After the star-studded piece of caper-candy that was Ocean's Eleven, it would be easy to think that director Steven Soderbergh had been consumed by the more crassly commercial side of the Hollywood machine. But this is the man who followed up sex, lies, and videotape with Kafka, Out of Sight with The Limey, and Erin Brockovich with Traffic. He follows the same pattern here by being as willfully unHollywood as possible with this low-budget, disjointed, intriguing and sometimes confusing L.A. Zeitgeist comedy that is both dyspeptic and darkly funny-in places.

Essentially one day in the life of a group of La-La Land dwellers, all of whom are connected both to each other and the movie biz, Full Frontal introduces us to a dozen characters. Movie stars Francesca (Julia Roberts) and Calvin (Blair Underwood) are acting in a film scripted by neurotic Carl (David Hyde Pierce), a magazine writer whose marriage to executive-wife Lee (indie darling Catherine Keener) is on the rocks. Lee's sister Linda (Mary McCormack) is a masseuse who hauls her rig to various hotel rooms to service film industry bigwigs, including producer Gus (a cameo by David Duchovny). Oh yeah-Brad Pitt plays himself, as does director David Fincher (Fight Club) and Soderbergh too (albeit with a digitally rendered blank box over his face.) That's just scratching the surface; there are many more characters and subplots. Confused yet? This is a movie that demands an audience's attention.

And it is also a movie that wants to show the venality, shallowness, bitterness, paranoia, mean-spiritedness and general desperation that most of us know lurks beneath the surface of Hollywood life. That would be no small feat because just as (male) full-frontal nudity is frowned upon in Hollywood films, so to are full-frontal exposés of the Hollywood underbelly. By calling his movie Full Frontal, Soderbergh thinks he's managed it. Well... not quite-although you do get a brief shot of male full frontal nudity.

Using a structure that allows him to present the film-within-the-film (Hollywood "artifice") in lovingly lensed 35mm and the day-to-day L.A. "reality" in grainy, dung-coloured digital video provides Soderbergh with a nice visual trope to fit his message. So to does some of the sharply satirical writing-the point of most conversation, for example, seems to be a discussion of the "porn-name game," the old joke about taking your middle name and the name of the first street you lived on and combining them to come up with a name to use when you become a porn star.

But the difference between Full Frontal and his earlier spitballs to the eyes of the Hollywood and its marketers-the element that here belies Soderbergh's intent-is this effort's name cast. It's a testament to his darling status that Soderbergh can sign up the likes of Roberts to what is essentially an experimental film. But it also speaks to his "safe" status. Throw in those cameos by Pitt, Duchovny, and Terence Stamp (reprising, in one line, his Limey role) as well as the solid appeal of Keener (Being John Malkovich) and Frasier's Hyde Pierce (very good here) and you have a marketer's wet dream, not a real piece of subversion. Full Frontal doesn't quite shed enough of its Hollywood clothing to be the real deal, but until something else comes along that does, it will do.