Paul Schrader recounts the life and death of Bob Crane (1928-78), ephemeral star of TV's Hogan's Heroes, obsessive womanizer (exploits he would copiously document in photographs and on primitive video), and unsolved-murder victim. This is a story of the Dark Side in which the lightweightness of the main character (very few would remember Crane for his public life if not for his private one) sanctions a light tone, a palm-rubbing approach of gossipy good fun. The moral decline of the hero thus becomes fodder for spectator sport rather than for the analyst's couch: the stereotypical Sexual Revolutionist of the post-Eisenhower Era, marching under the banner of "A day without sex is a day wasted." (Greg Kinnear's blandness and blankness in the role erase even the scowl lines from the real man.) The movie probably works best as an exercise, a light workout, in remember-when nostalgia: the Pop Art graphics and cultural icons of the opening credits; the Space Age décors; the prelapsarian strip club with its live "house band" (in which Crane liked to sit in on drums, to unwind after a day's work); and above all the gradual advent of video, a sexual aid of truly revolutionary proportions. At the approach of the Grim Reaper, Schrader feels obliged to clear his throat and put on a more funereal face. The candied color of the earlier chapters drains away to an ashen gray. The hand-held camera wavers in the grasp of an arm-weary cameraman. The music by Angelo Badalamenti enters his ominous Twin Peaks mode. And the movie limps, crawls, squirms to the finish line. To say it more succinctly, Schrader feels obliged to poop his own party. Willem Dafoe, Rita Wilson, Maria Bello, Ron Leibman. (2002) — Duncan Shepherd