Traffic (2000)

4/5

Steven Soderbergh's Traffic weaves an intricate, spellbinding tale that is nearly impossible to take your eyes off of for its entire 2.5 hour running time. The plotting is impeccable, keeping you engaged whether detailing the intricacies of drug consumption or the complex involvement of governments on drug trafficking. The stories, as penned by Stephen Gaghan, are eye-opening and richly-textured. We are thrust into a collection of environments so authentic that we cannot help but take the events that pass as reality. We become involved and complicit; we end up shaken and unclean. Every person has a little bit of good in them and a little bit of bad in them, making decisions equal parts wrong and equal parts right. There are heart-breaking scenes in here, made all the more powerful thanks to superb acting, that combine with profound and provocative ideas to bring home a very specific message: the war on drugs is a lost cause. The film ends on a solemn, haunting note, showing us characters continuing to fight a battle that will never end and will only take more lives. Everything feels so overwhelming, and we are all so helpless to effect change.

But despite my high praise, the movie also fails on a number of levels. Honestly, I hated the editing. The pacing was practically non-existent, with innumerable superfluous scenes cut together haphazardly. (Not that the movie was boring per se, just that there was about 30 minutes of extra footage meandering throughout its nonlinear storyline.) The editing was almost as bad as some of Soderbergh's directing decisions. Really? Blue, orange, and red? That's your big contribution to the story? I'm not saying it's not a well-directed movie from other standpoints, just that the colors were a bit too in-your-face for me. It was about as subtle as a sledgehammer. But Soderbergh still somehow manages to fill our minds and our hearts to their breaking point, giving us a timely and timeless story that is both absorbing and poignant. And also unforgettable.

IMDb link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0181865/

Side Effects (2013)

5/5

Steven Soderbergh's Side Effects is an utterly absorbing film of the highest caliber. It is so phenomenal that I will simply urge everyone to see it immediately. This review will still be here when you come back, and you can read it then. The movie is pristine, with a story that is compelling from start to finish. The writing is finely-tuned to the daily grind of medical professionals, with an impeccable ear for realistic dialogue, and an authentic sense of paranoia regarding malpractice. A movie focusing on each individual element with the level of skill seen here would be commendable, but Side Effects weaves them all together and throws in hints of sinister subterfuge to underpin the movie.

The film begins by entrenching us in the banalities of depression, and the movie is about as far from exciting as you can get. It fills each frame with Instagram-style mood shots that are surprisingly evocative and effective. The story unfolds from there, evolving into a shocking murder mystery and its innumerable unexpected consequences. We are thrust into a legal battle that should frighten any practicing physician--one of the movie's greatest triumphs is how eerily accurate this situation feels--but it is not over yet. Soderbergh continues to mesmerize us with a twist ending that upends not only the framework of the film, but of the characters therein.

Every aspect of this movie fascinated me. I was absorbed and engaged, watching it with a delighted smile the entire time--up until the gasp of horror at the finale, that is. Soderbergh has perfected his techniques and he can retire from film knowing he made a masterpiece. On top of the thematically-rich script, he gives us crisply-filmed cinematography, tightly-cut editing, and expertly-cast acting. Honestly, I cannot stop thinking about this chilling film. It unnerves patients and doctors in all the right ways, forces us to contemplate the failings of our current health care system, and does it all with unerring style. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

IMDb link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2053463/

Magic Mike (2012)

2/5

Steven Soderbergh's Magic Mike is loosely based on Channing Tatum's early stripping days in Tampa. It is essentially a dance movie like Step Up with more bare chests and pelvic thrusts. The plotting is uninspired: Tatum introduces 19-year-old Adam (Pettyfer) to male stripping, When Adam discovers he has a knack for it, he becomes entrenched in drugs and high-risk sexual behavior. Tatum is trying to get out of the stripping "business," although I personally thought his dancing was better than his custom furniture, which teetered between eyesore and offensive. It's nothing you haven't seen before, and it's not done particularly well by Soderbergh this time. The dancing was "Xquisite," but the acting was not. McConaughey did give an uncharacteristically competent and believable performance, and Tatum's acting continues to gradually improve, but I would still place both of them in the category of "would not cast in my own movie unless I wanted star power." On the whole, it's a decent enough movie but fails to introduce us to anything new or different.

IMDb link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1915581/

Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989)

4/5

Steven Soderbergh's Sex, Lies, and Videotape is the quintessential independent film of the late 80's/early 90's, and it undoubtedly set the bar for independent film for the next decade. It focuses on the characters more than the plot, their motivations more than their actions, and their relationships more than their promiscuity. It is appropriately patient, awkwardly humorous, and sensually descriptive. It is emotionally explosive and subtly fascinating. But it is also maddeningly unclear sometimes.

The movie is basically a four-person character study. But it never feels as if the writer created the characters and manipulated them to his whims like voodoo dolls. Instead, the characters were real people, and the writer simply watched them interact in his mind, and faithfully transcribed the events. This is an expertly-written film that feels impossibly realistic and true. And contains interesting thematic elements. It examines the ubiquity of sex and lies, through the eyes of each character. It uses videotape and asks what it means to watch, to point the camera at someone, and to have it pointed at yourself.

