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Derren Brown: Sacrifice (Netflix)

Started by Noodle Lizard, November 28, 2018, 02:36:25 AM

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Noodle Lizard

Just watched this.  Biggest load of shite he's done, and that's up against some stiff competition from the past 10 years or so.

Anyone else see it?  Fuck me.

Lost Oliver

No but I heard him talking to Sam Harris about it and it sounded dull AF. In fact the whole interview was.

Replies From View

Was happened in it?

Edit:  the episode not the interview.

DrGreggles

I haven't watched any of his TV shows for a long time now.
The live shows are still brilliant though.

Noodle Lizard

Quote from: Replies From View on November 28, 2018, 08:24:18 AM
Was happened in it?

Edit:  the episode not the interview.

Finds a bloke with garden-variety "send them home" attitude towards immigrants
Does some bullshit
Bloke intervenes when immigrant is about to be murdered in cold blood by racist maniacs
Conclusion: why can't we all just get along?

I heard him on Joe Rogan (I know) making it very clear that the sociopolitical relevance was coincidental, which having seen it feels incredibly disingenuous in retrospect.  It's about as zeitgeisty and opportunistic as you could imagine, whilst not really proving or even demonstrating anything relevant to the issues it claims to tackle.  There's literally a bit where they make this bloke stare at a Foreign in silence for 4 minutes straight which, despite apparently being based on some sincerely effective experiment, is unintentionally bizarre and hilarious.

It's essentially 30 minutes of pseudoscientific set-up followed by 10 minutes of watching a bloke act as any half-normal person would in the extreme situation presented to them.  It's also dodgy as fuck; I've had suspicions about the authenticity of some of his previous "let's transform this idiot" shows, but this one was really pushing it at times.

I think it was very clearly made for a new (American) audience, and to attract the clickbaity reverence that dominates entertainment journalism here.  Derren barely even presents himself as a mentalist magician anymore, it's pure self-help guru shaman stuff now.

rasta-spouse

I've listened to 2 podcasts he's been on. Was he always this boring? I'm sure he was an opinionated upstart when he broke out, but he seems to say the exact same 10 mild things on every interview he's on.

Also, ivory towered as he is, someone must have told him by now his shows were much better when he was the protagonist. 


Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

It couldn't be as bad as that lottery one, could it?

monolith

Quote from: Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth on November 29, 2018, 12:04:51 AM
It couldn't be as bad as that lottery one, could it?
That was actually real, he figured it out using statistics.

Thomas

Derren Brown recently appeared on James Corden's presumably interminable chatshow, where he blew the good host's fortress-like mind with another amazing psychological trick.

Spoilers. If you squint, you'll notice two clunkily concealed mechanisms: the die is magnetic, and the rice-drop is sleight of hand. Derren concludes the trick with a moral message about how it's okay to be the weirdo outcast at school.

Now, all that's fine, of course. He's a magician. He does tricks and dresses them up with false explanations for purposes of entertainment and money (only this century the trendy explanation is 'psychology' rather than 'magic'). He's a fun and energetic performer, likeable and frantic. But I think that ten minute video captures the entirety of Derren's current MO. The old magic tricks disguised as psychology, as in the early noughties on Channel 4, but with a simplistic self-help message slapped on top for Netflix relevance.

I feel that his reputation as a genuine psychological genius - fostered even among sceptically minded peers and viewers who believed his play-explanations - probably zoomed ahead of his expectations back when he started. You begin forging your career as a magician with a psychological spin, and suddenly everybody thinks you are actually - actually - super-brain Sherlock Holmes.

Quote from: Noodle Lizard on November 28, 2018, 10:34:56 AM
It's also dodgy as fuck; I've had suspicions about the authenticity of some of his previous "let's transform this idiot" shows, but this one was really pushing it at times.

After noticing all the sleights of hand, splitscreens, blanks, and magnets, I think it's safe to presume that most of his 'authenticity' is a playful cover. He's David Copperfield, except he hangs around afterwards to explain that the Statue of Liberty was hidden using quantum entanglement. His classic disclaimer cites the following techniques:

QuoteMagic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection, and showmanship

I do think the third word should be in a really small font. And 'editing' should be in there somewhere, in big Word Art.

Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth


Replies From View

The best one he did - with the most pleasing explanation too - was the horse-racing one.

im barry bethel

Spent 2hrs queing up for the Derren Brown ghost Train ride at Thorpe park then the bloody thing broke down, Dezza can fuck right off

DrGreggles

He's the nearest thing there is to the devil...

#TeamDodds

lgpmachine

I never really understood why the lottery prediction had such a negative reaction.   I always felt that it was just an interesting trick that served as a framing device to explore and detail some concepts and ideas (wisdom of crowds etc) in a way that wasn't just a straight documentary.  Ultimately, he's a magician, so he was never going to reveal how it was really done.

Cuellar

Quote from: Replies From View on November 29, 2018, 06:00:08 PM
The best one he did - with the most pleasing explanation too - was the horse-racing one.

