Salon: Best 9/11 Film (Wenders) Has No Distributor

"Land of Plenty": Wounded people in a screwed-up country -- and guess what?
It's ours!
http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2005/10/06/btm/index.html

At least on a theoretical level, it's obnoxious to rant and rave about some film that 90 percent of you, or more, won't get a chance to see unless and until someone puts it out on DVD. But as noted above, most of the movies chewed upon in this space never get shown outside New York and L.A. anyway. So what makes Wim Wenders' "Land of Plenty" special? Well, it's apparently getting no U.S. distribution at all, beyond a one-week engagement at the IFC Center in New York's Greenwich Village. (It's listed as an IFC Films release, and God love the company for that -- but it also isn't listed anywhere on the IFC Web site.) ... "Land of Plenty" was shot on digital video, of course, but has been spectacularly blown up to wide-screen film and is as visually memorable as any of Wenders'
classics. Yet unless you live in Manhattan -- and feel like going to the movies some night next week -- you'll never get to see it.

Is this, to use the most overused word in our language, "ironic"? No. What it is instead is a sad commentary on the overarching stupidity and cowardice of virtually everybody and everything. Apparently the buzz coming out of the Venice Film Festival was that "Land of Plenty" was some kind of shrill anti-American screed -- although I can't find any evidence that anybody who actually saw it said that -- and the film was rendered pretty much untouchable.

Wenders himself has been accused of talking out of both sides of his mouth. At a Venice press conference he insisted that "'Land of Plenty' is not in any way an anti-American film," but later told an Italian newspaper, "Well, what do you want? Bush has convinced everyone that those who don't agree with him are anti-American."

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If we lived in a world where it was possible to skip the dumbass Manichaean politics and talk about art as if it potentially expressed nuance and subtlety, I would tell you that "Land of Plenty" is a haunting film about loss, fear, faith and loneliness, with America as its highly symbolic frame.

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