Friday, September 18, 2009

The Fall


Beautiful and boring, imaginative and yet still somehow so dull, Tarsem Singh’s daffy opus is mostly lauded on the basis of its delirious imagery—billowing sheets turning blood red and so forth—but its style is mostly cribbed from better filmmakers like Alejandro Jodorowsky and Sergei Parajanov, both of whom do this mythic exoticism with more intelligence and bravura. (That’s not even mentioning a left-field homage to the Quay brothers that I’m still trying to process.) Presumably, there’s a kind of story buried in this mess of images somewhere. Perhaps an ode to the art of the anonymous stuntmen from the days of silent film, or maybe just a simple tale of innocence lost. But who can be bothered to excavate that story from beneath the rubble of this film, which collapses in on itself under the weight of a thousand good ideas, all half-developed and completely useless? I’d sooner watch The Color of Pomegranates. Hell, I’d sooner watch Fando and Lis, and that’s not even a good movie.

No comments: