While the fate of Pushing Daisies still isn’t clear, I figured this is a good time to recommend another Lee Pace vehicle: The Fall.
The Fall suffers from what I call GESWBN disease: Great Entertainment Saddled With Bad Name (see also: So You Think You Can Dance? and Life on NBC). Because while “The Fall” sounds like it might be about Adam & Eve, or fallen angels, or even something demonic, in reality it’s nothing of the sort. It’s a fairy tale.
Here’s a synopsis I pulled from IMDB:
In a hospital on the outskirts of 1920s Los Angeles, an injured stuntman begins to tell a fellow patient, a little girl with a broken arm, a fantastical story about 5 mythical heroes. Thanks to his fractured state of mind and her vivid imagination, the line between fiction and reality starts to blur as the tale advances.
They aren’t kidding when they say “vivid imagination.” The movie was filmed in about a dozen different countries, and boasts having no computer-generated special effects. Each location shot is absolutely stunning. We watched this in Blu-Ray, and I can’t express how beautiful the composition of this film was. I envied the characters as they got to globe-trot during the course of the story.
The fairy-tale itself reminds me of Pan’s Labryinth, without being quite as heavy, and many may find it trite and shallow, but I loved it. The young lead is a treat, and is so completely natural in front of the camera without a hint of saccharine that mars many child performances. Lee Pace gives a great performance as a man who knows what he wants, and will do what he has to do to get it. The two of them play off each other remarkably.
Movie reviews aren’t my strong point – thousands of other folks out there are much better at it than I am. I liked it, and you might too.
