I’ll say it: 2 hours and 30 minutes is the worst movie runtime. It’s the unhappy compromise of a film too confused to say what it needs to in two hours and a film too afraid to commit to the full three. Unfortunately, it seems like 2.5 has become a default— a last gasp attempt to “eventize” every movie, no matter how trivial.
Against this backdrop of bloat, movies that can get in and get out in under two hours - something that used to be standard practice - have started to feel special. And at this particular moment, there’s no higher compliment I can pay a film than “lean and mean”, a phrase I often associate with good exploitation movies. Exploitation is far-ranging and difficult to define (less a genre than a catch-all vibe for films too shocking, nasty, or well, exploitative, for the mainstream film culture to otherwise categorize). If exploitation films do have something in common, however, it’s that they’re scrappy by necessity— budgets were typically low, meaning there just wasn’t room to introduce much fat.
Southern Comfort, from 1981 and directed by Walter Hill, isn’t quite an exploitation film (it was studio-backed and released by 20th Century Fox), but its violence and bare bones sensibility are hallmarks of the genre. It’s a genuinely mean film— as unkind to its protagonists as it is to its villains, all set against a backdrop of understated but deep political cynicism around the Vietnam War.
In the film, a squad of Louisiana National Guardsmen convenes in the bayou in 1973 for a routine training exercise. When they get lost and borrow (read: steal) civilian boats to cross a swamp, they unwittingly unleash a life-and-death campaign of retribution from the local Cajun hunter-trappers in the area. What’s the last film you watched that had a set up this simple? The entire film follows the soldiers trying to survive as they get picked off one-by-one. It’s linear and lean in the way exploitation movies often are. The film outlines its parameters quickly (bayou, Cajun hunters, lost soldiers), and then plays so innovatively and creatively within those borders that you forget how simple it really is.
One of the film’s few indulgences is an ensemble cast of nine. However, the size of the cast ultimately only underscores Southern Comfort’s economy, as the film rapidly sketches each character without trailing into endless exposition. The limited backstory means the audience must scrimp and save each line, accumulating details from throwaway dialogue to put together where each man comes from. The leanness of the film, however, isn’t just the result of hiding the ball of each character’s history. Instead, it’s a philosophical choice— knowing something of a man’s past can tell you something about his present, but to understand who a man really is, all you need to see is their reaction to the pressures the film is putting them under.
After the soldiers steal the boats and their captain is killed by the trappers, each soldier reacts in a slightly different way. One turns over the boats and drops the men into the water, whether out of pure panic or a heroic attempt to protect everyone from the gunfire. The second-in-command assumes the leadership role but insists on following the training manual in a way that inspires no confidence. Another man refuses to share the ammunition he has brought with his fellow soldiers— until someone steps in and threatens him with a knife. All the characters are in the exact same pressure cooker, but some simmer, some wilt, and some completely explode.
Our understanding of each character therefore develops directly as a result of the story instead of as a solution to a mystery that must be kept hidden. Nothing in the film is wasted. Every beat of dialogue, every action scene, and every decision accrues meaning, just as the soldiers accrue grime.
A rare recent example of a film with an old-school ethos of spareness is Black Bag, Steven Soderbergh’s sleek spy thriller starring Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett. Unlike Mission Impossible or Bond films, Black Bag derives few of its thrills from the usual spy staples (endless international locations, glamorous events, an uber-masculine central spy). Instead, much like Southern Comfort, it introduces a handful of characters in a basic setting (the upper-middle class landing pads of London - townhouses and office skyscrapers), then winds them up and watches them go.
There’s none of the grime or nastiness of Southern Comfort, but there is a linear focus to the film that harks back to the simplicity of exploitation. The twisty espionage plot is really only a mcguffin to explore characters reacting to a central pressure: being under suspicion. Black Bag is far less interested in saving the world and far more interested in what the people who are supposed to be saving the world are actually doing in their everyday lives. This shift in perspective explains why the most intense scenes in the film are dinner parties instead of high-thrill chase sequences.
At 93 minutes, Black Bag is about as lean as they come, and amid a pretty abysmal first three months of 2025 moviegoing, I welcome a spy movie from Soderbergh. However, the film is so consciously pared back and so conspicuous in its aloofness, that when compared to Southern Comfort, it makes me long for simplicity without sacrifice. Black Bag is a film with a $50M budget parading as a lean, mean movie from the past. Its deliberate excising of any distraction from the main plot means the film has an emptiness to it, a sense that if we push too far, it would simply cease to exist, like a video game failing to render.
Not every movie has to be nasty, mean exploitation for it to be lean. But Black Bag proves there are still lessons we can learn from films like Southern Comfort about narrative drive, shrewd character development, and unshowy simplicity. Regardless, at this point, I’m still grateful for any film that actually knows how to leave something on the cutting room floor. Celebrities might be in their Ozempic-era, but in Hollywood, if you’re looking for a film without fat, it’s slim-pickings out there.
Culture Crumbs
The revelation that Southern Comfort was re-released in Iran with a completely different plot line in which anti-war soldiers are killed off one-by-one as planned by U.S. authorities
Rumors are swirling once again that Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney are dating after she broke off her engagement and showed up at Glen’s sister’s wedding…
This New Yorker interview with Sarah Snook, currently starring in The Picture of Dorian Gray on Broadway, which is a genuinely innovative show if you can see past the ticket price
The substack 11am Saturday, which asks critical questions about moviegoing preferences to fun people in the industry— see Bilge Ebiri’s interview here
Paul Schrader’s First Reformed alone, at the Metrograph, at 3:45PM on a Sunday
After a very long and accidental hiatus, B&B is back! It has, unbelievably, been over four years since I started this newsletter. Thank you so much for reading.