RECOMMENDED

Over the weekend, Steven Soderbergh offered the annual keynote address at the San Francisco International Film Festival, opining far and wide on the state of the film industry as he continues to proclaim his retirement from theatrically released features. But he made this proviso: no recording, no photographs, no iPhone videos, no Instagram, no online, no streaming. (Reportedly, SFIFF recorded it for some future release.) “If you’re not here today, you are missing out. This is a one-of-a-kind event, it will not be recorded. It will not be put online,” fest boss Ted Hope said. A few epigrammatic bits escaped via Twitter (and Sundance Festival worker Joseph Beyer), including “Is there a difference between cinema and movies? If I ran Team America, I’d say ‘Fuck yeah’”; “Cinema is something that is made, movies are seen”; “Cinema is a specificity of vision. It’s as unique as a fingerprint. If it’s done well, you know exactly who made it,” and “If I were running a studio, I’d get a Shane Carruth, a Barry Jenkins and an Amy Seimetz and ask ‘What do you wanna make?’” Amy Seimetz, who is the female lead in Shane Carruth’s “Upstream Color,” and was in Jenkins’ fine “Medicine for Melancholy” is also the writer-director of “Sun Don’t Shine,” and even if Soderbergh Studios’ largess has not yet arrived, she’s a gifted filmmaker through and through, and lives up to the first two epigrammatic stretches as well. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

Clever extrapolations can be made that almost any movie is a reflection of the means of its making.

Or, in the case of “Side Effects,” the moment of Steven Soderbergh, asserting that at the age of fifty, he’s done with feature-length “cinema,” and will move on to painting, longform, television and other yet-to-be-discovered venues for his intelligence and prodigious energy.

A tricky, sardonic thriller shot after the fashion of Adrian Lyne’s sexual-remorse thrillers like “Fatal Attraction” and “Unfaithful,” “Side Effects” is a revival of a script by Scott Z. Burns (“Contagion,” “The Informant!”) that Soderbergh took up after a “Man From U. N. C. L. E.” revival collapsed. A psychiatrist, Dr. Jonathan Banks (Jude Law), is assigned a patient who’s apparently tried to harm herself, Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara) after the release of her husband (Channing Tatum) from prison after four years on insider-trading charges. A succession of drugs (all with real names) doesn’t help, until a new (fictional) one seems to: Ablixa. But the thrills (and an ample aptitude for suspension of disbelief) come from questions of culpability and being wronged, rather than the pharma folderol. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Keanu Reeves, about to make his directorial debut with a China-set action movie, makes an engaging interlocutor in “Side By Side,” Chris Kenneally’s clear, brisk conversation of a documentary about the repercussions of the abrupt accomplishment of the handover from 35mm film as what we’ve known as “movies” for over a century to multiple permutations of digital production, distribution and exhibition. (Distributor Tribeca Film also has at least thirty short outtakes from the on-screen interviews at their YouTube channel; one with Lars von Trier in his office is below. It’s a genial mix, and a list of names alone suggests the quality of the exchanges: Steven Soderbergh, James Cameron, David Lynch, Martin Scorsese, Lana Wachowski, Andy Wachowski,  Richard Linklater, Christopher Nolan, Wally Pfister, David Fincher, Greta Gerwig, Robert Rodriguez, cinematographers Vilmos Zsigmond, Michael Chapman, Vittorio Storaro, Michael Ballhaus and Anthony Dod Mantle, editorial eminence Walter Murch, Danny Boyle, Dick Pope and “Lawrence of Arabia” editor Anne V. Coates, and, wouldn’t you know, George Lucas. Postures, postulations and occasional apercus follow. Read the rest of this entry »

Channing Tatum, Cody Horn.

RECOMMENDED

It took under a second to want to love Steven Soderbergh’s “Magic Mike,” and a fragment of a second that’s missing at the very very very very last shot of the movie seals it with a kiss. Opening with the 1970s Warner Bros. studio rollout—a wide screen filled with red with a white-on-black studio logo in its center—and the words, “Let’s fucking get it on tonight,” “Mike” immediately jabs: here, here’s a spirited try at what I can do with the mood of the 1970s Hollywood Renaissance. Lessons in place and pace offered by Altman and Ashby are immediately in evidence; there’s a loving embrace of “Saturday Night Fever”; as well as the passage of time being charted by Kubrick-like intertitles. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

The kick-ass experience: “Haywire” is kinetic neo-pulp that lands halfway between the solar plexus and the lizard part of the mind. The latest by prolific director-cinematographer-editor Steven Soderbergh, working a third time with screenwriter Lem Dobbs, after “Kafka” and “The Limey,” is self-conscious filmmaking, using genre trappings and a multi-double-triple-cross espionage plot to explore Soderbergh’s most consistent latterday theme—where government meets money and money wins—as well as the potential of a distaff Jean Claude Van Damme taking down a succession of handsome male adversaries (with notably crummy haircuts), largely through physicality alone. (The movie’s original, double-entendre title was “Knockout.”) Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

Gesundheit!

