Taste of Cherry

Director: Abbas Kiarostami
Year Released: 1997
Rating: 2.0

Here's a quick recap: a man, for some reason, wants to kill himself ... and the way he wants to die is by taking too many sleeping pills and lying in a hole. He needs an accomplice, though, to come the next day and cover him with dirt if he's dead. For the 90+ minute running time, he drives around in his truck trying to find someone to be his accomplice for a bit of money. At first, I thought: why doesn't he just use a gun? Or hang himself? But oh no, Kiarostami's trying to make some sort of universal message about the preciousness of life and it's all about how we look at things, etc. Unfortunately, he hasn't presented that message in an interesting way: he'd rather treat us to endless, empty shots of the main character driving.