Ugg, did anyone else see Full Frontal?

[JonathanLB]

I sat through Steven Soderbergh's Full Frontal and... jesus, it tried so hard to be the worst movie of the year, and it fell just short. Shame, really.

Sorry Stevey, but I gotta keep The Sweetest Thing as #1 just because it was so incredibly disgusting and offensive besides being so utterly lame, and your movie didn't offend me it just made me bored to tears and wishing I was somewhere else.

Jason X looks like Star Wars compared to Full Frontal.

I am going to have fun roasting this in my review, though. My parents and I were all laughing after the film trying to think of the funniest criticisms. I decided that if the entire movie world, every movie, is a giant beach towel, this is a crapstain on that towel. If you took a roll of film and wiped your ass with it, you'd still come up with a better movie than Full Frontal. I'd rather see a movie of people WATCHING a great movie than actually see Full Frontal again.

I cannot believe how bad this was. Wow. That's really all I can say about it, wow.

I ragged on films like Amelie and Monster's Ball, but seriously I can see the value in both of those movies, a tiny little bit of value, a tiny message that wants to be heard. I hated them both, but they were at least ATTEMPTS at making movies. They had a little value, even if not much.

I guarantee I could make, no no, I HAVE made better movies than Full Frontal. They used the Canon XL-1S (or maybe it was just the 1), which I own myself, and I can tell you for a fact that you can make it look GREAT, but they made it look horrible. It looks like someone's home video camera instead of the professional filmmaking tool it is. There are many reasons for this, but I'll just touch on the most obvious of them. First, the lighting. As I have learned from only very limited experience of film (I am NOT trying to pretend I am a filmmaker, because I'm not, I have hardly done anything), lighting is really difficult and REALLY important too! The lighting in a scene is absolutely key and it makes a film either look hokey or professional, depending on the quality. Those guys on set who do the lighting, you think they just have "minor" roles in a film, but from being on a real set before, that's just not true. They have tough jobs! It takes a lot of skill to get that light to look just right on the actors...

The other thing, which I guess may even be more noticeable, is the scene transitions. I firmly believe that although critics sometimes have no idea what they are talking about, they've seen enough movies to realize what is good and what is not. Well, you cannot transition from Julia Roberts talking to Julia Roberts talking 2 seconds later. You just can't do it. You need to have her talking, then if you want to show her again at a different part of her speech, you must pull back and show a wideangle shot or possibly a shot of the other person she is talking to, or even of another group at a nearby table, or something, THEN you can go back to her talking. Instead, the entire movie they kept on switching sometimes 4 times from the same actor talking at one point to the same actor talking a few seconds later, so the cuts seemed really unnatural. You'd never see that even on the worst TV show.

You wouldn't think I would be able to tell Steven Soderbergh how to do HIS craft, but jesus, it's impossible to believe the same guy made a very good film like Traffic and then he also made Full Frontal.

This is disappointing to me because I think he's quite a "hot" director in Hollywood today, one of the rising stars after this last year, no question, and I really look forward to his next film, which as I recall is Solaris. I cannot wait for that and I think it'll be great, but this was just not worth his time or mine. It was horrible.

I'd say this is the 2nd or 3rd worst film of the year. I'll think about it. I mean, Martin Lawrence Live was pretty bad. I was hoping it would be Martin Lawrence Dead by the time I got finished seeing that movie.

[JonathanLB]

I wrote my review, sans plot summary, which I'll do later. Right now I'm getting all of my thoughts down in reviews and THEN putting in plot summaries, because they are easy to write from existing materials, while my opinions begin to fade after time...

Full Frontal (2002)
Jonathan L. Bowen

Full Frontal is absolutely one of the most horrible films of the year. Judged purely on production value and general craft, it is the worst of the year. It is The Blair Witch Project of 2002, though apparently made for an even smaller sum of cash. One wonders how a talented director such as Steven Soderbergh could move from two very good movies such as Traffic (2000) and Ocean’s Eleven (2001) to Full Frontal. The plot makes almost no sense and only two or three funny lines exist in the entire movie.

Many celebrities make cameo appearances or even have significant roles in the film, such as Julia Roberts, David Duchovny, Catherine Keener, Brad Pitt, and Terrence Stamp, but star power does not automatically transform itself into a quality movie. Full Frontal is yet another movie about a bunch of ordinary people living out their meaningless lives. For some reason, the director thought audiences would actually want to see clips of these people in a movie, which is probably the biggest mistake since 20th Century Fox thought Mariah Carrey could act.

To say the cinematography is awful is a vast understatement. Most film school students, or even parents with video cameras, could have shot a better film. The lighting is awful and every scene is either too bright or too dark. The editing is the worst part of the entire movie. Instead of having transitions, sometimes a character will be talking and the movie will cut to yet more talking from the same character, without any type of transition, making the film seem awkward, amateur, and just painful in general. The camera is often shaking as though Mr. Soderbergh forgot what a tripod was or apparently could not afford one.

Soderbergh shot the entire movie using the Canon XL-1S, which is a powerful digital filmmaking camera that is capable of quality not much worse than film, but Full Frontal makes the quality look awful just from its lame editing and atrocious lighting. Canon should sue. Everyone who saw the movie in theaters should file a class action lawsuit along with Canon. If the theaters playing Full Frontal had simply projected a used roll of toilet paper instead of the film reel, the result probably would have been a huge improvement. A movie about an audience watching a great movie would be better than actually watching Full Frontal, and it definitely could not be any more boring. The problems with Full Frontal can be condensed into one criticism: it was 101 minutes too long.

No stars.