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.

`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'

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

I couldn't track the characters and after 20 minutes I didn't want to track them. I just wanted it to end--what was Soderbergh thinking? At first I thought it was supposed to be amateurish since it was a movie within a movie, but, when it went on and on with horrible lighting and terrible hand-held camera work, it was enough to make one want to run out screaming.

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.