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All I know about The Fall is that it looks weird and I hear it sucks and it's by the director of The Cell which looked like it sucked but I heard it looked neat. David Fincher and Spike Jonze present?!? The same Spike Jonze who gave us the Furpile Vore and bird stoning Where the Wild Things Are? Good thing producers generally don't have anything to do with anything. So anyway yeah, we've got slow motion black and white people being rescued from a river by some guys up on a train bridge with a giant fishing pole, pulled by a train, with some nice soothing classical music that would fit in a Civilization soundtrack when you get to the modern era or so, and after a while of that, we switch over to LA in the 1920s. The 1920s apparently classifed as "once upon a time" now. Here's some kids in a hospital. Here's some girl with a broken arm wandering around and here is... wow. That is the most badass looking X-ray technician even. He looks like he should be sitting on some big black horse with flames snorting out of its nose. And here's some salt of the earth type. Her name is apparently Alexandria, her English is less than perfect, and country dude is apparently going to tell her a story about Alexander the Great because he is really into name origins it seems.
... or not. We just started to go into flashback mode then just kinda stopped and got distracted for a while by her box full of random weird stuff. Oh, now we're back to Alexander the Great. Who... has no shirt. Crazy headdress, gold miniskirt, boots, that's it... and oh frell what's wrong with the DVD? Oh, he has some gold collar thing too. It's like, he remembered to put on everything frilly and ornamental, but he forgot to actually get dressed first. He gets to a bit about dumping the last of their water supply in the desert because there isn't enough to give everyone, and Alexandria just calls BS on that and sucks us out of awesome story vision. So now we've just got more of people lying around the hospital. Random patients, kid licking the giant ice block being delivered... aha, apparently our storytelling country dude is an actor, who was jumping off the train bridge on a horse, which died, and he got pretty messed up, for the sake of a stunt. A friend of his is talking to him about how he lost a leg and it's been great for his career, because he can keep getting it chopped off and stabbed and such now. Alexandria wanders by and asks if he's a pirate, and now it's freaking Story Time again it seems.
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Different story though. Here's some dudes sitting on a crazy tiny island, here's some indian swimming up to deliver a message. They are weird weird weird looking dudes. Dude #1! He's a slave with awesome antelope horns on his head, who lead a revolt against the governor for working him to death. Dude #2! He's an Indian whose wife was abducted by the evil governor, and killed himself. Oh, and this is amusing. He's clearly talking about the Injun kind of Indian, but Story Vision is what the girl is picturing, so he's the other kind of Indian, and we're interpreting wigwam as opulent palace. Then we have Dude #3! Luigi the explosives expert. Then we have... wow. A really insane interpretation of what Charles Darwin looks like. He has this black white and pink fur coat and a black bowler hat, and generally looks like a total badass. At this point the story needs some revising because he thought she wanted a pirate themed story. So.... OK, they're just bandits. And their leader is some mysterious masked pir- er, bandit, who looks like a crossed between the Dread Pirate Roberts and one of the Three Musketeers. Anyway, on the advice of Darwin's talking elephant, they escape from their tiny island prison by riding an elephant over and building a sandbar bridge for Masky because he can't swim. Also? This movie has very much of a Baron Munchausen vibe going for it now. I am REALLY pleasantly surprised.
So they find some crazy zulu guy bursting out of a burning tree who's been sent to help them. Darwin interprets. Their leader passes though. And... OK, yeah. They go to the evil governor's palace and his guards totally have the same look as that awesome X-Ray tech. They also sound like wookies. Awesome fight scene occurs! One guard runs in to get help, but when everyone else gets the door open, there's the mystic they dismissed standing on a hill of like, 100 or so guards he apparently killed with his bare hands. Suddenly, we have an intermission again because our storyteller isn't sure if he can feel his toes, which he sorta can't. Bad sign. He starts getting back into it with this bit about The Black Bandit's old crew having been hanged, at which point we see them in a big net hanging from a crazy crazy high ceiling, but then some random killjoy chases Alexandria off. Eventually she comes back with a stolen communion wafer. This leads into an awkward language barrier conversation.
