Stop And Appreciate 'Black Bag' Before It's Gone (Plus: 'The Electric State' Massacre)
#312: "Black Bag," "The Electric State," "Big Trouble in Little China," "The Studio"
Edition 312:
Hey movie lovers!
This week: Steven Soderbergh is out here grinding again, and nobody is properly respecting it. As for movies you can feel free to disrespect, look no further than Netflix’s $300 blockbuster, and a mid-80s farce. Oh, and don’t sleep on AppleTV+! In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” the first look at the new Paul Thomas Anderson movie starring Leo!!
Black Bag
The one trait I admire and respect most about Steven Soderbergh — and there’s a lot to pick from, considering this is the Oscar winning director behind the Oceans trilogy, Erin Brockovich, Contagion and so many others — is his desire and willingness to just try stuff. Smaller budget? Straight-to-streaming? Self-distributed? Who cares!
In the last five years (since 2019), he’s made eight features and directed on two mini-series. That’s wild. You may remember I was just talking about him in this newsletter a month ago when Presence came out. Two movies in two months!
His movies are always interesting, always competent, and always him. Regardless of whether it’s shot on an iPhone (High Flying Bird), shot on a cruise ship crossing the Atlantic (Let Them All Talk), or in recent years painting within the lines of hard genre like noir (No Sudden Move), thriller (Kimi), horror (Presence) or now spy movies, you know it’s a Soderbergh movie by the way he keeps his audience in the dark, doling out bread crumbs of information that give an audience just enough to stay engaged and fascinated but not so much that it spoils what is usually a big reveal ending (one of his other signatures is the replay back through the story at the end after the big reveal to explain everything you missed the first time, with a big a-ha!).
Black Bag is the biggest, most commercial project he’s put together during that span. You’ve got two big movie stars in the lead roles, Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett, as British spies who are married to each other. You’ve got Pierce Brosnan in that classic suits and glasses intelligence boss role, Marisa Abela as a femme fatale and René-Jean Page as a semi-villain. In look and feel all of this is not dissimilar to a James Bond movie, at first glance.
But this is not a $200 or $300 million blockbuster. It’s not Mr and Mrs Smith. There’s no car chases or shootouts. Because you simply cannot do the usual “action/adventure” elements of a spy movie on a reported $50-60 million budget.
So what you get is a 1hr33min movie about people in different rooms talking. Now, that’s not to say the movie is boring. Far from it. There’s plenty of that spy lingo and lying and espionage to keep a viewer hooked, and if anything, when there is one…ehem…stunt moment (no spoilers) at the very end, it lands much harder because of how unexpected it is.
Of course, because this is a spy movie, there’s a crucial piece of intelligence that’s leaked and they have to find the rat. And of course they all suspect it’s each other. But Soderbergh’s genius is to overlay that classic story with a deeper story about marriage and the things we do and do not share with our loved ones (the movie’s name comes from the primary couple’s safe word for “I can’t talk about that”).
This is the best movie of 2025 so far, primarily because of the acting performances of Fassbender and Blanchett on either side of that marriage. She is the epitome of cool and mysterious, and he’s so good at playing spy-types that he’s done it four times in the past two years (The Killer, “The Agency,” and Kneecap). I love it every single time — he might rank among my favorite actors currently.
The real shame of it is that because there’s no sizzle here, it’s almost certainly a money-losing proposition regardless of its quality. A half-dozen movie stars and one of the signature directors of the past 30 years is not enough (not even close) to draw an audience in 2025.
After just $25 million at the box office, the movie will try to leg out a break-even in VOD and streaming.
Years from now, when the chaos of our current Hollywood moment has hopefully settled, we’re going to see that the problem was never “oh we’re running out of ideas” and instead it was “wow we really gave our money and attention to the wrong things.”
Because movies like Black Bag will stand the test of time and still be watched and loved 10, 20 or 30 years in the future.
