"The Fall": Pretty, Vacant

Phil Nugent — Thu, 08 May 2008 22:35:00 GMT

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." (It's based on a 1981 Bulgarian movie called Yo Ho Ho, which Singh has acknowledged in interviews but isn't mentioned in the credits.) Lee Pace, bedridden for much of the film yet showing more fire and ardor than he's gotten the chance to show on the cult TV series Pushing Daisies, plays a man lying in a hospital in 1915 Los Angeles and nursing a broken heart: he's been dumped by his girlfriend, who happens to be one of the nurses (Justine Waddell) for another man. The real center of the movie, and the main thing it really has going for it, is a Romanian girl named Catinca Untaru, who's eleven now but was about eight when the movie was shot. She plays a resident of the children's ward who keeps sneaking off to visit Pace, who tells her a story in order to earn her friendship and trust. His secret motive is to persuade her to steal him a dose of morphine strong enough that he can give himself an overdose and kick off.

As that last detail indicates, The Fall has a bellyful of mournful seriousness tucked inside its gleaming shell. It's an innocence versus experience story, with the lonely kid learning about the dark side of life from the self-pitying adult who devalues the gift of story by using it for manipulative purposes. (There might just be an allegory about Hollywood in there somewhere.) Singh puts his stamp on the sequences illustrating the story Pace tells, in which he appears as one of a group of gaudily photogenic heroes who have sworn vengeance on a cruel villain who's done them dirt--and who, inevitably, is played by the same actor (Daniel Caltagrione) who, in the "real world" scenes, plays the new lover of the perfidious nurse. These fantasy sequences, set in fairy-tale desert landscape, have the expected production-design glitter, and even a few traces of wit. (Pace describes one of the heroes as an "Indian", and from his references to the fellow's squaw and wigwam, it clear that he means the Native American kind, but the little girl pictures a swaggering, bearded dude in a green turban and robe.) But the fantasy heroics that the little girl--and the audience--are made to look forward to don't really arrive. Sighe is more interested in playing postmodern games about how Pace's depressed state affects the quality of his storytelling and how the details of the real world leak into the fictional one, as well as with the misery experienced by the characters in the "real world" storyline, which is pretty much a non-starter anyway. And though Catinca Untaru's untutored performance is remarkable and affecting, when things go bad in both worlds, Singhe milks her for tears as ruthlessly as a silent-movie director throwing a puppy off a cliff. It stands to figure that The Fall ends up as a bejewelled blank space: filmmaker who romanticize and mythologize the storytelling process tend to be people who can't tell a story to save their lives. Real storytellers just roll up their sleeves and get to work.

The Thirteen Greatest Long-Ass Movies of All Time, Part 1

Peter Smith — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 18:00:00 GMT

There are long movies, and there are really long movies. But there's also that notorious third category: The Long-Ass Movie. You know them. Usually they have to be split into two or three parts. Sometimes they have to be released as mini-series, with abbreviated versions put out in theaters. Occasionally they're hacked to pieces by studios and distributors, and become founts of controversy. More often that not, they're made by Germans. (We're not kidding. Check the list.) And most of the time, though sadly not always, they're great — ambitious, sprawling, uncompromising, and riveting. There's something really special about a long-ass movie, which, for our purposes, we're classifying as a film over four hours long. You never forget the experience of sitting through it. We certainly didn't. Here's our list of the Greatest Long-Ass Movies of All Time.

HAMLET (1996) Running time: 242 mins.

It's highly unlikely that anyone in Shakespeare's time actually saw Hamlet in full. As many critics and biographers have noted, the full text of The Bard's masterpiece would run over four hours if performed — a prohibitive length even today, despite such modern conveniences as lighting, electricity, and weekends. Clocking in at a limber four hours and two minutes, Kenneth Branagh's full-text version of the play struck a remarkable balance: an uncompromised performance that was also relentlessly cinematic. Some called Branagh's camera tricks show-offy, but he was simply following in the footsteps of one of the great linguistic show-offs of all time. The film's baroque visual style complemented the verbal gymnastics of Shakespeare's sweet tongue, and the result is not only the most faithful adaptation of Shakespeare ever filmed, but also, for our money, one of the absolute best.

UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD (1991) Running time: 280 mins.

