Monday Morning Quarterback Part II
By BOP Staff
February 13, 2013
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Brett Ballard-Beach: In no real order:
Favorites: Out of Sight, The Limey, Ocean's Twelve, Che, King of the Hill, Schizopolis
Least: Full Frontal, The Good German, Ocean's Thirteen
Haven't seen several of his most recent (And Everything is Going Fine, Contagion, Magic Mike, Side Effects)
Favorite scene/image: The freeze-frame on George Clooney ripping off his tie in frustration at the outset of Out of Sight
He's a stylist who managed to work in the mainstream without ever entirely becoming mainstream, scoring a surprise "smash" and conversation piece with his first film, making mostly small offbeat films throughout his first decade and then entering a commercial stretch that produced three consecutive $100 million hits and an Oscar win in a two-year period. This allowed him another decade to keep balancing the would-be box office hits (Contagion) with the more offbeat star-driven pieces (The Informant!) with the uncategorizable (Bubble, The Girlfriend Experience). Without wanting to engage in hyperbole, I think his is pretty much the model for any director who accepts the challenges of working on both big-budget studio pictures and micro-budget improvisatory character sketches. Having summed all that up, I don't know that I have formed a true opinion of him. I think I perhaps admire a lot of his work more than "love" it, but then most of it wasn't work that was made to be "loved." Like a completely different director (Robert Altman), I respect that he was willing to tackle pretty much every genre and that the more cold, clinical side of his directorial persona could be balanced with unexpected warmth and tenderness.
I also don't believe that he's retiring.
Edwin Davies: I've still got to catch up with some of the stuff he did in the mid-00s, but of the stuff of his I have seen I'd probably rank my Top 5 as follows:
The Limey, King of the Hill, And Everything Is Going Fine, The Informant!, Traffic
There's not really many of the others that I out and out dislike, but Kafka would easily be my least favorite.
Like Brett, I think I admire Soderbergh more than I actually like him, and the same is true for most of his films. A lot of them are too icy and clinical for me to really engage with them (it's perhaps unsurprising that my favorites are the ones that are, in one way or another, more emotionally fraught than a lot of his work) but he has never been less than interesting. He managed a fine balance between his commercial sensibilities and the smaller, weirder passion projects that the commercial stuff helped get made, but even the commercial stuff displayed a terrific level of craft and originality, even when he was remaking older works. He could create something as sleek and efficiently entertaining as Ocean's Eleven one moment, then do a complete about face and make something like Solaris which had no chance of connecting with a wide audience, but which he clearly cared a great deal about. He was an real artist who knew how to navigate the murky waters of working in Hollywood, though it's easy to see why that might have worn him down over the years.
Also, I think this is going to be a retirement in much the same way that Jay-Z "retired" from music after The Black Album. When you're that good at something for so long, it's hard to stay away. A few years away might revitalize him, though, given the furious pace he has kept up in recent years: Side Effects is the fourth Soderbergh film to come out in the last 18 months, after all. People that prolific are usually uploading stuff onto YouTube, not releasing it in over 2,000 theaters.
Bruce Hall: He'll be back. I think it was last year at the Venice Film Festival that he revised his announcement and specifically characterized his impending "retirement" a "sabbatical". He wanted to devote time to other creative pursuits, such as painting.
Sounds to me like a man who needs a break. Soderbergh strikes me as a man who made the kinds of films that HE wanted to see. Not in a self indulgent way, bit in the way of a person with diverse interests who happens to have the ability to explore them on film. That's what makes his catalogue so eclectic and undefinable. There's no Soderbergh "brand", because with each project he dove into a subject that intensely interested him, made an honest, intelligent movie out of it and moved on.
So when people call Traffic a "prestige picture", they're not just lumping it in with the slew of vanity films that appear near awards season, with one eye on the Academy and the other on the box office. It's just that good, and it's his own talent and honest desire to challenge himself that makes it that way.
In other words, not every film he made was great, but they were made by a great filmmaker.
My favorites include: Traffic, Sex Lies, Out of Sight, Solaris
The ones I can live without: Ocean's Thirteen, The Good German, Full Frontal
Max Braden: When I think of Soderbergh's style, I'd describe it as being a little casual, loose, and cavalier. Things are never out of control in his films, but it feels like he's trusting that the movie will work out rather than driving it with a tense hand on the controls. Come to think of it, that's a characteristic of a lot of the main characters in his movies. At his best, that makes for lighthearted, fun movies. I love the image of Jack Foley waving at the U.S. Marshal who's trying to put him back in prison, and the non-verbal communication between Clooney and Pitt in the Oceans series (though I really only like the first one). At his worst, though, that style becomes lazy and boring. Solaris nearly put me to sleep for its lack of exposition, The Girlfriend Experience was like watching the day in the life of nobody important, The Informant expected you to laugh when it wasn't that funny, and the street jogging chase in Haywire felt endless. In most of his movies, though, there are some great set up shots for the camera.
Soderbergh may not have the must-be-number-one gene that drives someone like Michael Bay, but I can't believe that someone who loves movies like he must would just give them up when the option to make them is still available. Maybe some time off will spark some interesting vision for future projects.
Kim Hollis: I also would be surprised if this were a real retirement, but I can also easily imagine that he's grown weary and that his artistic focus and interests have shifted. Like many others have commented here, I admire but don't necessarily love Soderbergh's films as a whole. It's true that there is something clinical about them, similar to what can occasionally bother me about Clint Eastwood's movies. With that said, though, there are a few of Soderbergh films that I truly enjoy, including Out of Sight, The Limey and Ocean's Eleven, and to a somewhat lesser degree, Solaris. I disliked Traffic and The Girlfriend Experience (ho-hum), and although I didn't hate Ocean's Twelve, I found it to be the weakest entry in that series.
