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The Prestige


BritinUSA

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Just watched 'The Prestige' on DVD. It's a movie about two magicians who are trying to out-perform each other and come up with the perfect magic trick. Superb acting and a great script/story.

It's one of those films where you have to watch and listen carefully as it is full of deception, the plot goes back and forth between past and present. It is set mostly in England with a brief visit to Colorado Springs and Nikola Tesla (protrayed by David Bowie).

It stars Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale and Scarlett Johansson and has now become one of my favourite movies. I didn't see the end coming at all.... It had me totally fooled.

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I wonder if anyone has seen the movie that figured out how it was done BEFORE the revelation at the end. All the clues are there, everything that was said throughout the movie made sense at the time and made even more sense once the big reveal had occurred.

It's very, very clever...

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I wonder if anyone has seen the movie that figured out how it was done BEFORE the revelation at the end. All the clues are there, everything that was said throughout the movie made sense at the time and made even more sense once the big reveal had occurred.

It's very, very clever...

Yea. Right after we walked out of the theater, I said that I had to watch it again... Hmm, I think I'm going to rent it tonight.

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It was good but personally, I liked The Illusionist better. What's with movies with similar time periods and similar themes coming out at the same time? We went to go watch The Illusionist thinking it was going to be The Prestige. After 15 minutes of no Hugh Jackman or Christian Bale, I finally figured it out. :wacko:

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The begining was a bit slow and halfway through it I had it figured out. Then 3/4 of the way I had it figured out as my first gues was off. About 5 minust till the end I had to figure again and was all set then 2 minutes after it was over there is still something that I had not figured on.... hmmm??? :ph34r:

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It was good but personally, I liked The Illusionist better.

Got that one too, very good movie !

I had the feeling I had seen a similar story before but for the life of me I can't remember where.

My main reason for getting the Prestige was that it had Nikola Tesla in it... The guy was years ahead of his time, read a biography of him last year, he was probably as smart as Einstein if not more so...

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Though at times the movie felt a bit long (and at 131min it is not short), I thought it was well worth it. Nevermind that anything with Miss Scarlet J is worth watching, but I found the story really engrossing. I kinda regret the the tiny bit of science fiction they use to pull off the story, but overall I was pleasently surprised though I saw a few of the twists ahead of time, but not all the clever ones towards the end.

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I really liked the Tesla connection in the movie. I went to college in C-Springs and I wished the physics and the EE profs there would have told us that Tesla had set up shop in the Springs. A field trip possibly.

So how did JP Morgan screw over Tesla?

Tesla really seemed like a man ahead of his time. After seeing the Prestige, a quick google search for "Tesla" made it sound like very quickly after Tesla's death the government came in and cleaned everything out.

Very interesting.

I like Christian Bale as an actor. How he could slim down for his role in the Machinist and then bulk up for Batman Begins, I'll never know.

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It was Tesla's Alternating current that enabled the transmission of electricity over long distances. JP Morgan owned the company that made the wires and strung them up to carry the electricity from one place to another.

When Tesla invented a method of transmission of electricity through the ground (without wires), JP Morgan would not bankroll it as it would put his wiring company out of business.

The bit in the movie with the lamps in the ground is not made up. Tesla actually made it work.

A good book to read on Tesla is 'TESLA: Man out of time' by Margaret Cheney

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Thanks BritinUSA, for the book advice.

Supposedly, Tesla also bought a 1920 or 30 something Pace Arrow w/o an engine. He and an assistant stuck an electric motor in it and connected that to some box that the assistant kept in his lap on the ride to whereever they were going.

I can't rember for sure but it was some significant distance at the time, probably still an incredible feat by today's standards too.

I thought it was actually Westinghouse who came up with AC. It was Edison and his gang who wanted to run DC through all the power supply lines.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I really liked the movie.

I was so tired when I started watching it that I fell asleep about 30 minutes in. I remember thinking - "it's not all that good..." But then when I watched the rest of it I was blown away. And I normally don't like movies that depend too much on how the scenes are presented to make the movie "good." But in this case I didn't even care.

And I forgot that it was the same "machinist" Christian Bale. I'll probably watch it again tonight.

be

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  • 2 months later...
Interesting development in the transmission of electricity through the air

Fox News - Transmission of electricity

I sent the light bulb trick to my mechanic mentor, who is pretty much a scientific-electrical genius, and he replied with what's below. I wasn't surprised actually, since it was on the news.

RE the Wireless light bulb trick......The photo depicts an "air core"

tranformer which like any transformer induces current in the secondary coil

by AC magnetic field rise and collapse in the primary! Air does not focus

the magnetism well and that is the reason that "real" transformers have iron

cores to focus the energy from the input coil to the output coil. This is a

demonstration of an early "radio" signal! It is not relevant because the

energy required to light that bulb is probably a magnitude of 10+ more than

the bulb consumes! That is why all radio receivers have amplifier circuits.

If the radio broadcasts 50k watts and you need to add power to receive it,

why is that a good deal???

We have not yet figured out how to send electricity through a wire with zero

loss so what chance is there that we will figure out how to send it through

thin air without loss. There is a theory that lossless flow occurs at a

temperature of absolute zero but I don't want to live there!

It is a baby step but not a new one and no apparent progress has been made

since Marconi!

I used to wonder how the pioneers could fall for the "Snake Oil" peddlers

but it simply is a matter of wanting something so badly you will believe it!

Like carburators that will give 100 mpg on a 500hp mustang. There is just

so much energy in a drop of gas and that's it!

If you can get 100% efficiency, it still won't be close.

We need to tap solar, wind, wave. They're the only free ones out there and

I'm not sure solar isn't the source of the other 2.

l8r

Tp

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