Don't laugh. The two-hour, thirty-eight-minute U.S. theatrical release version of Wim Wenders's insanely ambitious sci-fi epic romance was a messy, albeit fascinating, journey through an ultra-globalized millennial world, with William Hurt and Solveig Dommartin bouncing around the planet recording with a revolutionary camera designed to help blind people see, accompanied to snippets of songs from the director's favorite rock acts (Nick Cave, R.E.M., U2, etc. — the soundtrack CD for this thing was a mainstay in many a contemporaneous college dorm room). The full, nearly-five-hour version, it turns out, wasn't nearly so messy. Rather, it was a sober, compelling, and visionary lament for the ways in which the oncoming technological transformation of society would transform human contact; Wenders's portrait of a hyper-connected world predated the Internet revolution. More importantly, it had even more of that awesome music.

1900 (1976) Running time: 315 mins.

Unjustly tarred on its initial release as a disaster, Bernardo Bertolucci's epic, a highly personal film despite its five-hour running time, has withstood the test of time far better than anyone would have expected. Its big-name cast, surprisingly, doesn't hold up particularly well — thanks to a sometimes shaky script and a not insignificant language barrier. But as an epic of great scope and a continuation of Bertolucci's tremendous visual-storytelling techniques, it's a raging success. Five hours fly by in the presence of such gorgeous filmmaking, thanks to the sensual, earthy tone of the film, the solid pacing, and the director's extreme care. Bertolucci apparently envisioned 1900 as his own response to the success of The Godfather — he would tell the modern history of Italy, just as Francis Ford Coppola had told the modern history of Italian-Americans, with a similar sense of range and scope and sweep. At the time of its release, no one would have credited Bertolucci's film as successful on that level, but if he'd had the foresight to do as Coppola did and release it as two separate films telling a single story, it's easy to imagine that 1900 would have enjoyed a much better critical reception.

NAPOLEON (1927) Running time: 330 mins.

Abel Gance was one of the towering French directors of the silent era, one of those pop-eyed geniuses whose only reservation about the movie medium was that it would be a shame if it turned out to have any boundaries at all. The massive epic that is now Gance's best-known work was originally intended to be only the first chapter in a multi-part historical epic consisting of six enormous features. You get a taste of what Gance hoped to achieve at the end of this picture, when three different projectors are used to show contrasting images on three screens, achieving something like a split screen image to the nth degree. Unfortunately, this silent landmark was completed the same year as The Jazz Singer, and Napoleon was released in America in a savagely truncated version that didn't even attempt to preserve the triple-projection imagery. Gance would continue to work, but most of his wildest ambitions would go unfunded and unfulfilled. He didn't become fully appreciated until the film historian Kevin Brownlow assembled a restored version that, with live musical accompaniment, played to ecstatic responses in packed theaters in 1980 and 1981. (Thankfully, Gance lived to see it — he died late in 1981.) That initial restoration ran five minutes short of four hours, but Brownlow kept going back, and by 2000 he had extended the film by another thirty-five minutes. It remains a thrilling mixture of audacious filmmaking, charming corn, and some very strange politics: Napoleon is so thrilled by the French Revolution that he sets out to bring democracy to other countries by invading them — evidence that the French, of all people, created the Bush Doctrine.

LA COMMUNE (PARIS, 1871) (2000) Running time: 345 mins.

As huge fans of Peter Watkins, we found that the number of Watkins-related items on Screengrab has been shockingly low of late, so we'll take any opportunity we can to plug his work. La Commune, his epic film about the Paris Commune of 1871, which in its full form runs five hours and forty-five minutes, is in many ways a summing-up of Watkins's career that tests the methods and techniques he'd developed over the course of more than thirty years. The Commune was a group of intellectuals, students and workers who took over a section of Paris in 1871 and formed an experimental government. True to form, Watkins took over an abandoned factory and staged the rise and fall of the "Commune" as covered and reported on by modern TV crews, who take turns interviewing the non-actors who represent the political leaders, the common people, the military forces working to smash the Commune, et al. He even tosses in a dandyish news anchor who spreads anti-Commune sentiment on a competing network, "Versailles TV." Ever the iconoclast, Watkins refuses to consign the fervor of Communards to the distant past, and by doing so he celebrates the revolutionary spirit both past and present, as when a discussion between the characters gives way to a contemporary debate about globalization. It may be the crowning achievement of one of the strangest film artists of his time — a man who sees himself as trying to bring history alive in order to educate the masses, but who has no apparent ability to make films in a way that might entice the masses to want to see them.

— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

The Screengrab : r.e.m.

"The Fall": Pretty, Vacant

The Thirteen Greatest Long-Ass Movies of All Time, Part 1