“All you need is a mango season and everything will change.”

High Flying Bird

(2019)

(SPOILERS) The most noticeable thing about Steven Soderbergh’s return to moviemaking has been that so few really noticed. He has directed four films since his four-year hiatus (sorry, retirement), with a fifth on the way, and seems to be operating by a career rationale in direct contrast to Tarantino’s. The latter wants every one to count, to dig deep into his auteur status and thus leave behind an indomitable rep (underlined by that all-important – and terrifying as a prospect to some – ten-and-out movies). Soderbergh appears to have only one criterion in picking his projects: that they’re desperately inessential.

Of course, I’m saying all this as someone who hasn’t bothered to catch any of his comeback pictures until now. But it says something that out of seventeen-odd features since 2000 perhaps two of them could be claimed as more than either respectable, okay-ish, middling or a mistake. If you’re wondering, those would be The Informant! and curate’s egg Ocean’s Twelve. I said Soderbergh’s one criterion for picking projects was their inessentiality, but that’s not entirely true. Foremost, and likely informing that inessentiality, is what he can bring to them technically. He’s like Bob Zemeckis but for cameras rather than special effects.

So High Flying Bird, like Unsane before it, was made on an iPhone 8 (with a special lens). Why? Because he can, and because Netflix stumped up the cash. There’s probably a “If I can do it, so can you” lesson for aspiring young filmmakers here, but it’s rather lost in the realisation that, yeah, High Flying Bird looks fine considering it was filmed on an iPhone, but it hardly looks great. And formally, it’s a very uninteresting film. You’re watching it thinking “This is how he’s holding his iPhone right now to get that shot”.

The fact that you’re so preoccupied arguably comes down to the inessential material, unflatteringly evidencing that Moonlight Oscar winner Tarell Alvin McCraney is a playwright first and foremost, since the film is shot through with an inescapable staginess in structure and design. You can get away with that with an adaptation of Glengarry Glen Ross because the material and the characters grab you; you may not be interested in real estate, but their situations and pressures draw you in. While I’ll bet there’s a way to make an interesting movie out of the workings of the NBA, particularly for someone with zero fascination for the subject like me, this is not it. And it has about as much passion behind it as every other of Soderbergh’s projects. Which is none.

There’s an Altman-esque quality to his career at this stage, in that it appears working indiscriminately is enough, and if you get something decent at the end of a shoot, well that’s simply the luck of the draw. There’s a kernel of a good idea here in André Holland’s sports agent wheeling and dealing and finagling during a pro-basketball lockout, but Soderbergh and McCraney keep us so far from his doing that, there’s no intrigue, such that when the reveal of what he’s done comes, it elicits a shrug rather than applause at how clever he’s been.

Holland’s great, though, and entirely responsible for what interest the picture does garner. Nice too to see Bill Duke, and there are small roles for a beefy-looking Zachary Quinto and Kyle MacLachlan. Soderbergh employs devices such as players talking to camera about their experiences, When Harry Met Sally… style. It feels like just that, an old narrative enabler, lazily used. High Flying Bird is a scribble of a movie, a scribble that, in this case, took three weeks to get down on paper. Now it’s forgotten, lost in the Netflix pile, and its director is on to the next scribble. There’ll be another following that one presently.

Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.

Comments

Mondo bizarro. No offence man, but you’re in way over your head.

The X-Files 8.7: Via Negativa I wasn’t as down on the last couple of seasons of The X-Files as most seemed to be. For me, the mythology arc walked off a cliff somewhere around the first movie, with only the occasional glimmer of something worthwhile after that. So the fact that the show was tripping over itself with super soldiers and Mulder’s abduction/his and Scully’s baby (although we all now know it wasn’t, sheesh ), anything to stretch itself beyond breaking point in the vain hope viewers would carry on dangling, didn’t really make much odds. Of course, it finally snapped with the wretched main arc when the show returned, although the writing was truly on the wall with Season 9 finale The Truth . For the most part, though, I found 8 and 9 more watchable than, say 5 or 7. They came up with their fair share of engaging standalones, one of which I remembered to be Via Negativa .

Schnell, you stinkers! Come on, raus!

Private’s Progress (1956) (SPOILERS) Truth be told, there’s good reason sequel I’m Alright Jack reaps the raves – it is, after all, razor sharp and entirely focussed in its satire – but Private’s Progress is no slouch either. In some respects, it makes for an easy bedfellow with such wartime larks as Norman Wisdom’s The Square Peg (one of the slapstick funny man’s better vehicles). But it’s also, typically of the Boulting Brothers’ unsentimental disposition, utterly remorseless in rebuffing any notions of romantic wartime heroism, nobility and fighting the good fight. Everyone in the British Army is entirely cynical, or terrified, or an idiot.

Isn’t it true, it’s easier to be a holy man on the top of a mountain?

The Razor’s Edge (1984) (SPOILERS) I’d hadn’t so much a hankering as an idle interest in finally getting round to seeing Bill Murray’s passion project. Partly because it seemed like such an odd fit. And partly because passion isn’t something you tend to associate with any Murray movie project, involving as it usually does laidback deadpan. Murray, at nigh-on peak fame – only cemented by the movie he agreed to make to make this movie – embarks on a serious-acting-chops dramatic project, an adaptation of W Somerset Maugham’s story of one man’s journey of spiritual self-discovery. It should at least be interesting, shouldn’t it? A real curio? Alas, not. The Razor’s Edge is desperately turgid.

