A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Release Date:
January 7, 2005
Original Title:
Derren Brown: Messiah
Alternate Titles:
Derren Brown: The Specials - Messiah
Genres:
Comedy
Production Countries:
United Kingdom
Ratings / Certifications:
N/A
Runtime: 50
For his show "Messiah," Derren Brown traveled to the United States to try to convince five leading figures that he had powers in their particular field of expertise: Christian evangelism, alien abduction, psychic powers, New Age theories, and contacting the dead. Using a false name each time, Derren succeeded in convincing all of the "experts" that he had powers, and four openly endorsed him as a true practitioner. The concept of the show was to highlight the power of suggestion with regard to beliefs and people's abilities, and our failure to question those beliefs. His conclusion was that people tend to hear only things that support their own ideas and ignore contradictory evidence; this is known in psychology as confirmation bias.
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Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).
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Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)
While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:
Regarding profile removals and data corrections:
Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).
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Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.