The Fall
"a love story as seen through the eyes of a child, told by a man with a broken heart"
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0460791/
The first time I had heard of this movie was right when I came back from Spain. A friend of mine told me about this movie starring an actor we liked Lee Pace (this is before Pushing Daisies came about) At this point, I had only seen Lee in "Wonderfalls" and I thought 'What the heck, I'll give it a shot." I did not know what to expect
Needless to say, it's a feast for the eyes that also strikes a chord in your heart with such subtle and beautiful acting from both Lee Pace and his young leading lady (Romanian actress) Catinca Untaru. Almost all of the scenes between this twosome is mostly improvised creating a realistic dialog that is a joy to watch.
Tarsem(the director) uses his vivid imagination to create absolutely breathtaking scenery and not a pixel of CGI was used which contrasts his previous film The Cell. The Fall has two intertwining story archs:
One being the story of young Romanian immigrant Alexandria who is hospitalized after a fall. She befriends a hollywood stuntman, Roy Walker, who was also hospitalized from a fall. Roy then begins to weave a story about five buccaneers and their quest to kill the evil Governor Odious. It then becomes obvious to the audience that he is using the story to gain Alexandria's trust in order to manipulate her.
The other story is of the five buccaneers. The story is seen through Alexandria's imagination as she gets facts mixed up and uses people she knows as her heroes and villains. An Indian who worked with her as The Indian; another stuntman as Luigi, the explosives expert; the man who delivers ice to the hospital as the ex-slave, Otta Benga; an orderly as Charles Darwin; and Roy himself as the masked bandit. As the story progresses, the audience sees how the story coincidentally mirrors Roy's tragic love story.
If you want a great movie, I suggest this. Even if you don't like the story, it will make you want to travel the world just to visit some of these beautiful places. Perhaps it will also make you realize that even in this CGI-overdrive world, there are is an abundance of natural and real beauty to be found in our world.
