Hacker Cinema
The Fall
2008 · Film · 117 min
Directed by Tarsem Singh
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 fantastic 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.
16 positive3 neutralfrom 19 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
21 comments on Hacker News
The Fall is a great movie but still more style than substance imo.
apparently part of The Fall's magic stems from the fact that the girl playing Alexandria (Catinca Untaru) somehow didn't really understand that she was playing in a movie. the director received some criticism for this manipulation. she also didn't really continue acting afterwards.
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1942458/
I have Lee Pace on the radar since Singh's The Fall.
Your assessment of movie magic is only partially correct. Obviously, a character has to be convincing by himself but the heavy lifting of the illusion is done by the peer characters acting as if they believe the role he plays.
"The king is always played by the others"
Not sure who is to credit for this quote but in my opinion it is one of the most important insights to understand how movies work and also why movie characters are never relevant role models.
If you like Lee Pace, check out The Fall (2006). It's my favorite film, incredibly ambitious and funny and yet virtually unknown to the public. Lee's performance is incredible, as is his young co-star's.
He also stars in The Fall, one of my favorite movies ever.
> Tokyo Story
I watched it because it's on every list of best films, so expectations going in were high. It's not overrated. I don't cry from movies but I did when watching this one. Very subtle and relatable.
Edit: Since we're here, "The Fall" (2006) and "City of God" (2002) are some of my other favorites.
The Fall is one of my favorite films and I’ve never met anyone who’s ever heard of it, probably because of it being out of print and not on streaming sites. I really hope they do a US re-release at some point.
Some that I've enjoyed recently (or rewatched):
Good One (2024) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt30319516/
Strange Darling (2023) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt22375054/
The Creator (2023) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11858890/
The Night House (2020) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9731534/
The Empty Man (2020) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5867314/
Possessor (2020) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5918982/
Booksmart (2019) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1489887/
Volition (2019) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6385952/
Welcome the Stranger (2018) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5716280/
Time Trap (2018) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4815122/
Wind River (2017) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5362988/
A Dark Song (2016) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4805316/
I Am Not a Serial Killer (2016) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4303340/
Midnight Special (2016) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2649554/
The Devil's Candy (2015) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4935372/
Mr. Holmes (2015) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3168230/
The Witch (2015) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4263482/
A Most Wanted Man (2014) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1972571/
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1340800/
Tucker and Dale vs Evil (2010) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1465522/
Pandorum (2009) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1188729/
The Fall (2006) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0460791/
In a Savage Land (1999) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151047/
Office Space (1999) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/
The Double Life of Véronique (1991) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101765/
Don't have Netflix so not sure what's available there, and several might not be wife-friendly. Also I enjoy weird, so YMMV.
In 2008/2009, I bought a DVD of this movie called "The Fall": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fall_(2006_film) . I'm a sucker for visually-appealing films so I loved it, but I eventually lost the DVD and was never able to find another copy, despite checking every year or two. The wikipedia page says:
> As of September 2023, The Fall had been unavailable on streaming services or rental services, making it notoriously difficult to access with secondhand Blu-ray copies of the film being very expensive.
But apparently that isn't the case anymore! MUBI bought the rights earlier this year, and it looks like I can watch it through Amazon Video if I sign up for a MUBI trial.
EDIT: I maybe should have visited https://mubi.com/ before commenting - clips from The Fall is the very first thing they show.
What dreams may come is sublime, and sad and beautiful. I've rewatched and remain charmed.
Try 2006's The Fall for another special film that surprises your heart and gives a visual treat.
For me, anything based mostly on story or suspense is out, because I know what's going to happen. Even if they are some of my favorites. So usually it's for the visuals, music, or action.
Hardcore Henry I've probably watched the most. Such an absolutely wild action movie.
For visuals, I've watched What Dreams May Come(despite it being pretty heavy) and Tarsem Singh's "The Fall" probably five times each. The latter is hard to find, but definitely worth a watch if you come across it.
Rotten Tomatoes says, "More visually elaborate than the fragmented story can sometimes support, The Fall walks the line between labor of love and filmmaker self-indulgence." That's a pretty good description.
