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.

Jacopetti and Prosperi’s masterwork, Africa Addio, is a dizzying, mind-blowing work of violently contrasting emotional extremes. A sprawling epic three years in the making, the film goes from detached social commentary to in-your-face battlefield journalism as the ‘Dark Continent’, in the words of the nihilistic voiceover, disintegrates into complete anarchy as the British take their leave. As a follow up to their amusing yet hollow Mondo Cane films, Africa Addio expands the scope tremendously; instead of loosely connected “shocking” vignettes, we’re dealing with the societal breakdown of an entire continent.

At first, the directors aren’t really sure what they’re filming. Early passages depicting the British exit ceremonies have a very stiff awkwardness to them, as does the strange tangent involving the formation of the new “Black Bourgeoisie”. A sequence in a courtroom is chilling, less for the spoken accounts of murders of Whites by the hands of natives, more for the tacit message that “Caucasians equal order”. There’s a condescending, darkly sarcastic scene in a formerly White-owned manor, which has been newly converted to a disorderly hovel for several native families. You can practically hear the cameraman stifling his laughter.

And then the massacres begin.

At first, Jacopetti and Prosperi choose to emphasize the plight of the abundant African wildlife, once protected by White policies, now free game in their national parks which have turned into open hunting grounds. Poachers numbering in the thousands conduct their own personal genocides in self-contained cells. Presumably pretending to be hunting enthusiasts, the directors are invited to come along on one of these killing sprees. Animal lovers beware: these poaching sequences are as drawn-out as they are stomach churning. You’ll see practically every form of animal roaming the savanna getting obliterated by mankind’s latest technology, butchered to create trinkets for tourists, or contribute to the thriving black market for ivory and animal pelts.

Images such as a spear-riddled elephant defiantly pulling a shaft out of its back with its trunk, then making a final, suicidal charge at his adversaries, are sickening, mesmirizing, and unique. With the cost-saving Techniscope process, the many horrifying sequences in Africa Addio have a grandeur about them yet retain a gritty immediacy. It’s easy to see why the directors were accused of having staged some scenes; the film almost looks too good.

When they’re on the danger of achieving shock overload, the editors have the good taste to throw in something quirky or otherwise surreal. Witness the initially heartbreaking moment that begins with a zebra calf discovering his mother’s corpse, then suddenly turns into grand absurdity when the calf is affixed to a helicopter harness, then flown hundreds of miles to sanctuary. Or how about the Dadaesque crocodile rescue operation that involves a lot of colored balloons and a whole lot of heavy sedatives?

It is in these lighthearted, humanist moments that Africa Addio almost has the touch of greatness. Lest you be lulled into false security, those damn Africans can’t seem to go five minutes without some wacko pulling off a successful coup d’état, then initiating some bloody racial cleansing. At first it’s just the usual Rwandan Hutu/Tutsi massacres; isolated radical groups conducting small-fry genocide with dull machetes. The cool detachment of the African police force reflects everything about the “mundane” quality of these horrific mass murders. How can anyone coolly stand there, posing for the cameras with a French assault rifle, while a pile of 50-60 severed hands rests no more than three feet away? The most horrifying image in this sequence isn’t all the blood and guts, it’s the supremely jaded looks that the perpetrators give to the camera.

At a certain point in Africa Addio, one is confronted with the notion that the film would have been drastically different were it not made by Whites, who were pushing an obvious pro-European slant. Certainly the very presence of Jacopetti and Prosperi was enough to draw unneeded suspicion, yet without this suicidal risk-taking, the film would be devoid of its most powerful scenes.

One such tangent involves the filmmakers’ attempts to enter the recently overthrown island territory of Unguja, the capitol of  Zanzibar, to cover the reported genocide of its Arab population. As they attempt enter the territory, with a crew of German journalists in another single-engine Cessna, they can only watch as their companions, who make the mistake of landing on an occupied airstrip, are taken away by an angry mob, while the mob sets fire to their plane. Nothing says “you are not welcome” quite like the image of a burning aircraft on a desolate dirt road. Undaunted, they try again the next day in a helicopter, carrying a red flag “to confuse the savages”. Somehow, the gambit works and they’re directed into the interior, where ethnic cleansing is currently taking place. There is no way this sequence could have been faked.

There is so much actual death in Africa Addio that the film has a kind of numbing effect on the viewer. By the time we hit the mean streets with a crew of hardened European mercenaries, sent to wipe out violent rebel forces, the combat footage seems anticlimactic. The eradication of this one, self-contained radical group is meant to work as catharsis for the pent-up White Guilt simmering under the surface, yet the meaningless violence seems to reflect more poorly on the mercs than it does the natives. Depicted as bored, directionless men of war, destined for an inglorious end on one foreign battlefield or another, there is no sympathy evoked for these tragic souls. In fact, there is no sympathy for anyone on any side, and in the film’s original form, there were even sarcastic asides such as an inexplicable sequence depicting black men watching a white woman perform in a cabaret. Thankfully the “Director’s Cut”, the most widely available on DVD, excises most of the tasteless parts in favor of a rounded, if not entirely truthful worldview.

One strange appendix, after the gut-wrenching violence, is a fantastical trip to Cape Town replete with psychedelic editing and a whole lot of half-naked white women gyrating on trampolines. Another follows the production of the British propaganda piece Zulu and a rather strange musical break between staged tribal dance scenes. The fusion of black and white culture is interesting if not wholly fleshed out. These are just weird vignettes in the Mondo Cane style; since the film was originally meant to be Mondo Cane 3, the original vision of the product must have involved a lot more of these pointless yet memorable images.

So Africa Addio isn’t entirely horrific, nor is it entirely humorous, humanistic, or insightful. What it is is total sensory overload in a classical journalistic style, and I’d imagine any attempts at psychedelic enjoyment would result in some very unpleasant trips. The images are so powerful that Jacopetti and Prosperi could never shake the stigma of having staged some of them for the camera. In fact, Ruggero Deodato’s legendary Cannibal Holocaust seems to have been made as a direct response to Africa Addio. Its two “heroes” are clearly meant to be the two Italian Mondo kings; in the film they stage scenes of tribal violence in order to capture brilliant footage for their Mondo doc. However, they go a bit too far and end up on the receiving end of the natives’ wrath. They also indulge in a bit of the old in-out-in-out with a native lady, and commit outright homicides, so perhaps Holocaust exaggerates a little.

Whether you love it or hate it, or can’t even watch enough of it to form an opinion, Africa Addio is an indispensable addition to the documentary genre. Its fearlessness is to be admired even if its sketchy morality is to be avoided at all costs. It’s a work of intense passion that yields equally fruitful rewards for a brave viewer. You can often learn more from a misguided work than a masterpiece, and this film is so masterfully misguided that it’s all but impossible not to have a strong reaction to its flood of imagery.