steven soderbergh

That Gum You Like is Back in Style

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I had a classic theatrical experience at the downtown location of The Prytania this Wednesday, when I caught a double feature of the new Looney Tunes movie and the new Soderbergh. Since both films mercifully clock in around 90 minutes a piece, it was not an especially exhausting trip to the cinema, but more importantly they paired well as a charming throwback to theatrical programming of the distant past. The next morning, I read a series of confusing headlines about how “Moviegoers Want More Comedies, Thrillers and Action Titles,” so they haven’t been showing up to theaters for lack of interest in what’s currently out there. The survey generating those headlines is obviously flawed, since moviegoers simply don’t know what’s currently out there. Anyone claiming they don’t regularly go to the theater because “They don’t make ’em like they used to,” has lost sight of what’s actually on theatrical marquees, a problem that could be solved if they’d just glance up. The Day the Earth Blew Up & Black Bag are both exactly how they used to make ’em; it’s more that audiences “don’t watch ’em like they used to.” The habit of checking the newspaper for listings of what happens to be playing this afternoon or physically stopping by the nearest theater and catching whatever has the most convenient showtime is a lost cultural practice.

The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie is about as classic as they come. Sure, its sexual & cultural references are a little more up to date than the anarchic sex & archaic pop culture parodies of Looney Tunes past (with innuendo about anonymous truck stop hookups and visual allusions to sci-fi horror classics like The Thing, Invasion of The Body Snatchers, Jurassic Park, and Night of the Living Dead). At its core, though, it’s just an extended Merrie Melodies short, following the goofball exploits of Daffy Duck & Porky Pig as they desperately attempt to hold onto their entry-level jobs at the local bubblegum factory while simultaneously fighting off a space alien who wants to poison that gum with a mind-controlling goo. Classic stuff. The humor ranges from vaudevillian slapstick to Ren & Stimpy gross-outs in a cacophonously loud celebration of all things loony, all rendered in glorious 2D animation. In a better world, every movie would open with a condensed version of this kind of goofball novelty as an appetizer for the Feature Presentation, maybe accompanied by a short news report about The War or what Lana Turner wore to her recent premiere. Instead, we live in a Hell dimension where its day-to-day box office uneasiness is a bargaining tool in backroom negotiations about whether the other recently completed Looney Tunes feature should be released to theaters or deleted from the Warner Brothers servers for a tax write-off. It’s grim out there.

For the adults in the room, Steven Soderberg has put a pause on his recent unsane genre experiments to instead re-establish his presence as one of Hollywood’s more classical entertainers. Black Bag finds the director returning to the suave professionalism of past commercial triumphs, this time casting Michael Fassbender & Cate Blanchett as a married couple of international cyber-spies who would literally kill for each other despite their shared need to constantly lie in order to do their jobs. The spy plot is a tangled mess of double-triple-crossings involving two “interlocked counterplans” to break this elite marriage part (and take over the world in the process), but none of that really matters. The project is more about signaling a return to the handsome, timeless world of tweed caps, stirred cocktails, and wholehearted monogamy. Soderbergh puts in a Herculean effort to make monogamous marital commitment sexy & cool. It’s a trick he finds much easier to pull off with Fassbender’s love of administering polygraph tests to fellow spies, since those come with their own bondage gear that signals sexiness from the jump. Setting all of this laidback, horny sophistication in the swankiest corners of downtown London and then going out of your way to cast a former James Bond actor in a prominent role (Pierce Brosnan, as the spy agency’s untrustworthy head honcho) all feels like a deliberate callback to the kind of classic thriller surveyed moviegoers claim to want, even if they’re not used to seeing it filtered through Soderbergh’s personal kink for commercial-grade digital textures.

In a word, Black Bag is cute. It’s a nice little treat for Soderbergh casuals who prefer the classic sophistication of Ocean’s 11 over the erratic playfulness of Ocean’s 12. I’m happy for that audience, even though I can’t relate. Similarly, The Day the Earth Blew Up is cute. It’s good for a few sensible chuckles and a few outright guffaws (the origin story for Porky Pig’s trademark stutter got an especially big, unexpected laugh out of me), but it’s in no way attempting to invent or innovate. It’s classic Looney Tunes buffoonery, a familiarly pleasant offering for anyone who’s looking to get out of the house and chomp some popcorn at The Movies. Watching it as a warm-up for a handsomely staged spy thriller about the timeless beauty of a traditional marriage felt like an experience that I could have had at the picture show at any time in the past century. People largely seem unaware that these traditionally entertaining movies are out in the world right now, though, since only the occasional Event Film (i.e., reboots, superhero flicks, live-action remakes of Disney cartoons) seems able to cut through the social media babble to grab their attention. It’s a problem I don’t really know how to fix, but thankfully I’m not in marketing, so it’s not really my job to fix. I just like going to the movies. Every week, I check my local listings and pop in to see what’s being offered to me. It’s a constantly rewarding hobby, one that requires minimal effort.

