Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh is like a box of chocolates. You’re never sure what you are going to get. His recent releases -- the epic political biography Che and the low-budget independent art film on the world of call girls, The Girlfriend Experience -- have virtually nothing in common with his newest film, The Informant!, a jaunty comedy about a real-life corporate whistle-blower starring his Ocean’s Eleven (and …Twelve and …Thirteen) cast member, Matt Damon.

With its opening titles that wink at us while declaring the movie’s fidelity to fact and the sitcom-like bounce of the Marvin Hamlisch musical soundtrack, The Informant! all but insists that it is nothing to be taken seriously. Although its plot is not too far off from Soderbergh’s earlier, earnest Erin Brockovich, the breezy tone of The Informant! is far more reminiscent of Steven Spielberg’s fable of lighthearted larceny, Catch Me If You Can.

Instead of an impostor, it concerns a duplicitous biochemist for Archer Daniels Midland, the agribusiness conglomerate which specializes in corn syrup derivatives, food additives and price-fixing. As Mark Whitacre, the longtime executive who goes undercover to gain evidence against the company for the FBI, Damon is blithely nerdy. Having added 30 pounds, a fake-looking mustache and a cheesy hairpiece, he brings the suave James Bond to no one’s mind except his own.

When Whitacre agrees to become a double agent for the feds, strapping on a wire to obtain the aural evidence of collusion, he is suddenly excited by the idea of becoming a government hero and do-gooder. In addition, he is so far out of touch with reality he sees himself succeeding to the top ranks of the company once his corrupt superiors are hauled off to jail.

The only problem is Whitacre is not that bright, and he blunders his way through many an electronic eavesdropping situation that he bungles. Or maybe he is far smarter than any observer would ever give him credit for, because we eventually learn that he has been siphoning off millions of dollars along the way.

The book that all of this is based upon is deadly serious in tone, but Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns have turned it into a goofy comedy. The voiceover narration by the Whitacre character is laced with nutty irony and the mere fact that all of this could have actually happened becomes a darkly wry statement of how screwed up the corporate landscape -- and the federal justice system -- really are.

Standouts in the cast are Scott Bakula as Whitacre’s increasingly incredulous FBI contact and Melanie Lynskey as his puzzled, but loyal wife. Still, the crucial performance that makes the whole movie work as well as it does comes from Damon. Though he fancies himself an Ian Fleming secret agent, his lumbering gait and one-beat-too-slow verbal delivery puts the lie to that image. He makes us identify with him, picturing ourselves in such a quandary and rooting for his unlikely extrication from the enveloping net around him.

All of these filmmaking choices are risky, and the movie has its share of misfires and miscalculations. But we have seen the straight dramatic version of stories along these lines, so another would likely be redundant. The Informant! is an odd, often unbalanced, minor film, but brash and surprisingly entertaining.

THE INFORMANT! Studio: Warner Bros.; Director: Steven Soderbergh; Starring: Matt Damon, Scott Bakula, Melanie Lynskey. Rated: R. Opens: Friday, at most commercial venues

Unassuming and wildly unlikely, Herbie and Dorothy Vogel would not seem out of place in a South Florida condo, whiling away their retirement years with a hot game of gin rummy or mah-jongg. Instead, as the affectionate documentary Herb & Dorothy recounts, they are the toast of the New York art scene as nurturing, instinctive patrons who amassed a major collection worth millions of dollars.

The fact that they did this on two civil service salaries makes their story all the more amazing. He was a postal worker who never finished high school and she was a librarian. Throughout their lives, they lived on her income and used his to buy art, often supporting significant, but unrecognized artists when no one else would, paying for the work in installments when necessary.

Director Megumi Sasaki, a former journalist, takes us on a tour of the Vogels’ world, into their tiny, rent-controlled Manhattan apartment, filled with pet fish, turtles and cat, stuffed with artwork, which adorns the walls and ceiling, but is mainly stacked in piles or shoved under their bed. When they eventually donate their collection to the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., it amounts to nearly 5,000 pieces of art which requires five massive moving vans to transport it to its new home.

Much of the film, which opens Friday and plays for the week at Lake Worth’s Emerging Cinemas, focuses on the artists that the Vogels discover and champion. They concentrated on Minimalism and conceptual art, which was beginning to emerge in the ’60s. It is not that they necessarily understood the art -- the Vogels readily concede that they did not -- but it was what they could afford. Still, many of the artists, from Chuck Close to James Siena to Christo, talk of what good, knowing taste the Vogels have.

