The End of Violence

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.

It didn't feel like it had any central thread. Nothing really grabbed my attention. There were a number of promising potentials, but they were never followed up on. Through most of the movie, I didn't know what the hell was going on, and I wondered if the whole thing was Wenders' private joke. Many of the characters were either annoying (actors playing their pretentious selves), or just big blobs of nothing. Pointless non-sequitur slug of a movie.

"The End of Violence" is a clutter of stick figures wandering through a messy story about some sci-fi "big brother" government project being tested in Los Angeles. The film trades interesting characters for interesting situations, connects the dots too late revealing too little, and ends in a self absorbed coma about as flat as warm beer. Nonetheless, the film has a respectable cast, a garnish of neo-Beat poetry, a brooding noir feel, a good soundtrack, and some husky-voiced philosophical narration by Pullman making it a par watch for the needy couch potato. (C)

A film producer who escapes death by murder and chooses to lead a simple life afterwards, a group of good Mexican gardeners, a second-rate movie actress who becomes jobless, a police officer who is not happy with the filing of his case, a Salvadoran maid whose family has been shot by death squads, a NASA employee who knows too much and his old father who doesn't want to exchange his old typewriter by a computer, a mysterious project of ending up violence in the world by putting everyone under surveillance, with all those ingredients what could a movie director have made? Surely an excellent movie. This one however is too much ambitious and produces rather poor results in comparison with that ambition. Where the contrast between dream and reality, love and greed, poetry and vulgarity could have been explored we are left with a story not bad in itself but not very deep and not especially moving.