Man on Wire is perhaps the most disgustingly overrated film of the past decade; that its undeserved Oscar was awarded on the same night the repugnant Slumdog Millionaire walked away with eight statues is apropos enough. Perhaps the widespread acceptance of this film is the real “artistic crime of the century”. We have nothing but a pandering hagiography founded on the wrongheaded thesis that tightrope walking in public places somehow translates to High Art, and breaking numerous laws while endangering the lives of countless innocent people is okay so long as nobody gets hurt in the process.

Phillipe Petit, a skilled tightrope walker, prides himself on impromptu demonstrations of his limited, yet admittedly formidable skills. The caveat is that he feels compelled to do it in highly populated areas, at considerable height, without any prior announcement. Does this make him a de facto artist, or just a ballsy stuntman with a sociopathic disdain for rules and regulations? If a public performance better suited for patrons of Barnum and Bailey can be considered an artistic achievement, then so can the Wild West Stunt Show at Six Flags.

But director James Marsh, who helmed the far superior and tragically underseen Wisconsin Death Trip, unwisely goes ahead with this wild assumption and heaps tons of fawning praise over Petit via endless talking heads and annoying interjections from the man himself.  In a roundabout fashion, the tale of “Le Coup“, an illogical and illegal tightrope walk between the unopened Twin Towers, is recounted by Petit and his former accomplices.  We see re-enactments of Petit and crew setting up their equipment, complete with Goodwill costumes and peeling adhesive sideburns. “When I first saw [architectural sketches of] the Towers, I knew I had to do it,” he proclaims. It makes perfect sense in that the scale of the buildings somehow matched the scale of his boundless ego.

Cutting between the poorly mounted re-enactments and rose-colored recollections of Petit’s formative years, the flash-forward structure not only kills tension but also unnecessarily convolutes the timeline. Here it is used to synthesize suspense, and it fails with great aplomb. Perhaps Marsh wasn’t sure we would sustain interest through half an hour of home movies and Petit’s former conquests fawning over the man, intercut with his own undoubtedly exaggerated stories. A balanced approach, considering all possible viewpoints, is impossible because no one in the film has any ill to say about him whatsoever. This lighthearted, fluffy treatment of a multifaceted and, let’s face it, downright sinister subject becomes grating in a hurry. Our All Honky Caper, Le Coup, taking place in 1974, is the only interesting thing going on, and it’s interesting for all the wrong reasons.

All the factual aspects, involving fake IDs, stolen blueprints, and a nighttime ascent to the top story of the guarded WTC complex are believable enough. Since we know that Petit and company pull off this ludicrous crime, there’s no suspense whatsoever, but what complications arise are recounted by Petit himself with a clarity that belies the temporal distance from the events in question. See, it’s not enough that the Port Authority fuzz came snooping around the 104th floor and the crew had to hide. According to Petit, they had to throw a tarp over themselves and stay motionless. And they happened to be on a tiny plank which happened to be over an elevator shaft! And the cop just happened to light his cigarette and stand right next to the shrouded team! And they stayed unmoving for five hours after that!!

If the man weren’t so damned charismatic, it would have been impossible to convince all his hapless friends to support him on his mission of pure, unadulterated onanism. That fact in itself is remarkable, and again, undoubtedly sinister in nature. There must be a good reason he doesn’t share the room with his former accomplices: he can’t share credit at all. As the title of the film suggests, the Man on Wire is the be-all-end-all of this subject. He walked his wire alone, he basked in temporary infamy, and would have faded into well-deserved obscurity were it not for this documentary. Petit milks his time in the limelight for all it’s worth; his self-aggrandizing nature is excruciating and his dismissal of not only his assistants but also the consequences of his reckless behavior becomes increasingly disturbing. Man on Wire should have been a short subject.

While we may be groping in the dark for some sort of Herzogian synthesis between fact and fiction, it’s almost a certainty that Petit’s accounts are distorted, willingly or not. That some of these are re-enacted adds to the surrealism. It’s hard not to laugh when Petit claims to strip off his clothes to feel around for a strand of fishing line attached to an arrow shot from Building 1 (which turns out to be dangling on the edge of a yawning chasm, natch); even funnier when it’s re-enacted in a dramatic fashion. It didn’t occur to him to bring a flashlight? No, of course not, because history has been conveniently altered to portray Petit as a dashing man of mystery willing to take whatever risks were necessary to pull off his ego-stroking publicity stunt.

The fact that this clown didn’t die during his quarter-mile-high walk isn’t reason enough to care about his story. The fact that he didn’t drop anything from that ludicrous height isn’t some kind of miracle. His showboating isn’t some kind of artwork in the same sense that a painting or a film is a work of art. Perhaps the individual pictures, the only existing record of his suicidal tightrope walk, could be artistic. Perhaps the ridiculous caper is artistic, in the same way that a well-executed bank robbery is artistic; likewise the only rewards were those reaped for personal gain. Celebrity is a fickle thing, all right, and as an exploration of the nature of fame and the wages of infamy, Man on Wire succeeds in fits and starts. In all honesty it can only be considered a success if viewed as a very dark character study, much like Barbet Schroeder’s documentary account of General Idi Amin Dada. Only with less violence and far more ego-stroking insanity.

