Magic of the Movies

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Brakhage saw Méliès as his precursor, "the first man to recognise motion pictures as medium of both super-nature and under-world". Scorsese has said that, for him, the most enjoyable aspect of Hugo was the opportunity that it gave him to be Méliès, reconstructing Méliès's glass studio and recreating the underwater set of his 1903 Fairyland: Kingdom of the Fairies.

The story follows a young street magician named Bo ( The Maze Runner's Jacob Latimore) who is taking care of his little sister Tina ( 12 Years a Slave's Storm Reid) following the death of their mother. Performing magic on the streets for tourists isn't enough to pay the bills, so Bo has turned to peddling drugs at clubs and parties for a local drug dealer Angelo ( Psych and West Wing's Dulé Hill). Making clever use of his sleight of hand skills, Bo is able to avoid trouble from the police. Last summer I had a fun experiment with my family. We started watching the movies that won the Academy Awards for best picture. Magic is a 1978 American psychological horror drama film starring Anthony Hopkins, Ann-Margret and Burgess Meredith. The film, which was directed by Richard Attenborough, is based on a screenplay by William Goldman, who wrote the novel upon which it was based. The score was composed by Jerry Goldsmith.Today I’d like to invite you to immerse yourself in the movies you want to watch—not by just passively consuming the story, but by fully living and experiencing it.

Right now we’re watching movies with Marilyn Monroe. It is so much fun to experience the stories from the perspective of the storytellers—the humor, the drama, the futility of most of our struggles, and the impermanence of everything as we know it in this life.I think cinema, movies, and magic have always been closely associated. The very earliest people who made film were magicians. ~Francis Ford Coppola You know what your problem is, it’s that you haven’t seen enough movies - all of life’s riddles are answered in the movies. ~Steve Martin Movies bring the story—in vivid detail—to life and transport us to a magical world. We escape, we laugh, we cry, we think and we learn through movies. When I asked Pico Iyer, a writer with a deep respect and reverence for cinema, what he felt about literature’s relationship to movies, he said: “It’s no surprise to me that those writers who hold us most are often the ones — I think of Raymond Chandler, Graham Greene, Kazuo Ishiguro — who have clearly learned from the leanness and wordlessness of movies. Movies have given us a new way to lose ourselves, and our artists a new, crafty, universal and post-verbal way to tell a story.” Yes, yes, yes — exactly. Pico’s eloquence comes to my rescue: these are the very things I have perhaps been fumbling to say about what movies do for us. A Separation is a realistic movie that might be expected to make us think of life and shake us up, while something like Scorsese’s Hugo, a fantasy — a richly entertaining 3D fantasy — is as far away from true life as we can get, and yet they both fill our senses and touch us deeply. In different ways, yes, but both, a story about a boy’s adventure in a Parisian train station and an intimate, complex moral drama of two families in modern Tehran become in our hearts, in our imagination, one indelible emotional, aesthetic experience. It’s not the high level of realism in one and the delirious sense of fantasy in the other that get at us, but their art — cinematic art.