sex, lies, and videotape (1989)
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
Ann, a frustrated wife, enters into counseling due to a troubled marriage. Unbeknownst to her, her husband John has begun an affair with her sister. When John’s best friend Graham arrives, his penchant for interviewing women about their sex lives forever changes John and Ann’s rocky marriage.
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What critics compared sex, lies, and videotape to
That didn’t exactly happen, but Smith’s little film, when combined with a handful of other independently produced efforts like Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape (1989), Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy (1989), Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992), and Robert Rodriguez’s El Mariachi (1992), helped to reshape the industry, proving that bigger is not necessarily better (which megaflops like 1995’s Waterworld and 1996’s Cutthroat Island amply proved a few years later).
Such was the state of his two protagonists in Sex, Lies, and Videotape.
Steven Soderbergh's best film since sex, lies, and videotape (and the film most like it in theme and execution), Solaris is a moving, hypnotic adaptation of the classic Stanislaw Lem novel, which was first made into a film in 1972 by Andrei Tarkovsky.
In his last theatrical feature before his planned retirement, Soderbergh plants uncanny echoes of his first, sex, lies, and videotape, by putting his protagonist on the therapist’s couch, where she tries to sort through the disappointment, betrayal, and general ennui that’s gripped her life.
In ten years, go from the truth-telling, auburn celluloid lasso of sex, lies, and videotape (1989) to the truth-telling digital one of American Beauty (1999), with touchpoints in the appalling, historical-integrity-raping Forrest Gump and Titanic along the way.
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Believe it or not, it’s been 20 years since a young independent filmmaker named Steven Soderbergh put the outsider genre on the map with Sex, Lies, and Videotape, his stunning Golden Palm win at the Cannes Film Festival.
It’s a good plan, until one of the drones is invaded by the artificial intelligence known as Ultron (voiced magnificently by James Spader in the same creepy, dulcet purr he used to convince women to spill their secrets in sex, lies, and videotape ).