Is the work of Steven Soderbergh the most overrated thing ever?

(i enjoyed it mainly bcz i discovered that my friend nic totally looks like julia roberts as she in in this movie, and i never noticed in real life: so basically for me it wz all abt how my friend nic worked her butt off in skanky too-tight clothes to win all these foax in a small US town lots of deserved money for being poisoned by THE MAN)

(probbly the best bit is, if i told nic she looks like JR in EB, she wd doubtless punch me in the mouth!!)

(the orig Traffik is great)

(and wasn't EB, well, a lie [ie company not found liable but settled and lawyers got all the money anyway or some such thing]?)

What Ilike about him is his workman like attitude to film-making.

haha in fargo it says "based on a true story" and ppl said "is it?" and they said "no" and ppl said "you can't do that!!" and they said "why not? it's fiction ie not true so that includes the phrase 'based on a true story'"

Pitch Black was great too. I hadn't noticed the connexion befor but that and Kafka have a lot in common. King Of The Hill is grebt.

I suspect Traffic will be unwatchable in a few decades. It's like Stanley Kramer + Alan Pakula.

He ain't no Terry Gilliam though.

Didn't have the heart to go see _Solaris_, myself.

Plus, the oldest of 'his last four movies' dates all the way back... to 2000.

I've never found much use for the term "hack," as it tends to caricature or obscure the specifics of the creative process. How do we know that Soderbergh doesn't work closely with his screenwriters? That he doesn't feel strongly about the material?

I do agree that the "one for them, one for me" pattern in his filmography is worrisome. I wonder if his films have suffered for his artifical dichotomy between compromise and experiment--"wonder" because I haven't seen the last two.

I *did*. I was a movie critic back then, and I thought it was a hoax. Honestly, the idea that something quite that fake could be sent to Cannes, let alone be the talk of the place, could only be explained by it being a pratical joke. Did anybody listen? Am I still a movie critic? (Is Bush about to bomb Iraq for humanitarian reasons?)

Which, according to the interview he and Clooney did on the Charlie Rose show, is precisely how they ended up remaking Solaris. To his credit Soderbergh said that he could bring something new to the story, but that it wasn't his project from the get go.

it's called THE LIMEY!! (= it isn't even remotely concerned with actual real british people you've met!)

also it's unfinished and oddly-paced in a way quite faithful to the films it's emulating (60s Point Blank-style revenge pictures, not film noir). What's great about soderbergh's genre work is also what i guess can be frustrating about it - its aesthetics are more meticulously "studied" than usual (and it's here where his film-geekiness really kicks in, not in the arty pictures nobody sees), which means you wind up getting his homage to what's good AND bad about the source material

i REALLY didn't get the fuss the "how dare you remake this venerable classic" contingent raised when Ocean's 11 came out - the original is exactly as shallow and silly as the remake is.

bed for me i think

Solaris was a good waste of 2 hours but once again not something I'm gonna add to the stacks anytime soon.

I have apparently not seen any of his really good stuff. Maybe someday I will fix this.

As a cinematographer (under the nom de cam "Peter Andrews"), however, he is particularly good - those Mexico scenes in Traffic.

The Alan J. Pakula reference is OTM on at least one point - he stole the closing credits for Traffic from All the President's Men.

The toothache was there to show the extent of her agoraphobia imo

And the source of it is clearly tooth grinding, hence the mouthguard

But I appreciated that the movie let me make that connection myself rather than the dentist being like “we need to talk about your nervous tooth grinding. And the sooner you open up to someone about the abuse you suffered in summer camp when you were 8 the better. I know your mom was never there for you, but you can’t let that affect your dental health”

I got all that with the first close up shot of the mouthguard alone! And then they still gave her a toothache/infection, and still had her get the teledoc visit with the dentist, and still had her walking around holding her cheek in pain for the rest of the movie, lol. In fact, by my estimate at least 20% of the movie was closeups of her mouthguard or her complaining about her tooth.

In all seriousness, I wish there was even less of that information given out, as if covid wasn't enough of a reason to be a shut-in. They just piled on the stuff, but the movie didn't need any of that. And come on, she had excellent dental health, she emphasized that to her dentist. And besides, another 15% of the movie was her brushing her teeth.

So do you think they sent the Euro hitman to kill Andy Daly and his family, since she sent the file to him? Something arrogant Euro guy missed, incidentally. I would def. watch a full-comedy sequel of Andy Daly being chased around by hitmen.

some observations on some of the subtle (or not so subtle) signifiers that seem to be sprinkled throughout the film here:

I knew Kimi was going to be a Bisexual Woman With Mental Health Issues movie but I wasn't expecting it to be Has An Autism Keychain level. pic.twitter.com/fGmvFerTgk

— chris person (@Papapishu) February 13, 2022

Even as more-or-less of a Soderbergh stan i thought this looked eminently skippable, but are you saying Andy Daly gets chased by hitmen in this?? Bc that would rocket it to the top of my watchlist.

