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OSCARS DEATH RACE: UNDEFEATED

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Fearless Sarah D. Bunting of Tomatonation.com is making it her mission to watch every single film nominated for an Oscar before the Academy Awards Ceremony on February 26, 2012. She is calling this journey her Oscars Death Race. For more on how the Oscars Death Race began, click here. And you can follow Sarah through this quixotic journey here.]

It's not generally a compliment to say that a film reminds you of other films, or has the DNA of other films; the phrases "a poor man's" or "but with less" seem inevitable. To call a documentary "well made" isn't the highest of praise, either, suggesting as it does the absence of anything extraordinary. "Every shot in focus — a triumph of competence!"

Undefeated did remind me of other stories, and it is well put together, but that doesn't mean it's derivative or dull. It's a straight-ahead chronicle of a year in the life of a North Memphis football team that has never darkened the doorstep of the state playoffs in the school's long history. Practice is held on a hillocky field surrounded by abandoned buildings, and presided over by a plump ginger volunteer coach named Bill Courtney who will bellow the same speech about failures contributing to character until his team hears it.

The film has echoes of everything from Hoosiers to Hoop Dreams (the rising and falling fortunes of Money and Chavis) to The Blind Side to the late great Friday Night Lights, but that's a pretty impressive list of memorable narratives to have echoing down your movie. (Well, I loathed The Blind Side on film, but I'm told the book is good.) Directors T.J. Martin and Daniel Lindsay trust their story, and their subjects, and rightly so; Bill Courtney probably knows what the filmmakers are going for, and he's good at boiling those things down, but not in a sound-bitey way. In one longish interview, he ruminates on giving up on people, how you know if it's a test or a lost cause. Elsewhere, he grumps that football does not build character, "football reveals character."

Martin and Lindsay (the latter of whom also made a doc about the road to the world beer-pong championships; awesome) don't try to reinvent the wheel, or get all hectic with interstitial fonts in an attempt to apologize for a straight-ahead conventional documentary. It's kids, hope, and grown men getting their crying done through football. You don't have to spread much mustard on that. (And that crying scene is a killer.)

More on this when I write my Best Doc overview, but it's a nice piece of work that basically has no shot.

Sarah D. Bunting co-founded Television Without Pity.com, and has written for Seventeen, New York Magazine, MSNBC.com, Salon, Yahoo!, and others. She's the chief cook and bottle-washer at TomatoNation.com.

OSCARS DEATH RACE: MONEYBALL

When I heard that Moneyball was set to become a film, I didn't get it. It's a good book, and I'm a huge baseball fan, but as far as a narrative with wider cinematic appeal, I didn't see a there there. It's a story about a guy using statistics to exploit market inefficiencies, so…good luck with that?

It's not that it's uninteresting material per se, or difficult to follow, in the hands of the correct writer. (Like, say, Bill James, the godfather of statistical baseball analysis who's mentioned frequently in the film.) I love that stuff. But how do you get people who don't care about baseball to care about it on film, for two hours plus, using arithmetic — and without alienating diamond nerds like myself who would sit there, arms folded, the Nit-Find-o-Tron 4000 ready to start picking?

I can't speak to what baseball atheists got out of it. I can name maybe two other people who got the same frisson of hilarity out of the casting of Chad Kreuter as Rick Peterson as I did. I know for a fact that nobody else snickered at "No bunting whatsoever," but I of course collect comments like that. But I'm pretty sure "Who's Fabio?" "He's that shortstop from Seattle"; the "I'm just saying, his girlfriend is a six, at best" sequence; and Billy Beane's ex-wife's new husband and his man-dals got laughs from other people, because I'm pretty sure Moneyball is a good movie qua movie, sharply observed and well acted across the board.

It's not perfect. The last half hour is draggy, and co-writer Aaron Sorkin couldn't resist one or two of his patented And Now My Proxy Will Lecture You In A Tone Of Self-Congratulation (Supplemental Oxygen Will Not Be Provided) speeches. But one of those speeches is about not getting sucked into the romance of baseball, which is good advice for baseball-movie screenwriters — in a script that miraculously avoids 98 percent of the hero-journey mawkishness the sport tends to churn up. And Brad Pitt as Billy Beane is fantastic. The performance grew on me steadily, and by the time Beane snarked at Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman, also very good and styled authentically, which is to say he looks like hammered hell), "Every time we talk, I'm reinvigorated by my love of the game," then did that herky ass-out-of-joint walk out of Howe's office, he had me. Ever since Ocean's 11, Pitt is usually having more fun than anybody else onscreen; here, part of that is Beane, but Pitt gets that a strong, thoughtful performance doesn't have to look like a Metamucil ad. He's fun to watch.

Every performance is good. I don't get Jonah Hill's Best Supporting nomination here, because we've seen the performance before, it seems like. But he won't win, so it's fine, and he and Pitt have flawless boss/underling bro chemistry onscreen. I want them to do another movie together. This movie probably isn't in the Best Picture discussion, which I'm okay with, but it exceeded expectations as far as splitting the difference for both fans and agnostics. A little too long, but the best possible iteration of the material.

OSCARS REVISITED, 1981: ATLANTIC CITY

[EDITOR'S NOTE: In a yearly feature titled "Oscars Revisited," Press Play takes a look back at the Academy Awards race from earlier eras. Our inaugural series focuses on the five Best Picture nominees from calendar year 1981: Reds, Atlantic City, On Golden Pond, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Chariots of Fire.]

