One of Soderbergh's high points is the trifecta of Traffic, Erin Brockovich, and Ocean's Eleven, three films whose major success made him better-known and sought-after than ever. After these, he did a great deal of producing and ran directly toward something more dangerous and less "safe" in Full Frontal.
12: Erin Brockovich (2000)
sassy lady pseudo-biopic narrative feature
131 min
on disc (USA) || 2012 Region A/B/C (all) Blu-ray, complete with all extras from the ancient DVD (around $15 on Amazon, including said ancient DVD & iTunes Digital Copy)
streaming (USA) || not available
best way to watch || the Blu-ray: deleted scenes with commentary are the highlight on top of the really solid HD visuals, with a pair of featurettes thrown in
Julia Roberts plays a real-life sassy lady who wears sassy clothes and who has lots of sass. This sassy lady helped (spoiler alert!) get a massive precedent-setting settlement from a big company that was making people sick.
I get why people hate on this movie. By people, I mean mostly my male friends. There are no guys being awesome badasses in it. It is very satisfying and doesn't disappoint. I’m convinced it’s more interesting with Soderbergh at the helm than it would be in the hands of another director. Julia Roberts is good, and so is Aaron Eckhart. Albert Finney is great, and seeing him this good in what amounts to a walking (and standing) and talking part is something often overlooked in the career of a guy better associated with bombast and theatrical showmanship.
I just haven’t felt compelled to re-watch it except for those instances when I find myself writing a career retrospective on Steven Soderbergh. I never find myself saying “hey honey, let’s throw on fuckin’ Erin Brockovich! I love that movie! It reminds me of when we had cable and would flip past TNT! Remember TNT, the one that 'knows Drama'?”.
best title translation || In Turkey, it’s called Fresh Trouble
13: Traffic (2000)
multithreaded narrative feature
147 min
on disc (USA) || Criterion's 2011 Region A Blu-ray, complete with the exhaustive extras from the previous 2-disc DVD (for about $25), Universal's relatively barebones 2010 Region A/B/C Blu-ray goes for around $8
streaming (USA) || Netflix Instant (requires subscription)
best way to watch || on the cheap: Netflix, but ideally, the Criterion Blu-ray: 3 commentaries, tons of deleted scenes and featurettes covering production techniques
Soderbergh was nominated for Best Director twice in the same year, for this movie and Erin Brockovich. I’m glad that he won for Traffic, but I’m much more glad that he gave the acceptance speech that he did:
It’s a rare instance of real poetic justice at the Oscars. That isn’t to say Brockovich isn’t good and all that, but Traffic is the towering achievement.
A multi-pronged approach to examining the drug war based on a UK miniseries (Traffik), it features a big ensemble cast, big topics examined on the microcosmic scale, and a varied visual style that Soderbergh first toyed with in The Underneath. Different "zones" are photographed using distinctly different methods. Most-cited is the use of color (dusty, super-hot red-yellow for Mexico, for example), with varied frame rates also employed to radically distinguish the look and feel of the different sections of the narrative.
Here, Luis Guzman cements his role as one of the signature Soderbergh performers, after killing it in The Limey.
There's the drug czar, his daughter, beat cops, corrupt officials across the border, and many other people that fit together in the overall puzzle. Anyone who downplays the degree of achievement in Traffic hasn't seen it recently enough (or at all).
It takes a lot to earn the adjective "epic", but Traffic capably earns it with a compelling, multi-threaded narrative and inventive visuals. The visual style has been imitated to limp effect frequently ever since by less-talented people. To be honest, it's been otherwise aped with annoying regularity in all video media ever since.
Traffic is definitively not something that you can throw into the DVD player and half-watch with pals over pizza and beer while you update Facebook. Traffic is a movie that demands your attention more so than requires it. It isn’t “fun”, but it’s great. The deconstruction of the drug "war" (more like the drug "world") is still relevant, and comes off as more prophetic than it was considered even by its most ardent supporters 13 years ago.
If you ask me, it’s a good thing when the director cites The Battle of Algiers and William Friedkin’s The French Connection and especially Sorcerer as direct influences that he regularly re-watched during production.
Soderbergh knows how to pick talent out of a crowd. John Slattery, better known now for Mad Men, has a short appearance here as a District Attorney. Over five years ago, Soderbergh called him out on the Criterion commentary as being an amazing presence, who’s able to do a lot with very little. I guess that’s how Slattery got on K Street. More on that one soon.
expanded thoughts on how to watch Traffic || If you're among the massive majority who has Netflix Instant, that's something you're already paying for, but the quality is SD at best. The recently released Universal Blu-ray has some positives on top of the now-expected negatives on titles that also see release from Criterion. Traffic's stylized visuals and very precise color palette demand reasonable bitrate and resolution, something reasonably accounted for by the Universal disc, which actually has a higher bitrate than the Criterion one...however, it uses inferior VC-1 compression as compared to Criterion's MPEG-4 AVC encoding. If those abbreviations mean nothing to you, rest assured that the consensus is that AVC is much better.
