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

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 way the end-credits appear in both traffic and EB (maybe in his other films too but i either haven't seen them or wasnt paying as much attention) - while the movie is still in process, so you don't have this BLACK SCREEN appear and wrap things up and force you into making some kind of judgement/summation. so we get a kind of a profundity-of-the-everyday quality - the 'final judgement' already happened without us noticing (actually, both end scenes i'm talking about here are very much ABOUT the mundane turned profound - benecio attending the little league game which becomes this beautiful cosmic event with the help of eno and everthing being saturated in mars red and erin's workroom squabble which resolves itself into 2 million dollars)

sure, some films of his are great, some are okay - and some are crap.
but i'd like to hear anyone who's seen schizopolis bad mouth soderbergh. go on, you know you can't.

George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh don't have much trouble getting the media's attention. The swooning and curiosity that's surrounded their quasi-fictional political show for HBO, "K Street," never fails to mention Clooney's charm, wit and sparkling grin, and to lavish praise on Soderbergh, glossing over self-indulgent flops "Solaris" and "Full Frontal," and ignoring his obvious embrace of his own celebrity despite humble, "Gosh I just hate this stuff" interviews to the contrary. A few signature leading-man looks from Clooney and a little self-deprecation from Soderbergh and these two are sophisticated, talented, swashbuckling guys just crazy enough to try something new, blurring the line between politics and Hollywood (what line?) and breaking down the barriers between reality and fiction (what barriers?).

http://www.salon.com/ent/tv/review/2003/09/15/k_street/index_np.html

On the other hand, Albert Finney's accent. Oy.

The first settlement was 500 mil, but that was supposed to be the first of many, in the film...

I just saw EB again last night, and the scene where Aaron Eckhart and Julia Roberts break up is so great. Her speech is so realistic, her delivery. Everything with Finney is hilarious (and I only noticed his accent once). There are some scenes that are overplayed--the brittle female lawyer bitch is too much. But the townspeople are portrayed with so much care that I'm totally baffled by the reaction here. Should movies never deal with small-town victims of corporations? These people are shown to be skeptical and smart. The scene with no sound, with the dad throwing rocks at the company at night--scenes like that put this movie WAY out of the realm of TV movie.

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.