I’ve been spending the last week or so thinking a lot about Steven Soderbergh, maybe it’s because I hope to finally see Contagion very soon, and I come to a thought that I generally come to whenever I spend too long thinking about the filmmaker. That is, that he’s unique. He’s one of the few filmmakers who’s brilliant and almost impossible to tell that it’s his film without watching the credits. He’s one of the few filmmakers of today that many critics and enthusiasts hold up in high regard and doesn’t seem to have much of a schtick when it comes to his films.
Thinking even further as to how odd that is nowadays I can’t seem to figure any other filmmaker, writer, actor or composer working in film today that isn’t immediately recognizable when you spend more than fifteen minutes with the film.
This week in particular I’ve finally seen Kafka, a noir science fiction tale of a man in an insurance company where people who ask too many questions get sent to “the castle” and are never heard from again. I also watched his next film King of the Hill (not related to the FOX animated series) which is about a boy struggling without any family for a period of time during the depression in a run down hotel. Both films have absolutely nothing in common with each other but find ways to evoke emotion in a way that only top class filmmakers can do.
So I pose this question to you as I finish writing up a half-assed post of the week. Who else out there, working today, is as talented as Soderbergh and at the same time as enigmatic is his film choices.