Matt Damon has been in Chicago working on "Contagion," the pandemic thriller directed by Steven Soderbergh, and the actor said he's consciously tried to enjoy the experience because he doubts that he will have many more chances to work with the filmmaker.

"He's retiring, he's been talking about it for years and it's getting closer," Damon said of Soderbergh, whose credits include "Erin Brockovich," "Ocean's Eleven," "The Informant" and "Sex, Lies and Videotape." Soderbergh turns 48 next month, and if that sounds young, that's the point, Damon said.

"He wants to paint and he says he’s still young enough to have another career," Damon said. "He’s kind of exhausted with everything that interested him in terms of form. He’s not interested in telling stories. Cinema interested him in terms of form and that’s it. He says, 'If I see another over-the-shoulder shot, I’m going to blow my brains out.' "

Soderbergh told Esquire two years ago that he'd like to retire by the age of 51, which marks his 25th year as a filmmaker. Damon offers more specifics: “After this movie we’re doing ‘Liberace’ next summer with Michael Douglas, and then he might do one more movie after that with George [Clooney], and then after that he’s retiring."

It may sound like a hoax or gag, but Damon said he is absolutely serious -- the only filmmaker nominated twice in the same year for the Academy Award for best director (for "Traffic" and "Erin Brockovich," both released in 2000) is weary of moviemaking. Damon, who has appeared in five Soderbergh films, said it's frustrating for him to contemplate.

"After I worked with Clint [Eastwood] I went back and said, ‘Look, Clint is having a blast and he's going to be 80 years old.’ And Steven says back, ‘Yeah, but he’s a storyteller and I’m not,’” Damon recounted. "If you're an actor or a writer or someone working in film, it's such a waste. For me, I'm going to spend the next 40 years trying to become a great director and I will never reach what he's reached. And he's walking away from it."

-- Geoff Boucher

Photo: Matt Damon and Steven Soderbergh. Credit: Getty Images

For a director who's known for a studied lack of sensationalism, Clint Eastwood is sure riling up a lot of people.

Eastwood's new movie "Hereafter" opened last weekend in Los Angeles, New York and Toronto, where it grossed a very strong $36,000 per screen. It will play across the country beginning this weekend. But where this unassuming spiritual drama should be doing what many movies aimed at grown-ups do -- get a finite number of people to quietly come out to see the film -- something more polarizing is happening. Eastwood, who at 80 epitomizes Hollywood restraint and politesse, is causing a ruckus.

"Hereafter" examines three geographically separate but thematically related characters, all of whom have some connection to death and the afterlife. There's a working-class London boy who has tragically lost his twin brother and wants desperately to communicate with him. There's a reluctant San Francisco psychic (Matt Damon) who would like nothing more than to stop communing with the dead. And there's a Parisian woman obsessed with what comes next after she goes through a near-death experience in the 2005 Asian tsunami.

Eastwood's new film, it quickly becomes clear, is a bold examination of spiritual concerns that the movie business is typically too scared or too secular to explore.

Or wait, it's a warmed-over exercise in Hollywood cliche and pseudo-spirituality.

As the movie stands on the threshold between hit and disappointment (and awards contender and Oscar also-ran), critics are sharply divided. But they're not just divided in the usual way. They're divided, it seems, along generational lines.

Here's how it breaks down: Many younger reviewers -- those in their 30s and 40s, and maybe inching into their early 50s -- are coming down hard on the movie. Most of the older generation? They're  finding much to embrace in the movie.

The list of prominent naysayers reads like a who's-who of prominent younger critics: the New York Post's Kyle Smith, New York Magazine's David Edelstein, Movieline's Stephanie Zacharek, The Onion's Nathan Rabin, Time Out New York's Joshua Rothkopf and Entertainment Weekly's Lisa Schwarzbaum. We could spend a whole post on their diatribes, but here is Rothkopf, channeling many of his contemporaries: "Hereafter" is "an undercooked slice of paranormal mumbo jumbo.... What was Clint thinking?"

Or Smith: "Clint Eastwood's 'Hereafter' brings together recent historical events, including a European terrorist attack, plus Charles Dickens and the after life without having anything to say about any of these topics. The movie drags, yet it feels like it's missing an hour."

EXCLUSIVE: Matt Damon is set to play Lance Armstrong in a long-gestating biopic about the Tour de France champion that may never get made.

But he'll be connected to the star athlete in another filmic way: Damon will narrate the new documentary about Armstrong from Oscar-winner Alex Gibney.

Gibney, whose Eliot Spitzer nonfiction film "Client 9" is coming out next month (more on that in a later post), centers his Armstrong movie on the cyclist's much-touted comeback at the 2009 Tour de France.

