Contagion (Soderbergh)

[Adam]

An action-thriller centered on the threat posed by a deadly disease and an international team of doctors contracted by the CDC to deal with the outbreak

starring...

Matt Damon
Gwyneth Paltrow
Marion Cotillard
Jude Law
John Hawkes
Laurence Fishburne
Bryan Cranston
Sanaa Lathan

I'm a sucker for these kinds of movies (and also Soderbergh, to an extent) so I'm pretty much already in the bag for this one. Comes out October 21st

[Morris Schæffer]

Somehow that premise sounds like it doesn't quite go together with the name Soderbergh, but I ain't complaining. Still think Traffic is the man's best work so I'd love to see him return to an established genre rather than going oddball & quirky on us although I guess Ché was anything but.

So since there's little else to discuss at the moment, I just wanna say that Petersen's 1995 Outbreak is pretty damn exciting.

[Dukefrukem]

so it's essentially... Outbreak

Matt Damon was in that movie too.

[Raiders]

so it's essentially... Outbreak

Matt Damon was in that movie too.

No, he wasn't.

Soderbergh's other film releasing this year, Haywire (written by Lem Dobbs, same writer as The Limey, Soderbergh's masterpiece) interests me far more than this film.

[Dukefrukem]

No, he wasn't.

Yes he was. :crazy:

edit: I think

[Morris Schæffer]

Doubt that Damon was in Outbreak. Perhaps as a bit player since he certainly wasn't known then, two years before Good Will Hunting.

[Izzy Black]

That's the key point, I guess. Soderbergh has not made a film as good as Magnolia, Boogie Nights, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Seven or Fight Club. Out of Sight is his closest, and I love it, but it is a rung lower than those other films.

I don't agree.

I think it is cute how much Irish hates PT Anderson. Artistically rigid? Sucks the air out of the room? That shit doesn't even make sense. But I admire the forthright, consistent way he peddles this nonsense.

I thought he was defending PT. I don't think he means artistically rigid in a bad way. He's trying to say he's an auteur of sorts and Soderbergh lacks this sort of consistent artistic identity. Although I personally don't think his inconsistency in style disqualifies his status as an auteur. To the contrary, even.

[Yxklyx]

Thanks for bringing this back up - there's some good reading on this last page!

[[ETM]]

Well, to be fair, no one had any clue just how far the internet craziness would overload our daily lives. 2012 was such a quaint time in comparison. Anti-vaxxers and flat-Earthers were barely a blip on the radar.

[DavidSeven]

Well, to be fair, no one had any clue just how far the internet craziness would overload our daily lives. 2012 was such a quaint time in comparison. Anti-vaxxers and flat-Earthers were barely a blip on the radar.

All the more reason I’m impressed that the filmmakers chose to make the conspiracy nut angle such a prominent part of the story. Even before the rise of the current lunacy to the online mainstream, the film pretty much nailed that this would be a huge element of a global pandemic, particularly in the U.S.

[Mysterious Dude]

Definitely a movie worth thinking about, these days. I've often thought about the movie's vaccine rollout, and I wonder if we'll have to institute a similar type of lottery. It would probably be better to prioritize more vulnerable people, and the movie didn't predict that so many people would refuse to be vaccinated.

[[ETM]]

It has shown an incredibly deadly virus with high contagiousness.By contrast, even with so many dead everywhere there are people still claiming Coronavirus is a hoax.

Sent from my Mi 9 Lite using Tapatalk

[Yxklyx]

What got me in this thread was the Alan Parker reference, and he just died...

[Izzy Black]

I think you're confusing, in some cases, fans of specific cult films with fans of specific directors.

That is, mistakenly believing the people loved Fight Club because of Fincher and not because its subject matter hit a cultural nerve or because of Palaniuk's twisty story. (Somehow I doubt this subset of fans were eagerly awaiting The Game when it hit theaters or running to Blockbuster to rent Alien 3. For one, they were to busy punching each other in crab grass filled backyards, much to the delight of local news crews across the country).

It's similar, to me, as universally conflating Star Wars fans with George fanboys. Or thinking that everyone who loves Indiana Jones rabidly follows the career of Steven Spielberg.

I could indeed be making such a mistake, but it's not obvious to me that I am, or that the distinctions here are so fine. I imagine that those cult fans of Fight Club are also fans of Fincher and at least some of his other films. Fanboys tend to be pop culturally literate - they're movie buffs and sophisticated enough to be aware of the importance and impact of the director on a film. I find no trouble in thinking that fans of Fight Club also sought out and own S7even on DVD (and perhaps The Game) on the basis of the director. You will also see no trouble in finding fanboys of Batman Begins and The Dark Knight are also Chris Nolan fans with a copy of Memento on DVD. Likewise, you'll find that fanboys of the Matrix are also often fanboys of Wachowski. Fanboys typically use their intimate knowledge of the director of a film as a means of vindicating their obsessive love for that given film.

