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

"prosperity gospel" talk suitably skin-crawling

He always seems consciously invested in honing his own skills even when it means trying new variations that don’t quite work, and notably doing so without just throwing bottomless money at things until they pass a focus group

I don’t know that I’ve read more than a couple interviews and have never noticed a social media presence!

https://twitter.com/bitchuation

This is something else.

10 tweets in a year is not what I wld call a “constant presence on social media”

Holland said that Soderbergh showed them Sweet Smell of Success.

I didn't know Zazie Beetz or Sonja Sohn from their TV work, both fine especially the latter.

I think you would like Atlanta.

for a while I thought Sonja Sohn was Angela Bassett; her voice has the same timbre.

I think everyone would like Atlanta.

I want to see Atlanta! It's taking me over a year to get through Twin Peaks 2.0.

I recognized Harry Edwards as a go-to talking head on race in American sports for decades, but wasn't aware he helped bring about the '68 Olympics protest:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_Project_for_Human_Rights

zazie beetz -- how wonderful is it that this is her real name? if philip roth gave a character this name, reviewers would be rolling their eyes. she's lovely btw.

news I can use

half an hour to go because I was dozing on painkillers the first time and rewatched to catch up, but the tiny bits of basketball are easier to follow than every single other thing about the NBA's contracts and "lockouts" and tactics tbh

and it looks great. the sort-of-flat field is integrated into his approach, with the flexibility of "camera" placement turning that into a somehow bombastic yet intimate visual. Unsane felt more like an experiment, technically, but here he's obviously freestyling wildly with setups and movement and tracking/panning that you can't do with a camera*, yet it's servicing an overall controlled, mannered feel.

*or can do in seconds in situ vs production designing, building, lighting, etc - like the conversation btwn Ray and Sonja Sohn in the bar that's shot from behind the glasses of cherries and twists

remembering I still have** 2/3 of Mosaic left to watch, because a) I loathe watching stories on a phone and b) Sharon Stone went on WTF a few days after I started watching and talked about the ending of this 18-part-plus-other-stuff story, is the work of Steven Soderbergh the most existing thing ever, for a "film director"? Woody Allen has written & directed 47 features in 48 years, plus acting in things and writing other stuff. Studio system and b-movie directors could crack out a couple of features in a year, but very rarely wrote them. (TV directors can turn out 15 hours in a year that shows their style, or more on soaps, but never (?) as writers-directors.)

In Soderbergh's first 24 years as a narrative film director, he made 23 features as director (one of them 4.5 hours long and later released as two), only wrote five of them, but wrote two features with / for other directors, wrote and directed two shorts (one half-hour narrative, one 4-minute artier thing), directed-from-existing-material a feature Spalding Gray doco, directed a feature of a Spalding Gray performance, DPed 16 of his features and one short, edited 11 of the features and both shorts, directed two half-hour stories for television, directed/shot/edited a ten-episode season of TV, and produced half a dozen features for other directors. (Not counting "executive producing.")

In the three years he was "retired" from features, he directed/shot/edited two ten-hour seasons of television, and shot/camera operated/edited one feature (his best film, obv).

In the three years since unretiring, he's directed/shot/edited three features, produced another one, and directed/shot/edited a (let's call it) 18-part, 8-hour branching narrative.

Plus he's going home at night and editing 2001 or his friends' unfinished films for fun! Just adding up by minutes, has anyone else come close?



** oh it turns out the app was decommissioned a few days ago, go fuck yourself HBO

easier to follow than every single other thing about

lol that the minute I picked back up again, the NBA stuff immediately became a metaphor for Soderbergh's experiments with and failures in self-distribution

Erin Brockovich is very well made, and thank God he hasn't made another like it. It's a Julia Roberts superhero movie; no wonder you poptimists love it. Ed Lachman (dp) and Anne Coates (edit) better than Roberts and Finney.

High Flying Bird is very well made popular entertainment, and thank God he made it.

Labor drama that skips the basketball? Not *that* pop.

Looooooove High Flying Bird. iPhone populism 4ever!

Zach Lewis on EB:

The most quotable line from the film is a response to Ed’s questioning of her prerogative power: “They’re called boobs, Ed.” This would almost devise a problem for Brockovich, posturing her as the archetype of troubled-past sexual-aggression that weakly traverses the narrative as a feminist conclusion without an argument. Instead, Roberts’s archetype, purportedly funneled from the “golden-hearted hooker” character from Pretty Woman, embodies sassiness as a confident hallmark, using it when necessary and as a subversive atmosphere when not. As the case accelerates, Ed calls in a big-city law team to handle the formalities; Brockovich is furious as she feels that she maintains legitimate ownership of the case and that the people of Hinkley will not respond to formal tactics. Her curvy outfits disrupt their expectations as she vocally lists phone numbers and complicated personal information of various clients from memory, solidifying herself as the case’s paramount authority. While Soderbergh places keen adjustments to a well-known paradigm, the film ultimately becomes lost in a motherly sentimentality, making Brockovich a messiah figure for the residents for the residents of Hinkley sans unconditional love; her emphasized “I just want to be a good mom” monologue in the beginning now appropriated for the cancer and disease-ridden town. It is a nice gesture and a definitive comment on the parent/career dilemma, but it is troublesome to accept given Roberts’s previous performance of a woman whose life has finally been given purpose via her career. Her reconnection with her kids at the end of the film also suffers; they accept her social-ladder-climbing by relating to the sick kids with whom she is actually spending time — no real catharsis, just narrative happy-ending excuse, an emotional deus ex machina.

https://www.popoptiq.com/erin-brockovich-investigates-the-power-of-performance/

Traffic is failed agitprop. I was one of those guys fooled for a few weeks into thinking the fun Erin Brockovich was the less 'serious' film.

