![]() Since her birth in 1963 Mindy has had to overcome immense obstacles. The film centers on Los Angeles based artist, Mindy Alper. ![]() ![]() In addition to this recognition at the Oscars, the film has received both the Audience Awards and the Jury Awards at the Austin Film Festival and Full Frame Documentary Festival. This is the central premise of the short documentary, “Heaven is a Traffic Jam on the 405.” The film is one of five Academy Awards nominees for Best Documentary Short Subject and marks the first bid for director, Frank Stiefel. If Gaghan's ambitious script is not perfect - there is a little hectoring at times, and some of the allegiance shifts in this treacherous world are not entirely convincing and sometimes hard to follow - Soderbergh's electrifying pace always keeps this huge project firmly on the rails, always moving, always running.Even if someone has a score of emotional and psychological problems, there can be hope for a life to be well-lived and fulfilled. Mumbling mostly in Spanish, Del Toro turns in a performance of such effortless and classic cool that they should spin him off into his own TV show. Pre- and post-production processes achieve a distinctive look for all three storylines: steely blues for the Beltway-bound Douglas burnt yellows for the oppression of Del Tore's Mexico bright colours and deep shade for the crumbling cocktail society of Zeta-Jones.Īs for the cast themselves, newlyweds Douglas and Zeta-Jones are just fine in a uniformly excellent ensemble, Douglas especially finding real pain and pathos in an unshowy role however, the ace in the pack here is Del Toro's Tijuana lawman, an honest guy caught in an impossible situation. And the fact that Soderbergh, as his own cameraman and cinematographer, has employed natural light, doesn't make Traffic any less visually da ring. Soderbergh describes Traffic as his $49 million Dogme movie, and certainly the hand-held style pushes the post-Blair Witch boundaries of mainstream moviemaking, but with the multiple storylines and delicately poised moral ambiguity, Traffic is closest in feel to a feature-length episode of NYPD Blue - indeed, it's no coincidence that Gaghan won an Emmy for his work on the revolutionary cop show. It's like a documentary with all the boring bits taken out. But what we are dealing with here is economy: Soderbergh's signature cutting, always to the chase, establishes a breathless rhythm which is more real than real. Just as his imaginative framing of a seduction reinvigorated the traditional love scene in 1998's Out Of Sight, Soderbergh works similar wonders with his largest canvas yet: two countries, three distinct storylines, well over 100 speaking parts. to a new plane is Soderbergh's storytelling skills. What elevates this company - drug dealers, corrupt cops, informants etc. ![]() Not much in Traffic's screenplay is entirely new- painstakingly researched and full of inside detail, certainly, but we have been here before (especially if you caught the original Channel 4 mini-series, Traffik, upon which Stephen Gaghan based his script). Welcome to Steven Soderbergh's 'run and gun' movie. Then a plane lands overhead and the movement starts in the form of constant running, camera slung loose over a shoulder, which doesn't let up for two and a half hours. Inside, two Spanish men talk in their native tongue about dreams. We open on a car parked in the desert, suffused with sun-bleached light. Watching Traffic, it's a while before you realise you're watching a movie made in America.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |