Characteristic piece of Wim Wenders deep-think, or deep-sulk anyway, about the decline of Western civilization, the ascent of Big Brother, the crass commercialism of the American cinema, and similar morsels. To get down to brass tacks: it tells of a successful Hollywood producer (Bill Pullman), specializing in violent movies and currently producing one under the candid title of Violence, who has a near-fatal brush with actual violence (shades of Lawrence Kasdan's Grand Canyon) and who, in reaction, drops out of the rat race and completely out of sight to start a new and more fulfilling and cornier life among a happy family of Mexican gardeners. This storyline intersects and intertwines with a science-fictional one to do with a secretly installed system of surveillance cameras through which a gloomy computer scientist (Gabriel Byrne, an ideal Wenders actor) can watch over every inch of the City of Angels (shades of the surveying invisible angels of Wenders's Wings of Desire and Faraway, So Close), or, if he misses something, can recapture it and enhance it via video (shades of Antonioni's Blow-Up). The preposterousness and pretentiousness of all this are effectively muffled but not totally silenced beneath the Wenders blanket of frost. Andie MacDowell, Loren Dean, Traci Lind, Sam Fuller. (1997) — Duncan Shepherd
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