Was that the one where he convinced a bookie that he had a winning ticket?

And was the explanation: "we got the bookie to go along with it on camera then gave the money back afterwards"

mojo filters

Quote from: Cuellar on November 30, 2018, 03:06:24 PM
Was that the one where he convinced a bookie that he had a winning ticket?

And was the explanation: "we got the bookie to go along with it on camera then gave the money back afterwards"

I assume it was the long show where a punter started out winning on one race, then progressed to the next then the next etc. The explanation was obvious yet rather clever nevertheless.

I remember the show you reference, though I didn't realise he actually explained how he did the Star Wars style winning ticket thing!

Cuellar

Ah right.

I've just assumed that was how that ticket thing was done.

When I worked at a bookies you took the ticket off the punter and ran it through a machine to determine if you should pay out.

Mango Chimes

Quote from: lgpmachine on November 30, 2018, 02:57:27 PM
I never really understood why the lottery prediction had such a negative reaction.   I always felt that it was just an interesting trick that served as a framing device to explore and detail some concepts and ideas (wisdom of crowds etc) in a way that wasn't just a straight documentary.  Ultimately, he's a magician, so he was never going to reveal how it was really done.

I don't think not revealing how it was done was the big problem. It was the shitty fake reason he gave about 'the wisdom of crowds'. Someone with a better memory than I (or who can be bothered looking him up on IMDB) can correct me, but I think this was especially egregious because that that stage in his career he'd made a shift towards being a Houdini-inspired debunker.

Also, the show was just a bit crap and uninteresting. Contrast the "I'm going to shoot myself in the head" one years earlier, which shared a "well, he obviously isn't" undercurrent but managed to still be tense and exciting.

Replies From View

Quote from: lgpmachine on November 30, 2018, 02:57:27 PM
I never really understood why the lottery prediction had such a negative reaction.   I always felt that it was just an interesting trick that served as a framing device to explore and detail some concepts and ideas (wisdom of crowds etc) in a way that wasn't just a straight documentary.  Ultimately, he's a magician, so he was never going to reveal how it was really done.

Yeah unfortunately "wisdom of crowds" is a shit topic to talk about under any pretext.

The major problem for me with the lottery one is it broke the one rule about television magic, which is "don't use camera tricks".  If you are going to do magic on TV, the television audience are trusting that what they are seeing there is the same as they'd see in the room, and the trickery will depend on misdirection, sleight of hand and so on.  If this simple trust is abused, and a camera trick is employed to make an assistant disappear or the lottery results appear, then quite rightly that magician will be treated with less respect thereafter. 

Nowadays, it would be quite possible to "bring" a CGI creature into a live television studio in the palm of your hands, but it's not what anyone actually in that room would see and it surely dilutes a magician's craft and skill to bundle such things into their act.  Quite simply, you don't get to say you fooled anyone if you've relied on camera tricks; you've only done the thing they were trusting you wouldn't be low enough to do.

Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

Exactly. If he'd have pretended to pull the numbers from a sealed envelope, it would have been a hoary old trick, but at least it would have required some skill on his part.

Replies From View

Quote from: Cuellar on November 30, 2018, 03:06:24 PM
Was that the one where he convinced a bookie that he had a winning ticket?

And was the explanation: "we got the bookie to go along with it on camera then gave the money back afterwards"

No, it was the one where he had a woman win one horse race after another on his recommendation. 

And it was shown that he'd gone through the same process with loads of other volunteers, so that every betting combination was covered.  Loads of other people were shown winning a string of races and then losing on the fifth or sixth one.  The woman who became the centre of the show just happened to be the person whose horses all happened to win.

I just found it a satisfying and honest show from a time when Derren Brown did good things.


Quote from: mojo filters on November 30, 2018, 03:17:33 PM
I assume it was the long show where a punter started out winning on one race, then progressed to the next then the next etc. The explanation was obvious yet rather clever nevertheless.

Yes that's it.

lgpmachine

Quote from: Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth on November 30, 2018, 04:33:41 PM
Exactly. If he'd have pretended to pull the numbers from a sealed envelope, it would have been a hoary old trick, but at least it would have required some skill on his part.

I guess it was probably just a case of it being something he thought of as being a good looking trick that he didn't really know what to do with short of building an entire show around it.

Replies From View

Quote from: lgpmachine on November 30, 2018, 07:51:46 PM
I guess it was probably just a case of it being something he thought of as being a good looking trick that he didn't really know what to do with short of building an entire show around it.

I think I'd have had more time for it if it had been an entire show built around increasingly ludicrous uses of camera trickery, with the lottery sequence being somewhere near the end, in the "so obvious the viewer isn't supposed to fall for this one" category.

And then the explanation a day later (if that's when it was) should have been an "at what point did you realise this was all camera trickery?" type of reveal.

I mean it would have been an arguably pointless exercise anyway, but people probably wouldn't have moaned about it as much because a) it would have at least had the amusing effect of an apparently sensible magic show becoming more and more obviously fake while it was luring people in, and b) the final reveal would have been truthful.