C&C 69: Recent Release Roundup
The telephones of SEPTEMBER 5, the accessories of BLACK BAG, the vibe of EEPHUS
Almost a month out from the Academy Awards and I still haven’t caught up with all ten Best Picture nominees, a state of affairs that at one time in my life would have been unthinkable. I can say that I liked September 5 (2024) more than any of the contenders I’ve seen. There was hope that the film would be a player during awards season, and it did end up a finalist for the top prize from the Producers Guild and the Golden Globes as well as landing an Oscar nod for its screenplay by Moritz Binder, Alex David, and director Tim Fehlbaum. Playing like a contained thriller, it follows the ABC Sports crew assigned to the 1972 Munich Olympics who are abruptly thrust into a drama when Israeli athletes are taken hostage by the militant group Black September mere yards from where they’re broadcasting. The tension mounts as the team learns on the fly how to practice a different kind of journalism both logistically—can we get one of our studio cameras outside?—and ethically once they realize the terrorists are watching their live coverage. The film is also a tribute to the gloriously tactile nature of bygone technology: telephones with huge, clunky buttons; film cannisters smuggled in and out of the Olympic Village; onscreen graphics that must be painstakingly assembled one letter at a time, using tweezers. The action is built around archival footage of beloved ABC Sports anchor Jim McKay, with Benjamin Walker offering an uncanny Peter Jennings and Leonie Benesch (Babylon Berlin) as a translator who becomes central to the enterprise.
Calling the shots is Peter Sarsgaard as Roone Arledge. The ABC sports honcho is impressive as he cuts last-second deals for satellite time and lobbies on behalf of his untested staff. But the movie is ambiguous about his motives, leaving you unsure whether he’s chasing the story or the glory. After all, his watchword for the Olympics coverage is to stress emotion, as befits the producer of Wide World of Sports and its focus on “the thrill of victory … and the agony of defeat.” With September 5 bookending Shattered Glass (2003), in which the actor delivers one of my favorite performances of this century as New Republic editor Charles Lane, Sarsgaard is now the patron saint of contemporary journalism films.1
Last month, I was in the theater to see Presence, written by David Koepp and directed by Steven Soderbergh. This month I went back to see them at it again with Black Bag (2025). The first movie is spare and almost experimental, while the follow-up is sinuous, big-star filmmaking at once casual and precise. Secret agent Michael Fassbender is assigned to uncover which of five colleagues could have pilfered some critical software, with one of the suspects being his wife (Cate Blanchett). Delicious fun ensues. I needed this movie, smart and made for adults, especially married ones. It’s also, unexpectedly, a clothes showcase, because it turns out I needed Fassbender in his Harry Palmer glasses and weathered but natty fishing togs; Pierce Brosnan in his gorgeous suits slyly riffing on his 007 years; Blanchett zipping up her knee-high leather boots before unleashing mayhem. I needed all of it. Interviews with Soderbergh, a relentlessly inventive filmmaker, are always worth reading, including this one with Matt Zoller Seitz for Vulture in which he describes the challenges of directing not one but two twelve-page dinner table scenes that become “the action sequences of the film.”
It’s nice to have, so early in the year, a 2025 film that I truly love. On the one hand, Eephus—named after an obscure pitch—is so authentically inside baseball that it doesn’t seem to have been made for a niche audience so much as a specific list of people on which my name happens to appear: Guys of a Certain Age Who Subscribe to FanGraphs and Also Know Who Frederick Wiseman Is. On the other hand, it’s about a subject relevant to everyone, the passage of time and those rare moments in life when you can sense an end coming.
Eephus unfolds on a crisp October Sunday in a western Massachusetts town in the 1990s. Two beer league teams get together to play, the movie starting when the unofficial scorekeeper arrives and ending when he heads home, another result in the books. But this time there’s a difference. It’s not only the last game of the season, but the last one to be played on this community field, slated to be plowed under so a new school can be built. And considering that the next closest ballpark is half an hour’s drive away and in lousy condition, it’s also likely to be the last time any of these mostly middle-aged men trot onto a diamond.2 Every frame of this film is freighted with finality. The next generation won’t remember that the field was ever there. People are already making Halloween plans, and there’s even an early Thanksgiving greeting. Christmas’ll be here before you know it.
The teams square off, and keep playing even though they start running out of light and baseballs. Co-writer/director Carson Lund3 moves around the field, eavesdropping on the players in no rush to go to the Aces for post-game shooters and sliders. Each individual registers so strongly in their brief snippets of chatter and trash talk. The guy who never finishes a thought, the one who is perpetually angry, the kid who knows a lot but doesn’t have anything figured out.4 The legendary Bill “Spaceman” Lee, supreme evangelist for the eephus pitch, wanders out of the woods to serve up a few meatballs along with his crackpot wisdom. The film is bighearted enough to also check in on the spectators who happen by—bored kids, stoners, retirees, supportive family members—as part of its salute to having places to go and people to see.
Today is Opening Day. I’ve written before about what baseball means to me. The OMG Mets helped make 2024 bearable, and I expect to lean into the sport even more this year. I also have no doubt I’ll revisit Eephus, a miraculous movie that captures the feeling I have when I attend a game and stand up to leave when it’s over, taking one more look at the field in the hope that the players will sprint back out, ready to play two. Because where else would I rather be?
What I’m Reading
Speaking of things I needed, atop that list is this gem of an essay by Jason Wilson on drinking wine as an act of resistance. Come for the Wes Anderson love, stay for the shots at wellness culture.
What I’m Drinking
Speaking of Steven Soderbergh, in addition to making movies at a superhuman rate, he also imports Singani 63, the Bolivian eau-de-vie comparable to pisco. He was introduced to it by a crew member during the production of his two-part historical epic Che (2008). In 2019, I spotlighted a Singani cocktail in Noir City magazine. Jeremy Floyd christened his concoction The Bitter Stems after Los Tallos Amargos (1955), a film from Argentina rediscovered and restored by Noir City’s publisher, the Film Noir Foundation. The drink combines Singani with that Argentine obsession Fernet-Branca. Floyd offers two variations, depending on whether you’re using the “more earthy” Argentine version or the “surprisingly sweet” domestic one. Whichever you choose, The Bitter Stems the movie is now playing on the Criterion Channel as part of its Argentine Noir series, with most of the films restored by the FNF.
The Bitter Stems, by Jeremy Floyd
1 ½ oz. Singani
¾ oz. sweet vermouth
¾ oz. Argentinian Fernet-Branca, or replace with:
.375 oz. American Fernet-Branca and
.375 oz. Cynar or Averna
Stir. Strain. Garnish with an orange twist.
It’s weird the movies that stick with you. To this day, I parrot Hayden Christensen’s needy, plaintive “Are you mad at me, Chuck?”
Witness the forlorn looks they cast at the adjacent soccer pitch, which has been spared because it’s the sport the kids love.
Lund also served as cinematographer on Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point (2024), from the same filmmaking collective, Omnes Films.
My personal avatar: the dude who mutters “Mother Machree” whenever he exerts himself.