Schizopolis - Criterion Collection (1997)
Schizopolis - Criterion Collection Image Cover
Additional Images
Director:Steven Soderbergh
Studio:Home Vision Entertainment
Rating:4
Rated:NR
Date Added:2006-03-27
ASIN:B0000BUZKS
UPC:0715515014328
Price:$39.95
Genre:Satire
Release:2003-10-28
Duration:96
Picture Format:Widescreen
Aspect Ratio:1.85:1
Sound:Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Languages:English
Subtitles:English
Features:Anamorphic
Steven Soderbergh  ...  (Director)
  ...  (Writer)
 
Scott Allen (II)  ...  
Betsy Brantley  ...  
Silas Cooper  ...  
C.C. Courtney  ...  
Ann Dalrymple  ...  
Summary: Both a kind of home movie and a salute to the hip, pop-up sketch comedy of 1960s-early 1970s television--Laugh-In, Monty Python's Flying Circus, that sort of thing--Schizopolis is a hit-and-miss series of dada gags with vaguely connecting threads of Kafkaesque paranoia. Soderbergh himself stars as two people--one an ineffective dentist, the other a speechwriter for a cult movement called Eventualism, which has set out to "question all answers"--connected by their romances with the same woman, played by Soderbergh's real-life ex, Betsy Bramley. There isn't so much a story as a series of bits in which these characters often (though not necessarily) turn up, from press conferences on the subject of horse urination to old footage of nudists to a scene of an Eventualist exchange between husband and wife: "Generic greeting!""Generic greeting returned!" None of this leads to a literal point, but after a while an undercurrent of disease about making sense of the modern world becomes apparent beneath the jokes. Soderbergh (sex, lies, and videotape, Out of Sight) is certainly a filmmaker who goes his own way in life, always hitting his target in one spot or another and occasionally getting a bull's-eye for his trouble. Schizopolis is no bull's-eye, and it has just as many detractors as admirers, but it's impossible not to appreciate Soderbergh's conviction that making a film out on the fringes is a worthy endeavor. --Tom Keogh