Review: The Fall (2006)

"Why are you killing everybody?"

Films about filmmaking are usually self-congratulatory douchefests designed to inflate art's importance so that nobody loses their job. A way to sidestep that pitfall would be similar to an optical illusion, where the magic happens on the periphery, although I think the result is identical to simply telling a good story. Here, we have two! A man in a hospital bed begins an epic tale to a young child (a western, though not imagined as such) solely to earn her trust and get her to retrieve pills from the hospital's dispensary. The narrative cross-stitching functions completely without the technological excuse in The Cell, only by the imagination of the cutest little girl in the world, and the reality of the hospital and her life influence the casting and visuals of her imagination in monumentally clever ways. The film pulls you in two different directions at first; the more visually arresting is also less important, a tough thing to meet halfway until the stakes of real story increase and Roy's motives become clearer and less tasteful. Tableaus are constructed and discarded, quickly and effortlessly, and we are pulled into a third direction as his tale become dangerous. The brutal squeeze it puts on your heart by the end is a hammer collapsing your chest, where it is hard to tell if we are Alexandria, demanding a happy ending, or Roy, bitter and broken by life's hardships. It's an awe-inspiring achievement with an insane amount of connective tissue weaved throughout the various themes.

You don't need to be part of a hero myth to pull someone out of hell. The movie is incredible, Lee Pace is a motherfucking boss, I cry a bunch. Oh, and look, Bedtime Story again! This guy loves Mark Romanek.

Review: The Prestige (2006)

The Prestige is less of a tale of revenge and more of a love story that expresses itself through sabotage and violence, where a goal of supremacy is so seductive that one magician lives half of a life and the other forgets quickly the tragedy of his wife's death and refuses to hear Michael Caine screaming the solution to the trick halfway through. And though we yearn for it, because think of the tricks the "two" of them could perform, our two romantic leads will never come together. This story is told through three layers of narration, two diaries and what we can assume is Caine's final assessment, and its success is the kind you only see in novels, rarely in film. It's... "the greatest trick I've ever seen." If magic is a lie that everybody knows about, this is something else. A movie about the lifelong desire to perform miracles manages to exist as a miracle in its own right. It is one hell of a breathtaking ride, both inspiring and suffocating. You will never do anything this good in your life, and Christopher Nolan might not either. What a gift.