If this trailer means anything at all, Steven Soderbergh‘s High Flying Bird (Netflix, 2.8) is going to be aces. Basketball with an emphasis on managing, strategizing, opportunity knocks…right? I’ll be in the audience for the first Slamdance screening. André Holland, Melvin Gregg, Zazie Beetz, Sonja Sohn, Zachary Quinto, Kyle MacLachlan, Bill Duke. The script by Tarell Alvin McCraney, the Oscar-winning co-writer (i.e., “story by”) of Moonlight.
Soderbergh (aka “Peter Andrews”) shot it last March on an iPhone7, as he did with grimly greenish Unsane. This time the visuals are much more appealing.
![](/images/column/oshkosh18/basketball.jpg)
From my 3.20.18 Unsane review: “My basic reaction as I shuffled out of the screening room was ‘why did Soderbergh go to such an effort to make this film look ugly?’ He shot it on an iPhone 7 Plus in 4K, but that’s no excuse — you can make an iPhone movie look like Technicolor VistaVision if you want. Start to finish Unsane looks drained and murky and heavily shadowed, almost in a shitty shot-in-the-’70s-on-16mm way. The two main colors are a muddy dispiriting brown and a kind of sickly institutional green, along with some buttermilk walls and the occasional haze of bluish gray.
“I get it, I get it — Soderbergh wants you to feel as turned around and psychologically tormented and forcibly sedated as Foy, and the color scheme is intended to reflect her states of mind. But I was two or three steps ahead of Soderbergh in this respect. The bottom line is that, yes, I was feeling Foy’s pain and disorientation, but I was also coping with my own lethargy and displeasure. I respect Soderbergh’s decision to cover Unsane in brown murk, but I hated the palette. Sorry but I did.”
![](https://hollywood-elsewhere.com/wp-content/themes/amory/patreon-banner.jpg)