-Brandon Ledet

Presence (2025)

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There’s a playfulness in the basic tech and form of every Steven Soderbergh picture that invites us to wonder what new toy the director is going to be most excited to play with. However, there isn’t much time to wonder in his new haunted house picture, where his playful tech-tinkering is at its most immediately conspicuous. Shot in a single house over the course of eleven days, Presence is a ghost story told from the 1st-person point of view of the ghost. It’s a clever premise that frees Soderbergh to be as playful with the camera as ever, handling the equipment himself as he follows around his small haunted-family cast and constantly directs the audience’s attention to the act of observation through his wandering lens. The resulting image is a kind of supernatural found footage horror that leans into the improbability of the genre by strapping its GoPro to a ghost, so we don’t question why the camera continues rolling once the violence starts; we only question why that camera operator is choosing to observe what we see (and to ignore what we don’t). The last-minute answer to that question gave me a shock of goosebumps and made me want to immediately rewatch in the way that the best ghost stories do. It’s in the asking of the question where Soderbergh gets to have his fun, though, and it’s delightful to see a filmmaker this many decades into their career still excited by the opportunity to play with the basic tools of their craft.

Lucy Liu stars as the high-strung, wine-guzzling matriarch of a nuclear suburban family. She’s poured all of her hopes and self-worth into the athletic achievements of her jock teen son Tyler (Eddy Maday), whose burgeoning persona as an egotistical bully is directly correlated with the effort she puts into supporting his swim-team dreams. Meanwhile, her daughter Chloe (Callina Liang) is treated as the mother’s genetic leftovers, molding in the back of the fridge while the father (Chris Sullivan) solemnly shakes his head in exasperation. It’s not an especially complicated family dynamic, but it’s one that becomes increasingly eerie & foreboding as it’s filtered through the security-camera eyes of a ghost. At the start of the film, the ghost is trapped in an empty, echoey suburban house, and what fills that void once its tenants arrive (with the help of a comically unprofessional real estate agent played by Julia Fox) are the typical horrors that haunt the modern American family: loneliness, mental illness, drugs, alcohol, the violent radicalization of young men, etc. As the most isolated member of the family, Chloe is the most vulnerable to those horrors, and so the ghost (and, by extension, the audience) spends the most time watching over her, eventually stepping in to protect her from whatever harm can be prevented by a noncorporeal force . . . since no one alive seems especially motivated to actively help.

Since it’s a formal experiment more concerned with what’s implied by every subtle movement of the camera than it is a mechanism for delivering routine scare gags, most audiences are going to be reluctant to engage with Presence as a horror film, likely likening it to titles like A Ghost Story, Nickel Boys, and Here. Personally, I found its icy, distancing approach to form to be effectively chilling, and the movie I most thought about during its runtime was the creepypasta novelty Skinamarink. Both films repurpose the filmic language of the found footage horror genre to coldly observe the isolation & cruelty of modern domestic life from an impossible supernatural vantage point, dwelling on an eerie mood that most people only feel when we’re alone in an empty home. Presence ultimately forms a more traditional narrative than Skinamarink thanks to the mainstream professionalism of screenwriter David Koepp, choosing to answer the question of its ghost’s mysterious identity in a final explanatory reveal instead of letting it hang in the air. I appreciate Soderbergh’s eagerness to bring distancing, arthouse abstraction into mainstream venues in that way, along with implied political commentary that reaches beyond the boundaries of his increasingly small, generic stories. Like other recent Soderbergh successes Unsane & Kimi, Presence is high-style genre pulp that only becomes complex & nuanced when you poke at the decisions behind its creation – most importantly, in this case, the decisions on where to point the camera and when to look away.

