The Fall

First off, I'm going to say that if you at all enjoyed Pan's Labyrinth, you need to see this movie. It isn't as magical a story, but The Fall is a very unique fantasy that is unlike most films you've seen. Also, unlike Pan's Labyrinth, it's in English.

I was rather surprised how little attention this film received. Despite being produced by both David Fincher and Spike Jonze, and getting Roger Ebert's glowing praise, (He described it as a movie you should see simply because it exists,) it failed to make a splash of any sort. It didn't even get so much as an art direction nomination at the Oscars, (perhaps proving theory that an art film released over the summer will go completely unnoticed by the Academy.)

The Fall is a movie about storytelling. It's set in Los Angeles during the early days of cinema. A stunt performer named Roy is confined to a hospital bed after an accident. He befriends a little girl named Alexandria and tells her a strange, anachronistic, epic tale about an Indian, an ex-slave, an explosives expert and Charles Darwin. The four are out on a mission led by a masked bandit to get revenge against a man named Governor Odious. The tale begins as a fun adventure, but as Roy's depression deepens over the possibility of being paralyzed, the story he tells becomes darker and more sinister.



The narrative bounces back and forth between Roy's story and what goes on at the hospital. Alexandria draws from what she sees about the hospital and incorporates it into the tale, casting the patients, visitors and employees in the various roles. I almost wish that the entire focus of the movie was on Roy's tale, because it's such a visual departure from most fantasies, but the tale only works when juxtaposed against Roy's frustration at the events that sent him to the hospital.

The film plays about with the tale as Roy tells it versus how Alexandria imagines it, so the visuals don't always immediately match up with the tale as it's shown to the audience. For example, the Indian, as Roy describes it, is a Native American. He has a squaw who lives inside of a wigwam. However, Alexandria imagines him as an Asian Indian, with a long beard and a turban.

Occasionally, the setting also changes as Roy's description of a scene becomes more detailed, which results in some amazing displays of editing. In one scene the Masked Bandit and his crew are lost in a rocky desert valley. A mystic man takes charge of the situation and shows them the way to a lush green field that clearly was not there before, but was somehow there all along.

Perhaps this film's greatest strength is that the director, who goes by the name Tarsem, used no almost no computer generated imagery. If you look at the trailer, you'll realize just how incredible a feat that is considering how surreal this movie's imagery is. All of the exotic settings were filmed on location. There's actually montage where the characters in the tale are sent all across the world, dashing through places like Cairo and Paris. This meant that Tarsem sent the actors there for single shots lasting barely a second.

When Tarsem uses truly exotic locales, it makes the fantasy elements of the story seem unexpectedly convincing, something you don't get from George Lucas-style cartoon worlds. The deserts, the mazes and cities don't look like places that should really exist in the known world, but whether they do or don't there's not a second where you doubt the characters are really there.

If the visuals of The Fall feel strangely familiar, it might be that you recognize elements from Tarsem's previous work The Cell, also known as that Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Lopez movie from 2000 that looks nothing like what you'd expect a Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Lopez movie to look like today. The Fall is considerably more family friendly than The Cell, so much so that I'm a bit confused by it's R-rating. The swearing is minimal, and there is absolutely no sex at all. I can only assume that the R-rating is for the violence, but again that's minimal. Any blood shed onscreen is completely artful and would never be described as gory. By comparison, I'd be far more hesitant to show a 10 year-old the PG-13 rated The Dark Knight than this movie.

Fans of the show Pushing Daises would also want to check out this movie. Roy the stuntman is played by Lee Pace who Pushing Daises fans will recognize as Ned the pie man. Pace plays a considerably more assertive character in this film than on the show, but is still just as likable, (even when he tries to traumatize the little girl with his story.) His performance in this film is so good that it was a shock to see that he'd wound up as the dad in Marmaduke. After seeing him in The Fall you'll agree he deserves a better role.

Catinca Untaru gives an equally noteworthy performance. She plays Alexandria, the little girl. i suppose you can debate over how much of her performance is her acting ability and how much was just her being a good casting choice. Apparently Catinca learned to speak English as the movie was being filmed, so much of her dialogue is jumbled as she tries to find the right words to say in English. Whether deliberate or a happy accident, her character's struggle to speak English leads to a few great dialogue exchanges as Roy tries to get Alexandria to understand what he's saying.