Nineteen eighty-one was the last gasp of the independent spirit of the '70s American cinema movement. The previous year's Raging Bull and Heaven's Gate may have represented both the climax and glorious ruin of the previous epoch; the all-consuming onslaught of Spielbergism and Reaganism commenced the following summer with the paradigm-changing success of E.T. But in 1981 there still was a kind of film being made which was soon to disappear: a film designed for intelligent, upscale adult audiences willing to be entertained on a more sophisticated level. Warren Beatty could only have made Reds at this point in his career, and of all the films nominated for the 1981 Best Picture Oscar, it works best as '70s swan song, especially in its interpolated documentary portions of aging witnesses to the life of John Reed. Otherwise, Reds was an ambitious and impressively literate mounting of a Lean-like spectacle that, since it celebrated the aspirations and ultimately lost dreams of fervid young 1917 communists (and by allusion, the contemporary counterculture), was unrevivable and largely forgotten during the rest of a conservative decade. The other four contenders were a varied lot: Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark, the year's pre-eminent popcorn smash; Chariots of Fire, a solidly produced British tradition-of-quality prestige yawner that was given some emotional texture by a stirring Vangelis score (as played on the opening credits over a pan of euphoric runners); On Golden Pond, a turgid sentimental spectacle of aging veterans Katherine Hepburn and Henry Fonda working together for the first time and co-starring with Fonda's daughter Jane; and Louis Malle's Atlantic City. Malle's film was the least pretentious and assuming of the bunch, yet also the most movie-movie-ish (even moreso than the mechanical Raiders). It is also the nominee whose reputation has grown the most over time.

Atlantic City was a French-Canadian co-production and the second film Malle made in America. Most visibly, however, it provided a splendid vehicle for Burt Lancaster at the peak of his twilight period, and it would surely have gotten him the Best Actor if not for unavoidable auld lang syne spectacle of the never-before-awarded Henry Fonda, then languishing on his deathbed, being brought the award by his co-starring daughter. Indeed, Lancaster's avuncular presence and assured performance anchors the film. As more than one observer noted, it was a rare chance for the actor to essay in America the type of roles he was previously finding only in Europe.

Made more in the spirit of the American New Wave than the French, Atlantic City is a whimsical sigh not only for the crumbling New Jersey city of the past but a certain mode of filmmaking that was entering its twilight. Still, one has only to compare it to its obvious predecessor, Bob Rafelson's The King of Marvin Gardens (1972), in which a deserted, wintertime Atlantic City becomes a brilliant metaphor for an America stripped bare after the shock of Vietnam, to see how a certain element of upbeat sentimentality has watered down potentially pungent material. David Thomson has suggested that if the film had been French, Malle might not have been so kind to his characters. Indeed the melancholy mise-en-scene of an Atlantic City on the chopping block and on the verge of corporate renovation is at odds with the feel-good narrative trajectory of its whimsical losers and loners all getting their share of an ecomomic, emotional and romantic redemption before the final credit roll. As Andrew Sarris wrote,"Atlantic City is a wonderfully sleazy dance across the boardwalk of Atlantic City, through the interlocking destinies of characters caught in the spell of Monopoly money fluttering in and out of their lives."

The film's iconic image is the European-scented scene of Sally (Susan Sarandon) cleaning herself with Lemon wedges by an open window, serenaded by classical music and gazed at across the way by a furtive Lou (Burt Lancaster). Sarandon was never more beautiful and sensual than in 1980, with her distinctively large eyes and ample bosom (well-exploited by Malle, both here and in his previous film Pretty Baby). She plays a worker at an oyster bar (hence, the ritualized lemon cleansings) who is also training to be a dealer in the casinos. Michel Piccoli is likely Malle's stand-in as a wizened Frenchman tutoring her in the rules of the game as well as the Gallic language itself. She's visited by her ex-husband, a ratty drug dealer who's happened upon an illicit wad of cocaine, and his pregnant hippie girlfriend, Chrissie (also Sally's sister). Lou lives next door. He's an aging numbers runner who "worked for the people who worked for the people". He spends his time nursing Grace (Kate Reid), his lover from way back who came to town, took third place in a Betty Grable lookalike contest, married a mobster and stayed. Grace's bedroom is as gratuitously overdecorated as one of the boudoirs in Pretty Baby's New Orleans brothel.

Scriptwriter John Guare neatly bisects Atlantic City into an intriguing character study-cum-low level mob flick. The second half kicks into gear with the machinations of a good TV potboiler when B-movie thugs come to claim what's theirs, knifing Sally's ex, tearing through her and Chrissie's apartment, and threatening Lou and Sally. Eventually Lou gets the chance to behave like the old-time gangsters he once admired and shoots them both, giving his life the spurious meaning it lacked. Sally gets the spoils of the drug money's larger portion and heads off to a new life in Florida. The film ends with Lou and Kate striding proudly on the gleaming boardwalk while in the background, the wrecking ball of time continues on its inevitable path of destruction and change.

Atlantic City's narrative texture and freewheeling romanticism have earned it a place as one of the most beloved American films of its period, but what struck me on my most recent viewing was how much it resembled a colorful, Jonathan Demme-esque survey of tacky Americana. A late '70s sign extolling the era's ecominic boosterism ("Atlantic City-Back on the Map Again") fronts the dillapidated exterior of Sally and Lou's crumbling apartment complex; Lou takes Grace's yapping toy dog to the "Pet-tique"; Robert Goulet and a tiny couplet of showgirls incongrously entertain at the hospital where Sally identifies her ex's body; the funeral parlor has 'We Understand' affixed under its name; the local news reports have a tacky authenticity. Sally leaves A.C. listening to "Sunrise Semester" on her car radio. The end credits music mimics a car radio shuttling down the dial, with different recordings from different eras evoking what Atlantic City once was and the city in transition that it had become.

Outside of France, Malle as a director was apparently only as good as his collaborators. Atlantic City is easily his best American film, although Pretty Baby and My Dinner With Andre (1981) aren't too far behind. He was the most commercial and calculated of the New Wave subset, better than a Phillippe De Broca but nowhere near a Truffaut. Prior to Atlantic City he made a mark with two films of unusual provocation, Murmur of the Heat (1971) and Pretty Baby, which take indulgently European, non-judgemental attitudes toward incest and child prostution respectively. Over time, Pretty Baby, a movie that made a star of Brooke Shields and that was once ubiquitous on cable, has become as seemingly untouchable as Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salo (1977). Atlantic City is refreshingly free of such hooks. Crackers (1984) and Alamo Bay (1985) were two aborted exercises before he returned to his home country to make his best film, the autobiographical Au Revoir, Les Enfants (1987). He died in 1995, but not before leaving behind two other exquisite entertainments, May Fools (1992), which looked back to the Paris of the '60s, and his final film, the American production Vanya On 42nd St. (1994).

