talkmagic.co.uk

i was chatting with Penn Jillette and he and Teller both "hate" Criss Angel. They even mentioned in their show that they don't like him. They also said that A&E offered david blaine to do the show before criss angel was even in the picture and david blaine refused because he didn't want to use camera editing and trickery like the show is made of now. Also Criss angel's show in vegas is not surviving he signed a 100 million dollar contract for 10 years and since it is doing terribly it is being eliminated. Penn said " Of course it is doing terribly, you have to be a magician to have a magic show in vegas". I laughed.

gymguy203 wrote:i was chatting with Penn Jillette and he and Teller both "hate" Criss Angel. They even mentioned in their show that they don't like him. They also said that A&E offered david blaine to do the show before criss angel was even in the picture and david blaine refused because he didn't want to use camera editing and trickery like the show is made of now. Also Criss angel's show in vegas is not surviving he signed a 100 million dollar contract for 10 years and since it is doing terribly it is being eliminated. Penn said " Of course it is doing terribly, you have to be a magician to have a magic show in vegas". I laughed.

Really?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtlpkjGXQeQ

I quite like Criss Angel personally, he reignited my interest in magic!

When I was a young and impressionable child (opposed to a young and impressionable adult!) I saw Copperfield's Buzzsaw illusion on a television countdown of the worlds best illusions and after weeks of trying to work it out decided there was no way I would ever be able to conceive such an amazing illusion and should therefore forget about magic, which is a pity.

You can imagine my excitement when I visited Vegas and was able to go and see the legendary Copperfield live but to be honest, the show lacked finesse and showmanship. None of the illusions really giving me pause for thought. My wife convinced me that we should go see Criss Angel BeLIEve, granted because she thought he looked hot and I was not keen as the only time I had really heard of him was from the show he did where he escaped from the prison cell naked, which I thought lacked magical content and spent too much time with the build up.

I was very pleasantly surprised by BeLIEve. Criss Angel has fantastic stage presence and the amalgamation with a Cirque Du Soleil show gave the entire presentation a very unique feel. I think the only reason the show receives so much criticism is because traditional magic shows are generally; trick, applause, trick, applause, tri... etc. so people feel it lacks magic content and traditional Cirque fans might consider it a bit "tacky" to have "magic tricks" in what is normally a reasonably "high brow" theatrical performance.

I would be lying if I said I did not feel cheated when I worked out how various illusions Criss Angel performs were achieved with purely CGI and stooges. I feel there is a difference between performing an illusion and CGI (as someone stated earlier, otherwise you just have some talentless shell with 'Industrial Light and Magic [sic]' doing all the work) however I think Angels work is sufficiently spread to encompass illusions that do not always rely on this, however as also stated in an earlier post, if you feel cheated by a magician then it probably means he has done something right.

For those of you that have not seen the Luxor Levitation I think that is well worth watching as I know the conventional method for achieving this and know the facility would be available but cannot see how it would have been achievable under these conditions.

Damn I can waffle on, sorry for such a long first post!