Steven Soderbergh

[diamonds]

Soderbergh's got a new film premiering at Sundance in 2024: Presence, scripted by David Koepp.

A family moves into a suburban house and becomes convinced they’re not alone. Cast: Lucy Liu, Chris Sullivan, Callina Liang, Julia Fox, Eddy Maday, West Mulholland.

...we’re told it’s something of a ghost story; it was shot this summer in secret under an indie SAG waiver (meaning, it was shot and edited in about six months), and while shot on the quick, it was not shot on the iPhone like Soderbergh’s last horror-ish project “Unsane” in 2018.

[jazzo]

There was also an Extension 765 update a couple of days ago with absolutely no mention of box sets. But, hey - order yourself a baseball cap!

[flyonthewall2983]

The Ocean’s trilogy is being put out on 4K this year, as individual titles as opposed to a box set.

[pzadvance]

There is also a box set coming

[flyonthewall2983]

Ooh nice

[therewillbeblus]

Revisiting Ocean's Twelve and Schizopolis in close succession made me realize that the former is basically the latter's vibe in disguise - a sublime virus supplanting the world of Blockbuster Movie Star Paradise of "Cool" with ironic farce. I've already written a love letter to the movie, but I never deciphered the specific connections between the two films - a silly oversight considering what Soderbergh is doing in revealing silly and exasperated and passionately inspired sides of himself in very unique ways for him, compared to the rest of his oeuvre by this point in his career

[The Narrator Returns]

Those two are definitely very closely linked in their senses of humor and glee at disregarding whatever expectations the audience might have for them (Soderbergh himself admitted on the O12 commentary that the Matsui scene appeals almost exclusively to those who like Schizopolis), not to mention the romantic melancholy running through their veins. I think of The Informant! as the capper to that trilogy, returning to Schizopolis's absurdist workplace comedy and fully annihilating the central movie star in an apocalypse of meaningless language.

[therewillbeblus]

I think of The Informant! as the capper to that trilogy, returning to Schizopolis's absurdist workplace comedy and fully annihilating the central movie star in an apocalypse of meaningless language.

I was thinking the same thing, though hardly surprising!

[pzadvance]

Another update on the box set (sounds exactly like the last update):

“One of the things that I’ve been working on is creating a box set of seven films, the rights of which have come back to me. These aren’t the hits. These are like the B-sides. It’s stuff like Kafka, Mr. Kneff, Schizopolis, Gray’s Anatomy, Bubble, The Girlfriend Experience and Full Frontal. It’s an unusual group. But I’ve spent the last three years remastering, in some cases re-cutting. And I’m going to put out this limited edition with individually stamped numbered box sets. It’s not going to make any money. It [will be ready] maybe around the end of the year if it keeps going in the right direction.”

[brundlefly]

Black Bag trailer.

[jazzo]

I'm always interested in his work, though David Koepp is the writer, and I usually find his scripts are the weakest parts of their collaborations.

I would like to comment on the newest trend in trailers, though - one that is more bizarre, though less annoying, than the previous trends of spoiling every big reveal in the film, or cutting each image and movement to an aggressive percussive beat. It's this new 5 (or so) second "preview", for lack of a better word, of the trailer, before the trailer actually begins. Then they announce the trailer is beginning with text. Then they show you longer versions of the same scenes.

I'm not sure what the logic is, nor can I tell you if the editors just succumb to idiotic trends, or if some algorithm has told studio executives that this is what young people online respond to and set a mandate for their trailer editors, but it is quite fucking stupid.

[Grand Wazoo]

It's because people click off the trailer (and 99% of internet videos nowadays) if it's not captivating in the first few seconds. I can confirm this from firsthand experience at a large media company who always complained if your project did not have 'wiz-bang' energy to open.

[jazzo]

Geez.

[diamonds]

Soderbergh is also set to shoot The Christophers in February, the latest in an ongoing collaboration with screenwriter Ed Solomon:

The Christophers is a dark comedy about the estranged children of a once-famous artist who hire a forger to complete his unfinished works so they can be discovered and sold after his death.

If memory serves, he recently indicated that he might be shifting more toward comedies in the future.

[colinr0380]

That 5 second thing is also because the trailer will likely also be showing up before other videos as a general forced by YouTube advert, which are all unskippable for the first 5 seconds (the current trend that has begun to occur over the last six months is a move towards two consecutive adverts with 5 second delays to skipping before the selected video starts). So anyone (without an ad blocker) wanting to get through to the video that they actually want to watch will click through irrelevant annoyances as soon as possible, but with that unskippable 5 second bumper before being able to hit the "Skip" button the Studio will already have gotten the broad outline of the film across anyway.

I don't blame the film companies for doing this, although it is another example of how the internet space is shaping film culture, or at least film trailer culture by creating 'dual format' adverts! I'd also argue a bit that it is not entirely about the longer trailer being unable to captivate an audience's attention, forcing the studios to have to speed up - I have skipped lots of forced adverts in my time for things that I'd find interesting, but if I'm going for a particular video at that particular time I am wanting to get to that ASAP, and not be diverted off into another tangent. If I want to see a film's trailer, I'll more often than not be directly seeking it out. But those 5 second bumpers still manage to push the message anyway! And lots of other companies do the same thing as well, which is why you get that whole trend of people in adverts hastily screaming lines like "Before you press that button, listen to this!!", because they're also trying to maximise that lucrative opening 5 seconds before the viewer can escape them to drill their product into the audience's mind - the main irritant that crops up all the time in the UK end of YouTube is Keith Lemon shilling for 32 Red Casino by doing that kind of thing. Which somehow manages to make Keith Lemon into even more of an annoying character than in his TV show!

