Something to watch tonight: Monday 15 January

The Informant (Soderbergh, 2009)

Firstly, I have seen social media com­ment from vari­ous people that the AppleTV+ release of Killers of the Flower Moon that was recom­men­ded here last Friday is borked* and unavail­able for New Zealand view­ers. I haven’t exper­i­enced that prob­lem but my setup at home is not com­mon. Please advise in the com­ments if you have man­aged to make it work.

Secondly, but actu­ally most import­antly, yes­ter­day was the 61^st birth­day of the dir­ect­or Steven Soderbergh so I thought today would be a day to spot­light him. Coincidentally, on this day back in 2010, I men­tioned his film The Informant! in my Capital Times “Best of the Year” column for 2009 so that’s the film of his that I have chosen.

It’s based on the true story of a cor­por­ate whis­tleblower whose ini­tial attempts at telling the truth about mal­feas­ance in the com­mer­cial live­stock busi­ness are over­taken by ambi­tion and delu­sion in roughly equal measure.

From my ori­gin­al review in December 2009:

Likely to slip under the radar with so many oth­er fine options avail­able is the pro­lif­ic Soderbergh’s latest, The Informant!, an enorm­ously enter­tain­ing tale of an out-of-control cor­por­ate fabulist whose capa­city for bull­shit just digs him into deep­er and deep­er trouble. Matt Damon is a rev­el­a­tion as the slightly over­weight, bald­ing “hero” and New Plymouth’s finest act­ing export Melanie Lynskey again proves she is one of the sin­gu­lar tal­ents on the scene as his devoted wife. This is Soderbergh in his pop­u­lar Oceans mode rather than his more exper­i­ment­al frame (the evid­ence of which we rarely see here), but his gifts remain prodi­giously on display.

What I love about Soderbergh is that there is no detail too small to deserve the finest atten­tion, no char­ac­ter that can’t jus­ti­fy some inter­est­ing cast­ing. Even the jazzy score, by Marvin Hamlisch who won an Oscar for The Sting back in Hollywood’s last hey­day, is the last thing you might expect but turns out to be abso­lutely perfect.

Interestingly, The Informant! script is by Scott Z. Burns and one of his own films as a dir­ect­or is queued up for a recom­mend­a­tion here at a later date.

Where to watch The Informant!

Aotearoa: Digital rent­al from Apple

Australia: Digital rent­al from Apple or Amazon

USA: Streaming on Max

UK: Digital rent­al from Apple, Amazon, Sky or Rakuten

Further watching

Steven Soderbergh being a per­en­ni­al stu­dent of cinema, as well as being some­thing of a poly­math, he is also a teach­er of cinema.

Back in 2014, as an exper­i­ment in look­ing at sta­ging and com­pos­i­tion, he pro­duced a ver­sion of Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark in black and white and with the ori­gin­al dia­logue and music replaced by a soundtrack by Trent Reznor:

I value the abil­ity to stage some­thing well because when it’s done well its pleas­ures are huge, and most people don’t do it well, which indic­ates it must not be easy to mas­ter (it’s fright­en­ing how many oppor­tun­it­ies there are to do some­thing wrong in a sequence or a group of scenes. Minefields EVERYWHERE. Fincher said it: there’s poten­tially a hun­dred dif­fer­ent ways to shoot some­thing but at the end of the day there’s really only two, and one of them is wrong). Of course under­stand­ing story, char­ac­ter, and per­form­ance are cru­cial to dir­ect­ing well, but I oper­ate under the the­ory a movie should work with the sound off, and under that the­ory, sta­ging becomes para­mount (the adject­ive, not the stu­dio. although their logo DOES appear on the front of this…).

Refer a friend

So I want you to watch this movie and think only about sta­ging, how the shots are built and laid out, what the rules of move­ment are, what the cut­ting pat­terns are. See if you can repro­duce the thought pro­cess that res­ul­ted in these choices by ask­ing your­self: why was each shot—whether short or long—held for that exact length of time and placed in that order? Sounds like fun, right? It actu­ally is. To me. Oh, and I’ve removed all sound and col­or from the film, apart from a score designed to aid you in your quest to just study the visu­al sta­ging aspect. Wait, WHAT? HOW COULD YOU DO THIS? Well, I’m not say­ing I’m like, ALLOWED to do this, I’m just say­ing this is what I do when I try to learn about sta­ging, and this film­maker for­got more about sta­ging by the time he made his first fea­ture than I know to this day (for example, no mat­ter how fast the cuts come, you always know exactly where you are—that’s high level visu­al math shit).

Mr. Soderbergh also pro­duces an annu­al list of everything he watched or read in the pre­vi­ous cal­en­dar year. Here’s 2023.