Full Frontal (2002)
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
Written by Coleman Hough

Though many have claimed the film to be painfully pretentious and Hollywood insidery, I say that Soderbergh manages to capture the desperation and emotional ups and downs of what are basically normal people who happen to be involved, however removed, in the making of movies.

Soderbergh is one of those directors who can jump from big Hollywood to small indie, and manage to make it all feel personal. He draws on a number of sources from the 1970s for stylistic chits, but in Full Frontal it's most clearly Robert Altman.

Altman's always left me feeling cold and a little violated, like he just squeezed my nipple without asking and walked away with a satisfied smirk, as if to say, "See, life's painful." Full Frontal is more human and less insistently bleak … the film equivalent to Soderbergh squeezing my hot buttcheek in an equally unexpected but friendlier fashion.

Stylistically, Full Frontalis probably most like Short Cuts, cutting casually from one seemingly unrelated story to the next and back again. But unlike Short Cuts, Full Frontal has both a sense of humor and hope. Story threads that in Altman's films would lead to dead-end heartache, in Soderbergh's world open up new possibilities. He seems to be a lot more optimistic than Altman, and I for one appreciate not walking away from a movie planning the least painful suicide.

The performances are almost uniformly excellent. Cast includes the truly gifted David Hyde Pierce (not playing gay for once), Catherine Keener, Blair Underwood, Mary McCormack, and Enrico Colantoni (from "Just Shoot Me" and Galaxy Quest). Julia Roberts is okaaaay, though it's very hard to get past her hairdo, and I often feel as if she's a lot more satisfied with her acting than she ought to be ("I make $20 fucking vermillion dollars a day, by gum!"). David Duchovny puts in an amusing cameo, which almost seems to be all he can muster these days, while Jeff Garlin of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" generates the film's only laugh-out-loud moment.

So I'm not gonna promise you won't think it's ludicrous hornswoggle, but I'm pretty hopeful that if you keep an open mind, you'll like it as much as I did, and we can talk about it further over coffee, not that I'm pressuring you or anything, but we haven't really talked in a while, have we?

Review by Crimedog