Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay Molly Bernstein and Alan Edelstein 2012 USA | 88 minutes

Ricky Jay is a master magician. Like most magicians, he does not like to share his secrets. His grandfather raised him in the magic tradition, and introduced him to some mentors who are the real subject of the movie. Jay had no use for his parents. His friends became his family, but his teachers, the master sleight of hand artists like Dai Vernon, Charlie Miller, and others with names that end like Houdini's--Slydini and Cardini, and the great comic Flosso who made Ed Sullivan laugh-- raised him not just as a performing artist but as a human being.

Jay says, "The real key to learning is almost like the sensei master relationship in the martial arts. The way you want to learn is by someone that you respect showing you something." The mentors shown in the movie are his senseis. Ricky Jay spent untold number of hours with them, watching, refining, developing his art, until they trusted each other enough to show each other an "effect."

There is enormous risk in what he does. Exposure would be fatal. The code of conduct among magicians is iron clad. You do not reveal anything. And at his grandfather's funeral, the wand was broken in the same ritual that takes place every year at Houdini's grave on October 31, to show that with the magician's death, the wand has lost its magic.

Visually, interviews with Jay take place in front of mirrors, seated at bars. Suzie Mackenzie of the Guardian relates an effect that was done just for her, an intimate demonstration of Jay's tending to the details of what makes magic so amazing. We forget ourselves for just a moment, and think that logic has been suspended.

Some people might be frustrated by the amount of magic actually demonstrated. The few scenes that do show Jay performing are quite wonderful, especially when he was on the Dinah Shore show with Steve Martin, and when he was very young and had long hair streaming down his back. There are many scenes of Jay shuffling cards almost as an act of meditation. He does this extraordinarily beautifully if you can call shuffling an act of beauty. He and the cards are one. But the movie is not a recording of one of Ricky Jay's shows. That would be another movie, and one I would love to see. Bernstein and Edelstein's movie is about how a master magician became great, through working with others who he considered greater than he was until he could meet them as peers and share their trade in friendship.



I highly recommend this movie to anyone lucky enough to have access to it.
Here is the link to the movie:
Ricky Jay

Here is the link to Film Forum
http://www.filmforum.com/movies/more/deceptive_practice_the_mysteri

Kings Point (documentary)

Produced and directed by Sari Gilman
2012.  31 minutes.  HBO

Kings Point, a short documentary on HBO, introduces us to several residents of a retirement community in Florida.  We hear them describe their wishes for companionship, their reasons for leaving NYC in the 1970s for the better climate, the attractions of the location, the common desire for a better life.

Now thirty years later, those who were just beginning their retirement in the 1970s are in the last stage of life, and some wonder what they gave up by leaving their families behind up north.  By family, they mean their children, their grandchildren, their great grandchildren.  In this community it does not seem that there is a wing for those whose health declines and need nursing care.  There is little discussion of this among the old people, just a wish not to have to listen to bad news (which inevitably means the decline of someone's health).

There are so many more women than men here, a single man creates conflicts and bitchy behavior.  The one man we get to know who looks much younger is blunt.  "I already buried my wife.  I want someone to bury me."

The idea of survival is temporary as we witness the quick decline and death of most of the subjects of this sobering film.

There are so many stages that lead us to our final demise, it is hard to prepare for all of them.  The movie made me question what is the most dignified way to grow old.

I am still thinking of it days later.

Inside Job

This muckraking movie makes me mad with its shocking analysis.  

People are interviewed  from  Iceland, where banks once regulated and stable were deregulated and drowned in debt, nearly bringing down the government, and laying off thousands of people.  In a country of 300,000 that has a huge impact.  In the United States where deregulation began with the Reagan administration, the continued ripple effect on the global economy resulted in larger layoffs, more recessions, and continues to this day under Obama and what one interview subject called the "Wall Street government."

Money is made on debt that cannot be paid.  The higher the debt, the more leveraged the bank becomes, until eventually, so large (too large to fail), the executive who was supposed to be overseeing this, bails out and gets his package, which includes millions of dollars.  Sometimes these executives, knowing that the company is headed south, sell their shares and take them home with their severance package, and here's the funny thing, their heads held high.

When what you are selling is so complicated that it cannot be explained without a programmable calculator something is wrong.  And it is sinking the financial markets around the world.  Unbridled capitalism bankrupts us all, punishes the poor, and makes the rich make out like bandits.  This movie urges us to take the system back from the criminals.  And to change the way government works.  This movie, though most of its heavy firepower is aimed at the GOP, does not exempt Clinton, sitting very cosily with the biggest of the marauders, or Obama, who has allowed the status quo to continue.

There are some heroes in this film, who speak before and after those caught red handed.  Unlike the Federal Reserve Governor, and the Harvard University economist, and the bankers forced to testify to Congress,  there are  heroes like a consumer advocate who warned Greenspan, and then Bernanke about what was happening to no avail.  There is an executive at the International Monetary Fund whose paper was published criticizing the mathematical model that used derivatives to make money on bad mortgages; he was subsequently shunned.  George Soros says some things about the inequity of executive compensation that sound dead on. 

Eliot Spitzer sits in a large vacant room with miles of windows making us wish he had never gotten in trouble with someone not unlike the madam who was interviewed earlier about what Wall STreet traders like to do after their fifteen hour days on the floor.  Spitzer reminds us how he used to go after the people who were raiding consumers' accounts to line their own pockets.  He says he isn't in a moral position to say much about their morals now. Damn.

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work

 
photo by Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times
 In the documentary of her last year leading up to her victory on Celebrity Apprentice, which signalled a bit of a resurgence in her career as a comedian, Joan Rivers shows her floor to ceiling card catalog of jokes.  As a librarian, I loved the fact that the jokes were in alphabetical order.  Cooking jokes were just before Tony Danza jokes.  Does she write all her own material?  She seems to in this film.  Some of the jokes are very very funny.  The movie does not lionize her in all her difficulties, but it does document how terribly hard she works.  And how personally she takes slights.  And how sad she is  when her long time manager and she break off their business relationship.

Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo

Beauty and transience are linked in Japan. Think of cherry blossoms, and how they are celebrated in ritual gatherings, adored for their short lives as much as for their visual splendor. In Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, a first film by Jessica Orent, the Japanese people show their love of insects through collecting. In the US if you go into a pet store, you see the cuddly puppies and cute kittens. In Japan, children yearn for the stag horn beetle in the square plastic box. Women go to pet supply stores in search of the best bedding for their insects, and the best insect snacks. At night, the hunters of the beetles are out with flashlights and special nets to capture the beetles who climb trees. Anyone in the beetle business seems to know just how to kick the base of the tree to dislodge the unsuspecting bugs. Overhead images of people swarming at intersection in the rain, their heads under colorful umbrellas, link our species to the insects. Constant voiceover relates how poetry, art, nature, and philosophy relate to the Japanese love of insects. Most of it is in Japanese, requiring the viewer to read the subtitles which takes our eyes off the images. This is a minor flaw, but it leaves the audience somewhat exhausted after watching.

Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo Trailer from Myriapod Productions on Vimeo.