oh my god

people who aren't horrible or stupid or boring actually saying interesting things about interesting movies, i can breathe again:

Tarsem’s The Fall is one of those movies that inspire modified praise, even from its most fervent champions—phrases like “flawed masterpiece,” “magnificent folly,” and from A.V. Club superfan Tasha Robinson, “the most glorious, wonderful mess put onscreen since Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.” One’s mileage for glorious messes tends to vary—the “mess” part is all Tasha and I can agree on with Gilliam’s recent The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus—but there’s great appeal in a filmmaker who commits to an ambitious, splashy, personal vision, however awkward and foolhardy it might be. I don’t doubt that everyone who watches The Fall recognizes both its folly and its magnificence, but it’s fascinating and telling (and personal) how individual viewers wind up balancing that equation in the end. It’s one of those strange cases where two people can agree point by point on everything that does and doesn’t work in a movie, yet come to opposite conclusions about it.