'Fall' gorgeous but convoluted

Imagine "The Bucket List" if it were really shot in all those exotic locales the geezers supposedly visited. Now, imagine "The Bucket List" with a terribly told story. Put them both together and you've got "The Fall," a gorgeous piece of globe-trotting adventure with the imaginative discipline of a bacterium. Based on an obscure Bulgarian movie, this is the second film directed by music video (R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion") and commercials wiz Tarsem Singh. His first was theJennifer Lopez whatsit "The Cell," which was pretty good-looking and surrealistically inane, too.

The director tops himself in both categories here. Marvelous backgrounds — remote mountains, dense rain forests, windblown deserts, pyramids, ancient cities — were filmed in 18 countries over four years. Production design and cinematography are appropriately lush, in a spare-no-expense magazine-shoot kind of way. Eiko Ishioka's costumes deserve special mention for their witty, otherworldly and sensuously tactile qualities. They're the most inspired, original things in the movie.

The story had potential, although the real part of it boils down to the old "Wizard of Oz" trick, in which aspects of people's lives manifest in a wild, symbolic and — hopefully — enlightening fiction.

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