mike-seaman Explaining Schizopolis seems counterintuitive. The movie is a mixture of autobiographical self- examination and self-deprecation. At the same time the film seems to be tackling some larger cultural themes and postmodern concepts of language and communication. In the end, I think the movie is a fun assortment of ideas being exercised together in a rather harmless fashion. Schizopolis never seems to take itself seriously, the movie is made on a small-budget, with a purposefully contained cast, self-aware and referential humor, taking stabs at life, narratives, movies, culture, and humanity while never entirely aiming at any single target (except perhaps the filmmaker himself). I recommend this movie not because it is a fully realized concept (because it isn't) or because it is a hidden gem that must be discovered (because it isn't) but it is refreshing to see an experimental film created playfully, aware of its self-indulgence and entirely at ease with it.

mglasson Schizopolis is perhaps best summarized with the copy line - 'All attempts at synopses of this film have resulted in hospitalization.' It's no understatement - just about every convention and niche of film is broken in this flick, and those looking for an easy ride into movie-watching oblivion won't find it here. The film mainly revolves around ad exec Fletcher Munson (played to perfection by Soderbergh) who is unhappy in his work, marriage and life, in general. He frequently masturbates at his office job and is generally distracted by his active imagination. After a co-worker suddenly has a heart attack, Munson is stuck writing a speech for T. Azimuth Schwitters - an L. Ron Hubbard type guru who sells a brand of self-help called 'Eventualism.'One day, Munson spots his doppelganger and follows him to his home. Turns out this fella is a dentist, and, without any clear reason, he is suddenly transported into Dr. Jeffery Kortchack's body and assumes the dentist's life (which includes having an affair with his own wife from his existence as Fletcher Munson). Confused yet? Then there is also the story of Elmo, the exterminator who speaks in a language of random words (I.E., 'Jigsaw. Uh, fragment chief butter. King surgery mind??') and gets laid by all of his beautiful women clients. Language is altered and skewed throughout the film - one scene has the husband and wife exchanging analytically defined sentences ('Generic greeting!' 'Generic greeting returned!') And yes, it gets much stranger, but that is one of the many wonderful things this film has going for it - you will be completely uncertain as to what is next coming. I can do no justice trying to explain the plot; the above encapsulation is an infinitesimally small fraction of the entire story and all of its interwoven subplots, thereof.So, what the hell does it all mean? I can't say that I'm entirely sure, myself, but I always have one helluva good time riding through it. There are endless side-stories and (seemingly) left-over ideas conceived through a myriad of supremely clever and bizarre film devices. It's a jarring experience at first, but with repeated viewing, the unconnected pieces of information come together in a most surprising and rewarding fashion. To me, Schizopolis is the cinematic equivalent of a Rubic's cube - you may fumble with it for a long time, but when you finally get a side complete - Ahhh, the joy and relief of a job well done. Yet, there are five other sides that remain mixed.Soderbergh took several years to make this film completely outside of the Hollywood machine ('I was in danger of becoming a hack,' he said) So he mounted this indie-indie-independent labor of love in the vein of a guerrilla production - a project he was literally shooting in his own back yard and at the houses of friends and neighbors. Still, the film never feels like its cheating the audience because of its budget limitations. Whatever it is that he's trying to do within the film's cryptic scenes, he manages to pull off with the confidence that he knows what he's doing. Steven Soderbergh also plays the leading man - a choice more practical than really desired according to him, but his performance is amazingly funny (the scene where he's making faces at himself in the mirror is a keeper for all time). He also cast his recently separated wife (Betsy Brantley) as his wife in the film, echoing his own a personal dilemma.And though this film embraces obfuscation and absurdity, have I mentioned that it's ridiculously hilarious? This is a cross-brand of comedy that I have never-before-seen. It's kinda like the Marx Brothers directed by Richard Lester on acid. But all insipid cross-comparisons aside, I feel like there's little room for improvement in this grandiose experimental film. There may be some minor performance flaws or uneven pacing, but in a film that embraces lack of coherence, that's hardly stable grounds for critique. This film was readily dissed by critics (if an established director does something completely off the wall and confusing, it must be self-indulgent), and the 12 people that actually saw it, abhorred it (any film that has people walking out after 20 minutes must have something going for it). So do yourself (and Mr. Soderbergh) a favor and seek this one out. Accept the challenge that this film proposes and try putting this puzzle together. Not that there's any doubt about this now given his expansive oeuvre, but Steven Soderbergh is one of the leading revolutionaries working in cinema today.

