Grade:        D

Moral:        Suicide is bad, mmkay?

Equal parts bombast to idiocy, The Fall is the cinematic equivalent of a boob tassel: all glitter, all sparkle, and just twirling around and around, demanding nothing of itself and asking merely that you gape at it, slack jawed. Basically just a travel log of the most scenic vistas on the planet, it’s very nearly a mess, and, after his similarly gassy The Cell, doubly convinces me that director ‘Tarsem’ should stop trying to port his music video – informed, anti-narrative vacuity to the big screen.

At least The Cell was high-concept and under-plotted, a state so much more digestible than being low-concept and over-plotted, which is The Fall all over. It presumes the importance of slow motion without ever establishing what is so goddamn important, it color codes everything just for the hell of it, and it floats around on pseudo-loaded imagery so free of heft or symbolism that one is tempted to stare at William Blake all day, just to remind that abstruse imagery can be more than pretty bullshit.

As if this weren’t annoying enough, The Fall has the damnable audacity to wrap all this into a self-reflexive package, yet another instance of banal filmmakers sitting around and patting themselves on the back without ever accomplishing anything. Worthwhile artists evince the viability of their medium by making good art; hack artists try to evince the viability of their medium by ‘demonstrating’ the ‘power’ of good art. So, like Be Kind Rewind and Big Fish, the grand poobah of this crap, The Fall expects its audience to prostrate themselves in front of the power of good storytelling, but it hypocritically refuses even to attempt a good story; instead it cloaks itself in cheesy, self-aware gimmickry and ludicrous attempts at pathos. ‘What’s the fastest way to characterize someone as sad? I dunno, have them swig from a whiskey bottle?’

Even without the bankrupt story, it’s just wretched stuff, more so because it’s so clearly made by and for the type of snotty filmgoer who babbles on and on about only liking ‘art films,’ without ever realizing that they’re swallowing the same soma as a preteen gawking at Transformers. It’s the same brain-dead spectacle; it’s just swathed in more prestigious clothing. Worse, it’s another faux-cultured art-piece that further demonstrates that such filmmakers are only aware of about six or seven pieces of classical music, yet they still think they’re being heady when they dredge up Beethoven’s 7th for the four-billionth time. But ultimately, you can only cower while in front of The Fall, for fear that it might burst and spray piping hot blase all over you.