Moving pictures
Wednesday I tagged along with a couple of lj-free friends that I don't see nearly often enough to see The Fall. It's a breathtakingly gorgeous movie. The credits tell me it was shot on location in seventeen countries, and I could see burning a whole lot of vacation time going to visit some of the places they filmed. The actress playing the little girl is fantastic. Many of the scenes are visually and conceptually stunning, and more so for there being no computer tricks involved. (I wonder if there's some blue screen magic in a few spots, though.) I want to steal all their costumes, especially the demolition expert's coat. The structure ... needed some work. It's a story in a story, with the two main characters -- a stunt man (Roy) and a little girl (Alexandria) each in the hospital recovering from a nasty fall. He starts telling her a story, and the majority of the movie is spent in the tale he's spinning. The outer story in the hospital is consistent and reasonably compelling, but the more interesting chunks are presented mostly by implication, and it winds up feeling under-developed -- possibly because everyone but Roy and Alexandria is a flat icon, and so none of the emotional ties to them work for me. The inner story borders on incoherent -- the characters in it have a Goal, but there's no logic or flow scene to scene at all. Some of that is because of heavy emotional and symbolic bleed from the outer story, and of course the trope of the storyteller reweaving the story around the listener is active, but both of those could have been in play without completely fracturing the inner story, even with the storyteller actively retcon'ing the story and/or its symbolism. So the inner story is made up of many amazing visuals -- I particularly liked the scene where the mystic was introduced, and the whole sequence with the mystic and the map, and the funeral of the blue bandit -- but it makes no sense except inasmuch as it represents Roy and/or Alexandria's emotional realities. I wanted the inner story to also be a story, even though it has to falter and misstep with the outer characters. Its incoherence I felt undercut both Alexandria's investment in it and its place in dragging Roy through his despair. Still, I'd watch it again for the pretty, and to catch some of the layering I missed the first time.
Somewhat longer ago I went with Kurgan and Alymar and others to see Iron Man. That movie I forgive many, many faults for being such an unabashedly geeky flick. I would not have guessed that spending such huge swaths of the movie talking technobabble, waving around blueprints, and building and testing the suit(s) would sell to a mainstream audience.
Somewhat longer ago I went with Kurgan and Alymar and others to see Iron Man. That movie I forgive many, many faults for being such an unabashedly geeky flick. I would not have guessed that spending such huge swaths of the movie talking technobabble, waving around blueprints, and building and testing the suit(s) would sell to a mainstream audience.