Full Frontal

I like Steven Soderbergh. Really, I do. But I can't defend this. Full Frontal is supposed to be a "wicked satire" about the fakeness of Hollywood or something, but it's really just masturbatory garbage designed to make Soderbergh feel better about making money and winning an Oscar. There's a plot, sort of, about actors and writers and massage therapists and autoerotic asphyxiation, but it's really beside the point. Half of the movie is buried under pretentious voice-overs and shot with really crappy digital cameras; the other half is some insipid romance film made by the characters in the other half, starring Julia Roberts under the ugliest wig I have ever seen. The digital video footage is so bad he must have shot it poorly on purpose -- Soderbergh is a very talented cinematographer (operating, as always, under the pseudonym Peter Andrews), but the movies I've made with my friends in my apartment look better than Full Frontal's DV portions. The only thing remotely redeeming about this whole enterprise is David Hyde Pierce, who gives an excellent performance as the depressed screenwriter Carl. But it's almost impossible to see under Soderbergh's movie-within-a-movie-within-a-movie-within-a-movie. Okay, Steve: you're an artist. We get it. Can you go back to making good movies, please?

Rating: 1/2*