[pistolwink]

A number of years ago Eric Hynes pointed out that many contemporary documentaries, especially those produced for streaming services, now essentially begin with a "teaser" for themselves, a sort of quick montage of the highlights. He noted that executives at streaming services explicitly ask for this, since they're afraid that if a doc gets off to a slower or more mysterious start, that people will just immediately skip over to something else.
Once Hynes pointed this out I can't help noticing it in almost every mainstream doc.

[colinr0380]

That is exactly how that Heart of the Paris Games documentary started, with the trailer basically being the first couple of minutes of the programme redundantly previewing itself.

[erok910]

Just heard on Indiewire's podcast (promoting Presence) that Soderbergh still has a plan of releasing the films he owns the rights to in a limited edition box set. Mentioned both cuts of Kafka (Mr. Kneff) and shorter cuts of Schizopolis and Full Frontal being a part of the set.

[therewillbeblus]

Decal Releasing has scheduled a UHD and blu-ray of Presence for May 20

[The Curious Sofa]

Does for ghosts what In A Violent Nature did for slashers. Presence may start out as a formal experiment, but halfway through it turns into a more traditional haunted house movie, but that's not a bad thing. In some ways it plays like one of the better Paranormal Activity movies. The family dynamics and character development are compelling enough, though it feels like some of the implied aspects of the parents' marriage could have been fleshed out more. More of a doodle than a masterpiece, but a doodle from a master nonetheless.

What is tedious is the online discourse about whether this is a horror movie at all, because "I" didn't find it scary. But it does fall into a certain tradition of a ghost story.

Spoiler

It becomes clear early on that the Presence is benign and not really meant to be scary. And what almost always happens in this case is that the plot introduces a human threat to our protagonists, in this case, a psychopathic serial killer, which then makes this part of two horror sub-genres.

[therewillbeblus]

I liked Presence just fine, but Black Bag is a wonderful lark, an ode to both le Carré paperbacks and the paranoia thrillers of the 70s. It's exactly what you expect and hope it to be: stylistically slick, clinically-coated stupid fun with both a dry and sopping wet sense of humor (the latter almost exclusively thanks to scene-stealer Marisa Abela). I loved how Soderbergh tightens the screws formally - this starts out quite talky and slow and subdued, but quickens up in a variation of arrangements across the spectrum of filmmaking attributes, all the way to a brash, stupefying conclusion. It helps that both the script and acting (a few variables that don't always click in his modern genre exercises) are so flavorful this outing. Is it a five-star film? For what it is and is trying to be, yes

[pistolwink]

In re. Presence, if I didn't already know that Soderbergh was a huge fan of the third season of Twin Peaks, I'd guess it after seeing this movie. Something about the proudly janky digital effects made me think of it immediately.

I quite liked Black Bag, though I'm surprised it cost as much as it did (was half of the budget Blanchett's salary?). I'm not a huge fan of the get-everyone-together-in-a-room-and-hash-it-out way of resolving a twisty thriller plot, but everything here was done with almost breathtaking precision and panache. For someone who works so quickly, Soderbergh has an incredible knack for finding exactly the right camera position for every nuance of dialogue and expression.

This was a pure genre exercise, as I'm pretty sure it had nothing to say about spying or marriage* much less the world around us. At this point, given the baleful state of the U.S. government and the diminshed state of the U.K., these sort of movies where their agencies are full of hyper-competent operators making surgical interventions in foreign conflicts exist in an ever more blatantly fantastical alternate world.

And yes, Abela held the screen amazingly. I'd never seen her in anything before.


*I did find it interesting that the middle-aged characters were all childless (a fact they mention a few times), since that removed one sentimental form of character motivation and made it purely about the commitment between a long-married couple. I guess one could even read this as symptomatic of declining birth rates in the West.

[therewillbeblus]

I think adding children would've complicated things when it was about base loyalty between a union; trust, and most importantly 'faith', in an untrusting context. I'd hope that theme would extend to children if there were any, but it would've been an extraneous detail here.

I also have a feeling that most actors took pay cuts and the money primarily went to set design and props and such. It's a small and intimate film but there's a lot of fancy toys and places around

[pistolwink]

Yeah, the sets were nice.

I wonder, has anyone tried to sync up Soderbergh's amazingly extensive media diet to the productions of his films? Does he spend 10-hour-days shooting an intimate scene between Blanchett and Fassbender and then go home to watch two movies (I particularly enjoy his double feature of Born to Be Bad and Mad Max), binge a TV series, and read a novel?

[pianocrash]

Yeah, the sets were nice.

I wonder, has anyone tried to sync up Soderbergh's amazingly extensive media diet to the productions of his films? Does he spend 10-hour-days shooting an intimate scene between Blanchett and Fassbender and then go home to watch two movies (I particularly enjoy his double feature of Born to Be Bad and Mad Max), binge a TV series, and read a novel?

I would think he's pretty concise with his leisure time as he is with his shooting regime, that is he concentrates it pretty specifically for maximum results. As for his book readings, I'm guessing he lists them as they are completed (probably in chunks, over time), unless he's speed reading (1990's represent). There are small chunks here & there wherein there is no activity at all (as with the first week of Black Bag prep), but it's probably hard to notice when most of the logs are just Jaws or Hacks over & over again.