Inside Traffic: The Making of 'Traffic'

IMDb is littered with thousands of listings for these "making of" so-called documentaries, few of which have any merit, and 99% have no standalone value whatsoever. They are merely a by-product of the DVD (and now Blu-Ray I guess) era: filler that Pavlovian trained home theater watchers demand to get their money's worth. Whether they get recognized and accorded a full IMDb entry is 100% arbitrary; about half of the ones I sit through are in, the other half (regardless of quality) ignored.

This one has lots of random excerpts from the film, padded out by talking heads of the cast and crew explaining what they were attempting with the film TRAFFIC. Director and screenwriter get relatively little time, and just to prove this is a fake docu and not the real thing, the genesis of the project in two previous TV miniseries is never mentioned at all. Suppressing this essential fact is key to the raison d'etre for this 19 minute time-waster: it's merely a long promo/advertisement.

I learned next to nothing from watching it, other than Soderbergh's self-congratulatory doubling as a camera operator, and incredibly pompous and pretentious statements about how he hates perfection ("it's dull") and likes the mistakes that come while shooting from the hip. Given some of his later work (and encompassing that of like-minded hack Mike Figgis) this revelation shifts in my mind instantly from the intended "gee what a bright boy am I" to "what a jerk!".

Oh for the days when filmmakers were making films, not some "product", and the theatrical exhibition mode was the goal. And especially for the times when the finished film had to stand on its own, good or bad, with no commentaries, out-takes, phony "director's cuts" and crappy making-of promos to guide us humble viewers to enlightenment.