The Illusionist, with Ed Norton, Paul Giamatti, and Jessica Biel. One, the flipping-the-coin method is to be officially abolished as a method of choosing which movie to watch - don't trust its beguiling, flippy witchcraft! And two, I'm really not sure why this movie seems to be getting the good reviews it's getting. For one thing, I noted that it said, 'based on the short story...' That's short story. Not 'excessively drawn-out movie that goes on way too long.' I mean, I'll admit we were a bit disillusioned, as we thought we were going to see The Prestige, but had gotten the two movies confused, but we thought, hey, this has Ed Norton, it might be good. Yeah no. What might have been solid had it been short and focused maintaining an outside-perspective of that old school Mage: the Ascension-style magick - that is, leaving the story ambiguous as to the supernatural nature of the given act, and even and especially as to the outcome - was instead a banally archetypical story that relied upon being clever, when it wasn't really.

Invincible, with Mark Wahlberg and Greg Kinnear. This movie, on the other hand, was quite solid, even in being a simple, archetypical underdog/sports story - it didn't have any illusions as to what it was or was trying to do, and was more honest and the stronger for that. Sure, everyone can pretty much guess exactly what's going to happen, when the encouraging words are going to be said, etc, etc. But I thought there was a surprising amount of effort put into subtly delving the economic situation concurrent to the story, and how sports played into that; hell, in a few small ways, I was way more concerned with the mental/emotional plight of the city-characters than with the football situation.