official ilx thread for steven soderbergh's haywire starring gina carano and bearded antonio banderas

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFV0Uvzpz0o

pretty psyched for this. dunno how good an actress carano is but the rest of the cast is dynamite and soderbergh is best at genre pics.

Thank God this isn't coming out til next year, so I don't have to see it.

soderbergh is best at genre pics.

kind of ugh, unless you mean The Limey.

and out of sight, those are his 2 best movies fer sher

I'm guessing max isn't identifying Bubble as a murder mystery.

is it better if i say his track record is better in his genre/"popular" films?

I don't know how to divvy them up in some cases. I prefer to label those Ocean's things as "powdered donuts" instead of genre films.

ocean's 12 and 13 are prob his worst movies

well hes good at "powdered donuts"

probably why he keeps threatening to quit

(I think he's better at Solaris)

most of his films belong to a genre, so I'm thinking we're talking "crime films" here.

When I first heard the title I applauded at him doing another dramatic adap of Brooke Hayward's memoir.

S.S. & Carano are doing a screening/Q&A of this at Lincoln Center soon

I kind of like the shamelessness of SS's "build movies around chicks I wanna bone" era

I have had a serious crush on the woman for four years, I hope this movie is good because I am going to see it

do you frown while serious crushing on someone, head in ur chin and just sitting there going 'hmmmmm ws'

I often make this face:

http://i432.photobucket.com/albums/qq48/surefire0828/obama-serious-face.jpg

he's thinking 'would i smash why yes, yes i do believe i would'

"... ws, dammmit"

alternately: "oh for chrissake, ws"

Matt, do you include Bubble in this era?

http://reverseshot.com/files/images/pre-issue22/bubble.jpg

When I first heard the title I applauded at him doing another dramatic adap of Brooke Hayward's memoir.

this looks like it will own

then he makes the HBO Liberace pic for those of us who hate ownage

glad you finally identified your problem

in this place, it's easy

The trailer to this is so... b-movie-ish (except for the cast, I guess). I hope it's good.

Hoping something Limey here, hope that's not hoping too high.

The trailer to this is so... b-movie-ish (except for the cast, I guess)

considering that it appears to be a high budget Cynthia Rothrock movie with CR replaced with a walking goddess, this isn't surprising

watched Out of Sight for the first time last night.

what'd you think mate

considering that it appears to be a high budget Cynthia Rothrock movie with CR replaced with a walking goddess, this isn't surprising

― Bam! Orgasm explosion in your facehole. (DJP), Friday, January 6, 2012 10:01 AM (23 minutes ago) Bookmark

smh @ at implication about rothrock's non-goddesshood

I did have reservations about that post but I don't think you fully understand the magnitude of the crush I have on Gina Carano

wasn't bad!
what stuck with me tho, was Jenifer Lopez's butt. forgot how much i revered it.

i'd forgotten over time how good j-lo was in that movie, kinda too bad she went on to become so intolerable.

ya, i was surprised. the Ocean's 11 vibe loomed pretty large tho (i realize OoS is probably the older of the two). but overall pretty good flick.

these stills look great

http://altscreen.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/haywire11-e1326212327195.jpg
http://altscreen.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/haywire8-e1326212367153.jpg

also enjoy this inspiration

Carano tells of how the star of “Shame” proved her match. “[Michael] Fassbender just became a mentor to me, he was so supportive. And he was so down to just bang into everything we could, vases, everything. He always was like ‘We need to slam our head into that wall a little harder.’ “Those words came back to haunt him, however, in one brutal fight scene. “In the hotel room fight scene,” Soderbergh relates, “which was rehearsed at length, for weeks, our lead stunt choreographer explained to Michael ‘Listen, here’s what’s going to happen. When she reaches for the vase, your instinct is going to be to look at it. Don’t do that, because if you do that, she’s going to hit you right in the eye with it.’ They drilled this into him, and sure enough, on take one, she grabbed it, and he looked right at it, and she hit him right, flush — and it’s the take that’s in the movie. That’s the good news. But he really got clocked. I mean it’s breakaway, but you don’t wanna get hit by her with this at full tilt. He took a beating.”