The Fall has already started to find it's audience among film buffs, so I wouldn't be surprised if in a decade filmmakers start mentioning this as an influence or making sly references to it in their own movies.

Push

(Not based on a novel by Sapphire)

When Push first came out, I categorized it to myself as a guilty pleasure. Sure, the movie was fun, but at the time I thought of it as the sort of movie studios make when they realize something is "big" or "in" at the time. Around it's release, The X-Men and Spider-Man franchises had already hit their apexes, and the show Heroes still felt like it was one season away from re-capturing the charm of the first season. In other words "ordinary people dealing with superhuman abilities" was "in" and Push was a bit of a Johnny-come-lately.

The film centers around a group of ex-pat Americans (played by Chris Evans and Dakota Fanning) in Hong Kong with telekinetic abilities who are trying to lay low from a government agency called Division that wants to harness their powers. Take away the Hong Kong part and the plot sounds suspiciously like the first season of Heroes. In fact both stories heavily rely on characters with the ability to draw future events to move the story along, but while Heores's future predictions were drawn by acclaimed artist Tim Sale, Push's predictions were admittedly bad sketches done by Dakota Fanning's character. Probably because of this similarity, I brushed it off in my mind.

Then about a year after it's release, I watched Push again and realized that I actually liked it on it's own terms (and that Heroes had gotten embarrassingly bad). For one thing, I realized it wasn't an attempt at doing a superhero movie without a comic book franchise to back it up. Instead, it's more like an espionage movie with superpowers. The characters aren't constantly blasting each other with fireballs and what not, instead everybody is trying to outwit everybody else. The fight scenes that do ensue are reasonably good, in particular the ones involving a silent blonde guy that repels bullets with his mind, but the focus is more on the characters than the action.

Now, I will admit that this movie has some serious flaws in its execution, but if you accept them ahead of time, you can still enjoy the movie. For one thing, the movie starts off with Dakota Fanning explaining the mythology of the movie; what kinds of powers people have, what they're called and so on. It's an unnecessary info dump one that a better director would have let the audience figure out on its own.

The plot also becomes a bit too complicated towards the end on account of some characters' abilities to see into the future, and other characters' abilities to use mind control. The characters all come up with elaborate methods of side stepping each others' powers that make it easy to lose track of what's going on. But hey, even The Dark Knight got damn hard to follow halfway through, (can anybody honestly explain the Melvin White part?) so I say cut the little guy some slack.

Lastly, it's obvious that the producers had every intention of making this into a franchise. The ending is a bit abrupt and left open for the clear purpose of it leading into a sequel. I wouldn't mind seeing a sequel to this actually, but a tighter ending would have been nice. On the plus side, rumors have been circulating that this film has become enough of a sleeper hit on DVD that the story might get continued as a TV series.

Overall, Push isn't some sci-fi epic that everybody should have seen but didn't. Rather, it's more like the film Equilibrium, in that it's a fun action flick that could have been done better but it's entertaining enough as is. You catch it if it's on cable, or put it in your Netflix queue and pop it in on a weekday night when you feel like an action movie you haven't seen before. Not something you necessarily go out of your way to see, but you'll enjoy it when you get around to watching it.

And it's got Djimon Honsou in it. Yeah, he's been in the occasional bad movie, but have you ever seen him play a role badly?

Southland Tales

Another Mind Blowing Sci-fi Movie From the Writer/Director of Donnie Darko

Southland Tales is director Richard Kelly's follow up to his cult hit Donnie Darko. Considering that Donnie Darko's popularity grew so huge that it's one of the few films I can think of that actually got a theatrically released director's cut, whatever Kelly released next seemed destined to be huge... at least in the nerd/art house film crowd. Yet Southland Tales is still a little known movie, a fact made even stranger considering the film's all star cast.

When I say "all star" I mean that in a pretty close to literal sense. Just about everybody with a speaking role is a well known actor, although most of them play characters unlike anything they've ever played before. No really. It's got Dwayne Johnson, Sean William Scott, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Christopher Lambert, John Laroquette, Jon Lovitz, Mandy Moore, Cheri Oteri, Amy Poehler, Miranda Richardson, Kevin Smith, Justin Timberlake and the bald dude from The Princess Bride.

