The Fall (2006)

Title: The Fall (2006)

Director: Tarsem Singh

Cast: Lee Pace, Catinca Untaru

Review:

So I take it you guys have noticed how big a Tarsem fan I am, but what can I say? His films are so beautiful to look at I just can’t help myself. Actually, I’m kind of angry at myself for not having seen The Fall before, when the film was first released way back in 2006. I guess the film didn’t get much of a promotional push upon its initial release, and quite honestly, I cant imagine why! This movie has so many redeeming qualities! There are so many good things about it! It seems to me like the only way The Fall gets the recognition it deserves is by word of mouth. Sooooo, let me be another one of those reviewers to spread the love around: The Fall is an amazing movie! It is without a doubt in my mind Tarsem’s best film to date. I recently had a chance to watch and enjoy Tarsem’s Immortals which I loved and was impressed by, but after having seen The Fall I can safely say that it’s the best film in Tarsem’s repertoire. Why? Read on my friends…read on.

The Fall tells the story of a Alexandria, a little girl who is secluded in a hospital in L.A. recovering from a broken arm. Alexandria ends up befriending another patient in the hospital, a young actor by the name of Roy Walker. Roy is trying to recover from a bad back, you see, he is a stunt man for the movies and his latest stunt (jumping off a moving train and onto a horse) went horribly wrong, and so he hurt his back so badly he is now paraplegic and bed ridden. Good thing Alexandria is here to lighten up his day! They meet by happenstance, yet they develop a deep and profound friendship. To entertain Alexandria, Roy begins telling her a series of stories that he makes up as he goes along, sadly, even though he enjoys Alexandria’s company, Roy wants nothing more than to end his life. He feels he is half the man he was and he doesn’t want to live like this. Will he do it? Or will Alexandria save Roy’s soul?

To me Tarsem Singh is one of the great fantasy directors of our time. He reminds me of other directors entirely devoted to fantasy like Terry Gilliam for example, who I am absolutely sure has influenced Tarsem in one way or another. In fact, while watching The Fall, it reminded of one of Terry Gilliam’s fantasy masterpieces: The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988). Let’s mention the similarities shall we? The main character is a little girl, she escapes into a fantasy land where the good guys each have a special ability, one is a scientist, one is an explosives expert, one is a bandit…and so forth. In fact, the five characters that Alexandria meets in her fantasy world are like superheroes in many ways, same as the good guys in Adventures of Baron Munchausen and same as in that movie, the little girl is trying to save an older mans soul, and older man who becomes a father figure to her. Though The Fall is reportedly inspired by a Bulgarian film called Yo Ho Ho (1981), I would say that Gilliam’s film was also highly influential here.

But don’t go on thinking The Fall is simply a rip off of any other film because in many, many ways, The Fall is actually a very unique film unlike anything you will ever see.

One of the most interesting aspects of this film is the way in which it was made. Tarsem funded most of this film himself so he could make it his way, which makes The Fall a film totally void of studio intervention. This is Tarsem doing exactly the kind of film that he wants to make. That’s right my friends, this isn’t just any old film, this is a special film. How special you ask? Well, for example, The Fall was filmed in 18 different countries! But you wouldn’t know it by watching the film, because it all looks like it’s part of a cohesive universe that exists in little Alexandria’s head. The way in which The Fall was made reminded me of the way German director Werner Herzog makes his films. A lot of Herzog’s films are shot in such outlandish locations that one could easily mistake them for some fantasy world, or alien planet, when in fact Herzog makes his films right here on Planet Earth. It’s just that he knows how to exploit exotic locations to the max. The same thing can be said about Tarsem’s The Fall, the exotic locations chosen whisk us away to Alexandria and Roy’s fantasy world.