Gibney sees in Armstrong a figure both complex and polarizing. "There is, at least from the public perspective, a big disparity of opinion on him. Some people hold him up to be a saint. Particularly if you're a cancer survivor or cancer patient, he provides enormous hope," Gibney says. "Other people see in him a kind of hypocrisy, and hypocrisy drives people crazy, particularly if they make money off it."

Gibney is pulling a bit of a switch with the comeback tale. The director has often been preoccupied with powerful people brought low, as he was in the Oscar-nominated "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" and the Spitzer doc. He also directed the Afghanistan torture movie "Taxi to the Dark Side," which won the Academy Award for best documentary.

With a recognizable voice and a clear (and at times itself polarizing) interest in current events, Damon has been moonlighting as a documentary narrator quite a bit lately. He narrates the current financial-crisis doc "Inside Job" and did the same on the 2008 water-crisis doc "Running the Sahara."

Gibney says he chose the actor because he knew many cycling fans were aware of Damon's attachment to the Armstrong feature and wanted to give them another point of connection to the story. The movie, incidentally, has been in development for more than six years, with veteran producer Frank Marshall ("Back to the Future," the Bourne movies) set to direct, but at this moment the film doesn't have much, er, forward momentum.

Meanwhile, the Armstrong doc, which is set to come out next year, becomes more timely as doping scandals grow — disgraced Tour de France 2006 champion Floyd Landis has accused Armstrong and others of doping, and three-time and current champion Alberto Contador risks being stripped of his title because of a failed drug test — developments that also make Gibney's movie a moving target.

The filmmaker, who is mostly done shooting but is still talking to some subjects, says this makes for hard but necessary choices. "At some point, the only thing you can do is make up your mind on when the story ends," he says. "If you try to put in too much, the film will just go on forever."

— Steven Zeitchik

twitter.com/ZeitchikLAT

Photos: Top, Lance Armstrong. Credit:  Bradley C Bower / Associated Press. Above, Matt Damon. Credit: Peter Foley / EPA.

At 80, Clint Eastwood has made it clear he has no interest in repeating himself.

"At the age I am now, I just don't have any interest in going back and doing the same sort of thing over and over. That's one of the reasons I moved away from westerns," he told our colleague Geoff Boucher recently.

Case in point? Eastwood's latest film, his sixth in fewer than four years, a supernatural drama called "Hereafter."

The film -- which we get a glimpse of in a newly released trailer -- centers on three individuals with unique connections to death and what may happen afterward. There's a young boy grappling with the loss of his twin brother (Frankie McLaren), a French journalist who apparently comes back to life after dying in a tsunami (Cécile de France) and a psychic who holds the power to connect with the dead (Matt Damon).

But if you watched the trailer, you likely weren't able to tell that Damon only comprises a third of the film. He's featured prominently throughout the preview (a marketing decision that is perhaps understandable, considering McLaren is a newcomer and American audiences aren't yet all that familiar with De France).

Playing a reluctant medium struggling with whether or not to use his powers, he's inhabiting the role he's often best in -- a man who's hesitant to show his emotions.

Critics are already remarking that the film seems like a departure for Eastwood. Some of that probably comes from the triptych structure, and some of it from the instances of CG (particularly in an opening scene depicting a tsunami). While scenes like these lead us to believe the movie will be visually stunning, we're a bit worried that the movie could have a somewhat maudlin tone. We don't think anyone cracks a smile once in this trailer.

It's Eastwood and Damon, of course, so we're still intrigued. We just hope that the film doesn't rely on stale ideas about the hereafter -- and is able to deliver the emotional wallop it seems to be promising.

--Amy Kaufman

Twitter.com/AmyKinLA

Photo: Bryce Dallas Howard and Matt Damon in "Hereafter." Credit: Warner Bros.

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Poor Matt Damon. Maybe it's just that he works too hard. Last year, the Oscar winner was scheduled to bring out three movies in the fall and saw Universal move one ("Green Zone") into March of the following year. This coming fall, it will happen again.

Incidentally, the Damon switch means that it's the second movie of the fall-spring season about mystical events surrounding a ballerina. Darren Aronofsky follows up his tour de force "The Wrestler" with "Black Swan,' about mysterious goings-on at the New York ballet, in a likely fall release. And they say Hollywood has abandoned the highbrow.

-- Steven Zeitchik
twitter.com/ZeitchikLAT

Photo: Matt Damon and Emily Blunt in 'The Adjustment Bureau.' Credit: Andy Schwartz / Universal Pictures

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There hasn’t been too much hype for Matt Damon’s upcoming film “The Adjustment Bureau,” but after the trailer was released Thursday, it seems the Internet is abuzz over it, with bloggers and critics asking, "Why haven’t we heard more about this one?”