I can’t point to a particular scene on the Universal and say “it looks like they hit the ‘easy’ button on the telecine machine and then ran the whole thing through a digital noise reduction filter that made it look like everyone got Botox treatment.” I can’t say that because there’s a shitload of grain in the image, something Univeral has often (rightly) been accused of removing too much of in its work. That isn't the case here. There are some changes in the sepia/brown/orange filters used to more pronounced effect in the theatrical cut than are seen here, but they're gone in both the Universal and Criterion releases, as is preferred by the director. Is this technical sacrilege as compared to the original theatrical release? Yes. Does that kind of change usually bother the everloving shit out of me? Absolutely. Does it really bother me much in this case? To be completely honest, maybe a touch, but not really at all.
If you just want to see it for the sake of seeing it, it's on Netflix. If you want a much higher-res look at a gorgeous movie, on top of a solid weekend afternoon worth of extras (aka the full experience), then the Criterion Blu is your thing.
14: Ocean's Eleven (2001)
smooth-ass, funktastic heist narrative feature
116 min
on disc (USA) || 2008 Region A Blu-ray, complete with both commentaries and featurettes from the DVD ($10 USD on Amazon, the Ocean's Trilogy box is usually $25)
streaming (USA) || none available
best way to watch || the Blu-ray
If movies were children, this one would be entering sixth grade.
Most mainstream audiences know Soderbergh for this movie and that’s it, which is a shame. That isn’t to say Ocean’s Eleven isn’t a really good and well-made movie, in addition to being a hell of a lot of fun. I always wish more people knew about the cool off-the-radar movies that he's done. I don’t mean that everyone out there should see Kafka or Schizopolis, far from it. I feel like people should know King of the Hill or The Limey just as well as this one.
Let me say this first: I’m far from a proponent of remakes, more often than not. With that out of the way, I’ve gotta say the original Ocean’s 11 is the worst kind of movie, and by that I mean superhumanly boring. It’s iconic, don’t get me wrong, and I dig all the people in the movie, especially Angie Dickinson, but it’s a pile of talking and not much happening, even within the talking.
In this version, everyone’s having a ton of fun, cast and audience included. There’s nothing wrong with having a good time, right?
This version of Ocean’s Eleven is more on the snap-crackle-pop wavelength, on top of being much more self-aware as compared to the up-its-own-ass original. The big Hollywood stars get that they’re all in a movie together and that they don’t have to be stone-faced as if going for the little gold man. Topher Grace gets to show off how fucking funny he can be when given the chance to be, albeit briefly. The movie is loose, but not laid back or lazy. Soderbergh had to be completely on his toes to sneak in an almost undetectable reference to Winston, the short he made fourteen years before. The main character of that movie is intimidated by a romantic rival speaking three languages. In Ocean’s, Terry Benedict speaks three languages plus he’s learning Japanese, and it doesn’t so much as faze Danny Ocean.
If there’s one thing I love most about this movie is that it’s not too hard to figure out before the twists come, and it paves the way to trick the audience into watching the sequel, which is better and more brilliant than almost everyone gives it credit for. More in it in the next installment.
best translated title || In Portugal, it’s called Eleven Men and a Secret. Makes it sound like an erotic thriller.
assorted trivia || Don Cheadle went uncredited here due to a disagreement regarding his contract stipulations for equal billing, from what I understand based on the always-reliable internet.
I feel a little lonely in raging about just how under-appreciated Bernie Mac was and still is. His bit with Damon here makes the whole damn movie.
Up Next in Soderberghopolis
I skipped his 2001 producing credits here in the interest of cramming them into the next installment, which finds Soderbergh appearing to hunger for the danger of the fringe, and a break from the mainstream. Full Frontal, Solaris, producing movies for Nolan and Clooney (as well as the final Qatsi movie!), and his first foray into TV are up next.
Soderberghopolis is an open-ended, chronological career retrospective series looking at the work of Steven Soderbergh in moving pictures: cinema, TV, installation art, whatever fits.
Essential sources include (but are not limited to): various interviews (linked where applicable) and the various commentaries, booklets, and featurettes produced by The Criterion Collection.
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