Word: magicianly
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...Boston's Orpheum Theater, the shabby old moviehouse that currently shelters Sarah and her troupe. Fire belched from a dragon's mouth. A huge severed head blinked a bloodshot eye and sang. Horses flew. So did a witch on a broomstick. So did Russlan and an evil magician, dueling madly away above a castle. How Caldwell managed all that (the stage at the Orpheum is only 26 feet deep and has no wing space to speak of) is her secret. It is enough to say that the results were full of energy and surprise...
...drawing them out randomly to create anti-poetry. Joyce has come to borrow money for his English Players, but stays to argue with Tzara. In a wonderful monologue borrowed from one of Joyce's early essays, the writer lectures Tzara on the duties of the artist as magician, pulls a rabbit out of his hat, smiles, bids Mr. Tzara a top of the morning, and leaves...
FELLINI DELIGHTS in showing us how he has made this artificial world, like a slyly smiling magician revealing the secrets of each of his tricks. And this master is such a consummate artist that his revelations are more marvelous than the tricks were. The stage-set world is fascinating because it is visibly cardboard; Casnova and the other characters are intriguing because they are caricatures, marionettes...
...pretentiousness of the film itself doesn't help matters. Welles looms onto the screen at the outset, his stupendous bulk cloaked in a magician's cape, pulling pennies out of a boy's mouth and making keys disappear. Next he jumps to his editing room, where he's making movie magic--cutting and splicing a documentary about another sleight-of-hand expert. Hungarian art forger Elmyr deHory. But also about deHory's biographer. Clifford Irving, a hoaxster in his own right. Have it straight so far? F for Fake is thus a cinematic illusion (movie), directed by a renowned beguiler...
Cousin, Cousine's final image epitomizes Tacchella's approach. Abandoned by the magician and his audience, a woman who is supposed to have been sawn in half cries out to be released from half a trunk. If Tacchella wants us to be truly involved with his films, he will have to let his people...