High Flying Bird (Steven Soderbergh, 2019)

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dda1996a
Joined: Tue Oct 27, 2015 6:14 am

Re: High Flying Bird (Steven Soderbergh, 2019)

#51 Post by dda1996a » Fri Feb 08, 2019 9:43 pm

Meant to write up on this early morning but forgot. I don't like digital, I think I should made it clear now. I think we've arrived at a time where 35mm and 4k look about the same , but I personally always see the difference and am a sucker for grain.
Said that, I found the digital here to be pretty ugly, in your face, but I guess on the same level as a lot of other digitally shot films (so I guess it's a compliment). But I found this way too talky. I think McCraney is a fantastic writer (based on this and Moonlight) but this film felt more like a play than a film. Rarely did anything "visual" stand out to me, and while I liked the script story and character wise, I don't think Soderbergh did much visually here (his angles and editing do keep the talky film going, so there's that).
Over all I found this an entertaining 90 minute but this is no near Soderbergh's best. Still waiting for something to rival his mid-early cross cutting brilliance (Out of Sight and Limey ftw)

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hearthesilence
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Re: High Flying Bird (Steven Soderbergh, 2019)

#52 Post by hearthesilence » Sat Feb 09, 2019 3:41 pm

Richard Brody loved this:
Richard Brody wrote:“High Flying Bird” features one of the great characters in recent cinema, a venerable basketball coach named Spence (Bill Duke)...His sternly authoritative independence is realized by Duke in a passionately oracular performance that’s already salted into my year-end list.

With “Unsane,” I had the sense that Soderbergh was doing a technical experiment with a story to which he was relatively indifferent, and I wondered how he’d apply those skills to a subject that sparks his passion; “High Flying Bird” is the spectacular answer.

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tehthomas
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Re: High Flying Bird (Steven Soderbergh, 2019)

#53 Post by tehthomas » Sun Feb 10, 2019 12:15 pm

"High Flying Bird" is a wide open 3 point shot that results in an airball.

The premise is great, focusing on the politics and capitalism of basketball during a NBA lockout.
Sadly, there is not enough basketball or riveting politics and what results is perhaps the worse Soderbergh film to date.
The dialogue is uninspired. The cut scenes featuring NBA players Reggie Jackson, Karl Anthony Towns and Donovan Mitchell discussing the trials and tribulations of being a rookie don't translate or add to "High Flying Bird", which spends most of it's time with offices and living rooms where the exposition is far from rim shattering. Andre Holland is superb though as the unsavory agent who is not interesting enough to carry this movie. There are plenty of jokes in the script that fall flat. The iPhone photography is fine enough, although sometimes the lighting is lacking. There is no buzz and energy to this movie, and considering how popular the NBA game is now because of how fast and free the game is currently being played, the "game on top of the game" is not nearly as interesting -- at least as presented here.

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whaleallright
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Re: High Flying Bird (Steven Soderbergh, 2019)

#54 Post by whaleallright » Wed Feb 13, 2019 2:38 pm

Was surprised (maybe I shouldn't have been) by how much this was a writer's film, with its stylized dialogue and almost diagrammatic, replete series of revolving encounters between a small number of players. It's not difficult to imagine this performed on the stage—and in fact it reminded me strongly of mid-1950s anthology dramas like Serling's "Patterns" in its circumscribed dramaturgy, the way it revolves around the solving of a single problem (will the lockout end?), and how it ends abruptly on a note of some ambiguity.

I have to admit I don't know much about sports, and even though this was not about the game as such—and instead about power relations between (mostly white) owners and (mostly black) players and their representatives—it still failed to really get me interested, even as I sort of admired the weird mix of the very unstylized settings and the way that Soderbergh's use of wide-angle lenses managed to stylize them (in an interestingly alienating way) anyhow.

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whaleallright
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Re: High Flying Bird (Steven Soderbergh, 2019)

#55 Post by whaleallright » Wed Feb 13, 2019 2:42 pm

oh, and Holland really works well in this world of stylized naturalism. one thing that I found interesting about The Knick was the wide variety of acting styles on display. here almost every performance is sort of tuned to Holland's telegraphic delivery, his almost rhythmic cockings of his head and expressive eyebrows.

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Finch
Joined: Mon Jul 07, 2008 5:09 pm
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Re: High Flying Bird (Steven Soderbergh, 2019)

#56 Post by Finch » Wed Feb 13, 2019 5:43 pm


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DarkImbecile
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Re: High Flying Bird (Steven Soderbergh, 2019)

#57 Post by DarkImbecile » Wed Feb 13, 2019 7:38 pm


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mfunk9786
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Re: High Flying Bird (Steven Soderbergh, 2019)

#58 Post by mfunk9786 » Tue May 28, 2019 4:21 pm

I found this very dull outside of admiring the cinematography - as a big sports fan, I should have found this all a lot more compelling than it was, and I think that had a lot to do with the limitations around telling this kind of a story without much in the way of budget. The real-life interludes don't work because they have so very little to do with the story itself - we don't see players working on their games, or improving, or contemplating difficulties with these things - so how does hearing about it improve the overall narrative, outside of Soderbergh's excellent visual composition of those B&W interviews? The film isn't really, narratively, about anything that the players are being prompted to discuss much of the time. It's a concept that Bennett Miller was wise to abandon for Moneyball, it turns out.

