frankenbenz http://eattheblinds.blogspot.com/There isn't too much to like about Wim Wenders' films over the last twenty years. There have been a few bright spots, but for the most part, Wenders' obsession with America has gotten the worst of him. In his prime, few directors since Antonioni were as adept at depicting inner monologues through silence. Wenders' characters were complicated men of few words.Over time Wenders love affair with America somehow convinced him that the 'less is more' approach was failing. Wenders threw his greatest strength out the door and substituted it with what would become, over time and many films, his achilles heel: big ideas.The characters in Land of Plenty aren't really individual people, they are ideas. These characters represent something grander, something excruciatingly ambitious: the American conscience. Lofty goals of this sort often end up as preachy and pretentious and LOP's screenplay is just that. Shot on the cheap, on digital video, LOP feels like noble idea rushed into production without the benefit of enough revisions to weed out the heavy handedness. Films concerned with the traumatic effects of 9/11 are compelled to be both profound and reverential, the problem is profound and reverential seldom make for a worthwhile movie going experience. If there was a rating system based on the number of American flags displayed in a movie, LOP would score full points, as it is, LOP rates very low.

wrlang Land of Plenty is about an Viet Nam Vet looking for terrorists around every corner. His naive niece from Palestine visits at the behest of her dead mother to get an education about America and Americans. The majority of the film is about the vet imagining all kinds of terrorist plots as he goes from place to place in LA following people and making all kinds of assumptions to support his neurosis brought on by agent pink which was the precursor to agent orange. The niece learns that America is a land of plenty that not everyone gets a piece of as she takes up residence in a mission while looking for her uncle. A drive by shooting of a homeless Pakistani brings them together as she looks for the next of kin and he looks for the terrorist cell. Upon meeting the Pakistani relative, they come to the realization that while America is a great country, the real America is not the stuff of legend, it is the struggle of its people to make their way through their lives and through the world.

Furuya Shiro The heaviest line for me was "We won", Paul, A veteran from Vietnamise War told his niece Lana about the Vietnamese War. I can not be objective to the Vietnamese War, as it was the events in my adolescent and youth ages. As an Asian youth, I was heavily empathized in the Liberation Front side. But I can understand the mentality of the American ex-soldier saying "We won". It makes sense he wants to think the death of his comrades and his after effects agony of the Agent Pink are meaningful and valuable.When I went to New York in 2003, I saw a man a bit older than I on the 5th avenue driving an electric wheelchair with American flag attached to it. I thought he must be in the Vietnamese War generation. I can understand the mentality of Paul rising up to protect America after the 9.11 incident. Though everybody can tell Paul's belief and behavior are ridiculous, it is the USA whose government is behaving on the same mentality. This is not as innocent as Paul.Lana is a woman as her mother says she has inherited all good aspects from her parents. I felt refreshed and relieved by that Lana and the pastor are described as they are affirmatively. The scene Lana prays looks positive and affirmative. I think this movie portrays the most persuading message among those movies based on the 9.11 incident.

