The Soderbergh Threepeat

Out of some strange, unplanned coincidence, I happened to have seen three movies within the span of a couple of days that just so happened to be the latest three films from filmmaker Steven Soderbergh.  So, I figured, what the hell, what a perfect time to revisit the blog and lump this batch together.  And they are quite the batch.  Each film almost completely different from each other in style, substance, and themes but all coming within the span of the last two years from the same great filmmaking eye.

First up, purely at random, is The Girlfriend Experience, starring porn actress Sasha Grey as a high class escort who provides a bit more than the average hooker.  She offers, as the title suggests, the complete girlfriend experience.  Someone to talk to, cuddle with, and, sure, with most of her clients, eventually have sex with.

But it’s not a world of underground criminality that Soderbergh is offering here.  What I find most interesting about this film is the representation of a woman running her own small business.  This film is set at a very specific place in time.  Throughout the film, there are constant references to things that are happening in the news at that time as the financial crisis hits and the presidential debates begin to fire up, this is a film entrenched in the Wall Street reality of Autumn 2008.  It’s what the film tries to say that I found compellingly interesting about the struggle of the small business in a country that values the largess of almost criminal corporations as seen through the lens of a criminal (in this case a very high end prostitute) just trying to make a little something for herself.

Shot on a shoestring budget in the same vein as Soderbergh’s previous experimental drama Bubble, the film is strikingly beautiful at most times and is a technical dream.  Soderbergh’s deft cinematic eye stretches the canvass of a small film to feel intimate while allowing the beating heart of New York during incredibly uncertain times.  However, in the end, the film left me cold.

Porn star Sasha Grey comes off as almost hollow and one note throughout but there’s always an inkling that maybe this was purposeful.  The character of Christine is emotionally closed off from those all around her, even her understanding to a point boyfriend, played by Chris Santos.  There are a couple of brief moments where the script allows her to be vulnerable and Grey actually shines fairly well in these scenes, but these moments are all too brief as we are left to this stonewalled character.

The central themes of the film and the technical brilliance that Soderbergh brings to the story is what elevates this film just slightly but the script with much of its bland, lifeless dialogue and a story with very little in the way of forward momentum or connective tissue, loses the viewer in the shuffle.  I certainly felt listless as the movie went on, not a good sign when the film’s runtime is less than an hour and a half.  There is some conflict with the boyfriend and his personal training business and Christine finding a connection with a client but all of this comes far too late, which is strange considering the jumbled timeline of the narrative.  Unfortunately, it all comes across as a bit too scattershot with little narrative boost given in.  This was certainly the weakest of the three, by far.

Next up, the two part epic story about the Argentinean revolutionary Ernesto Che Guevara.  Separated into two films, Che Part One: The Argentine and Che Part Two: Guerilla, Soderbergh does not attempt the standard biographical picture here.  Segmented here into two separate pieces of his life, the films follow Che Guevara the guerilla fighter.  Part One follows Guevara through the successful Cuban Revolution of the 1950s intercut with scenes of him giving an address to the United Nations in 1964 in New York City.  Part Two follows his failed attempt to bring the revolution to Bolivia and his eventual death.

First off, just to get this completely out of the way, it is absolutely criminal that Benicio Del Toro was not recognized for any major awards for his incredible performance here.  What Del Toro brings to this role is an incredible magnetism and a truly powerful spirit, an important aspect considering the many people he got to follow him through his guerilla escapades.  Benicio fully embodies not just the man but the spirit of Che Guevara from his fiery speech to the UN to the dirt and sweat in the battlefields of Cuba and Bolivia.  It’s just spectacular and I don’t really have the words to give it justice.  He is at times both warm and giving while at the same time fierce and dangerous.

Moving on, these films are very deliberately separated from each other.  Just to save me some headaches, I have lumped the two part Che into one whole movie and I will view it as such but make no mistake, these are very much two separate movies, in approach, execution, and style.  Part One almost plays out as a more traditional war picture.  The beginnings of the revolution in Cuba are shown as Che travels by boat with Fidel Castro and much of the battle scenes have a more open, cinematic feel to it.  There is also a bit more optimism as the success of the revolution becomes an inevitability.  This is a striking difference from the dark, isolated jungles of Bolivia as the failure of Che’s mission becomes as inevitable as his Cuban success.  Che’s dark, violent demise looms over the entire second half.  In this way, Part One certainly contains more in the way cinematic sweeps and brushstrokes but both films do share the feeling of being there in the jungles alongside Che and his soldiers.  The feeling and reality of fighting this way is a grand achievement as seen through the lens of Soderbergh.