To bolster Marsh’s public-spectacle-as-art thesis, we are subjected to glowing accounts of the day of Le Coup, from astounded bystanders who claimed to “see a man walking on air”. From the vantage point of the sidewalk below, Petit must have appeared as nothing more than a moving dot. From the point of view of the policemen waiting to arrest the fool, he must have been nothing more than an amusing nuisance, like a roof-jumper with a bit more panache. His arrest was inevitable, his immediate release was unreasonable and misguided. He should have been sent directly to an asylum for psychiatric help.

Could he look more smug in that picture? From his own account, the policemen gave him a round of applause upon his entry into the precinct building, and after his improbably faithful accomplices posted bail for his release, he allegedly left them all waiting in the lobby while he boned some fawning groupie. This dubiously factual event is re-enacted in a fashion similar to Alex DeLarge’s hyper-speed threesome in A Clockwork Orange, and is about as hilarious. If we were to bring up the subject of what would have happened if Petit fell a quarter mile to the busy streets below, instead of basking in post-arrest sexual relations, the proceedings would be a lot less warm and fuzzy, but the levity would be a refreshing counterpoint to the preceding 85-minute blowjob.

What about the poor Port Authority guards who were probably fired over the incident? What about Petit’s accomplices who share their recollections with much less enthusiasm than their glory-mongering compatriot? What about, God forbid, a single dissenting viewpoint? Maybe someone with a more level-headed view of things? Alas, what we are left with is a very strange glorification of reckless endangerment, an endorsement of sociopathic risk-taking, a documentary with more fabrications than most fictional films. Herzog’s nihilistic Encounters at the End of the World predictably lost out in the Oscar race to this crowdpleasing ode to artistic masturbation, and so it goes: a comforting illusion will always triumph over cold, stark reality.

Inception, the latest attempt to make Leonardo DiCaprio a weighty actor, fails in this impossible quest. All the ingredients of Inception are spot-on; great acting, a beguiling premise, a relentless film-noir atmosphere, and clean special effects. But having all the right notes does not necessarily make for a good film. I would hazard that Inception is a victim of its own poor editing, which in the end is far and away the most important aspect of filmmaking. Inception spends too much time dangling the premise before our noses while falling far short of a film’s most important task—creating sympathy and empathy for its characters.

DiCaprio plays Dominic the Extractor, who specializes in stealing ideas of dreams and planting ideas into people’s heads. His fellow cast members are a who’s who in A-list actors who are given frustratingly bland characters: Ken Wantabe giving us the inscrutable Asian routine once again, Joseph Gordon-Levitt still looking like a teenager, Michael Caine’s obligatory wizened old man shtick, Marion Cotillard as the wounded dream-wife always looking for a excuse to stab someone, and a surprisingly restrained (and therefore tolerable) Ellen Page playing a newly hired dream architect who should have been a major character in the story, but barely shows up in the film. Even the great Cillian Murphy (who I still refer to as “My Man Scarecrow”) is handed the most cliché of conflicts, the inability to satisfy his domineering father. He looks as bored as Jeff Bridges did in Iron Man. In essence, Inception boasts a very good looking, talented cast, but the characters inspire nothing but apathy and a sinking feeling of been there-done that.

The plot piles on top of itself like a triple-decker sandwich that’s either about to collapse or give you lockjaw. Inception has none of the Mobius strip charm of Momento or Lost Highway. There are dreams inside of dreams inside of dreams, but all these dives in the human subconscious begin to resemble each other like suburban strip malls. Look, there’s an auto-cypher of a happy family, little children laughing and running into Dominic’s arms, on the beach, naturally. And there’s the stop-motion Matrix style physics to make you feel disoriented. One of the great lines of the movie refers to the fact that you never think a dream is strange until you wake up, yet this intriguing truth is never explored. I was wondering about that until I realized that almost none of these dreams are actually strange.

The crux of Inception’s failure is, ironically enough, the blandness of its imagination. You would think that a technology such as dream manipulation would be an earth-shattering, game changing device, like the automobile or sliced bread. But alas, this most wondrous of inventions is merely at the service at some mundane corporate espionage plot device, some attempt to corner the energy market. Ho hum. And the poverty of the dreamscapes is surprising as well. The dreams we enter are anonymous cities populated by buildings of Dominic and his wife Mallorie’s nostalgia, grey streets that resemble some dreary downtown of a Midwestern city. The only scene that held any interest for me was the opium den of dreams run by chemist Yusuf (a jovially charming Dileep Rao), hinting that all this dream manipulation is becoming this generation’s crack cocaine. Now that’s a premise that could suspend my disbelief. An overbearing score by by Hans Zimmer only helps muddle the scenes, desperately trying to extract drama when there is none.

