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Rabu, 30 Oktober 2013

State of the Union: The 5 Key Points of Soderbergh’s Speech

56th San Francisco International Film Festival - Press Conference With Steven Soderbergh

Steven Soderbergh’s state of cinema talk, delivered Saturday at the San Francisco International Film Festival, caused a big stir. Because he requested his remarks not be filmed, taped or transcribed — and because, of course, it inevitably was — information about the speech trickled down in dribs and drabs. What was initially colored as the kvetching of a director reiterating the timeless Hollywood battle between art and commerce has a lot more to chew on than initially reported. Five things to chew on from one of our smartest (ex?) directors’:

1.) “Art, in my view, is a very elegant problem-solving model.”

That explains a lot about Soderbergh’s filmography — famously eclectic in its subject matter, yet easily recognizable as the work of one mind. Some of the ways in which Soderbergh asserts himself aren’t universally pleasing, to say the least: the color-coded filters which separate one location/time from another (introduced in “Traffic,” taken to their logical extreme in “Contagion”) are as ugly as they are functional and have been known to turn former fans into haters.

But here’s a guy who’s approached disparate projects and genres and made them distinctively his own: in his latest hyper-productive stretch (“Contagion,” “Haywire,” “Magic Mike”), it would take only five seconds to ID the maker. Compare/contrast with a director like Ang Lee, who’s solved many problems — filming on water with a tiger on “Life of Pi,” mainstreaming gay anti-romance with “Brokeback Mountain” — yet still seems stolidly, insistently anonymous, both stylistically and thematically. Soderbergh’s films fixate on economic inequality, the visible symptoms of late capitalism at its worst, and what it’s like to track one story through multiple global locales, imposing a viewpoint through distinctive visual/editorial products.

2.) “When a studio is attempting to determine on a project-by-project basis what will work, instead of backing a talented filmmaker over the long haul, they’re actually increasing their chances of choosing wrong. Because in my view, in this business which is totally talent-driven, it’s about horses, not races.”

There’s a closer-to-home, non-sports analogy in the music industry. In the 2009 book “Appetite For Self-Destruction,” Steve Knopper makes the point that record companies once functioned on a model of signing a band, then letting them work the kinks out of their artistic system until they were ready to make music that would satisfy both them and the vast public, the prototypical example being R.E.M. That model collapsed eventually — Knopper devotes a few pages to Debbie Southwood-Smith, whose last act before being canned from Interscope was to sign TV On The Radio, who paid off long-haul after she’d been fired — but it’s not clear that the music industry’s benefitted from concentrating on short-term effects. Major labels also notoriously focused on a model in which the vast majority of albums would flop terribly, hemorrhaging money all over the place, but in which blockbuster records would more than make up the cost. That strategy isn’t surefire and can be costly, as when Universal Pictures lost $83 million for one quarter on the sole basis of “Battleship” bombing.

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3.) “There’s the expense of putting a movie out, which is a big problem. Point of entry for a mainstream, wide-release movie: $30 million. That’s where you start. Now you add another 30 for overseas. Now you’ve got to remember, the exhibitors pay half of the gross, so to make that 60 back you need to gross 120. So you don’t even know what your movie is yet, and you’re already looking at 120.”

This is the part of the speech that got the most attention initially, and I’m not interested in disputing it: I’m not an industry reporter, nor do I have access to the kind of mind-numbing, soul-crushing info Soderbergh does, and I believe what he’s saying. However, there’s clearly one pocket of studio production that’s beaten the advertising cost odds, and that’s the micro-budget horror movie. Inspired by the success of “Paranormal Activity,” grungy little movies that rarely top the $5 million mark budgetarily are released all the time, and they work like gangbusters. It doesn’t matter if they’re terrible or audiences feel burned — as with last year’s “The Devil Inside” — because a good opening weekend is really all that matters. For whatever reason, these things sell themselves, and it’s an anomaly worth noting.

4.) “The international box office, which used to be 50% of revenue is now 70%.”