Something New
The Electric State (The Netflix): This movie is the convergence of literally everything I’ve complained about, ranted against and called to exterminate from modern movies for the past several years, all rolled up into one stinking pile of poopoo — “The Chewbacca Problem” (and yes, I was on this years before its recent popularity bump on The Ringer), blockbuster mumbo jumbo storytelling, lifeless CGI/green screen aesthetics, offensively inoffensive themes, the nonexistent cultural impact of a streaming-only release, and the coup de gras…Mille Bobby Brown’s acting.
My 2020 observation that the social media superstar (63.6 million IG followers!!) picks her projects based on what aesthetic “era” (in Swiftie parlance) would make for good social content has proven true once again, this time with blonde hair, dark eyeliner, a cyberpunk wardrobe, and the same lifeless acting style.
One has to imagine that her control as an executive and creative producer on her movies — a privilege granted to her at age 16, les we forget, and yielded two Enola Holmes monstrosities and the Damsel disaster — must mercifully be reigned in after helping spend $320 million on a project that has been pummeled by every critic and viewer with two eyes and a brain.
The heist of studio money only continues for the Russo brothers, who fail upward back to Marvel after directing this and The Grey Man for Netflix (two of the worst big budget movies of the century), and “Citadel” for Amazon (an expensive flop), to make two more giant giant blockbusters in the MCU. Their ability to “oversee” and “caretake” big IP slop cannot (and in my opinion, never could) be mistaken for creativity.
All told, I wish I could undergo the surgery from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind just to eliminate this movie and its component parts from my memory.
Something Old
Big Trouble In Little China (1986, Amazon Prime): This mid-80s farcical action comedy directed by John Carpenter (Halloween, Escape From New York) is an interesting cultural artifact, because it demands to be taken unseriously. It’s one of those movies that’s so campy and ridiculous you can’t help but laugh at and with it simultaneously.
That’s good because on its face, it might rank among the most racist movies ever made — Kurt Russell’s bumbling, macho truck driver gets mixed up in and stumble through a Chinese underworld packed with every stereotype imaginable.
It’s easy with modern eyes to look accusingly at the 80s and think “WOW, they thought this was ok back then?” when the truth is, they knew exactly what they were doing even at the time (“is big trouble in little china racist” is a popular search term). (To be fair, it’s equal opportunity stereotyping for the white characters, who are dumb, confident, and obsessed with guns and women.) The movie is in fact so ridiculous that I believe it upends those stereotypes, as if poking fun at it is the final act of victory over the characterization. As Roger Ebert said in his review, "It may not be true that Chinatowns are honeycombed with subterranean throne rooms, but isn't it kind of fun once in a while to pretend?”
Something To Stream
The Studio (Apple): Don’t look now, but Apple is on fire. “Severance” is the buzziest show of the year so far, with strong viewership to match. The company is trying hard to convince us The Gorge is a streaming movie hit (my expectations are low), and I’ve heard John Hamm’s “Your Friends and Neighbors” and newsletter favorite Brian Tyree Hentry’s “Dope Thief” are both good.
It was enough to convince me to resubscribe to the service and start to work through everything, starting with this behind-the-scenes Hollywood dramedy from Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg about the misadventures of Rogen’s fictional studio chief. Much like 1992’s The Player, this show serves as a send-up of the industry and all of the reasons why nothing good ever gets made, but unlike that movie, this show has a really soft heart underneath it and shows a deep romanticism for the moviemaking process.
The narrative propulsion of each episode, made with long takes and luxurious set design, make the show an absolute pleasure to watch even if you don’t “get” every cameo, name-drop and inside joke that make the show hilarious for nerds like me.
Trailer Watch: One Battle After Another
We’re about to find out just how much juice Leonardo DiCaprio still has with audiences, and whether he can bring out more than just the hardcore movie-lovers who are already salivating about this new joint from master filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson (Licorice Pizza, The Master, There Will Be Blood). It’s likely to be more on the artistic end of the spectrum than commercial, but as this first trailer suggests, there are guns and talk of revolution, so maybe it can be the rare double-play. You can count on me to be lined up to see it opening weekend.
I was suprised by but enjoied the movie