With his new movie High Flying Bird, Steven Soderbergh continues his love affair with iPhone filmmaking, challenging the traditional formula for how movies are made.
Late last week, with little to no fanfare, Netflix released Steven Soderbergh’s latest film High Flying Bird. Starring André Holland, Zazie Beetz, and Melvin Gregg, High Flying Bird is an untraditional sports drama set during an NBA lockout. Written by Oscar winner Tarell Alvin McCraney (Moonlight), High Flying Bird trades in familiar on-court thrills for off-the-court drama.
André Holland plays Ray Burke, a sports agent struggling in the midst of an NBA lockout, who sees an opportunity to change the landscape of the NBA and basketball itself. He represents a new and recently drafted player Erick Scott. Together with Scott and his former assistant Sam, Burke schemes and sleuths his way through back offices, secret meetings, and untelevised matches as he works to end the lockout and change the way the game is played.
For some, High Flying Bird will prove to be too densely packed with sports jargon to enjoy (or even understand), but with a slick visual style, confident direction, and skilled performances, you could do a lot worse. The main issue is that the film sort of requires that you come into it with at least a basic understanding of how the NBA draft works and the rules by which players are forced to abide. Although it makes an effort to work in as much explanation as possible, you still may not be able to escape the feeling of things slipping over your head.
Even if sports movies aren’t your thing, there’s something admirable about the way the film defers the traditional narrative arc of the genre. By making a sports movie that is about the fight to play the game rather than the actual the game itself, Soderbergh and screenwriter McCraney challenge the rules of what a sports movie can be. But that’s not the only thing High Flying Bird challenges.
High Flying Bird marks Soderbergh’s second film (in a row, no less!) to be shot entirely on an iPhone. The director has spoken at length in support of low-budget, streamlined filmmaking, noting how new technologies like this make it easier for people to make movies for less money and with greater ease. Proponents of iPhone filmmaking talk about how it holds the potential to democratize filmmaking, but the success of this new method remains to be seen.
Less than a year ago, Variety published a list of movies shot entirely on iPhones. Spoiler alert: it’s a pretty short list of mostly unsuccessful movies. Who can blame them, though? Unlike Soderbergh, most young filmmakers don’t have decades of experience and an Oscar-winning reputation to stake their claim on. Their movies, shot on an iPhone just like Soderbergh’s, get labeled cheap whereas Soderbergh’s is considered trendy.
However, change, no matter how incremental, is still change. That one of Hollywood’s most prolific working directors has committed to making movies on an iPhone is a notable shift in the tides. It wasn’t long ago that director Sean Baker, whose 2017 film The Florida Project gained some awards traction, brought his iPhone film Tangerine to Sundance.
Tangerine was a significant milestone, marking one of the first full length movies to be shot entirely on an iPhone. However, after Baker abandoned the practice for his next film, it sent a message was that Tangerine was a just test of a new technique. Soderbergh, on the other hand, has demonstrated a clear interest in continuing to use iPhones as a way of making movies easier and faster.
So, while Netflix’s unceremonious release of High Flying Bird is likely a byproduct of the company’s inability to effectively market their massive volume of “original content,” it’s striking how, like Soderbergh, they are actively using new technologies to poke holes in traditional institutions that have long defined how movies are made, distributed, and watched.
The way both Netflix and Soderbergh are challenging the system is not unlike the way the protagonist in High Flying Bird seeks to challenge the NBA. Wrapped up in the movie’s story about an NBA lockout is one man’s love of the game and his desire to reclaim that game from the business owners and league leadership and give it back to the players.
In the midst of a lockout, Ray Burke forges a coupe to steal the game for the players and remind those big, bad business owners that their industry is still a game and games are meant to be played. Interestingly enough, this isn’t far from the game that Soderbergh and Netflix are playing.
It remains to be seen whether this is a game they can win, but it’s a competition that benefits viewers like us.
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