Random I-Tunes Song of The Moment: My Guitar Lies Bleeding In My Arms By Bon Jovi
Holy Crap! Chris Hestnes is an incredibly talent dude. His level is one to aspire to if you're an XCM guy. For those of you just tuning in, that's not X-Rayed Cow Membrane. It's eXtreme Card Manipulation, and Hestnes is one of the best.
For $35 bucks, you get over two hours of eye-candy, 13 visually stunning extreme flourishes, an incredibly produced DVD and a pretty big piece of ad copy that does NOT live up to its claim. The ad copy claims that anyone with basic knowledge of card handling can easily follow along. I beg to differ. I have a pretty advanced (or worst case scenario intermediate - certainly beyond basic) knowledge level of card handling, and it was not easy. In fact, some of the stuff was basically not learn-able because portions of the teaching that I felt were needed were just not there. As you'll see below, the method of teaching left so much material untaught.
The bottom line is this: If you want to spend $35 to watch a couple hours of incredible flourishes, in all likelihood, you'll be happy with your purchase. However, if you plan on learning these moves, I think you'll be quite a bit disappointed. The method of teaching is to have a camera above and behind Hestnes, looking over his shoulder while he does the sequence of moves very slowly. There is no talking, no discussing of finer points, no help on tricks or tips on mastering the moves; just Hestnes doing the moves slowly. That's it.
Again, the material is incredibly entertaining, but the teaching is just not there. There are, for example, a few moves/sequences where he seems to be using some pressure in a particular way to get the cards to fling into the air and flip over and land on his other hand. It's just not very clear how he's doing it. This would be a perfect place for some commentary explaining what's going on. In fairness, in the bonus section there are a few moves/flourishes taught with verbal explanations. But for the most part, there is a ton of information that is lost or missing due to the method of teaching.
Some flourishes might be learn-able via this method, but most of them on the DVD, in my opinion, are not. If you just want some killer entertaining flourishes to watch, as I said, you'll like this video. If you want to learn them, you probably will not.
So, I'm left with a middle of the road decision.
Final Verdict:
2.5 Stars with a Stone Status of Grubble (sort of gem and sort of rubble).
4 Comments
It was brought to my attention after reading this review that the basics of card handling for some one into cardistry is very different from the basics in card handling for some one into magic. Magicians might consider the pass, the double lift, the back palm, the charlier cut and the Elmsley count to be the basics but for some one who performs just cuts and flourishes there is a whole different vocabulary of basics. The basics for a flourisher might include Kalush’s cut, the tornado flourish, the werm, five faces of sybil and the Carnahan fan. So I wonder if there was some disconnect here where this was not a magic DVD per se but a cardistry DVD.
@Josh – I’m not sure I’d buy that point. I understand what you’re saying, but my gut tells me 99 out of 100 magicians, both XCM types and “traditional” sleight of hand would say that “basic card handling” is just that . . . knowing your way around a deck of cards, competent with basic moves (e.g., breaks, cuts, shuffles, etc.).
The X in XCM stands for extreme. By definition that’s not basic. It’s advanced, so even someone who knows some relatively easy flourishes would not be considered to have “basic” knowledge. They’d be considered to have intermediate or advanced knowledge.
If the ad copy said “basic flourish knowledge” I might lean a little bit more to your point, but they said “card handling.” In my opinion, a pass is not “basic card handling.” Even that’s intermediate at least.
Yeah, I see your point. On another note, one of my pet peeves in any magic DVD, including cardistry DVD’s is silent tutorials. I think it’s kinda on the lazy side. A quick verbal run through before the silent slow motion video does wonders for learning speed.
@Josh – The silent tutorials tend to bother me as well. I get that they’re trying to be international, but on a DVD as advanced and technical as this one, it’s foolish to go silent. This is the kind of stuff that requires nuance and knack which is already hard enough to learn by having someone show and explain. It deepens the wound and stretches the learning curve to darn-near infinity when you do it completely silent. I’ve seen some silent DVDs that have worked because the material was simple enough, but not in this case.