The movie is certainly dated, and shows its age from hairstyles to clothing to slang, but that never takes away from the experience. What does take away is the somewhat deflated ending; and the feeling that I never got a satisfying explanation of what exactly happened in the characters' pasts and why. Part of me enjoys that, knowing that real life is never so tidy, but the rest of me is annoyed. Still, the movie is a great watch and asks intriguing questions. Highly recommended.

IMDb link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098724/

Haywire (2011)

4/5

Steven Soderbergh's Haywire is a tightly-paced action thriller about a covert ops agent (Carano) who is double-crossed by her boss (McGregor). If the plot feels tired and rehashed, that's because it is. Story-wise, nothing about this movie is all that new or interesting, despite the scriptwriter's best efforts at infusing it with twists and turns. Two things make this movie good, and two things only. One is the directing and the other is the fighting. And there are a lot of fight scenes. Soderbergh avoids the frenzied over-editing you find in lots of modern action films and keeps the camera far enough away so you can actually tell what's going on. The fighting feels authentic thanks to the lead, Carano, who is an MMA fighter and American Gladiator. Unfortunately, she's not a great actress. Her lines are cold and hard, so half the time she manages to sound like a badass and the other half she sounds like an idiot reading a script. If you know what to expect going in, this movie will more than live up to your expectations, but it's far from a genre-bending production.

IMDb link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1506999/

Contagion (2011)

4.9/5

Steven Soderbergh's Contagion is a phenomenal, finely-crafted film. This doomsday thriller uses an exquisitely contagious pathogen to intertwine the lives of people around the world. The movie starts with Beth Emhoff (Paltrow) after she develops an annoying cough. She flies home from China to meet her husband (Damon) in Minneapolis and manages to spread it across Kowloon, Guangdong, Chicago, and San Francisco within days. Scientists at the CDC (Ehle, Martin) and WHO (Cotillard) are racing against the clock to find patient zero and treat the disease. Dr. Cheever (Fishburne) and Dr. Mears (Winslet) begin isolating known contacts, quarantining the sick, and dealing with the press while an internet blogger (Law) proclaims the miracles of a homeopathic drug. Seemingly minuscule actions rapidly spiral out of control and we cannot help but try to follow along at its breakneck speed.

There is an intensity and urgency to everything about the movie; its feverish pace is electrifying. The film manages to pack a lot of content into its 90-minute running time, and luckily this movie has some very intriguing thematics and hypotheticals from every sphere of society for you to ponder. Technically, the filmmaking is exceptional. Soderbergh switches between storylines swiftly and smoothly without it feeling startling or obnoxious. The acting is pristine and believable, which is difficult to do considering the somewhat alien and unpredictable scenario. The writing is equally authentic. The challenge in medical films is getting the science right, but Contagion does it with aplomb. There is nary a misstep in sight, despite a few improbable stretches of the imagination for the sake of artistic license. It's not quite a perfect movie, but Contagion has just about everything you could want in a movie and I can't wait to watch it again.

IMDb link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1598778/

The Informant! (2009)

4/5

Steven Soderbergh's The Informant! is a rare mix of comedy, drama, and annoying music. The plot follows Matt Damon as a biochemist in a corn processing conglomerate in the 1990's who starts helping the FBI set up a case against his company for price-fixing lysine. He wears a wire and provides evidence, but as the trial looms closer the agents on the case (Bakula and McHale) can't help but feel that he isn't telling them the whole truth. The storyline could have easily been turned into an action thriller or a sentimental drama, but Soderbergh chose to emphasize its sometimes outlandish scenarios and turn it into a comedy. And in order to make sure the audience fully appreciated its levity, he soaked the movie in the musical equivalent of urine. One review I read called it "wacky, circus-like music," but that is an understatement. My ear felt like it was ravaged raw. I had to nurse it back to health.

Despite the aural travesty, this movie had a lot to like. From the simplest decisions like font choice to the complex decisions like voice-overs and shot-by-shot editing, Soderbergh does a fantastic job. The movie feels like it was made in the 90's, which may be a good or bad thing depending on who the viewer is, but it was impressive nonetheless. It was the subtleties like overblown highlights and faded colors that really made the film feel 15 years old. Certainly not one of Soderbergh's best or worst films, it's still a solid piece of entertainment with some sadness, some sympathy, and a whole lot of humor. If the previews piqued your interest, it's definitely good enough for you to drop $10 on it. But don't say I didn't warn you if you come out of the theater with bleeding ears.