It’s not as if she were a… maniac, a raving thing.

Psycho (1960) (SPOILERS) One of cinema’s most feted and most studied texts, and for good reason. Even if the worthier and more literate psycho movie of that year is Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom . One effectively ended a prolific director’s career and the other made its maker more in demand than ever, even if he too would discover he had peaked with his populist fear flick. Pretty much all the criticism and praise of Psycho is entirely valid. It remains a marvellously effective low-budget shocker, one peppered with superb performances and masterful staging. It’s also fairly rudimentary in tone, character and psychology. But those negative elements remain irrelevant to its overall power.

You have done well to keep so much hair, when so many’s after it.

Jeremiah Johnson (1972) (SPOILERS) Hitherto, I was most familiar with Jeremiah Johnson in the form of a popular animated gif of beardy Robert Redford smiling and nodding in slow zoom close up (a moment that is every bit as cheesy in the film as it is in the gif). For whatever reason, I hadn’t mustered the enthusiasm to check out the 1970s’ The Revenant until now (well, beard-wise, at any rate). It’s easy to distinguish the different personalities at work in the movie. The John Milius one – the (mythic) man against the mythic landscape; the likeably accentuated, semi-poetic dialogue – versus the more naturalistic approach favoured by director Sydney Pollack and star Redford. The fusion of the two makes for a very watchable, if undeniably languorous picture. It was evidently an influence on Dances with Wolves in some respects, although that Best Picture Oscar winner is at greater pains to summon a more sensitive portrayal of Native Americans (and thus, perversely, at times a more patr

My Doggett would have called that crazy.

The X-Files 9.4: 4-D I get the impression no one much liked Agent Monica Reyes (Annabeth Gish), but I felt, for all the sub-Counsellor Troi, empath twiddling that dogged her characterisation, she was a mostly positive addition to the series’ last two years (of its main run). Undoubtedly, pairing her with Doggett, in anticipation of Gillian Anderson exiting just as David Duchovny had – you rewatch these seasons and you wonder where her head was at in hanging on – made for aggressively facile gender-swapped conflict positions on any given assignment. And generally, I’d have been more interested in seeing how two individuals sympathetic to the cause – her and Mulder – might have got on. Nevertheless, in an episode like 4-D you get her character, and Doggett’s, at probably their best mutual showing.

You’re a disgrace, sir... Weren’t you at Harrow?

Our Man in Marrakesh aka Bang! Bang! You’re Dead (1966) (SPOILERS) I hadn’t seen this one in more than three decades, and I had in mind that it was a decent spy spoof, well populated with a selection of stalwart British character actors in supporting roles. Well, I had the last bit right. I wasn’t aware this came from the stable of producer Harry Alan Towers, less still of his pedigree, or lack thereof, as a sort of British Roger Corman (he tried his hand at Star Wars with The Shape of Things to Come and Conan the Barbarian with Gor , for example). More legitimately, if you wish to call it that, he was responsible for the Christopher Lee Fu Manchu flicks. Our Man in Marrakesh – riffing overtly on Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana in title – seems to have in mind the then popular spy genre and its burgeoning spoofs, but it’s unsure which it is; too lightweight to work as a thriller and too light on laughs to elicit a chuckle.

The best thing in the world for the inside of a man or a woman is the outside of a horse.

Marnie (1964) (SPOILERS) Hitch in a creative ditch. If you’ve read my Vertigo review, you’ll know I admired rather than really liked the picture many fete as his greatest work. Marnie is, in many ways, a redux, in the way De Palma kept repeating himself in the early 80s only significantly less delirious and… well, compelling. While Marnie succeeds in commanding the attention fitfully, it’s usually for the wrong reasons. And Hitch, digging his heels in as he strives to fashion a star against public disinterest – he failed to persuade Grace Kelly out of retirement for Marnie Rutland – comes entirely adrift with his leads.

I don't like the way Teddy Roosevelt is looking at me.

North by Northwest (1959) (SPOILERS) North by Northwest gets a lot of attention as a progenitor of the Bond formula, but that’s giving it far too little credit. Really, it’s the first modern blockbuster, paving the way for hundreds of slipshod, loosely plotted action movies built around set pieces rather than expertly devised narratives. That it delivers, and delivers so effortlessly, is a testament to Hitchcock, to writer Ernest Lehmann, and to a cast who make the entire implausible exercise such a delight.

Look out the window. Eden’s not burning, it’s burnt.

Reign of Fire (2002) (SPOILERS) There was good reason to believe Rob Bowman would make a successful transition from top-notch TV director to top-notch film one. He had, after all, attracted attention and plaudits for Star Trek: The Next Generation and become such an integral part of The X-File s that he was trusted with the 1998 leap to the big screen. That movie wasn’t the hit it might have been – I suspect because, such was Chris Carter’s inability to hone a coherent arc, it continued to hedge its bets – but Bowman showed he had the goods. And then came Reign of Fire . And then Elektra . And that was it. Reign of Fire is entirely competently directed, but that doesn’t prevent it from being entirely lousy.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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