I used to get the film on DVD via Netflix. I'm glad I saw it again before Netflix stopped that service. The film really does need to be available. It's a remarkable bit of filmmaking, a tribute to the way movies used to be made.
I find its best enjoyed at that meta-level, saying "Wow, this film really is just as we're looking at it". It ends with a montage of silent-movie effects, from the "holy cow, I can't believe that stuntman just did that" era.
Tarsem Singh's next movie The Fall is visually similar (though in another genre), so watch it too if you didn't already: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0460791/
When I refer to this distinction, I mean something like the following (which overlaps to some extent with the distinction between "wide" and "narrow" AI, and I admittedly haven't tried very hard to formalize the difference):
1. We already have AI that is "human level" or even better than human level in the "narrow AI" sense. This part is trivial to see. AI's can beat humans at chess, dividing large numbers, and any number of tasks. But this is "narrow" and by and large the program that can play chess can't also drive a car or anything else.
2. With that established, if we took AI's from (1) above and did nothing but make them more generally applicable, so that the same program can play chess, drive a car, or calculate complex integrals, you'd arguably have something that could at least come close to being called "human level artificial general intelligence".
3. But nothing about establishing (2) above entails, so far as I can see, the necessity of the AGI having human like behaviors, emotions, desires, intentions, attitudes, etc. The easiest way to explain what I mean here is to think in terms of embodiment. It seems clear to me that some portions of our intelligence and behavior are tied up in the way we experience the world through our bodies. Even down to the analogies we construct and use and how we understand them. For example, we talk about "the stock market falling" or a person "falling down" (both in the literal sense or like the movie of the same name), or we say the level of a lake "fell", and I'd argue that some of the understanding of the abstract notion of "fallingness" is tied up in our visceral experience of falling. We know what it means to "fall" in a certain sense, because we have all fallen. We've experienced stumbling, being off balance, beginning to tip over, seeing the floor rush towards our noses, extending our hands to break our fall, getting carpet burn on our hands as a result, etc. And I posit that we can't really divorce those experiences from our subsequent learning and behaviors. And a (2) AGI, unless specifically built to be embodied, and to have that ability to experience the physical world, probably won't have the same attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, etc.
That's not to say that you can't teach an AGI some notion of "fallingness" without it being embodied. My argument is simply that there is a distinction between "human level" and "human like" and that that distinction is largely related to our physical manifestation via our bodies.
No formal proofs of any of this, but this general view informs my overall position towards AI / AGI in many ways. Others may or may not find it useful.
Not a documentary but visually stunning: The Fall
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0460791/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2
If not for my friend who sails a lot, i would have needed to turn to the Pirate Bay to get a copy of the film The Fall with Lee Pace in it. One of the most beautiful films ever made and it’s not available to stream anywhere. Or purchase in hard copy unless I go for an $80 used copy on eBay or amazon. It’s out of print and no studio seems to be interested in putting it out there. Went through something similar for the film Hero with Jet Li, but eventually found a new old stock copy for a reasonable price. Sometimes things just aren’t legitimately available anywhere, streaming or not.
I'm traveling to India in a few weeks and The Fall is basically my itinerary. After seeing the movie, this was one of the first place I googled because I didn't immediately get what this was for. It should have been obvious, but my preconceptions of deserts/arid places is based on the middle east, where (AFAIK) there are no step wells.
One of those stepwells was used to great effect in Tarsem’s movie The Fall (which is a glorious visual feast where clever cinematography did things that you would expect to be CGI)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0460791/
I' never heard of it, but it doesn't seem like a mainstream movie:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the-fall-2008/
The niche audience liked it just fine, but I don't know how they could turn it into recouping those millions.
Movies are very expensive to market (average cost in Hollywood is over $20 million in marketing), and a movie _without_ marketing -- virtually regardless of the how much it cost to make -- will do almost no theatrical business at all.
Tarsem's "The Fall" is a great example: the guy spent tens of millions of dollars of his own money making a pretty interesting film, had no marketing, and did just a few million at the box office, despite moviegoers liking the film.
Same here, I remember loving the vivid imagery of that movie.
I watched "The Fall" recently and this is the first one that came to mind. Highly recommended: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0460791/