Traffic (2000)
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
An exploration of the United States of America's war on drugs from multiple perspectives. For the new head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the war becomes personal when he discovers his well-educated daughter is abusing cocaine within their comfortable suburban home. In Mexico, a flawed, but noble policeman agrees to testify against a powerful general in league with a cartel, and in San Diego, a drug kingpin's sheltered trophy wife must learn her husband's ruthless business after he is arrested, endangering her luxurious lifestyle.
25 connections found
View:
25 connections, in both directions
What critics compared Traffic to
This part of the tale is reminiscent of Steve McQueen's "Bullitt" as the two cops struggle to keep their ward alive long enough to testify.
Ryan Coogler’s vision for Wakanda—shot by recent Oscar nominee Rachel Morrison as an Afrofuturist paradise—rightly draws its inspiration from an omnibus of natural sources, just as a casino scene in South Korea affords Morrison the chance to go full Deakins (James Bond references all over this thing), imagining the world of the MCU as Steven Soderbergh might have scoped out Traffic, developing a fully sensual visual language to define the many locations of this world-hopping adventure without resorting to sterile maps or facile borders.
“Syriana” was written and directed by Stephen Gaghan , who won an Oscar for best screenplay adaptation for “Traffic,” another hyperlink movie.
Mr. Gaghan wrote the screenplay for Mr. Soderbergh’s Traffic (2000), about the cross-border drug trade between the United States and Mexico, a more amenable subject for multi-character intrigues than the global miasma of Syriana.
From writer/director Steven Gaghan, the Academy Award winning writer of "Traffic," "Syriana" pushes the boundaries of political correctness.
Writer/director Stephen Gaghan returns to familiar waters with "Syriana," a complex geopolitical quilt of stories and characters that aims to do for oil what his Oscar-winning "Traffic" script did for narcotics.
The first-time director’s approach is nothing new, especially if you’ve seen Steven Soderbergh’s “Traffic,” for which Gaghan received a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar.
Gaghan's script has, mostly, even greater courage in its convictions than his fine, Oscar-winning template for Steven Soderbergh's Traffic, but as a director, he lacks Soderbergh's ability to blend quotidian impressions with dramatic turning-points, so that we have a closer sense of how every level of life is a node within this system.
Gomorrah's episodic, mosaic structure is in some ways comparable to Steven Soderbergh's Traffic, but Garrone is not so much interested in diagramming a process as mapping a specific terrain.
Gomorrah (the original Italian title left off the "H," to pun on the name of the iniquitous biblical town) makes up for lost time by following at least five separate narrative threads — à la Traffic, Syriana, etc. — about dirty deeds spiraling around each other in the weed patches and disco-bars.
It also has the loose structure of Steven Soderbergh's coke-trade chronicle, "Traffic," although it's even looser.
Advertisement
Babel , but the fact remains that Babel exists; and what seemed fresh and exciting and dare I say revolutionary in 2000 does not seem that way nearly so much in 2012; nor does it help that Soderbergh himself made basically the exact same movie in 2011, with Contagion - down to the same editor, Steven Mirrione, and the same composer, Cliff Martinez, both of whom contribute an almost incalcuable amount to the tension and shape of both films - with "Disease Is An Important World Issue" subbing in for "Drugs Are An Important World Issue", and a little of the seriousness giving way to thriller mechanics.
Unlike Soderbergh’s other major multi-narrative film Traffic, this film often skimps on giving many members of its heavyweight cast suitably rich material to explore.
He's helmed boisterous crowd-pleasers like the "Ocean's 11" movies, Oscar-bait like "Traffic" and "Erin Brockovich" and quiet little indie films like "Solaris" and "The Girlfriend Experience."
Contagion shares some of its DNA with Soderbergh's prior global political thriller, Traffic.
Like the director's Traffic , the film explores all the connections, from the most obvious to the most subtle, that link the teeming mass of modern society, but where Traffic is almost Dickensian in its world-as-theater storytelling ambition, Contagion is as single-minded as its microscopic star: it wants to freak us out, showing how our life as globally-connected beings is both our greatest risk and our greatest hope for being able to survive whatever terrible and largely arbitrary things might happen to us (the explanation for MEV-1's origin is balanced right on the edge between "that is terrifyingly believable" and "that is ludicrous", and either way it's predicated on a series of entirely run-of-the-mill coincidences).