I wish I had more to say because the full Che experience here is quite an overwhelming cinematic achievement.  It’s not so much a traditional war picture or bio picture but more of a film that washes over you.  Of course, the film shies away from the darker underpinnings of Che the man such as the executions that were held in Cuba but those aspects stand in defiance of the film’s overall themes.  These movies are designed more as a testament to the guerilla spirit, the fortitude of the revolutionary spirit.  What these men would do with it afterwards, either in success or defeat, is almost irrelevant in the film’s grand scheme.  It’s a film more about the procedural reality of using guerilla warfare and why Che does what he does.  Rather than go through character building monologues or providing a standard beat by beat bio picture, Soderbergh shows who this man is and what his ideas were about through his actions in trying to bring revolution to Latin America.  The film never passes judgment allowing the camera to linger on the people and jungles that surround him, rather than trying to pontificate on any grander meaning through overwrought dialogue or the usual dramatic arcs.  Some would say that omitting the specific parts of his life that the film does, the film therefore does pass a favorable judgment on an interesting but controversial figure.  What I think he does is segments his life into two events that ultimately shape what this man truly was, or at least, what he tried to be.

And, finally, there’s The Informant!, certainly the most straight up entertaining of the three films presented here and the second to be based on a true story.  Starring Matt Damon, the comedy follows an upper management employee of a lysine developing company who turns informant for the FBI in a widespread price fixing scandal.

A jumpy, happening little comedy it’s a film filled with quiet subtle laughs filled with the kind of slick filmmaking that’s become very familiar to anyone who’s a fan of the Ocean’s movies.  It’s certainly the lightest of the movies as well but it’s incredibly fun to sit through and timely as well with its themes of corporate malfeasance and it’s constantly lying lead character.

Matt Damon is obviously having a ball here as the hapless fraud Mark Whitacre who fumbles and stumbles through one lie to the next to the point that he’s telling lies about the lies immediately after admitting to lying.  He’ll be lying about lying.  It comes to the point of such a twisted thread of chicanery and fraud, that there’s literally nothing you can believe about what comes out of his mouth.  Damon’s great here keeping things light and moving while alluding to deeper depths in the man as he navigates from one lie to the next.  The voice-over throughout the film is also hilariously entertaining as he more often than not is talking about things not directly related to what is happening on screen, seemingly unawares of the hole that he is constantly digging deeper and deeper for himself.

I thought it was a very interesting choice to fill out much of the supporting cast with these great comedians such as Tom Papa, Joel McHale, and Patton Oswalt in these deadpan serious roles as Damon, the more dramatic actor, is able to bounce off these guys with a great comedic energy.  Everyone’s great with their roles, especially Scott Bakula who starts off as kind of an FBI buddy for Whitacre but who becomes more antagonistic as he sees the kind of deep sociopathic lies Damon’s character tells.

I don’t have much more to say about this one other than it’s a fun, lighthearted flick with a great cast and a fun score that hearkens back to movies of the seventies and sixties.  The film does drag at points towards the beginning but once things start clicking in the latter half, the film kind of barrels through in fun and interesting ways.

So, after all that, what connects these three movies?  Besides the great, exacting eye of Steven Soderbergh?  Three movies of complete stylistic and tonal 180s from one another, they each have their own separate character explorations, thematic cores, and overall auras about them.  What I see when I look at these three movies, are pieces of himself, Soderbergh trying to get across in as varying ways as possible the plight of the filmmaker.