For their part, they explain that they only had three rules of acquisition. They had to afford the art, it had to be portable enough to be brought home in a taxi cab or a subway car and it had to fit in their apartment. Some of the work is highly minimal, like the piece of rope with frayed ends that Mike Wallace is particularly skeptical of during his 60 Minutes interview with the Vogels. (Yes, they became media darlings too, for their story is so deliciously irresistible.)

They began collecting just as the art market was beginning to explode, so the collection soon spiraled in value. But the Vogels were adamant that they were not doing this for money and they never sold anything they had bought. They felt that they truly were custodians of the art, so they eventually went in search of the right institution to donate it to, with the same care that they gathered it in the first place.

Herb & Dorothy is foremost a great story, but Sasaki gets exceptional cooperation and access from the Vogels, following them as they go on buying visits to their favorite artists and to chic art gallery openings, where they seem all the more out of place.

Originally, both Herb and Dorothy yearned to be artists themselves, but when they accepted the fact that they were insufficiently talented, they threw themselves into collecting with a similar passion. The way they have make art the center of their lives is both amusing and inspiring, well summed up in this entertaining hour and a half.

HERB AND DOROTHY. Studio: Fine Line Media; Director: Megumi Sasaki; Rated: Not rated; Screens: 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. Friday through Sunday, 4 p.m. Monday through Wednesday, 4 p.m. and 8 p.m. Thursday, Black Box Theatre at the Lake Worth Playhouse. Call 586-6410.

Caricature can be an incredibly damning cross to bear. Just ask Yoko Ono, Joan Rivers and Sarah Palin, to name a few prominent women whose names have been partially or forever sullied by the media’s manipulation of their characters.

When perception becomes reality, truth blurs into fiction: Sarah Palin never said, “I can see Russia from my house,” just as Marie Antoinette, another victim of caricature, never proclaimed, “Let them eat cake.”

This is not an effort to launch a pity party for Palin -- just to provide context to which Anna Wintour, the longtime editor of Vogue, certainly can relate. In Lauren Weisberger’s bestselling The Devil Wears Prada, cruel and heartless fashion editor Miranda Priestly was the Charles Foster Kane to Wintour’s William Randolph Hearst, and Meryl Streep’s wicked onscreen portrayal of Priestly all but cemented the caricature of Wintour as an icy witch who treats her numerous underlings like ratty pairs of Levi’s.

Even her name sounds chilling: Wintour, a word evoking the frostiest of the four seasons while simultaneously suggesting a kind of dinosaurish creature out of Final Fantasy: Be sure to buy this potion for the best defense against the winged wintour!

But if The September Issue, a new documentary about Wintour and the development of Vogue’s fattest issue ever, accomplishes anything, it humanizes the lithe fashion mogul, whose pageboy haircut and no-nonsense demeanor have been staples at every major international fashion event for decades. Sure, she can kill careers with -- literally -- the blink of an eye, and she doesn’t have much tolerance for anything less than perfection, but since when did this become a negative attribute? Since when did your boss need to be your friend?

Wintour’s perceived ruthlessness could just as easily be labeled “efficiency” without any spin. She knows what she wants and is not one to waste time. And the results speak for themselves.

But aside from revising Wintour’s polarizing public image, this documentary, directed by War Room producer R.J. Cutler, is too puffy and lightweight to challenge anything about the world of fashion journalism, a term many would consider an oxymoron. It has plenty of amusing moments, mostly stemming from the day-to-day quarrels between Wintour and Grace Coddington, the magazine’s model-turned-creative-director and one of the few members of the Vogue establishment willing to stand up to, and even defy, her boss.

But unlike Cutler’s War Room, a timeless and essential political document, one gets the impression that he’s sacrificed some of journalistic objectivity for the starry appeal of insider perks. Nobody comes off looking negatively here, and as the magazine risks a crash-and-burn just a week before its biggest issue closes, it’s hard to believe there wasn’t more backstage drama than the restrained snippiness Cutler presents.

Nor does Cutler address the controversy surrounding some of Wintour’s decisions. He credits her as a trailblazer for placing celebrities on the magazine’s covers, but fails to mention the outrage from animal-rights activists over her single-handed revitalization of fur.

The film’s finest and most illuminating moments find Cutler interviewing Wintour and her daughter at home, digging beneath the showbiz glitz and office grind to probe the editor about what the rest of her family of esteemed political journalists and activists think about her career (“They’re amused by it,” she says, revealing some self-awareness with a tinge of melancholy).