The question is, how much 'fun' should a film with people dying of cancer via corporate malfeasance at the center be?

Erin Brockovich is very well made, and thank God he hasn't made another like it. It's a Julia Roberts superhero movie; no wonder you poptimists love it.

yeah stfu you poptimists

erin brockovich was on c5 last night

― mark s (mark s), Wednesday, March 12, 2003 2:05 AM (sixteen years ago)

Erin Brockovich is nearly as good except it forgot to have a story.

― pete b. (pete b.), Wednesday, March 12, 2003 2:13 AM (sixteen years ago)

erin brockovich has too much story!!

― mark s (mark s), Wednesday, March 12, 2003 2:19 AM (sixteen years ago)

_Erin Brockovich_ is at best, a TV-movie-of-the-week starring Julia Roberts. Utterly overrated.

― Matt Maxwell (Matt M.), Wednesday, March 12, 2003 4:14 AM (sixteen years ago)

Erin Brockovich [...] is really weak though and Full Frontal is one of the worst movies I've ever seen.

― Alex in SF (Alex in SF), Wednesday, February 16, 2005 7:00 AM (fourteen years ago)

the subsequent eleven years of approving posts are all from dedicated superhero movie fan Alfred, so fair enough

he likes certain kinds, see also Hoffman as Tootsie

so then EB is as fraught as any well-made Hollywood product

also Brockovich has one of THOSE Thomas Newman scores. Does he still get work?

I've more of a problem with the script's caricature of a female lawyer. Every one of those scenes is a cringe.

Yeah... particularly strange as it was from a female screenwriter. (Check her subsequent credits to confirm that the script is the Achilles heel of this, abetted by Star Syndrome.)

https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/dd56f3c2-1b74-406a-b3f0-b3aeb3bf9042

shoulda gotten Ed Asner

I've generally like Soderbergh but I forced myself to watch Oceans 11, 12, and 13 on some flights last month and goddamn if those movies don't get progressively worse with every passing minute. By the end of 13 I wanted to beat every one of their smarmy faces to a pulp.

i only saw O11, which is a decent powdered donut, not a film. Had no interest in the others. Clearly minor works.

i rewatched them last year. 11 >>> 12 >>>>>>>>>>>>> 13.

Logan Lucky is the heist film the Oceans movies were prep work for

i should watch that. Yeah, caek's assessment is spot on though I'd put maybe more of a gulf between 11 and 12.

Nah, the Oceans films are delightful, though the first one is far better than the other two. Bad Soderbergh is when he thinks he's an auteur and makes four hour films about revolutionaries.

upcoming:

Thinking of Gary Oldman's German accent in THE LAUNDROMAT way too much. "Do you VANT to go BACK to BUH-nan-UHS?!?!"

— Keith Uhlich (@keithuhlich) September 13, 2019

Looks familiar, but I'm down for it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuBRcfe4bSo

That looks VERY Big Short.

It's not an iPhone film this time? I just hope it's as greatly filmed as his last two, then I kinda don't care what it's about.

Not on iphone:

There are certain things that you can do when you’re shooting with a capture device as small as a phone that you can’t do any other way, and that’s great. But there are also other things that you can’t do that are really frustrating. Because of the fact that it doesn’t really have any mass, that can actually be a problem in some circumstances, particularly car work. The phone is so sensitive to vibration it’s kind of useless in a car context, at least for us.

The other thing is, a dolly-based, multiple-destination master is a really tricky thing to do with a phone. You need a camera that you can put on a real dolly head and a real dolly. Those are the kind of things that you have to give up a little bit. And selective focus—with the iPhone, essentially, everything is in focus. So if you’re somebody who likes to create directionality for people’s gaze with focus, that tool is gone. It was nice to be back in a world where I can do that.

also:

Filmmaker: What was behind the choice to widen the aspect ratio during that segment and the use of the anamorphic lens?

Soderbergh: I wanted there to be a different approach for each story branch. Ellen Martin’s is the most straightforward, camera always on a fixed device and very simple framing. Mossack and Fonseca in Panama when they’re at work is always handheld. The Beverly Hills sequence is The Goodbye Girl meets California Suite, a Herbert Ross from the ’70s thing. For (China), I thought it’s like a Bond film. It feels like a spy thing to me. This is the other great thing about being in the all-digital world now, you can do things like this and it’s not a problem. You can change formats in the middle of your movie. I felt like a different vibe would really help.

Also, since making this one, he's finished another film with Meryl Streep, using the first model of a new Red camera that's almost as light as an iPhone, which he intends to carry on with.

Lol. This new technology has been so good to Soderbergh.

speaking of iphone, Apple sent Rian Johnson their new model to play with and he took it outside for an hour or two: https://vimeo.com/361345913

looks like he had fun with it

let his longtime cinematography collaborator Steve Yedlin borrow it now imo

This is really disappointing. Should have been an iPhone film.

A disappointment, yes. I wanted to bludgeon Banderas and Oldman with a candlestick.

Would use this to teach Brecht’s “distancing technique” that heightens the artifice of character to make larger points about societal constructions.

It was fine on Netflix on a Sunday night, would have been disappointing in the theater. Clunky.

the blah short

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/movies/contagion-movie-coronavirus.html

also Contagion: Soderbergh, Winslet/Damon/Fishburne/Cotaillard/Paltrow/Law/etc/etc/etc

"Contagion" is scarily prescient

great revive