FULL FRONTAL = NOT-SO-FULL THEATERS - I heard a radio report this morning calling Steven Soderbergh's little digital experiment, Full Frontal, one of the biggest bombs of the summer. I don't know if that's completely fair. Box Office Mojo estimates Harrison Ford's K-19: The Widowmaker cost $100 million to make, with an additional $35 million spent on marketing. It didn't work. To date the film has made just $33.8 million. That's not a bomb. That's a nuclear meltdown...which is fitting, I suppose, considering the movie's subject matter. By comparison, Full Frontal cost about $2 million with another $2 million for promotion. Granted, it's only grossed $1.9 million in three weeks, but Miramax will surely at least break even in the end. There's no doubt the film has been a disappointment, however. After opening the movie in New York and L.A., Miramax hoped to expand to other cities on a wave of critical adulation and positive word-of-mouth. Instead, the critics tore it apart and the movie has been losing momentum. Last week it played on ten fewer screens than the previous week and saw its receipts drop 38%. A slight Soderbergh backlash had to be expected. Already a critical darling after Out of Sight (1998) and The Limey (1999), the overwhelming success in 2000 of Traffic and Erin Brockovich -- which made him the first director since Michael Curtiz to be nominated for Best Director twice in the same year -- propelled him to the top of Hollywood's A-List. Soderbergh's next movie is a remake of Solaris, the 1972 Russian science-fiction film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, based on the book by Stanislaw Lem. It stars Soderbergh favorite and production partner George Clooney, and is scheduled to open wide the Wednesday before Thanksgiving (11/27). In a five-part interview with Film Threat, Soderbergh recently described Solaris as "a combination of 2001 and Last Tango In Paris." It doesn't exactly sound like box office gold, does it? Fortunately, Soderbergh isn't content -- and never was -- with being a Hollywood hit producer. The line for Solaris may be small, but I'll be one of the first people in it.

* Thanks to Full Frontal's poor reception, it has yet to play on a screen anywhere near me. But CS Chicago correspondent Sam Hallgren contributed this astute review:

If the idea of experimentation in film does not, or has not ever interested you, you will likely find Steven Soderbergh's new film Full Frontal unnecessarily... messy: The cinematography is messy; the narrative is messy; even the acting is messy. Inspired in part by the legacy of Dogme 95 filmmakers like Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg (click here to learn how to make a Dogme film), the film was shot, for the most part, on digital video and edited on a Mac with DigiPro. Unlike many of the films that have come out of the Dogme 95 school, however, Full Frontal won't make you feel like you've just been molested. It's less an experiement, really, than it is, or appears to be, an opportunity for Soderbergh to blow off some steam - to make a movie without the pressure to make $100 million.

Soderbergh seems to need this play-time. For a relatively young filmmaker, his filmography is already littered with no-budget one-offs that aren't intended for mass consumption (Schizopolis, The Limey). His best films - Out of Sight and, too a lesser degree, Traffic - feature the best of both his pop and his experimental instincts. I think it's a great gift to cinephiles that one of the very best young directors working in Hollywood spends his time between big-budget studio projects, not by taking a 4-year hiatus, but by making a small film that allows him to push the boundaries of his craft. You may not like watching a grainy Julia Roberts mope around for two hours. And you may not understand the movie-within-a movie narrative that Soderbergh plays with. You may, in fact, wonder what the point of the whole thing is at all. But never once did I question Soderbergh's commitment to the piece.

According to the movie's advertising, Full Frontal offers a look at behind-the-scenes Hollywood. While offering some of that, it's really the least interesting part of the film (the exception is a wonderful scene between Julia Roberts - playing an actress - and her assistant. (It's the most honest and funny bit of acting I've ever seen Roberts do). The rest of the film works the periphery of the entertainment industry, offering choice bits to Catherine Keener (doing an occasionally inspired variation on her Being John Malkovich character) as a quickly unraveling HR director, and the movie-stealing Nicky Katt as a pretentious actor starring in an unintentional homage to Springtime for Hitler.

To Soderbergh's credit, the actors don't sabotage the film by having too much fun or by winking at the camera; but Soderbergh is winking - too often he reminds you that you're watching a movie. And this, really, is the film's biggest flaw: It doesn't take itself quite seriously enough to sustain the narrative (what there is of one to begin with).

Full Frontal is flawed, but I expect that this was the point. Experimentation is very often synonymous with self-indulgence, but I have always found Soderbergh a particularly unselfish director. He likes actors; he likes stories; and he respects his audience. If Full Frontal is marketed correctly, the film will get an audience that parallels its (tiny) budget - an audience made up primarily of those self-selective members of the movie-going public that know what they're getting into.

There may not be a need for more films like Full Frontal, but there is a great shortage of filmmakers like Soderbergh.

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