Kino Eye on Steven Soderbergh

200) Magic Mike (2012) Dir: Steven Soderbergh Date Released: June 29, 2012 Date Seen: June 26, 2012 Rating: 3.75/5

I like the way Soderbergh says what he says more than, uh, what he actually says. See my review for Press Play.

17) Haywire (2011)

17) Haywire (2011) Dir: Steven Soderbergh Date Released: January 20, 2012 Date Seen: January 10, 2012 Rating: 4/5

Soooooo good. Definitely need to rewatch. But I had a blast. See my review for Capital New York.

More Belated, Half-Assed 2011 Ketchup

508) Le Quattro Volte (2010) Dir: Michelangelo Frammartino Date Released: March 30, 2011 Date Seen: December 29, 2011 Rating: 4.25/5

510) Senna (2010) Dir: Asif Kapadia Date Released: August 12, 2011 Date Seen: December 30, 2011 Rating: 3.75/5

511) Cold Fish (2010) Dir: Sion Sono Date Released: July 6, 2011 Date Seen: December 31, 2011 Rating: 3.5/5

2) Contagion (2011) Dir: Steven Soderbergh Date Released: September 9, 2011 Date Seen: January 1, 2012 Date Seen: 3.75/5

Le Quattro Volte: This film feels a little stuffy at the start. But once we get to that one great take, the one where the goats are freed from their pen and the car crashes and everything seems to happen for a reason but you can't quite discern what that reason is? At that point, I was all in.

Senna: Good character study and rather dynamic. Still, a bit too neat. Had more specific thoughts but, as is often the case with films I don't have to immediately write about for $$ (let's be honest: I get paid peanuts and they're not even whole peanuts, either), my thoughts have left me by now. Which is why I'm scrambling to get caught up with my notes-taking. Because there's so much I want to say and if I don't get it all down when the getting is good, then...well, I don't want to think about that.

Cold Fish: Don't get the rancor against this film (Thinkin' about you, D'Angelo!). As Sono's most pitilessly cynical of his recent films, Cold Fish is thoroughly misanthropic. It's often facile depiction of human behavior is frustrating. But there are singular moments in this one that impressed me, like the disposal of the first body and also, the planetarium visit. In the latter scene, Sono establishes something that deeply disturbed me: we crave to know that we don't matter, basically. That's what that sliver of a scene suggests. And that suggestion is terrifying and its pitilessly bleak. But it's so pointed in its bleakness (Look at this man and see him looking to know how small he is compared to the universe. Look at this man trying to re-establish order in his life by trying to convince himself that he doesn't really matter. a\And know that you crave to be put in your place, too.) that this one scene almost made me want to cry. So yeah, monotonous, to be sure, and Sono often stacks the deck a little too neatly. But hahaha whyyyyy?!

Contagion: Ends on a soft note with Matt Damon and his kid and I don't think any of the post-outbreak stuff really worked. But yeah, pretty terrifying, innit?

333) The Informant! (2009)

333) The Informant! (2009) Dir: Steven Soderbergh Date Released: September 2009 Date Seen: October 10, 2009 Rating: 3.75/5

Whenever Steven Soderbergh takes it upon himself to make a movie that make points, he proves why he's one of the few American directors capable of delivering smart but overdone socially conscious dramas. The Informant! tells the true story of white-collar criminal turned FBI informer Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon) like it were a cynical Blake Edwards-style comedy sucked dry of Edwards' signature ebullience. Soderbergh insists that we know just how deranged Whitacre, a manic-depressive, bipolar, pathological liar, is from the start, digging up Marvin Hamlisch to provide a Bananas-esque soundtrack and having Damon provide stream-of-conscious voiceover narration that's just a smidge more grounded than the kind the unreliable protagonist of The Face of Another provides. These two overloaded, telltale signs of Soderbergh's wryly zany approach to his material are significantly dialed downed in the second half. Then, Soderbergh finally trusts the material to go far enough off the rails on its own steam. And yet, he plays the heavy-handed cynic so well that the film never feels so off-center for that that complaint became more than just a persistent, though mild, reprimand. Likewise, making Whitacre look like a half-cocked mental patient isn't the hardest task and Damon makes mince meat out of the role. Still, sometimes, it'd be nice to see what the character and the movie might've been like without Soderbergh's voice intruding as loudly as it does here. I guess that's what This American Life is for, huh?

