What they say... "Mentalism is the art of exploring and revealing hidden connections." - Jay Sankey
Featuring OVER 3 HOURS of outstanding "magic of the mind," HEMISPHERES is an ingenious collection of 20 startling psychic effects, many of which Jay is sharing for the very first time. This exciting dvd includes "experiments and demonstrations" with business cards, coins, watches, playing cards, fortune cookies, photographs, magazines, notepads, paper money, tarot cards, play-doh and even a doll's eye!
And thanks to Jay's philosophy of "mind over muscle," the majority of these truly startling routines require VERY LITTLE SLEIGHT-OF-HANDABILITY! Instead, the emphasis is on full presentations and nurturing a REAL connection with your audiences. Jay even includes an enormous amount of scripting right out of his own professional repertoire!
Jay also discusses the importance of making your mentalism as visual as possible, deflecting focus away from yourself, the relationship between simplicity and flexibility, the power of the implicit, and the performance of what Jay calls "meaningful mentalism."
Jay even shares "The Punch Principle" and "The Billet Delivery System" two exciting new techniques he's been keeping to himself for years!
And as a very special ADDED BONUS Jay has included a professionally printed, full-color photograph for his incredible PHOTO FINISH routine!
Cost About £24 from any good online magic ven-door.
Difficulty
(1=easy to do, 2=No sleights, but not so easy, 3=Some sleights used,
4=Advanced sleights used, 5=Suitable for experienced magicians only)
3, but a fairly easy 3. Most of the effects revolve around one fairly simple premise, which for me is something I like about Sankey stuff. (I mean "one each", not "one overall"!)
Review
Firstly, let's make the obvious comparison. In {whatever year it was!}, Sankey released "Boris Pocus". It contained "mentalism" effects that were still distinctly Sankey - they were simple, to the point, mostly quite easy to do and to put together, but it was criticised somewhat for being mentalism-lite for magicians. I liked it, because it was entertaining and I like Sankey's approach to any effect, mental or otherwise. He has also released "22 blows to the head", another foray into "mental magic".
So, in brief, this DVD is... more of the same. And although I liked Boris Pocus, I can't help but feel slightly disappointed by that. It's weird - I was looking forward to it, expecting it to be the same, and now it is more of the same, I'm not entirely thrilled.
Let's look at what you get - there are 20 effects on here, which is a lot by anyone's standard. Say whatever you want, you can't accuse him for skimping on material, and with a run-time of over 3 hours, you'll certainly feel you got your money's worth in terms of viewing time. The "added bonus" of an included prop is fairly lame as it could very easily be created by most people at home or at the office - he would have been better including some tarot cards for one of the effects.
With all but a few effects, the mental slant he gives each effect is fairly repetitive. Almost every one starts with him pattering about "an experiment to see how connected we are..." or something to that end. Perhaps you can't help but get bored of this watching 20 effects back to back, but I actually found myself watching at 1.5x or even 2x speed, just because I wanted to skip through the predictable presentation to the actual bread and butter of the effect. Unfortunately, Sankey doesn't present mentalism in a particularly stunning way... I could watch him jump about and do funny voices or wacko-humour for hours, but when trying to be more serious he seems a little... deflated.
Some more negative points... with the exception of 2 effects, I wasn't fooled. Which is a shame. Granted, I have a fairly good understanding of principles in both mentalism and magic, but you hope when watching a DVD that several effects will really "get you"... and when I said I was fooled, it wasn't even "wow, that's really cool!", it was more "hmm... not sure how he did that."
Also, when I say that this DVD is more of the same, I really do mean it - many of the effects are forms of card prediction or "coincidence", which to me largely play out as a slightly tame piece of card magic. Out of the ones that don't use cards, most of the principles are not only second hand but were on Boris Pocus or other DVDs of his. He uses the "newspaper column prediction cut" technique thingy... again. He uses paperclipped... again. He actually uses one principle which is such old hat I had to look outside to see if bell-bottoms were back in style! The one effect that really did actually impress me uses a very straight forward and much-used method in mentalism for making future predictions.
Moving on, let's talk for a second about the "Billet Delivery System"... I am actually concerned about a legal problem here. The "BDS" is an envelope - I'm not going to describe it's workings because who'sever it is won't thank me, but I'm pretty sure it ain't Sankey's. I've definitely seen it on one of the Mark Spelmann DVDs, it even made me flick through Corinda to see if it was in there. I watch this with interest...
It seems that when Sankey puts it mind towards coming up with mental-type effects, he racks his brains, comes up with his favourite old principles and works out a way to shoe-horn it into a more mental presentation. Which is a shame, because I'd really love to see him thinking outside the box a bit more... in all honesty, there has been a more mental twist to some of the effects on his straight magic DVDs than many of these. "Magic of the Mind" is perhaps a good description of what this is - magic tricks with a slightly mental flavour. Not a bad idea, but even then, the mental flavour is pretty weak in some of these effects, but because Sankey seems to think that the mentalism presentation will add the "power", the magic is not necessarily strong either! What you feel left with, in some instances at least, is a straight-forward card trick with a few lines of bullsh*t!
However! After all that, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. This DVD, like Boris Pocus, does help to teach you a lesson - that, despite what Craig Browning would have you believe (:P
) mentalists put on their trousers one leg at a time too, and you don't have to have a receding hairline and start trying to use crackpot psychological forces in order to introduce a mental aspect to your magic. This is not for people wanting effects to make up a powerful mentalism routine, it is for magicians who want a bit of variation.
Still, there are some decent effects on here. Just because they didn't fool me doesn't mean a great deal - in many cases it's probably because I recognised the method, and if they impressed me when I first saw them on other DVDs then hey, maybe this is packed with gems!
There are also a very few principles which are quite inspirational, and if I don't use them for that particular effect I will certainly use them elsewhere. Amusingly, a few weeks ago I was doing a bit of creative thinking about magic, every day items that were lacking any decent effects with them etc. and I thought about an effect with receipts. Two of the effects on this DVD use receipts. I was thinking more of a torn and restored but still, I like the dimension added by this recognisable item, and I like both of the effects that use them.
Overall this is less mentalism, more "mental magic". It is Sankey through and through and I'm actually still happy enough that I bought it. The simpleness to the routines is a pleasant change from many DVDs which require long winded, difficult or expensive set up, and if you're looking for some good mental magic effects, you'll probably find some stuff you like on here. But don't buy this expecting a load of stuff you haven't seen on other Sankey products. On this DVD, Jay himself recognises that Boris Pocus didn't receive a rave reaction from the magical fraternity - I hope he's not holding his breath about this one because it's effectively Boris Pocus without the crazy-ness.
A mediocre 6/10 Originality - not really, value for money, probably, worth buying, possibly. For some reason, I'm still quite glad i got this, but I don't really know why. Does that help?!
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xxx (Peace-Up)
