Salon.com > Steven Soderbergh

Steven Soderbergh is writing a novella on Twitter

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 22:00:00 +0000

It's an exciting day on Twitter. Donald Trump is fighting with Danny Zuker, Mel Brooks just joined for Twitter's ComedyFest and "Magic Mike" director Steven Soderbergh is tweeting a novella:

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The first chapter begins in "Amsterdam."

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It's a crime mystery told in the second-person:

There are pictures:

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Read chapters one through seven here.

Cannes Film Festival’s 2013 lineup announced

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 13:37:00 +0000

PARIS (AP) — The Cannes Film Festival's 2013 lineup announced Thursday features work from some of the globe's most dangerous locales for artists, and a sprinkling of works by old favorites including Roman Polanski, the Coen brothers and Steven Soderbergh.

Celebrating world cinema from countries with limited freedom of expression is clearly one of this year's stories, with a lineup with features from Chad, China, Mexico and Iran among the 19 films competing for the Palme d'Or, one of cinema's most coveted prizes.

"The festival is a house that shelters artists in danger," said Cannes President Gilles Jacob, who announced the nominees Thursday.

Harking from Africa, "Grigris" by Chadian filmmaker Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, will feature alongside "The Life of Adele" from French-Tunisian director Abdellatif Kechiche. "Zulu" — a police thriller shot in South Africa and starring Forest Whitaker and Orlando Bloom — will close the festival but is not competing.

The list also includes "A Touch of Sin" by Chinese director Jia Zhangke; "The Past," from Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, featuring Tahar Rahim and rising star Berenice Bejo who garnered attention for "The Artist"; and Mexican narco-film "Heli" by director Amat Escalante, who explores how love and family ties can provide solace in the desperation stemming from drug trafficking.

“Side Effects”: A chilly, mysterious thriller ends a strange and brilliant career

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 01:00:00 +0000

It’s not enough to say that the absence of human feeling is characteristic of Steven Soderbergh’s films. It’s more that the absence of human feeling is Soderbergh’s principal subject matter, and central to his diagnosis of contemporary society and its pathologies. From his 1989 debut with “Sex, Lies, and Videotape” onward, Soderbergh has seemed divided between a yearning for human contact and a (supposedly) detached and dispassionate belief that it can’t happen anymore and maybe never could.

In Soderbergh’s new movie “Side Effects,” which he says will be his last as a cinema director, all human interaction is mediated by some abstract force, whether that’s money or a commodified and quotation-marked notion of sexuality or an impressive range of psychoactive pharmaceuticals, most notably a fictional antidepressant called “Ablixa” that serves as an enormous plot MacGuffin. This follows such recent Soderbergh films as “Contagion” (scripted, like “Side Effects,” by frequent collaborator Scott Z. Burns), whose true protagonist is arguably a pandemic virus; “Haywire,” in which almost every meeting between characters leads to violence; and “Magic Mike” and “The Girlfriend Experience,” tonally opposite but thematically linked films that depict human sexuality as a marketplace and prostitution as its governing metaphor.

The side effects of “Side Effects”

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 16:00:00 +0000

On Friday, audiences will get to check out "Side Effects," a movie so convoluted that late-coming critics were booted from screenings, as they wouldn't be able to follow the plot. Without spoiling the movie -- or blowing our own minds -- we can briefly summarize Steven Soderbergh's final film: Rooney Mara's character, depressed to an incapacitating degree, is dosed with some SSRIs that cheer her up — a bit. They also cause her to sleepwalk, and it's within the realm of possibility that she committed the horrific crime at the film's center while zonked out on a fictional drug, "Ablixa," prescribed by a doctor (Jude Law) looking to make a quick buck trying new drugs for Big Pharma.

"Everything is accurate in terms of what has gone on and what may be going on," said Sasha Bardey, the medical adviser to the film and a forensic psychiatrist. "As certain medications have gone through the various phases of study, one of the final phases is that it's tried in a clinical setting. The psychiatrist can be reimbursed -- and even paid a fee."