-Brandon Ledet

Bubble (2005)

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Even more so than your Slow Cinema auteur of choice, Steven Soderbergh is the master of the mundane. He consistently makes tight, thrilling, wryly funny dispatches from the florescent-lit hell pits of American tedium.  A 70min experiment in early-2000s digi cinematography and purposefully deflated genre payoffs, Bubble is a perfect illustration of that skill.  Its vision of America is a complex labyrinth of small-town diners, factory breakrooms, and low-ceiling apartments.  The doomed souls who navigate those mundane spaces all work multiple jobs for the privilege of getting paid minimum wage, wondering in their spare time what it might have been like if they had stuck it out for a full high school diploma.  When jailed for a violent crime, they complain “It’s horrible in here,” but it’s so oppressively bland everywhere else that it’s questionable whether rotting in a concrete cell is any worse than being free to work their next shift.  Even the murder that lands them there is bleakly, purposefully uninteresting. 

I suppose there’s some novelty in what type of Midwest factory employs these small-town workers.  Bubble was shot in a real, operational doll parts factory in Ohio, which makes for some horrific digital-video footage in early scenes.  The mundanity of the world outside the assembly line quickly closes in, though.  Loneliness & petty jealousies shared among three of the factory workers leads to one of their murders, with only one clear suspect and no real need to investigate.  A deleted scene explains the psychology behind that act of violence like the Freudian denouement of Hitchcock’s Psycho, but Soderbergh removes even that morsel of narrative satisfaction from the final cut.  He also undercuts the potential for dramatic excitement or emotion by casting non-actor locals to play the central parts, mumbling their semi-improvised lines through obvious shyness.  Even the camera’s movements are pedestrian, often just swiveling on a stationary tri-pod like an oscillating security cam.  It’s all very matter of fact, and the facts of the matter are all grim, grey gruel.

Handling the editing & cinematography himself under pseudonyms, Soderbergh seemed to be having fun playing around with the unpretentious tools of the new digital filmmaking era.  He even got hands-on in Bubble‘s distribution strategy, striking a deal with the Mark Cuban-owned cable company HDNet to release the film simultaneously in theaters, on-demand, and on physical disc.  His pitch was that hopefully audiences would be drawn to see the movie in theaters and, if they liked it, would pick up a physical copy for repeat viewings on the way home.  Corporate theater chains were outraged at this disruption to the traditional theatrical window, but that day-and-date release strategy has obviously become more of a standard practice in recent years.  Bubble was supposed to be the first of six HDNet releases with the same improvised-drama filming methods and unconventional home distribution schedules, but instead it flopped and mostly fell out of circulation.  I had to find my DVD copy second-hand, and it only includes a Spanish-language subtitles track, so it likely traveled far to reach me.

Forever adaptable, Soderbergh has been doing just fine in the two decades since the Bubble debacle.  If anything, he’s since moved on to making straight-to-HBO cheapies instead of straight-to-HDNet cheapies, which feels like a minor step up in prestige.  He’s also had a few theatrical hits since then and has flirted with the idea of early retirement, only to discover that he’d rather be making movies no matter the scale in production or distribution.  Bubble is not his most exciting, imaginative dispatch from the great mediocre American void (that would be Schizopolis), but it might be the most indicative example of his stripped-down, unfussy style.  In most other cases where a career-shifting work from a major filmmaker had fallen out of distribution, it would be tempting to petition for a spiffy new digital restoration from a boutique Blu-ray label.  In Bubble‘s case, it feels totally appropriate for it to be stuck in time on thrift-store DVDs.  The only reason to reissue it, really, would be for a new director’s commentary track looking back on how the industry has changed in the past couple decades, since Soderbergh happens to be the master of those too.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #184: A Taxing Woman (1987) on Tax Day

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Welcome to Episode #184 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Hanna, and Britnee celebrate Tax Day with a grab bag of movies about dramatic tax audits & tax evasions, starting with Juzo Itami’s A Taxing Woman (1987).

00:00 Welcome

02:08 Suzume (2023)
04:55 Enys Men (2023)
13:18 Passion of the Christ (2004)
20:55 Ernst Lubitsch
27:21 John Wick: Chapter IV (2023)
32:00 The Women (1939)

37:30 A Taxing Woman (1987)
56:15 The Laundromat (2019)
1:16:20 3 Hearts (2014)
1:36:00 Exotica (1994)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

-The Podcast Crew

Kimi (2022)

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Of course, of all the big-name Hollywood filmmakers you’d expect to thrive in spite of COVID-era production troubles, Steven Soderbergh has been thriving the brightest.  Three decades into his career, Soderbergh still conveys a playfulness and adaptability that have got to be near impossible to maintain in an industry that’s increasingly hostile towards anything that’s not pre-established, multi-billion-dollar IP.  While most legendary auteurs have struggled to get no-brainer projects off the ground, Soderbergh remains a scrappy, resourceful innovator who’s still making exciting work at the margins of the industry – the kind of movies you’d expect out of a director in their twenties with something to prove.  Adding the circumstances of the COVID pandemic to his already unstoppable filmmaking routine is just another obstacle for Soderbergh to navigate his way around, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he was genuinely delighted by the challenge.  Two years into the pandemic, he’s already made and distributed three feature films, making it look disgustingly easy while most of the Hollywood machine feels like it’s still on pause.  I’m halfway convinced that he’ll be up to four COVID-era features by the time I finish typing this paragraph.