No, unless it happens off screen in a different movie.

Movie is definitely worth seeing, script is just kind of half-assed, in my opinion.

Btw, I did like how it's set up, and we're primed to expect, that Kimi is evil and spying on Angela/everyone, but in the end, the only eavesdropping it did was at the behest of its (soon to be murdered) user, and in fact at the film's climax, Kimi even comes to the rescue. The corporation is evil, but the product is useful! The biggest invasion of privacy demonstrated in the film comes via her phone.

God, I’ve never seen an HR director as vividly portrayed as Rita Wilson does in that one scene.

Also, JiC’s point behind the spoiler text is a good one.

watching logan lucky for the first time. utterly enjoyable

I think Logan Lucky was to me the movie Glass Onion is to a lot of others.

the casting is from heaven, peaking with dwight yoakam as the warden

the standoff with the prisoners where they’re bargaining over game of thrones books that don’t exist yet… cinema

That scene is Priceless.

Soderbergh had to do several Oceans movies to refine his heist movie skills in order to make Logan Lucky

I think Logan Lucky was to me the movie Glass Onion is to a lot of others.

same

Just re-watched Side Effects on HBO Max. Trashy pulp Soderbergh is the best Soderbergh.

See also the various Three Imaginary Boys vs. Boys Don't Cry polls.

stamp is bad in the limey (for londoners) for the same reason tom wilkinson is a problem -- despite an otherwise v funny performance -- in michael clayton for uk listeners, which is that the underlying accent (not-cockney for stamp, not-US for wilkinson) pokes noticeably thru

stamp (born stepney to a tugboat stoker! moved to plaistow and went to school there) learnt his trade a london drama school before kitchen sink made it ok (indeed fashionably preferable) for young actors to have any kind of regional accent, and had the cockney totally knocked out of him, so it comes back out of him in his 60s as if voice-coached, and you can hear the posh* at the ends of his lines**

*even tho it's learned posh!
**the ends of the lines is where you listen to check if an english actor is actually good at an american accent, they generally do the starts fine

actually it's not quite the same problem: wilkinson is very animated and basically funny in michael clayton, fake accent notwithstanding; stamp is merely robotic in the limey, the flatness is presumably a performance decision? but it's a bad one

I can't address your point about his accent, but I found Stamp's flatness of affect rather funny, especially when Wilson allowed himself to feel something for the Americans (e.g. coaxing Eduardo to order a cocktail at Valentine's party). He also uses his body in character well.

i didn't mean flatness of affect so much as me feeling that the character was actually just a cardboard cut-out on a pole but maybe that's what *you* mean by "uses his body in character" :)

one helluva cardboard ass when he gets up after those goons rough house him

New limited series, Full Circle, is up on HBO now. Knew it was coming but had no idea it was here, as if people needed an HBO break after Succession and The Idol.

He's got another show coming soon to his website:

https://extension765.com/blogs/soderblog/command-z

Wow, had no idea!

was previously semi-announced as The Pendulum Project and was being shopped to streamers in January — guessing he ended up with no good offers and figured coattailing off whatever press he can get for Full Circle was the best chance of getting seen

was startled by either Louis CK or a guy who looks a lot like him in Command Z trailer. I'll be pretty bummed if it turns out to be him.

Assuming you mean the guy at 1:30, there's a photo of the same guy a few seconds earlier, and it's clearly not LCK.

Watched the first episode of Full Circle tonight; it's OK. It's a riff on High & Low, for those who don't know.

Definitely not watching that other thing. Haaaaate Michael Cera.

Watched all of Full Circle, it was ok. But am I an idiot or did the last shot invalidate any bit of sense that the plot had...if the whole idea was that this Guyanese investment property made money that kickstarted Dennis Quaid's hot sauce empire, how does that happen if it never got built? Whatever, man..

xps I haven't seen it in a while, but The Limey is probably my favorite Soderbergh film, and I've always liked Stamp in it (and everyone else). I haven't kept up with Soderbergh's work, but aside from The Limey, I don't recall ever revisiting his past work - the ones I'd probably want to see again are Sex, Lies, and Videotape, King of the Hill, Che (maybe my favorite del Toro performance) and The Informant! (maybe my favorite Matt Damon performance). And I still haven't seen The Underneath - I've heard it's supposed to be excellent.

xp I watched it a couple months ago... I think the whole Guyanese investment was more of a macguffin, it wasn't that it kickstarted his career, just that it was the most prominent skeleton in the family's closet. the mic drop of that as the final scene was just that all this trouble happened for essentially nothing. that underlining the racial commentary of the whole show

That makes sense thematically, although there was even that interview scene where Quaid is asked how he got his business going, and he references that they had money from investments that paid off (although his whole deal is being clueless anyway). Maybe the family had enough money to bribe a bunch of shady people in Guyana, lose the money, and still start a huge business but it wasn't really portrayed that way.