|
List Price: $14.95Amazon.com's Price: $13.49 You Save: $1.46 (10%)as of 11/23/2009 02:04 EST details
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Buy Now!
This item ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping.
Audience Rating: Unrated
Binding: DVD
EAN: 0796019815512
Format: Color, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
Label: Weinstein Company
Languages: SpanishSubtitledEnglishOriginal Language
Manufacturer: Weinstein Company
MPN: WEID81551D
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: Weinstein Company
Region Code: 1
Release Date: October 28, 2008
Running Time: 97 minutes
Studio: Weinstein Company
Theatrical Release Date: 2007
Editorial Review:
Product Description:
Studio: Genius Products Inc Release Date: 10/28/2008
Amazon.com:
Death Defying Acts would more aptly be titled Houdini's Whirlwind Romance as it focuses less on the famed magician's skills and more on what kind of secret lovers he may have had. In this historical drama, ravishing con-artists, Mary McGarvie (Catherine Zeta-Jones), and daughter, Benji (Saoirse Ronan), play two sharp girls ready to take Houdini (Guy Pearce) for a ride. Set in 1920s Scotland, the plot centers on a contest Houdini hosts in Edinburgh to find a psychic medium who can channel his deceased mother. Mary, tired of pick-pocketing to stage fake magic shows, desperately wants Houdini's $10,000 cash prize and auditions successfully for the role of (real) medium. From there, passions flare up as they negotiate how much of their magic is sheer trickery. Director Gillian Armstrong's (Little Women) rendition of Houdini's life depicts him as a regular joe struggling to convince his pragmatic business manager, Sugarman (Timothy Spall), that magic and science are connected. Scenes in which Houdini trains for and then tests his boundaries and skills during famous theater acts, are highly entertaining and well re-created. Scenes in which McGarvie and her daughter read characters for clues to rig their paranormal hoaxes are equally well-done, and Zeta-Jones is gorgeous as a spiritualist. But when Mary and Houdini collide, their definitions of magic turn to mush through Hollywood translation, as something semi-equivocal to faith in love. This unfortunate injection of melodrama in an otherwise smart film cancels out its better parts. Do Houdini fans really want to see him, on screen, grappling with CG angels as he floats, straitjacketed, in his sealed water tank? I doubt it. Still, Death Defying Acts stars Houdini, which automatically makes for some fun. —Trinie Dalton
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
This is a good flick with interesting actors. The plot is mostly fiction but, I think, Houdini, would have liked it. Zeta-Jones is always nice to watch and Saoirse Ronan made me look up the pronounciation of her name.
Rating: -
If you're looking for a hard facts or a psychologically insightful bio of the great Houdini, then Death Defying Acts will disappoint. DDA is more a tea cake of a film, selecting odds and ends of facts from the life of the master illusionist and mixing them into a sweet, "what-if" confection.
Houdini did, in fact, mount an active campaign to debunk spiritualists and the Mary McGarvie of this film may have been suggested by a real life American psychic, "Margery" - one of Houdini's ... Read More
Rating:  -
"Death Defying Acts" is not a movie biography of Harry Houdini. Instead, it takes a small thread and weaves it into a full-length movie. The story here centers around mother-daughter con artists Mary McGarvie [Catherine Zeta-Jones] and her street smart daughter Benji [Saoirse Ronan whose claim to fame is from the movie Atonement]who barely eke out a living in Edinburgh, Scotland. They put on shows at the local theatre, where they play exotic characters that are able to foretell the future [having done ... Read More
Rating: -
Gillian Armstrong makes fine movies: she is a director who knows how to tell stories and enhance what appears on the surface to be reality with a healthy dose of fantasy. Her sense of pacing and image creation adds substance to her tales that sometimes border on bizarre.
DEATH DEFYING ACTS uses the character of Harry Houdini as the stimulus of to tell a story about the folk of Edinburgh, Scotland at a time when stage shows were embraced much the way America was using vaudeville - an escape ... Read More
Television Show
Collectibles
Movie Searches
|
|
|
Search for posters,
art prints, photos, collectables, merchandise, toys, t-shirts
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
TV Guide
Program listings, celebrity profiles, industry
gossip, movie reviews, puzzle.
More
Entertainment
& TV Magazines
This site is
Hosted
by Bluehost
Read
my Bluehost Review
Most Popular TV collectibles
|
|
Home
Articles
Images
Forum
Search
Shopping
TV Trivia
Watch TV
Wallpaper