And so the world ends, not with a bang but with a touch. However it’s seen—a bookend to the nihilist ending of summer hit “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” a planetary “Poseidon Adventure” with an all-star cast helping us tell a vast number of roles apart, or a process piece, an “All the President’s Men” of pandemic preparedness—”Contagion,” Steven Soderbergh’s twenty-third film since 1989, is a corker of dread. Read the rest of this entry »

All Michael Bay’s “Transformers” in 3D is missing is a 40. (Take a 40, please.) Robustly cynical, “Transformers: Dark Of The Moon,” credited to screenwriter Ehren Kruger (“Scream 3,” “The Ring Two,” “Transformers 2″), serves up generous lashings of counterfactual pulp, including an Autobot-Decepticons-NASA-JFK-Nixon conspiracy with a soupcon of Chernobyl for spice. It’s like a Bizarro World Warren Report reduced to postage-stamp size. (The briefly seen JFK stand-in resembles someone who took second place in a Donald Trump look-alike contest.) “TDOTM” premiered at the Moscow Film Festival, and some of the most jazzed-up (yet largely incomprehensible) passages resemble the winningly cheesy special effects of local mogul Timur Bekmambetov’s “Night Watch” and “Day Watch,” but with less rude charm. Hope for keenly choreographed mayhem quickly fades. If not on the level of Michael Kidd and Vincente Minnelli’s work on “The Band Wagon,” say at least a few bars of “Collateral Damage,” the musical? When you’re working with Decepticons, a sentient race of mechanical beings that preceded film executives, you can hope to be the biggest and the best, but at best, you could only ever be ne plus Ultraman. (Or “Cars 3,” with eager-school-leaver Shia LaBeouf in the role of “Mater.”) Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

In “And Everything Is Going Fine,” monologist Spalding Gray narrates his life from beyond the grave in Steven Soderbergh’s inspired collage. Soderbergh had collaborated with Gray on the monologue film “Gray’s Anatomy” (1996), about the writer’s failing vision, as well as directing one of the most convincingly grim portraits of a despairingly doomed writer in “King of the Hill” (1993). Gray died in 2004, a likely suicide off a ferry after an earlier accident had damaged his lucid, limber memory. Soderbergh’s knack for fluid, inventive editing serves him well in this refined narrative, drawn from a reported ninety hours of original footage. Gray said he was dyslexic, and had said he remembered the previous telling when he performed more than he would recall a set text or consult his familiar notebooks or a tall clear glass of water. In its accomplished form, “And Everything…” replicates that organic palimpsest that existed only in the unique formations of one man’s brain. And not to forget, what a funny guy. What an observant man. What an estimable artist. Soderbergh didn’t carve a monument: he finished a sentence. Or, rather, allows Gray to finish his many sentences: he’s the sole narrator, his solitary subject, in this final version of all his tale-telling and truth-digging. The ending “lamentation” is discovered, found, observed, and perfect—the hearing of a kindred spirit. (89m. HDCAM video.) (Ray Pride)

“And Everything Is Going Fine” opens Friday at Siskel.

By Tom Lynch

50. “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” Shane Black, 2005

49. “In America,” Jim Sheridan, 2002

48. “The Lives of Others,” Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006

47. “Pan’s Labyrinth,” Guillermo del Toro, 2006

46. “Best in Show,” Christopher Guest, 2000

45. “Michael Clayton,” Tony Gilroy, 2007

44. “The Dark Knight,” Christopher Nolan, 2008 Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

Stately, plump Mark Whitacre bounds through the frame within the frames of rooms in hotels and corporate offices in “The Informant!” like a man whose racing thoughts propel him ever forward, his near-pompadour of hair ever upward.

In Steven Soderbergh’s lovingly batshit comedy about corporate conspiracy and whistle-blowing at Midwestern agricultural combine Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) in the 1990s, the storytelling moves at a velocity past a couple of the “Oceans” movies, along with a voice-over of comic static from biochemist and corporate vice-president Whitacre’s (Matt Damon) head. Seemingly outraged by the liberties taken by his bosses, Whitacre becomes a mole for the FBI in what appears to be a price-fixing setup with Japanese competitors in the market for lysine, an amino acid derived from corn. Sounds deadly dull? Not for a second. “The Informant!” plays like an ADD edition of “The Insider,” everything that would possibly be glum imbued with a rosy, optimistic, hopeful charge. Whitacre’s brain crackles with non-sequiturs; his inability to focus at any given moment is what makes the movie both strange and eccentrically funny. While this reportedly under-$25 million comedy may be described by some as a straightforward movie by the experimentally minded Soderbergh, it may be his most cracked, fractured film since “Schizopolis.” It’s high-fructose mania. Overlapping, contradicting, questioning, reassuring, it makes you wonder for the man’s sanity almost immediately. Read the rest of this entry »