soderbergh Tagged Articles at Cinematical

I don't need much of an excuse to visit Austin, Texas. Find me an event that A) strings more than four movies together, and B) takes place at one of the Alamo Drafthouse movie theaters, and there's a good chance I'm checking my bank account, desperately scrambling for flight money. But despite the fact that I've done five SXSW visits, three Fantastic Fest trips, and a few more Austin journeys just for the heck of it ... I'd never attended a BNAT shindig. But I made it to the tenth annual Butt-Numb-a-Thon, and of course I had a damn good time once it got rolling.

Let's just do a quick run-through, chronologically speaking, and I'm listing just the FULL movies here. At the end I'll go over the various clips we were treated to...

If you thought leading a revolution was easy, try filming one. In The Huffington Post, Jeffrey Wells of Hollywood Elsewhere discusses Steven Soderbergh's two-part Che Guevara biopic, comprised of The Argentine and Guerilla. Despite earlier rumors to the contrary, it appears that both movies will definitely screen next month at the Cannes Film Festival, where Soderbergh was warmly welcomed last year for the premiere of Ocean's Thirteen. The reception of his latest project could be even more positive, but its distribution prospects are another story: As Wells explains, Soderbergh's project guarantees to offend some people for its apparent exclusion of Che's stint as the overlord at La Cabana fortress, where he ordered the execution of over 600 political prisoners. Add to that the heavy amount of Spanish dialog and the director's insistence that the two movies should be enjoyed as a four hour-plus package, and you've got enough red flags to send even the bravest U.S. distributors packing.

Wells, who read both scripts, analogizes the project to Lawrence of Arabia. "Hey, how about presenting the two films as a single, gargantuan Lawrence of Arabia-styled deal with an intermission, running between four or four and a half hours?" he suggests, perhaps somewhat tongue-in-cheek.

Jon Stewart had it right during the Oscars this year when he ironically geeked out over Lawrence of Arabia on an iPod. If most audiences can't appreciate that movie on the big screen now, why would they turn up for something like this?

 

Steven Soderbergh – who shot to fame 17 years ago, when sex, lies and videotape took the 1989 Sundance Film Festival by storm – won a Best Director Oscar for Traffic and immediately used his newfound Hollywood clout to cast George Clooney in a remake of Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris. That didn't turn out so great, and some of us – well, okay, probably just me – spent one or two sleepless nights worrying about Steven Soderbergh's career. Though he'd surely never speak to it, perhaps Soderbergh was worried, too, because after the lackluster reception to 2004's Ocean's 12, he went out looking for a kick in the ass. So let's get the business part out of the way: Bubble is the first of six films that the director plans to make, on high def video at a budget of about $250,000 each, for Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner's 2929 Entertainment. 2929, in turn, plans to release all six films on DVD, in theaters, and on HD Net cable – simultaneously. Going in, it's hard to brush off the worry that the deal – and, particularly, its emphasis on technology and speed – might dictate, or at least influence, the way Soderbergh approaches his form and content. What's immediately striking about Bubble, however, is its apparent lack of desire to conform to ... anything. Bubble is not a commercial film, and as such, it in some ways seems like the ideal test case for 2929's simultaneous distribution gambit. If there's any film in today's marketplace that needs to blow its wad all at once to get noticed, it's this.

In a recent interview at the Television Critics Association press tour (where he stopped by to promote the Sundance Channel) Robert Redford shot back at  complaints that the Sundance Film Festival has gone Hollywood. "I don't think that's happened," he said. "I think Hollywood is just taking films from the festival because they realize they have worth." Though the silver fox acknowledges that crowds have grown over the years – "Once it started to roll and you had the success of films like Sex, Lies, and Videotape and other films, then suddenly more people began to come ... Then the paparazzi came, and then the fashion came. And it's like a pebble being dropped in a pond, but these ripples come out" – he maintains that at its core, the festival has followed the same programming philosophy for the past twenty years. He seems to lament the fact that the festival – his baby – gets such a bad rap from media focused on bling and bloat. "When a media person comes in and looks at the festival, but from an outer tier, they're going to see a completely different picture than the one we're programming," he said. "They'll think it's about Paris Hilton, which is not about anything." I'm heading to Park City for the first time ever on Wednesday – let's hope I'm given an opportunity to prove Bob right.

Laura M. Holson contributed a piece to the New York Times yesterday about the changing face of distribution and, fittingly, she saved Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner's revolutionary alliance with Steven Soderbergh for last. The moguls and the director are working together to simultaneously launch a series of films, starting with Bubble, on DVD, in theaters, and on cable; as Holson writes, "What the three men are proposing is a radical - and, to theater owners and existing distributors, not particularly welcome - model of how movies could be distributed one day." It's not at all surprising that Cuban and Wagner's competitors would alternately find the proposal foolhardy and terrifying – the kicker is that Holson gets Wagner to agree. "I know if I went to [a non-Landmark] theater and said, 'Let's sell the movie at the same time on DVD and in the theater,' they would say 'no'. I don't think there is a right answer yet. We are experimenting. If we are just dead wrong, we are not going to do it anymore." This seems like a radical change in faith for Wagner – what's causing the drop in confidence? Has the home office finally faced the fact that whilst Bubble is a very interesting film, it's not a very commercial film – and thus, is probably not the best subject for a simultaneous release experiment?