THE FALL

Special to PollyStaffle.com

Recently, I compiled a list of the ten worst films of all time. One of the films on the list, Jonathan Whittle-Utter’s The Fall (2009), has no critical literature associated with it that I can find; there’s simply no writing about it. Maybe there’s a chance my writing about this bad film will shine some light on something, explain something, something like that. I don’t really know. It’s really bad. How bad is it? I don’t recommend you waste any time watching it.

This is a very boring art film that doesn’t go anywhere. Its ending doesn’t resolve much. It’s the first feature length film about Neuro-Lingusitic Programming, NLP, an odd “technology” of psychotherapy that would remind you a little bit of Scientology if you’ve ever read up on that. The film even mentions Scientology. Some people think NLP is brainwashing and other people just think is pure fraud. Whatever the case, this Whittle-Utter guy isn’t doing the NLP movement any favors because this thing is hard to sit through. I did sort of laugh at the actress that’s supposed to be a sexy British lesbian but has a terrible fake British accent and isn’t especially that great looking. Other then that there is nothing enjoyable about watching this film. The acting is extremely overwrought, pacing is slow. The storyline doesn’t come to any real conclusion.

I guess that’s one way to flush your trust fund down the toilet; games to prove your intelligence that ad up to nothing in the end. The plot is that this young man’s girlfriend has vanished unexpectedly and without reason. It turns out she was involved with yes, you got it, NLP. The young man starts doing detective work and there’s this whole bit about a network of people who have taken NLP to the level that they can manipulate and erase people’s memories with hand gestures and words. There’s something about the Illumanti and the CIA in there, the girlfriend being a double agent who doesn’t even remember she’s a double agent. How is that achieved? Through the magic of NLP hand gestures!

The Illumanti, the CIA or whoever is represented by this one villain Vincent, who’s just a guy in a suit with a shaved head. By the end of the movie we don’t know what happened exactly to the girlfriend. Hey, that sounds sort of interesting or sort of funny, you think to yourself, I’d like to watch that. I’m going to have to urge you not to do that, if you do you’re going to want to throw a rock at your DVD player.

It’s kind of interesting though that his trap is in believing he is an artist, playing endlessly into the notion that being an artist is somehow deeply important. The film starts with the quote from Nietzsche “Perhaps we are all greater artists then we realize” or something to that effect. I haven’t read enough Nietzche to say anything about that or the context it comes out of, and I kind of don’t care. I live in Las Vegas, the Las Vegas arts district is about a block, and I don’t prefer it to the shooting range. I kind of think calling oneself an artist is a good way to make a fool of oneself. I actually feel that the slice of art that is worth paying any attention to or caring about is really small. I obviously enjoy writing these movie reviews here, so I have a taste for horror cinema. I’m sort of an admirer of early punk and goth type stuff. Even all that is what it is to me. I don’t aspire to make a living through my writing anymore. I aspire to move up from firearms instruction and security work to being a private investigator.

The DVD has a little section that explains that the film is meant to be “like a painting” and cites influence of French new wave and surrealist films. He believes very strongly in the artistic genius. When the boyfriend goes through her old undergrad papers on NLP, I love this part, he says “she must have been a literary genius.” You have got to be fucking joking me!

I have a literature degree from Bard College. I know his type well. This guy reminds me far too much of an undergrad philosophy class. The myth of the artist, that’s what the film is really about. It’s a dangerous little myth.

Then there’s the whole NLP thing. Yeah, I don’t really buy it. It seems strange that Jonathan Whittle-Utter wouldn’t have used it to become very well known if it worked. That’s one thing that’s in the film is that the whole NLP thing can be very much about making money, but the only film primarily about it is not well financed particularly. Oh yeah, I’d sure love to be a success and to make more money and all that but that doesn’t necessarily mean that this whole nervous system reprogramming idea is going to get me hired. I suspect that the guy running the NLP online bookstore is getting rich, I don’t know if anyone else is. The Fall is released on-demand so, Whittle-Utter isn’t getting rich off that most likely. I think someone pulled a fast one on Whittle-Utter, to be honest.

That’s quite an intersection of problems with this film. The chick is a literary genius because she wrote college papers on NLP? You’ve got to be joking me. You’ve got to be kidding me. I can’t believe this film is even real. It’s a dull art house film that doubles as a propaganda film for a highly dubious form of new age psychotherapy. That’s unholy. And the plot goes nowhere and doesn’t resolve itself. In the beginning the guy’s girlfriend vanishes, at the end we know she was playing around with this NLP shit, and she’s still gone, never revealed where. That’s bad. That’s a bad movie.

That’s LAME!!!! That’s weak!!!!

For a good laugh, take a quick peek at that dude’s webpage, because he’s sort of a renaissance man of awful. He’s an actor, a director, a writer, he does it all. And he does it all as badly as I’ve ever seen. I like the blog he does on gay marriage where he says that he’s outraged as “a liberal” and also as “a libertarian.” I’ll tell you, that makes a lot of sense, that Ron Paul guy that the Tea Party likes so much, he ran for president on the Libertarian Party ticket once, he’s a dedicated leftist, let me tell you. I’ll have to ask that guy from the Oath Keeper Militia that drops by the Nevada Libertarian Party meetings about that. I think the conventional reasoning on that is that the Libertarian Party is a conservative party. I have heard the description of the party as fiscally conservative and socially liberal but I think that is misleading, the libertarian support for legalizing marijuana and prostitution are rather based in principles of small, constitutionally based government. In fact, last Nevada Libertarian Party meeting we had a conversation about how we consider ourselves to be right wing extremists, if I recall. Then again, we always get distracted talking about our guns. I’m sure if you contact Jonathan Whittle-Utter he’ll let you know his opinion on that, I’m sure he can tell you all about it, and tell you some more about it, and then tell you even more about it.

- William Wheaton, August 2010

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