Tag Archives: Steven Soderbergh

Steven Soderbergh’s THE INFORMANT (2009) is a based-on-truth film though the opening blithely warns us the director’s not prioritizing accuracy. Matt Damon plays Mark Whitacre, an Archer Daniels Midland executive who cooperated with FBI Agent Shepard (Scott Bakula) to expose the company’s massive price-fixing operations. As he explains it, he started out in the tech end, got bumped up to management and isn’t comfortable with it.

Public-spirited? Maybe. Then again, he tells his wife that this might open up opportunities in the hierarchy if anyone above him gets busted. And then it turns out that while working with the FBI he also launched several million-dollar scams and kickbacks to line his own pocket. And even before that, he made up stuff, like his tragic family history. Soderbergh doesn’t go deep or try to pin down Whitacre’s motives (he does dismiss out of hand the idea his bipolar illness was responsible), treating this more like the kind of “you won’t believe this story” you might tell a friend over coffee. Well-done. “Everyone in the country is a victim of corporate crime by the time they finish breakfast.”

Soderbergh’s next film, CONTAGION (2011), now looks almost creepily prescient post-covid. We have a disease that jumps from bats to pigs to humans, then explodes across the globe, spawning terror, grief, death, and also masking, social distancing, paranoid conspiracy theories and anti-vax hucksters. It’s also, from what I’ve read, accurate in its portrayal of how things work (or worked at the time — god knows what things look like under RFK Jr.), though one doctor said no way does the CDC get real-time information this quickly (and based on reading for Watching Jekyll and Hyde about self-experimentation, one doctor testing a vaccine on herself shouldn’t speed things up that much). Very good and well cast: Laurence Fishbourne as the head of the CDC, Gwyneth Paltrow as an adulterous Patient Zero, Matt Damon as her shellshocked husband, Marion Cotillard and Kate Winslet as doctors and Jude Law as an Alex Jones-style huckster. “Clearly we’re not lucky.”

Warners almost buried COYOTE VS. ACME (2026) in the studio vaults which would have been a great shame — and a great mistake, as it’s proving a solid hit for them. Fed up with decades of Acme products that boomerang on him, Wiley Coyote hires attorney Kevin Avery (Will Forte) to sue them. Avery is a schmuck who’d happily settle rather than take on the world’s biggest corporation and its ruthless legal team headed by Buddy Crane (John Cena). However as events progress it becomes obvious Acme is engaged in very shady business and Avery slowly realizes he’s not willing to walk away. This was a delightful, fun movie and offered some great Easter eggs (“Let’s go to our news team in Guadalajara, where a mouse just broke the sound barrier!”). Well worth seeing if you find the time. “Pursuant to Sylvester v. Gonzalez, ‘chase by predator’ is an occupation under the law.”

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While at ConGregate last month, I had a quiet stretch in my room in the early morning and wound up watching GABY (1956), which though I didn’t know it was a remake of Waterloo Bridge.

Leslie Caron plays the eponymous protagonist, a French dancer who fled the Nazi occupation to London after the death of her parents. John Kerr is Greg, an American GI who’s never met anyone so elegant and sophisticated and falls for her like a ton of bricks. Before long, vows are exchanged; I assumed that having married in haste, the drama would come when they repented at leisure (Gaby’s parents are alive and Vichy or something equally shocking). Wrong. After Greg apparently dies on D-Day Gaby, currently unemployed, turns to sex work to support herself. When Greg returns, injured but alive, Gaby is to guilty to live and walks out into a German V-2 rocket bombardment.

Admittedly I wasn’t paying close attention to the film — it’s not that gripping and I was doing other stuff during parts of it — but I was surprised to realize Gaby was selling her body rather than just sleeping around. Maybe it was me not paying attention but it’s possible the Production Code forced the filmmakers to keep things much less obvious than in Waterloo Bridge, especially as Gaby doesn’t pay for her life for her sins. Instead Greg tells her that war is hell, people do terrible things — but it’s over now, let’s put it behind us. “I thought all Americans were divorced?”