Although Soderbergh has already delivered other experiments in COVID-era cinema (all for HBO Max), his latest dispatch, Kimi, is the first that feels like it was produced during the pandemic.  While Let Them All Talk & No Sudden Move would’ve felt right at home in any other year of Soderbergh’s post-“retirement” era, Kimi directly acknowledges the ongoing pandemic and integrates it into its narrative.  It initially plays like Soderbergh making an easy exercise out of updating Rear Window for the COVID era.  Zoë Kravitz stars as a low-level surveillance tech who reviews and solves technical issues for an Alexa-style personal assistant gadget called Kimi.  An agoraphobe whose anxiety about leaving the apartment is only worsened by the pandemic, she’s limited almost all of her in-person social interactions to physical communication with the tenants of the apartment building opposite her window.  Given how most COVID-era productions have shifted to screenlife thrillers contained to laptops and single-location living spaces, you’re trained to expect the entire movie to play out in this one beautiful, but restrictive Seattle apartment.  Instead, Soderbergh turns that familiar set-up into an excuse for a totally Unsane remix of The Net.  While working her surveillance data-collection job, Kravitz discovers evidence of a violent crime.  Reporting it puts her in danger of suffering a similar fate of the victim she’s trying to save, as the corporate suits at Kimi will literally kill to prevent the resulting public scandal.  So, she has to go on the run outside her apartment to escape violent, corporate thugs, which is really just an excuse for Soderbergh to play with the unique anxieties of what it feels like to exist in public right now.

The brilliant thing about Kimi is that it feels like a throwback to mid-budget tech thrillers of the 1990s like Sneakers and The Net—the exact kind of movies that most Hollywood studios neglect to make anymore—even though it has distinctly modern sensibilities in its technophobic satire & production circumstances.  The film’s paranoia about the illusion of online privacy, its dual use of the Kimi tech as both a weapon & a punchline, and Kravitz’s e-girl haircut are all firmly rooted in modern internet culture, but they’re treated with a retro Hollywood thriller sensibility in the film’s plotting.  Meanwhile, Soderbergh is having fun playing with his filmmaking toys, as always.  He shoots Kravitz’s nervous escape on the streets of Seattle with a sped-up skateboard video aesthetic that recalls the anxious discomforts of Unsane.  He stunt-casts comedians David Wain & Andy Daily in bit dramatic roles that recall similar casting pranks in The Informant.  Most importantly, he continues his reign of filming the ugliest, drabbest office settings in the biz, depicting our current corporate hellscape as a fluorescent-lit nightmare we’d all be lucky to wake up from at any second.  If there’s anything that unifies Soderbergh’s filmmaking sensibilities beyond his continued playfulness in craft, it’s that all his films maintain a sternly anti-Capitalist political bent – capturing the cruelty, tastelessness, and absence of Life in our soul-drained modern world like no other filmmaker working today.  It’s all very honest about the exact corporate power structures that are crushing the few good things left in this world, while also recalling the phoniest blockbuster thrillers of Hollywood past.  Exciting stuff.

I have no idea how much longer COVID will continue to disrupt the production logistics of traditional Hollywood filmmaking.  I’ve stopped trying to predict the future after these last two years of watching a global health crisis get unnecessarily prolonged in a game of profit-over-people politics.  Still, I can say with full confidence that Soderbergh will continue to make movies as long as he’s alive on this planet, and his movies will continue to confront those exact misanthropic politics for what they are.  They’ll also continue to be wonderfully entertaining; he’s always dependable for that, even if his modes of professional survival are forever in flux.

-Brandon Ledet

No Sudden Move (2021)

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I never tire of watching Steven Soderbergh play around with celebrities and camera tech.  It’s like babysitting a little kid who’s toying around in a playroom where each dolly & gadget cost millions of dollars.  I usually prefer to see Soderbergh’s playtime sessions projected on the big screen, and I like them best when they overlap with genres I’m already in love with – which is to say that it’s going to be hard to top the experience of seeing his iPhone-shot psych horror Unsane at the shopping mall multiplex.  Still, it’s been continually fun to watch a long-established director who’s remained excited by his job fuck around with Prestige Cable TV money as if he’s still figuring out the basic elements & limitations of his medium.

