Here's another clue for you all - GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY -- dir. Rian Johnson; Daniel Craig, Edward Norton, Kate Hudson, Dave Bautista, Janelle Monáe, etc etc

We may as well give the previous film it's own thread.

I feel like this should be pretty spoilers-friendly, like if you're clicking on this thread now, you should be prepared to see some shit? If some of you disagree that's fine, we can sort it out.

Without spoilers though, I can't imagine what it must be like to be Rian Johnson, to have made a film largely relating to the character of millionaire 'disrupters', and for it to open now, after $50 billion of free advertising over the last four weeks.

Also this film rules go see it.

does billionaires gets shanked y/n

or millionaires, i'm not picky

y

(I mean, it's a millionaire-rich environment, throw a rock, etc)

This one's great fun, pretty different from the first. As I teased on the other thread, Johnson's timing re: a certain tech dude's public immolation/humiliation is uncanny.

Anyway, I only discerned one minor plot hole: The (literal) smoking gun is still somewhere on the island, right? If the police eventually found the gun or not, Helen has the bullet lodged in the journal, and the hole in her suit, as proof that someone tried to kill her, which is still a pretty major crime. Whether or not they could pin it on Miles specifically, *someone* attempted that murder, and given it was only this handful of folks on the island, it's not like the police would just let them all go. They'd all at least be suspects. But that is super minor and ultimately irrelevant, since the conclusion played out in a totally different direction.

I would like at least three more of these ASAP

This was fun.

I'm bewildered by a bizarre bankruptcy of Benoit Blanc books, bordering barratry.

the internet is here for you, friend

this was entertaining although maybe a tad weaker than Knives Out. I thought Daniel Craig, Janelle Monae, and Edward Norton were all great, but a lot of the other characters felt much too thinly drawn. Knives Out did a better job of making each character weird and compelling.

Yeah, though sometimes it's just that they got to do a thing - Michael Shannon doesn't get much time, but he does get that one scene where he terrifies Ana de Armas. Leslie Odom Jr. doesn't get that, nor does Kathryn Hahn.

I could have done with more Peg - I heard that they were considering Audrey Plaza for the role, which might've made it bigger?

I think a difference is that all the suspects were like a big school of fish, sticking together as a unit and turning together as needed. They all essentially had the same motivation and less individual characterization (though a couple of them were of course pretty colorful), which sanded off some potential complexity. Also, because of their relationship to Miles, they never seemed to hate one another, unlike the characters in the first movie. But for sure as wild cards Peg (and Derol) didn't get much development, though Whiskey's turns were welcome.

Perfect little entertainment and yes impeccably accidentally timed.

It is though insane to me that it's 139 minutes long -- wtf happened to 90 or 104-minute movies since the pandeic?

the pandemic too

Knives Out is 150?

Ugh this sh1t again

also was surprised that this was a pandemic movie. they used it pretty well.

Knives Out is 150?

― Andrew Farrell

Exactly!

twas delightful. try to see it before it stupidly disappears until the streaming release

Well, the reportedly $180 million Disney cartoon "Strange World" made $28 million on 4000 screens, while "Glass Onion" (a $40 million movie) made $13 million on 700 or so, maybe it will expand a bit? I have no idea why Netflix settled for a limited run, since the last movie was a sleeper smash and this one is a crowd pleaser.

(Sorry, Strange World I guess cost more like $130, Glass Onion made more like $15.)

https://deadline.com/2022/11/strange-world-bombs-box-office-disney-glass-onion-bob-iger-bob-chapek-1235182222/#comments

Netflix payed something like $400 million for rights to Glass Onion and Untitled Benoit Blanc Mystery #3 sometime in 2020/2021 (in what will probably prove to be the last hurrah of Netflix’s profligate spending on tentpole content); the theatrical run is probably partly just a favor to Johnson and partly a marketing campaign so that the film’s biggest fans will spend the next month telling their friends to reup Netflix so they can stream it on Christmas. It’s hard to see how this pencils out for Netflix in the end but maybe if they don’t get a subscriber pop out of it they’ll try to return it to theaters in January

That said, if you don’t get to the theater this week, definitely reup Netflix in December and watch with your family! It’s good!

