Classy - Gone With The Wind / The Prestige

I hardly get time and patience to watch movies lately. But I managed to watch a few last week from the bunch of movies lying in my 500 GB external hard disk for long time. Couple of them were "The Prestige" and "Gone with the wind", two classic movies release of two different era and both made a motion picture from best selling novels and I liked both.

The Prestige:

I heard a good review of this movie about 3 years back and downloaded it. But the movie was deleted without watching due to shortage of memory in our computer back then. I got this movie very lately from one of colleague friend. I may have taken so many days to watch it for the first time, but it took less than a day for me to watch it the second time. It is such a candid movie from the renowned director "Christoper Nolan" whose recent flick "The Inception" movie got him many attention. I was able to better comprehend the movie only in the second watch.

The story revolves around two rival magicians namely Angier and Borden whose rivalry gets exacerbated when the latter performs an stunning crowd pulling illusion back in London. The movie reveals few illusions which magicians perform commonly which I was wondering how for many years.

Every magic consists of three parts.

The first part is called "The Pledge" where the magician shows something ordinary like a deck of cards or a bird.

The second part is called "The Turn" where the magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary like disappearing it.

The third and the hardest part is called "The Prestige" where the magician brings back what he disappeared.

The ultimated illusion done by Borden was called "The Transported Man", the prestige of which was kept secretly by him. Borden lives his real life to support this illusion keeping even his wife and child away from the secret. His rival Angier tries unorthodox ways to make Borden reveal it but he fails. Finally he goes to America to meet a Scientist who invents a machine which duplicates everything which it holds. This is where the movie contradicts nature. Apart from this part, I liked every other part of the movie and it could well contest for a classic work.

The movie has enough suspense to carry forward in every scene to make you stay close to the screen once you manage to get pass the first few minutes.


Gone with the wind:

The next movie was the 1939 classic "Gone with the wind", winner of 10 Academy awards. This was the first time I had watched a movie which runs more than three and a half hours. The stage was set during the American Civil war time with a mentally strong lady named Scarlet as a protagonist.

I was stunned when operations where performed without giving anesthesia to soldiers of war, since they ran out of it. The scene should have definitely stunned the audience of 1939 who were very close to the civil war.

A civilization in southern America in a place called Tara gets destroyed completely and goes in the wind after which the movie is named. Scarlet loses her lover Ashley in the start of the movie who gets married to her cousin. She then loses her husband, a soldier who becomes a victim of the civil war. She then moves to Atlanta to forget all these agony during when the civilisations get washed out in the south. She bravely returns back through the war destroyed places to her parents back in Tara with a pistol for her protection. The town runs out of everything including food. Scarlet fights all odds including murdering an Yankee to rescue Tara. She marries a local businessman for the second time, who too gets killed in a trifle in the town later. Scarlet then marries a rich man called Rhett Butler for the third time and gives birth to a girl child. She later even loses her daughter in an accident and even Rhett leaves her to complicate her agony. Even after all these, Scarlet possess strength to go forward in her life.

A note on a private building in Tara is still in my mind which says:

"Don't squander Time.
This is the stuff of which life is made of."

The movie portraits the struggle of Scarlet who turns from a playful girl to a serious lady to save her love and family and is nothing short of a masterpiece.