My serial watching of Stephen Soderbergh came to a halt when I couldn’t find 2009’s THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE anywhere streaming. Finally, though, I ordered the DVD. This is one of Soderbergh’s art films (as opposed to crowd-pleasers like Ocean’s Eleven), with porn star Sasha Grey playing a sex worker dealing with men ranging from her slightly jealous live-in boyfriend to a client who might be more to various clients who want to give her advise on investing or better design for her website. As Roger Ebert says, most of them are buying sex but what they really want is to be told how smart they are.

The book Marked Women has a whole chapter on “prostitute as businesswoman” films. These include left-wing critiques showing how capitalism corrupts even sexual relations and those that show sex work is simply work, a job like any other. This film definitely fits the second category: Grey’s character is a businesswoman and her business is considerably safer because she runs it through the Internet (something Samantha Cole brings up in How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex). Overall, I liked the film, though while I agree with Soderbergh not diving deep into her motives (as he says on the commentary track, it’s too easy to go cliched), the result is that it never gets below the surface of her life. “I’ve told them I can’t make the junket to Vegas.”

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In working through the films of Stephen Soderbergh, I’ve been dawdling on watching THE GOOD GERMAN (2006) because I’d confused it with The Reader, which was good but nothing I particularly wanted to rewatch. Nope, it’s an entirely different film.

George Clooney plays Jake Geisner, a reporter who arrives in post-WW II Berlin, bombed out and under Allied occupation (divided into a Russian, French, English and American zone). Officially Jake’s there to write; unofficially he’s there to find his former girlfriend, Lena (Kate Winslett), a German Jew. By coincidence, she’s sleeping with Tully (Tobey Maguire), Jake’s military driver, a black marketeer who’s trying to pull enough strings to get Lena papers so he can take her out of Berlin. Then Tully ends up shot dead in the Russian zone. Is Lena in danger? Can Jake save her?

The film is a visual treat, done in the style of a 1940s Warner Brothers thriller from the opening credits through the Casablanca ending. In its own right, though, it’s an unsatisfying film — Soderbergh knows the music but he can’t quite play it. The acting feels self-conscious and the story (involving America’s efforts to smuggle Nazi scientists into the US) doesn’t have enough drama. “Driving to work, he killed more people than Al Capone in Chicago.”

That led me to rewatch a couple of movies from my sizable recorded-off-the-air collection. In Billy Wilder’s A FOREIGN AFFAIR (1948) it’s Congresswoman Phoebe Frost (Jean Arthur) who’s arriving in Berlin as part of a fact-finding commission. She’s shocked to discover American soldiers are dabbling in the black market and fraternizing with the local frauleins, despite Col. Plummer (Millard Mitchell) insisting it’s only to be expected (“You can’t pin a sergeant’s stripes on an angel.”).

When Frost learns one soldier is keeping Erika (Marlene Dietrich), a nightclub singer and Nazi wife, she recruits Captain Pringle (John Lund) to help find the man … which he could do just by looking in a mirror (you probably guessed that). He decides the best way to fend off Frost’s investigation is to romance her but damned if he doesn’t start falling for her for real (you probably guessed that too). The result is an odd mix of noirish cynicism and screwball romance that didn’t work as well for me as it did when I first saw it. However that may have been my mood more than anything. “There are 12,000 of our boys policing that pest-hole down there and if reports are accurate, they’re being infested by a moral malaria.”