IMDb link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1130080/

Ocean's Thirteen (2007)

4/5

Ocean's Thirteen is entertainment of the guiltiest form. Although far from an artistic endeavor, it keeps you hooked. You know what will happen, but you watch anyway because the ride is so much fun. With its wonderful tongue-in-cheek style, you can tell just how much the actors were enjoying themselves. The numerous self-references, movie references, and in-jokes prove this. (I am a sucker for Godfather references.) I think Soderbergh really hit home with the style. From the 60's credits to the wipes and zooms, it truly felt like the movies it stole from. The pacing worked exceptionally well and I loved how the stories interweaved. Ocean's Twelve unevenly favored a few characters while most of our favorites were imprisoned and helpless. Here we see everyone working their magic the way we first met them, in perfect synchrony and balance. In this movie, Soderbergh fixed all the mistakes present in Twelve. And Pacino is great as the bad guy. It's a fun movie, so check it out if you liked the others (or at least the first one).

IMDb link: http://imdb.com/title/tt0496806/

The Limey (1999)

4/5

The Limey is smart, unique, and innovative. Soderbergh displays his true artistry in this film, a film that is stylistically divergent from every other revenge thriller. Terence Stamp plays a father fresh out of a British prison who goes to the States to discover the details of his daughter's "mysterious car accident." As with any movie based on this premise, it was not an accident, but murder. And he must kill the person responsible. The plot is nothing to write home about; the striking aspect is the style. Soderbergh pushes the envelope of common cinematic conventions like shot/counter-shot dialogue. People have a single conversation at different times, in different places, yet it feels natural and smooth because a consistent mood is maintained. The cinematography was unbelievably stunning and the editing was refreshingly new. The writing was simple yet effective. My favorite line: "There's one thing I don't understand. The thing I don't understand is every motherfuckin' word you're saying." The most enduring line: "You tell him, you tell him I'm coming. Tell him I'm fucking coming!"

The beginning of the movie was quite confusing because of the stylistic choices. After a while, the style itself lost its power and grew a bit tiresome. The movie can be a bit too artsy, which can turn people off if they go in expecting a typical action movie, but I didn't mind it. What did bug me was the introduction of Peter Fonda's Terry Valentine. The use of dissolves made it look like a Calvin Klein ad. I found a lot of the acting stale and unrealistic (mostly by the women). There is a shot near the end that mirrors the opening shot, which I was really hoping they would close on. Unfortunately, they didn't.

IMDb link: http://imdb.com/title/tt0165854/

The Good German (2006)

3/5

The best part about The Good German is how it looked. A murder mystery set in 1945 post-war Berlin, it attempts to emulate a film noir style but doesn't quite succeed. The problem is that Soderbergh doesn't know film well enough, and doesn't get the specifics right. I liked how he made the film look, with his stark black and white photography and slightly blurred images, but film noir didn't look like that. While film back then was never quite as crisp as the HD cameras we have now, it was certainly more crisp than the TV-style images inhabiting this movie. And the heavy black and whites with minimal gray midtones was too stark for 40's noir; it felt more in line with the worse film grain from the mid-30's. Additionally, while noirs are supposed to have confusing, labyrinthine plots, this one is a bit excessive. At the end of the movie, I really had no idea what had happened, which is never a good thing. I understood more about The Big Sleep. It seemed as if there were a bunch of innuendos and assumptions that the characters went with that I never got, which left me in the dark for most of the movie. Also, there were so many "references" or "homages" to Casablanca, not just in shots, but in entire plot constructions, that it just felt like theft to me.

On the other side of the stick, the cinematography was amazing. The lighting and composition in so many scenes were spot-on and looked like actual 1940's film noir. The consistently bleak mood and dark underbelly of surviving in such a ravaged situation fit nicely in the noir genre. While the swearing and sex were not exactly staples of film noir, their inclusion in the movie made it feel more crude and more vulgar, which I believe is how film noir felt in the 40's. The acting was amazing by all parties. Tobey Maguire unnerved me, Cate Blanchett was equally stunning and deceptive, and George Clooney, it seemed, really would stop at nothing to get to the truth. Unfortunately, this movie is not a film noir, for a great many reasons, and despite all its efforts, it is merely an unsuccessful attempt at one. Not really recommended, but A for effort.

IMDb link: http://imdb.com/title/tt0452624/

Ocean's Twelve (2004)

3/5

Ocean's Twelve was an enjoyable comedy/heist movie. The heist elements were pretty subpar for the most part with a couple cool things thrown in here and there, but I thought it was just so funny. My expectations were so low because everyone came out disappointed (because the first one was so good) that I actually had a really fun time watching this. The acting as always was great, the laughs consistent and solid, and the directing light and fun. There are cameos and big names like nothing you've ever seen before. And, for the most part, it just works. You let go of small inconsistencies because you're entertained.

However, the plot was pretty pitiful, a fact that cannot go ignored; it felt like it was trying to construct a story around the actors' schedules and not the other way around. Because of that, I was actually impressed when all the actors were on the screen together. But the story's limitations really hinder it, considering it's a crime movie with more than twelve main characters in it. Each character really should have some fundamental role in the narrative, and they don't. They're merely accessories. This is what is lacking in this movie that people seemed to love about the first one. Anyway, I greatly enjoyed myself while watching it, and if you're interested you should definitely check it out.

IMDb link: http://imdb.com/title/tt0349903/