Atlantic City won uniform raves. Both Sarris and Pauline Kael were enthusiastic, with Kael typically effusive: "When you leave the theater you may feel light-headed, as if there were no problems in the world that couldn't be solved." As for Burt, Kael thought "if this was a stage performance, the audience would probably give him a standing ovation." Sarris wrote that Atlantic City was "a cinematic tone poem, sifted with classical grace through modernistic sensibilities." Vincent Canby called Lou "…one of Mr. Lancaster's most remarkable creations, a complex mixture of the mangy and magnificent." Newsweek liked Sarandon, calling her "touching and funny," and Sarris wrote that Sarandon provided "a creative mix of shrewdness, vulnerability and sensuality." Independently financed by Canadians, the film was picked up by Paramount who opened it in April. Despite the critical drumbeat, Atlantic City failed to do business and mostly played in the larger cities. My first memory of seeing the film was with my dad (a former exhibitor who was teaching film at the time) at one of the local shopping mall theaters. The house was empty but I do remember the line for the film next door, Friday The 13th Part II, reaching way into the back recesses of the mall. I remember my dad saying that if most of those waiting for the slasher flick would actually try Atlantic City they'd be surprised and have a good time. Perhaps some of them would, but even then, at the age of thirteen I knew that Malle's film was a genre film for more sophisticated and cultivated tastes. As incarnated by Burt Lancaster's world-weary loser seeking and being granted redemption, Atlantic City was a romance best appreciated by those who've experienced the better part of life, and the movies therein.

Ross Freedman grew up in film, having a father who taught movies and surrounded his life with film. Ross has graduated from the Schuler School of Professional Art and has spent most of his life doing freelance and professional artwork, but his main interest is movies. He resides in Baltimore and has contributed film pieces to other publications.

OSCARS REVISITED, 1981: REDS

At 3.5 hours, it was the last Hollywood movie to be made that required an intermission. It cost Paramount roughly $91 million ($33 million in 1981 money). And it focused mostly on American communists and anarchists in the shadow of World War I, as viewed from the perspective of super-red American journo John Reed, author of Ten Days that Shook the World. In retrospect, it’s not shocking that a film like Reds was never made again. It’s shocking that at some point in American history, such a film was ever made.

Chalk it up to the power of Warren Beatty. Coasting on the success of such mega-hits as Shampoo – which he’d produced and starred in – and Heaven Can Wait – which he’d starred in, produced and co-directed – he was ready to make the ultimate “one for me.” And what a one it was. He’d been fascinated with the journalist since the mid-60s, and, with his typical slow burn, had started filming interviews with old-time lefty heavy hitters like feminist author Rebecca West, playwright Arthur Miller and ACLU founder Roger Nash Baldwin as far back as 1970 on the off chance that he'd gain funding to make a film about Reed and his comrades. Somehow he convinced Paramount of the feasibility of the project – though soon after signing on the dotted line they reportedly offered him $1 million to not make it – and it not only scored the brother four Oscar nods and one actual statue, but made $41 million, which was a highly respectable box office return for the time.

For all the hoopla it garnered in 1981 – it also nailed cinematographer Vittorio Storaro and Maureen Stapleton much-deserved Academy Awards – the film has since largely disappeared out of the public consciousness. In fact, it was only released on DVD in 2006, at which point Beatty finally consented to publicly discuss the film for the first time. (At a New York Film Festival screening I attended that year, he could scarcely shut up on the subject, although he mostly decried his funding difficulties.) But does it hold up?

Yes and no. I confess I’m most partial to Reds for the miracle of its very existence, for the fact that it managed to put the mishigas of 1910s trade unions and two warring factions of the American communist party on a big screen for all the world to see, for how it breathed life into such increasingly obscure characters as anarchist Emma Goldman (Stapleton) and American Communist Party founder Louis Fraina (a wonderfully slim Paul Sorvino exhaling great gales of Italian). And in general, the performances are wonderful. As Reed’s editor, Gene Hackman fumes with a half-grin; he should add a rider to all his contracts that ensures he gets to bellow “Dammit” at least four times, as he does here. And Reds may be the last instance in which Jack Nicholson truly disappeared into a different character. As playwright Eugene O’Neill, he radiates a booze-soaked unhappiness that is as subtly sinister, as uncharacteristically passive-aggressive, as his more recent performances are predictably bombastic.

At the film’s center lives the fraught romance between Reed (Beatty) and socialite writer Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton); Beatty had to maintain that aspect of the sweeping historical epic tradition, after all. I’d never really grokked Keaton’s much-touted beauty before. Above the high lace collars of that era, though, her grey eyes widen and narrow with a sensuality that’s hard to deny, and she speaks with none of the stammering affectations that muck up so many of her performances. But because the star-crossed lovers proclaimed a “free love” relationship – an eternally naïve concept if there ever were one, and one destined to appeal to well-known lothario Beatty – scene after scene sounds the soap operatic notes of their off-and-on relationship, including some gratingly if convincingly moony love scenes (Keaton and Beatty were reportedly involved off screen) and some awfully wooden dialogue (“I'm just living in your margins! No one takes me seriously!” “Well, what are you serious about?”). In general, dialogue has never been Beatty’s strong suit; everyone tends to rat-a-tat-tat in bumperstickese here (except for him; the man is a hopeless mumbler). There’s something charming about all that ideological jargon, though. So earnest. So unfashionable, at least until recently.

For Americans in this decade have once again become a people inured to wartime, as they were in the 1910s. More, a recent Pew Research Center poll states that for the first time more people under 30 view socialism positively than view capitalism positively, a statistic certainly borne out by the insurgence of Occupy Wall Streeters, though that movement has yet to fully identify its objectives. Instead, OWS is slowly building with equal parts whimsy and will – not unlike Reds itself, whose relevance has thus finally been resurrected.