Contagion is a well-made, effective chiller directed by an authenticity-obsessed Steven Soderbergh (Traffic).
Ms. Davis, whose work I'm not as familiar with, is also fast becoming part of Team Soderbergh herself, this also being their third film working together on after "Out Of Sight" and "Traffic."
With the divergent "Ocean's Eleven," "Traffic," "Erin Brockovich" and "Out of Sight" on his recent rsum, the writer-director now turns to a remake of the Russian science-fiction classic, directed by celebrated Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972.
The maverick director of Traffic and Out of Sight doesn't shy away from challenges, and even when he fails, you can sense him planning for his next run at the hill.
Out of Sight and Traffic contained a wide variety of film stocks and filters, while The Limey and The Underneath played around with time.
With Solaris the diverse and talented director Steven Soderbergh (Traffic, Out of Sight) has commendably tackled the philosophical potential of the science fiction genre.
A rather uninteresting example of the small-scale films Soderbergh likes to do between more expensive and expansive movies like Erin Brockovich and Traffic, it has attracted considerable attention because the heroine is played by porn star Sasha Grey, though in fact the film features a lot of talk and very little sex.
Soderbergh has balanced his ability to make commercial hits ( Ocean's Eleven, Erin Brockovich) with his desire to do more personal, innovative and political films – such as Traffic, The Good German or Schizopolis.
He makes bright, boisterous fun films (think Ocean's Eleven and Out Of Sight), cynical, smart personal meditations (sex, lies and videotape, The Limey), and Oscar grabs (Traffic, Erin Brockovich).
Sure, he’s crafted such commercial hits as Erin Brockovich, Traffic, and the Oceans franchise, but he always goes back to a more “personal” style of filmmaking, branching off and exploring the medium in efforts like Bubble, Full Frontal, and his most recent turn, The Girlfriend Experience.
Soderbergh fait également sentir sa présence au coeur d’une démarche esthétique évidemment très distante en proposant un jeu de couleurs assez similaire à celui qu’il avait si habilement intégré à la facture du remarquable Traffic de 2000, notamment par cette prédominance de teintes bleuâtres venant renforcer à la perfection cette idée de vide et de désunion.
Running at a brisk 77 minutes, The Girlfriend Experience isn't on the scale of Soderbergh's more ambitious films, including the Oceans blockbusters, Oscar-winners such as Traffic and Erin Brockovich , and his epic Che .
Soderbergh, who was Oscar-nominated for best director twice in the same year, for "Traffic" and "Erin Brockovich" (winning for the latter) has been prolific, always bringing a sharp eye and energetic creativity to his projects, ever since his game-changing "sex, lies and videotape" in 1989.
In “Side Effects,” purported to be the penultimate film of auteur Steven Soderbergh (“Traffic,” “Magic Mike”), Rooney Mara (“The Social Network,” the Americanized “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”) plays the depressed half of a young New York City married couple.
Side Effects is directed by Steven Soderbergh, and for a while I thought this was going to be a minor variation on his exhaustive Traffic .
The result is a severe let-down, particularly considering the director behind it, Steven Soderbergh, a filmmaker who has given way to whimsy (the Oceans Eleven franchise) and, worse, self indulgence ( Solaris, The Girlfriend Experience ) since winning his own Oscar for Traffic and one for Julia Roberts for Erin Brockovich in 2000.
Soderbergh has directed more than two dozen movies in as many years (and almost as many genres), from Sex, Lies and Videotape to the Ocean's movies, from Bubble and The Girlfriend Experience to Erin Brockovich and Traffic, from Che to Solaris to (my own favorite) Out of Sight.
Directed by Soderbergh ( Traffic , Contagion ) from a script penned by David Koepp ( Jurassic Park , Panic Room ), Kimi casts Kravitz as an agoraphobic employee of a tech firm specializing in the sort of A.I.-driven “smart” assistants like Amazon’s Echo and Apple’s Siri that have become ubiquitous in our lives.
