Everything That Dies, Some Day Comes Back

It’s fascinating of course to watch this 2011 Stephen Soderbergh film about a global pandemic to see how prescient it was. For starters the fictional virus originates in a Chinese market where live animals are sold. And the film gets a lot of technical detail right apparently, and even references R0 at one point. On the other hand instead of lockdowns it imagines whole cities being isolated, leading to breakdowns in law and order. And the speed with which a vaccine is created and the way it is proved safe are not credible but that's understandable given that the reality of how a vaccine is developed and tested is not that riveting.  Which brings us to the main issue here, which is that a pandemic is not in itself necessarily make for good drama. This film tries to solve this problem by focusing on half a dozen or so individuals, and so how much you enjoy this film hinges on how satisfying you find their stories. The one I was most into was that of Kate Winslett who goes to Minneapo...

This spy thriller directed by Steven Soderbergh  has a simple and effective setup: George (Michael Fassbender) is given the job of uncovering a traitor among his colleagues, the sting in the tail being that one of the five suspects is his wife Kathryn (Cate Blanchett). In the first half of the film we see George spying on Kathryn, culminating in one of the best scenes, in an intelligence briefing, when George for the first time is visibly shaken - could indeed his wife be guilty of betrayal? Actually it quickly turns out that his concern is not that she is a traitor but rather that they are both being set up, so the tension that had been building around Kathryn's loyalty is dissipated, and then everything gets resolved a little too easily for my taste.   I ended up not sure what was going on in George's head.  Did he really suspect Kathryn, in which case I wasn't sure what convinced him she wasn't guilty?  Or was his trust in her rock solid throughout, in which ...

This is one of those films where the director Steven Soderbergh makes it all look so easy.  Just take an aging British film star from the 1960s (Terence Stamp), drop him into LA trying to find out the truth behind his daughter's death, and let him rub up against a variety of unsavoury or odd characters, chiefly Peter Fonda as a vacuous and sleazy film producer.   There isn't even much of a plot to keep track of,  or denouement, so we can just relax and enjoy Stamp single-mindedly stomping through the landscape. But of course it takes a master director like Soderbergh to make this kind of thing sparkle. The sound editing is very tricksy, juxtaposing dialogue and sound from other scenes into the current scene.  Maybe this is intended to convey Stamp's disorientation, or maybe Soderbergh just likes to give himself technical challenges.  Or maybe Soderbergh was concerned about the basic simplicity of the story and felt the need to tart it up (to use a technical...

There really is no point in this sequel, other than to make loads of money, which it did. Having tried something a bit different with 'Ocean's 12' Soderbergh reverts to Plan A, except the heist here is scarcely worthy of the name, and without Julia Roberts or Catherine Zeta-Jones  there's no romance either.  Which leaves us with Clooney and Pitt et al exposed, having nothing much in the way of substance or characterisation to fall back on.   I love a good heist movie, and there was pleasure in the first film in seeing the components of the heist coming together, plus the denouement when Garcia's relationship with Roberts is skewered. Replicating any of that was always going to be a tall order, but the writers don't even try. There's so little at stake - are we really supposed to care about Reuben, and whether Pacino's character gets his comeuppance?  Most of the efforts at comedy fall flat, for example the goings-on in the Mexican factory.  There's o...