The big-picture details of Soderbergh’s latest direct-to-cable effort, No Sudden Move, sound like they belong to the pilot episode of a standard-issue HBO crime drama series.  Don Cheadle, Benicio Del Toro, and Kieran Culkin star as three low-level lackeys who’re hired to hold a business man’s family hostage in exchange for a confidential document of great political import.  The job goes horrifically wrong, and the bottom-rung gangsters find themselves scheming across 1950s Detroit to hold onto the top-secret document as a bargaining chip for their lives . . . and an exponential amount of cash.  It’s a standard heist-gone-wrong plot, styled like a spin-off series about the crime-world decades following Boardwalk Empire.  And yet, it never feels boring or unsurprising thanks to Soderbergh’s flair for wryly funny stunt casting and behind-the-camera mischief.

The biggest hurdle most audiences have to clear to enjoy No Sudden Move is how absolutely fucking bizarre it looks.  While the set & costume design resemble the usual HBO crime series, Soderbergh shoots the entire movie with an extreme wide-angle fisheye lens, often backlit.  Whenever your eye momentarily adjusts to its skateboard video framing and chiaroscuro lighting, the camera pans or glides to make the whole thing look warped again.  I have to imagine it has a lot of unsuspecting audiences scrambling to adjust the picture settings on their TV, but I was personally delighted by that clash of modern camera tech against a vintage setting.  When the cowardly businessman mark, played by David Harbour, complains into a telephone “Everything is so weird right now” I felt like I knew exactly what he meant.  The film never stops looking strange, even if it’s narratively well behaved.

Beyond that extreme fisheye effect, I was mostly just tickled by No Sudden Move’s casting choices.  From the winking, referential casting of Jon Hamm in Mad Men-style G-man suits and Ray Liotta in pistol-whipped Goodfellas mobster mode to the chaotic screen presence of Uncut Gems’s Julia Fox as a bored, pouty moll (recalling Paz de la Huerta in the Boardwalk Empire pilot, come to think of it), you can tell Soderbergh and casting director Carmen Cuba are having a ball.  Otherwise, I can’t say the film really did much for me, at least not as much as the campier, more acidic Behind the Candelabra – the most recent example I’ve seen of Soderbergh playing around in HBO’s toy chest.  If these same fisheye lens or movie star stunt casting experiments had been applied to something more my speed—like a morally queasy horror movie or something draggy like Liberace—I could have fully fallen in love with it.  Knowing Soderbergh, I’ll probably only have to wait a few weeks before that next experiment in craft arrives.

-Brandon Ledet

Behind the Candelabra (2013)

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Stephen Soderbergh is the ultimate one-for-me-one-for-them director, but it’s still unbelievable that the final film before his (first) announced retirement was going to be a made-for-TV biopic. Seemingly fed up with the indignity of begging for funding for proper movies and the general corralling of proven auteurs to the limbo of Prestige Television, Soderbergh announced that he was bowing out of the game entirely. That “retirement” didn’t last long. If anything, he’s more prolific than ever now, having found a way to pump out a steady stream of heady low-fi genre experiments powered by smartphone cameras & celebrity actors’ goodwill. As always with Soderbergh’s career, there’s something slyly cheeky about the suggestion that he might’ve retired on a made-for-TV biopic, though; it’s as if the choice of project and the timing of the announcement were themselves a statement on the current state of the movie industry. Of course, that doesn’t mean he phoned in his work on Behind the Candelabra; it’s just as crowd-pleasing & devilishly self-amused as any of his other, better-funded films.

It helps that Behind the Candelabra isn’t so much a birth-to-death biopic as it is a chronicle of one specific, fucked-up romance that typified Liberace’s love life. Recent glammed-up biopics of outrageously costumed musicians (think Rocketman, Stardust, and Bohemian Rhapsody) have strained themselves limp trying to emphasize the Rock Star Magic of their subjects while sticking to the exact lifeless formula that Walk Hard parodied over a decade ago. Behind the Candelabra instead takes that alluring glam persona for granted, plainly presenting Liberace’s glittery hair pieces, disco-ball pianos, and on-stage limo arrivals without any stylistic embellishment behind the camera. The most the movie goes out of its way to underline the majesty of those Vegas showroom performances is in including the wide-eyed audience who ate it up with childlike wonder. It’s a glittery presentation that still mesmerizes even in its fictionalized recreations, and by the time Liberace declares “Too much of a good thing is wonderful!” at the emotional climax it’s a tough point to argue against. Of course, those performances are only a small portion of runtime, as the title invites us to witness a much uglier performance behind those glimmering stage curtains.

