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

syphilis nose way harder on my stomach than the c section

oh should i still be watching this? i kind of forgot about it!

are you a fan of syphilis nose

who isn't?

That the "comedy" Typhoid Mary subplot is the light relief in this series says a lot.

haven't seen traffic in like a decade, willing to believe it will suck on re-screening, but i always thought the closing eno-soundtracked scene was p cool

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNgvVVjgK68

Watch his "touched" version of 2001: A Space Odyssey:

http://extension765.com/sdr/23-the-return-of-w-de-rijk

anyone hear The Limey's commentary track?? sounds crazy.

http://www.avclub.com/article/the-new-cult-canon-ithe-limeyi-filmmaker-commentar-23702

it's been a long time since i heard it but i remember enjoying it and cringing in equal measure. it's like the polar opposite of the chummy, rambling john carpenter / kurt russell commentary tracks.

yes, it was A+.

yea I have, dobbs is a p crabby dude but its mostly good natured kvetching iirc

that's one of the best commentary tracks! probably the most illuminating one i've heard in terms of how a film is a kind of negotiation between competing authorships.... the robocop and starship troopers commentary tracks w/ verhoeven and neumeier are also englightening that way, though in those cases the principals seem less aware of what they're revealing.

i was just thinking yesterday of how 90% of commentary tracks are a waste of... time and space, i guess.

was listening to the commentary on the monte hellman double feature (shooting/ride in the whirlwind) and while there are a quite a few interesting anecdotes, almost none of them relate directly to what you're seeing onscreen. in that sense you have to appreciate it as two separate streams of information. on the video level, you're kind of re-experiencing the film, while on the audio level, you're hearing a bunch of people gab about the movie -- but the two seldom interact meaningfully.

the hal hartley/richard pena(?) commentary on godard's "hail mary" is another missed opportunity IMO. hartley is (well, /was/) one of the smartest Godard acolytes, who has a great fondess for JLG's 1980s work, so it should have been a gas. but it's clear that no preparation was done, no remarks were planned, so it really is just like eavesdropping on a not entirely enlightening conversation. it does help that pena (i think it's h im) has nothing of interest to say at all.

i should add that bill krohn and blake lucas, who "interview" hellman for the two commentary tracks i mentioned, have some interesting things to say but probably 70% of it is just bloviating and them floating dubious theories about the films' relationships to the western genre, most of which hellman tellingly just avoids responding to.

to bring this back to soderbergh, his commentary w/ john boorman on the point black dvd/blu-ray is great. soderbergh in general is kind of the master of commentary tracks, i'd say it should actually count as a key part of his body of work.

point BLANK

Yeah, the point blank track really is great

i wish more filmmakers were as good at /talking/ as soderbergh.

actually, hal hartley is a great talker, too, which is one reason his "hail mary" commentary was such a disappointment.

I'mm not a fan of them either – I only listen to them if I'm watching a movie a second or third time – but a top fiver for me is, of all things, Jack Nicholson's for The Passenger. Meticulous, consistently interesting, no trace of the Jack persona; the guy knows about composition, film history, etc.

yup, which makes it all the more regrettable that nicholson is nowhere to be found on the criterion of those hellman films, which he starred in and produced (and he wrote one of them!).

feel like soderbee is kinda underrated rn if anything

he's thanked in the liner notes btw, which probably means he helped out somehow--maybe he gave them a phone number or two--but bowed out of actively participating. which is a shame.

who know who is overrated? Gus Van Sant. I have no clue how a man so talentless at directing fumbled his way into a highly successful career.

i don't think he's talentless, but i think his best moves are stolen from other directors and that his choice of subject matter is positively vampirish.

but nobody really cares about gus van sant anymore, right?

boy the King of the Hill Blu-ray is gorgeous.

it's a really good movie! i love the ending, in particular.

did you watch the supplement where soderbergh talks about how terrible he thinks "the underneath" is?

I watched The Underneath and remembered how non-descript it is, a couple of acerbic exchanges and framings of actors around interior design aside. Peter Gallagher is so miscast.

Also: it's awkward! The hopscotching through time and space often breaks rhythms.

yeah, it looks really nice, though.

i remember good things about alison elliott's performance in that film but i don't know if that's an accurate memory.

