Sex, Lies and Videotape – 20 years old, meeting for the first time.

I will admit this upfront. I have never seen Steven Soderbergh’s 1989 directorial debut “Sex, Lies and Videotape” until today. Granted I was only 13 years old when it came out and probably as a 13 year old I should have been drawn to a movie with sex in its title. But for whatever reason I never watched it and it just slowly slipped by me into history. It became one of those movies that I would always say “gotta see that”

Now over the years I became somewhat of a fan of Soderbergh’s work. Traffic is amazing, Erin Brockovich is moving and The Oceans movies are just pure fun. Based on those alone you would think  I would go back and revisit all of his early work. But I didn’t. Until Steve and I decided to write something about Soderbergh for the LAMB directors chair series. I thought “what would be better then watching his first film and writing about that?” In theory that was a great idea. I just wished it had worked out as well as I had intended.

I started to watch it last night, after I couldn’t get my hands on the the latest eps of Friday Night Lights or Its always Sunny in Philadelphia. And it started off okay, but I could tell that it was a first feature.  A lot of long lingering shots, allowing the actors the space to act. Which I find great when the actors are doing something interesting but boring as all fuck when they are just sitting there. Nothing slows a movie down as long shots of people talking. And if the dialogue is just okay, its even worse. Tarantino gets away with it, because he lets his actors just spew out this fast paced, rapid fire words. Not so much in this flick.

I got about 40 minutes in before my eps of FNL and Sunny showed up, so I had to put the movie on hold and get my laugh and then my cry on, (FNL was quite moving this week) and decided to pick up the rest of the movie this afternoon, while I was finishing capturing a bunch of tape I was working on. So I sat down and suffered through the rest of this movie, appreciating what Soderbergh was trying to do, but not quite loving it as much as I wanted to. My biggest complaint, for a movie about sex, there was no nudity. Now I am really glad that 13 year old me never got his hands on this. He would have been so disappointed.

I tried to look at this in a positive light, trying to salvage something out of the experience. But even now as I write this, I keep getting distracted by all the noise out side my building. They are filming the TV show “Fringe” right now and its quite awesome to watch from your apartment window as they drag some actors across the pavement while a giant fan blows debris all over the place. I don’t know what the F is happening but I am curious to find out. But I digress. Sex, Lies and Videotape is a decent first film, that was probably quite impressive in 1989 when it was first released. But now, its just sort of okay.