In Steven Soderbergh's UNSANE, nitwittery hits a ripe new height

You've got to hand it to Steven Soderbergh. When he's good (as in last year's Logan Lucky), he's very good, and when he fails, he does it big-time: no halfway-there for this guy! His new movie, UNSANE, is as ripe a piece of unintentional camp silliness that we've seen in, well, let's just say it makes that recent Halle Berry thriller Kidnap look like a classic of the genre. Word has it that Unsane was filmed entirely via cell phone (see shot of the director, below).

If so, congratulations --  though the film is nowhere as good as either King Kelly or Tangerine, both of which were "cell-phone" precursors of this overlong, let's-toss-believability-out-the-window mess.

The mess is less due to Mr. Soderbergh, who at least knows how to move things along, than to its writers -- Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer -- who take a smart, timely idea (a rehab center that entraps its clients and then won't let them go until their insurance payments have expired) and then fills it with such stupid and nitwit details (male and female patients sleep in the same room?) and ridiculous coincidence that all credibility is soon left for dead.

The film stars Claire Foy (above), who is onscreen for practically the entire movie and does a yeoman job of "trying." But her character is so thoroughly manufacturer-to-fit-the-bill that, again, any credence or caring is lost to behavior that is rather unlike any seen either on screen or in the world as we know it. (The character is repeatedly warned what her violent behavior will bring her, and so she engages in it like there's no tomorrow.)

This makes her rather the equal of the film's villain, played with enough relish to fill three movies (and a whole lot of hot dogs) by Joshua Leonard, above, who has been quite good elsewhere (Humpday), and I'm sure will rise again.

For a short while (this is the most believable section of the film), we are meant to wonder if our girl is sane or not so, but it soon becomes clear that she's the victim. Subsidiary characters are the equal, in terms of believability, of the leads: There's the unhelpful matron, played by Polly McKie (above, left) and another patient, limned by the always-fun Juno Temple (below), who exists simply and only to annoy our heroine.

The most interesting character, a patient who is really an investigative reporter planning to "out" this rehab center, is played by Jay Pharoah (below, right), but what this fellow can so easily accomplish (rather obviously yet without anyone noticing) just adds to the film's foolishness.

Yes, we also get that scene of running down totally unpopulated hallways (this is yet another "thriller" in which a medical facility seems to have lost its entire staff), and a heroine who can stab the bad guy but then forgets to do it again so he is incapacitated. And on and on it goes.

In retrospect, I think this may be the perfect movie for our Trump era -- in which everybody (on both sides of the screen) is either sleazy or stupid. Good luck to us all.

From Bleecker Street and running a too-long 97 minutes the movie opens (pretty much nationwide, I believe) this Friday, March 23. Click here then scroll down to find the theater(s) nearest you.

Soderbergh's back -- with the smart, fast, funny but low-key frolic, LOGAN LUCKY

Steven Soderburgh (shown below) said goodbye to movies a few years back -- but not to cable TV, for which he'd already directed Behind the Candelabra and soon would oversee The Knick. Now, like Frank Sinatra and his many good-bye concerts and recordings, the filmmaker is back. And if his latest -- LOGAN LUCKY -- is any indication, he's simply gotten all that much better during his flirtation with those premium channels. Over the past couple of decades, TrustMovies has been up-and-down regarding Soderburgh's work. Some of his most successful -- those Oceans movies and especially Traffic (his mediocre remake of one of the best-ever British television series) and the more recent Magic Mike -- have been among my least favorites.

Logan Lucky, I think, is one of Soderburgh's best. Maybe the best. Among this filmmaker's biggest strengths is his ability to match his style (never a hugely showy thing) to the particular atmosphere and content to which he's currently involved. Thus we get the Oceans movies' gloss, The Underneath's noir-osity, The Good German's sense of time and place, Erin Brockovich's documentary feel, and Haywire's speedy, lo-calorie smarts. Though Logan Lucky is a heist movie (as were the Oceans), it is set in what we might fondly call the redneck territory of NASCAR racing, among the lower-, middle- and upper-classes of our nation's no-one-would-mistake-them-for-classy citizens. Hence, his film, which is supremely well-written (though it is credited to one, Rebecca Blunt, the IMDB says that this name is likely a pseudonym), has the slow-but-sure look, feel, sound and movement of that down-home place and people. The movie may take it sweet time to unfurl, but, boy, does it deliver 'dem goods!

It also gives Channing Tatum (above) another great role to inhabit, which he does in spades, playing the careful, caring dad who, like so many Americans these days, is having employment trouble. (That's the sweet young actress, Farrah Mackenzie, above, who plays his daughter.)

