Full Frontal

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.

`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'

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.)

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.

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