![]() ![]() What had drawn me to watch Death Defying Acts, is that it's a story with Harry Houdini, arguably the greatest illusionist and escape artist of our time. This is an unjustly overlooked film that, while not being a masterpiece, serves up a fine story well told. Pearce, Zeta-Jones, Spall and Ronan turn in excellent performances. The musical score by Cezary Skubiszewski is a terrific mixture of Scottish tunes and instruments with solid melodramatic mood music. The atmosphere of the film is well captured by cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos who understands who to balance the mire of the streets of 1926 Edinburgh with the gorgeous fantasies used during Houdini's escape acts. How Mary and Benji work their way into Houdini's belief system and love life with their con game forms the meat of the sparing. Houdini's manager Sugarman (Timothy Spall) arranges Houdini's water tank escape acts and other acts of 'magic', and when Mary and Benji arrange to meet Houdini, Sugarman is aware they are charlatans. Their idol is Harry Houdini (Guy Pearce) and when they learn Houdini is coming to Edinburgh to 'perform', they discover Houdini is promising $10,000 to anyone who can prove they have the ability to look into the future (or past). Mary does exotic dances then uses her 'gifts' to see into the 'other world' of people in the audience ( Benji does the investigative work and is the prompter for the séance like acts Mary performs). Mary McGarvie (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and her daughter Benji (Saoirse Ronan) survive in Edinburgh by picking pockets not merely for cash but for information to use in their act in the little theaters. DEATH DEFYING ACTS uses the character of Harry Houdini as the stimulus of to tell a story about the folk of Edinburgh, Scotland at a time when stage shows were embraced much the way America was using vaudeville - an escape from the rather dreary state of living to a world of entertainment and love of magic. Her sense of pacing and image creation adds substance to her tales that sometimes border on bizarre. Gillian Armstrong makes fine movies: she is a director who knows how to tell stories and enhance what appears on the surface to be reality with a healthy dose of fantasy. "Death Defying Acts" turns out to be a bore. Fortunately, Saoirse Ronan is delightful as the psychic sidekick. There is little chemistry between Guy Pearce and Catherine Zeta-Jones. I do not care about the characters, and whatever relationship they have between them. There is not much tension or drama to captivate me. The plot is slow, plain and not exciting at all. However, this film has none of these attributes. As Houdini is the greatest escape artist of all times, a film about him should have been exciting, thrilling and even death defying. It is a slowly unfolding drama about how Mary attempts to con Harry, and how harry falls for her. "Death Defying Acts" sounds like an action movie, but the poster looks more like a romantic film. To return multiple licenses provide a comma separated list of licenses that need to be returned.įor more information about sesictrl, click here.This film is about a woman who works as a con artist trying to deceive Harry Houdini into believing that she has psychic powers. You must use the License Administrator (hkey). Note partial returns are not supported with sesictrl. The License ID is the numeric ID of the license to be returned. sesictrl return-license LicenseID to initiate the return.sesictrl print-license to get a list of installed licenses (the first column is the License ID).Type sesictrl login to log into your SideFX license account.Once you have the Houdini environment setup in your Terminal, use sesictrl to return the license: To have access to sesictrl, you will need to setup the Houdini command line environment.The sesictrl program is a way to manage licenses without a graphical interface.You may return a subset of licenses from the full quantity. Enter your email address and the password used for licensing.Īs of Houdini 19.0, partial returns are now supported.Right-click and select "Return License".The disable code is also recorded and added to your account. When you return a license, a disable code is calculated and written to your licenses file on the computer. They will be placed back into your SideFX licensing account as uninstalled entitlements which can be pulled down from another computer using the License Administrator. Returning licenses will release them from the computer name and hardware. A license may be returned up to 10 times per year.Licenses cannot be returned from the website.Returning licenses must be initiated by the computer itself.Use the License Administrator (hkey) or sesictrl (non-graphical hkey). ![]()
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