The filmmaker as the rough and tumble guerilla fighter, the filmmaker as the small business man (or woman) just trying to navigate through a corporate owned Hollywood only to face their harshest critics at the end of it all, the filmmaker as the constant liar, juggling so many threads of non-truths and shades of grey that he can lose himself within his own web of lies (stories).  I see all of these incredibly different characters put together, as kind of the maverick filmmaker that I believe Soderbergh to be in my eyes.  Even when I’m not a complete fan of whatever movie he makes, I always know it’s always at least worth watching and these past three movies are certainly perfect examples of a busy filmmaker hard at work putting just that little bit of himself in every one of his works, or at least very vague representations of such.

Needless to say, I’m a fan.  So cheers to you Mr. Soderbergh.  I anxiously await your next feature.

Inglourious Basterds

Quentin Tarantino’s latest Inglorious Bastards caps a fairly uneven decade for the auteur filmmaker.  After the one-two-three punch of his 90’s work culminating in the absolute perfection that is Jackie Brown, Tarantino had a longish six year break where apparently all he did was watch movies.  Kill Bill Volumes One and Two was a slapdash mix of every filmic influence of Tarantino’s upbringing all latched onto a violent revenge story.  Stretched into two films, the movie(s) are equal parts good and bad with moments of genius mixed with moments of tedium, feeling more like a walkthrough of Tarantino’s greatest hits at its lowest and classic Tarantino wit, dialogue, and action at its heights.  And then Death Proof, with it’s languid, almost too relaxed for its own good first half and it’s action packed latter half (almost feeling like two separate movies), basically being all about referencing and playing off of the grindhouse movies of his youth.

Not that his previous movies lacked these self referential quirks.  They are littered all across Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and most especially, Jackie Brown.  What differentiates Tarantino’s 90’s trilogy of films from his 00’s trilogy of films?  The 90’s films are certainly more entrenched in the gritty crime stories that were a basic part of 90’s indie cinema but there’s a bit more to it.  His work of the 90’s feel more like original stories, even Jackie Brown strangely his only adaptation, laced to Tarantino’s sensibilities and tastes.  His films of the 00’s feel as if they work backwards.  They start with his favorite genres and films and then laces these stories to narratives that don’t wholly work on their own.

Inglorious Bastards (spelling corrected to keep from driving myself crazy) certainly fits this wholesale description, ripping straight from his favorite B-movie WWII man on a mission movies.  However, this film transcends both Kill Bill and Death Proof because it stretches from these confines to tell its own story.  Occasionally, here and there, the film tries to burst back into the overly stylish Tarantino threshold, but there’s a certain restraint in that regard.

And that’s the core of why the film works.  Tarantino’s focus strays away from the Bastards from a good amount of the film.  In fact, the majority are given no dialogue whatsoever.  The men on a mission movie that Tarantino seemed set out to make is put on the backburner for the story of Shosanna (played by Melanie Laurent), a French Jew who escapes death at the hands of Col. Hans Landa or “The Jew Hunter” (a great performance by Christoph Waltz) as a child and who comes to own a Parisian movie theater where she finds the chance to kill the entire high command of the Nazi regime.  The Basterds,a squad of Jewish Americans assigned to collect 100 Nazi scalps each as lead by Lt. Aldo Raines (played by Brad Pitt), also have their own plan of blowing up the movie theater but it almost seems incidental.

The Basterds seem almost relegated as a subplot in their own movie as the main action and the main thrust of the narrative force belongs to Shosanna’s story, a character that barely even comes in contact with any of the Basterds over the course of the movie.  In fact, take away the Basterds and little would be lost minus a few scenes of violence and an exquisitely tense bar scene.  It’s telling that Pitt seems to play Aldo Raines as little more than a roguish cartoon character while Laurent and Waltz get to form actual characters.

SPOILERS AHEAD!

In the end, what this film represents, as much of his work this decade has represented, is his love of not just genre films but of the power of film in general.  The climactic scene at the Parisian movie theater is almost poetic in its technical elegance while also mind numbingly violent in its utter violent devastation.  It’s what the power of these films do to the audience as much as it is about what happens on screen.

