sex, lies, and videotape (steven soderbergh, 1989)

Sometimes said to be Soderbergh's feature directorial debut, which isn't quite correct ... he had directed a concert film of the band Yes. But it is what Wikipedia calls his "narrative directorial debut". Made dirt cheap and in a hurry, it won an Oscar nomination for Soderbergh's screenplay. Laura San Giacomo got her first movie credit after a few TV appearances and one uncredited film. Former model Andie MacDowell showed how far she had come since her film debut five years earlier as Jane in a Tarzan movie where her Southern-accented speech was dubbed over by Glenn Close.

The title of the film suggests something lurid, and indeed, according to the IMDB, "The film was playing in Berlin's largest movie theaters when the Berlin Wall fell. A lot of East Germans crossing over to West Berlin went to see it, expecting Western-style porn." The title is in fact perfectly honest as to the contents, but not in the way those East Germans hoped for. There is sex, but not much of it is on screen. There are lies ... everyone tells them. And there is most certainly videotape.

This was the tenth Soderbergh movie I have seen (I also like to mention his fine TV series, The Knick), and it's been an interesting career. The earlier films I saw were all quite good (Out of Sight, The Limey, Erin Brockovich, Traffic), then came Ocean's Eleven which made lots of money and spawned sequels (I didn't care for the first one so I passed on the later editions). Then came movies that were all good, never bad, never great: Contagion, Haywire, Logan Lucky, and this year's No Sudden Move. It adds up to a fine body of work ... I have him at #52 on my most recent Best Directors list. But one reason he ranks so high is that I have avoided a lot of his movies that received less-than-positive reviews. So I'd say Soderbergh is hit-or-miss, but his hits are frequent enough and good enough to warrant our interest. I don't think he's ever made a masterpiece, but he's made enough good ones to suffice.

Sex, Lies, and Videotape is one of the better ones. The acting by the four principals is excellent ... you'll wish better use had been made of James Spader in his later career. There are probably many college theses about the use of videotape here, but Soderbergh thankfully doesn't beat us over the head ... it's there, we can draw our own conclusions about what the tapes in the film mean for the characters. At the time, the film promised great things from the new director ... it won two awards at Cannes. How much he fulfilled that promise is the question. At the 2001 Oscars, he lost for Best Director (Erin Brockovich), mostly because he beat himself (winning for Traffic). I don't think we can blame him for being prolific, and his percentage of good movies is pretty good.