That scene itself, heavily featured in the trailer, was in fact the spring-off point for the whole project, via a mostly forgotten vehicle for “The Birds” star Rod Taylor. Soderbergh explains “The writer, Lem Dobbs, had turned me on to a movie that was made in the 60s called ‘Darker Than Amber,’ which starred Rod Taylor, who I always liked a lot. And there’s this scene in the middle with him and what must have been a stuntman, where they get into this incredibly brutal fight in a hotel room, smaller than this one and not as nice, and they just tear each other apart, and tear the room apart. And we talked about it, and I thought that would be great, but it’d be even better if it was a four-star hotel, and he was in a suit, and she was in a cocktail dress. That would be a really odd juxtaposition of elements. In a lot of ways, the movie was built out from that idea.”

And true to its retro inspiration, the director was keen to stay away from any contemporary “Bourne Identity”-style camerawork. “I don’t think there’s a single hand-held shot in the movie,” Soderbergh said. “We were really consciously going against the grain there, because my feeling is that lately, there has been a way of disguising the fact that the people can’t really do what’s required, and knowing that I had Gina, and knowing that we had cast people around her who could actually do this stuff, we took the conscious position of letting you really see it, not cutting as fast, keeping the shots looser, and having you feel, ‘Wow, that’s really happening in front of us.’ “

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aABT-FjR4_M&feature=player_embedded

sodes is in a phase right now where he hates to move his camera. some of the shots in the haywire trailer look kinda stiff to me. im glad hes trying to break the mold a bit wrt action movies, but... tracking shots arent evil steve! im sure it'll be dope though

im getting so hyped for this

via nyt

Another important stop on Mallory’s itinerary of flight and payback is Dublin, scene of an intricate and suspenseful foot chase that serves as Mr. Soderbergh’s critique of current trends in action filmmaking, in particular those associated with the British director Paul Greengrass. Instead of the splintered, speeded-up cutting favored by Mr. Greengrass and his followers — most memorably deployed in the second and third “Bourne” movies, which turned the cities of the world into Google Earth kaleidoscopes of controlled chaos — Mr. Soderbergh builds momentum and uncertainty through extended tracking shots and tight, restricted perspectives. Like Mallory the audience can’t see everything that’s happening and isn’t sure what will happen next.

In another sense, though, nothing is really in doubt, and very little is at stake. Unlike the “Bourne” films, whose baroque webbing of plot and counterplot suggested an allegory of global paranoia, “Haywire” goes to great lengths to avoid being about anything beyond its immediate situations and effects. It is self-consciously and aggressively trivial, a feast for formalists who sentimentalize the gloriously cheap B-movies of the past.

Nowadays everyone must love (or at least pretend to love) pleasures that were supposedly once disdained or taken for granted: dive bars, street food, trashy films. But knowing, sophisticated attempts to replicate those things often traffic in their own kind of snobbery, confusing condescension with authenticity. Movies like “The American,” “Drive” and now “Haywire” offer strained pulp, neither as dumb as we want them to be nor as smart as they think they are, and not, in the end, all that much fun.

"The American" seemed like it was doing something kind of different, idk

For what it's worth, the actual efforts at pulp are actually more blah, like Drive Angry

This was a load of big dumb fun -- loved it.

reviews quite lukewarm or worse

Nowadays everyone must love (or at least pretend to love) pleasures that were supposedly once disdained or taken for granted: dive bars, street food, trashy films.

gtfo of my dive bars then

lol of course the nyt thinks people disdain street food

or sorry, thinks they used to before they got all ironic

i hope this gets badly reviewed so its not a thing and i can just watch it

u can probably just watch it either way

no

This was fun in the moment, but incredibly forgettable - I can barely remember anything about it beyond a few moments, and I saw it on Monday.

dive bars, street food, trashy films

Some of us just call this "neighborhood bars and food" and "movies"

i agree. part of me was thinking, "boy this is kind of thin as a concept, isn't it?" the other was saying, "yeah, but this is a pretty satisfying 80 minutes."

i mean jesus i'd rather watch 80 minutes of this than 180 minutes of some comic-book adaptation made by committee or whatever.

i dont really understand how michael douglas fit in exactly, other than the $10m they got off him it seems like it wouldve been wiser to keep him out of the loop, they were getting money from the lil bearded evil rich guy anyway right, why double dip when itll just piss douglas off, just greedy i guess 'its always abt the money'

are you referring to the process by which the actor michael douglas was cast in the movie?

i long ago came to terms w/the fact that i will never understand that particular phenomenon

loved the part where her dad has his mind blown by seeing her kill a guy in his bathroom and tries to comfort her but shes just hungrily looking out over his shoulder at the desert

!!

