Nickel Tour: The Illusionist (2006)

Here's the nickel tour:

It's been a while since the Netflix fairy brought me anything, much less something good. (It helps when you actually send the movies back instead of letting them get lost on the coffee table.) The Illusionist is a pretty good movie, a love story/magical realism piece. The story itself was a sort of typical boy meets girl above his social station, boy moves away mysteriously for many years, boy meets girl as an adult and she's going to marry the bad guy, etc. However, the characters here are really interesting. Edward Norton is a really great actor, Paul Giametti is lots of fun as the chief inspector ("Are you completely corrupt?" "Not completely, no!"), and Rufus Sewell from Dark City has some good moments as the price of Vienna. Jessica Biel is passable as the love interest, but I think she's just there for the asses-in-seats factor to get guys to watch this with their chicks. All the actors do a decent job with accents, too.

The production itself is very fitting- part of the story is told as flashback, and that section of the movie has a slight iris lighting effect and a bit of flickering, as though seen through a magic lantern or zoetrope. The overall lighting and cinematography was a pleasure to watch in and of itself. If anything, some of the magic so central to the tale falls a little short- the 19th-century audience were amazed, but I had a hard time not seeing the CGI. I give it a "Rather good and definitely worth watching once."