Reaction Shots

In 2012, when Steven Soderbergh announced his retirement, I scratched my head and figured that it isn’t like he hadn’t been prolific or paid his dues or added to the process of how films are made. A little while later, he walked his comments back and said he was taking a sabbatical. That, too, is fair; well-deserved break and all that. But it continues to amuse me that the following year, he came out with “Side Effects” and “Behind the Candelabra”, busied himself with producing “The Knick” series (as well as directing) in 2014 through 2015, as well as producing no less than three other films for other people, took another break, cranked out “ Logan Lucky ” in 2017, another series (“Mosaic”) and “Unsane” both in 2018, produced a couple of other flicks for other people, and I’m sure I could keep going, but you get the gist: Soderbergh keeps himself busy and at a glance, this means something like two features a year not always, the two under discussion are about a year apart. There’s a...

Chloé Zhao “Eternals” adaptation is a case study in what the MCU does to individualistic directors. This is not going to be a slam on either Marvel or Zhao, but it’s time to really evaluate the dynamics between the corporate vision and the individual auteur’s.   I’ll dip into this more as we go on, but I need to start off by saying that I completely disagree with Alex Dowd at the A.V. Club and his claim that Zhao’s work is just another boilerplate Marvel movie. Far from it; there is a tremendous amount of love in this film, there are actually moments when characters and the actors portraying them are actually given space to breathe, and I disagree strongly that it’s just as formulaically “quippy” as other films in the MCU. However, it’s just these strengths that point to the weaknesses in the film and while I personally don’t find them completely debilitating, those weaknesses are distracting and keep a film that could have been one of the best MCU offerings from being just reall...