Best movie ever!

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

"Magicians are the most honest people in the world. They tell you they're going to fool you, and then they do it."A great title for a film that revolves around a magician who is devoted to uncovering the lies told by faith healers and psychics around the globe. The subject of this documentary is James "The Amazing" Randi, who was once a brilliant magician and escape artist, but has now decided to put his talents into use to unmask those people (the con artists) who are making money out of false claims and trickery. The documentary begins with an interview where Randi explains how a magician's job is to tell its audience he or she is going to fool them and make them wonder how he or she pulled it off. That is a very different thing from a person who claims to have special psychic powers or a special communication with God and use those abilities to lie and deceive people. Randi's passion for magic and his humanity led him to use his abilities to show others how they are being deceived without ever revealing the trick. The way he went about uncovering these people is what makes this documentary compelling as he creates fictional characters or personas to fool audiences, the media, and even scientists before revealing to them that it was all a scam and proving therefor how easy it is to deceive others when you have abilities to perform these tricks. Randi himself is a charismatic man and we see it through some old TV archives in interviews with Johnny Carson, Larry King, and Regis Philbin. The documentary is pretty standard as it goes back and forth between interviews and TV footage, but what makes it stand out is the story it is telling which I wasn't familiar with. I was so completely unaware of what this film was about that I didn't even know it was a documentary until it began. In the beginning we are introduced to this great escape artist who marveled audiences with his stunning tricks. He explains he dropped out of High School at the age of 17 to join a circus and that is where his adventures began. Once we are introduced to the man himself, the documentary begins to explore some of the psychics he began to unmask. The first thing Randi decided to do was get his good friend Jose Alvarez to pose as a psychic who is traveling to Australia. They invent several media clips about his accomplishments in the US and once he arrives in Australia he immediately fools everyone because the media never even bothered to check the reliability of the sources they were providing them with. After exposing how easy it is to fool the media, he continues to do so with the scientists as well. There is one great clip about how they unmasked a faith healer named Peter Popoff by proving that his wife was telling him what to say through an earpiece from some prayer requests cards that they had asked the people to fill out prior to the service. Despite the great amount of footage shown of how Randi unmasked these psychics they still continued to fool a lot of people. Randi couldn't understand why so many people failed to acknowledge that they were being fooled and clung on to their beliefs. Then as we were approaching the end of the documentary we were exposed to a surprising and ironic twist that allowed us to view this in a different light. Without giving away any spoilers, Randi himself was being deceived and after the deception he too decided to cling on to his love and accept it. Perhaps the lesson we might learn here as ironic as it sounds is that we choose to see what we want to see and accept the deceptions we want to accept. The twist kind of took everyone by surprise so it wasn't explored all that much, but it still seemed to make an interesting point to what was being said. Rand's personal life wasn't as interesting as his work, but the end justifies why it was introduced in the first place. This was a good watch but it didn't do anything groundbreaking for the genre.

There truly is something mystical about "An Honest Liar", that allows it to transcend its flawed structure and be relevant in spite of it. At its core, the ambition of the film is to establish and walk the line between what constitutes an illusion and what rises to the rank of deception. To achieve this, it takes a good, long look at the life of James Randi, renowned magician and skeptic of things in the paranormal. Going beyond its overarching ambition, An Honest Liar builds on three parts - Randi's life as an artist, his challenges as a skeptic and his (intertwined) personal travail. The first is as interesting as magic can be, without ever revealing the secret behind tricks - I'm sorry, illusions. But the pace really picks up as the case for skepsis takes shape, trying to untie the blatant lies and manipulation from the willing suspension of critical thought and disbelief. The question of what really constitutes the truth, as expressed through the power of belief, both religious and - ironically - scientific, gets a fair, balanced and creative tackle. Ultimately, Randi's personal life and some surprising insights into the act of deception lying close to its core, becomes a bit of a meta-analysis of the previous two parts.The problem is that this last segment mostly fails, because it appears very tangential to Randi's quest and shifts the focus on fairly mundane personal matters that are contorted somewhat to fit the wider arch. Yet, it came easy to me to go beyond it.Just because the directors' reach exceeded their grasp does not mean that the film doesn't work artistically, as an expression and an experience of boundary blurring between truth and lies. It achieves this by dragging you into taking a stand by the end, in a narratively artificial yet intellectually testing personal battle for Randi, after seventy minutes of case building and creating an emotional connection with the subject. In that, it is fun and relevant, stressing the strength of belief over fact, over truth and the challenges that lie in dealing with it.

The life and career of the renowned stage magician turned scientific skeptic of the paranormal, James Randi.We have some great classic footage, though some is a bit fuzzy by modern standards. The well-known debate with Uri Geller is here, but also a pretty thorough section on Peter Popoff, whose story I did not know about. It is sad to know that these guys get debunked and keep on going.The film also focuses on Randi's relationship with his boyfriend of twenty-five years, José Alvarez, who at the time of filming, had been discovered to be living under a false identity, calling into question "whether Randi was the deceiver or the deceived." This is quite a fascinating twist, as the great debunker turns out to have been sharing his life with the greatest con of all.

I admire Randi since I was a kid because he was passion about the truth, and his effort to expose BS. I always hear about he was a magician, but never got the chance to see him in those days. Gladly, this documentary tell his story from the beginning to the present, so there is a lot of footage of his magician days.The story sometimes jumps back and forward, but I think in a good way. Overall is told chronologically.A long story compress in so few minutes. But don't feel like was too short or too long.Also is great to see people that was involve in all those stories talking about it in the present.If you are a fan of Randi, for sure you most watch it.