Beyond the curdled vintage camp, the fabulous sequin capes, and the plastic surgery gore (!!!), the film is most worthwhile for its two central performances. Michael Douglas gets to return to the sexual menace of his erotic thriller era as an already-famous, ferociously horny Liberace in his middle age years. Meanwhile, Matt Damon goes full Dirk Diggler himbo as the pianist’s naïve teenage (ha!) boyfriend, who’s taken on more as a house pet than as an equal. Once the novelty of daily champagne bubble baths with his glamorous idol wears off, Liberace’s lover starts to question just how much personal freedom he’s given up to live a lonely life of wealth. The over-decorated mansion they share is populated only by a disapproving staff who act more as prison wardens than friendly faces. The relationship rapidly declines once Liberace pressures his young ward/fucktoy to get plastic surgery to look more like his biological son (or a Dick Tracy villain, depending on your perspective); it’s an eerie undercurrent of body horror that crescendos when Damon shouts “He took my face!” in horrified acceptance of how much of himself he’s given up to accommodate the Glam God who runs his ever-shrinking world. It’s a pain that stings even worse when he realizes that he’ll eventually age out of his usefulness to the much older man, and there’s a replacement waiting in the wings to start the cycle all over again.

For the most part, Behind the Candelabra doesn’t do much to test the boundaries of the TV Movie as an artform. Soderbergh skips the pageantry of an opening credits sequence, occasionally goes meta with trips to movie sets & the Oscars, and concludes the somewhat dour drama with a show-stopping musical number, but for the most part he’s pretty well-behaved. If Behind the Candelabra is to be contextualized as a Soderbergh Experiment the way most of his movies are, it’s merely in the fact that he made a TV Movie at all. Maybe the idea of being stuck in television productions for the rest of his career was enough to make him want to retire (or at least take a break from the press), but the results are mostly as sharp & slyly playful as most of the one-for-them pictures he makes for the big screen. The performances, the costume & set design, and the jarring mix of high/low, dour/camp sensibilities are all wonderfully realized, and I’ve seen plenty of much better funded, Oscar-winning biopics about glamorous musicians do much worse with their glut than what’s accomplished here.

-Brandon Ledet

High Flying Bird (2019)

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Ever since we covered his low-fi cerebral freak-out Schizopolis as a Movie of the Month, I’ve become a dutiful fan of Stephen Soderbergh. His latest post-“retirement” phase of low-key crowdpleasers that pack a vicious anti-capitalist political punch just below the surface are of particular interest to me, making recent titles like Magic Mike, Logan Lucky, and Unsane can’t-miss appointment viewing. It says a lot about how far outside my usual thematic wheelhouse High Flying Bird is then, that it took me several weeks to catch Soderbergh’s latest even though it was readily available on Netflix. A backroom business drama about a power-struggle between pro basketball players & the NBA (or at least its fictionalized equivalent), High Flying Bird is ostensibly the exact kind of “inside-baseball” sports movie I’d generally have zero interest in if someone’s name like Soderbergh’s weren’t attached. Of course, Soderbergh only uses the pretense of the pro sports drama as an excuse to explore leftist financial politics in what the movie would describe as “the game played behind the game,” as well as staging meta-narrative about his own career in filmmaking. I just didn’t personally connect with the film as much as I might have if it were instead about, say, rowdy strippers or a crazed stalker.

From a Soderberghian experiment standpoint, perhaps the most impressive feat High Flying Bird pulls off is in reflecting the director’s own career within the movie industry without at all sacrificing the voice or politics of its screenwriter Tarel Alvin McCraney (best known of penning the stage play source material for Moonlight). The dense, rapid-fire dialogue that pummels the audience throughout the film doesn’t feel too deviant from the slick-talking hucksters from Soderbergh’s Ocean’s series, but the themes discussed in those exchanges are, to be blunt, more conspicuously black than anything the director has ever handled before. As André Holland (also from Moonlight) travels from boardroom to sauna to gymnasium instigating an Ocean’s-type heist behind the backs of the mostly white (and mostly off-screen) businessmen of the NBA, he almost exclusively interacts with fellow black power-players: Bill Duke, Sonja Sohn, Zazie Beetz, Melvin Gregg, etc. The same thematic territory of the landmark documentary Hoop Dreams is elevated from college recruitment to the pro sports level, as the film tiptoes around equating its racially-caged labor dispute between NBA players & team owners to a continued form of American slavery. High Flying Bird deftly talks about race & labor without officially talking about either in explicit terms, a sly trick played by McCraney that I’m honestly a little too dimwitted to fully appreciate or even comprehend.

