There are those who say that Mr Soderbergh has somehow lost it. The idea of having a geek who manages to balance between multi-million dollar industry and tiny arthouse flics is very charming, but the question is when did he last manage to perform in the arthouse segment – and which one of the blockbusters is actually worth watching? "Oceans 11" – more boring than it should have been. 12? Unwatchable gibberish, in which I missed the main plotline because I could not stand all that crappy dialogue anymore and listened to other things such as my grumbling stomach. 13? Forgot – I canot even remember whether I watched it or not. "Sex, Lies, Videotape" was pretty good at the time, even thoug it may have been more important from an industry point-of-view than from the audience’s. Terrible "Kafka" nonsense. "Erin Brokovitch" was pretty interesting and fun at the same time. I was also one of the few people who liked "Traffic", but was very much underwhelmed by the "Solaris" remake. "Bubbles" and "Schizopolis" I have not seen. "The Good German" I now did, because I still believe in DVD package blurbs, and what you get when you fall for those is… boredom. And confusion. You are expected to believe that there is drama evolving, but the drama is about nothing. A bit of nuclear physicist nonsense material, around which Hitchcock would have created a thrilling world of espionage and murder. A not very pretty love interest that gets penetrated from behind by Spiderman, which is a bit ridiculous to watch (you expect Kirsten Dustbin to blow around the corner and tell him off for it, or shoot him in the face. Thank God they spared us from this!). George Clooney’s part makes you go to IMDB to check out why this guy became famous and respectable in the first place – and that is not a very good idea, because there you are reminded that hardly any of his earlier roles deserve too much respectability (except the fact maybe that he showed up in ER not only as Doctor, but a couple of years earlier in a different role, apparenly. Not that I care, having never watched it). (And except From Dusk til Dawn, of course, because his tattoo is pretty).
You see how ambitioned the film is about re-creating the atmosphere of the 50s, by being accurate to the point of annoyance and using for example old camera lenses to be true to the kind of crap look-and-feel our parents or grandparents were used to and could rightly call state-of-the-art. I don’t want all this cinematic masturbartion. If you don’t have an interesting story to tell or a fascinating character to introduce, just don’t. Go read a book, Mr Soderbergh, because you are staeling our time, and I’m not getting younger.
thomas4cinema 