Is the work of Steven Soderbergh the most overrated thing ever?

See also the various Three Imaginary Boys vs. Boys Don't Cry polls.

stamp is bad in the limey (for londoners) for the same reason tom wilkinson is a problem -- despite an otherwise v funny performance -- in michael clayton for uk listeners, which is that the underlying accent (not-cockney for stamp, not-US for wilkinson) pokes noticeably thru

stamp (born stepney to a tugboat stoker! moved to plaistow and went to school there) learnt his trade a london drama school before kitchen sink made it ok (indeed fashionably preferable) for young actors to have any kind of regional accent, and had the cockney totally knocked out of him, so it comes back out of him in his 60s as if voice-coached, and you can hear the posh* at the ends of his lines**

*even tho it's learned posh!
**the ends of the lines is where you listen to check if an english actor is actually good at an american accent, they generally do the starts fine

actually it's not quite the same problem: wilkinson is very animated and basically funny in michael clayton, fake accent notwithstanding; stamp is merely robotic in the limey, the flatness is presumably a performance decision? but it's a bad one

I can't address your point about his accent, but I found Stamp's flatness of affect rather funny, especially when Wilson allowed himself to feel something for the Americans (e.g. coaxing Eduardo to order a cocktail at Valentine's party). He also uses his body in character well.

i didn't mean flatness of affect so much as me feeling that the character was actually just a cardboard cut-out on a pole but maybe that's what *you* mean by "uses his body in character" :)

one helluva cardboard ass when he gets up after those goons rough house him

New limited series, Full Circle, is up on HBO now. Knew it was coming but had no idea it was here, as if people needed an HBO break after Succession and The Idol.

He's got another show coming soon to his website:

https://extension765.com/blogs/soderblog/command-z

Wow, had no idea!

was previously semi-announced as The Pendulum Project and was being shopped to streamers in January — guessing he ended up with no good offers and figured coattailing off whatever press he can get for Full Circle was the best chance of getting seen

was startled by either Louis CK or a guy who looks a lot like him in Command Z trailer. I'll be pretty bummed if it turns out to be him.

Assuming you mean the guy at 1:30, there's a photo of the same guy a few seconds earlier, and it's clearly not LCK.

Watched the first episode of Full Circle tonight; it's OK. It's a riff on High & Low, for those who don't know.

Definitely not watching that other thing. Haaaaate Michael Cera.

Watched all of Full Circle, it was ok. But am I an idiot or did the last shot invalidate any bit of sense that the plot had...if the whole idea was that this Guyanese investment property made money that kickstarted Dennis Quaid's hot sauce empire, how does that happen if it never got built? Whatever, man..

xps I haven't seen it in a while, but The Limey is probably my favorite Soderbergh film, and I've always liked Stamp in it (and everyone else). I haven't kept up with Soderbergh's work, but aside from The Limey, I don't recall ever revisiting his past work - the ones I'd probably want to see again are Sex, Lies, and Videotape, King of the Hill, Che (maybe my favorite del Toro performance) and The Informant! (maybe my favorite Matt Damon performance). And I still haven't seen The Underneath - I've heard it's supposed to be excellent.

xp I watched it a couple months ago... I think the whole Guyanese investment was more of a macguffin, it wasn't that it kickstarted his career, just that it was the most prominent skeleton in the family's closet. the mic drop of that as the final scene was just that all this trouble happened for essentially nothing. that underlining the racial commentary of the whole show

That makes sense thematically, although there was even that interview scene where Quaid is asked how he got his business going, and he references that they had money from investments that paid off (although his whole deal is being clueless anyway). Maybe the family had enough money to bribe a bunch of shady people in Guyana, lose the money, and still start a huge business but it wasn't really portrayed that way.