Johansson was hopelessly miscast as an action babe in The Island, passive and useless in Woody Allen's Match Point, thoroughly implausible in Allen's wretched Scoop, ridiculously out of her league as a postwar vamp in Brian de Palma's abysmal The Black Dahlia, and now entirely extraneous as a duplicitous magician's assistant in The Prestige. She also appeared in A Love Song For Bobby Long, in which John Travolta was so utterly unbelievable as a drawling Big Easy literature professor that nobody noticed how unconvincing she was as his protege and daughter; and In Good Company, where she was out-acted by both Dennis Quaid and Topher Grace, no mean feat. Increasingly, the very fact that Johansson is in a film suggests that it will not make very much money, not be any good, or both.

The kiss-of-death phenomenon affects performers great and small, young and old, male and female. Yet it's astonishing how often the kiss of death is planted by someone who actually has talent. Robert Downey Jr, (Chaplin, Restoration, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, A Scanner Darkly), though widely respected and even envied, has the kiss of death; can you recall the last time he was in a hit? Val Kilmer, one of the most charismatic actors of his generation, has been in a string of duds stretching back to the age of the pharaohs. If Sharon Stone shows up anywhere within 3,500 miles of a motion picture set it's bound to be a disaster, and the same goes for Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, particularly when they weave their magic spell together.

Travolta is a sort of recidivist death-kisser; he's the only actor in history who first got a reputation for being the kiss of death, then eradicated that reputation, and then got hard to work re-establishing it (via a series of terrible movies and scientology associations). And if Nicolas Cage is not now the kiss of death - Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Snake Eyes, Bringing Out The Dead, 8MM, The Family Man, Windtalkers, Lord Of War, The Weather Man, The Wicker Man - I don't know who is. Passing mention must also be made of Adrien

Brody, who merely takes up space in Hollywoodland, The Village, and King Kong - all of them major disappointments. Mark Ruff alo's another case in point, whose presence in a film almost always signifies disaster, but who is so nondescript and dozy that few moviegoers will even notice that he is in the cast. Ruffalo's negative aura is better described as the air kiss of death.

And let's not even get started on Jude Law, whose new movie Breaking And Entering opens this week. Sean Penn leapt to Law's defence at last year's Oscar ceremony when host Chris Rock had the temerity to ask, "Who is Jude Law? Why's he in every movie I've seen in the last four years?" Penn humourlessly retorted that Law was one of our finest actors, perhaps because he'd just shot All The King's Men with him. And guess what? All The King's Men tanked big time, just like Alfie, Sky Captain, Cold Mountain, and everything else Law's touched in the past four years. Rock was right: Law ain't no Tom Cruise.

In the rarefied atmosphere of those bearing the kiss of death, few careers are more puzzling than that of Jennifer Connelly's. Debuting in the ballyhooed catastrophe The Rocketeer, Connelly virtually vanished from the screen for a decade before miraculously resurfacing in Requiem For A Dream, Pollock and A Beautiful Mind. Since that time, she has appeared in an uninterrupted series of flops - The Hulk, House Of Sand And Fog and Dark Water.

Numerous theories have been advanced to explain Connelly's failure to catch on with the moviegoing public, though the fact that she is at best only a passable actress is not one of them. The most popular theory is that her children-of-the-damned eyes and Leonid Brezhnev eyebrows scare the bejesus out of the very male moviegoers whose ticket purchases make all the difference between success and failure at the box office. A less sexist theory is that the male leads in Connelly's movies always come to hideously unpleasant ends - Jared Leto loses his arm to junk in Requiem For A Dream, Russell Crowe ends up mad as a hatter in A Beautiful Mind, Ed Harris winds up dead on the Long Island Expressway in Pollock, Ben Kingsley kills himself and Ron Eldard gets sent up the river in House Of Sand And Fog, and we all know the cruel fate that awaits Eric Bana in The Hulk. Sad to say, things don't turn out much better for loverboy Patrick Wilson in her new art house film Little Children, so Connelly's reputation as the kiss of death is unlikely to dissipate anytime soon.