He’s made political epics like “Traffic” and “Che,” popcorn delights like “Ocean’s Eleven,” and unnerving thrillers including “Contagion” (which gained a new relevance in light of Covid).
Other Soderbergh collaborators make appearances too, such as Erika Christensen (Traffic, 2000) playing the resident murder victim and Betsy Brantley (Schizopolis, 1996), Soderbergh’s ex-wife, voicing KIMI.
Steven Soderbergh, the hip auteur behind such critical hits as “Out of Sight” (1998), “Traffic” (2000) and the “Ocean’s Eleven” films, as well as the pandemic-prescient “Contagion” (2011), sets a thriller against this tired Covid moment (about half the people we see along the streets or in the office are wearing masks) in Seattle, where a tech worker discovers a potential murder in the file base of the titular entity – a Siri or Alexa competitor that uses humans to edit communication/response bugs.
El escritor, director y productor americano es responsable de darnos estupendos filmes como la trilogía de “Ocean’s Eleven”, “Traffic”, “Erin Brokovich”, “Magic Mike” y “Contagion”.
Las pocas veces que el cineasta, que se ganó el Oscar por su dirección de “Traffic" y lanzó el movimiento del cine independiente en los noventa con “Sex, Lies and Videotape”, ha trabajado en este género se ha especializado en la comedia del absurdo (“The Informant”) o con fusiones con otros géneros como son el caso de “Ocean’s 11” y sus dos secuelas.
Steven Soderbergh, the Oscar-winning director of Traffic (2000) and films as diverse as Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), Kafka (1991), his two-part biopic Che (2008) and The Girlfriend Experience (2009), returns to features after a four year absence with a cool breeze of summertime sweetness called Logan Lucky.
To single out a mere eight of 28 film credits: There’s the indie film lodestar Sex, Lies, and Videotape; drug trade exposé Traffic; experimental head case Schizopolis; a hypochondriac’s anxious-sneeze confirmed in Contagion; mixed martial arts adrenaline shot Haywire; new-millennium Norma Rae Erin Brockovich; new-genre invention – hullo, male-stripper-meets-the-recession! – Magic Mike; and, oh yeah, only the most stylish crime caper ever made, Out of Sight.
Crash reminded me very much of Steven Soderbergh’s great Traffic in that both pictures feature about a dozen characters in multiple story lines that examine an important social issue from many perspectives.
In the same way that 2000's Traffic looked at the world of drugs, Crash relies on overlapping storylines and intersecting lives to weave a complex tapestry depicting the consequences of city dwellers making snap assumptions about each other based on accent or skin color.
For a gritty film about the drug trade to succeed in this post- "Traffic" world, it will need what "Traffic" lacked: heart and humanity.
It's "Traffic" via "The People vs. Larry Flynt."
"Blow" had the bad luck to arrive soon after Steven Soderbergh's "Traffic," which gave such a vital, original look at similar material that it makes the ordinary "Blow" pale by comparison.
April 7, 2001 -- The problem of drugs in the U.S. has been tackled in three ambitious, well-acted movies in recent months, "Requiem for a Dream," "Traffic," and now, "Blow."
"Blow" is the third motion picture about drugs in the last seven months (with the other two being the superior "Requiem for a Dream" and "Traffic"), but manages to differentiate itself enough to not feel routine or tedious.
His interlocking structure and sociopolitical agenda recall films like Traffic and Syriana, but where the Soderbergh touch is supercool, Inarritu’s movies are sweaty from exertion.
In all of the wild cutting, Inarritu and editor Stephen Mirrione (who won an Oscar for editing Traffic, 2000) avoid saying, "cut."
Advertisement
Their lives, along with insurance adjuster Sharon Coombs (Halle Berry), intersect — a la Soderbergh’s film Traffic — after a robbery goes wrong and a victim is left behind.
David O. Russell (Three Kings), Steven Soderbergh (Traffic) and Alejandro González Iñárritu (21 Grams) are all adept at the technique, but Greengrass has been the most consistent and eager—not to mention monetarily successful—hand-held enthusiast of the past decade: Bloody Sunday (2002), The Bourne Supremacy (2004), United 93 (2006), The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), The Green Zone (2010), and now Captain Phillips all share the same intense camerawork.