With this many stars, it's no surprise that Janeane Gerafalo's role ended up getting cut down to a half second cameo.

So why haven't you probably heard of this movie? Truth be told, it didn't fare too well with critics in early screenings. They were mostly baffled by the film's intricately twisting storylines, and onslaught of geek references. Presumably, based on the bad early press, it was given a very small theatrical release, even by art house film standards. But this really isn't a movie for critics at all. This is a movie for fanboys looking for an out and out crazy piece of hard sci-fi.

Now you're going to ask me what it's about right? That's where it gets a bit tricky. The short version is that it's about the way the world ends. Not with a whisper, but with a bang.

The long version, is that it's a Bush-era fable about a world where government paranoia has gone rampant. Terrorists detonate a pair of nuclear bombs over Texas, prompting the nation throw control of Congress over to the Republicans. In turn, they put the nation on complete lockdown, with visas required for interstate travel and heavily armed soldiers in the streets.

Against this backdrop are interweaving stories about the citizens of L.A. in this new world. There's Boxer Santaros (Dwayne Johnson) an action star with political connections who has amnesia and finds himself in the company of Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar), a porn star trying to go legit. There's Ronald Taverner (Sean William Scott), a cop who finds himself caught up with a group of Neo-Marxists trying to take down the government. We follow the government employees who believe that they're restoring order to the world, the Neo-Marxists who think they're doing the same thing, and everybody else who is caught up in between, whether deliberately or not.

However, it's not so much the plot that's the draw of this story as is the execution. If you've ever seen Donnie Darko, you should have some idea what to expect next. For starters, the one liners are fantastic. If you thought Samantha Darko asking "What's a fuck-ass?" at the dinner table was good, you ought to hear the stuff that comes out of Sarah Michelle Gellar's mouth.

Then there's the whole sci-fi aspect. Much like Donnie Darko, the characters find themselves subjected to things like parallel dimensions, time travel, destiny and religion. Yet there's never that moment where everybody figures out exactly what is going on. Suffice to say, things get really freakin' weird fast.

Thankfully, they never get weird in the David Lynch, I'm-never-going-to-figure-this-shit-out kind of way. You'll be able to follow the plot (mostly) on the first time through, but there's going to be a lot of stuff that is going to go over your head. This movie just politely asks that you sit back, enjoy the soundtrack, and let it blow your mind. It begs you to watch it again with the promise that you'll have a better understanding of what you just saw the next time around.

As you can guess, this is an extremely ambitious movie, a fact made more notable considering that the movie wasn't even envisioned as the entire story. You'll note that after an extensive prolog, the story starts out at chapter 4. That's because Richard Kelly conceived this story as a truly multi-media extravaganza, with parts of the story told in different formats. There was supposed to be a massive viral marketing campaign and a comic book mini-series leading up to the release. The comic, which tells the first three chapters of the story didn't get that wide a release and the online aspect was started but never really completed. For example, even two years after this movie's release, the website for the character Krysta Now, the porn star/aspiring businesswoman, still has a coming soon banner on most of its pages. In case you're wondering, it's not essential to read the comic before seeing the movie. The important parts of the comic are summarized at the start of the movie, but it gives the viewer a better understanding of the back story.

The soundtrack, as I mentioned before, is incredible. For one thing, Moby was such a fan of Donnie Darko that he agreed to score the film, which is something he rarely ever does. Then there's selections by the Pixies, Waylon Jennings, Blur and a nice little number sung by Sarah Michelle Gellar as Krysta Now called "Teen Horniness is Not a Crime." Of all of these, the showpiece is the scene where Justin Timberlake lip syncs to The Killers' "All These Things I've Done," during a hallucination filled with dancing nurses.

Like I said before, this is an ambitious movie, but while that's a phrase usually used to describe movies that aspire to be something great and fall extremely short, Southland Tales seems to be every bit the epic Richard Kelly hoped it would be when he started work on it. This is a movie that will probably never be part of the mainstream, but I suspect that over time it will find its audience and become a cult hit. That being said, I recommend renting it soon so that you can say you were one of the cool kids who saw it before everybody else.

Promo Art courtesy of Darko Entertainment