I watched Steven Soderbergh and David Koepp’s Black Bag this evening, and nothing happened. I sat, I glared, I waited. Cupped my ears, but couldn’t hear half of the dialogue. I felt lost almost immediately. I began to search for a detailed synopsis on the phone, couldn’t find one. “What am I watching this thing for?”, I asked myself about an hour in. I began to hate the sleekness, the clever shop talk, the icy-cool vibes. Uninterested; not in the least bit engaged, I’ll have to give it another try when there’s a subtitled option.

From a 9.29.09 N.Y. Times article about Soderbergh by A.O. Scott:

“I will put my cards on the table and say that I have disliked quite a few, perhaps the majority, of Mr. Soderbergh’s movies of the past decade. I’ve been unmoved, perplexed, frustrated, repelled. But I’ve wanted to see them all more than once.

“And I always look forward to the next one. Around the time I was being ushered into that screening of The Informant!, news reports were circulating about “Moneyball,” an adaptation of Michael Lewis’s best seller about the business of baseball that was to star Brad Pitt. The studio, Sony, rejected Mr. Soderbergh’s script and dropped him from the project, and the story became a miniature Hollywood morality tale, either about a studio quashing a filmmaker’s bold vision or about a filmmaker’s self-indulgence reined in by the hard budgetary realities of the business.

“Mr. Soderbergh, in any case, has moved on to new problems and puzzles. And I find it hard not to root for him or to avoid paying him a compliment that is sure to sound more like criticism to some ears, but is really an acknowledgment of the risk he takes, again and again. He cares more about the movies than he cares about the audience.”