To solve our hero, Jimmy's, financial problems, he and his Iraq War-wounded brother, Clyde (another fine job in another unusual role by Adam Driver, above, left), conspire to rob the NASCAR racetrack vault. This is of course ridiculous, but so cleverly is the convoluted screenplay conceived and executed, with Soderburgh taking just enough time to explain what we need to know when we need to know it, that we're suckered in and then hooked from beginning through the very exciting heist itself, and on to the to the film's funny climax and quite fabulous, if quietly ironic, denouement.

Along for the ride is such a huge and mostly memorable cast that I don't begin to have time to list them all. But, in the movie's biggest hoot of a joke, the end credits herald the "introduction" of an actor by the name of Daniel Craig. Yes, that classy Brit-and-Bond-ish Daniel Craig, above, in a role the likes of which you will not have seen this very capable performer previously essay. Hillary Swank (below) makes a very late-in-the-game entrance, too, and she provides a good deal of quietly determined fun.

I hope this movie is a huge success, but I do have some doubts. Its heist plot is so complicated that I fear a mainstream American audience may not be able to easily or properly follow it. So concentrate, please. There are plenty of funny, exciting, clever moments along the way to keep you occupied, as well as all those name actors popping up and doing their smart thing smartly.

From Bleecker Street and Fingerprint Releasing (Soderbergh's own firm, which you can read more about by clinking the preceding link), Logan Lucky opens nationwide this Friday, August 18. Here in South Florida, you can see it all over the place: In the Miami area at the AMC Sunset Place 24 Theatres, AMC Hialeah 12, AMC Aventura Mall 24, AMC Tamiami 18, AMC Pompano Beach 18, Cobb Dolphin Cinema, Cobb Hialeah Grand 18, Cobb Miami Lakes 17, CMX Brickell City Center, Cineopolis Grove, Regal The Falls, Regal Oakwood, Regal Kendall Village 16, Regal Westfork, Regal Southland Mall, and Regal South Beach 18.

In Ft. Lauderdale it will play the AMC Coral Ridge 10 Theatres, Classic Gateway, Silverspot Coconut Creek, Cineapolis Deerfield, Cinemark Paradise 24, Thunderbird Drive-In, Paragon Ridge Plaza 8, Regal Magnolia Place, Regal Cypress Creek, Regal Broward 12, Regal Sawgrass.

In West Palm Beach/Boca/Delray and further north areas, look for it at the Living Room Theater, Regal Shadowood 16, Movies of Delray 5/Movies of Lake Worth, Cinemark Boynton Beach 14, AMC City Place 20, Cobb Downtown at the Mall Gardens, Paragon Wellington 10, Regal Royal Palm Beach 18, Regency Square 8, AMC St Lucie 14, AMC Indian River 24 , Palm 16, Regal Treasure Coast Mall 16, Majestic 11, Cinepolis Jupiter 14. Normally, I'd provide links for the all these many theaters, but I need to get to bed by midnight for an early day tomorrow....

Wherever you live across the USA, to locate a theater near you, click here. 

Catching up with Steven Soderbergh's Spalding Gray film, AND EVERYTHING IS GOING FINE

This coming January will mark the tenth year since the death of Spalding Gray. Already? This hardly seems possible. Gray, such a primary force on the New York cultural scene during the final three decades of the twentieth century, was also more than anyone else, I think, responsible for the trend toward the "monologue evening" that is now such a staple of theatre, whether performed by a Daisey, a Birbiglia or so many others. I had been a fan of Mr. Gray for a long while, appreciating both his sense of humor and his keen intelligence, and noting, too, that we were born in the same month in the same year (January 1941) and were both raised in households where that bizarre religion of Christian Science was in full swing. And then there was the interest in homosexuality, which I perhaps embraced more fully than he.

Gray's theater monologues usually offered up a good portion of the fellow's history, yet they always left us wanting more. A smart move, of course, because audiences would flock right back to whatever the man did next. The beauty of Steven Soderbergh's film AND EVERYTHING IS GOING FINE is that it captures Gray remar-kably well over a rela-tively long period of time (in only 89 minutes) and ends up giving us more than we've ever seen of this troubled, funny man, along with the family he came from (below), and the family he helped create and then left behind.

Soderbergh selects portions of various of Gray's theater performances, interviews with him by journalists (like Charlie Rose), Gray's own interviews with members of his audiences, talks with his father, archival footage and more -- weaving all this together into a surprisingly full look at the man, his work and how he developed his signature style.

