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

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

Social Distancing, Alternative Facts, and SD Cards?

https://www.indiewire.com/2020/05/soderbergh-wrote-sex-lies-and-videotape-sequel-in-quarantine-and-is-eager-to-direct-it-1202232376/

Hasn't written an original narrative screenplay since Sex Lies in 1989; has to go a few weeks indoors without directing anything, and promptly cracks out a sequel to that last one, an adaptation of a novel, and a rewrite of something else.

bless

Frottage, Fibs and Fiios

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

as mentioned on the Carruth thread, Soderbergh's B&W silent Raiders of the Lost Ark

looks absolutely incredible, the Social Network score doesn't work as well

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.

― now let's play big lunch take little lunch (sic), Friday, September 20, 2019 6:59 AM (one year ago)

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

― Frederik B, Friday, September 20, 2019 7:26 AM (one year ago)

Dianne Wiest also revealed the film was shot with “no equipment. The only equipment was sound equipment. Steven held the camera in a wheelchair and just rolled along. None of the lights, and the trucks, all that stuff that goes into making movies, there’s none of it. There was Steven and this new camera.”

Let Them All Talk on HBO Max in December.

https://nofilmschool.com/red-releases-price-komodo

Not quite iPhone weight in the end

Just watched his cut of "2001" again. There are a couple of small changes I don't like, but the vast majority of it I do like a lot, and don't really miss the stuff he cut out, tbh. And his changes definitely make it more accessible to, say, my 16-year old daughter.

"Let Them All Talk" out today I think?

I violently despised his mediocre Hollywood version of Solaris. I'm sure it's not the worst thing ever but at the time it triggered me that much I was huffing and hawing and effing and jeffing all the way through it!

producing the oscars

I suspect it will be....mostly the same

I suspect (for two reasons) it will give more attention to the craft/labour side of filmmaking, and substantially less to movie stars in tuxes smiling at each other

that is definitely possible, hopefully while shortening it too somehow

It's gonna be a new edit of the 1986 ceremony.

He'll shoot the 2022 ceremony during the ad breaks, and have it edited by the time the credit scroll finishes.

often feel alone in my love for soderbergh's solaris

honestly feel like lem's book, tarkovsky's film, and soderbergh's film amplify such different aspects of the same themes that they almost form like a prism you can see the complete story through

Meanwhile, Let Them All Talk has leaked out (think I'll skip this one)
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/09/movies/let-them-all-talk-review-that-ship-has-sailed.html

often feel alone in my love for soderbergh's solaris

im a big fan as well brad. never read the book but your prism comment feels otm. tbh i actually dont even like the tarkovsky film, but even if i did i feel like each film is doing such different stuff that they dont really tread on each other that much.

Let Them All Talk has leaked out

it was released two days before this post. you thinking it leaked bodes very well for AT&T's plan to move all of their feature film, TV and comics publication from the real world to HBO Max!

anyway I dug it, based especially on the last 20-30 minutes when a bunch of things you didn't know were dominoes start plunking into place. Candi B absolutely kills it in dis ting. visual storytelling-wise it's in a very similar style to High Flying Bird, lots of still frames / locked off shots, but without the screen having light stylisation that the iphone gave that one.

on Dianne Wiest's "no lights" comment - the stuff in enclosed spaces, like libraries and especially the auditorium and the Pos K dance club, can look good to great, but on the whole this is something that won't suffer from no cinema release, if considered vs most of his / Andrews' work.

Watched it last night and thought it was gorgeous to look at but otherwise kind of a mess tbh. Soderbergh's penchant for ultra efficient no-fat editing, starting scenes late and getting out early, seemed too clever by half here, almost kind of perverse. Thinking particularly of Streep bumping into Lucas Hedges 2/3 way through and Bergen's last scene with Streep - both of which were the payoffs of the main dramatic arcs that had been happening, and then he deliberately withholds the actual dramatic part of the scene.