Her daughter Bee has no interest in the fashion world and instead is pursuing a law degree. This discussion leads to an awkward moment between daughter and mother in which Anna is seemingly unwilling to accept this reality. Bee elaborates in a one-on-one sit-down with Cutler in which she criticizes the silly, life-or-death importance of her mother’s industry, which will come off as a voice of blasphemy or rationalism depending on the viewer.

Would that Cutler have taken this distinction a bit further and looked at the social and cultural implications of Vogue and its multimillion-dollar industry -- or at least provided more of Wintour the person, less of Wintour the editor -- it could have been more than a myopic vindication story debunking his subject’s caricature. But that’s about all it is.

Wintour closes the film herself by asking Cutler, “So what else?” I couldn’t help wondering the same thing.

John Thomason is a freelance writer based in South Florida.

THE SEPTEMBER ISSUE. Director: R.J. Cutler; Distributor: Roadside Attractions; Opens: Friday; Venue: Most area theaters

The final weekend before Labor Day is usually a movie dumping ground and this year’s is no exception.

Opening on Friday is All About Steve, an actively annoying vehicle for Sandra Bullock as a socially inept, crossword puzzle constructor know-it-all who becomes fixated on a cable news cameraman. Unless the rest of the year is a disaster, this one is assured a place on my 10 Worst list.

Then there is World’s Greatest Dad, which brings superlatives to mind, but “greatest” isn’t one of them. It stars the increasingly woeful Robin Williams as a school teacher whose son accidentally kills himself in the midst of an act of self-gratification. (Did I say that tastefully enough?)

The dad gets out the word that the boy committed suicide and he distributes an anguished diary that he ghost-writes. Like many Williams films, it goes from strained to maudlin by the final reel. (By midweek, the movie’s theatrical release was scrubbed and will now be available only on video-on-demand.)

That leaves Extract, an amiable, though forgettable comedy from Mike Judge, who gave us the slacker pair of Beavis and Butthead and the satirical King of the Hill. More to the point, he wrote and directed the cult favorite feature film Office Space in 1999 and is back again with another workplace comedy.

While Office Space’s humor is seen from the viewpoint of the employees in the cubicle trenches, Extract is the tale of downward spiral of Joel Reynolds, owner of a flavor-extract manufacturing business, those little bottles of artificial root beer, cherry and vanilla.

Joel (played by the likeable Jason Bateman) is a decent enough guy, hard-working and fair-minded with his employees. In short, destined for a major fall. The root cause of his personal and professional woes is Joel’s sexual frustration, since he works too late to get some action from his indifferent wife (Kristen Wiig). The object of his sudden obsession is a new employee, a hottie named Cindy (Mila Kunis), who also happens to be a ruthless liar and thief.

Add to the mix a former co-worker of Joel’s, a pill-pushing bartender (Ben Affleck, almost unrecognizable in dark beard and long hair) who convinces him to hire a gigolo to try and seduce his wife. If the gigolo succeeds, then Joel will be justified in putting the moves on Cindy.

Meanwhile, an assembly line accident leaves a slow-witted redneck worker testicularly challenged. He is soon convinced by Cindy to hire a pitbull liability lawyer (Gene Simmons) to sue Joel’s company, which puts the brakes on an offer by General Mills to buy the extract mill.

Extract is a low-key farce, an improbable but marginally possible series of setbacks that should convince moviegoers they never want to run a business.

Bateman, who played the yuppie potential adopting father in Juno, is again a suburban Everyman, easy to identify with, flaws and all. Kunis (the sultry desk clerk in Forgetting Sarah Marshall) again steams up the screen -- or maybe it was just my glasses -- and newcomer Dustin Milligan amuses as the dunderhead hunk gigolo. Irrelevant to the main plot, but one more thorn in Joel’s side is his boring, overbearing neighbor (droning, motor-mouthed David Koechner).

Judge’s humor is awfully dry, particularly when compared to the in-your-face comedy of a Judd Apatow, but if you are stuck for a movie this weekend, Extract is the best of an underwhelming bunch.

EXTRACT. Studio: Miramax; Director: Mike Judge; Starring: Jason Bateman, Mila Kunis, Kristen Wiig, Ben Affleck, J.K. Simmons; Rated: R; Venues: Opens Friday, most commercial houses