Black Bag: Pick It Up

Just saw Black Bag, which popped up on Peacock on May 2, after debuting in theaters here in the U. S. on March 14.  It has a lot to commend itself,  including a top-notch cast, with Michael Fassbender (whom I just saw in The Agency, the CIA in London series which I reviewed the first three episodes of here), Cate Blanchett (who starred in lots of great movies and series, including recently Disclaimer, a brilliant literary psychological drama which I reviewed here), and Pierce Brosnan (formerly Remington Steele and James Bond, of course, currently starring in Mobland (giving a tour-de-force performance as a gang boss; I'll be reviewing it after its finale next week, but I can tell you now that it has one of the best theme songs I've heard in many a year).

Black Bag actually has some music running through it, too.  It has some action, but most of the time it's more a chess-piece cosy that Agatha Christie would have appreciated.  It also, like The Agency, flaunts the very best of current and possibly imagined AI and digital media in the spy-craft it details.  But its best feature is Fassbender's George and Blanchette's Kathryn as a loving couple who are likely good guys, and the rest of George's team, evenly matched between men and women who are also romantically involved in one way or another.

If I had a complaint, it probably would be that the narrative resolved itself a little too quickly, and may have played better as a limited series of three or four episodes.  Also, the villain was not as ingenuously concealed as in Agatha Christie's work, and maybe more time for that story to spool out would have been helpful too.

But the mix of espionage and romance worked well, and one advantage of a movie over a TV series is that you're not investing as much time in watching a movie as you would a series, so the movie's lack of perfection is less objectionable.

Disclaimer: Media vs. Reality

I just finished watching Disclaimer on Apple TV+, the seven-episode series adapted from Renée Knight's novel of the same name, which I haven't read.  The short series has so many twists and turns, that I'm really going to try to give you a review with no spoilers, and try hard to confine myself to the powerful and deep generalities that animate the narrative.

Well, I will say this about the first episode, which I suppose constitutes a spoiler of sorts.  I had almost no idea what was going on in that opening episode.  It wasn't until the end of the second episode that I began to get a glimmer of what was going on.  And by the third episode, I was coming to the conclusion that Disclaimer is one outstanding series, the likes of which I can't quite recall ever seeing on any television or laptop screen before.

It's erotic, reminiscent of the first R-rated movies I saw in theaters with my girlfriend now my wife many decades ago.  It's also an increasingly breathtaking mystery, with lives almost literally hanging in the balance.  But it's most of all a story about media, about the circumstances under which we may take them for reality, and the very deadly dangers of so doing. I'm not talking about fake news, though I suppose Disclaimer does have some connection to the rash of fake news that's been plaguing this world and our lives for years now.

But I was thinking more specifically of the photograph, which thanks to our mobile phones, has become as easy and ubiquitous as the blink of an eye.  As I often point out in my books and in my classes at Fordham University, the painting is an interpretation of reality, in contrast to the photograph, which is of reality.  But how much of it?  Certainly not all of reality, or even more than a split second of it.  If we want to capture a bigger time slice of reality, we need to move from photo to video.  But even a video has a beginning and an ending, and it doesn't capture what happened an instant before or after the video.

And then there's the written memoir.  Now words on a page or screen quite obviously are not reality, they are at most descriptions of reality.  But that knowledge doesn't stop us from taking memoirs seriously, as truthful accountings of what really happened.  But how can we tell the difference between a memoir that is utterly factual and a novel that is pure fiction?   Not as easily as you might think, especially if the work has not been published as yet, and in that process has been officially labelled as memoir or novel.  (I recommend Caroline Shannon Davenport's Terror at the Sound of a Whistle as an example of an excellent memoir that reads like a novel.)  And what of a book published as a novel but thought to be a truthful memoir by the publisher?

Well, I hope you see enough of where I'm going with this -- but not too much -- and if these issues and questions interest and even fascinate you as much as they do me, and you're in the mood for an R-rated series brought to life by outstanding acting and directing,with Cate Blanchett and Kevin Kline in unforgettable leading roles and Leila George as the erotic interest, and Indira Varma with a narrating voice, created by and directed to perfection by Alfonso Cuarón -- trust me, you can't go wrong with Disclaimer.