'Deceptive Practice' - Movie Review

The full title of the movie is "Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay." Ricky Jay is a well known magician (if you don't know the name, you'd recognize his face), and he's an intelligent and generally interesting man - although a bit of an ass. Somehow they've managed to make a remarkably boring movie about him - in part by taking a lifetime of magical practice and repertoire and reducing it to less than 15 minutes of footage in the movie. Instead, we have Jay talking about his mentors, magicians long gone (Cardini, Dai Vernon, Charlie Miller). Certainly, he's not telling us their secrets: he's a magician, they don't do that. So he talks about what it was like to be around them. And this kind of story telling isn't really his forte as a performer. I would much rather have seen him perform for an hour and a half.