You can’t make great movies if the world doesn’t amaze you.

I have to recommend you a great film reviews blog and a fantastic writer.

http://moviewaffle.com/

I've discover it two years ago while I was surfing on web about THE FALL. Moviewaffle was at the beginning at that time but now after two years it looks like a everybody loves it ...It was longlisted for Wales Blog Awards 2010 (Best Writing) .

Here is one of the best reviews of The Fall directed by Tarsem Singh written with passion and truth by moviewaffle.com ...

The Fall – A Review

The greatest special effect is the close-up. Every vista pales in comparison with the human face. Because without that face – what do you connect with? What moves you? The desert might be a character in Lawrence of Arabia, but its performance is opaque. What makes Lawrence is Peter O’Toole. The same way – in Apocalypse Now – Marlon Brandon shows you what the jungle is thinking. In director Tarsem Singh’s breathtaking movie, The Fall, there are sights that equal anything David Lean or Francis Ford Coppola accomplished. And there is also a little girl (Catinca Untaru), whose face knocks every other wonder into a cocked hat.

The story is about a stuntman in Hollywood in the 1920s. He has fallen, both literally and metaphorically (the movie – while breathtaking – isn’t subtle). He’s in hospital. A famous actor has seduced the stuntman’s girl. Of all his injuries, this cuckolding is the worst. The stuntman becomes addicted to morphine. Bedridden, it’s hard for him to maintain a constant supply. He befriends a little girl (hospitalized after – you guessed it – a fall) as a ruse so she’ll steal morphine for him. In return for her help, the little girl keeps bugging the stuntman to tell her a story. He does – and it’s breathtaking – but as the story unfolds, the morphine takes over…

Tarsem Singh spent four years making The Fall. In eighteen countries. With his own money. And Catinca Untaru still steals the show. In interview, the director speaks of how he couldn’t have made the movie till he found the right girl. And he was right. When a movie is this dazzling, it needs reality. Untaru has never acted before. With luck, she will never act again. Not for Sophia Coppola-type reasons, but because: she’ll never be this good. Non-actors get one shot at a perfect performance. Then they become actors. There are reaction shots The Fall catches from Untaru that one actor in a million could replicate. Tarsem Singh’s best decision was to let this little girl dictate how every other actor behaves. When Lee Pace (the stuntman) is with her, you’re watching an actor unlearn acting. And be better for it. Because acting is play time. Would that every movie had the luxury of children playing children instead of “child actors”.

So what do we see? Some examples: the desert; a wall of sand that looks a thousand feet high; a lone rider like an ink smear on the dunes. Or how about an island in the shape of a butterfly; blissfully white; set it in a billowing blue ocean. Or a dead tree sprouting into flames. Or an aqueduct designed by M.C. Escher. Or a wedding couple ringed by whirling Dervishes. Or tiny birds flying out of a man’s mouth. Or – Beauty. In essence. The Fall is “the full meal” (as a wise teacher of mine once phrased it). It is absurd, sensual and (my favourite) unabashed. It puts me in mind of movies like The Fountain, where the audience has to have the right appetite. You either gorge on such movies or you’re bored by them. Cynics will only gag.

While spirituality might seem ham-fisted in Singh’s handling of it (“Are you trying to save my soul?” the stuntman asks, repeatedly), like Darren Aronofsky, the soul of his movie isn’t there in words, it’s grasped holistically, through the movie. To put it another way, The Fall would be about the soul if the stuntman and the little girl talked about cornflakes. Like a great song which leaps the boundaries of its form; the message isn’t the words, it’s the music.

It’s easy to wear-out a word like “breathtaking”. How good can it be? we long to sneer. But great movies come from a director’s childish awe at the world. You can’t make great movies if the world doesn’t amaze you. How else to explain the power of the close-up? To look at something so intently that – for a few seconds, a lifetime – it engulfs you. Human faces are the best kept secrets told by close-ups. Most of us still retain the capacity to be awed by a desert or an ocean. And the deserts and oceans of The Fall are awe-inspiring as any in movies. But that one little girl. We’d miss her. She and everyone else who’s ever given a great performance on-screen. Because great acting is only half of it. For the other half: you have to look close.

About MovieWaffle in 2008

I am an English teacher by day, and I’m often fairly busy, but a friend kept bugging me to write and so write I did (let that be a lesson to anyone who ever had a dream for someone else).

