The List

Just got finished watching The Prestige, which I had wanted to catch in theaters but never did for want of a buddy or the testicular fortitude to go watch it alone, a block which I managed to break through before leaving New York.

Holy shit.

HOLY SHIT.

It is, I suppose, somewhat presumptuous to have a "list" of people you really, really, really, really, REALLY want to work with. Well, call me presumptuous, because Chris Nolan is one of those people.

I love that his movies are challenging, I love that they're intellectual, I love that they're great stories, I love that he is passionate about his work and it shows, particularly in The Prestige, where magic is a obvious metaphor for the movie making process. Indeed, the mind-numbingly large number of people who create movies (you know, all those Oscars that nobody pays attention to, because the people who win them tend to be extremely untelegenic and have little or no stage presence, which is why they work behind the scenes in the first place) are the modern-day inheritors of the magician's mantle. Everyone knows that there's no magic, that the Victorian era is gone, that there's a man behind the curtain and blah-di-de-blah-blah-blah (that's a technical term, for those of you not in "the biz"). But there is magic in the minutes and hours when you can make those things live again, where people will forget reality and believe in something you show them, and follow you wherever you are able to take them.

It is not, in the final analysis, a great movie. But it is a good one, and an interesting one, which is more than I can say for the vast majority of Hollywood releases nowadays.