I picked up a copy of Steven Soderbergh’s FULL FRONTAL, thinking “Oh, you don’t see this one in the charity shops often.” But I could have saved the £1.25, it turns out, because despite the presence of lots of amiable actors I was unable to machete my way through the morass of 16mm grain which had turned into sort of orangy grains of rice caught in an infernal dance, due to the digitisation process which I would characterise as suboptimal.

Only the Julia Roberts scenes were glossy and 35mm, not because they were happening in a different universe, so far as I can tell, but because Julia Roberts does not parade herself in front of cheap cameras.

I can’t offer any other observations on this because I didn’t watch it. It has one very nice jape, though — the opening credits are for a different film, RENDEZVOUS, one made by a fictional character in the movie. So this is the only movie I know of to deliberately misidentify itself. Cute.

I turned instead to a more recent Soderbergh joint, NO SUDDEN MOVE, written by Ed Solomon, who often brings out the best, or anyway second-best, in this director. The title is off-putting — that is not a phrase or saying. It’s more like an aphasic attack. It’s not quite as bad as OUT OF DEPTH, my all-time favourite example of an inept title, but it’s clearly inferior to CHUBBY RAIN, the fictional movie in BOWFINGER. How intelligent people wound up with a title like that on their movie is beyond me. I mean, it does suggest a thriller, so it performs one function, but by being both clunking and generic it bypasses the memory altogether, so it fails to sell the product.

The product is a very twisty, complex number with a splendid cast — the plot keeps getting more fankled and more characters keep popping up, almost in a Guy Ritchie way, but not rubbish. We start with Don Cheadle, then pick up Benicio Del Toro, then Kieron Culkin, who form a trio hired to do a home invasion/kidnapping/babysitting job for an unknown boss, with Brendan Fraser and Julia Fox as interested parties. Then David Harbour, Jon Hamm, Ray Liotta, Bill Duke and an uncredited Matt Damon get roped in. It’s pretty engaging though I didn’t always have as clear an idea of what the heck was going on as I was supposed to. Part of it is the problem of scenes where two characters talk about a third, someone we have sometimes met but sometimes haven’t met. David Mamet calls such scenes “bullshit,” which would be bad news indeed for THE THIRD MAN. Francois Truffaut identifies them in his Hitchcock book as failures of visual storytelling. The audience doesn’t remember names and identities nearly so well as it does faces and actions. In this case I am the audience and I can say I agree with him.

(This is why John Le Carre’s *Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy *is so hard to adapt. He can bring offstage characters to life on the page because a name is a word, and a novel is made of words. Also the pages can be flipped back in search of reminders of who is who. On the screen we tend to disregard names unless they’re attached to somebody. And THE THIRD MAN works because Harry Lime is just one guy and we hear about him constantly, enough to drive that distinctive name into the most recalcitrant hippocampus.)

The film has a distinctive look — influenced, we’re told, by 50s Nick Ray, Soderbergh as cinematographer pursues rich colours and strong blacks. He also shoots with a very wide lens which gives his cast a bad case of the anamorphic mumps whenever he shoves them into the edges of the frame, which he does often in pursuit of striking compositions (see above). This travesties the human form and dsitributes a Schlitzy the Pinhead phrenology to anyone near the sides of the screen (see above). He also adds a dark vignetting at times (see above), which looks nice enough when the camera is still, or dollying forward or back, but becomes distracting with any panning or crabbing. We want to feel we’re looking *at *something, not *through *something. The QUINTET effect, I call it. Or like the superimposed broken glass that pans with the camera at the end of the mirror scene in LADY FROM SHANGHAI. So I feel like Soderbergh the director should have a word with Soderbergh the cinematographer.

The period feeling is evoked well by the Detroit locations and costumes, imperfectly by the dialogue. (Ending a sentence with “whatEVer” might have been possible in the fifties but it’s always going to sound more modern.) Most of the cast get really good bits. Harbour’s “I’m going to have to punch you. This is going to be a punch,” is very well conceived and performed. Amy Seimetz is terrific.

The specific plot twists are less interesting to me than the way the story spirals out from a DESPERATE HOURS type scenario into a series of different tense situations. The industrial espionage element (following a thread from Soderbergh’s THE INFORMANT!, one of his best) is intriguing. Maybe the movie is putting too much weight on its MacGuffin? But that’s forgiveable.

I’d rate this as a good Soderbergh, in that it’s engaging while it’s on and at the end you slightly wonder if it was all worth it. If it were a bad Soderbergh you wold wonder that while it was on. If it was a great one you wouldn’t wonder it at all.

Middle-aged Liotta is such a great presence, a sad loss.

Bill Duke is likewise incredible to look upon, and costume designer Marci Rodgers has had a ball dressing him.

“What about… it’s orange and teal, but reversed?”

NO SUDDEN MOVE (Jeez, that title!) stars Basher Tarr; Cash Jackson; Dudley Do-Right; Fenster; Julia De Fiore; Igby; Kris; Hellboy; The Boy; Bridgette Bird; Don Draper; Pitch Pipe; Shoeless Joe Jackson; Chief Hinges; and Tom Ripley.

This entry was posted on December 17, 2025 at 6:26 pm and is filed under FILM with tags Amy Seimetz, Benicio Del Toro, Bill Duke, David Harbour, David Mamet, Don Cheadle, Ed Solomon, Full Frontal, Guy Ritchie, Hitchcock Truffaut, John Hamm, John Le Carre, Julia Roberts, Marci Rodgers, Matt Damon, Nicholas Ray, No Sudden Move, Out of Depth, Quintet, Ray Liotta, Steven Soderbergh, The Desperate Hours, The Informant!, The Lady from Shanghai, The Third Man, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Truffaut. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.