Let's push this further. I have stated that fanboyism finds its early roots in the response to Pulp Fiction and Clerks. These films have a cult following, and to say that the cult following of fans that formed around these films at the time of their release are not also cult fans, in some sense, of the directors, I think is a mistake. That doesn't imply that early fans of Tarantino and Kevin Smith are also cinephilies of the kind we find here on MC, but it's also not to deny that these directors didn't enjoy a cult following of fans that might be described as a "fanboy" audience.

I say Soderburgh disappeared for 10 years because he pretty much did. From 89 to 98 he made a string of movies that nobody saw. His career, and his name, had faded from public view when he came out with The Limey and Out of Sight at the end of the 90s.

I don't really agree. He was still part of the indie culture in the 90s, and many film publications covered his work and activity. I remember this first hand. Kafka, King of the Hill, Schizopolis, and Gray's Anatomy, released in 1991, 1993, and 1996 respectively (and perhaps less notably he made Underneath in 1995), are some of his finest films. If you look at the poster for Gray's Anatomy (1996), the New York Times gives the film four stars and describes the film as "... a wild, whimsical philosophy from America's master of monologue." Indeed, Soderbergh had a very strong cinematic identity in the 90s, largely connected to his work on Sex Lies and Videotape, emphasizing talky characters in quirky experimental roles. In truth, Soderberg's work in the 90s is most properly compared to the likes of Noah Baumbach, Richard Linklater, Gus Van Sant, and Jim Jarmusch. He was a part of this entire 90s indie New Wave movement, of which Smith and Tarantino were also a part, but who generated bigger cult followings, in many ways, than these other guys did.

I say he's more mainstream because he doesn't do small art house stuff like Punch Drunk Love. He does big budget studio Oscar bait crammed with A-listers and in between experiments with the commercial market. He's also, afaik, the only one who has done multiple sequels to his own work, which is a huge indicator as to where his interests lie. (And no, you don't get to sneak in Nolan. Without one of the biggest, most famous franchises in the world, Nolan would be a footnote in an Intro to American Independent Film textbook at a community college.)

Again, the dark shadow of the 90s you assume reflects Soderbergh's hiatus from film was actually when he was very involved in independent cinema and was actively building the foundations of his entire career. By the time he made Ought of Sight and Erin Brockovich, he was considered a consummate professional who had finally paid his dues. That's how he was able to get big budget films like that. You also don't seem to realize that he's as much an experimenter at the box office as he is on the art-house circuit (i.e., non-commercial markets). Solaris was a bold adaptation of a challenging novel and Soviet arthouse filmmaker that was essentially marketed as big budget arthouse cinema. He paid the price for it too, hence why it wasn't a box office success. You can't fault the man for working with a big budget and all star cast no more than you can Robert Altman or PTA for doing the same.

While Soderburgh had a 10 year head start on the other guys, he's also made 3 times as many movies, and produced nearly a dozen others. By comparison, Anderson has made what? Six? Fincher about the same? They're a lot more careful about the stuff they put out there.

Dubious. Soderbergh is prolific but that says nothing about his artistry. Woody Allen and Hitchcock were also extremely prolific, but we don't gain any insight about their careers by leaving it at that. Secondly, Soderbergh didn't really have a 10 year head start. If his career really begins in '89/'90, then PTA and Anderson are only a couple years off, and Tarantino, of course, is right there with him. The fact is Soderbergh isn't best classed with these guys, especially not his 90s work, as much as he is with the other filmmakers I mentioned from the 90s (who are no less talented).

I call them artistically rigid because I can almost guarantee you these guys will rarely, if ever, deviate from their established styles and fields of interest (can you imagine Taantino attempting something like Age of Innocence or Kundun?).

Their work has become so codified they operate almost like their own brands, like Woody Allen does and Martin Scorcese and Spike Lee used to.

I've already agreed that Soderbergh's polystylism helps ward off that kind of attention. For one, his style was (slightly) more contained in the 90s. By the 2000s, he had fully evolved into a kind of filmmaker that consciously engages different styles and approaches to film (like Gus Van Sant and Richard Linklater, all of which might be described as polystylists at various points in their career based on this experimental independent movement in the 90s). He's an intellectually curious filmmaker, and that's why he has gotten the attention of critics, even if not fanboys. But I don't think this tells the whole story. I also think he lacks an iconic fanboyish film that these other filmmakers have. That's why he ought to be classed more with the other filmmakers I cite.