Herein lies a film – a movie, really – that builds glacially and with an elephantine grace, that lingers a deliciously long time on conversations held in the velvet-draped saloons and drafty wooden halls and plum-colored parlors of the time, and then breaks out with a sudden lightness in a revelation of mass communion and political comedy. In the tradition of all the very best American endeavors, the messiness of this film’s big aims proves most integral to its success. Boosted by its terrific visuals (all dusty refracted sunlight and lonely crowds of faces) and an original Stephen Sondheim score, Reds is a big sincere sprawl whose tragedy and ever-widening vistas will, somewhat inexplicably, always gladden the heart.

Lisa Rosman has reviewed film for Marie Claire, Time Out New York, Salon, LA Weekly, Us Weekly, Premiere and Flavorpill.com, where she was film editor for five years. She has also commentated for the Oxygen Channel, TNT, the IFC and NY1. You can follow Lisa on twitter here.

OSCARS DEATH RACE: HELL AND BACK AGAIN

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Fearless Sarah D. Bunting of Tomatonation.com is making it her mission to watch every single film nominated for an Oscar before the Academy Awards Ceremony on February 26, 2012. She is calling this journey the Oscars Death Race. For more on how the Oscars Death Race began, click here. And you can follow Sarah through this quixotic journey here.]

Sgt. Nathan Harris took a gunshot in the hip during an ambush in Afghanistan in 2009. Hell and Back Again tells you this without delay; Harris, back on U.S. soil and trying to rehab his way back to active duty, takes care of telling everyone else, compulsively — Wal-Mart greeters, prospective landlords, fellow Marines. He can't help it. His shattered leg has become his world, and his medications send him spinning away from other topics despite himself.

Hell and Back Again cuts back and forth between the present day and the ground operation that brought Harris to harm, between Harris's attempts to manage his pain and his civilian life and the platoon's attempts to manage the mission, and civilians, in Afghanistan. In the quieter moments, the film is too pointed in showing us that this isn't a war to be "won," and the overlapping style of the sound design — by J. Ralph, and I'm probably the only one who remembers that he did the song for that VW ad where the guy who looks like James Spader is late for a wedding and trapped behind a freight train — can feel gimmicky. We don't necessarily need an elbow to the ribs and a stage-whispered "PTSD"; we can see the man's face. And we can see his wife's face, reflecting Harris's intermittent disappearances into confusion and rage.

A gimmick will usually work at least once, though, and the layering of the sound of battle over the mild aggro of a complicated drive-through-menu order does create tension. The level of access to Harris's unit, and the extent of the footage (not least during firefights, during which I genuinely cannot conceive of NOT dropping the camera and sprinting to…let's say Germany), is remarkable. Also remarkable: Harris himself, a smart, tough, funny man, gentle at bedtime, boyishly romantic about his pistol, who looks a little like John Travolta and sounds a lot like Lucas Black. He looks like fun. He looks like hell.

It's a solid enough doc, but I'm not sure how this gets a seat at the table when Project Nim and The Interrupters didn't. What you think of its chances depends on how cynical you want to get about subject matter in the category as a determinant. More on that when I complete the category.

PAUL ROWLANDS: Will the real Steven Soderbergh please stand up?

Whenever friends ask for my opinion on Steven Soderbergh, I reply, "Which Soderbergh?'" Are they referring to the man who directs super-stylish, cool, intelligent entertainments such as the Ocean's trilogy, Out of Sight and Erin Brockovich, or the man who directed such idiosyncratic experimental features as Schizopolis, Full Frontal and Bubble)? On the surface, his career choices seem among the most perverse and erratic of any modern filmmaker. There aren't any other contemporary directors who are able or willing to switch from one genre and style of filmmaking to another and exhibit such different sensibilities. It is entirely possible to love one side of the man's professional identity, the entertainer — a side currently represented by his bruising action picture Haywire (2012) – whilst remaining ambivalent about his other, equally important and equally characteristic side, the experimenter.

Soderbergh gained mainstream ecognition for such mainstream films as Traffic (2000) and Erin Brockovich, both released in 2000 and representing his popular peak: both were nominated for Best Picture; Julia Roberts won Best Actress for the latter, and Soderbergh Best Director for the former. And yet Soderbergh sees himself as a filmmaker to whom this work is all of a piece. Where other directors might have reeled after having their vision for a film (Moneyball, 2011) rejected mere days before the scheduled start of production, he took it in his stride, and it seems likely that his chameleon temperament helped him move on. Whether directing big-budget, star-driven, Hollywood movies or micro-budgeted, freeform, experimental works, to him it's the same process, just a different canvas. Soderbergh told The Rumpus, 'That's a delineation only somebody who doesn't make movies would make. They're all for me."

This attitude frustrates some critics and fans and has been a source of some personal difficulty for the director. Soderbergh's commercial films have made money, earned critical respect and won awards. I always compare his Hollywood features, or at least the best of them, to the amazing work done by John Schlesinger on Midnight Cowboy (1969). Like Schlesinger, Soderbergh is no hack. The man is a brilliant director of Hollywood films, bringing experimental style and techniques to his movies that add richness, class, emotion and taste. His intrinsic understanding of what Ocean's Eleven could be is what turned it into the crowd-pleaser that it became; he talked of Jaws (1975) and Ghostbuster (1984) being the models for that 2001 hit, and he brought out the best in his large cast. His decision to film the separate storylines in Traffic using different filters and film stock led some critics to call the movie schematic, but it made a potentially confusing story easy to follow and compelling. (Compare Traffic to the similarly plotted but very confusing 2005 film Syriana, which was directed by Oscar-winning Traffic screenwriter Stephen Gaghan, but had an unvarying visual style.) A career built exclusively on the likes of Traffic, Erin Brockovich and the Ocean's films would satisfy most directors.

But over the decades Soderbergh has built a parallel career of small-scale, experimental films which, whilst always interesting, are always flawed and rarely, to be honest, accomplished. They all have the air of needing to be made to satisfy some personal quirk or to test new technology. In a word, they are 'experimental'. And Hollywood doesn't understand 'experimental'. It's a results-based town.

