A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Monday, June 23, 2025

Black Bag (Steven Soderbergh, 2025)

Michael Fassbender, Tom Burke, and Pierce Brosnan in Black Bag

Cast: Michael Fassbender, Cate Blanchett, Marisa Abela, Tom Burke, Naomie Harris, Regé-Jean Page, Kae Alexander, Ambika Mod, Gustaf Skarsgard, Pierce Brosnan. Screenplay: David Koepp. Cinematography: Steven Soderbergh. Production design: Philip Messina. Film editing: Steven Soderbergh. Music: David Holmes. 

Steven Soderbergh's Black Bag is a solid, satisfying spy thriller that breaks no new ground for the genre, which may be why it was not a success at the box office: There are no spectacular moments, no stunts, no especially gory deaths -- in short, nothing to spark a word of mouth publicity campaign. Its characters are all handsome and sexy but also not very likable. In fact, they delight in getting on each other's nerves. In fact, it feels more like a pilot for a series on a streaming channel like Netflix or Hulu than a stand-alone movie. 

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