You’d figure with the unlimited potential of the human imagination, you’d have a sex orgy on a space station or a dinosaur rodeo, but I suppose married life means being shackled to a boring imagination. In short, this film is a more smartly dressed, far less obnoxious version of the migraine-inducing Strange Days. As much as I tried to suspend my disbelief, my dreams weren’t having it. Inception is not a terrible film—it’s too well acted and yes, too well directed (particularly in the case of the Taming of the Page); rather, I would describe Inception as disappointing, after the fearless 70s-style moral ambiguity and rich characterization of Nolan’s Batman films. Perhaps Inception deserves another look on my part, but I simply don’t give a hoot about Dominic and his tortured psyche. It’s nothing a halfway competent psychiatrist couldn’t sort out.

**SPOILER WARNING**

Johannesburg has been besieged by a giant hovering metaphor, which deposits a vast population of ‘aliens’ in a shantytown ruled by African gangsters. It’s up to an annoying pencil pusher with a silly accent to exterminate them for a fascist mega-corporation. District 9 wins a point for its clever use of CGI, creating the illusion of a much grander scope than its paltry budget would allow. Also, the cinematography vastly diminishes the image quality, allowing for less detail intensive modeling. The first act is a very badly done fake documentary, appearing to be something produced for South African Community Television; here, the crappy image works to the advantage of the film, provided it is viewed as a strange parody of apartheid, just as Alien Nation satirized mass Mexican immigration.

Rookie director Neill Blumkamp is too clever by half; the interviewed “alien experts” often must explain things that would be self-evident in their own universe, and there are several lame attempts at foreshadowing the terrible fate of its protagonist. Intriguing details, such as the prawn junkies who become strung out on canned cat food, are brought up and then never pay off; it’s all smoke and mirrors. The first 30 minutes are purely expository, setting up the human task force, led by a Jesse Ventura clone, who will ultimately become the one-dimensional source of villainy. The rest is bullshit that comes across like an imitation of the Media Breaks in Starship Troopers and the magnificent Robocop, both infinitely better offerings for the science fiction fan.

While the attempts at hard sci-fi are sometimes compelling, it doesn’t take very long until one realizes the trickery is there to distract us from the inherent lack of a plot. Nothing of interest happens until Wikus van der Merwe, the pencil pusher, encounters a plot device that inexplicably turns him into an alien. Somehow, this mysterious alien race is able to make fuel for their ship that turns humans into one of their own upon contact. By this logic, if a prawn were to come into contact with, say, gasoline, he would slowly but surely turn into a human. Maybe District 10 will deal with this subject. Lord knows District 9 has made a trainload of cash. Part of me’s happy for Peter Jackson and his glorious Wingnut Films, but another part’s mystified as to why everyone likes this increasingly ridiculous, onanistic CGI showcase. Even the great Walter Chaw was seduced by the skillful special effects, wrote a superlative review, and will doubtless place this halfhearted effort on his Top 10 list. To be fair, it’s been an underwhelming year at the movies, but raising District 9 to classic status is a premature action at best. Especially in light of just how bad the movie becomes after a certain point.

The third act undoes all the promise of the plotless first act, ditches the faux-doc format and turns into a braindead, formulaic buddy action flick, with the only bits of originality being Wikus’ utter heartlessness and cowardice in the face of the thinly developed Bad Guys. But he comes back to use his wicked new prawn tentacle to wreak havoc, in an unexplained, unearned shift of character. Even more insulting is the simplistic conflict, using an all-purpose evil conglomerate to represent all of humanity, which leaves the oppressed “prawns” as the only sympathetic characters by default. But, since the aliens are unable to use their own weaponry, Wikus is inexplicably left to free the prawns from the icy grasp of apartheid. And he does so during an action sequence that features  a robotic deus ex machina giving Wikus incredible powers, which cause the baddies to explode juicily while they empty machine guns into his metal carapace with no visible effect. And the damn thing is boring. As William Hurt once said, “How do you fuck that up!?”

Not like the painfully uncomplicated carnage would faze the Halo fans in the audience who are most assuredly jacked up on Mountain Dew. Cool alien gun make bad humans go BOOM! Whee!!!!

There could be so much more to this universe. How come the humans didn’t turn the floating ship into a military outpost or a tourist attraction? How come the world’s brightest minds were unable to reverse-engineer the aliens’ advanced weaponry? How come Wikus is able to maneuver an alien battle-mech, with digitized readouts all in Prawnese, after only 70 odd hours as a humalien? How come, for a movie that tries so damn hard to be against racism, the only black characters are evil drug lords, voodoo cultists, or bureaucratic puppets who end up in prison? How come, for a movie with such ambitious scope, does 75% of the action take place in a generic shantytown set? How come this Blumkamp fellow, whose only prior experience was directing video game cut scenes, gets to be called a “visionary” while much more capable directors continue to slave away unnoticed in non-genre fields?

District 9 is a shoo-in for Overhyped Film of the Year. Its novelty wears out before the second act is even through, and by the time the dickish “hero” begins his cathartic rampage, you’ll either be offended or asleep. It is just another paean to the power of the white man, dressed up with a much more elaborate disguise than usual. In the end, the sci-fi is so soft you could spread it on a Ritz cracker to wash down with some White Zinfandel.