BERLIN EXPRESS (1948) reminds me of the WW II trope where the mixed-ethnicity platoon (the Texan, the Italian American, the Irish American, the guy from Brooklyn …) must unite to become an effective fighting force. Here representatives of the Allied powers (including Robert Ryan as the Yank and Merle Oberon as a French woman) must work together when a cadre of leftover Nazis kidnaps Paul Lukas, the French diplomat who might be the one man who can reunite postwar Germany’s factions (the idea of The One Man Who Can Bring Peace is a trope with a long history, as in Hitchcock’s Man Who Knew Too Much). Can the good guys overcome their mutual antagonisms to succeed? The film is very much a product of its time, conscious the window to build a more peaceful post-war world is ebbing but hopeful it’s not completely shut (sigh). A solid little thriller directed by Jacques Tournier. “Some day my people will understand that peace is also a crisis — and then you will be done.”

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DUNE (2021) was Denis Villeneuve’s shot at adapting the supposedly unfilmable novel (though I think Syfy did a good job with their miniseries), which I caught to prep for TYG taking me to Part Two, below. The story of Timothee Chalamet’s Paul Atreides following his family to Arrakis — an indispensable planet to the Empire because the “spice” collected there is what makes space travel possible —only to be betrayed into the clutches of monstrous Baron Harkonen — is mostly faithful to the book but it’s underwhelming. I read that Villeneuve opted to shoot as if it were newsreel footage of real events, avoiding the flash of Star Wars or Flash Gordon and that was a mistake. And while the cast, including Oscar Isaacs as Baron Atreides, Stellan Skarsgard as Harkonen and Zendaya as one of Arrakis’ native Fremen are good, they’re giving their lines as if overly conscious that they’re doing Serious Drama Not Pulp Entertainment. In short, not impressed. “There is no call we do not answer, there is no faith that we betray.”

DUNE PART II (2024) was a pleasant surprise, with far more energy and action than Part One generated. Living among the Fremen, Paul learns their ways and steps into the role of their prophesied champion but Zendaya begins to worry his White Savior ways ultimately mean the Fremen are exchanging one master for another. With Javier Barden as a Fremen and Christopher Walken as Emperor, this was completely satisfying — but taken as a whole, I might still prefer SyFy (a final verdict will hinge on my rewatching it). “Place your hand in the box.”

SOLARIS (2002) was Steven Soderbergh’s adaptation of the Stanislaw Lem novel (which I’ve read and didn’t care for) about a space station orbiting the eponymous planet where suddenly the crew are encountering the ghosts of their past. Psychologist George Clooney goes up to make sense of all this only to find himself haunted by the ghost of his suicide wife. Clooney’s good but the movie’s ghost story didn’t work for me when I caught it in theaters, nor does it work on rewatching. “I’m going to resist the impulse to ask you about the doorknob.”Andrei Tarkovsky’s SOLARIS (1972) remains a much superior version, never dragging even though it’s almost twice as long. According to TCM host Bob Osborne (I caught part of his narration taping this off the air) Tarkovsky made the film after seeing 2001 and thinking it spent too much time on SF and not enough on the people. Thus this starts out with the psychiatrist (the Clooney role) spending time on Earth learning about what’s going on (which is never clear in the Soderbergh). Despite emphasizing people it feels more science fictional that the later film did; a shame Tarkovsky couldn’t make his Stalker equally good. “In this situation mediocrity and genius are equally helpless.”

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BETTER LUCK TOMORROW (2003) focuses on a group of Asian American teens who turn to shoplifting as a break from their rigorous academic lives. From there they jump to drug-dealing, selling cheat sheets and then … Competent but this never clicked with me.  “It’s literally a full-time commitment just to make people believe you’re the person you’re supposed to be.”

Stephen Soderbergh’s THE LIMEY (1999) stars Terence Stamp as a tough British thug, just out of the jug. His daughter, living in LA, has just died in what Stamp suspects was no accident, which is very bad news for the people responsible. This co-stars Lesley Anne Warren as a friend of the daughter and Peter Fonda as her ex-lover; the story is slight but the performances are strong.  “That’s usually what senseless violence comes down, to isn’t it? Bad loans, bad judgment, bad faith.”

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