Such distinctions frustrate Soderbergh because he doesn't see himself as an art house director who compromises himself every time he makes a commercial feature, nor as a mainstream Hollywood director who makes a bit of art on the side. He's a total filmmaker who writes or cowrites, directs and produces his movies and often shoots and edits them as well (under pseudonyms). He wants a cinema that can be both experimental and commercial. And if he does continue to make movies (in 2010, he talked about plans to quit film for painting), his challenge will be to find ideas that interest both him and a large audience – a lesson that he learned during the first decade of his career.

When Soderbergh, at the age of 26, won the Palme d`Or at Cannes (the youngest to ever do so) for Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), he joked, "It's all downhill from here." And commercially at least, until Out of Sight almost a decade later, it was. Sex, Lies, and Videotape was a phenomenon – it revitalised the independent filmmaking community and briefly made it seem as though "indie" films could crossover to the mainstream with ease. While other independent filmmakers flourished in his wake, Soderbergh stood his ground and went his own way, making films that unfortunately didn't interest many critics and failed to cross over. As Soderbergh told The Telegraph about his commercial and critical disappointments, '…they failed because the ideas were too narrow. Not enough people were interested in the ideas."

In retrospect his choices were commendable and speak volumes about what kind of filmmaker he is: Soderbergh decided to follow his interests and instincts and damn the consequences, and all the films were at least interesting. Kafka (1991) is a mystery thriller that blended fact with fictional elements from Franz Kafka's novels. It was barely released and isn't readily available even now, being a much sought-after import DVD (Soderbergh has talked of puting together a director's cut of the movie). King of the Hill (1993) was similarly little-seen, but the likeable Depression-era drama was acclaimed by certain critics and won Soderbergh his second Best Directing nomination at Cannes. Perhaps hoping to increase his commercial chances, he next made The Underneath (1995), a modern updating of the Noir classic, Criss Cross (1949). The result was a film that even Soderbergh was disappointed with at the time. (He has described all three films as failures.) He followed that up with his least commercial venture up to that point, the 80-minute Spalding Gray monologue, Gray's Anatomy (1996).

Schizopolis (1996) was the film ended the first chapter of his career. It was also the first evidence of his rebellious, mischievous, quirky side, and his surreal sense of humour. Soderbergh told The Believer that when he finished directing himself in Schizopolis, "I honestly thought…that I was really onto something that was going to be very, very popular. I thought that movie was going to be a hit. I thought people would go, 'This is a new thing'. I thought it was going to be bigger than Sex, Lies, and Videotape. You have to believe that while you're making it. Once I started showing it, I didn't believe it anymore.'

Schizopolis (1996) has a non-linear narrative and tells the same story from three different perspectives. Wholly improvised and shot for $400,000, the film is a surreal satire, but it's (deliberately) unclear of what. Identity? Scientology? The lack of communication in modern life? Our attempts to extract meaning from art? Soderbergh plays the hero Lester Richards, a nod to his filmmaking hero Richard Lester, whose spirit pervades the movie; he also directed, wrote, co-produced, photographed, co-composed and co-edited. It is one of his most personal films, and at the time (or even now to casual fans), it forces one to reassess what one thought one knew about the filmmaker. It's tempting to see it as an act of artistic liberation, a cleansing of the soul, and a questioning of his identity as a filmmaker, husband, father and human being. His marriage to actress Betsy Brantley (his estranged wife in the movie) had ended in 1994,; the couple have a daughter together. Soderbergh had gone his own artistic path, but it had paid no dividends apart from his own personal satisfaction. He had tried to make a more commercial film but failed. Soderbergh would eventually describe Schizopolis as being "about the breakdown of a marriage. It's very simple, in a way. It's about two people who can't communicate. It's all in the service of expressing this emotional detachment and frustration. As crazy as it gets, it's not actually an obscure movie to me." Schizopolis wasn't hated, it just wasn't widely seen, and for the most part critics weren't interested in it. It's a film I didn't like on first viewing, but I now appreciate the artistic bravery, the apparent wish to break free of constraints and simply have fun and not worry about narrative, structure and the profit margin. Its sense of humour is slyly amusing rather than hilarious. A similar thumbing-of-the-nose sense of humour is apparent in Soderbergh's later, more tightly structured and linear The Informant! (2009), a funny and entertaining film.

Schizopolis has since become a cult film and was included in The Criterion Collection, but it did nothing for Soderbergh's career, and its US gross was only $10,500. The offer to direct George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez in the Elmore Leonard adaptation Out of Sight must have seemed a strange prospect to him, but it set him on the road to commercial and critical recovery and gave him a new agenda: to make mainstream films, but to bend their structure, play with their style, and tinker with their tone; in short, to make films that both he wanted to make and that audiences would appreciate. Out of Sight's nonlinear narrative is probably what held it back from being more than a modest hit. But it may also be what made it seem so fresh at the time (attracting the attention of Hollywood producers previously disinterested in him), and is surely one of the reasons it holds up so well.

Soderbergh's next assignment was the intriguing revenge thriller The Limey (1999). Despite its status as a flop, the film is brilliant, and a key entry in the man's ouevre because it was an even more artistically successful melding of experimentalism and commercialism than Out of Sight. The plot – Cockney career criminal Terence Stamp comes to L.A. to avenge the death of his daughter at the hands of music promoter Peter Fonda – is secondary to the innovations beneath the text. Soderbergh skilfully uses flashbacks and flashforwards to reveal the hero's sadness, disappointment and regret of a life ill-spent and his neglect of his daughter, and the anger and will for revenge that such bittersweet memories elicit in him. The approach doesn't come across as arty or self-indulgent but unexpectedly poignant, and it subverts the genre. The plot is little more than a remake of Get Carter (1971), but Soderbergh also pays homage to films from the '60s and early '70s. Stamp's film Poor Cow (1967) supplies the flashbacks and his character's name and occupation: Wilson, thief. (He also played a supergrass apprehended by his ex-cohorts in 1984's The Hit.) Peter Fonda comes across as if his character from Easy Rider (1969) had decided to go mainstream but, despite his cyncism, still had his head in the pot-haze of 1966 to early '67. Andy Warhol repertory company member Joe Dallesandro has a small part as a hot-tempered thug. Barry Newman, who starred in the 1971 chase film Vanishing Point as a disaffected ex-cop angry at The Man, plays Fonda's henchman, and has trouble controlling his car.

