The latest film by Steven Soderbergh, credited for kick-starting independent film-festival chic with his Sundance hit "sex, lies and videotape," will premiere locally at the Maryland Film Festival next month. "And Everything is Going Fine," a documentary and performance film about the supreme artist of the contemporary monologue, Spalding Gray (left), draws on 90 hours of material covering roughly a quarter century. Advance reports promise that Soderbergh has fashioned what amounts to a self-portrait of the artist, concentrating on the period from Gray's artistic breakthrough in the 1970s to his presumed suicide in 2004. Soderbergh has often been compelling and inventive in the way he addresses movie audiences (think of the scintillating flashbacks in his near-great "The Limey"); his use of Matt Damon as an untrustworthy storyteller in "The Informant!" was hilarious and fascinating (if not always dramatically satisfying). "And Everything is Going Fine" sounds like it might be a labor of love that is also an artistic golden moment.
(AP photo by Sara Krulwich)