Moore of the Same
“Smart” and “cynical” are not the same but, lately, film culture has confused the two—as proved by Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant! and Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story. Both films pretend to critique greed and corporate insensitivity through the filmmakers’ liberal-leaning scrutinies of the American way of life. Soderbergh dramatizes how an Archer Daniels Midland executive, Matt Whitacre (Matt Damon), swindled his company for over $10 million while Moore takes his usual scattershot, mockumentary approach to the banking industry and its connection to the recent economic collapse. Read more
The Beautiful and the Damned
The System rewards Steven Soderbergh and he pays his Faustian debt with haughty judgments. Soderbergh’s new film The Girlfriend Experience is the most unironic celebration of materialist privilege since Woody Allen’s Reagan-era heralds Manhattan and Hannah and Her Sisters. Already proclaimed, even in the alternative media, The Girlfriend Experience paints a gaudy face on the whoredom to which every powerful person in New York, it sometimes seems, has consented. Narcissistic media can’t even resist its fun-house mirror reflection. Read more
CHE
“How does it feel to be a symbol?” Benicio del Toro is asked in his role as Che Guevara. “Of what?” he replies and is told: “The revolution.” But in Che, Steven Soderbergh’s two-part art thing, this revolution is about style—not politics. After decades as a poster boy for counterculture hipness, Che Guevara provides Soderbergh a pretext for another idiosyncratic, uncharismatic enterprise. (This one makes Bubble look like Gone With The Wind.)
Out-perversing Gus Van Sant’s Milk, Soderbergh makes a four-hour-plus biopic about a historical figure without providing a glimmer of charm or narrative coherence. One can’t accuse Soderbergh of pandering to feel-good piety because Che proudly resists sentimentality about people’s power, distribution of wealth, Marxist theology, radical chic or morbid celebrity. Read more
