Steven Soderbergh’s latest offering suffers from some major pacing problems.  On my drive home from the screening, I kept mentally comparing the experience of watching the film with childbirth. Going through the labor is very unpleasant, and you swear you will never do it again, but the payoff is so fantastic, that you forget about all the pain you endured and immediately want to do it again. That’s right, I want to see this movie again.  After all my sighing, seat shifting and a subliminal kiss-off of all future Soderbergh projects, I want to see this film again. That, my friends, is the talent of Soderbergh.

Based on the  true  story of Illinois agriculture executive turned FBI informant Mark Whitacre, The Informant! takes a slightly satirical spin on actual events. Far from being the ribald comedy the trailers lead you to believe it is, this is actually a character study of a very complicated man. There are funny parts peppered throughout, but if you go to this movie expecting a flat-out comedy, you will be disappointed. Several people walked out of the screening that I attended, and based on the marketing, I didn’t blame them.

Matt Damon is stupendously good as the nerdy executive at an agriculture plant that produces lysine, a corn by-product.  He is a shoo-in for best actor this year.  Whitacre’s bizarre and inappropriate inner dialogue garners most of the film’s laughs. He’ll be shaking the hand of a business prospect while thinking ” I wonder if bees ever get sad.”  He does this through the whole movie, and Damon provides the voice-over for Whitacre’s running stream of consciousness, which allows the audience to  be privy to the fact that Whitacre has some serious social flaws. He lives in his own little world, observing the minutiae of day to day life. Cliff from Cheers has nothing on this guy, they both recite useless knowledge they have collected in lieu of having actual conversations with people.

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Two and a half weeks ago, Columbia Pictures shut-down the Steven Soderbergh helmed Moneyball, just days before it was to start production. Last week, Soderbergh formally bowed out of the project.

Since then, the explanations as to why the project was put into turnaround at the last-minute, especially with a big star like Brad Pitt have been fast and furious, with each side wanting to get their view across.

Trying to parse the entire situation is very (forgive the pun) “inside baseball.” That said, here is a brief summary of this summer’s hottest off-screen drama.

Initially, the explanation for the “Moneyball” axing was blamed on a script that had deviated from its original awesomeness. By all accounts, the original script by Steve Zaillian was great. Soderbergh’s rewrite, well, the consensus was “not so great.”

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