A device viewing for a device type filmmaker

Most filmmakers will tell you that they would hate for you to watch their movie on a "device." You know, a phone, an iPad, a Kindle Fire, a Google Glass, what have you. Of course, a TV is also a "device" but I don't think they're getting that technical.

Steven Soderbergh is not most filmmakers.

Oh, he probably still subscribes to the general notion that the big screen is the best place to see the thoughtfully composed output of a talented director. But his creative choices have meant that he's virtually forfeited any sense of indignation if you were to choose to watch his movie on, I don't know, a postage stamp.

It was, then, very appropriate that I watched his new movie The Laundromat -- half of it, anyway -- on my phone while waiting at the doctor's.

"So what's the big deal, Vance? You watched a movie on a phone. I do that all the time."

It's a big deal because I don't. It's not because of the size; it's because of the data.

Back when my iPod still worked, I was happy to download a movie to it and watch it, though I would try not to watch anything I cared too much about, visually. Still, one of the last movies I watched before it died, Robert Zemeckis' Allied, would certainly be considered the aforementioned "thoughtfully composed output of a talented director."

My phone has been a replacement for my iPod in many respects; it's where I now listen to my podcasts, for example. But I haven't been loading movies on there, in part because I seem to always be on the verge of running out of space just from my photos and videos, but in part because I still primarily rent movies using iTunes, even though I don't now have an iPod. I don't think they would work on my android phone.

I have a Netflix app, but streaming (outside of a WiFi connection) was not much of an option because of the inordinate amount of data it seemed to consume.

Until recently, when I noticed, you know what? It really isn't consuming that much data.

Only a year ago I hesitated to watch even ten minutes of a baseball game on my phone because of how much data (like a gig) it seemed to consume. But it's not doing that anymore. (I'm not questioning it.) And I may be out of the country for part of my current data period, so on Friday, I decided to chance it.

The Laundromat, Soderbergh's new film, seems to have only just been dropped. Especially given my less-than-tepid feelings about his first 2019 film, High Flying Bird, I was more than willing to "ruin" the viewing by watching it on my phone. He "ruined" High Flying Bird by shooting it on a phone, or more accurately, by feeling so liberated by the ability to shoot on a phone that he set the camera up in a bunch of stupid spots that just called attention to themselves, and violated about every major rule of narrative filmmaking, just because he could. (But let's face it, the script wasn't there either.) (And let's not laugh too hard over the fact that the guy who announced his retirement like four years ago has made four more films, and now two in one year.)

I mightn't have even considered a movie while waiting for the doctor except you can wait for the doctor a really long time here. That comes with the territory when your health insurance is free. I think last time I waited nearly two hours. This 96-minute movie was a good candidate to cover most of that, and not break the data bank either.

Well, imagine my surprise when a) I got called in after 45 minutes, and b) I was disappointed by that fact, because I hated to abandon The Laundromat.

The first half of this movie was about my favorite movie of the year. It's Soderbergh trying to crack open the intricate web of financial chicanery that protects rich people from paying taxes by putting their money in shell companies that are housed on tropical islands. It's also Soderbergh demonstrating a more playful side than we've seen recently, as the film is basically narrated by two of these sharks, played by Antonio Banderas and Gary Oldman (doing a German accent). They guide us through what it all means like Margot Robbie and others did in The Big Short, and they seem to be having a heckuva time.

However, the film also has one of Meryl Streep's best performances in the past five years, which for her is saying something. She plays a pre-senility grandmother who loses her husband when the tour boat they're on capsizes, and she gets caught in the aforementioned intricate web upon trying to collect on an insurance settlement. She finds that this company bought that company and that company invalidated the policy for this policyholder for that legal fine print reason. This first half is both comic and horrifying, and is scarily plausible.

The second half is not quite as good, so it's not my favorite movie of the year. But it finishes strong, and I may watch it again before the year is up.

Of course, since I only had a chance to watch half of it on my phone (eating up somewhere around .5 GB), it wasn't the full device viewing I promised in the subject of this post.

And since this movie wasn't shot on a phone, it looked like a normal movie. Which is to say, it may ironically may me think twice about watching Soderbergh's next movie this way.