Sundance 2009: Evenings with hideous men

The ticket simply read "Sneak Preview 2." Earlier in the week, the mystery event had been colloquially referred to as "An Evening with Steven Soderbergh," as in a presentation of clips plus a Q&A. But everybody seemed to know what was going on: Yo, Steven Soderbergh is showing his new film, The Girlfriend Experience, on the down-low. Shh, don't tell anybody. Except your friends. And people who incessantly blog. And Twitter. So when the director and Geoff Gilmore walked out onto the Eccles stage where two stools were set up, the packed house collectively waited for confirmation. "There have been a lot of rumors going around, saying that we're going to show something," Soderbergh said. "I don't know how these things get started…[Dramatic pause]…except we are." Whooping! Clapping! Did I just hear a wolf whistle? He mentioned a few caveats: This was a work-in-progress, it was being shown on a 1080p reduction from a 4k file (cue tech geeks' uncontrollable drooling), a few kinks were still being ironed out. Then the lights went down.

By the time they went back up 70-odd minutes later and the bespectacled auteur came back to take some questions, the applause was slightly more restrained. Like Bubble, Soderbergh's Dogme-like experiment in lo-fi miserablism, The Girlfriend Experience falls under the category of the prolific filmmaker's "interesting asides." Personally, I love the fact that Soderbergh is someone who isn't afraid to take chances, go off on tangents and mix gajillion-dollar blockbusters with cryptic, elliptical character studies featuring nonprofessional actors. But there's something about this look at urbanite relationships—and more specifically, the way power and money affects those on New York's lower rungs—that nags at the back of your brain. This quickie drama is intriguing, intelligent and undeniably fascinating. It's also too chilly, aloof and abstract for its own good.

Yeah, I know: It's okay to make a four-hour biopic about a galvanizing revolutionary and keep a certain distance, but you suddenly have a problem when your cinematic hero does the same thing with a smaller, slighter work? Actually, yes. The longer we follow around the film's Manhattanite working girl (adult-film actor Sasha Grey) as she drifts from client to client, the less we end up knowing about this modern-day Holly Golightly. That's part of the director's plan, of course, and perhaps if Soderbergh were simply trying to fashion his own cover version of Vivre sa Vie, the movie's alienating techniques might feel a little more tied in to its content.

But it's not just about the shell she's constructed around herself, or how that armor is pierced by a loathsome Internet sleaze mogul (critic Glenn Kenny, whose falsetto pronunciation of the word cooooo-caine almost makes up for the film's deficiencies), or even how this causes the belle de jour to disastrously let down her guard in front of a john. The story is also about her relationship, if you want to call it that, with her boyfriend—an equally shallow personal trainer (Chris Santos). Thanks to Soderbergh's nonlinear approach à la The Limey here, we don't even know they're dating until past the halfway point, and even after that fact has been revealed, you don't believe these two are a couple for a split second. Nor, for that matter, do you buy that the director is interested in the inner lives of these characters at all. He just wants to see what happens when he gets a group of people together, turns on his camera and lets them improvise. Sometimes, that method yields masterpieces (see Cassavetes, Mike Leigh). Other times, you roll snake eyes. While talking to a well-known critic several days after the screening, the subject of Soderbergh's cinematic detour came up. "What did I think of it?" she mused. "Let's just say that I look forward to enjoying his movies again in the near future." The man is incapable of making a boring film. He can, however, make a needlessly disconnected one.

If you want to see some real whores, apparently, you have to look to the political parasites that will sell themselves out in nanoseconds for a piece of the action. Fans of British comedy know that writer-producer Armando Iannucci has been responsible for some of the U.K.'s funniest TV programs of the past 15 years (I'm Alan Partridge, The Day Today, Brass Eye), and that his "mockumentary" series on parliamentary backstabbing, The Thick of It, is damned near flawless. In the Loop is the Thick of It movie we've been waiting for, though you don't need to have seen a single episode to bust a gut over the nincompoopery and bad behavior on display. Peter Garibaldi reprises his small-screen role as Malcolm, a metaphorical hit man for the prime minister who has to clean up a mess made by a low-level cabinet lackey (Tom Hollander). The action soon moves from the U.K. to the Beltway, with a blowhard general (James Gandolfini), soulless senators and various other would-be power players jockeying to be on a secret war committee. Shenanigans and much running around ensues.

Political satire has had stiff competition with reality, which has rendered most outrageous comic scenarios moot over the past eight years: How can you parody something that's already beyond absurd? The current Iraq debacle is never mentioned, though In the Loop is clearly using the selling and manufacturing of that war as its basis, which immediately dates it. Premiering days after Obama was sworn in, Iannucci's snarky takedown of Downing Street/Capital Hill corruption and incompetence immediately felt like a period piece, but the sheer volume of eloquent vulgarity and biting dialogue is indeed timeless; there are so many great lines that rush by you that you need at least two viewings to catch them all. (Of all the perfect put-downs bantered back and forth, my personal favorites are both non sequiturs: Two boobs are referred to as "horse of the year" and "the baby from Eraserhead." Just writing those words sends me into a fit of laughter.) I was ready to lay into distributors for not having the balls to pick this up, then IFC swooped in at the 11th hour and grabbed it. They're set to release it some time this fall. Don't miss it.

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A few words of advice to filmmakers: Maybe you should try to avoid adapting short-story collections into feature films, no matter how well written the books are. And if it's a short-story collection penned by Bret Easton Ellis, abort the mission immediately.

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men connects the various one-sided conversations that make up David Foster Wallace's anthology of asinine dudes into a loosely connected story of a female grad student (Julianne Nicholson) exorcising her own demons. But despite actor-turned-director John Krasinski (The Office) enlisting an all-star cast to bring these tortuous tales of dysfunctional males to life, the film still feels like, well, a cobbled-together concoction of disparate elements. It's a nice try, which is more than you can say about The Informers. Gregor Jordan (Buffalo Soldiers) has proved he's adept at the whole sick-funny thing before, yet Ellis's curdled tales of ’80s excess have a knack for destroying any true talent that comes within vomiting distance. Yes, the Reagan era did give us synth-pop, AIDS and handsome hollow men with awesome bangs, but seriously: Why is this movie being made now? There's nothing here in regard to apocalyptic Hell-Ay that Less than Zero didn't do better, and at least that movie's proximity to the decade in question allowed it to act as both an insta–time capsule and a commentary. This disaster says nothing about the time we live in now, and precious little about the past. It's just beautiful bastards behaving badly. Why should you care? An excellent question, folks.