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OK! Back to the story! She doesn't like the voice he's doing for The Black Bandit, so we switch that (and his actor) to our storyteller, and we have some confusion over what country he's from. We were going with Spain, but apparently we're switching to France. Mystic accidentally ends up poisoning himself after a really awesome looking funeral ritual I can't properly describe for the old crew, but then leads them to a nice lush green valley in the middle of the crazy barren wasteland they're wandering through. Turns out this is where the rest of the crazy zulus live, and they perform a magic ritual that makes a map appear on mystic's chest. Darwin copies it down. Also we have some really really really awesome music for the montage this leads into. Eventually, our band of awesome weirdoes, while journeying through the blasted wastelands, they find the governor's huuuuuge wagon being hauled by 50 or so slaves, including some that are basically inside the giant hamster wheels attached to the side of the wheels. Sadly though, it's time to pause the story again, because our storyteller is trying to get Alexandria to swipe some extra pain meds for him.
Come on come on, let's hurry up with the hospital antics so we can get back to the visually extravagant story telling! Come on, steal those pills, stick'em in your treasure box, help your friend pretty well kill himself... get traumatized by seeing some kid around your own age dying of multiple snake bites while his mother freaks out, wet your pants in fear, get calmed down by some crazy old guy who insists that repeatedly shouting "Googly" is a magic incantation that wards off fear. Thanks to some miscommunication, she dumps the whole supply of stolen morphine except for the 3 pills she thought was all he wanted and flushed the rest. But, you know, whatever, it's back to story time!
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So... they attack the interesting interpretation of a covered wagon, and out comes.... a little bhuddist kid, and a chinese girl wearing a crazy fan over her face. So they kidnap her and head off to their secret lair, a palace, again opulent and Indian, in the middle of a lake. Yeah, our story teller is forgetting a lot of details, mainly because he's ad libbing this whole thing. Apparently she's a princess, AND a nun, and she's wearing this crazy awesome pink dress with insane accessories, and is vaguely based on Alexandria here, who needs to go to the bathroom. She also needs to go talk to her family of uh... what country are you people from? They don't speak english, so she has to translate, which she isn't really doing properly. Oh and here's, apparently our story teller's grieving girlfriend, a lawyer giving him his insurance settlement, confirmation that he is indeed suicidal, and some rather mobster looking dudes eavesdropping. Or maybe other actors. It's the 20s, so both groups have pretty much the same look. One of them makes her a mask from a newspaper though, so hey. And we're back to trying to get the kid to steal enough pain killers to O.D. on. Nice dude. Real nice. We're not getting the end of this story it seems unless swipes him a new bottle.
He's such a jerk he starts ODing before he even finishes the story! So now we have us a pill popping Masked Bandit, telling his princess that he's sending her away... yeah, the metaphor is really starting to break down at this point. Now here we have a reverse Princess Bride situation where the kid wants a big sappy kiss, but it's not coming. By the way, did I mention that Luigi in the story is, for some reason, a big fat cigar smoking Russian dude in a giant yellow coat with a crazy red hat? Anyway, it turns out Princess is engaged to the governor, so he decides to go and shoot her. The bullet however is stopped by her broken locked locket her father gave her, which, it turns out, has a really wordy message about how you should only marry for love. So she figures that's pretty darn portentful, and marries Masky instead. During the wedding, which has some pretty amazingly weir costumes in it, we get a bit more of that story and framing device bleed going on. He shouldn't O.D. he should just cant Googly, and the priest leading the wedding betrays them. They're to be executed by dehydration in the desert, with a REALLY awesome scene transition involved. Just when all seems lost, out of Darwin's bag pops... Alexandria, to fend off the guards, self-inserting herself as the Masked Bandit's daughter from a previous marriage, here to save the day. Unfortunately, at this point, our storyteller passes out from his earlier killing himself. This gives us one of those morbid/cute bits where, both in story and out of story, she's poking at him and making faces trying to get him to wake up.
