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.
24 connections found
View:
24 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).
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.
Advertisement
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.
In all of the wild cutting, Inarritu and editor Stephen Mirrione (who won an Oscar for editing Traffic, 2000) avoid saying, "cut."