The Fall (2006)

At a Los Angeles hospital in the 1920s, Alexandria is a child recovering from a broken arm. She befriends Roy Walker, a movie stunt man with legs paralyzed after a fall. Hilarity ensues as at her request, Roy tells her an elaborate story about six men of widely varied backgrounds who are on a quest to kill a corrupt provincial governor. Alexandria's imagination starts to run wild as her vision of the story gets more and more vivid and the line between fiction and reality begins to blur. But Roy has his own motives for befriending Alexandria that include procurement of Morphine.

Trivia: The film was shot on 26 locations over 18 countries. The director claims that there are no special effects in the film despite its surreal looks. Everything was shot on real locations. A miscommunication between the casting agent and Catinca Untaru (Alexandra) led her to believe that Lee Pace (Roy) was a real-life paraplegic. Director Tarsem Singh found that this brought an added level of believability to their dialogue, so he decided to keep almost the entire cast and crew under the same impression. Singh had to speak to the actor playing Alexandria's father and explain that his role was smaller than it appeared, since the script implied that he played the role of the bandit (actually played by Pace) in the fantasy scenes. Apparently it was hard to keep up the lie - a makeup artist walked into a room to find Pace standing and almost passed out from shock. The cinematic poster for this movie is based on the Salvador Dali painting, "1935_03_Face of Mae West Which May Be Used as an Apartment", circa 1935.

I saw Bedtime Stories this weekend (the review will be up in a couple of days) that had a man tell a story to two children and the story was acted out by the three of them and included other people in their lives. It was okay, a fun little romp. This movie blows it out of the water. It was a lot sadder then Bedtime Stories which is a comedy, and it deals with a lot of heavy issues including suicide, but it is still a lot better movie. Alexandria's imagination of the story is so vivid and full of color it is like a painting. It truely has no bounds. This picture was just so lush and beautiful. The thing I like the most is that the story was told by an American man about a native indian, a bandit, an explosives expert, a runaway slave, an East Indian swordsman, and Charles Darwin, but instead of just having Alexandria imagine the cliches that we associate with these name, her vision was of far away places and had a distinct far east feel. Her imagination was allowed to roam free. This is a gorgeous film, you should find it and see it.