The Limey was followed by three critically acclaimed, commercially successful movies in a row: Erin Brockovich, Traffic and Ocean's Eleven. He followed this run of movies with Full Frontal (2002), his first fully-fledged experimental piece since Schizopolis and likewise a movie that confounded critics and barely made a dent at the box-office. I didn't enjoy it at the time, finding it tedious, self-indulgent and pretentious. But my second time was a different experience. It's not a serious film, but a lark in the spirit of some of Godard's work, all about the artificiality of the Hollywood or L.A. life, and its sense of humour is subtle but playful. Like Schizopolis, it's an opportunity to flex the muscles and act on the impulses that commercial filmmaking doesn't require, and to refocus and replenish energy. As great as his previous three films were, Soderbergh had had to work hard to make them his own – proving his worth as a filmmaker able to tackle any project – and Full Frontal was a film just for himself: a freewheeling, French New Wave-inspired comedy docudrama, shot in a month on digital video for only $2m. I feel embarassed that I sat on my first viewing attempting to compare it with his previous three films. it's not aimed at same audience. One shouldn't look for the qualities found in his commercial work in his experimental work because they are not there. His commercial films have star performances and feel professionally and stylishly made. His experimental films tend to be shot on digital formats, feature non-professional actors, and have a lo-fi, off-the-cuff feel.

Soderbergh would argue that his 'eclectic' upbringing, in which he saw many styles and genres of films, made it natural for him to go "from one genre to the next, with the same satisfaction", but the timing of Full Frontal is interesting. Was Soderbergh worried about becoming typecast as a craftsman, a Hollywood director-for-hire with famous friends who would appear in his films (at reduced fees) at the drop of a hat? Probably not. The film was likely a reaction to the wearying realities of Hollywood filmmaking – the politics, the deal-making, the endless rewriting, the star trailers, the long shoots, etc. Full Frontal was as Un-Hollywood as one could get, and gave him a chance to see who he was as a filmmaker after being embraced by Hollywood.

Full Frontal would be followed by the big-budget remake of A ndrei Tarkovsky's Solaris (2002). It was a worthy remake, more emotional than the original but no less haunting. Its unfortunate failure at the box-office would push the possibility of Soderbergh's experimental instincts and commercial expectations co-existing in a popular film even further into the distance.

He tried something similar in Ocean's Twelve (2004). Whilst a huge hit, the film confounded audience members who didn't want such a complex plot and a twist ending that fooled them. They likely wanted a repeat of the original. Matt Damon remarked that the only reason he returned for Ocean's Thirteen (2007) was to make up for the second film.

Twelve was followed by a third experimental venture: Bubble (2005). It was again low-budget ($1.6m), filmed without a script (just an outline by his Full Frontal collaborator Coleman Hough) and with Soderbergh working in various capacities (director, producer, cinematographer, editor). The film was shot on HD video, and was controversially simultaneously released in cinemas and on cable/ satellite network HDNet Movies. The DVD followed a few days later. Only 73 minutes in length, the thriller tells the story of an overweight, middle-aged factory worker whose infatuation with a much younger co-worker has deadly consequences. The actors in the film were not professional actors but simply people Soderbergh had chosen from areas of West Virginia and Ohio. If anything, with his experimental features he was getting further and further away from the films that had made his reputation, and many saw him as being deliberately obscure and self-indulgent.

Ocean's Thirteen (2007) and the big-budget, two-part (and commercially unsuccessful but well-reviewed) Che (2008) were followed by a kind of companion piece to Bubble titled The Girlfriend Experience (2009). Inspired by Godard and Bergman and shot for $1.3m with a RedOne digital camera, it details a few days (leading up to the 2008 Presidential election) in the life of a high-class Manhattan call girl (real-life porn star Sasha Grey). The movie drew the usual mixed reviews accorded Soderbergh's experimental films, and the New York Post went so far as to call it 'half-assed'. (Roger Ebert, however, loved it.)

Soderbergh told The Believer: "A lot of people who write about art don't understand the importance of failure, the importance of process. Woody Allen can't leap from Annie Hall to Manhattan. He has to make Interiors in between to get to Manhattan. You've got to let him do that."

Perhaps the truth is that we the audience need to be more open-minded and supportive of his artistic choices. His experimental films have to be treated as what they are, "experiments". They are attempts to test the ground and make small steps forward that can advance his art, and the art of film in general. He has learned from his "failures" and is on a quest to make his films clearer. He wants to connect, but his way, telling The Rumpus "…the hardest thing in the world is to be good and clear when creating anything. It's the hardest thing in the world. It's really easy to be obscure and elliptical and so fucking hard to be good and clear. It breaks people. Because you don't often get encouragement to do that, to be good and clear." Soderbergh believes there is a thread that unites all his work, telling the same website: "There's probably a commonality in protagonists who feel that through sheer will they can make things turn out the way they want them to turn out.'

Soderbergh's latest releases, Contagion and Haywire, prove he's a remarkably versatile, resourceful filmmaker who is still trying to fuse the two strands of his cinematic personality into a coherent whole. Haywire is a low-budget action thriller that has found critical acclaim and proves that the aesthetics, practices and lessons learned from his experimental films can be applied to a popular genre with strong results. Soderbergh's medical thriller/ disaster movie Contagion (2011), released only four months earlier, was a mainstream blockbuster with a similarly restless sensibility, and is a culmination of lessons learned and skills honed. It's globetrotting, and has many inter-connected storylines and a lot of information and allusions to impart, but like Haywire star Gina Carano, it's lean, direct, and packs a hell of a punch. It's an experimental in its digital, raw, docu-style, but the approach fits the essence of its reality-based story, and helps the audience accept mega-stars (Matt Damon, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow) as real people.

