Whoa.
So, what, I take a few weeks (well, ok, three months) to move from Alaska to Austin, Texas, and to date/break-up with a lovely young woman, and when the dust clears, I haven’t blogged anything in months and I missed issue three of Paracinema?
Goodness gracious me, that just won’t do.
What with the moving and the breaking up and the (insert Professor Frink noise), I haven’t gotten to see very many movies recently. But, at the insistance of a friend, I was lucky enough to watch something I really enjoyed. And after reading back through the blog… um… no, no, it looks like it hasn’t been written about, so the pleasure is all mine! Huzzah!
When I was a kid, one of my absolute favorite movies of all time was The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. It was the story of the legendary Baron Munchausen who, with his crew of extraordinarily talented friends, traveled around the world (and the moon), having fantastic adventures. I think. It’s been a very, very long time since I last saw it.
Anyways, one of my favorite things about the movie as was the unreliability of Munchausen’s stories, and the way reality and fantasy kept intertwining. A theatre company is performing their version of Munchausen’s adventures on the eve of a great war, and an old man claiming to be Munchausen storms the stage, tells them that they’ve gotten it entirely wrong, and begins to tell his version of the events. From then on, the movies moves artfully between the “real-life” stage production and the memories of Baron Munchausen, with the actors playing the characters appearing in his memory as the characters themselves. It was my first real experience with the idea of an unreliable narrator, and I ate it up. Plus, as a Terry Gilliam film, it looked really, really cool.
Remember, this was in the days before CGI, so all the fantastic imagery was done the old fashioned way – sets, matte paintings, precise editing, what have you. Simply lovely for its day.
So, not having thought about this movie for, hell, the better part of a decade, I find myself walking into The Fall and getting the most lovely sense of deja vu. You see, The Fall is very-much-so in the same realm as Munchausen. A young girl with a broken arm and a delicate grasp of English encounters an injured stunt-man in a hospital, and to win her over, he begins to tell the story of a great adventure. However, since the girl is only a child, she imagines the story as a child would, and places people from the hospital in the lead roles. As the man tells his story, the young girl begins to make her own creative additions, and the story begins to take on the personality of both characters. However, as the story begins to twist and turn, it becomes evident that the man is just using his tale as a way to manipulate the little girl into helping him find a way out of the hospital.
I’m not going to lie. I loved this movie for one very simple reason – it reminded me of another movie I loved when I was a kid, when movies were still pretty damn “magical.” Don’t get me wrong, The Fall stands out very well on its own. It is directed by Tarsem Singh, who also directed The Cell (i.e. that J-Lo movie that made you think, wow, too bad all those great images were wasted on such a dumb movie), so believe me when I say it has some pretty fantastical and beautiful moments. And Lee (“The Piemaker”) Pace does a great job of mixing heartbreak with whimsy, even though the movie belongs, like most movies in this vein, to the little girl.
But I loved this movie because it was like watching Baron Munchausen all over again. Every time I’ve revisited my childhood favorites, I’ve found that my perspective has changed. The cool images and the clever dialogue are kind of… well, worse for wear, now that I’m in my mid-20s. I’ll spare you the list of movies I used to love, only to find out that they were stupid, but trust me, it does go and on and on.
So The Fall was the perfect way to relive my childhood. It has all the same elements that made me love Munchausen, such as fantastic imagery, an unreliable narrator, and some scenes of genuine sadness (that shit sticks with you when you’re young), but it’s polished, cleaner, more cohesive for the older version of me. Remakes always disappoint, but this isn’t a remake – it’s an entirely different movie that somehow manages to capture the essence of the older one, and evokes the same kind of wonder inside me. It is as if my favorite childhood movie has been maturing along side me, growing up and getting smarter, and finding a way to appeal to a Matthew that doesn’t think Star Wars is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Who knows, maybe I’ll re-watch Baron Munchausen one of these days and find that it holds up remarkably well. There’s always a chance of that. But then again, maybe I’ll just keep that one on the shelf for now, remembering how great it was when I was a kid, and how the movie seemed to be a kick to my imagination’s gonads (uh, figuratively speaking, of course). And any time I’m in the mood for a fantasy with a cute young girl, a tragic narrator figure, wonderful imagery, and the perfect blend of the real and unreal, I’ll just go pick up a copy of The Fall.
The Trailer and clips from the movie can be found at the following address. I really recommend you check it out.
http://www.collider.com/entertainment/news/article.asp/aid/7640/tcid/1
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deepfix
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christine
