Steven Soderbergh offers no reassurance, after Ocean's Eleven (and Traffic and Erin Brockovich), that he has not been ruined beyond redemption. Outwardly, this day-in-the-lives-of-motley-Hollywoodites would appear to be an attempt to recapture that old Independent Spirit, even if the filmmaker hedges his bet by enlisting Julia (Roberts) and Brad (Pitt) and others, so that the mainstream press and mass audience will have something to buzz about. (Besides the gossipy topic of Hollywood or the impenetrable meaning of the title.) The "appearance" of independence, in any event, amounts to little more than the appearance of cheapness, messiness, and obscurity: the over-reverberant sound, to be specific, and the grainy blurry home-movie-ish image that alternates with a sharper and higher-grade image for a film-within-the-film called Rendezvous. (Except for the film stock, little difference can be discerned -- is that the point? -- between Hollywood "reality" and the "fiction" of Rendezvous, a film apparently about a magazine reporter interviewing an actor on an airplane, following him to a meeting with Miramax's Harvey Weinstein, onto location with Brad Pitt, and back to the airport.) Where independence for Soderbergh once might have meant something like self-sufficiency or self-possession, it now seems to mean things like self-indulgence and self-importance. Not to forget self-deception. Any random touch of cleverness -- the cameo of Terence Stamp in his fictional persona from Soderbergh's The Limey -- vanishes likes a drop of water on a hot stove. With Blair Underwood, Catherine Keener, Mary McCormack, David Hyde Pierce, Nicky Katt, David Duchovny. (2002) — Duncan Shepherd
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