tedg I am glad that Soderbergh is making films, even if every other one is a glossy mess. Like many filmmakers, he lives in and loves the medium. Unlike most of them, he experiments in film with things that matter — and he does it while pretending it is a joke.This will be seen by many as a bizarre hoax, a vanity project, a sandbox. But I think not; I receive it as a small, complex personal project. His marriage was falling apart. He was baffled by matters of duality: simultaneous understanding and confusion. So he made a film featuring himself and his already ex-wife. In it, time faces itself; everyone has dual lives among which they shift.You'll only get part of what is going on the first time around, but this rewards multiple viewings.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

Graham Greene An experiment; an attempt by Soderbergh to strip away the extraneous baggage of narrative cinema - and, in the process, the often debilitating obsessions with style and presentation - in order to get to the pure essence of film-making, as an outlet for spontaneous, creative expression. Soderbergh would subsequently refer to the finished product as a necessary purging; a way of going beyond the obsessive technical approach and over-reliance on the look and technique that had been so important to the atmosphere of his earliest work, so as to make possible the more liberated and immediate film-making approach of subsequent films such as Out of Sight (1998) and The Limey (1999). As a result, Schizopolis (1996) can now be seen as both the end and the beginning of something really quite wonderful; offering, as it does, the full stop following perhaps the most interesting and successful stage of the director's career - in which he developed on the cool and seductive Sex Lies and Videotape (1988), the dark and expressionistic Kafka (1991) and the underrated American masterpiece King of the Hill (1993) - and the start of a whole new chapter - in which the director found his greatest success with the highly acclaimed Erin Brockovich (2000), the Oscar winning Traffic (2000) and the hugely successful remake of Ocean's Eleven (2001).In keeping with this idea of purging, we can see with Schizopolis an attempt by Soderbergh to indulge all of his various creative quirks and eccentricities before simplifying his style and vision in a way that would be beneficial to a mainstream American audience. Although he would create similar indulgences since - including films like Full Frontal (2002), Bubble (2005) and The Good German (2006) - those particular films often feel like extra-curricular exercises that don't, in any real way, relate to his more successful endeavours, such as the Ocean's Twelve (2004) and Thirteen (2007) sequels and his adaptation of the Stanislaw Lem novel, Solaris (2002). Whereas those films hid their post-modern reinvention beneath knock-about farce or widescreen spectacle, Schizopolis is home-made, experimental cinema at its most explicit and unhinged. From the narrative set-up, to the casting, to the use of editing, music and mise-en-scene, the film is literally bursting with ideas and ingenious abstractions, with Soderbergh taking influence from a number of far greater filmmakers - such as his personal heroes, Terry Gilliam and Richard Lester, to legendary masters like Jacques Rivette and Jean Luc Godard - and yet, still manages to produce a piece of work that seems true to his own unique style and individual creative preoccupations.Naturally, given the nature of the film and the outlandishness of its characters and approach, Schizopolis often seesaws wildly from the inventive, to the stupid, to the genuinely inspired. It was and still remains a bold and daring work for the director; disregarding the lush cinematography and evocative period detail of Kafka and King of the Hill and instead developing the rough and ready, hand-held, matter-of-fact approach that he would continue to use on subsequent films like Traffic and The Limey. However, the presentation works, and the style of the film does well to convey certain themes and ideas that are expressed through the tone and opinions of a central character that is perfectly performed by the director himself. It also creates that feeling of something anarchic and aesthetically quite progressive; disregarding any such notions of box-office potential, industry trailblazing or self-congratulatory deconstruction to simply make a film that presents the pure, unfettered spirit, energy and imagination that only the very best of cinema can convey. It obviously won't be to all tastes - which goes without saying - but even so, I feel that Schizopolis is a truly unsung work within the director's career; stressing personal expression, ironic self-deprecation and genuine cinematic invention.As it stands over a decade on from its initial release, Schizopolis can now be seen as a relic to the days when Soderbergh could (for me at least) be cited as perhaps the greatest living filmmaker of his generation; with the film capturing the sense of diversity, energy and complete control over all aspects of the production that can be noted throughout his work released during the 1990's. His more recent films might be more financially successful (and certainly not without merit), but for me, they simply fail to offer that same sense of inimitable defiance, unpredictability and that eccentric disregard for convention that his work was once synonymous with. It may not be wholly triumphant overall - and is certainly not on a par with the likes of Kafka, King of the Hill and the greater than you might remember it Out of Sight - it is, nonetheless, a work of pure vision; both mesmerising and maddening in almost equal measure, and punctuated by Soderbergh's static, deadpan performance and the capricious idea that anything could happen at any given time.