171) The Girlfriend Experience (2009)

171) The Girlfriend Experience (2009) Dir: Steven Soderbergh Date Released: May 2009 Date Seen: June 8th, 2009 Rating: 4/5

As a drama about the deceptively superficial nature of material goods in contemporary society, Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience is an ostentatious success. By following Chelsea (porn star Sasha Grey), an upwardly mobile call girl, screenwriters David Levien and Brian Koppelman ask us to sympathize with the ultimate recession-friendly underdog. As a member of the world’s oldest profession, Chelsea has to constantly reinvent herself and hence struggle to remain competitive in a male-dominated market controlled by clients that pay to emotionally and physically take as much as they can from her. Because she makes a living by putting on a show for them, she rarely lets her guard down to discuss how she “really” feels.

Therein lies the challenge that Soderbergh and company give themselves: stylistically reproducing the frenetic lifestyle of someone that’s constantly being looked at. Her story is jumbled up chronologically, abruptly transitioning from various “appointments” she has with high-powered clients to scenes with her boyfriend Chris (Chris Santos in his debut role). Similarly, to visually affect Chelsea’s harried emotional state, Soderbergh films events in High-Definition DV with a markedly detached aesthetic, focusing more on flashy, high-end building fixtures and decors first and then his equally pretty human subjects.

This impressionistic approach leaves the viewer to in a haze of mood lighting, nanny cam-like photography and structurally devious episodes. For the sake of immersing us into Chelsea’s emotional woes, we are assaulted with a narrative puzzle box that rearranges otherwise garish, pseudo-reality show fodder into an “information age” critique.

Make no mistake, while Chelsea traipses about in designer clothing and lives in a spacious Manhattan loft, the disjointed manner by which her story is told stems from Soderbergh’s ambitious stab at commenting on our media-saturated times. Because there’s so much information to process at once in any given scene of Chelsea’s life, everything is broken down into various interspersed segments. We aren’t deluged by diffuse chunks of information but rather a lot of little slivers. This gives us the illusory impression that we’re being bogged down with the task of determining which scenes go where in order to form a coherent story.

The Girlfriend Experience can subsequently be seen as a movie that aptly reflects contemporary exhaustion with a multimedia deluge of sound bite-sized data. “If I hear one more word about this debate,” Scott whines about the recent presidential debates, “I’m going to throw up. If I hear the word ‘Maverick,’ one more time, I’m going to throw up.” Like cobbling together a holistic view of anything political, or more specifically, anything involving our ailing economy, manufacturing a complex and coherent picture of a working girl’s life from so many diffuse moments is a nigh impossible task. Chelsea subsequently serves as a cipher for both her clients’ needs and Soderbergh’s social commentary.

That use of strong-arm aesthetics, which speaks more loudly as social commentary than it does as a narrative, strips Chelsea of her appeal as a character and transforms her into a bigger-than-life sandwich board. Her lilting pout and quiet one-note intensity sour and feel like the necessary means to an end, the qualities that make her a modern victim. Despite her independent and dare I say enterprising lifestyle, she’s never going to be able to get ahead in a world where even she, a self-professed expert at reading other people’s needs, can be taken in by a mysterious new client and potential love interest, a sleazy internet blogger (NY film critic Glenn Kenny) promising a great write-up in exchange for sex and even Chris, an aggressive type-A personality adept at making his interests the priority in any given conversation. For The Girlfriend Experience to work, Chelsea has to be an expectant loser.

The problem with that kind of mentality is that it’s only rewarding to the viewer that’s willing to accept Soderbergh and the gang’s pat use of Chelsea as a statement on the perils of making yourself your own product. I enjoyed Chelsea’s drama as an experimental made-for-tv reality show pilot about The Real Prostitutes of SoHo and appreciated it retrospectively as the Zeitgeist According to Soderbergh.