Tarsem’s films are often times accused of being style over substance, which is a fair assessment. It’s true, Tarsem loves conjuring up beautiful visuals and it’s true that he sometimes does this at the expense of story and character development, in some ways Immortals is a good example of that. But this was not the case with The Fall a film that kept me engaged, and a lot of that had to do with Catinca Untaru’s performance. Catican Untaru is the young actress who plays Alexandria. She’s such a cute little girl, so lovable, so innocent. She conveys the innocence of childhood to perfection. I hadn’t fallen in love with a young actresses’ performance so much since I saw Amelie (2001). I am wondering why she hasn’t been used in films again? The friendship that Roy and Alexandria develop during the course of the film feels so genuine and true. Roy is an adult who is depressed with his life; Alexandria is there to remind him how beautiful life can be. In many ways she functions like Roy’s guardian angel, coming to “save his soul”. The film took me by surprise because by its third half, the film had me in an emotional turmoil! I was sad…then seconds later I was happy, then seconds later I am devastated again! I’m not at liberty to say if a couple of my tears escaped or not, I’ll just say that heart strings where pulled; and the last director to do that to me with one of his films was Fellini with his Nights of Cabiria (1957). Very few directors manage to actually make a film that truly stirs my emotions, but dammit, Tarsem did it with The Fall. And speaking of Tarsem, if you want to see him direct the hell out of this film, watch the dvd extras where you can see how this amazing film came to be. On it you can see how passionate Tarsem is when he directs. You can actually see him squeeze tears from the little actress for some of the more emotional scenes, making a movie this movie was one big emotional journey for this young actress and I salute her for pulling it off. 

Like many of Terry Gilliam’s films, Tarsem’s films are highly influenced by art. This is something that I also talked a bit about in my review for Tarsem’s The Cell (2000). The Fall is no different. This one has a little bit of Dahli in it. You know how Dahli made these paintings that look one way from up close and totally different when you look at them from afar? Tarsem pulls this off in The Fall with some of its images. In fact, the poster for The Fall was inspired by Dahli’s “Face of Mae West Which May Be Used as an Apartment” So we have a film with lots of artistic influences in it, which of course explains why it’s so rich visually. Not only that, but The Fall also manages to pay its respects to older films, and to stunt men and woman who risked their lives in the past to entertain us. In this way it reminded me of films like Scorcese’s Hugo (2011), films that pay homage to all those filmmakers from the past.   

Dahli’s “Face of Mae West Which May Be Used as an Apartment”, which influenced the poster for The Fall

In conclusion, this is in my opinion Tarsem’s best film. You know how some of the best directors in the world have made films that are completely ignored upon their first release, and it’s only years later that people discover them and give them the respect they deserve? I think this will happen with The Fall. It’s an amazing film that failed to connect with audiences or fire up the box office when it was first released to the world. Hopefully, as time goes by people will finally discover this amazing film and give it the credit that it is due. It has many similarities with films like The Wizard of Oz (1939), Labyrinth (1986), Mirrormask (2005) and Pans Labyrinth (2006), films about a little girl escaping her harsh reality by going into a fantasy world in her mind. Do yourself a favor and check out this beautiful and emotional film by one of the finest fantasy directors working today.

Rating: 5 out of 5

The Cell (2000)

Title: The Cell (2000)

Director: Tarsem Singh Dhandwar

Cast: Jennifer Lopez, Vincent D’Onofrio, Vince Vaughn

Review:   

My first experiences with director Tarsem Singh’s unique visual imagery came by way of his music video for R.E.M.’s ‘Loosing My Religion’. Remember that one? Of course you do, the song has gone on to become a classic. It was a huge hit for R.E.M. and so was the video.  It won the award for Music Video of the Year at the 1991 MTV Video Music Video Awards. That video has always been one of my favorites, something about it’s visuals just stick to my mind like glue. The visual strengths of that video were enough to get him his first gig directing a feature length film, which is the film I will be reviewing today: The Cell. How did Tarsem’s first feature length film go?