Just moments before, we witness a Nazi audience cheering and howling at the violent retribution against American forces on the screen, and then that final utter irony, as Tarantino puts us in the Nazi viewpoint in a way.  The audience I was with cheered and howled just as hard as the Basterds mowed down machine gun fire amidst the burning wreckage of the theater as Shosanna’s visage projects ominously over the violent chaos, cackling with glee.  If these weren’t Nazis, if this was almost any other group of people, this scene would be abhorrent.  The great dichotomy of cinema separating what is real and what is not and what is acceptable and what is not, in terms of screen violence is explored in interesting ways here but its almost revolting in its way.  One can feel almost disgusted with the filth that the film uncovers both in its characters and in the audience.

It’s fitting that Tarantino ends this decade on a high note as he ended the nineties on a high note with Jackie Brown but, in my mind, his next film needs to be radically different.  After Inglourious Basterds, he needs to make a film completely free of violence.  I think he crafted something quite elegant in its handling on the themes of revenge and violence in cinema and after that last scene in the theater, he needs to step away from screen violence for at least one movie.  What that movie may be or what it could be about, I couldn’t really say but it’s just something I’d like to see happen.  I think he’s made his ultimate statement on both the pleasures of cinema violence but also on what it says about us, the audience, that revels in it so deeply on a primal level.  Taking a step back from that for at least one movie, would be something quite interesting to see from an already fascinating filmmaker.

Funny People

Attempting to play catch up on the movies missed during my sojourn away from the U S of A, the only one I was able to catch before leaving cinemas was Judd Apatow’s latest, Funny People.  Sorry Public Enemies and Bruno.  There’s always DVD.  Anyways, I thought I’d have more time to get to see this movie but sadly, it looked like it bombed out big time leaving my local theater a good 2 or 3 weeks after it came out.

To tell you the truth, I don’t really understand how it did so poorly.  It is certainly a departure from the usual Apatow slacker coming to terms with adulthood comedy in so much as there’s as much drama as there is comedy to it.  And it never provides simple, straightforward character arcs.  The movie ends in the grey area that is basically life.  That’s probably why it did so poorly.  While, Funny People does have some great comedic moments, Apatow stretches his skill set out into a solid dramatic story, Adam Sandler playing basically a variation of himself coming to terms with a fatal disease and learning to appreciate life and come to terms with the mistakes of his past.  Seth Rogen plays an up and coming comic hired to basically be Sandler’s friend and Leslie Mann plays the love of Sandler’s life that he wants to get back.

Overall, the film works pretty well.  Sandler is fairly capable in dramatic roles as seen in movies like Punch Drunk Love or Spanglish and he maneuvers his way fine here.  Of course, both of those movies play up many of the characteristics that he has refined throughout the years in his many average and below average sophomoric comedies over the years and the role here is not so much a stretch, playing the big deal movie star.

What I’ve heard said about the movie beforehand is that this is Apatow going the James L. Brooks territory mixing his comedic talents with a more dramatic sensibility.  In that sense, the film works fine.  But, unfortunately, that was also the problem.  I was never wowed.  The film is generally okay and surfs along smoothly right through the end.  The first half is certainly funnier than the latter half where it almost becomes completely given over to the drama of what Sandler’s character is going through and how much he hasn’t really changed.

The film goes so far as to say people can’t change even when faced with life or death struggles.  We are who we are and there’s a reason we did things before and we might do those things again.  This is certainly not the Knocked Up model where the viewer remains absolutely certain in the goodness of each and every character.  Here, characters are allowed to be incredibly flawed and almost despicable and yet, still people we’ll want to root for or relate to.  There’s an amount of reality given over to the film that has always been just on the edges of his previous films.

In the end, I can see why it didn’t do so well.  Mass audiences hate reality.   They want comfort, easy to digest themes and characters.  This film gives viewers an entertaining piece of reality and never condescends to its audience.  It wears its heart on its sleeves and I think it paid the price for that at the box office.  It’s unfortunate because it’s a really solid movie thrusting Apatow in a very new direction that would be quite interesting to see if he continues this way.  In fact, now that I think about it, the film almost hearkens back to Apatow’s TV days, specifically, Freaks and Geeks.  A great little show that had as much heart and drama as humor, Apatow’s little seen and swiftly cancelled NBC show shows a great skill in the kind of balancing act of laughs and drama.  Bringing a little more of Apatow’s Freaks and Geeks sensibility to his work would not be a terrible thing at all.