i assume the latter goes like this.

soderbergh: "hey, mike, i'm making this low-budget action movie. it's gonna be great. can you come in for two days' shooting?"
douglas: "sure, dog."

i generally h8 douglas but he was kinda perfect for that role

i didnt understand like 80% of the machinations, but they also didnt really seem to matter, so

the plot points come kind of thick in the last two reels. i didn't always keep up, but yeah it only occasionally dampened my enjoyment of the film.

i don't want to make any great claims for this (neither would soderbergh i imagine) but like i said, it was satisfying. i didn't have that twinge of existential panic that i have halfway through those big-budget action franchise movies where i think, "my life is finite. why am i spending 180 minutes of it watching this shit that is giving me such high doses of annoyance along with occasional moments of pleasure?"

haha my only memory of this movie was that it felt exciting to watch otherwise i have that vague feeling of 'did i really watch this or have i just seen a lot of commercials for it' when i think about what actually happened during the course of the film

it left me really wanting. i honestly think everyone who might see this would be better off just watching the fight scenes on youtube

thats totally how i watched 'lancelot du lac'

i at times felt myself wanting it to be some other movie but i ended up loving it for what it was

i liked the obscurity of the plot

there's really nothing good about this movie when she isnt beating someone up. fuck soderbergh

ewan macgregor!

well we will just have to agree to disagree *sniff*

i liked this ok, terrible music cues

yeah well contagion too

i think this was my 2nd fav soderbro but i really only like a few of his movies

i will admit that i am a v easy sell for exactly this type of thing

SS seemed to make like half of his decisions based on "okay, what would greengrass do, im gonna do the opposite," some of it worked, like the stationary camera, some of it didnt, like all the music

were there a lot of sounds in this movie

i just wish soderbergh was interested in, y'know, telling a story, with characters in it. i guess im a rube for wanting that instead of the jizzbomb of pure cinema he lobbed in my eyes

(thats not in response to any of you, just sodes' seeming disinterest in storytelling i guess)

there were kinda two levels of plotting one that was serpentine and obscure and the other that was all abt THE LOGIC OF VIOLENCE

Missed out on this at the theaters, regrettably

i dunno i actually think was deftly plotted

after 3 months all i remember abt this movie was gina carranos apt/house & the diner scene w/ tatum

Screenplay by Lem Limey Dobbs.

Mostly I remember Gina Carano's warrior paint.

how could you guys forget the driving scene in the snowy forest w/ the deer

best scene ever

man this thing was dull but luckily only a few minutes over 90. The music was as annoying as PTA's use of it in Magnolia.

I liked this a lot. watched it over the weekend.

the fight choreography was awesome. I liked that it was so ... technical and precise? like instead of a bunch of crazy cuts and blur you could perfectly see all the moves they were using.

I still have a big crush on Gina Carano.

Who wouldn't?

I'd let her put a big crush on me, etc

Some good set pieces and i wasn't bored, but I don't get the feeling that Soderbergh really likes this kind of movie all that much. He doesn't take any pleasure in the development of the plot or the process of building tension or anything like that. Would have been better if helmed by an actual genre filmmaker.

whats soderberghs deal how come he makes every movie in the world

Cause who else is gonna remake Outbreak, The Bourne Identity and A Night in Heaven all in the span of a year?

its true someone needed to do it

watched, better than Magic Mike

i don't think any of the Bournes were 93 minutes, plus i didnt see them

also thought of Fassbender getting totalled as Bazinian payback for Shame

thought this was pretty great while understanding H4A's criticisms. Hotel room fight was excellent, post-fight execution was ice-cold. Thought the Dublin foot chase was well-done. Obv "meant" nothing which was cool w/me. Carano's physical screen presence is pretty compelling, her line readings a bit stiff but I didn't think it was necessarily a negative. Reminded me of 'femme fatale' in the very broad sense of having a riveting lead actress whose physical acting is enough to overcome any drawbacks w her dialogue. I thought out of the supporting cast fassbender was really good and blankly creepy.

her line readings a bit stiff

90% of her dialogue is looped by someone else iirc

yeah that is noticable and distracting. otherwise it's great. I particularly liked the driving backward/deer scene

jesus who is still smothering their films in intermittent arbitrarily black & white montage sequences & smooth vegas hotel elevator soul muzak, this is terrible

this guy's retirement is depriving long-distance commuters of half hours of pre-xanax distraction on internal flights, it is a tragedy