His birth name was Randall James Hamilton Zwinge. He was born in Toronto, Canada, in 1928. At age 17, RJHZ joined a carnival, would later re-christen himself James Randi, and went onto become mostly known as a stage magician.
The doc includes some b&w archival footage of Randi in his early career as an illusionist, although, overall, AN HONEST LIAR doesn't concern itself too much with spotlighting prestidigitation. To its credit, it's more interested in Randi, skeptic of paranormal claims.
Enter Peter Popoff (televangelist) and Israeli Uri Geller (a self-identified psychic). The former professed to heal the ailments or afflictions of those he welcomed on stage during his religious services; the latter, Randi sought to expose as a mere legerdemainist rather than a gifted mentalist.
Psychokinesis. Telepathy. Dubious I am of these supposed extrasensory facets of the mind when fame and fortune are involved. With that said, exposing phonies and frauds in the business of swindling and scamming credulous dupes is a commendable line of work but does nothing to discount such phenomena in and of itself. My feeling is, genuine psi faculties are likely not innate abilities within the human but rather attributable to nonhuman intelligences operating through psychically sensitive conduits. As such, experiments within a scientifically controlled experiment, as Mr. Geller participated in, would almost certainly demonstrate a subject's lack of control over such unpredictable abilities, more than anything else.
Randi was admired by Carl Sagan, had served on the Advisory Board of the False Memory Foundation in the U.S., and was associated with CSICOP (Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal). Frankly, his earlier days performing feats of derring-do and escapology doesn't interest me all that much as his work as a professional "debunker." I used to love reading his articles, even if I didn't always agree with his opinions and conclusions.
Do hocuspocussing entertainers, with their bag of tricks, necessarily rule out the existence of actual thaumaturgy? I would think not. So a few parapsychologists, as shown here in the whole Project Alpha incident, were hornswoggled by a couple of psychic pretenders. So Randi's partner played a fake channeler and showed just how many people want to believe in this stuff. Yes, it's true that unctuous and affluent televangelists, for example, certainly give Christianity a bad name but in the end do nothing to discredit the Bible in any way. What isn't made clear in the film is what Randi thought of the paranormal and ESP in general, the charming and likable Geller aside.
Despite the scowling image as pictured in the film's promotional art, Randi is portrayed here as a supportive companion and all in all affable fellow. Still, AN HONEST LIAR is I feel at fault for spending too much time focused on Randi's relationship with his housemate. Other than "The Carlos Hoax" inclusion (which brought to mind the documentary, "Kumare"), the rest of the personal material is arguably superfluous.
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