The "inexplicable" 2002 movie Roger Ebert couldn't stand

The 'truly inexplicable' 2002 movie Roger Ebert couldn't stand: 'So amateurish' From the late 1960s right up until his death in 2013, the mark of a truly great film was whether it managed to impress Roger Ebert, the archetype of a film critic, and a man who was rarely known to mince his words when it came to panning a terrible movie. Back in 2002, he was particularly unimpressed by one of the year's most unique offerings. A trouble of being an experimental filmmaker is that, in many cases, those experiments fail. Ebert, to be fair to him, tended to reward pioneering, experimental offerings during his career as a critic. He had, after all, seen an immeasurable number of films by the time the new millennium arrived, so it isn't difficult to imagine him yearning for something different. That wasn't to say, though, that he automatically slapped five stars on something simply for daring to be different to the rest of mainstream Hollywood. So, when Steven Soderbergh returned to the directing chair in 2002 with an ambitious new project, hot off the colossal success of his Ocean's Eleven the previous year, it inevitably piqued the interest of Ebert and his fellow critics, which did not turn to appreciation upon actually viewing the film. 'Every once in a while, perhaps as an exercise in humility, Steven Soderbergh makes a truly inexplicable film,' he wrote in his one-and-a-half-star review of Soderbergh's Full Frontal. 'There was the Cannes 'secret screening' of his Schizopolis in 1996, which had audiences filing out with sad, thoughtful faces, and now here is Full Frontal, a film so amateurish that only the professionalism of some of the actors makes it watchable,' he declared. Plot-wise, the film is a rather meta exploration of the Hollywood film industry itself, positioning a film within a film, and adopting marks of documentary about itself, too. It is a bland, largely unengaging storyline, but Ebert's main quarrel with the 2002 film is simply how amateurish it looked. It was, after all, filmed entirely on a Canon XL-1 camcorder. Shooting a feature-length project exclusively on digital video was something of a novelty back in 2002, and it doesn't take a film student to guess what Soderbergh was attempting to create with his shaky, hand-held camera shots. As Ebert put it, though, 'This is the sort of work we expect from a film school student with his first digital camera, not from the gifted director of Traffic and Out of Sight'. He firmly offered, 'Soderbergh directs at far below his usual level, and his cinematography is also wretched'. For the critic, the final nail in the coffin of the camcorder-shot film was the clips of the film within a film, which were the only parts of Full Frontal shot on 35mm. Having those moments plainly presented how superior the format was and is to digital video and, as Ebert stated, 'only serve to make us yearn for the format as we see the other scenes in digital'. On the other hand, the critic loved the pioneering camcorder horror The Blair Witch Project, released three years prior, so perhaps the crimes of Full Frontal weren't limited exclusively to its digital format. Wrapping up his review of Steven Soderbergh's doomed film, he wrote, 'There is a scene in Full Frontal where a character comes to a tragic end while masturbating. That could symbolise the method and fate of this film'. Ouch!