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Watched his latest film "Unsane" this week. It's the second since he "retired" from making feature films, and it's easy to see why he made it. Quick and slick (I've read that the writing of the script and the completed shoot occurred in twenty days!), genre story that would be easy to sell, and easy to shoot... he did it all on an iPhone! And he really loved doing it, you can tell, exploiting the weird angles of the necessarily short lens. But ultimately, it fell victim to its genre trappings, and was pretty predictable by the end. Still, juicy, pulpy fun, and inspiring in that I could have done it!

All of Soderbergh's films inspire me, in fact. Not only does he do the shooting/directing/editing himself these days (I'm sure he contributed to the script as well), and his sensibilities often jibe with mine, he creates some of the most generous commentary tracks ever recorded. He'll talk about what lens he used, what shot he was ripping off (!), who his influences are, how he set up the camera or manipulated the set to get that weird, impossible shot... he's as close to being a film school as anyone gets (including maybe Robert Rodriguez).

Like last week's Coens, he's recently signed a deal with Netflix, and the next two films (which he's already shot, of course) will be coming out there. So maybe he's really retired from theatrical filmmaking now? I'll still be watching.

Description
Watched his latest film "Unsane" this week. It's the second since he "retired" from making feature films, and it's easy to see why he made it. Quick and slick (I've read that the writing of the script and the completed shoot occurred in twenty days!), genre story that would be easy to sell, and easy to shoot... he did it all on an iPhone! And he really loved doing it, you can tell, exploiting the weird angles of the necessarily short lens. But ultimately, it fell victim to its genre trappings, and was pretty predictable by the end. Still, juicy, pulpy fun, and inspiring in that I could have done it!

All of Soderbergh's films inspire me, in fact. Not only does he do the shooting/directing/editing himself these days (I'm sure he contributed to the script as well), and his sensibilities often jibe with mine, he creates some of the most generous commentary tracks ever recorded. He'll talk about what lens he used, what shot he was ripping off (!), who his influences are, how he set up the camera or manipulated the set to get that weird, impossible shot... he's as close to being a film school as anyone gets (including maybe Robert Rodriguez).

Like last week's Coens, he's recently signed a deal with Netflix, and the next two films (which he's already shot, of course) will be coming out there. So maybe he's really retired from theatrical filmmaking now? I'll still be watching.