Haywire

Over the last two decades, Steven Soderbergh has proven himself to be the most versatile and chameleon-like film director currently working. He can jump from genre to genre, tell a great story, while still keeping his trademark style at the forefront. In the past, he's made slick heist movies (the Ocean's 11 series), sweeping crime epics (Traffic), a science fiction romance (Solaris), tiny improvised independent films (Bubble), and so on. Just four months ago, he gave us an apocalyptic medical thriller with Contagion. What I'm saying is, you could find a Steven Soderbergh film in just about every Netflix category. I suppose that's why he plans on retiring a few movies down the road.

Haywire is Steven Soderbergh's martial arts movie, starring MMA fighter Gina Carano as Mallory Kane, a mercenary on the run from her employers who set her up for a fall. There's more of a story, but that's kind of all you need to know. She kicks lots of ass and tells her story to a 19 year old kid she takes with her. It's like a smart, slick, and stylized Steven Seagal movie, but with a hot girl mercifully put in Seagal's place.

Gina Carano is not an actor (or wasn't before this), but she did alright. She did better than I probably would have done if I ever tried acting. I thought she was better in some scenes than she was in others, which made me wonder if her better scenes were the ones that were the ones that were shot later on. Soderbergh wisely surrounds her with a lot of big talent, including Bill Paxton as her military father, Ewan MacGregor and Antonio Banderas as those plotting against her, Michael Douglas as the government man who hired them, and Michael Fassbender as a British agent she must work with.

I liked Haywire. It's not one of Steven Soderbergh's best works, but you can tell he's having a good time, and I found it infectious. Lots of cool camerawork, great editing, and a funky Out of Sight-esque score by that movie's same composer, David Holmes. The action sequences are really cool too, choreographed to play to Gina Carano's strengths as an MMA fighter. I'm not sure if this movie made a star out of her, but I bet she'll continue to find work based on it.

I'll always gladly go see a Steven Soderbergh movie upon release. I hope his talk of retirement is just talk. I hope he takes a couple years off, gets bored and comes back to filmmaking. I'm sure there are still a couple of minor subgenres he hasn't tackled yet.

Contagion

I've been a fan of Steven Soderbergh since, wow, since Out of Sight came out, which was when I was 15 or 16, right at the onset of my burgeoning deeper interest in filmmaking. I would even go so far as saying Soderbergh played some part in my deeper interest. I haven't seen all of his films, but I've seen many of them, and with the exception of maybe the Ocean's sequels, they've all been good (and even the Ocean's sequels have their share of moments). I guess I'm saying all this to illustrate that I know I'm in good hands when a Steven Soderbergh film comes out, and that sentiment again proved true with Contagion.

Contagion is much like his Oscar-winning epic Traffic, in that, instead of a single straight narrative, it follows several characters from around the globe, tracking the progress of a fast-spreading new virus as it tears its way across the world. Unlike Traffic, though, Contagion plays more as a thriller or even a Chrichton-esque horror movie. It never goes too far into the realm of science fiction, keeping the situation grounded enough in reality to be believable and genuinely scary.

Matt Damon plays the relatable human side of the movie, as a man whose family are among the first victims of the virus, trying to protect his daughter from sickness and all the other dangers that could come from a world ravaged by plague. He's good as always, I really can't think of anything bad to say about Matt Damon in anything, especially his work of the last five years or so.

Contagion also stars Laurence Fishburne as the head of the CDC, Jennifer Ehle as a CDC researcher working on a cure, Kate Winslet as an epidemiologist searching for the origin of the virus, Marion Cotillard as a World Health Org. investigator, and Jude Law as a corrupt blogger, profiting from the panic he's helping stir up. Many other good actors appear in smaller roles, too, such as Gwyneth Paltrow, John Hawkes, Bryan Cranston, Enrico Colantoni, and so on.

Soderbergh and the writer, Scott Z. Burns, clearly did a lot of work to show how an outbreak might actually spread and what might happen as we race to find the cure. It takes place over a pretty long period of time, since it wouldn't be realistic for a cure to be found and distributed overnight. I'm pretty sure they used the recent Swine Flu epidemic as their jumping-off point. Soderbergh uses some extremely cool editing to show the virus' progress via montage. The montage stuff was probably my favorite stuff in the movie.

So Contagion is totally worth checking out. Steven Soderbergh once again proves himself a capable and versatile director. I think he's made movies in almost every single genre by now. Besides, with all this talk of him retiring in the next couple years to become a painter, we should try to enjoy Soderbergh in theaters while we can.