Industry people know this, but the general public doesn’t seem to get it, and it’s an important answer to a question frequently asked by frustrated multiplex audiences: “What is this? Why was this made?” Most Hollywood movies aren’t made for Americans at all: they’re made for international consumption by audiences whose domestic industries can’t afford the high-grade CGI and lavish, visible overspending we can. A mediocre blockbuster spectacle is still a spectacle: as Soderbergh observes, genres that travel best are “action-adventure, science fiction, fantasy, spectacle, some animation thrown in there.” (The only Hollywood movies intended pretty much solely for domestic consumption are most comedies and the ambiguously-named “urban” [read: black-audience-oriented] movie.) You’re not the target audience, you’re just the excuse.

5.) “…Pushing cinema out of mainstream movies.”

Soderbergh argued that cinema as he conceives it — art, in short, rather than naked commerce — can no longer come through the Hollywood system, which seems as true as ever at the moment. I’d suggest a corollary, which is the decline of the hired-hand craftsman. The “genius of the system” has often been paid tribute to, and from time to time directors lament that they can’t participate in an efficient production line. Recently, for example, as unlikely a director as Portugese arthouse terror Pedro Costa said he’d “like to have a system that grounds me.” Forget cinema: what’s been lost in Hollywood is an assembly-line that’s good at what it does, economical in doing so, and capable of matching directors who want nothing more than to be efficient at their jobs with appropriate material.

It’s striking that Soderbergh’s recent run is his attempt at being a one-man studio, tackling various forms of genre while keeping an eye on what he thinks mainstream audiences might like. The sheer amount of inefficiency and interference from start to finish, combined with toxic amounts of money, has ballooned significantly in the time Soderbergh’s entered the system, reducing the amount of space available for minor miracles of economical precision. One of the joys of film history is sifting through previously marginalized B-movies for examples of the undervalued craft; when the historians come for the Hollywood of the last decade, they’ll find almost nothing like that.

Categories: Features

Tags: Speech, State of the Cinema, Steven soderbergh, Vadim Rizov

Sabtu, 19 Januari 2013

Top 5/Bottom 5: Steven Soderbergh’s Movies

Eric D. Snider January 14, 2013


Steven Soderbergh celebrated his 26th birthday on Jan. 14, 1989, a few days before his first feature, “sex, lies, and videotape,” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, launching his career and ushering in a new era of independent film. In the intervening 24 years, he’s made 24 more films, ranging from crowd-pleasing heist comedies to esoteric experiments, from biopics to whatever “Magic Mike” was. He occasionally writes his own screenplays, usually acts as his own cinematographer (under the pseudonym Peter Andrews) and often serves as editor (as Mary Ann Bernard). Sometimes he’ll release two movies in one year; once this resulted in him competing against himself for Best Director at the Academy Awards. (He won.)


The busy man turns 50 today, marking the point at which he’s said he intends to retire (or at least take a “hiatus”) from filmmaking. It remains to be seen whether he’ll go through with it. His pharmaceutical thriller “Side Effects” hits theaters next month, followed by his Liberace biopic “Behind the Candelabra” on HBO in the spring. And after that? In case there is no “after that,” we’ll take his half-century mark as an occasion to rank his five best films. And since it’s always good to give a birthday boy a little razzing, we’ll include the bottom five, too.


Top 5:


1. ‘The Limey’ (1999)
This hard-boiled thriller about a British thug investigating the death of his daughter in Los Angeles isn’t just marvelously entertaining, with an engrossing, twisty plot and an unforgettable lead performance by Terence Stamp. It’s also a prime example of Soderbergh’s gift for bringing artsy, inventive flourishes to mainstream products. In his hands, what could have been an ordinary crime drama is elevated to the status of minor classic.


2. ‘Traffic’ (2000)
Soderbergh’s one and only Oscar (so far) was for directing this sprawling, multifaceted look at the war on drugs. (It also won for its editing, screenplay, and for Benicio Del Toro’s supporting performance.) Loosely adapted from a British miniseries, “Traffic” was a box office hit as well as a critical darling, and it paved the way for HBO’s “The Wire.”