Liberace’s homosexuality makes Hollywood squirm

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 17:07:00 +0000

This is everything that's ridiculous about Hollywood in a single sentence. You can put together an acclaimed, hit-making director and two A-list, Oscar-winning actors, promise a low budget and an intriguing subject matter, and have the whole industry run away. The whole liberal, diversity-loving industry. Because, as director Steven Soderbergh explains, "They said it was too gay."

Too gay. That's the reason that Michael Douglas and Matt Damon's "Behind the Candelabra" biopic about Liberace is coming to HBO instead of a theater this year. Because in 2013, apparently the entertainment industry believes we can still only watch stories about homosexuals in the privacy of our homes. Soderbergh told the Wrap, "Nobody would make it. We went to everybody in town. We needed $5 million. Nobody would do it. They said it was too gay. Everybody. This was after 'Brokeback Mountain,' by the way. Which is not as funny as this movie. I was stunned. It made no sense to any of us." Maybe he could have gotten green-lighted with a movie about a gay star who died of AIDS that was just a little bit gay?

Soderbergh’s Liberace biopic deemed “too gay” for theaters

Sun, 06 Jan 2013 17:00:00 +0000

"Magic Mike" director Steven Soderbergh's new film, "Behind the Candelabra," is a "beautiful and relatable" film about "a real relationship -- a marriage -- long before there was gay marriage," according to Matt Damon, who plays the entertainer's (Michael Douglas) young lover in the Liberace biopic. But that didn't matter to Hollywood, apparently, who considered an in-depth look at a homosexual relationship too risky for theaters. In a recent interview with the New York Post, the Oscar-winning director said that “Nobody would make it.” “We went to everybody in town," he said. "They all said it was too gay.”

“And this is after ‘Brokeback Mountain,’ by the way, which is not as funny as this movie. I was stunned. It made no sense to any of us," Soderbergh added.

Instead, HBO has picked up the film and will premiere it this spring. “The whole package to them looked ... like a slam dunk. The studios didn’t know how to sell it. They were scared."

Male strippers: Please, just leave it on

Fri, 29 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Onstage was an overly tanned dark-and-handsome type dressed like a race car driver. He slowly unzipped his onesie while popping his knee to the throbbing techno music, which was accented by sounds of a car engine revving. Once naked, he took his flaccid penis in his hand, stretched it out as far as he could and let go; it snapped back to his body and flopped around as he wiggled his eyebrows at the crowd.

That was the first time I went to a male strip club -- and the last. Obviously.

But then came "Magic Mike," a new movie starring a mouthwatering array of maleness: Channing Tatum, Matthew McConaughey, promising newcomer Alex Pettyfer and that hot, perpetually shirtless werewolf from "True Blood." Ever the optimist about the potential of male stripping to be sexy, I allowed myself to believe -- against all prior evidence of banana hammocks to the contrary -- that this movie would get it right.

Well, having attended a screening earlier this week, I can tell you that the movie gets a great many things right, but male stripping isn’t one of them -- and of course not! It simply shows male stripping as it so often is: goofball, absurd and sometimes repulsive. That raises what is surely the most critical question of our time: Why is female-oriented male stripping so often unsexy? Why is it so prone to eliciting women’s laughs or cringes?

“Magic Mike”: Channing Tatum’s stripper romance

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 21:10:00 +0000

Count on Steven Soderbergh to turn a raunchy saga of ultra-beefcake male strippers and the women who love them into something unexpected -- in this case, into what may be the warmest and most romantic movie of his career. Now, as those who are familiar with Soderbergh's work over the last 23 years and 30 or so films will attest, praising him for warmth and romance is a little like proclaiming the nicest day of the year in Antarctica. Clear back to his era-defining indie hit "Sex, Lies, and Videotape" in 1989, this is a director obsessed with surfaces and reflections, with voyeurism and narcissism, with the way that human sexuality and the human body, once understood as realms of private experience, have become commodities.