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When this fails, she shrugs, rifles through his personal belongings for a it, wanders off and steals a nurse's rouge to paint a butterfly on her stomach, sees our sheet covered storyteller being carted out, puts two and two together, and properly gets to freaking the heck out. Turns out though that was some other guy who died and got carted off! It's going to be a happy ending after all! Well... except that our storyteller really wanted to kill himself, and is Very Upset that he failed. So yeah, he's throwing a bit of a tantrum. That night, Alexandria sneaks out of bed to swipe him more meds since she still hasn't worked out how those are bad. After a harrowing encounter with the X-Ray Tech/black knight, she climbs up the medicine cabinet to swipe more morphine for hi and... as the title might suggest, falls. This leads into this real freaky sequence of flashbacks and memories of the horrible tragedy that forced her to free her homeland and this freaky stop-motion sequence of all the horrible surgeries required to hopefully restore her to consciousness from the resulting coma. Brain surgery is apparently involved.
This, at least, works as a wake-up call for our storyteller. He's still a depressed jerk because his girlfriend dumped him while he was recovering, but dagnabit she really wants closure on this story! So there's a bit of talk about how hey, one of the nurses here has a crush on him, and then, finally, we get to resolve our story based on that. He's in a pretty black mood though, so while everyone is assaulting the palace, Darwin's monkey takes a sniper's bullet while chasing after the rare butterfly that factors into Darwin's backstory that I don't think I quite mentioned. Grief stricken, he covers his monkey in his awesome pimp coat, and allows the oncoming guards to drop him too. Luigi goes down next, taking a bullet in the foot and being chased by a huge horde into a dead end room, but holy cow does he take them all with them because, again, he's Mr. Dynamite! The force of the blast also drops the mystic, whose false teeth pop out, since he's metaphorically the old guy from the hospital as now is painfully clear. He proceeds to have a bit of a heart attack and gets tortured some.. The Masked Bandit meanwhile is drinking himself stupid, as is our storyteller, of course. Alexandria runs out to help him, again, having self-inserted. The slave dies shielding her from a hail of arrows. Chanting googly fails to save the mystic from being hacked apart by axes, but hey, he bleeds birds, that's neat. That just leaves Masky, Alex, and the Indian. Indian hook shots up to the princess/nun's window so everyone can climb free, but the guard get his legs as he's bringing up the rear, so he cuts the rope. At this point in the story, Alexandria is pretty well crying and asking why the story has to get so dark all of the sudden.
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He's all "It's my frelling story and this is how it goes!" The governor, who is just blatantly his actor rival gets to pound on Masky like crazy, who just takes it because he's a coward with low self-esteem who shouldn't be respected and again, we are losing our metaphor completely at this point. Eventually, her crying for him/the protagonist not to accept death wins out, we drop the whole fight scene and pining for the princess, and he just goes to take care of his daughter. The princess says she never really loved the governor, now that he's gone and accidentally fallen on his own sword. He's pretty much just "Screw you you manipulating bitch!" though and dumps the princess. He's got a massively head injured kit to look after now!
So then they go off and watch a nice proper western. Specifically, the one our hero almost killed himself filming... and in the final edit, it's really not much to look at because he just lands on his horse and rides away. Then Alexandra sticks the old man's teeth, ah, that's who actually died, right, anyway, she takes his teeth and sticks them in a hollowed out orange peel which she plants in the garden so he can revive himself with his magical mystic orange grove powers. Then we just end with a big montage of her watching all of the storyteller's other movies, because, dude, seriously? Stunt men in the 20s did some crazy stuff.
So yeah. Surprise! That was an awesome movie! I was expecting something pretentious! Instead, well, no way to describe it without comparing it to The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. You know what I do when I see a really good movie right? I find everything else I can by the dude who made it! So, let's just type ol' Tarsem here into IMDB and... wow. That is the shortest IMDB page I have ever seen. First thing he ever did was direct The Cell, which is going in the queue. Then he wrote/directed/personally financed this, wow. And now he's directing something called Dawn of War... which is apparently a greek thing and not at all related to the PC 40k game. You know who has a longer list of credits than that on IMDB? My cousin Kristin. Who, for what it's worth, actually has a pretty promising career in the whole makeup/special effects scene. And also at least one dress that would not have looked out of place with this movie's style come to think of it.
