The American Friend, for example, is beautifully made with a ripe ambiance of contemptuous decay, but one is likely to come away from it remembering bits with directors Sam Fuller and Nicholas Ray that are amusing but, retrospectively, largely besides the point. What that film had to do with Patricia Highsmith's source material is anyone's guess, as Wenders, like Godard, is often more taken with intellectualized appropriations of stories than actual stories. But where Godard, at his best, fashions an exhilarating pop-cultural shorthand, Wenders, with few exceptions, achieves a stilted, aimless self-consciousness.