For any other white filmmaker I could imagine, this business of using an explicitly black story of labor relations with wealthy, white higher-ups to discuss the director’s own career in the movie industry would be disastrous. Soderbergh somehow pulls it off, though, mostly by staying out of the way of McCraney’s words and taking the backroom political drama at the film’s core deadly seriously on its own face-value terms. The most you notice Soderbergh’s presence throughout the film is in the showy digi-cinematography of his iPhone camera equipment. Shifting away from the ugly smartphone photography of Unsane to achieve a colder, HD security camera aesthetic of wide angles & oscillating pans, High Flying Bird again finds Soderbergh playing with his toys – finding new joy in the basic, evolving (devolving?) tools of filmmaking the way he has his entire career. No one shoots corporate, office-lit spaces quite like him, a sickly aesthetic that mutates slightly here though the omnipresence of HD TVs running sports news coverage 24/7 in the background of every interior setting. It isn’t until Holland’s protagonist starts negotiating deals with streaming platforms like Netflix, Hulu, and Facebook to circumvent the NBA’s usual broadcast distribution profits in the third act that the parallels between the labor struggle in the film and the director’s own fights to finance his art within a cruelly changing studio system become unignorably apparent. Still, Soderbergh is smart enough to keep those parallels extratextual and to allow the racial politics of McCraney’s screenplay to work on their own terms. Any more emphasis on the connection between those conflicts would’ve at best been an embarrassment, but it’s interesting enough in isolation as is without overpowering the story being told.

Ultimately, High Flying Bird is a smart, well-made movie that I enjoyed watching, but I feel like it was made for an entirely different audience than me. Any film nerds out there with a political or philosphical interest in the world of pro sports are likely to get much more out of the film than I ever could. As a Soderbergh fan, it was fun to see the director continue his pet interests of labor politics, smartphone cinematography, and offhand references to Baton Rouge culture while adapting the peculiar rhythms of another distinct creative voice. McCraney more than held his own in that collaboration and provides the film with an authenticity & cerebral stage play provocation it would be limp without. If I were just a little closer to the sports drama wavelength these two creative subversives collaborated on, this would likely be one of my favorite films of the year.

-Brandon Ledet

Episode #59 of The Swampflix Podcast: Ocean’s ∞ & Logan Lucky (2017)

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Welcome to Episode #59 of The Swampflix Podcast! For our fifty-ninth episode, Brandon & Britnee discuss the entire Ocean’s 11 franchise, from its 1960s Rat Pack origins to its 2017 off-shoot Logan Lucky. Enjoy!

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– Brandon Ledet & Britnee Lombas

Unsane (2018)

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I never particularly understood what makes Steven Soderbergh unique as an auteur until we covered his cerebral, low-fi prank Schizopolis for a Movie of the Month conversation last year. Filmed cheaply on Super 8 cameras while dicking around in the hellish mediocrity of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Schizopolis is alone justification for Soderbergh’s reputation as a scrappy experimenter in content & form. If I hadn’t already gotten on his wavelength by catching up with that experiment in low-fi irreverence last year, 2018’s Unsane would have been just as viable of an entry point. Here, Soderbergh bridges the gap by getting on my wavelength, delivering the exact heightened horror schlock I cherish the most at the movies. Filmed on an iPhone and shamelessly participating in every mental institution thriller cliché you can imagine, Unsane is a Soderberghian experiment in the lowest rung of genre filth. It uses that unlikely platform to explore themes ranging from capitalist greed in the modern medical & prison systems to male-dominated institutions’ flagrant dismissal of the concerns of women to the power dynamics of money & gender in every conceivable tier of society. Much like how Schizopolis mixed heady existential crises with the lower irreverence of Kids in the Hall sketch comedy, Unsane experiments with a teetering balance between microbudget exploitation cinema & power-skeptical radical politics. They’re two flavors that shouldn’t mix well together in a single container, but find a chemically explosive reaction in the clash.