3. ‘Out of Sight’ (1998)
The director’s fascination with crime was never sexier than in this adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel about a suave bank robber (played by George Clooney in the first of his six collaborations with Soderbergh) who develops a mutual attraction with a U.S. marshal (Jennifer Lopez). Coolly seductive and playful, the movie thrives on the chemistry between its stars and on Soderbergh’s effortless ability to inject personality into a potboiler.


4. ‘Ocean’s Eleven’ (2001)
It’s his biggest commercial success to date ($183 million in the U.S., $451 million worldwide); it’s a remake; and it inspired two sequels. The man who was once the face of indie filmmaking went Hollywood here — and guess what? He proved as adept at popcorn fluff as he is at more thoughtful fare. Boasting a huge, charismatic cast — Clooney! Pitt! Damon! Roberts! — this is one of the rare remakes that improves on the original, a sleek, jaunty heist caper that demonstrates how much fun you can have making a movie.


5. ‘The Informant!‘ (2009)
It was another eight years before Soderbergh exhibited the kind of playfulness that made “Ocean’s Eleven” a hit, and while “The Informant!” didn’t do nearly as well, it’s even loopier and more creative. Matt Damon shines as a naive, talkative corporate whistle-blower, surrounded by a funny supporting cast and buoyed by a kitschy Marvin Hamlisch musical score. Just when you think you know where it’s going, Soderbergh takes you down a different path (the true story it’s based on is equally bizarre), providing an odd, provocative character study.


Bottom 5:


1. ‘Full Frontal’ (2002)
Soderbergh had experimented before, and he’d made a film with a large all-star cast. In “Full Frontal,” he combined the two, and man, what a wreck. Semi-improvised by actors who clearly were not adept at improvisation, this tedious, navel-gazing rumination about Hollywood is almost insufferable.


2. ‘Kafka’ (1991)
Talented though he is, Soderbergh was not immune to the sophomore slump. His follow-up to “sex, lies, and videotape” was this strange mystery that’s partly an adaptation of Franz Kafka’s fiction and partly a biography of him. Yet even here, in a misfire, Soderbergh’s talent shone through. Vincent Canby was not alone among critics in calling it “a very bad well-directed movie.”


3. ‘The Underneath’ (1995)
Remaking the 1949 film noir “Criss Cross,” Soderbergh showed that there’s only so much a good director can do with a weak screenplay (which he co-wrote) and formulaic material.


4. ‘Schizopolis’ (1996)
Soderbergh has never been more eccentric, more self-indulgent and more fascinatingly off-target than in this absurd, non-linear experiment in which he also starred. You can admire his boldness, and occasionally laugh at the gags, but this mostly comes off as a juvenile embarrassment.


5. ‘Ocean’s Twelve’ (2004)
Having scored a critical, commercial and artistic success with “Ocean’s Eleven,” Soderbergh here fell victim to a common Hollywood trap: trying to do it again without realizing what made it work the first time. “Ocean’s Twelve” isn’t a terrible movie, but it wastes many of its cast members, introduces too many new ones, takes the action out of Las Vegas and generally reeks of indulgence.

Categories: Lists

Tags: Behind the Candelabra, benicio del toro, brad pitt, channing tatum, Elmore Leonard, Full Frontal, george clooney, jennifer lopez, julia roberts, Kafka, Magic Mike, matt damon, Ocean's Eleven, Ocean's Twelve, Out of Sight, Schizopolis, sex lies and videotape, Side Effects, steven soderbergh, Terence Stamp, the informant!, the limey, The Underneath, Top 5/Bottom 5, traffic, Magic Mike, Out of Sight, Traffic, George Clooney, Steven Soderbergh, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Jennifer Lopez, Side Effects, sex, lies, and videotape, Behind the Candelabra, The Limey, Ocean's Eleven, The Informant, Full Frontal, Kafka, The Underneath, Schizopolis, Ocean's Twelve, Terence Stamp, Benicio Del Toro, Julia Roberts Previous article Lessons Learned at the 2013 Golden Globes Next article Movies Streaming/On Demand This Week: ‘Taken 2,’ ‘Paranormal Activity 4' & More