This necessarily, for me, means that Traffic has never worked as well for me as it did that very first time, though unlike a lot movies from around that same period that I've cooled towards in the intervening decade, I'm not prepared to entirely blame a 19-year-old's unfocused enthusiasm for making Traffic seem better than it "really" is I suppose that if a nice and pristine 35mm print ever made the rounds again (as if.), the movie would hold up just as well as it does in my inflated memories. A successful exercise, too, for I myself have now seen the movie on DVDs released by two different companies, as well as a theoretically unimprovable Blu-Ray, and none of those viewing experiences have come within striking distance of capturing what it was like to see the movie projected on film. I chose to begin with an irony: nowadays, Soderbergh is notable for being the most innovative and aggressive booster of digital cinematography in mainstream American cinema, but twelve years ago, Traffic was at least in part a deliberate exercise in showcasing the limitations of digital filmmaking. There are many places one can start talking about Traffic: its weird place of pride as one of the most broadly successful Steven Soderbergh films despite being in several key ways no more populist than most of what he's done in his career its historical importance as the movie primarily responsible for kickstarting the so-called hyperlink stories that were popular for a long chunk of the 2000s how very much the precise story it tells about the War on Drugs in the United States feels like it could only have come from a short window around the turn of the century (the film premiered in the last week of 2000, almost exactly the most perfect time for it). Let's flip that around, and take a look at the mainstream breakthrough for a director who proved how important of a stylist he'd eventually become with his own take on the same subject.
This week: Oliver Stone's Savages finds a filmmaker who was once a great stylist hunting for meaning in his career by telling us a grandiose tale of people involved in the drug industry. Every Sunday this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases.