Full 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

You know, for years I have been of the belief that Steven Soderbergh was a great filmmaker, because of Sex, Lies and Videotape, always waiting for his next great film, but it never comes. After watching Schizopolis, Oceans 11, etc., etc., and now finally Full Frontal, I have to say I think he's a fraud. How could anyone with even an ounce of artistic vision cast Julia Roberts all the time? She blows. I think Soderbergh is to indie film what Ringo Starr was to rock and roll. He was in the right place at the right time, but definitely not worthy of the indie-film-god status that seems to be associated with him. I think sans James Spader in SL&VT, we would not know Soderbergh's name today. Sad, really.

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.

I wish FULL FRONTAL was just better made, that's all. As somebody who in works in Digital Video, it just would of been great to see members of the Hollywood A-list (Soderburgh, Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt, etc etc) be in a great, crowd pleasing film that was made with the video equipment I use. Instead, we had a confusing film that caters to an art-house crowd, or at least, tries to. Too many times, the camera is operated in a way to say "Hey look, don't pay attention to the story, pay attention to this sun-glare, or bad zoom.)

Too dreary to work as a satire, too wrapped up in its own cleverness to engage; this is an insubstantial vanity piece that might have been entertaining to make but isn't much fun to watch. I'd have thought that if Soderbergh wanted to show off, he could have come up with something better than this collection of over-scripted (and not particularly original) gimmicks.

It might have worked had we spent more time in the company of the interesting peripheral characters (the theatrical Hitler, Gus the producer) than listening to the self-absorbed droning of the others. Film students will probably love it.