Skip to main content

The Illusionist - Movie Review

 


Something for Free

The Illusionist came out the same year as The Prestige. I naturally thought that a movie directed by Christopher Nolan starring Christian Bale, Hugh Jackman, Michael Caine, Piper Perabo, and Scarlett Johansson would be the better of these two movies about magic. To my surprise, Edward Norton, Paul Giamatti, and Jessica Biel have a much better story to work off of. However, you cannot buy The Illusionist digitally except on iTunes and YouTube if you like.

However, I did not choose to purchase it on either platform. The reason being you can watch the movie for free on several platforms. I recently became aware of this while working on the review. At the time, I found it on IMDB free with ads. Since I had not tried watching anything on this service, I felt it would be a nice change of pace. I was pleasantly surprised by the service. While writing this review, I find the movie is also offered free on Vudu, Amazon, and YouTube. Who says you cannot get something for free.

Review

The movie is a great blend of mystery and intrigue. The characters are well developed and you come to care for them on their journey. The movie briefly starts in the middle of the story with Paul Giamatti's character telling the beginning of the story. Perhaps the fact this movie has a love story intertwined with the mystery that makes it (in my opinion) a far better movie than The Prestige. Edward Norton was well selected for this role. While not the range we see in Primal Fear that was his breakout roll, he does portray a good tortured character. I highly recommend this movie. It is well worth the commercials to watch.

Rating

I give this a HD rating. I look forward to this movie being on Vudu for purchase. I would pick this up if under $10. I am almost tempted to get it from iTunes but for now will watch it for free. YouTube appears to have the movie free without commercials as I am currently only 20 minutes into watching here.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Protecting Your Online Collection

 Protecting Your Collection In this time of cyber crime, you want to protect your investment of digital movies. I will be focusing this page on the primary retailers that connect with Movies Anywhere. At the time of this post, I am only aware of Google and iTunes are the only two retailers that offer secondary authentication. Technically, Amazon offers a secondary authentication with the use of a pin for digital purchases. I highly recommend you use these security feature provided by Amazon, Google, and iTunes. This provides great protection for your collection and any saved credit card information that you have with the retailer. I would not advise keeping your credit card information with a online retailer but I understand it's convenience. With that said, I will point out that users have the ability to removed their credit card information from Amazon, FandangoNow, Google, iTunes (provided you are not using Family Sharing), and Microsoft. This is convenient when one of the retai...
Post a Comment
Read more

Avengers: Endgame - Review

Movie Review - Spoiler Free I will try to keep this a spoiler free review. First, I would like to applaud Disney/Marvel for making a movie over the 2 hour limit that most movies have kept themselves to lately. The movie would have felt rushed if it was only 2 hours. The movie starts out appropriately timed to the events of Avengers: Infinity War. The movie kept you emotional invested throughout the entire movie. There was some predictability with the story but for the most part, I was able to enjoy the ride without knowing what would happen next. This to me made the movie extremely enjoyable. We get see how the characters deal with the aftermath of the Infinity War and what their options are moving forward. Each character was given their opportunity on screen during the movie. This is obviously easier to do since there are fewer characters after the events of Infinity War. I felt that many characters had an appropriate conclusion to their stories. The movie did leave me with a couple ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Digital Ownership

 What Is? With the digital revolution, digital media has been sweeping the world. My memory of digital media was back with iTunes in 2001. There you could download music with a touch of a button from an actual retailer vs illegally with the bonus of malware to your computer. I actually had digital music from iTunes before I had a iPod or iPhone to play it on. In 2005, Apple released their video iPod and started to "sell" digital TV and movies. I am not saying Apple was the foundation for the digital revolution but it was my first positive experience with digital media. My first digital video purchase was the unaired Aquaman TV pilot as it was the only place to get it. What does purchasing something digitally really mean though? Apple and Amazon are coming under class-action lawsuits for their digital ownership definition of "buy" an item. The lawsuit stems from the fine print where retailers cannot guarantee you own the product but merely have unlimited streaming. T...
Post a Comment
Read more