He is a uniquely interesting and challenging filmmaker who time and again subverts our expectations. I may not always like the films he makes, but I understand his need to make them. We have to look at the bigger picture and see that whilst Godard had two careers with a clear chronological split in the middle, Soderbergh has two careers running parallel, but they are coming from the same adventurous spirit, and both are essential to understanding his artistic sensibility. If he does indeed retire to take up painting, it will be our loss.

Paul Rowlands writes about film on his website, Money into Light. He lives in Japan, where he also teaches English. Originally from the UK, he has lived in Japan since 1999. His writing has also appeared in the James Bond journal Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. On his site he covers films he believes to be misunderstood, underrated or brilliant, and interviews actors and filmmakers associated with such films.

OSCARS DEATH RACE: A BETTER LIFE

I wanted to love a movie that, in the first five minutes, had a teenage girl march up to a schoolmate and get right in his face all, "Give my boyfriend his money back or I'm-a have you killed." Ruthie (Chelsea Rendon) has gangster uncles, and she doesn't give a shit.

But A Better Life doesn't do anything with Ruthie after that, really, and what it does do is disappointing and timid. The center of the story is Ruthie's boyfriend, Luis (José Julián) — or rather his father, Carlos (Damián Bichir), and his struggles to keep Luis in school and away from bad influences like Ruthie's Uncle Celo (the charismatically tattooed, and underused, Richard Cabral). Carlos can't do much, though, because he works all the time and Luis's mother is not around. But when Carlos borrows a whack of money from his sister to buy his friend's landscaping truck (and by extension the business), he lets himself begin to dream bigger for himself and Luis, about more money, a nicer apartment, a safer school. Maybe even his citizenship.

(Spoilers ahead.)

This is a mistake, and the audience realizes it the moment the camera shows us Carlos dropping the truck's keys onto his jacket and preparing to climb a very tall tree. Carlos's new partner would like a truck of his own, so he steals it, in a sequence that's genuinely tough to watch — your stomach drops along with Carlos's as he gives vain chase, and then the film takes an intriguing turn as father and son team up in an almost buddy-movie sort of way to track the truck down. Forced to engage with one another for the first time in a while, Carlos and Luis knock on doors, chase leads, and try to solve the mystery, and that section of the movie is fun. The pacing is brisk, Julián kicks his acting up a notch, and because everyone in their world has to operate in the same cash-only, no-cops shadows they do, the story has an anything-goes feeling.

But like Carlos's big dreams, that doesn't last. If director Chris Weitz had stuck with that movie, the buddy movie? If the script had had Carlos and Luis keep finding the truck, then losing it again, finding it, losing it, climbing fences, occasionally yelling at each other, and then Carlos got by with it in the end? That is a snappy story about the sixteen different knife edges the hardworking immigrant has to balance on in this country without cutting himself to shit. Instead, we get After School Special nonsense like Carlos physically cringing when he witnesses a fistfight in a parking lot, or dismayed reaction shots from Bichir and Julián when Carlos and Luis find themselves in an apartment where fellow Mexicans bunk eight to a room. Thanks for the PSA, but a live-action Wikipedia stub about immigration policy should have something new to say.

And it should do it with professional actors. Bichir isn't actually great; he's fine, but he makes a handful of lazy or weird choices, and the fact that he's head and shoulders above the rest of the cast reeeeeally isn't saying much. Woody Harrelson should have had Bichir's spot instead, for Rampart, but…you know. The Oscars. This might just be one of those "Crash — no, we toooootally get it!" things with the Academy that you just have to let roll off.

The way that the movie is not good, and then almost good, and then not good again some more, is maddening. Non-completists may drive through.

OSCARS DEATH RACE: WARRIOR

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[EDITOR'S NOTE: The following is an entry in Oscars Death Race, Sarah D. Bunting's yearly quest to see every movie nominated for any kind of Academy Award. To view a scorecard, click here.]

Current Score: Oscars 45, Sarah 16 / categories completed: 1

Warrior is a lot of stories — which is unfortunate, because it should have picked just one of them, or two, and we've seen pretty much all of them before regardless. Tommy Conlon (Tom Hardy and his splendiferous saddle of neck muscles that has its own post office), a veteran whose departure from the armed forces is initially somewhat mysterious, returns to his hometown of Pittsburgh, looking to get back into mixed-martial arts. He's also looking to confront his estranged father and former coach, Paddy (Nick Nolte), about the crappy childhood he had to endure before Paddy got sober.

At the other end of Pennsylvania, Tommy's brother Brendan (Joel Edgerton), a physics teacher in Philly from whom Tommy is also estranged, is upside-down on his mortgage and supplementing his income with MMA fights in parking lots. What luck, then, that the MMA's World Series is coming up in Atlantic City, with a five-million-dollar winner-take-all purse! Gee, do you think the brothers will end up having to fight each other?

So, you've got a little Rocky going on with the scrappy underdogs; you've got a little The Fighter going on with the intra-fraternal resentments; you've got a little Million Dollar Baby over heeeere with the father figure trying to redeem himself, and a little Lights Out over theeeere with the wife who knowingly married a fighter and then made him promise not to fight ever again (Jennifer Morrison, doing what she can with the customary "I won't watch you fight AND ALSO DESTROY THIS FAMILY" scene). I really cannot abide that trope; if you don't want to marry a boxer, don't marry a boxer, but if the violence and the six-pack turn you on, take the good with the bad and stop trying to change the guy. Could one of these movies or TV shows please write the lady so she's with the fighter program? "Dang, the champ fucked your eye all up. That sucks, honey. Let's open a bottle of pinot and talk footwork."