My perverse personal dream is for an all-girl remake of The Magnificent Seven starring Scarlett Johansson, Jennifer Connelly, Meg Ryan, Jennifer Aniston, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Sharon Stone and Madonna.

This will be the first movie in history that nobody goes to see.

[Antoine Doinel]

If Hollywood actually wrote interesting parts for female lead characters on a routine basis, this article might have some merit. Also, equating box office success as some sort tangible meter on an actor's worth is kind of silly.

[a.khan]

Scarlett may not be a truly compelling actress but she is well-endowed. Is that a crime? I'd say the same about Josh Harnett but I bite tongue; I'm quite comfortable with my heterosexuality for now.

Such articles remind us once again how in Hollywood you are only as good as the box office returns of your last movie.

I don't know what is more hilarious: The institutional glibness of ‘journalists' like Queenan who ask “…is Christopher Nolan ever going to make another movie as good as Memento, or was Memento just a fluke?â€

[Barmy]

I actually enjoyed or at least tolerated many of the recent Johansson films, including The Island. But I still think she is a horrible, amateurish, actress. In a way, that's part of her appeal. In particular, she was abysmal in both Allen films (both of which I liked).

I haven't seen The Prestige and feel no particular urge to do so.

[Dear Catastrophe Totoro]

So, I guess I'm the only one who thought this film was some kind of masterpiece? I suppose I could have been viewing it subjectively, but by the time Thom Yorke started singing, I was too emotionally exhausted to get out of my seat. Just me?

Edit: Maybe I should clarify that it wasn't a "that was an exciting story!" sort of exhausted, but more like a "holy shit, that's all so true, I don't want to leave this theater because life is waiting out there in all of its horrible, pointless godlessness" exhausted.

[Roger_Thornhill]

The release of Christopher Nolan's confusing, morally incoherent film The Prestige raises a number of troubling questions.

The Prestige may require more than three brain cells to figure out it's storyline, but it's hardly confusing. In any event, what's wrong with a film that challenges you in even the tinest fashion?

And "morally incoherent?" How exactly is it "morally incoherent?" Naturally the author doesn't dwell on this as it makes no sense.

So, I guess I'm the only one who thought this film was some kind of masterpiece? .

No you're not, I think it's one of the most entertaining and engaging Hollywood films released this year. I could see myself watching this more often than either Memento or Batman Begins, both of which are films that I admire. Nolan's Insomnia remake, however, seemed rather pointless despite a fine non-screaming performance from Pacino.

[Matt]

So, I guess I'm the only one who thought this film was some kind of masterpiece? .

No you're not, I think it's one of the most entertaining and engaging Hollywood films released this year.

I really want to see it again, and I will surely buy the DVD - both of which are an indicator that I must have thought it was pretty good. I couldn't articulate an opinion about it if I tried, though (mainly because I thought I was getting one kind of movie and got another, better, kind and my brain was also too busy trying to figure out the "twist,"* so my first viewing was just kind of a trial run).

* This is also why I can't enjoy reading detective fiction. I'm constantly trying to figure out whodunit instead of just enjoying the unfolding of the mystery.

[a.khan]

It finally came out where I live (subterranean Earth).

I'd read Christopher Priest's book couple of months ago; so an added appeal for me was to compare the results. Nolan's film is stylishly made, but the feel is a little too contemporary. The story was easy to follow (I was watching closely), and I relished the amorality of both the Bale and Jackman characters. The romantic subplots didn't work for me at all even if I could see their usefulness to drumming up the emotional aspect of the story. Scarlett Johannson was truly awful -- even her titties weren't a big enough distraction.

Initial impression: Nolan tries hard to be a storyteller (and usually he is) but film form wins over narrative. I need to see this again.