Purely Joyful Movie!

I was totally surprised at how great this film.You could feel your paranoia rise as the film went on and as you gradually learned the details of the real situation.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

The movie is surprisingly subdued in its pacing, its characterizations, and its go-for-broke sensibilities.

Beware of the brand: if Wenders can deliver some inspired movies ("Stay, faraway so close", Antonioni's "Beyond the Clouds"), he can also offer the worst like this one. A little reminiscent of Lynch's "Mulholland Drive" for a personal trip into Hollywood, this movie is my worst movie of the year.Nearly, all the scenes add nothing to the story so it's long, dull… It's funny because Wenders shoots actually my feelings: MacDowell phones her husband saying she is bored. And the moment I prefer is when the director says the movie is finished! The only tasteful thing is the locations: For LA, the exterior sets are rather beautiful (the observatory) or very modern art (the highways). The shot of the filming set inside the movie looks a lot like the Hopper's painting "Night Hawks" (the famous realistic bar, if you prefer..) So, this movie is a gallery of paintings (only visual) and I prefer the Lynch's gallery.

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.

This film is more about people adapting to change than about thrills. Bill Pullman is a very successful producer who uses people. His wife decides to leave him, but at the same time he gets caught up in a bizarre plan to introduce a pre-emptive high-tech crime-intervention system based on the ubiquitous "Big Brother" cameras that we've all become so used to in the developed world. All though he actually knows nothing yet, he's targeted for assasination. He finds refuge with his Mexican gardeners, and, while trying to discover why he's now hunted he goes through an epiphany of his own. This film is full of lovely characterisations. It's much more than a conspiracy movie.

This movie fascinated me to the degree that I watched it twice and recommended it to several friends. While I agree with some of the comments of the person who didn't care for the movie, overall I enjoyed it, mostly because of good acting, its music and the "what's going to happen next" atmosphere set by the film . Granted, the twists and turns of the unusual and unlikely plot took some figuring out. It was almost like a David Lynch film, only not so bleak.I especially enjoyed the sound track.