Helvetica suffers when seen soon before Urbanized, because of the distractions of sets in an endless parade of selfconsciously designed offices (of typeface and graphic designers), and the ever-present risk of nerdish obsessing over micro-detail. It's most successful interviewees are Erik Spiekermann, whose spiky and arch asides mark him out from the faintly childish miasma surrounding most of the designers (Paula Scher ludicrously attempts to align a comfily boho 60s New York cultural touchstone with opposition to the war in Iraq; David Carson talks like a shambolic surfer) and the relaxed yet rigorous commentaries of Dimitri Bruni and Manuel Krebs. They are the only interviewees who actually reach the point of saying what a few others hint at or do not have the language to say: You can only say what your typeface will let you say, or wants to say.Urbanized repeats the structure of Hustwit's earlier film (talking head followed by scene-establishing or atmosphere-generating still camera shot) but draws its commentary from a much wider population, and never quite drifts into picture-postcardisms for it's cinematography. The sequence shot from the front of an over-ground train on a weekday in central Detroit, clearly and shockingly empty of people is as arresting as 'Day of the Triffids'. Each section (Bombay, Detroit, Stuttgart, Phoenix, Cape Town, Bogota) is a little too self-contained, and the final thought (city as an idea) might just as well have been a starting point (though for a very different documentary).
