Beanbioca
As Good As It Gets
Plustown
A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.
Taha Avalos
The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.
kurosawakira
This just might be Greenaway at the top of his game: unbelievably funny and witty, a film that is a structurally magnificent testament to the wonderful madness of Joyce, or Perec, who not only wanted to distill the world but somehow managed to create a microcosm of their own in their work.This is certainly the cinematic answer to a work like "Life: A User's Manual". Really, this is so laugh-out-loud funny it's not even funny, considering Greenaway's work for the past 25 years has been rather… serious? What Greenaway manages to do is this: he is able to create a profound film that looks deep in the mirror and sees the world unfold upon itself in an endless swirl; then he's able to present it to us in a structurally coherent way, by means of documentary filmmaking; then he's able to poke fun mostly at those means and the film itself, and still turn that gentle and witty parody on its head. In short, this is wondrous filmmaking, something quite unparalleled in my books.I wish there were more films like this that make you laugh and not feel bad about it.And to think that Greenaway, who is such an aesthete and wonderful crafter of shockingly beautiful images, mostly uses stock footage and images that are very much of the ordinary sort. Knowing that he would go on to make such multi-layered works such as "Prospero's Books" (1991) and "The Pillow Book" (1996) only adds to the fun. By the way, we have Stephen and Timothy Quay, of all people, pop up in the film!
Yxklyx
This really isn't what most people would call a "movie". It uses the film _media_ in a totally different method than what we are accustomed to. Of course I'm probably repeating something I've read elsewhere but this is really a "Visual Encyclopedia" or something like that anyway. I'm sure most of you have seen "movies" in a driver's education class - I'm thinking of the movies we had to drive to on virtual car machines back in high school in the 70s - now you wouldn't put those movies in the same class as Hudsucker Proxy now would you? Just because something was filmed on a visual media doesn't mean it's a "movie". Imagine Encyclopedia Britannica making a movie of their books - that's kind of what we have here - or better yet, imagine a dictionary in "movie" format in which each word instead of being spelled out is given a 5 second video clip - now splice all these video clips together and that's kinda what we have here.
Andrew Schneider
This movie has my vote for the worst movie ever made. Other candidates, such as "Plan 9 from Outer Space" and "Manos: The Hands of Fate," are at least amusing, if unintentionally so. "The Falls," however, doesn't even have this advantage. Instead it is just excruciatingly long, boring and repetitive, telling an absurd number of supposedly linked vignettes about victims of some undefined apocalyptic event. The victims profiled, most of whom have developed some sort of bizarre physical or psychological handicap as a result, have nothing in common other than that the first four letters of their last name are "F-A-L-L," hence the title. There is a theme, but no plot and no particular reason to care about anyone in the film. I sat through this monstrosity while in college. When the theater brought up the lights for an intermission, halfway through the 185 minute film, at least two-thirds of the audience got up and walked out. It was that bad.
kdufre00
I consider myself a fan of Peter Greenaway, and maybe since I only sat through 20 minutes of this movie, I shouldn't be giving it such a harsh review. But I can't help myself. I can't believe people actually liked this movie. I thought it was sheer torture! I went to a screening of this movie with my sister at the Harvard Film Archive a few months ago. After ten minutes of sitting through unintelligible dialogue and grainy photography, I thought to myself, "I have to sit through 3 hours of this?!" To my relief, my sister shared my feelings about the movie and we left the screening after another generous ten minutes.I hope I am not offending any ardent Greenaway fans out there. I like his movies too! I even met him 3 years ago at the Boston premiere of "The Pillow Book." I consider myself an intelligent person, and I like to see plenty of experimental movies. After reading the above comments on "The Falls" however, I am amazed that other people understood what it was about....and actually sat through it!