Tarsem directs Jennifer Lopez

On The Cell we meet Child Psychologist Catherine Deane (Jennifer Lopez) she specializes in a new type of therapy that lets you venture into your patients mind. This experimental technology lets you walk through a mental patients mind until you find their inner child. Then all you have to do is earn their trust and try and convince them to return to sanity, which Catherine doesn’t always succeed in doing; most of the time her patients divert right back into their own twisted dementias. But she keeps on trying in hopes that she will one day reach and cure one of them. At the same time, the FBI has caught a serial killer who has gone catatonic! The killer is completely unconscious and unfortunately, he is the only one who knows the location of his latest victim; a girl who will die in a matter of hours if they don’t find a way to wake the killer up so he can tell them where she’s hidden. In comes Catherine and her mind entering technology. She is asked by the FBI to venture into the killers mind to see if she can extract the location of the victim so that they can save her in time. Will the killers subconscious mind cooperate with Catherine? Will Catherine gain enough of the killers trust to get him to tell her where the girl is located?

One thing I found interesting about this movie is that it starts where other films of this kind end. You know how thrillers are all about getting the killer, and finding him before he kills somebody else? Well on this one, they’ve already caught the killer in the first 20 minutes of the film, the rest of the film is about venturing into the killers mind. So it’s a fast paced film, it gets to the good stuff rather quickly which I thought was awesome. It didn’t feel formulaic. This movie functions in the same way that a Nightmare on Elm Street film does, but of course, without Mr. Kruegers famous one liners. And these aren’t dream worlds we are visiting, these are mindscapes. But same as in a Freddy movie, if you die in the mind, your mind makes it real enough that you die in the real world as well. The best part of this film comes of course when the characters hook up to the machine that transports them into a patient’s mind, that’s when Tarsem’s visual magic comes into place. Tarsem has always been a director (much like Terry Gilliam) whose films are extremely influenced by paintings. You watch The Cell and you will get glimpses of where exactly Tarsem gets his inspiration. I picked up some H.R. Giger in certain scenes and a little bit of Salvador Dahli in others. Some scenes were also inspired by the kind of artwork we could find in Tarot cards, and others have elements from paintings by Odd Nerdrum, a Norwegian surrealist.

Odd Nerdrum's  'Dawn' (above) and H.R. Giger's 'Schacht' (below) two paintings that influenced the filmmakers behind The Cell. 

I love directors who build their films around their love of art because most of the time it guarantees an interesting looking film, which is exactly what The Cell is, an extremely beautiful looking film. Nightmarish, horrifying, hallucinatory, yet so beautiful. I mean, this kind of director knows where to draw from, they don’t just create their images from thin air; they know and love art, and they know which great artists they can best filter their imaginations through. The Cell draws from so many different sources! From music videos that came before it, from paintings, from tarot cards, from other films; this is a film rich with its artistic influences.

For example, when we go into the psychopath’s mindscape, it’s a total trip that brought to mind moments from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1969) mixed with an H.R. Giger painting and the aforementioned R.E.M. video. The best part is that since the psycho is such a twisted individual (he likes to hang from hooks as he masturbates while watching his victims drowning) well, the visuals and situations that we see when we go into his mind, are truly disturbing. These are the scenes where Tarsem cuts loose with dream imagery and logic. From the moment where we go into the killers mind onward, everything is extremely symbolic and surreal. Ever wondered how a psychopath sees himself in his mind? What kind of a world does a psychopath go to when they sleep? Is a psychopaths mind a place you’d want to get lost in? These are the questions this film asks and also answers. It goes further than that and analyzes what makes a killer a killer. What happened through out the course of his life that led him to become a psychopath? 

