the Fall

official image from the movie, The Fall

Okay, anyone who’s talked to me this year about movies has probably heard about “The Fall” — for some, it’s over and over and over. Such a freaking gorgeous film. I saw this trailer a year or so ago and have been stalking it ever since, hoping to see it on the big screen. In my book, it’s the lead contender for the best movie of the year — though “The Dark Knight” was also pretty amazing. Proof? I saw “The Fall” twice in one week. More, you want more? I think the trailer speaks for itself.

Apple Quicktime trailer

The movie, set in 1915 Los Angeles, is about an injured stuntman and how he befriends a little girl with a broken arm with an epic story about five heroes — an Indian, an ex-slave, an explosives expert, a masked bandit and Charles Darwin (yeah!) — on a impossible quest to destroy an evil man, governor Odious. All this to curry her favor so she might steal morphine from the hospital pharmacy for him. The line between his story and the world of the hospital blurs and bleeds into one another — think somewhere between “Princess Bride” and “Cinema Paradiso” but punctuated by larger than life costumes and sprawling backdrops (much like the space panels in “The Fountain,” also one of my favorites).

Tarsem, the director as well as one of the writers for this film, also directed “The Cell” (awful script but beautiful to see) and was previously a music video director, whose credits include REM’s “Losing my Religion,” and has worked on many commercials, how he found many of the locations for this film.

Shot in 18 countries around the world, this film features no computer special effects, opting instead for actual places and their naturally intense and vivid nature — an underwater shot of an elephant swimming overhead (looks as though it’s galloping through the water) comes to mind as does the above promotional photo, doesn’t that look like an M.C. Escher drawing? I would imagine that he got his fill of using CGI in “The Cell.” It took Tarsem 16 years to make this film and he nearly bankrupted himself. It was making the film festival circuits when Spike Jonze and David Fincher saw it and, stunned by what they saw, put up their own money to help put the movie into a limited number of theaters, which is how I saw it. Oh man, thank you guys.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that the title type design was done by Stefan Bucher, art director of 344 Design (link) and the creator of Daily Monster (link). It’s bold and completely what the film needed for its identity, though not my style at all.

“The Fall” comes out today on DVD, I’ve already pre-ordered it and I can’t wait to see it again.