And while the rhythms of the screenplay are occasionally intoxicating, it plays like Sorkin-lite, except Sorkin usually immerses himself in the topic that he's written about if he wasn't obsessive about it to begin with - in this case, I wonder if McCraney is much of a sports fan, or if he's just read a bit about the structure of the NBA's collective bargaining agreement and sort of did his best with the details about how the sports world works around the edges. Considering that it's an original screenplay from McCraney, I'm pretty amazed at how poor a match of writer and subject it seemed to be - almost as though it'd been done on assignment to adapt a New Yorker article or something.

One of Soderbergh's worst in a while, perhaps ever, for me. Which makes it a solid three-star affair that I still wouldn't discourage anyone from taking a look at, because the guy's that good.

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dda1996a
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Re: High Flying Bird (Steven Soderbergh, 2019)

#59 Post by dda1996a » Tue May 28, 2019 4:45 pm

This is still way better than Unsane I'd say. My main issues with it though we're how much it is about conversations and deal making that I sort of wished for some respite. But I agree, this is still solid

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swo17
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Re: High Flying Bird (Steven Soderbergh, 2019)

#60 Post by swo17 » Tue May 28, 2019 4:47 pm

I would much rather watch this again than any sport

Zazie Beets, c'mon!

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mfunk9786
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Re: High Flying Bird (Steven Soderbergh, 2019)

#61 Post by mfunk9786 » Tue May 28, 2019 4:52 pm

dda1996a wrote:
Tue May 28, 2019 4:45 pm
This is still way better than Unsane I'd say.
Poppycock - Unsane is much, much better than this
swo17 wrote:
Tue May 28, 2019 4:47 pm
Zazie Beets, c'mon!
She gives (easily) the film's best performance.

black&huge
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Re: High Flying Bird (Steven Soderbergh, 2019)

#62 Post by black&huge » Tue May 28, 2019 8:01 pm

Unsane is a really good Soderbergh

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The Elegant Dandy Fop
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Re: High Flying Bird (Steven Soderbergh, 2019)

#63 Post by The Elegant Dandy Fop » Wed Jan 29, 2020 3:40 am

Despite my film viewing habits jam-packed evenly between the theater and physical media, I’ve signed up for a month trial of Netflix to test streaming in 4K and to see the films from the platform I didn’t catch in theaters. It’s interesting to see everyone’s excitement over Soderbergh’s workflow and rapid way of working earlier in this thread and then to see it dwindle down to posts complaining about this being a lesser film by him. On a technical level, I feel it highlights the issues with the work flow he chose to take with this film. I appreciate the novel idea of shooting this on an iPhone 8, but the single, wide lens attachment he used for it puts the entire world into hyper focus. With the ‘scope framing, it made each scene distracting as the realistic detail on every single pixel and the way light lit each part of the set put entire shots into focus, making my eyes start to wander away from the main focus. In the opening scene in the restaurant, my focus was on almost everything but the performers. During one of the last scenes, all I could look at were the landscapes as one actor standing in a ‘scope shot leaves a lot of dead space. Even during Steadicam scenes this would happen, and I couldn’t help but notice Soderbergh’s cameo, even when he’s thirty feet away from the actors (and I swear I thought Anthony Kiedis was in the background of another scene, but I didn’t bother to pause and check). This is also some of the worst audio I’ve heard in a film in a while. The acoustics of the real locations were terrible and the framing didn’t lend the camera easy ways to hide mics. Between the mumbling, soft performances as well, it made me feel like an old man as I struggled to make out several sentences throughout the film.

I enjoyed the stylish script by Tarell Alvin McCraney, but it is often a hair too wordy as it gets “stagey” with scenes that would’ve benefitted from light trims. André Holland and Zazie Beets are absolutely wonderful in it and really lent this film a breezy quality. Two great actors at the top of their game. Too bad the film staggers quite and doesn’t start to get interesting until about the halfway point.

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The Narrator Returns
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Re: High Flying Bird (Steven Soderbergh, 2019)

#64 Post by The Narrator Returns » Wed Jan 29, 2020 4:41 am

I just rewatched this and actually think the open-air framing is one of its biggest strengths, for how wittily it accentuates McCraney's concerns about capitalism; the screen filled with the looming business landscape of New York or with clothing company logos, an Andre Holland speech being staged in front of the juxtaposition of a Pepsi logo and an American flag, and so on. It's solidly mid-tier Soderbergh for me (and I concur that Unsane is his superior iPhone movie), but I still think it's strong, engaged work, and it only looks that much better next to The Laundromat (if the script for this was a little too wordy for you, just wait for the reams of exposition falling out of the actors' mouths in that).


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knives
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Re: High Flying Bird (Steven Soderbergh, 2019)

#66 Post by knives » Mon Aug 16, 2021 11:04 pm

Finally got to see it, first new Soderbergh for me in a while, and was blown away. One thing I adored that I haven’t seen brought up here is how Soderbergh balances he play like nature of the film with his own cinematic goals mostly through Gilligan cuts. There’s a lot of shifting between locations that the script doesn’t demand, but which makes the film very engaging. It’s also fascinating how the film does white hot rage by playing thugs as quietly as possible.

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