   

We  get good performances all around, Jennifer Lopez as Catherine was appropriately angelic. She plays this lonely psychologist, she lives all alone in her cozy little apartment, and goes to sleep watching Rene Laloux’s Fantastic Planet (1973), by the way, Fantastic Planet is a film I always highly recommend, which means... give yourself a chance to check it out! There’s this scene where Catherine is getting ready to go to sleep, and just before she does, she lights up a joint and smokes it! I tell you there’s nothing more sensual than watching Jennifer Lopez smoking a joint in her undies, at least in this Film Connoisseur’s eyes! But on with my review…we also get Vincent D’Onofrio as the psychopath, and his performance is a frightening one. Strangest part is that even though he plays an extremely twisted individual, the film actually manages to get you to feel “sympathy for the devil”; for we learn that this psychopath’s upbringing was the stuff of nightmares! And finally, we get Vince Vaughn in one of those serious roles he used to do before he decided to do comedies almost exclusively. But aside from its cast, the real stars of the show are the visuals. Surprisingly, even though The Cell’s strengths lie in its visuals, the film is not style over substance; there is weight and symbolisms within Tarsem’s dreamy, stylish visuals. These aren’t images conjured up simply to look cool, nope, they all say something about the story and the characters.

In closing, this was a great start for Tarsem as a director. He went on to direct an elaborate Pepsi Cola commercial that showed Beyonce, Pink and Britney Spears as gladiators, and Enrique Iglesias as a despotic Emperor with Queen’s “We Will Rock You” playing in the background; I remember being impressed by that one, it had that look and feel of an extremely expensive multi million dollar commercial. After that he went with a film called The Fall (2006) which sadly failed to find its audience. I haven’t seen it, but my dear readers; you can expect a review for it in the next couple of days. His most recently released worked was the awesome Immortals (2011), which I recently gave a glowing five star review to. Up next for Tarsem is Mirror, Mirror (2012) a comedy/fantasy film that is based on ‘Snow White’ by The Brothers Grimm. I’m looking forward to that one. But it was The Cell that jumpstarted Tarsem’s career as a film director. It feels at time a little bit like David Fincher's Seven (1995), but with a sci-fi angle to it. In my eyes The Cell still remains one of Tarsem’s strongest films; after all these years it still managed to surprise and impress me!

Rating: 4 out of 5

Immortals (2011)

Title: Immortals (2011)

Director: Tarsem Singh Dhandwar

Cast: Henry Cavill, Mickey Pinto, Freida Pinto, Stephen Dorff, John Hurt

Review:

Immortals, the latest Tarsem Singh visual fest is the big fantasy film we’ve all been waiting for. It’s the film that that crappy Clash of the Titans (2010) remake should have been. Here’s a director how knows how to make a film based on Greek Mythology and he knows how to do it right! All you really need to know is that this is a Tarsem Singh film, the same director behind such visually arresting films as The Cell (2000) and The Fall (2006). Tarsem’s Immortals is so visually rich, that one viewing will probably not be enough to absorb everything it has to offer. I was thoroughly impressed with Immortals, I wasn’t expecting it to be such an explosion of coolness. I was expecting a film that was going to be mostly eye candy (and it was) but damn, Immortals was just pure awesomeness.

Story presents us with the tale of Hyperion (Mickey Rourke) the King of Crete. Hyperion hates the gods for not saving his wife and son from death, so he makes it his mission to find the Epirus Bow, a magical bow created by Ares, the God of War. His intentions are to release these evil gods called ‘The Titans’ who are imprisoned on Mount Tartarus. With the release of these evil Gods, Hyperion wants to kill Zeus and the rest of the gods so that he can rule over the world with an iron fist. Meanwhile Theseus, a slave and a bastard lives in a humble coastal town. Sadly, said town is being invaded by Hyperion’s armies which continue to take over every piece of land they comes across.. Theseus’s mother is slaughtered by Hyperion right before his eyes. Now it’s up to Theseus to avenge his mothers death and bring his people to freedom! Will he accept his destiny and achieve his full potential?

