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 61st 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…).
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.