Soderbergh Marathon: Part 24

Intro

Full Frontal (2002)
Full Frontal is a very weird movie.  It's one of those movies where Soderbergh is clearly experimenting with the process of filmmaking.  As such, I don't like it!  He shoots most of the movie on videotape and by god does it look awful.

Another one of the warning signs with Full Frontal is that it's a comedy, and Soderbergh is not especially good at making comedies.  Having humor in his movie sure.  But making a movie that can be called a comedy?  Not so much.

Unlike his other experimental movies, this one actually features name actors.  Ton of them in fact.  Julia Roberts plays a reporter who interviews Blair Underwood, who is a famous actor.  And in the middle of this interview at one point, cut is yelled, Julia Roberts takes off her wig, and is a famous actress not named Julia Roberts.  So Blair and Julia are operating in a fictional movie where most of what we see is that movie, but they're actually acting.

Confused?  I'll make things more confusing for you.  In whatever universe the movie operates in, Blair is an actor who acts alongside Brad Pitt being directed by David Fincher.  So she's interviewing him behind the scenes of a movie, and then the movie stops, and lets us know that both Julia Roberts and Blair Underwood are acting in a different movie we see the behind the scenes of.

There's also Linda, played by Mary McCormack, who has never dated someone for longer three months and is looking for love.  There's Catherine Keener, who's married to David Hyde Pierce, and they are clearly on their way to a divorce, as Keener cheats on Pierce's character, who knows it.  Pierce rambles on aimlessly to many different women in this movie.

There's Enrico Colotani, who plays a playwright, and he directs Nicky Katt, who plays Hitler in some sort of comical take on Hitler that is never really funny.  And then there's David Duchovny, who plays a guy who invites everyone to a party, which kind of ends up going nowhere.  The movie sets up the party as if it's going be this big endgame, but the plot deflates.

So what you have here is seemingly pointless script where the movie tries its hand at satire and I get the feeling you almost have to be in the movie business to understand that wavelength.  Like imagine The Player, but incomprehensibly aimless.  The Player had a plot for all its winking nods to Hollywood few of the people watching understand.  This doesn't.

And then you have Soderbergh filming most of it on grainy videotape for some reason.  I imagine he has a reason for it, I just don't understand it.  Even when I've disagreed with the method for how he shoots, I understand the intention.  This one?  I don't.  Basically nothing in this movie works, except that every actor is a professional and does their job.  But good actors can only do so much with an empty script and ugly visuals.

1/4 stars