The reporter is then cued to turn to his or her readers and viewers and elaborate knowingly. All Wenders films, so the refrain goes, are road movies, regardless of the means of transportation. Twenty minutes can pass before a word is spoken, much less a protagonist's name, and whether it's the filmmaker himself in search of traces of his chosen mentor's Tokyo or angels longing for an anchor hooked into something more substantial than heaven, nearly every soul cast on Wenders's screen is lost. Throughout his career, intentionally or not, Wenders has used luscious cinematography and actors with faces worth far more than a thousand words to romanticize uprootedness and alienation in much the same way that Camus made existential angst fashionable as hell decades before. As a product, the train is cool because, as with a movie, what you're purchasing is intangible, a slice of time, a perfectly excusable mini-vacation from oneself, the weight of home and all those pesky responsibilities.
Identity is deported.
In the Soenke Wortmann spot, Wenders tips his hat to the new generation of German filmmakers who have made the startling discovery that entertainment sells. Then there's Guenter Netzer , a soccer player, Hardy Krueger , a travel reporter, and Peter Scholl-Latour , a journalist. David Hudson has been known to drive the Texas highways for four or five hours to catch a German film and then drive home again. He's much older now, lives in Berlin and is terribly grateful for that whole home video thing that happened a few years back.