The Fall.

"Something like a pain-fueled, R-rated Princess Bride, The Fall straddles the intertwined worlds of storytelling and story," writes Nick Pinkerton in the Voice. "If the human details are often problematic, the IMAX-grade bombast, ceremonial camera, and Jodorowsky-esque eclecticism still combine for a singular spectacle."

"As in [Tarsem's] The Cell, the plot is a feeble framing device for what is, no more and no less, a wearying nosedive through a self-indulgent imagination, a succession of allusive images and Baraka-style jaunts to modern and ancient corners of the globe, and though The Fall lacks for the alluring empathy Jennifer Lopez brought to The Cell, it achieves something close to it through Catinca Untaru," writes Ed Gonzalez in Slant.

Updated through 5/10.

Tarsem's "is a classic case of a natural-born cinematographer playing at being a filmmaker," writes Michael Joshua Rowin at indieWIRE. "I'm not ungenerous enough to say certain moviegoers would be wrong to be moved by The Fall, and maybe my disapproval is a simple matter of taste for the unassuming over the ostentatious; but I also can't help but compare it to Hou Hsiao-hsien's latest, Flight of the Red Balloon, a film that so gently and delicately creates a world of enchantment out of the raw elements of everyday life that it proves wonder can be achieved without bludgeoning the viewer into submission."

"Even with his 'more is more' approach, Tarsem can't achieve in 18 countries what Peter Jackson accomplished in one," writes Sam Weisberg in the L Magazine.

Update, 5/8: "Presented by both David Fincher and Spike Jonze, The Fall angles to be a major event," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "It represents that artsy realm of music video by the generation of classy imitators who owe an unmistakable debt to visionaries Tarkovsky, Fellini, Ken Russell, Derek Jarman, Paradjanov. It's meant to crown what should rightly be called the post-music video era (vets like Jonze, Marcos Siega, Michel Gondry having gone on to make some of the most distinctive movies of the past decade). But given his catalog of styles, Tarsem works like a surrealist without political bona fides."

Updates, 5/9: "Shot piecemeal over the course of four years on locations in 18 countries, and paid for out of the pocket of its co-writer and director, Tarsem Singh, The Fall is a genuine labor of love - and a real bore," writes Nathan Lee in the New York Times.

"Jodorowsky Lite," suggests Steve Dollar in the New York Sun, "as if the hallucinatory fugue of The Holy Mountain could be evoked as a really expensive car commercial. Ironically, this is a movie whose subject is storytelling, and there's just not very much of a story."

"Tarsem clearly chose to make The Fall - which he adapted with Dan Gilroy and Nico Soultanakis from the 1981 Bulgarian film Yo Ho Ho (directed by Zako Heskija and scripted by Valeri Petrov) - as an excuse to splash more beautiful images across the screen," writes Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat. "And splash he does, from the gorgeous black-and-white of the pre-credit sequence to the desert landscapes of Roy's story. The only problem is that the story is precisely the hodgepodge a young amateur might realistically improvise; it has little of the wit or invention of the most obvious cinematic comparison, The Princess Bride."

"[N]o matter how good-looking a film may be, if it's as sleep-inducing as this, there's simply no point," writes Mark Olsen in the Los Angeles Times.

But for the AV Club's Tasha Robinson, "It's the most glorious, wonderful mess put onscreen since Terry Gilliam's Brazil."

"Maybe Tarsem Singh's story bordered on preposterous, but the audacious filmmaker had sucked me in," adds Marcy Dermansky.

"The Fall works like crazy as a multi-leveled, smart, jaw-droppingly beautiful, big-hearted piece of entertainment," writes Glenn Kenny. "I couldn't find a single inaccessible thing about it, which makes me despair that it found so long to get a theatrical release. Still, I can't quite bring myself to call it visionary. But it'll more than do until the genuinely visionary comes along, as that doesn't happen too often, especially these days."

Updates, 5/10: The Fall "is full of sights that provoke genuine astonishment," writes Dave Kehr in the NYT: "an underwater shot of an elephant swimming gracefully overhead, a palace courtyard built out of interlocking staircases that might have been designed by MC Escher, a village clinging to a mountainside where all of the buildings seem to have been individually painted in subtly different shades of inky blue. These images amaze precisely because they are quite evidently real, bursting with the life and detail that elude even the most advanced digital artist."

"Interesting that Tarsem Singh's The Fall is opening the same day as the Wachowski Brothers' Speed Racer adaptation," writes Keith Uhlich at UGO. "They're both the saturated-color ramblings of children (quite literally in The Fall's case), and all the more fascinating for all the surface infantalization. Neither can be said to 'work' in any traditional sense, but for the willing, they cast a rather remarkable spell, like Svengali or Mesmer on a longed-for beloved."

Posted by dwhudson at May 7, 2008 12:30 PM