Soderbergh's latest film an innovative Oscar contender

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"The Limey"|ret||ret||tab|

Directed by: Steven Soderbergh|ret||ret||tab|

Starring: Terence Stamp, Peter Fonda, Luis Guzman|ret||ret||tab|

Rated: R|ret||ret||tab|

The 1999 Oscar nominations will be announced Feb. 15. There are no fewer than 25 rules, some of them several pages long, that govern qualifying for this holiest of Hollywood grails. Rule No. 2 deals with the actual showing of a film. To qualify for this year's awards, a motion picture had to have been shown for seven consecutive days in a theater in Los Angeles County during the 1999 calendar year. Lest we forget, it's called the movie business: The rules further stipulate that admission must be charged. |ret||ret||tab|

My point here is that many of the films that will be nominated for the coveted statue will be virtually unknown by folks outside the film business or Los Angeles. (Wait a minute, everyone in Los Angeles is in the film business ... .)|ret||ret||tab|

A lot of movies just aren't ready for wide release by the end of any given calendar year, so the producers, set on qualifying for an Oscar, get a print ready, advertise it (another part of Rule No. 2) and show it for a week in L.A. |ret||ret||tab|

Voil, qualification. |ret||ret||tab|

Most of the time these are good films that eventually benefit from the notice they receive from being nominated. |ret||ret||tab|

Such is the case this year with Steven Soderbergh's instant classic, "The Limey," a film that will no doubt receive a handful of nominations and may even bring home a little bald statue or two. |ret||ret||tab|

Soderbergh's career features a varied style of films, from his groundbreaking "sex, lies and videotape," to the 1998 adaptation of Elmore Leonard's novel, "Out of Sight." "The Limey" may well be his best work to date. Somewhat derivative in style of Jean Luc Goddard or John Boorman's "Point Blank," this film has enough fresh ideas and approaches that it will surely be one of the most copied movies of the next few years.|ret||ret||tab|

On the surface, "The Limey" might appear to be just another gangster-seeking-revenge plot, but it's so much more. There's a great deal of humor and satire thrown in the mix and the dialogue is intelligent, if sometimes unintelligible.|ret||ret||tab|

Terence Stamp plays Wilson, the titular "Limey." He's an English gangster who has just been released from prison again after a nine-year stay. His estranged daughter has died in a mysterious car wreck after shacking up with megabuck record producer Terry Valentine, and Wilson wants to get to the bottom of her demise. |ret||ret||tab|

He comes to the States to ferret out information about his daughter, completely unaware of who Valentine is or just how powerful he's become. In another great performance, Peter Fonda plays Valentine and is completely believable as the guy who "repackaged the whole '60s Southern California zeitgeist and made a fortune doing it." |ret||ret||tab|

In a wry musical moment, we're introduced to Valentine as the Hollies' "King Midas in Reverse," (featuring the line, "He's easy rider with a curse") is playing. For those too young to remember, Fonda was in the film, "Easy Rider." It was about these two guys on ... oh, never mind.|ret||ret||tab|

Wilson's a cockney tough guy he uses a lot of rhyming slang that confuses the heck out of everyone in L.A. who is unacquainted with the style of the super rich and famous. In a twist of irony, however, we learn that he, too, made a fortune in the music industry. His last stint in jail was for lifting the receipts of a Pink Floyd concert. The cops never got the money, and it's tucked away making a good deal of interest.|ret||ret||tab|

We get the history of Wilson through another inventive device. In flashback scenes, Soderbergh uses clips from a 1967 English film called "Poor Cow," about a young cockney thief. The star of that film was Terence Stamp, making these flashback scenes infinitely more effective than bad makeup or finding an actor that looked like a young Stamp.|ret||ret||tab|

In a great barb at the movie business, we see one of Valentine's thugs watching the making of a movie in L.A. The of under-the-breath dialogue is funny, intense and (when it comes to the world of movie making) incredibly insightful. There's a lot of humor throughout the film, mixed with a lot of drama and action.|ret||ret||tab|

With great acting, inventive editing and a taut screenplay, be watching for "The Limey" when the Oscar nominations are announced and hope that it opens in wide release soon after. In the meantime, try to find a cockney slang dictionary so you'll know what Wilson means when he says things like "tea leaves," "butcher's" or "china plates."|ret||ret||tab|

(Jim Wunderle works at Associated Video Producers and is a Springfield free-lance writer and musician.)[[In-content Ad]]