Gray understood (he even remarked on this) that he was probably "fictionalizing," but that's what we all do when remembering our past. (Hearing him talk about his work in pornographic movies provides one of the funnier sections, fictionalized or not.) As Gray grows more successful, his life seems to be coming together nicely. He starts a family, which becomes, eventually, an extended family, all the while fighting off the depression that had plagued him, lifelong.

There's a slightly "embarrassed" quality to the man that went hand in hand with, and in fact probably accounted for, his singular success. And yet his take on life as "the glorious accident" seems consistent with his attitude and growth. Soderbergh had worked with Gray previously (King of the Hill and Gray's Anatomy), so he knew the man and the personality to some extent. And Everything Is Going Fine proves a wonderful marriage of a filmmaker to his subject.

The documentary is surely one of, maybe the best film overall that this up-and-down but often very gifted director has made -- about one of the most quietly iconic theater folk to have ever come our way. And Everything Is Going Fine is available now via Netflix streaming--and perhaps elsewhere.

Photos are from the film itself, with the 

exception of that of Mr. Soderbergh (second from top), 

which comes courtesy of Getty Images.

SIDE EFFECTS opens: Steven Soderbergh's so-so (and supposed) swan song to cinema

Damn us critics! We're always claiming we want something new (at least sort-of new, which is about as much as can be seen, under this sun). But then when we get it, we don't much care for it. I'm afraid that's the case with TrustMovies and SIDE EFFECTS, the new and quite spiffily outfitted film from Steven Soderbergh, the noted director who has told us that this will be his final film, though not neces-sarily the end of his output. In a very interesting conversation with this director pub-lished recently, the filmmaker makes it clear that he's quite willing to work in cable television and maybe other venues in which the format is more to his liking. But no more "cinema." (Oh, well -- Frank Sinatra was always giving "final" concerts, too, so who knows?)

I've long run hot and cold to Mr. Soderbergh's output (the director is shown at right), and I'm only lukewarm to this latest/last work. Though it has a lot going for it initially and up to maybe the halfway point, eventually it falls apart due to the unbelievable shenanigans set before us in almost "shorthand" manner to make everything go click-click-click into its clockwork-like finale. People's behavior suddenly turns on a dime and characters who were, oh, so smart now appear awfully dumb in order to bring the movie home. I cannot get more specific without giving away spoilers, and part of the movie's fun is how it quietly morphs from genre to genre to genre, becoming by its end something entirely different from what you imagined you were viewing at its beginning.

This clever genre-mashing has been done previously, but not, I think, as quietly and un-showily as Soderbergh manages it. If only he and particularly the film's screenwriter, Scott Z. Burns, had found a way to handle it all so that everything did not click into place without using what seems like every tried-and-true movie method -- making one character suddenly jealous of another, using the old hidden-recorder trick -- in its rush to completion. By trying to turn something interestingly nuanced into near-mainstream fodder, the movie ends up a neither-fish-nor-fowl concoction.

So lets get back to the good stuff, of which there is plenty, starting with the filmmakers' look at today's society and its dependence upon pharmaceuticals to solve problems, together with how easily doctors are willing to jump into bed with the companies that make those pharmaceuticals. Especially commendable is how Side Effects -- such a telling and inclusive title -- incorporates everything from the behavior of society's public servants to Wall Street's bumps (and grinds) into such an effectively sleazy scenario.

The movie's cast is part of the good stuff, as well, and, yes indeed, they all deliver. Jude Law, above, moving smartly into middle-age roles, makes a very believable therapist and johnny-come-lately protagonist.

Catherine Zeta-Jones is aces as another therapist (both her character and Law's have treated the movie's initial protagonist) who goes from bright and sunny (above) to something a bit more complex. Channing Tatum, below, hot off the Soderbergh hit (but again, only so-so in my book), Magic Mike, is here a bit wasted (in a couple of senses of that word) but he is absolutely confined by the movie's script and so does what he can valiantly enough.

More than any other cast member, it's Rooney Mara (below and at bottom) who delivers the film's knockout performance. It's not enough that she envelopes us with her neediness and sadness, but then she... ah, you'll see. Though I was disappointed in the movie overall, I have to recommend it for Mara's work alone.

Supporting roles are cast and handled expertly down the line. Everyone from Mamie Gummer (the wife of a business friend) and Polly Draper (Mara's understanding boss) to Vinessa Shaw (Law's significant other), Ann Dowd (Tatum's mom), and Peter Friedman and Laila Robins as Law's business partners) do a spot-on job.

Side Effects, from Open Road films, opens wide tomorrow, Friday, February 8. To find out where, click here and then click on BUY TICKETS NOW.