Voll frontal

Steven Soderbergh, who has films like the epic Traffic, the fun Ocean's Eleven and cooly out there Out of Sight, goes back to his roots of Sex, Lies and Videotape which is awfully tricky, and unfortunately doesn't succeed. Soderbergh's style here is getting a story of a movie within a movie possibly within another universe somewhere, all squeezed into the Hollywood underbelly of LA. One story tells of Julia Roberts as a reporter interviewing Blair Underwood, and it works fairly until at one point it almost turns to a behind the scenes thing where we can spot Soderbergh himself (humorously but un-needingly) with a censored black box over his face, and then showing and maybe not showing Underwood and Roberts as themselves. Another story has David Hyde Pierce as a man in his early fourties who gets fired after a beer comparison, and then even another story focuses on a small theater group trying to put on a play about Hitler with Nicky Katt giving the best performance of the entire time length as an actor who compares other famous directors works to his. And I just scraped the surface of what else pops up here.

In other words, despite a couple of funny jabs, a laugh out loud respect to Brad Pitt and some trying to be decent in acting, the film doesn't work cause the switching between real film and digital grain aspect will allude many of the filmgoers and confuse them to the point where they dont know when the movie lost it's main core and becomes a movie about nothing- like a behind the scenes DVD disc made into a movie. Soderbergh needs to get back to what he does best, if only so Julia Roberts can do something else as well. C

Steven Soderbergh's much-maligned digital satire of Hollywood took an unfair savaging at the hands of American critics, who seem to resent the fact that the man has become the single most interesting and consistently exciting film director currently working in America. Designed as a deliberately low-budget, quasi-improvised indie production to counter-balance the big studio production of "Ocean's Eleven", "Full Frontal" was shot according to a Dogme 95-like manifesto (the actors had to drive themselves to work and do their own wardrobe and make-up, all the locations are pre-existing), and is a cross between the confessional nature of "Sex, Lies & Videotape", the multi-story structure of "Magnolia" and the film-within-a-film framework of François Truffaut's "Day for Night". It's the tale of a day in the life of six Los Angelenos connected in some way to the film industry: budding screenwriters Enrico Colantoni and David Hyde Pierce; Pierce's sister-in-law Mary McCormack, a struggling masseuse, and wife Catherine Keener, a human resources VP on the verge of a nervous breakdown; black actor Blair Underwood and film star Julia Roberts. Soderbergh follows the day's events as if he were shooting a documentary, in grainy (post-produced) DV, intercutting it with 35mm photography of a film in production starring Underwood and Roberts, whose plot is supposed to echo the main characters' situations. The Chinese-box structure only really becomes comprehensible about a third of the way in, and what looks at first like a self-indulgent exercise in the mechanics of low-budget filmmaking quickly becomes a cinema masterclass as Soderbergh effortlessly navigates the veritable maze of referential layers between film and life to the point you can no longer distinguish where film ends and reality begins, throwing in a number of celebrity cameos (Brad Pitt, Miramax's Harvey Weinstein, Terence Stamp reprising a scene from "The Limey") that blur the borders even further. You have to be open for it, but if you are you'll be richly rewarded.

Director Steven Soderbergh calls Full Frontal the unofficial sequel to Sex Lies and Videotape, his groundbreaking 1989 film. Most everyone else has called it a mess, or useless waste of time. One prominent American critic even suggested this might be the worst film ever by a major director. I can't say I agree with the harsh criticism. While I'm not exactly sure what the movie is about, and vast passages of it simply do not work, I do think it is a film with great passion and energy. Soderbergh has left behind the slickness of Ocean's 11 and Erin Brockovich and made an experimental film that bristles with inventiveness. Not everything works, but there are several nice performances, particularly by David Hyde Pierce and Catherine Keener and I enjoyed watching an A-list director stray from the tried and true and explore rockier ground.

`Full Frontal' is maybe my greatest deception this year. Directed by Steven Soderbergh and having such a cast, I would not believe that the film could be such a crap. There are lots of characters, but none of them is well developed. Therefore, the viewer sees many famous actors and actresses on the screen and is not able to understand who they are, what are their motives, where they are. The plot is very confused, and some actors and actresses perform more than one role. The image and photography are horrible, using a kind of fake Dogma '95 style. I do not know how such talented people could be part of such a mess: friendship or big money? Anyway, a huge waste of talented people and of my time and money, in a film that never works. My vote is three.

Title (Brazil): `Full Frontal'

Rented this film after reading an interview in DV Magazine with Soderbergh. Evidently the film was a concept; to play the visual qualities of film against those of digital video, & to try to integrate the 'Reality Show' idea into a feature film. The film has a few good moments but comes off confusing & visually ugly. I have worked in both film & video. Video is still inferior to film in terms of visual quality but it doesn't have to be ugly. There is lots of footage in the film that is just plain ugly thru run & gun style shooting carelesness. A little more craft in shooting the video would have kept it technically in bounds & still allowed the video quality to express itself. While I'm at it a major mistake was shooting the video with only one cameraman (Soderbergh himself). This is a major advantage of video; cheap multi-camera shooting is one of the great benefits. Double teaming this excellent cast with two good cameramen on these small self-focusing cameras could have produced some awesome cutting material. A tragic mistake. There are also lightweight gymbal camera mounts for these cameras which make beautiful floating camera moves. They could really have helped the hand held camera. Even though the film doesn't quite work I have to hand it to the director for trying. It would be easy to back off the cutting edge thru fear. Hitchcock did proof of concept stuff with 'Rope', nobody ever did that again but the film wasn't a failure either. It's all about guts. I think the reason for the big name cast was that they wanted to try to break some new ground too. Maybe just making lots of money gets boring (although personally I can't see why). The best acting was by Catherine Keener. She got to develop a full & interesting character. Close behind & neck & neck were David Hyde Pierce & Blair Underwood. I also really liked Nicky Katt as Hitler. I agree with others that his role & the producer's should have been expanded; especially his. 101 minutes run time leaves 19 minutes to play around with (120 standard US film). That's lots of time. The article also said that there were some hidden & fully candid cameras used. I wish I could tell where or even if any of that was used. I say reload & try again. Hell even more radical. Shoot the whole thing with hidden cameras. What always kills avant guarde experiments is lack of good actors & there was no lack here.