The Movie: Full Frontal was director Steven Soderbergh's gritty, low budget followup to his glimmering, super-polished Ocean's Eleven. While it was being made, it caused quite a stir in the digital filmmaking world because such a big name director was shooting his film on digital video.

I think a lot of people were hoping that this film would show digital video as being a viable, high quality format for feature films, as recognized by a big director like Soderbergh. I think a lot of those people were kind of disappointed when this film came out and it was clear that the director wanted the portions shot on video to be of poor quality -- Soderbergh used video on scenes that represent "real life" -- while other portions of the movie were shot on 35mm film -- as they represented the romantic dreamworld of movies.

But enough about technical stuff... Full Frontal is what they'd call an "ensemble piece" without main "stars" and "supporting actors" as many movies do. The movie follows seven different strangers living out their lives in the days leading up to a big party being thrown by a mutual friend. Some of them are involved in the film industry, which brings in a "film within a film" plot device that gets kind of confusing, in an interesting way.

The cast is chock full of big name stars, who I guess really felt like this film would be worth their time, since the budget for the entire film was like 10% of what some of them make as actors on other films. Some of the cast includes: Julia Roberts, David Hyde Pierce, David Duchovny, Catherine Keener, Blair Underwood... with some cameos by Brad Pitt, and one of my favorite Hollywood players... producer Jerry Weintraub.

Anyway... this film might be pretty good for those who are kind of into all the little Hollywood tricks and secrets, and probably just OK to not very good to other people who could care less, especially since plot-wise, there isn't a whole lot of plot... it's more like a collection of character studies than it really is a "movie". It's definitely more of an art-house film than a big blockbuster, that is for damn sure.

The DVD: The video transfer appears to stay true to the original vision of the film -- which is to say most of it looks terrible with poor resolution, flat colors and a lot of video noise, while the 35mm film sections are perfectly pristine, crisp and clear with beautiful colors. I guess if it was just a standard of how accurate the video transfer is, I'd probably rate this one a 4 actually, but since most of it looks (purposefully) terrible and isn't going to really wow anybody on screen... I'll just give it a 3 for now.

Though there is 5.1 surround audio, most of the sound in this movie was meant to have sort of a documentary feel to it, so there isn't a whole lot of fancy processing or surround effects going on here. I mean, overall this is definitely not the type of DVD you want to play if you're looking for something to show off your wiz-bang home theater system.

Special features include some audio commentary, some deleted footage, a trailer, and an interesting little segment of behind the scenes footage as seen from a spy camera hidden in various locations by the director, capturing the actors between takes without them knowing about it. Kind of neat!