The whole thing is obviously heavily scripted to look laissez-faire and build tension for a boring stunt.
The fact that we never see a single continuous shot from the gun is a dead giveway that it is a con, as one would expect.
David Blaine may be insane for all I know (he’s not) but all those people together are certainly not.
Hence why I don’t trust Darren Brown, either.
I can’t get to the page in your link (blocked at work), but 90 foot-pounds is NOT a force, it has the units of energy.
If you’re wanting to figure the neck-snapping ability, you should be looking at the momentum, something measured in newton-seconds or pound-seconds.
Is Criss Angel a faker? I have no idea. I haven’t seen him him years. I know he’s a emo-douchey-goof, but has he faked stuff and tried to make it look real?
I saw your further points, but zero chance? We can’t know for sure, I think.
Have Penn and Teller given thoughts? I wonder if they think it was real.
Put it this way: Cris Angel’s way of doing the saw-a-woman-in-half trick is to get a stooge who was born without a lower body.
I’m not really following the rationale for calling some magicians “cheaters”. Every magician’s job is to deceive the audience. No one really believes that any magician can materialize rabbits out of thin air, or really saw a woman in half and restore her, right? It’s all deception. If Blaine presented his trick in a low-key way that makes some people think he might have actually caught a bullet, he has successfully performed his job. Of course, the chances that he actually did catch a bullet are infinitesimal, because there are numerous ways of performing the trick that don’t involve risking one’s life.
On the other hand, I have to agree that a TV magician who relies on trick photography is doing his job sloppily, without skill. That doesn’t make him a cheater, but it makes him a poor practitioner of his art.
So, is Ian McKellan a magician? How about Michael Gambon or Richard Harris? I wouldn’t call them poor practitioners of the art; I would say that they’re not practitioners at all. But what’s the difference between them and Blaine?
The realm of “magicians” creates lines far too blurry to support a clear finding that someone is a cheater.
However, David Blaine is qualitatively different to a regular stage magician. A regular stage magician uses trickery to achieve effects that would clearly be impossible to do without trickery. And they don’t usually claim any different. So the audience knows it has been tricked it just doesn’t know the details.
Blaine claims to be doing stunts that just conceivably could be achieved by extreme skill, daring and endurance, but is actually using trickery. So the audience (or at least part of it) has been tricked but doesn’t know it.
Does this difference matter? Who is to say?
Can you give some examples? Most of his stunts are unimpressive and merely uncomfortable things that anyone can do. Plenty of physics teachers get shocked by Tesla coils while protected by a Faraday cage, I saw one last time I was at Liberty Science center.
I assume he snuck some sugar and vitamins into his water when he was hanging over the Thames, but I don’t think that he hired stooges or used camera tricks to get out of the box every night, go for a stroll, or sleep in a bed.
And I don’t find it that hard to believe that, instead of using camera tricks to catch a bullet, he reduced the powder charge on the .22 so it had the force of a paintball or BB gun rather than the full amount. Obviously he’s lying about the mouth guard as well (it’s supposed to break) but that’s obvious puffery that we’re not expected to take seriously. Now, I agree that doing the trick with a real bullet and reduced charge is stupid and dangerous but it seems like a risk Blaine would be willing to take.
Isn’t Ian McKellan a magician in that movie? I thought it was real.
His Macbeth was magical, in a play that skirted blasphemy laws on representation of such things, but this time had no problem because King James I feared and hated witches, and was glad to see a spooky story with a bad King implied to be not-King James.
A production of the entire play with Sir Ian is on YouTube. Plus Judy Dench as Lady Macbeth, which isn’t too shabby either.
In that sense we can’t know, otherwise it wouldn’t sell.
I can believe he took a shot under very controlled circumstances for the slow motion close up (reduced charge, a few inches distance, etc).
The rest is just acting.
Rewatching the video it doesn’t seem convincing. The frontal normal speed shot just shows a plume of smoke and his head tilts back way more than the slow motion.
The bit about getting the bullet fragment out of the cup looks very fishy too. Both because it isn’t visible in any of the other shots, seems unlikely it would happen and it is stuck inside the cup. The “ow too hot” move doesn’t pass the sniff test either but I don’t know enough about the physics to conclusively rule out the possibility. The fragment would certainly be warm or whatever but I’ve never seen anyone flinch from the temperature of a bullet fragment.
His spiel is working, then.