flashback to 1989 – Page 2

sex, lies, and videotape (1989)
Written and directed by Steven Soderbergh

Steven Soderbergh is a filmmaker I feel ambivalent about. Of his prolific filmography, I’ve seen sixteen of his movies, and I still don’t have a strong opinion about him. This is likely because his subject matter, themes, and tone are profoundly eclectic. The director seems quite at ease making crowd-pleasing Hollywood fare as much as he enjoys experimenting with technology and structure. Often, I have a sense of the filmmaker as a person from their work. Directors like Scorsese, Kubrick, and Altman conjure specific emotions and images for me. Soderbergh remains a blank, an enigma that exists outside of any definitions I can articulate.

Heathers (1989)
Written by Daniel Waters
Directed by Michael Lehmann

Screenwriter Daniel Waters originally envisioned Stanley Kubrick directing the screenplay he wrote while working at a Los Angeles video store in 1986. The initial script was three hours long, and the opening cafeteria scene, added in subsequent drafts, was meant to be an homage to the opening barracks scene in Full Metal Jacket. Well, Kubrick didn’t make Heathers, though I am fascinated by what the film would have been like. It is still a fantastic movie, a satire dripping with the most acidic venom toward its targets, a mockery of everything white, suburban, and middle-class in America.

Category: flashback to 1989

Movie Review – sex, lies, and videotape

Movie Review – Heathers