There's a reason I call this blog "Exploring the Magic of Movies", and I suppose it has more to do with how I watch movies than the movies themselves, at least these days. In the early days of cinema, moving pictures truly looked like some kind of wizardry, and if you saw Martin Scorsese's Hugo a couple of years ago, you might have noticed the bit where audience members watching one of the first movies got up out of their seats and ran away in terror at the shot of an oncoming train. [youtube … [Read more...] about Who Doesn’t Love A Good Magic Trick?
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An Epiphany About Bambi’s Mother (and Other Notable Deaths by Disney)
I think I've finally answered that nagging question that runs through my brain from time to time, namely: why is it that so many Disney characters have dead family members? If these are fairy tales created for children, why is there so darned much death? I suppose the first and most obvious answer to the question would be that Disney based his movies on fairy tales, which themselves were at times quite dark and had plenty of death in them, but it's not as though those stories were followed … [Read more...] about An Epiphany About Bambi’s Mother (and Other Notable Deaths by Disney)
What Do You Want From Iron Man?
For the last week or so, I've been meaning to get over here and give my two cents regarding Iron Man 3. I'll start off by saying that although I used to read comics when I was a kid, I was more of a DC fan than Marvel, and so didn't follow the Iron Man stories too closely. But at midnight on opening night of Iron Man 3, my husband and I -- along with a fair number of friends we ran into -- christened our brand-spanking-new IMAX theater with this movie, and it was nothing short of a blast! This … [Read more...] about What Do You Want From Iron Man?
The Incredible Burt Wonderstone Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Comedy About Magic
I love magic. Let's just establish this from the start. I love seeing something amazing and feeling that tremendous sense of wonder that comes with it, when your rational brain can't really "sync" with the information it's getting from your senses. You know you've seen something truly unbelievable, and yet, you did just see it, so it had to be real. Right? In much the same way that a good story can transport you from the drudgery of your everyday world, experiencing good magic can inspire you … [Read more...] about The Incredible Burt Wonderstone Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Comedy About Magic
The Illusionist, Revisited
I spent a good portion of yesterday going through and cleaning up old and forgotten blogs, removing what I no longer wanted to keep, and reposting items I felt were worth keeping. Among the old posts was my review of one of my favorite movies, Christopher Nolan's The Prestige. At the end of that review, I made mention that my next planned viewing was The Illusionist, a film starring Ed Norton, which was also released at around the same time as The Prestige. I don't remember it getting nearly as … [Read more...] about The Illusionist, Revisited
Rise of the Intelligent Movies
Okay, it's been a few months since I last stopped by here to write. Anybody who follows me even a little bit knows that this is standard procedure. It's not that I haven't seen more movies worth writing about--far from it. Life just seems to have its own way of taking over your time. Kids go back to school, work picks up, I do stupid things like start writing a novel (well, okay, more like a novella, but whatever), and on and on. This morning during my usual social media rounds I read two … [Read more...] about Rise of the Intelligent Movies