High Flying Bird

There are obviously parts and scenes where you can see Steven Soderberghs technical virtuosity, the stale camera angles, or the slowly moving wide shots. It feels like a very professional movie, ironically shot on an iPhone. The acting itself also is quite convincing.

But I could not get anything out of this movie. It's a movie about basketball, that has no basketball in it. It has an idea but it does not have characters. You don't care about the characters because they simply aren't engaging. They don't have organic character arcs, or come to a satisfying conclusion. The script is fine, but mostly doesn't help the movie become compelling or interesting in any way. It just.. moves along.

There is one main message. Basketball leagues are controlled by white capitalists, although black people are the main players. The idea behind "beating" this game over the game may be interesting in itself. I left this movie with nothing, except the feeling of having seen some clever shots and some politics. But it should have been more of a documentary instead of a 90-minute drama.

Netflix movies are continuing to disappoint.

Not a sports movie, not a basketball movie, and it was boring and nothing actually happened to all characters in the movie. just a guy with smart thinking tried to end the NBA lockout ... OK but why should this be a movie? and why it has so high rating i cannot understand...

As Steven Soderbergh made his way back to feature film directing, bringing us the rough round the edges psychological horror Unsane - shot on iPhone 7+ smartphones. By contrast High Flying Bird was not shot on iPhone 7+ phones... actually iPhone 8+...

Soderbergh spoke about a new age of B-Movies. Not in the sense of second rate - but going back to the golden age of cinema, when b-movies were cinema fillers for huge audiences.

They were shot on low budgets. Often with limited lighting and not too many stars or spectacular sequences, with crowds of extras.

Instead, the director had to work around his limited means creatively, often filling a lot of the film with dialogue - as it's much cheaper to shoot: if you can't film all those scenes, you can always have one character tell another character what happened.

Be in no doubt, although a lot of those old B-movies were fillers, some were remarkable pieces of cinema. All the better for being forced into creative use of limited resources.

Indeed, this was how film noir was born. And that is very much what High Flying Bird reminded me of. Those old b-movie sports pictures which couldn't afford the big action scenes so left the sport part in the background while the action focused on the backroom talk.

I loved the cinematography. And it was absolutely refreshing to see old school camera angles instead of the tedium we get now - when every kid with a few hundred dollars to spend sports a DSLR and Bokeh inducing lenses.

Boken is no excuse for cinematography. And this is why the use of smartphones is a breath of fresh air. Without those boring ricks to fall back on (do we really need to see another extreme shallow depth of field close up?), every shot in this movie was thought about. Every shot had a purpose. And how great to have the wide depth of field of smartphones bring the surrounded architecture into play. Not a shot or a building was wasted.

And that's what this is all about. Instead of cinema fillers we have Netflix fillers. Who knows, just like the last time some of them may just turn out to be little gems. Soderbergh knows he'll never win any Oscars for these new b-movies. As did those movie directors of old. But he knows he'll have the freedom to make the films he wants to make and have fun doing it.

Lots of dull opaque talking in "High Flying Bird" to ultimately turn contract negotiations between millionaires and billionaires--not exactly "Norma Rae" (1979) this, let alone worthy of all the salvery references--into Steven Soderbergh's favorite genre, the con or heist flick, which in this case mostly boils down to a character revealing and reveling in how much smarter he is than are others and some message that pertains to a very select number of people, the professional black athlete. Documentary interviews with NBA players interrupt the drama, too, to lend advice to rookie basketballers. Makes me wonder why this is streaming on Netflix and not exclusively at NBA Orientation Days. For whom is this movie supposed to be?

For director Soderbergh himself, perhaps. He's one of the brightest at exploiting the fundamental importance of the cinematographic apparatus within his oeuvre--even being his own cinematographer, editor and so on. His breakthrough film, after all, listed a medium of motion pictures in its title, "Sex, Lies and Videotape" (1989). If anyone is going to make movies with a phone camera that are indirectly about making movies with a phone camera, it'd be him. I haven't seen "Unsane" (2018) yet, being generally not in a rush to see movies shot with an iPhone, but I have seen his latest phone heist of some of Hollywood's top actors, "No Sudden Move" (2021). There, the camera was fit with a distorting wide-angle lens that reflected visually the narrative involving automobiles--and did so by way of the reflective device in cars, the rear-view mirror. It may also allude to the past obfuscation involved in the genre plotting and its historical setting.

It follows, then, that Soderbergh may've shot "High Flying Bird" as a comment on another industry, that of making movies. Nominally, the narrative concerns undermining NBA owners by way of new technology and forms of communication to bring basketball to its fans and, thus, wrestle away control for the players, or their agents. Congruous for an independent movie shot with a mobile phone and released on Netflix, if not for the racial issues it raises as written by Tarell Alvin McCraney (also of "Moonlight" (2016)). He doesn't even show us the film-within-the-film, the one-on-one basketball game, because this isn't about a movie, or the story in it, but about how movies are made. The suggestion is that Soderbergh is changing the way the game, or rather the game on top of the game, is played.

He may be right. The anti-studio, anti-actual-film progenitor of a new era of independent and digital cinema has been before. Hopefully, at least, these phone movies will become better looking--that Soderbergh will not overlook keeping a shaky shot from the table that apparently holds the phone stand being bumped, or a distracting and odd-looking lens flare in another, and get better lenses in general. Everything is in focus in these shots, which is distracting, as anything and nothing consequently become the focus. As if the drama for millionaires weren't already irrelevant enough, too. And, I like meta movies generally, but this one seems overly self-satisfied looking in the mirror--the cinematic equivalent of a selfie.

This is a rather boring movie. But hey, some might like it. The issue I have with this film is that in reality, this film could be shot for $100k. Not the $2 mil if actually cost. There is nothing special in it, it feels like the run of the mill indie film, but there were no special scenes that would require lots of money to produce. As for the actors, the director could get cheaper ones. If you want to make an iPhone movie, do it cheap. $2mil is an astronomical budget if you're shooting with a phone.