Silent Movie look alike

Rating: 3/10 (4 February 2007)

Yes, the movement (see Editing)reminded me of a silent film (it may be that I've been educated visually by the extraordinary evolvement of movie editing over the years and have become unconsciously intolerant of this kind of editing).
There are 344 reviews of this movie and while I have but read a sampling; some raves and some pans, I must say that the negative reviews are some of the best I've read at IMDb (usually people, both pro and con, deal exclusively with emotional reactions to a movie; nothing wrong with that by the way.) So with the above in mind I will not repeat the major objections most people had but will report a few odds-and-ends that I didn't see commented on. Again, I thought the negative reviews were spot on.
1) Style of editing, mentioned above, was so slow that I remarked to my wife that whole feature films could have safely passed through the straits between scenes.
2) A weakness or too sometimes shown by inexperienced feature film directors: The costumes, vehicles, interior furnishings were squeaky clean. As a retired film technician I've seen this happen plenty of times first hand. Filmmakers, prop people, set people get overly concerned with the things they rent and are timid about, well, dirtying them for instance. Was Vienna of the late 19th Century that clean? I don't think so. Did every passerby as well as more featured characters always have supremely clean and pressed clothes/uniforms; I think not.
3) The cinematography was way too beautiful. It's a boy-meets-girl, boy-loses girl, etc. story and one didn't need to bashed over the head with the visual lushness. Restraint, restraint, restraint.
4) Penn and Teller and David Copperfield, to mention just two contemporary magicians, are able to visually do amazing things that are perfect illusions. I couldn't buy into some of the illusions Eisenheim performed on stage. Yes, suspension of disbelief as far as one is able to do it counts for something but I couldn't cede this because of the sophistication of some of the illusions placed in the contest of where stage magic was at the time.
Another final extension of 4): I find that many horror films and films like "The Illusionist" are faith-based. To me, they are essentially asking for the viewer to become believers. If a religious movie is directly showing miracles, for instance, then you sub-consciously accept or not-accept it based on your own belief system, either religious or secular. "The Illusionist's" illusions tap into the supernaturalism of religious belief and even the hideous *"explain all" ending confuses one when taking this tack. Inspector Uhl remembers the things that fooled him but doesn't think about something like how butterflies could be conjured that actually carry three a three dimensional object into the audience. *Hitchcock's brilliant "Psycho" also has an ending that almost screws up an otherwise perfect film; a psychiatrist "explains" why Norman Bates did what he did.