Kim Hollis: Top Gun 3D opened in 300 theaters this weekend and earned $2 million. What are your thoughts on this result as well as on the subject of the movie Top Gun itself?
Brett Ballard-Beach: It's just about on par on a per screen average with the limited engagement IMAX run of Raiders of the Lost Ark last year (ahead of its Blu-Ray release) although this had the added financial bonus of 3D. It's only playing through Wednesday (before Die Hard sweeps in to the IMAX screens) so this was just a little frosting on the cupcake. My best friend of 20 years went and saw this on Saturday, because this is her alpha and omega and has been her "origin story" film since seeing it back in '86.
I didn't see it in the theater, and in fact had not seen it in its entirety until catching a repertory engagement just before Thanksgiving four years ago (coming down with a cold, streams of mucus exiting my nostrils for the duration at something between a gush and a geyser as I worked through an entire box of Kleenex). I had heard pretty much every quotable line (from my friend) prior to going in so it was a redundant (or self-fulfilling?) experience. But hey, it's silly fun, has a great looking young cast about to break out and a great gathering of older character actors for gravitas. To each his own, I know, but the fact that this became the defining (recruitment) film for a generation mystified me as much when I was age 10 as it does now I am on the near side of 40. I was never the target audience, although I can appreciate a) that a lot of people were, b) That Simpson, Bruckheimer and Scott had a PG film in them and c) that writer David Sirota does an awesome analysis of it and other '80s gung-ho fare like Red Dawn in his book "Back to our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live in Now."
Jay Barney: I don't know why Top Gun was put into theaters again now. I am a big fan of the original movie, and have watched it again recently, but even I am not going to go out pay money to see it in the theater. Perhaps this is in some way connected with the development of the sequel, a way of putting movie news out there for fans. I have said this before and I will say it again, I wish studios would put their resources into new projects rather than rewinding and trying to update older material. I hope to see a sequel soon, but I was never going to pay to see the original on the big screen again.
Jason Dean: I believe that the reason for the theatrical release was a way to advertise the upcoming Blu-Ray release as perhaps take a flier (er, no pun intended) on getting back some of the conversion costs associated with the Blu-Ray remastering.
I have to admit that I was looking forward to a chance to seeing this in the theater again and did see it this weekend. I was in high school for the original release and saw it twice. The first time was at an average theater and the second was an ear shattering, eye popping 70mm presentation at the Waikiki theater (sadly no more). Perhaps a true IMAX presentation would have lived up to the 70 mm memories but the small format IMAX presentation was still fun. I will grant that it sounded good. I was lucky enough to go with someone who has an AMC annual pass so we didn't pay the $16.50 3D IMAX ticket so if that had factored perhaps we wouldn't have gone.
I had the following thoughts during the screening:
For me, being a plane/aerospace buff, the movie is plane porn. Sadly, I think that we may never see another like it and by that I mean that other than the sequences where planes take damage/explode, those are actual planes, filmed by a camera mounted in another actual plane. I fear a current version would be all computer generated. Speaking of that even the doomed planes were models which is arguably still more "real" than CGI.
Top Gun might be one of the homoerotic blockbuster films ever.
Other than the retired F-14s, the most dated portion of the movie could be the soundtrack.
Bruce Hall: I agree that this is likely tied in to covering the Blu-Ray conversion costs. I suppose there's interest for a sequel. This is an impressive per theater average all things considered, the idea's been bouncing around for a long time and Maverick himself (Tom Cruise, for the three of you who have not seen Top Gun) has expressed an apparently sincere interest in being involved.
Top Gun was a fantastic mix of action/adventure, jingoism, and the kind of vaguely homo-erotic go-getter aggression that could only exist in the 1980s. If there's anything worse than romanticizing war, it's forgetting about it entirely - which is how far most Americans have come since the original release. It's possible that a movie about ballsy fighter jocks is about as widely desired as another Ghost Rider sequel.
I actually believe current VFX technology would be a benefit to Top Gun 2, provided a tasteful hand is behind the camera. Considering the subject matter that's no guarantee but if nothing else, it's fun to go back and remember the rush of sexually ambiguous patriotism you felt at the movie's climax. Ahem.
Also, Kenny Loggins.
Max Braden: I saw absolutely no advertising for this, so it seems like last minute whim purchases would have been the only box office action. On the other hand, I have trouble imagining that heavy advertising would have been well spent. And that's with Jack Reacher just recently in theaters. I'm glad these revivals are shown in theaters. I should be the target audience for them, and yet I never go.
Tim Briody: I admit I had absolutely no idea that this was happening, so that total's not that bad considering Top Gun is now most relevant as one of Archer's best jokes.
Felix Quinonez: I think Top Gun is awesome. As far as the result I guess it's okay. I really don't understand why this was re-released at all but I find it even more confusing that they would go through the trouble of converting it into 3D and barely advertise it. I didn't even know about its release until the weekend of. The same thing happened when they did the Raiders of the Lost Ark IMAX last year. If they're going to keep doing these I think they really need to rethink their marketing strategy.
Kim Hollis: Here's a movie that was released right as I was reaching the end of my high school career. I don't think I saw it in theaters at the time (though I saw most Tom Cruise films as they were released when I was that age) but I've seen it plenty on the pay channels over the years. It's one of those films I would definitely stop to watch if I saw it was on. For anyone who might struggle to figure out how Cruise became such a big deal, Top Gun is pretty much a key moment in driving that to happen. I still lament the loss of Tony Scott, and Top Gun is (in my opinion) his shining moment.