Coming nearly 13 years to the day since the release of his first film, sex, lies and videotape, a little flick that won the top prize at Cannes, established both the Sundance Film Festival and Miramax Films as major Hollywood players, and grossed almost 25 times what it cost to make, Steven Soderbergh's experimental Full Frontal hits theatres without packing an iota of videotape's magic.  Anyone familiar with the director's career knows he followed up the out-of-left-field smash videotape with the disappointing Kafka before making two good films nobody saw (King of the Hill and The Underneath), two experimental films that even fewer people saw (Gray's Anatomy and Schizopolis) and two critical darlings (The Limey and Out of Sight) that set up his current reign of box office terror (Erin Brockovich, Traffic and Ocean's Eleven), which has accumulated five Oscars and, at last count, nearly a half-billion dollars in domestic box office alone.

If you didn't know any of that information going into Frontal, I can only imagine how confused you'll be on the way out.  The film plays like one long inside joke for the very Hollywood types it seems to be trying to mock.  Frontal's shtick is that it's about a movie within a movie within a movie (which may possibly be within yet another movie, but I stopped paying attention after a while).  The script is peppered with references to the filmmaking industry that most moviegoers just aren't going to get (I know I didn't) - like the part in which Curb Your Enthusiasm's Jeff Garlin plays a guy playing a guy who looks a lot like Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein (the credits list this character as "Harvey, maybe"), or one of the airplane scenes that pans over to reveal Terence Stamp sitting next to the same woman and uttering the same dialogue from Soderbergh's The Limey, or the blink-and-you'll-miss-it dig at the relationship between Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington in The Pelican Brief in a scene that features (gasp!) Julia Roberts herself.

Frontal depicts the lives of its main characters over just one day as they prepare for the birthday party of movie producer Gus (David Duchovny).  Carl (David Hyde Pierce) will be there, because he's a screenwriter.  Carl's wife Alice (Catherine Keener) will accompany him, even though she hates her husband, and she'll also bring her sister, hotel masseuse Linda (Mary McCormack).  When we first meet Nicholas (Blair Underwood) and Catherine (Roberts), we don't think they'll be going to Gus's party, but that's because we don't know Nicholas and Catherine are really Calvin and Francesca, two actors in Rendezvous, Gus's latest project (so it's a movie about making movies within the movie?).  Just Shoot Me's Enrico Colantoni is either the director of a play called The Sound and the Führer (starring Nicky Katt – hey, is that a play within the movie within the movie?) or the potential love interest of e-mail pal Linda.  Or maybe he's both, since he's listed in the credits with two different names.

Sound complicated?  It should.  Wait'll you see the scene where the camera pans back to reveal the set for Rendezvous.  We chuckle a little bit (mostly because David Fincher is directing that film), but when it pans further back and reveals another movie set, we're baffled because the director of that film is none other than Steven Soderbergh himself (with a black box disguising his identity).  Is it another movie with the movie within the movie, or are we watching the actual making of Frontal?  They say that truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, but how are we supposed to know when the lines between reality and illusion are this blurred?  Do we even care?  This shit is practically Kafka II, in terms of both its lack of clarity and the probable effect it will have on Soderbergh's career.

Frontal's studio has kept the premise of the film top-secret, most likely because they have yet to find someone who can accurately describe it.  They don't have any problem trumpeting the zany particulars of the film's unusual shooting style, however.  Soderbergh, who directs from a screenplay written by performance artist Coleman Hough (yet much of it was improvised) and shoots under the pseudonym Peter Andrews, filmed it all in just 18 days and spent just $2 million (still more than videotape cost). The miniscule budget didn't allow for things like makeup and wardrobe people, or even trailers for its stars (though there's a trailer shown in one of the movies within the movie) who had to physically drive themselves to and from the set each day.  Can you imagine?  Julia had to do her own hair!  And makeup!

The unjust recipient of an "R" rating (there isn't any "full frontal" in the film, though there is a rub-and-tug gag that was done better in 2 Days in the Valley), Frontal is the most obnoxious Let's-Get-Our-Friends-Together-To-Make-An-Important-Labor-of-Love film since The Anniversary Party.  You get the impression that the private screening for Soderbergh and his actors will generate more laughs and raves than one attended by regular folks who have to do their own hair and makeup every day.

1:46 -

for language and some sexual content