…Rant over. (That one. For now.) The story also features the obligatory expositional voicing-over by various sports commentators and newscasters, to bring us up to speed on MMA rankings, why Tommy really left the Marines, and so on, and the movie is too long, too interested in dialogue shortcuts that don't work for the characters, and too reliant on cellos to make sure we know what to feel. After his big for-your-consideration scene, Nolte is functionally done in the movie; pacing-wise, it's somehow messy and also too neat.

But by the time we reach the climactic fight, the story has (excuse the pun) fought through the clichés and the overtaxed good-guy signifiers to arrive at some bracing stuff. The acting by Hardy and Edgerton is outstanding, which helps, and their final face-off gets at a raw truth about sibling relationships, about how much inchoate joy and hate they can simultaneously contain. Nolte's isn't the performance I'd have nominated, and I wouldn't say it asks anything new of him, but it's solid, even when he's obliged to pay off a heavy-handed reference to Moby Dick.

And Frank Campano (Frank Grillo), Brendan's second, is an interesting character; with his Beethoven and his mantras, he starts out like a gimmick, but the script sticks with it and doesn't forget what he is, and in the fight scenes, he's an island of calm and compassion. The Death Race has its unexpected pleasures, like an actor finally getting something good to do and doing the hell out of it, as Grillo does here.

It's not a great movie; it's not even good, really, if you add up all the parts. But by the end — thanks to Hardy's second above-and-beyond performance of the film year, and to the story he and Edgerton tell together about the painful, sweaty, homecoming hug that is a family, sometimes — the sum of those parts is intense and worthwhile. Give it a look.

OSCARS DEATH RACE 2012: The adventure begins . . .

Hello, and welcome to the Oscars Death Race. I'm Sarah D. Bunting, the head rodeo clown at Tomato Nation; the Oscars Death Race is pretty much what it sounds like, a quixotic attempt to watch every single nominee in the Academy-Awards categories that appear on the broadcast.

Why do I do this to myself? Well, the intellectual-glamour answer is that it's important for me as a writer, a storyteller, a citizen of filmmaking culture to testify to all of the work presented, good or bad. And I do believe that it's critical for someone, anyone to give a damn, or try to, about the lesser-lauded categories like Sound Editing and Live-Action Short.

The real, no-bullshit answer? I started the ODR in 2010 as a distracting lark, because it seemed like less masochistic drudgery than the house renovation I was enduring at that time — but I didn't finish the Race that year, so I had to do it again in 2011, and I didn't finish it then either because, among other things, I failed to drive to Bangor, Maine to see goddamn Country Strong. Fucking Gwyneth. Perhaps you're beginning to see the breadth of the folly here, but if not, let me brass-tacks it for you: Buntsy is stubborn and doesn't know when to quit and she will keep Death Racing until she beats this beeyotch.

Third time's the charm, though, or so I've chosen to believe, and I feel good about my chances in 2012 — not least because the Press Play brain trust is providing me with critical support this time around. (There may or may not be an "unlimited rotgut" clause in my contract. I'm told I can't discuss it.)

So! Here's how it's going to work. This is the landing/HQ page for the 2012 Oscars Death Race, where you can find:

–   links to the complete list of eligible nominees;
–   links to the nominees I've already watched and capsule-reviewed over at the historic birthplace of this mishegas, TomatoNation.com;
–   links to more recent reviews, which the PP gang will publish; and
–   a little progress widget that lets you know how close I am to the finish line.

As the ceremony gets closer, stay tuned to Press Play (as well as to Press Play's Twitter, @PressPlayIW, and my own, @TomatoNation) for category-prediction overviews, should-win/will-win balloting, and more. (Please note that I have never done worse in my Oscar pools than since starting the ODR. Knowing the films doesn't do squat for you, trust me. More on that in February.)

If anyone wants to join me in an ODR sidecar, I'm torn between "that's awesome" and "ohhh no no no no don't do that," but I hope you'll hit the comments, discuss on Twitter, and cheer me on. With…rotgut.

Sarah D. Bunting co-founded Television Without Pity and has written for, among others, Glamour, Time Out New York, New York Magazine, and Yahoo! Shine. She's also the head lab tech at the North American Field Guide to Revolting Snacks. Please send booze and Cow Tales c/o Press Play.

MATT ZOLLER SEITZ: The Fan-Made Star Wars Uncut Is the Greatest Viral Video Ever

Star Wars Uncut: Director's Cut, a full-length sweding of the original Star Wars made by hundreds of participants, might be the greatest viral video in the still-young history of the Internet. It's also the best argument I've seen for an overhaul of outmoded copyright laws which, if enforced to the entertainment industry's satisfaction, would make such works illegal and essentially un-viewable.

The project started out as a bit of a lark. In 2009, director Casey Pugh asked fans to re-create a fifteen-second piece of Lucas's 1977 Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope as a building block for a feature. To everyone's surprise, the result won an Emmy last summer in the still-young "interactive media" category. That accolade is surely one of the reasons why YouTube, which has been slammed by big media companies over unauthorized uploads and forced to adopt a "guilty until proven innocent" attitude toward infringement, is hosting all two hours and ten minutes of the project. Well, that and the fact that Lucasfilm and 20th Century Fox, rapacious big media companies for the most part, have often adopted a "don't ask, don't tell" policy toward the Star Wars saga, a franchise that has somehow overcome its deficiencies as drama to become as much a part of everyday life as the lyrics to "Happy Birthday" (which, of course, is also copyrighted).

The sheer variety of storytelling modes showcased in Pugh's cut-rate epic is a show in itself. Star Wars Uncut includes countless examples of live-action "drama" (scare quotes mine), some of it staged on elaborately decorated sets, the rest performed in kitchens, rec rooms, living rooms, basements, and backyards. Some of the actors are surprisingly good; others are merely spirited. The movie also boasts cel animation, flash animation, Claymation, 3-D animation, old- and new-school video-game graphics, stop-motion-animated action figures and Lego characters and paper dolls, masked performers, and sock puppets.

If you would like to read the rest of Matt's article, click here at New York Magazine.

A critic, journalist and filmmaker, Matt Zoller Seitz is the staff TV columnist for New York Magazine and the founder of Press Play.