Pop Culture Pick: Celebrating Soderbergh

The genre-hopper: an appreciation

Last week, the world of cinema bid a sad goodbye to filmmaker David Lynch, whose unique style and oddball passions marked him as a creative person who truly followed his own path, and developed quite the following for it.

Another who has looked to do things their own way is Steven Soderbergh, who has a new film out this week, haunted house mystery Presence, which in Soderberghian style has his stamp on it by making the camera the ghost. I’ll have more to say about that one in my Weekend Watch column this coming Friday, but for now, I thought I’d spotlight some favourites from Soderbergh’s back catalogue.

Sex, Lies, and Videotape

Soderbergh’s first feature effort broke out big at the Sundance Film Festival in 1989, winning the Audience Award and being nominated for the Grand Jury Prize. A blistering peek at sexual mores and morality, it announced him as a filmmaker to watch. Unlike some others who have made a splash in the festival world, it actually ended up correct, as he’d go on to plenty of future success on films of different scales.

Contagion

Though I watched it when it came out in 2011, this scarily prescient look at a pandemic spreading across the world (written by Scott Z. Burns) really etched itself onto my consciousness when COVID hit. It certainly wasn’t an easy watch during lockdown, but it felt ever more prescient and urgent.

Ocean’s Eleven

Technically to be filed in the “one for them” category, while this is a big film featuring even bigger names (George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Matt Damon lead the cast, but the ensemble is bulging with recognizable actors), it somehow manages to be effortlessly cool and feel like an indie all at once. Albeit an indie with the budget to shoot within several Las Vegas casinos.

The smartest move was to remake the 1960 heist film featuring the Rat Pack, which isn’t exactly remembered as a pinnacle of cinematic achievement. Instead, Soderbergh, along with writer Ted Griffin, creates something jazzy and utterly fun. If the sequels don’t quite live up to it, they still have their charms.

The Informant!

One of the director’s purely funny pieces (well, he always brings layers to his films), this trifle adapted by Contagionscriptwriter Burns from Kurt Eichenwald’s book stars Matt Damon as whistle-blower Mark Whitacre.

What stuck in my mind was the superbly goofy score from Marvin Hamlisch, which worked in perfect accompaniment to the onscreen action.

The Knick

For my final choice, I’m heading to television, and this quirkily excellent drama set at New York’s Knickerbocker Hospital during the early part of the twentieth century. Clive Owen starred as the intense Dr. John W. Thackery, but the cast was stuffed with choices representing Soderbergh’s keen eye for talent, André Holland and Eve Hewson among them.