The Fall, the second feature from Tarsem Singh, the commercial-and-music-video director still probably best known for R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion", finally crawls into theaters this weekend, a couple of years after it was unveiled at the Toronto Film Festival. Singh's first movie was 2000's The Cell, an eye-popping, empty-headed thriller in which he deployed his elaborately detailed visual imagination to depict "the mind of a serial killer." (Turned out the poor guy had a Damien Hirst exhibition going on in there.) Like some other directors who made the leap from music videos to the big screen, Singh showed a faith in his own visual flash that was so intense and single-minded that it bordered on outright contempt for representational details and other essentials of basic storytelling: how else to explain the decision to cast Jennifer Lopez as a visionary scientist and Vince Vaughn as a morally stern FBI agent? Damned if The Fall, which is based on a screenplay credited to Singh, Dan Gilroy, and Nico Soultanakis, doesn't turn out to be a self-conscious tribute to the wonders of "storytelling."
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