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Very well executed

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

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

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

There are numerous visual delights here as an alchemist works with others to invent. What actually happens is the magic that has been done before resurfaces. Still, I really enjoy the faces that are presented to us. The magician never leaves character and continues to work, even though there are complicated issues. Nice little venture.

Mysterious Retort, The (1906) *** (out of 4)aka L'alchimiste Parafaragaramus ou la cornue infernaleA wizard falls asleep in his lab when a serpent comes out from a cabinet and soon takes shape in a variety of forms including a spider, a joker and a mysterious woman. This here is another one of Melies most popular films and it's easy to see why as we're given all sorts of nice humor, some weird situations and just an overall surreal atmosphere that really makes this stick out among his hundreds of pictures. I'm not sure what it is but I always love when that serpent shows up as I find it to be one of the most interesting figures from this early part of film. It's certainly nothing ground breaking and the effect of it is obvious but it makes for a lot of fun. The spider here and its web is another major plus. Fans of the director will certainly enjoy the humor here and if you're new to Melies then this is a good place to start.

I love the films of Méliès, as for their day, they were the most clever, creative and had the best trick cinematography of the day. His movies such as Le Voyage Dans le Lune are classics and I try to see every one I can--they are just so amazing and watchable even today (unlike the films of Edison and Lumiere which seem pretty pointless today).Unfortunately, while this IS a wonderful film, it is NOT among Méliès' best--in fact, oddly, it is almost plot less and is just an excuse to create special effect after special effect. The effects (apart from the cheesy snake) are great and the film is well worth seeing, but it has little lasting value unlike most of his other films I have seen.If you want to see this film online, go to Google and type in "Méliès" and then click the video button for a long list of his films that are viewable without special software.

Even when we look at one of Melies' films and don't know what he is going on about, still, we are carried along by his speed, his good humor and his inventiveness -- after all, his films at this stage rarely last more than a minute. Here, we have a piece that might be called "The Alchemist's Dream." The old alchemist falls asleep and dreams of finding the philosopher's stone: he dreams of snakes shedding their skins, of young women tossing gold, all the hermetical symbols of the Philosopher's Stone which not only granted the ability to transmute any item into gold, but gave one eternal youth.So this is a sad movie, in a way: an old man dreams of being young. Yet Melies hides behind these symbols, which we don't know about nowadays, and produces a fun little piece.