As far as intentions for the site go, I intend to write about movies I have seen. Some of them will be new releases, some of them will be old favourites and some of them I’ll review because my friend asks me to (I’ll bet he has plans). These reviews will not be fact-checked and will often, doubtless, contain inaccuracies and things I’ve remembered wrong. But they will also, hopefully, contain some thoughts you may agree with, and they will be written carefully, with care for the movies as much as where the commas should go.

If this site were a cinema it would be a small one, with only sort-of comfortable seating. It’s a pre-multiplex site: you come for the movies.

About MovieWaffle in 2010

The closest I ever came to getting shot was in Florida.

It was summer, and I had an AK47 pointed at my feet. The gun wasn’t mine, but it was my finger on the trigger. I had been handed a machine gun by a friend – partly for fun, partly to test my masculinity – and now, with a paper target taunting me like a raised middle finger, I was aiming low, in order not to lose control of the gun and kill everybody.

AK47s are lighter than you expect. They’re nearer the weight of an empty body bag, rather than a full one. However, far from being emboldened by the unexpected lightness of my gun, I was convinced that, when I pulled the trigger, the bastard thing would leap for my chin like a dog with iron teeth. So I pointed it down, as if ordering: “Sit”.

I was already nervous, after being told that I could burn my hand if I touched the barrel after firing. But the image of me, post-massacre, breaking my chin with the murder weapon…was too much.

I paused. There was something at stake beyond hitting the target. If I handed the gun back, I’d be coward. Not in the he-left-his-buddies-in-a-firefight sense; not even because I feared killing everybody, but because I’d have avoided risk.

Pulling that trigger was necessary to my life.

I gripped the gun, asserting control. My arms were rigid. The paper target was twenty feet away, but I wasn’t aiming for it. My aim was to fire. I willed my toes safe. I willed my friends safe. I willed the witless, molten AK not to catapult into my chin.

I fired…

(This is pretty much how I’d describe reviewing)

Above & Beyond . NOSTALGIA

I always have a nostalgia watching these breathtaking views ....
I want to believe that millions of years ago , in a prehistorical time of the time, I was flying above and beyond heavens .




Nostalgia ....I remember the sound of this word in the end of The Fall's making of documentary entitled ...Nostalgia.

" The haunting sentiment that one can never go home again plays a key role in the concept
of nostalgia. The longing to return home resonates with every individual. The desire for a home that is no more, whether because of changes in time, space, or essence, causes pain and often affects and produces the certain identity of each person. This painful longing for home is encompassed in the word nostalgia, which comes from the Greek nostos for “return home” and algia for “pain.” A characteristic of nostalgia is that one who feels the painful yearning for home is displaced and disoriented, searching for the orientation one receives from the place of origin. The notion of nostalgia is connected to memory and experience. The memory of home entails childhood, innocence, and comfort derived from the place where one felt unmediated experience with life, which then becomes transposed into memory for some lost paradise where we no longer belong. We are wanderers, alienated in our own lives, searching in all places (whether it is in another person, place, or object) for the sense of home sweet home. "
The Garden as Original Home: Nostalgia in Paradise Lost
Elizabeth Healy, Thomas More College



Nostalgia is a consequence of the Fall.

Caravaggio meets Fight Club. Dawn Of War by Tarsem Singh

Kevin Jagernauth reports for Canada Movie Examiner:

" Production Weekly has twittered that Tarsem Singh, director of The Cell and The Fall, has set up offices at La Cité du Cinéma in Montreal and is preparing to shoot his next film, Dawn Of War. The studio production facility, is one of the biggest in Canada and has been home to many high profile Hollywood productions including 300, The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button and The Fountain.
Like 300, this film is a Greek period actioner, and tells the story about Athens founder and king Theseus' battle against imprisoned titans. The film will mark the first big, meaty lead film role for The Tudors' Henry Cavill while the visually creative director Tarsem Singh, has described the look of the film as "Caravaggio meets Fight Club".
There are no further casting or production details available at this time, but with filming set to begin in March, more news should be announced shortly. "

Now let's imagine the future masterpiece.

Caravaggio


Fight Club


Henry Cavill


and TARSEM

Catinca Untaru, my first story

My first words about Catinca written on myspace blog one year later

I have never written about Catinca, but I spoke of her a million times. Catinca comes from a fairytale. I often look at her and and have the feeling that she is surreal. She inspires me to believe she is an elf.