The movie, based on a short story by Philip K. Dick, will hit theaters in September after Universal pushed back its end-of-summer release date. The trailer begins with ballerina Elise Sellas (Emily Blunt) and Senate candidate David Norris (Matt Damon) meeting each other seemingly for the first time, and it’s evident that immediately there's strong chemistry between them. Their shared glance triggers strong emotions within David — but are those feelings genuine or are they a part of some greater scheme controlled by a group of fedora-wearing men called the Adjustment Bureau?

David’s meeting with Elise was apparently not a part of that plan, and now David has to choose if he wants true love — which would mean sacrificing his political ambitions and apparently her dancing career — or to put his life back on the track it had been on.

The movie, directed by “The Bourne Ultimatum” scribe George Nolfi, seems to strike that rare but perfect balance that makes it appealing to both women and men — there’s a real, interesting romantic relationship at the center of everything that’s shrouded by a science-fiction mystery. We like the mix of flirty vignettes of the couple interspersed with the intense moments between David and the Adjustment Bureau. It also seems to have an “Inception”-esque vibe to it without getting crazily confusing.

That being said, our main qualm with the trailer is that it may give too much away — “just remember, we tried to reason with you,” one member of the bureau warns David. As the couple walks toward a blinding white light and David declares his love for Elise, it seems he opts for free will over fate.

Still, even if we have an idea of where the film is going, we’re intrigued enough to see what will happen once it gets there.

— Amy Kaufman (Twitter.com/AmyKinLA)

Paul Greengrass' films are known for kinetic action and lightning-quick editing, and his latest, the Iraq war thriller "Green Zone," is no exception. Greengrass and cinematographer Barry Ackroyd shot the action sequences in long, continuous takes with multiple cameras that had staggered start times, so one camera would be filming while another was reloading. "This allowed the actors to inhabit their environments more fully," explained editor and co-producer Christopher Rouse, who had to then break the raw footage down into categories (coverage of a single character, for instance) before cutting the scenes together. Up to 20 minutes of action needed to be boiled down to a few minutes on-screen, with individual shots ranging from a few seconds to as little as six frames. "Like the actors, I try to inhabit the scene so that I'm making intuitive choices rather than purely cognitive ones," Rouse said.

-- Patrick Kevin Day

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It's dispiriting to sit back today and soak in just how poorly "Green Zone" performed over the weekend, earning a meager $14.3 million. Depression sets in because the Paul Greengrass movie is legitimately great, a potent thriller and action picture that entertains no matter your politics (we're not the only ones who feel this way -- the movie is the second best-reviewed wide release of the year according to meta-review site Movie Review Intelligence).

But what's even more discouraging about the results is that they offer definitive proof that even the highest-quality filmmaking and the most palatable marketing hook can't save a movie set in a tumultuous Middle East. This was a movie retailed as a Jason Bourne-like thriller made by the director and the star of same, with all the double-crosses, chases and explosions one would want from such a union. And yet no matter how deftly it was executed, audiences didn't see past the topicality. The simple presence of Iraq kept people home, as it has before for films of so many different stripes, tones and budgets.

What's less clear -- and, indeed, what gets under our skin -- is the debate over how specific politics are responsible for the film's failure. "Did politics sink Matt Damon's 'The Green Zone'?" an Atlantic blog asks. Andrew Breitbart's Big Hollywood compares the opening of "Green Zone," unfavorably, to the Damon-Greengrass collaborations "The Bourne Supremacy" and "The Bourne Ultimatum" and implies that politics did this one in. "Gee, I wonder what the difference was [compared to those films]?" the piece asks sarcastically. (Never mind that those two movies were sequels based on a huge Robert Ludlum franchise.)

And in a New York Times op-ed column today, Ross Douthat faults "Green Zone" for "refus[ing] to stare real tragedy in the face, preferring the comforts of a 'Bush lied, people died' reductionism." (Incidentally that's not true -- sure, there's a one-note Paul Bremer-Douglas Feith character played by Greg Kinnear. But the movie is rolling in nuance and is particularly adept at showing internecine Iraqi tribal politics, something no scripted feature has previously done well.)

But even accepting Douthat's one-dimensionality argument, it's hard to see how that played a role in the picture's dismal box office. Douthat draws a contrast to a little Iraq movie that just swept the Oscars. " 'The Hurt Locker,' of course, was largely apolitical," he writes. "Throw politics into the mix, and there seems to be no escaping the clichés and simplifications that mar Greengrass’s movie."