The Prestige

[Steve]

Hmmm, I wonder about that. His Girl Friday verges on parody with the way the characters spit out their dialogue.
Rosalind Russell mocks Grant in the film for his rapid fire delivery.

What I was trying to imply was that, today, a modern actor mumbles slowly in the name of drama and you can't understand it; while in the press room in HGF, you hear five men firing back and forth at 240 WPM and we can still understand every syllable.

 

[scotrace]

...you hear five men firing back and forth at 240 WPM and we can still understand every syllable.

BINGO! And that is quite typical of older films. Bogart could speak - with a lisp - very rapidly indeed and you didn't miss a snip of it. And Powell - just try to speak his lines at his pace and as clearly sometime. It's very hard to do. yet we catch every word.

 

[Doctor Strange]

I just got around to seeing this on DVD. I had seen "The Illusionist" in theaters.

I liked The Prestige, but prefer The Illusionist. The Illusionist has much more heart and greater character depth. It's also a hair more believable in terms of being a semi-accurate period piece.

All the characters in The Prestige are ciphers - there's nobody to root for, just two obsessed protagonists and the folks caught in their orbit, and none of them were especially sympathetic. (And I felt that both Bale and Jackman gave technically adept but uncharacteristically flat performances.) I also believe that the film was unnecessarily complicated, with its flashbacks-within-flashbacks structure, and a little too long at 130 minutes.

And, as much as I was unhappy about the liberties taken with emerging motion picture technology circa 1900 for the stage effects in The Illusionist, The Prestige annoyed me far more with its last-act leap into utter fantasy/science fiction. For that matter, I didn't believe the Bale character's slightly-more-realistic secret would be workable in reality either.

Don't get me wrong, there was much I liked about The Prestige, but I found it more of a hall-of-mirrors mystery game in a Victorian setting than a film about recognizably human people. For me, The Illusionist - with its richer characters and deeper feeling - is definitely the better circa-1900 magician movie.

 

[Fleur De Guerre]

I find it bizarre when The Prestige is criticised for being "unbelieveable", or too fantasy or SF. It's a SF book for heaven's sake! The film was actually a far simplified version of the book, too. Though I agree Bale's character probably wouldn't have pulled off his disguise in real life (I spotted it was him because of his very distinctive chin), you also can't really do any of the SF stuff that happened in the book, so I could live with it.

 

[Dr Doran]

What I was trying to imply was that, today, a modern actor mumbles slowly in the name of drama and you can't understand it; while in the press room in HGF, you hear five men firing back and forth at 240 WPM and we can still understand every syllable.

I always heard that Brando started the modern style of mumbly acting. Or popularized it. Or was a big figure in it. Or something. I think that actors who have acted for years on stage GENERALLY speak more clearly; actors who have not had that experience for years have had no good reason to develop the ability to speak clearly.

 

[Feraud]

I always heard that Brando started the modern style of mumbly acting. Or popularized it. Or was a big figure in it. Or something. I think that actors who have acted for years on stage GENERALLY speak more clearly; actors who have not had that experience for years have had no good reason to develop the ability to speak clearly.

Right. I think the difference is more a "school of acting" difference versus any "then versus now" in terms of acting quality.
There are plenty of great actors today and bad ones from the past.

It makes for a fun discussion tho'.

 

[Marc Chevalier]

The most mumbly movie in history: ZODIAC.


I couldn't understand anything that Robert Downey, Jr. said. Or that anyone else said. And this is an extremely talky film!

Within every scene, be it newsroom or city street, some freakin' sound engineer amped up the background noise to deafening levels. How could anyone decipher the mumbles when typewriter sounds and whoosing cars drowned them out?

.

 

[Steve]

I always heard that Brando started the modern style of mumbly acting. Or popularized it. Or was a big figure in it. Or something. I think that actors who have acted for years on stage GENERALLY speak more clearly; actors who have not had that experience for years have had no good reason to develop the ability to speak clearly.

Stage actors definitely have an advantage in that area, you can't do two takes for a stage scene.

As to Brando, it fitted his persona and the roles he chose incredibly well to talk softly and slightly slurred. As to the likes of Bale, with the diversity of his roles, the mumbling doesn't always fit in as well as he thinks.

 

[cemetarian]

I'm behind the times........just rented this last night and was enthralled with it from the beginning...........and woke up thinking about it this morning........

The film is structured like a magic trick with all three acts and the Prestige is facinating.