Catinca is the resort that set things in motion with my project, 10. She has special powers that she is not aware of yet. I have always known that she would bring something special in my life and in the lives of those around her.

It happened while I was doing the casting for The Fall. It was a fortunate coincidence that I got to do a casting at her kindergarten and the principal recommended her insistently. I agreed to see her, even though she was older than what we were looking for. Our first meeting was incredible! I was casting in a kindergarten classroom, where all furniture was very small sized; I felt like Gulliver in the land of the dwarfs. When she came in, she sat in a little chair in front of me and gave me a photo album with pictures from when she was a baby. For minutes, I wasn't able to ask her anything because I was somewhat hindered by her reaction. She looked at me, curious, shy, unbelievably attentive… I was absolutely struck with her gaze that I could feel burning on me, and I was too embarrassed to lift up my eyes to her, as if I had just entered a forbidden world of the elves where the roles of investigation were inverted irrevocably. She was dainty, and ethereal, but I was looking for someone else – a small, thin, dusky little girl, with big, dark eyes. We had a simple discussion, and it was enough, because her state was so special that I needed no confirmation of her intelligence or acting talent. I decided to call her for an audition, well knowing that directors can change their minds about the outer appearance of their characters.

We saw each other again at the beginning of December 2003, after she had passed the first selection. At the first video session she came with her grandfather. I remember I had just read a book about Nadia Comaneci by Ioan Chirila, where Bela Karoly, Nadia's coach, said that a very important tool for him for selecting gymnasts was observing their parents. If the parents were not corresponding physically and empathetically, he would refuse the young gymnasts, as talented as they had been. I often applied this method, including in the case of Catinca. Her grandfather looked like a fairytale grandfather, like a character from the interwar period in Bucharest that I could almost see standing in the doorway of a candy store, surrounded by hordes of children, smiling, affable, and generous.

We saw many children that day, but the image of Catinca with her grandfather were by far the most special to our minds. This association served to bring even more focus on her little figure, and the audition strengthened the conviction that she was perfect for the part. I realized that it was not at all acting with her, that she was merely playing, with the most heartwarming candor. Watching Catinca, so genuine and pure, so innocent and powerful, I remembered just how incredible childhood is. I could write volumes on this subject! I think, when I have the time, I will.

Evidently, the long series of casting calls ended with her as the absolute winner. She had competed with children from around the world, and her success was on the emotional level rather than the more rational questioning. We were wondering how she was going to hold up during filming (3 months long, on 3 continents.) We discovered she has a fantastic strength, that she is extremely resilient and very serious. Almost like an adult. Catinca has the mindset of a director rather than an actor. During filming, she would spend time analyzing what was going in every shot, then she would build her own frames, and use her ebullient imagination to conceive small scenes inspired by what was going on on the set and the discussions of the adults…

Catinca was raised in the fairytale world. Her grandfather confessed that he must have read a thousand stories to her growing up, and that she never grew tired of them, and of stepping into that otherly world. She learned English from a flight attendant who kept her attention vivid to a story about her air travels, about how she would borrow the accent from every country she visited. It's quite a smart story that became hilarious during the filming of The Fall, because Catinca would "steal" the accents of the country she visited. The director ended up having to redo all of Catinca's lines in the film, because her accent changed from country to country.

Catinca is a total fairytale addict, without even suspecting anything unreal about them. She is both happy, and sad, laughing and crying when she goes deep into the story. Her sensitivity is extraordinary. Probably this sensitivity is her key to the imaginary and the supernatural. I think she inherited it from her mother, with whom she has a wonderful relationship. For Catinca, the greatest joy is being cast in The Fall and set on a marvelous journey with her mother. Many times I felt like they were more like sisters or the best of friends than mother and daughter.

When she wants to, she can be extremely funny. The trick is for her to feel comfortable and safe. She can make you fall down from the chair laughing. She is very self-reflective and honest. I remember that she loved listening to Tarsem tell the story of how she was first perceived on the movie set. The entire team was expecting to see a skinny, woebegone little girl, but to the amazement of many, this fluffy little girl shows up, striding around like an elephant shouting, "A butterfly! A butterfly!..." She laughs with thunders when she hears this story.

Catinca is a very special child. She is not a mere child actor or a child star. She is entirely a fairytale


Here is her first headshot