simpletonistic "Land of Plenty" is a thought-provoking film. How couldn't it be? Wenders, a provocative director, taking on 9/11 and its aftermath? Truly, not to disparage Wenders, a monkey with a digital camera and a placard reading "Tell me about 9/11" could create something worth watching given the subject.In Wenders case, he has made an insular film focusing on two people, Lana (Michelle Williams) and her Uncle Paul (John Diehl), and the after effects of 9/11 upon both. Lana is a painfully naive 20 yr. old Christian who has just returned from a missionary stint in Palestine (where she witnessed 9/11) to work in a Los Angeles mission while searching for evidence justifying vehement, anti-American sentiment abroad. In her possession is a letter written by her recently deceased mom, Paul's sister. Deliverance of the letter compels here to track down her wayward uncle, the letter's addressee. Paul is in his 50s, a shell-shocked, paranoid Vietnam vet, intent on keeping this country safe from the free-roaming terrorists who are, in his eyes, ubiquitous within the City of Angels.Wenders draws these characters in such vivid Blue and Red colors that you would have to have your head up your butt not to see that they represent the mindset of Democrats (Lana) and Republicans (Paul). In fact, in various interviews, and during a Q & A after the 3/31/05 screening I attended, Wenders asserted that this film IS "a political film." Though he feels he has not made a polemical film: he has. You will be hard-pressed not to choose sides while watching the film. As for Wenders, he leaves little doubt as to his choice: true Blue.To that end, one need only take into consideration Wenders' mocking presentation of Paul as a hyper-vigilant nut case roaming L.A. in a beat-up, surveillance-equipment-crammed van in search of terrorist activity. Paul undertakes this toothless work functioning as a self-appointed renegade operative for Homeland Security, who have no connection with him. Paul's right hand man, Jimmy, is a grungy garage mechanic whose only connections to top-secret sources are Internet search engines. They bring to mind as Beavis & Butthead, with not much more at their disposal than Harriet-the-Spy in terms of fruitful resources. But for one scene showing Paul suffering the ill effects of post-war syndrome during a gripping nightmare, Wenders shows him to be something of a lunatic rube--a virtual laughing stock. Indeed, most of the movie's laughs come at Paul's expense because just about every action he undertakes furthers one's opinion of him as a maligned, pathetic xenophobe. (No doubt, if this movie finds a US distributor, most patriotic Vietnam vets will express their outrage at being presented as loose cannon extremists.) Wenders' presentation of Paul clearly displays his loathing for such Reds: the pro-war, high-angst, flag-waving, Dubbya-backing, kill'-em-all-and-let-God-sort-'em out folk who tote, and vote for, the conservative line.It's a credit to John Diehl that his intense, career-defining portrayal of Paul embellishes the shallow character created by Wenders. Diehl never allows Paul to breakdown completely, despite the various defeats he suffers, and has suffered. You want to like him for to see him overcome his burdens. He's troubled but not entirely lacking heart.As for Michelle Williams, she is god-awful as Lana. Wenders wrote the part for her, but one wonders if he did so just so that he could see her face on the big screen. With her bobbed black hair and perpetual doe-in-the-headlights countenance, she brings to mind a fifth-rate imitation of Audrey Tattou ("Amelie") and the poor man's Gweneth Paltrow, Scarlett Johannson ("Lost in Translation"). For the most part, she functions as eye candy. At other times she's a distraction. And, in one embarrassing scene--a testament to Wenders' music video work furthering my belief that he had other things in mind when he wrote the part for her--where Lana is seen in isolation wearing headphones while bopping to a tune emanating from her MP3, you beg for someone to push her off the mission's rooftop. In short, Williams fails to ACT, neither adding nuance to Lana's emotions nor any inventive idiosyncrasy to Lana's physical being. Where Diehl took what he was given and ran with it like a crazed wolverine, Williams was unable to enhance her character, instead, opting to stand around, a vapid clothes horse.Wenders' presentation of his two main characters in such unmistakable hues ends up reducing Lana and Paul to one-dimensional cardboard cut-outs, relegating them to ancillary evidence supporting his messages that mental, spiritual, social and political poverty are bad, and that the USA's polemical political system, which has reduced and divided citizens into two opposing factions, sucks.The title comes from a Leonard Cohen song, "The Land of Plenty." Cohen's lyrics--And I don't really know who sent me/to raise my voice and say/May the lights in the Land of Plenty/Shine on the truth some day--influence Wenders' directional choices. He employs the song strategically throughout the film, right up to the very end where truncated lyrics: "Shine on/The Truth," float in a slate gray New York skyline above Ground Zero, as if sky-written by a passing plane.An epitaph? An invocation? A critique? A prayer?Probably, all of the above.Despite Michelle Williams' abysmal performance, the conceptual limitations inherent in the rapid creation and completion of the film and the shortcomings of Wenders' obvious one-dimensional characters and biased message, "Land of Plenty" remains a provocative film worth viewing. If for no other reason than to remind us that life ain't always pretty, even here in the land of plenty. One hopes that one U.S. distributor will have the courage to pick up the film and disseminate it nationwide. If nothing else, viewers will come away thinking about just how divisive our Red and Blue political system is and maybe, just maybe, start thinking of how to change it.