A movie about the business of making movies in all its vacuity and of recording things on camera. This is Wim Wenders' "Le Mepris" and his "Rear Window", (it's all about looking and not about seeing), and it's full of movie references. Sometimes they are about the only thing to distract you from all the ennui and the lack of anything remotely interesting happening up on the screen. In place of believable characters and a decent script or lines you might want to listen to Wenders fills his screen with images that are supposed to engage us on a movie-buff level. The film's like a game pseudo-intellectuals play; you fill in the blanks and if you can guess the better film the blanks come from, all the better, you get brownie points. In other words, this is pretty terrible, the kind of unmitigated disaster only a great director could make when he starts believing his own hype. I mean, Wenders can't lay the blame entirely on the cack-handed script; after all, he co-wrote the original story with script writer Nicholas Klein. I was going to say it goes deeper than that, (or aspires to), but deep isn't really a word you want to use when reviewing this pile of horse dung. OK, it looks terrific; what more can I say? Oh, except he talked the legendary Samuel Fuller into appearing in it and he's terrible, too.
Review of The End of Violence