I get that he's thinking he doesnt want to waste the audience's time with "redundant" scenes or w/e, but this wasnt supposed to be Traffic or Michael Clayton, its Bergen Weist and Streep on a cruise liner, wish he'd stepped back and let my girls cook a little more.

let them, as it were, talk

Streep"s character is not demonstrative at the best of times, and is keeping more secrets than usual during this cruise crossing - I think we do see the big dramatic moment in those scenes, especially the last one with Bergen. I was on the edge of my seat from the shots of Candace silently watching during the previous dinner conversation.

For long stretches the movie is partly about this finely calibrated passive aggressive kabuki dance of streep being baffled that candace wont see her privately, making plans to meet, breaking plans to meet, all these bait & switch fremeny moves. But then after all that, we just cut without warning into a scene of them alone in a room mid-discussion. like, what? how did that happen? It just seemed like a really weird choice to me. I get that the bare-bones "point" of that scene was the discussion they had, not how it happened. But still after all that will-they-or-wont-they mishegoss getting the audience invested in that, it felt really jarring to just cut past it. It may not have been absolutely narratively essential but it still sure would have been interesting to see whatever happened between them to get them into that room, a partial resolution to a conflict that had been teased for the whole film.

Idk it just seemed like he was too ruthless with stuff like that, maybe a pitfall of editing your own stuff for so long. Its nora ephron material but he handled it like a bourne movie

Wasn't he quitting?

I liked Logan Lucky but then i've always liked him unlike .. many here.

Wasn't he quitting?

(revising a post I made in another thread a few months ago:)

He announced his retirement from film-making in February 2013.

During his retirement he

- had a completed film screen at Cannes in competition for the Palme d'Or, enjoy theatrical release outside the US, and come out as his first HBO feature in the US
- directed & shot & edited ten hour-long episodes of The Knick - did a draft cut of Spike Jonze's Her, trimming the film from 2.5 hours to 90 minutes
- developed & produced the half-hour-episode dramedy series Red Oaks, that ran for three seasons
- developed a six-hour narrative / 18-or-w/e-hour interactive mystery
- shot & operated camera on & edited a feature film sequel to an earlier feature that he'd directed & shot & edited
- compiled & music directed an installation piece combining the 1946 The Killers with the 1964 The Killers; edited & sound directed a mashup installation piece incorporating parts of his The Underneath and the noir it was based on, Criss Cross; generated a "silent" film version of Raiders Of The Lost Ark by removing the colour and scoring it with Reznor & Ross cues from The Social Network; cut a 110-minute edit of 2001: A Space Odyssey; cut a 108-minute edit of Heaven's Gate; cut a mashup of Psycho (1960) and Psycho (1998), called Psychos;
- directed & shot & edited another ten hour-long episodes of The Knick
- signed on to Bill & Ted 3 as producer and got it funded after a decade of the writers & stars trying
- and EP'ed the Girlfriend Experience TV series, including hands-on creative decisions.

Plus he started a new day job as importer and promoter of a Bolivian liquor, and revived an earlier side-gig, directing Chloe Grace Moretz in a play by his frequent collaborator Scott Burns.

He un-announced his retirement from film-making in February 2016.

(Then before he made Logan Lucky as his unretirement film, he cut & music directed a feature-length mashup of the three theatrical films starring Michael Caine as Len Deighton's Harry Palmer. Since Logan Lucky, he's made and released another four feature films; made and released that 6-18-hour interactive mystery app that also came out as a linear TV series; edited and test-screened new cuts of at least five of his older films; written several screenplays in lockdown, including his first non-adaptation fictional piece since Sex, Lies & Videotape {it's a sequel to S,L&V}; led the DGA committee on how to devise COVID-safe protocols for film production; and put them into practice by directing, shooting and editing another feature film in November.)

Just imagine how busy he could have been had he *not* retired. What a waste.

What a waste.

I don't understand what this refers to.

Josh is joking :)

New one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRD1xr-dmfQ

Great cast. Bill Duke! But I must admit I could barely make it though that trailer, looked like the most recent season of "Fargo."