Without his saying so it's totally a crisis movie: the kind of approach he'd abandon lest he turn hack-ish.

I can see why a studio would have endorsed the project: it's 1995, heist movies are big, the kid needs a hit. But the thing is humorless and faceless.

I missed this last winter: he's still really pleased with Ocean's 12

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/10/steven-soderbergh-oceans-12_n_6289914.html

He's a smart guy and he makes good points - O12 is not incompetent filmmaking. It just feels so profoundly superfluous, even by the standards of sequels, and so much of it feels so smug (iirc). Not fun but "fun." But it's all worth it for whatever review I read that pointed out the number of scenes where a tired Brad Pitt just sort of shows up on the periphery with a coffee cup, looking like he's coming off the childcare night shift.

I like his genre exercises of the last five years or so: Contagion was the weakest of the batch, but Haywire is fucking great, Magic Mike is one of those movies I'm afraid to go back and re-watch in case it's deflated, and Side Effects was great, too.

I'm sure the day I finally cave and buy The Limey on DVD they'll announce a Criterion Blu-Ray or something. So I'm waiting.

Soderbergh otm, Ocean's 12 was full of visual flair that never gets talked about.

http://www.vulture.com/2016/05/adam-driver-joins-soderberghs-logan-lucky.html

Steven Soderbergh will produce, with an eye to direct, a movie based on the infamous Panama Papers, the largest data leak in corporate and government history.

Lawrence Grey’s Grey Matter Productions acquired the feature film rights to the forthcoming book, Secrecy World, being written by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Jake Bernstein and published by Henry Holt and Company, and is teaming with Anonymous Content (“The Revenant,” “Spotlight,” “Babel”) to develop, finance and produce the film.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPzvKH8AVf0

On the eve of the release of Logan Lucky, I thought it amazing that he has s few good movies relative to profligacy.

Not many people like his Tarkovsky remake; it’s closer to a re-imagining, transforming the original Solaris into an exegesis on remembered melancholy, the kind bereft of — too cool even for — ghosts. His instinct for cutting the crap shows itself in sharp dissolves and and crisp editing that isolate George Clooney’s astronaut in the shallowness of his recollections. I haven’t watched it again since 2002 and I’m afraid to — this guy’s work often wilts from on second thoughts.

yeah, i was surprised by how much i enjoyed his solaris - i saw it not long after it came out, having just read the book for the first time, and it struck me as a decent interpretation of lem's themes, but i've never been motivated to go back to it laregly for the same reasons as you

i think out of sight is probably my favourite of his as far as rewatchability goes, mainly for the lead performances and elmore leonard's story, which is one of my favourites of his. the aggressive colour grading hadn't aged terribly well the last time i saw it, though, and david holmes' score seemed very much of its time

I am amazed at how few people I know who have still not seen Out of Sight. The one film of his formative years I think I still haven't seen is the Underneath, which if I recall correctly also has a radical color scheme and plays with time as well.

Ouch, too many double negatives in my post. Meant how many people I know who have not seen Out of Sight.

Soderbergh is correct to call The Underneath his crisis film. You can see him lose interest in this kind of movie and narrative approach.

He seems to go into crisis mode with some consistency. While I think most of his stuff is pretty middlebrow, he's a really smart guy, and I think sometimes struggles balancing his intelligence and perhaps more radical inclinations with his similar urge to entertain. Epitomized by stuff like this:

http://extension765.com/soderblogh/18-raiders

I recently re-watched the Oceans films with my older one, and the sheer half-assed indulgence of the second one still made me mad.

Preferring Magic Mike XXl doesn’t mean we weren’t relieved that Soderberg directed the male gaze at beautiful lunks in movement the first time around

as DOP and editor, Soderbergh is still directing the gaze on XXL

(whatever gender or orientation it is - XXL is obviously very intently concerned with the female gaze, but welcomes anyone to be part of it)

i'd be really interested to know more about how xxl was made - i find it hard to imagine soderbergh being on set with actors he's worked with before and being content to just concentrate on the photography

i dunno, maybe it felt like a holiday or something for him but for someone who usually acts as his own dp when directing i wonder how difficult it was to separate the two

(xxl is rad btw)

The abs also gaze