Claire Foy stars as a cutthroat corporate stooge who works in one of those sickly, florescent-lit cubicle hells from past Soderbergh joints like Schizopolois & Full Frontal. She comes across as aggressively uptight & snooty, but not without reason to be on-edge. Her mother constantly infantilizes & undermines her. Her boss leverages his position to hit on her without consequence. Potential Tinder hookups pose a threat of physical harm to her as a single woman who lives alone. Her steeled exterior is a performative defense, mostly because of a violent stalker from her past that has driven her into a constant state of fear & paranoia. As she relapses into seeing this stalker’s face in spaces he logically cannot occupy, she seeks psychiatric help from a mental health facility that tricks her into “voluntarily” committing herself for suicide watch. Once she’s locked into that system, the hospital uses every small infraction possible to extend her stay, heartlessly milking her for insurance money. The scam is described (mostly by a fellow level-headed patient, SNL vet Jay Pharaoh) in terms of a prison sentence: “They’re locking up sane people for profit,” “Do your time. Keep your head down,” “Learn how to live the routine,” etc. Remaining cool, calm, and collected proves to be impossible, though, as the stalker she fears so much surfaces as an employee of the hospital’s, an authority figure she cannot escape. Worse yet, nobody believes her, perhaps not even the audience. The rest of the film from there is a cheap slasher masquerading as a giallo mystery & a wryly funny descent into the bowels of Kafkaesque capitalist bureaucracy.

Besides my more general appreciation for morally tacky horror, I have a very specific love for affordable fad technology being documented in microbudget (and often technophobic) genre pieces. In the past, I’ve praised at length the laptop POV of Unfriended, the gaming app aesthetic of Nerve & #horror, the ringtone eeriness of Suicide Club, the GoPro energy of Afflicted, the Snapchat pop grime of Sickhouse, and so on. On the surface, Unsane’s iPhone cinematography appears to be closer tied to the classy transcendence of the medium in works like Tangerine & Damascene, but the film is too deliberately, persistently ugly to make that leap. Soderbergh intentionally chooses outright hideous angles & vantage points that recall daily digital footage we’re used to seeing outside of cinematic contexts: security camera pans, low-angle YouTube uploads, uncomfortably close webcam conversations, voyeuristic distance in clips of celebrities’ or strangers’ public behavior covertly captured on smartphones. However, outside a brief sequence where social media is explained to be a security liability to stalkers’ victims, there isn’t much outright paranoia about the evils of modern technology reflected in this approach. Instead, the film uses pedestrian modes of everyday, we-all-do-it filmmaking to approximate the feel of an investigative journalist sneaking a hidden camera into a crooked mental institution that holds patients against their will, like the horror film equivalent of an episode of Dateline NBC. An occasional experiment in double-exposure digi-photography pushes the aesthetic beyond that approach to match the protagonist’s manic (or too-heavily medicated) psyche, but Unsane mostly dwells in the drab digital hell we’re immersed in online daily. It’s something I always appreciate from my trashy horror movies, if not only as an honest document of our current culture as it truly looks to the unfortunate souls who live it.

Almost anything I could praise about Unsane would potentially be a turn-off to other viewers. Like with last year’s Split, I love the films schlocky premise as is, but wouldn’t hold it against anyone who finds its treatment of mental illness as morally repugnant. As I’ve learned from recommending small budget technophobic horrors in the past, not everyone shares my voracious appetite for pedestrian digital photography in their proper cinema. Claire Foy’s central performance (as the wonderfully named Sawyer Valentini) might be universally recognizable as a knockout punch of paranoid tension, but it’s in service of a dark, dry, often cruel sense of humor with punchlines like “Hail, Satan!” & offhanded blowjob references that might derail her presence’s wider appeal. I’m saying this to note that, like Schizopolis & Full Frontal, Unsane is firmly rooted in the required taste end of Soderbergh’s career, far from the bombastic crowd-pleaser territory of an Oceans 11 or a Magic Mike. Respecting its themes of abuse within the bureaucratic capitalist paradigm or of men in power dismissing the claims of women in crisis is not enough in itself. You must also be down with its indulgence in the moral & visual grime of microbudget exploitation horror. That dual set of interests might be a slim column on the Venn Diagram of Unsane‘s genre film experimentation, but I totally felt at home in that position. With Schizoplolis, I ventured out into the wilderness of Soderbergh’s psyche to understand him on his own terms. With Unsane, he returned the favor by stooping down to my lowly genre film trash pile to offer me a leg up.

-Brandon Ledet