Film Review: Magic Mike XXL (2015)

Magic Mike XXL is nominally a sequel to Magic Mike, but may be closer to a sequel to Magic Mike's trailer. Although the Steven Soderbergh-directed original was sold as an outrageous good time, it was actually a fairly downbeat examination of what a grind it is to escape the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder. It featured a lot of stripping, obviously, but that was a somewhat incidental part of a story about someone (Channing Tatum) trying to scrape together enough crumpled ones to get his custom furniture business off the ground. There were dramatic stakes in the first film which allowed it to explore ideas of masculinity and the impact of The Great Recession, and these ideas were at the heart of the film, while the stripping providing an interesting milieu for them to play out.

Film Review: Side Effects (2013)

Steven's Soderbergh's retirement from filmmaking - something which, considering his commitment to directing an entire television series next year, should probably be viewed through huge sceptical quotation marks - has had two distinct yet symbiotic consequences. Creatively, it seems to have reinvigorated him, giving an urgency to his work that suggests that he is trying to work through as many genres and styles as he can before he leaves film behind forever (again: sceptical quotation marks). When you look at the disparate films he has made since he announced he was walking away - from the throwback action of Haywire to the lurid kineticism of Magic Mike - as well as the speed at which they have been produced and released, there is a definite sense of an artist trying to get everything out of his system before it's too late.

Film Review: Magic Mike (2012)

This picture is the end result of a spectacularly unsuccessful attempt to find a decent image from the film that did not feature a shirtless Channing Tatum.

Steven Soderbergh has always been a mercurial talent, able to move smoothly from making mainstream films with big name stars to off-kilter experimental films without losing step, all the while maintaining his own style and voice on every project. Within the last twelve months alone, he has made a bleakly realistic disaster movie and a minimalist action thriller, both of which were vastly different in scope, but which were unmistakeably his own. He even found time to squeeze in some second-unit work on one of the most successful films of the year. Even given how varied his workload has been, it says something that Soderbergh's latest film, set amongst the lives of male strippers in Florida, is probably the strangest prospect of them all.

Film Review: And Everything Is Going Fine (2010)

About two-thirds of the way through And Everything Is Going Fine, Steven Soderbergh's documentary about the life and career of writer/actor/raconteur Spalding Gray, Gray relates the story of how Soderbergh approached him to play the character of Mr. Mungo in King of the Hill, the director's 1993 film about a young boy surviving on his own during the Depression. Soderbergh had read Gray's semi-autobriographical novel, "Impossible Vacation", and felt that the regret of the central character fit that of Mr. Mungo, a lonely man living with nearly boundless sadness. When Gray asked what happened to the character in the film, Soderbergh told him that he committed suicide, and this appealed to Gray, who said that at the time Soderbergh approached him, he was contending with thoughts of suicide, and felt that the role would allow him to work out his fantasies of killing himself through a creative medium.

Rethinking Matthew McConaughey

I feel bad for using this ridiculous image as the main one for the article, but if he's going to continue to make artistically interesting choices, then I might no longer get to make fun of him anymore, DAMMIT!

If you're anything like me - and why wouldn't you want to be? I'm grrrrrreat. And a cartoon tiger, apparently - then you probably don't think all that much of Matthew McConaughey, if you think of him at all. For the best part of the last twenty years, he's been a blandly charming presence in a succession of slightly rubbish dramas and extremely rubbish romantic comedies, most of which, if their posters are to be believed, seem to revolve around him leaning on things:

I choose to believe that the level of commitment he brings to any given role can be determined by the angle at which he leans and how few clothes he is wearing on the poster. So we see that he is putting a lot of effort into Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, could give a shit about Failure to Launch, and is super-committed to his work in Surfer, Dude.

Film Review: Haywire (2011)

As he hurtles towards 50, the age at which he claims he will retire, or at the very least will take a prolonged break, from film-making, Steven Soderbergh seems intent on burning through as many genres as possible. The already prolific director, who has made 25 feature films in 23 years, will have released three films in the space of twelve months before this year is out, all of which are radically different. Contagion was a stark and bleak look at what could happen in the case of a cataclysmic pandemic, the forthcoming Magic Mike is a comedy about a male stripper played by Channing Tatum, and the recently-released Haywire is an action-thriller that, on the surface at least, seems pretty standard.

Film Review: Contagion (2011)

It is perhaps only fitting, given its story of a deadly pandemic and the efforts of scientists and officials to contain it, that "clinical" is the only appropriate word for Contagion. It sets its stall out very early on when a business woman named Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) returns from a trip to Hong Kong, falls ill, then dies coughing and spluttering. The seizure that marks the beginning of the end of her life is treated in a cold, distant and silent fashion that is deeply unnerving, as is the scene in which her husband Mitch (Matt Damon) is informed of the tragedy. There's something painfully real about the efficient, calculated way in which the doctor informs him of the news, as well as Mitch's complete inability to comprehend what is happening to him.