High Flying Bird

“I know you're old school. I sent you a fax.”

Filmology Rating: 3 out of 4

High Flying Bird is an early 2019 Netflix release from part-time crazy man that rants on a street corner, Steven Soderbergh. In this film, a sports agent pitches a controversial business opportunity to a rookie basketball player during a lockout.

I could care less about anything related to the NBA or basketball, but it's a Steven Soderbergh film from Netflix that got great reviews. In the last Steven Soderbergh review for "Unsane", the most glaring issue was his radical idea to shoot the entire film on an iPhone in possibly the widest lens he could find. Unfortunately, that is the same case for this film as well.

Recently, Soderbergh's films are possibly the least cinematic films ever. Everything is shot in, what is most likely, an 18mm lens so there is too much depth of field where it enters the uncanny valley territory. The human eye is thought to have a 55mm perspective and Soderbergh goes so far in the wide direction that every shot is almost off putting. That can be attributed to his idea that "shooting movies on phones are the future." God, I hope not.

The entire first half of the film was: "Who is this? What is this angle? What are they talking about?" I may have been slow to gather the plot because I am unfamiliar with Basketball lingo and have no idea what "a lockout" means.

The other major issue is that almost every scene is people sitting and talking. That is also accompanied by uninspired camera placement and a ton of objects crowding the foreground in half of his shots.
Soderbergh also did not set up any real stakes. So nothing has any dramatic weight to it. I realize that this athlete is in a contract limbo, but what is at stake? That is never clearly established.

However, the last third is far better. The sports agent has an idea to create a boxing-like service where he pins two all-star NBA athletes against one another and they go one-on-one and forget about the hoop-hopping that the NBA is. He then gets calls from Netflix and Hulu who wants to form an entire streaming service around this idea.

This film is largely slow and uninteresting, but it is inspiring to see a film shot on an iPhone do so well.

Rating: See It

-Nolan