While watching Immortals I kept feeling like I was watching a sequel to Clash of the Titans (1981) or something, it had that feeling of grandeur that the original Clash of the Titans had. And I kept thinking that Tarsem should have been the director to make that Clash of the Titans remake, because this guy really gets Greek Mythology, he knows where to draw from in order to get things right. He knows how NOT to make ‘The Greek Gods’ come off as cheesy superheroes. Immortals will undoubtedly, get compared to the old Ray Harryhausen fantasy flicks from the 60’s and 70’s and it will also draw comparisons to Zack Snyder’s 300 (2007) for two reasons. One, they share the same producers and two the way they were made; meaning lots of CGI, with only the actors, props and certain sets being real. Truth be told, this is the best  kind of film for filmmakers to go crazy with CGI on. Tarsem takes full advantage of special effects at his disposal and gives us some truly spectacular visuals. The kind of visuals you will only get on a Tarsem film. The computer generated images on this production are top notch, the colors, amazing. I highly recommend this film for many reasons, but the biggest one is that it’s a beauty to look at. The effects, the colors, the wardrobe all add up to an impressive looking film.

The themes played out in the movie are varied, for example we follow Theseus, a slave who has excellent warrior skills because he’s been trained by Zeus himself. With his character we follow two themes, that of revenge (for his murdered mother) and that of becoming the leader of his people, of waking up, staying alive and rising up to the challenge of going up against the ultimate evil, an evil that is rising yet again after being  dormant for such a long time. So basically, it’s that idea of learning to believe in ourselves, and living up to our full potential. Of becoming the best human beings we can. Because maybe then, by arriving at our fullest potential, we’ll have the Gods on our side, backing us up. Then we have the story of the evil tyrant taking over the land. King Hyperion (played by Mickey Rourke) is hell bent on world domination, even going up against the gods themselves in order to do so. Through him we explore the ideas of an evil government mistreating its people, and that of a rebellious leader - the one most fit for the job- taking the rains of leadership and standing up against the tyranny. There’s a bit of a religious debate as well. Are their gods really listening to our prayers? Or do our prayers fall on mute ears? Do the gods want us to take care of ourselves, so that we can really show our worth? Interesting themes in deed.

But this is not a film lost in characters endlessly babbling, nope, this is an extremely fast paced film. Something spectacular is happening all the time on this one, if it’s not Gods coming down from Mount Olympus to intervene in human affairs, then it’s the humans killing themselves in bloody battles and trust me, the battles get really graphic! This is something that amazed me about this one! When someone gets impaled by a sword or a spear, you really see it; the camera does not cut away. When someone is decapitated or his head is smashed by a war hammer, you will see it! Human bodies are tossed left and right, skulls are smashed, eyes are gauged…things get ugly! Tarsem slows things down during the battle scenes so that you can see the blood flowing and the bodies and skulls being cut in half! These scenes are the ones that will garner Immortals comparisons to 300, but Immortals is gorier with it’s battle sequences. And by the way, I didn’t see it 3-D because the 3-D version was starting much later, but you can bet your asses I’ll be seeing it again this weekend, with the glasses on this time! From what I hear, Immortals is meant to be enjoyed in Three Dimensions! And if what I saw in 2-D is any indication, than those comments are true.

Finally, it was cool to see Henry Cavill in action. All I kept thinking was how he’s the next actor who will be playing Superman and how perfect he is for the role of ‘The Last Son of Krypton’, a great casting choice. The ending of this film leaves the doors wide open for a sequel and though Tarsem is not a director known for making sequels, I wouldn’t mind seeing a second Immortals film. At all! In fact, a sequel is probably a done deal, judging by how much I enjoyed this film, The Film Connoisseur predicts that Immortals will become a huge hit over the next couple of days. And that will probably happen because of strong word of mouth. Once people see this movie, and word spreads around of how awesome it is; Immortals can only go up. Currently, Tarsem is directing a film called Mirror, Mirror which is a retelling of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. I’m looking forward to seeing how Tarsem tackles a Brothers Grimm fairytale, I’m sure it will be another visual feast! So anyhow, drop what ever you are doing right now and go watch this one! This is the best fantasy film to have come in a long time, and it does not disappoint. Trust me when I say that this one was meant to be enjoyed on the silver screen.

Rating: 5 out of 5