Then probably cancel Netflix again

aiui the limited screens this week are fourwalled by Netflix, and non-bigtwo theatres or chains are going to be allowed to bid to book it after the Netflix streaming debut

Anyway, I only discerned one minor plot hole

I bet Johnson would be super-embarrassed to realise he accidentally wrote a scene that depicts Bron as being reckless, hasty to indulge whims that are destructive to others in order to protect himself, but lacking in forethought or critical thinking

Yeah, I bet he's really sad.

saw it this weekend it is just delightful and fun, didn't feel anything close to its running time

Enjoyed Serena reading Gravity's Rainbow in the gym scene.

ha, i didn't catch that! nice callback to the joke in the first one

enjoyed this plenty, fun way to spend an evening with friends. certainly Norton is one of the more memorably hate-able of the growing crop of cinematic dumbass tech billionaires. everybody did a good job, but i wasn't swept away the way i was with the first one. tough bar for all sequels to things where half the appeal was how fresh they felt.

i do think the relationship dynamics among the cast maybe weren't quite as vivid, as others have noted. but I'll also point the finger at the setting, which i found really bland and fake-looking, compared to Christopher Plummer's creepy old Victorian manse. still a good flick tho!

very fun. can't believe "Agatha Christie shit that isn't set in great-grandpa days" hasn't been a decades-long thriving genre.

for real.

this also reminded me of latter-day Hitchcock, very determined to entertain but unafraid of being quite silly on the way there.

"We appreciate the input, and acknowledge this would've made $100 million with ease, but it is very important to Netflix, as a business, that people watch this movie on their phones. For some reason." https://t.co/qlGDfGXDVK

— David Roth (@david_j_roth) November 30, 2022

yes. you might even say it was SOOOOOOOOOOOO... foolish i guess

We were going to see this last no night but the theater had sold out to the point where there were no open seat pairs left.

SHITBALLS

Last night I rewatched Knives Out for the first time since it came out. I was struck by how much more naturalistic it was compared to Glass Onion. The new one really leans into the glitz and glamour and overall spectacle, and in doing so ends up being quite a bit more cartoony.

this was a lot of fun, not as neat as the first one but entertaining

loved the anticlimatic scene where blanc ruined the gillian flynn plot

daniel craig is hilarious, I wonder if it's the gravitas that comes with age that allows him to be so funny, or if he was always very funny

He's good in Logan Lucky (with a similar accent), though some of that is that he seems dangerous in the film as well - the lightness and fussiness is new, I think?

Film is great. A LOT of stuff to giggle at, like the red Solo cup given to the assistant

BUTTRESS

this was terrific, just highly enjoyable from start to finish. Craig & Monae, MAGIC!

also RMDE at all the balloonheads on twitter who were breathlessly calling White Lotus a “mystery” or a “whodunnit” when ~THIS~ exists, like stfu you dopes

i def want to watch it again & luxuriate in the enjoyableness

and this is only a small matter but man i love seeing kate hudson deployed correctly. she was great.

also lol at the burnout dude chilling in his room to Little River Band’s “Cool Change”. A+

My older daughter hadn't seen it yet, so most of us watched it again and enjoyed watching her watch it for the first time.

I also loved this. My only complaint is that I didn’t bug that a governor running a progressive Senate campaign would willingly jump on a party call with a boner pill meathead, let alone go on a weekend retreat with him

*believe, I don’t know how that ended up as “bug”

She knows there was ZERO rhino in those pills

I know there are a million little details like it, but I caught how Duke's holster had the Gadsden snake and "DTOM" printed on it.

I liked how they dispatched with COVID as a concern. (Ethan Hawke: "You're good.") I was distracted in the first few minutes by people who seemed to work for Kathryn Hahn not wearing masks at her house.

Very nice “oh she’s off putting out some fire” gag

birdie’s mask being just netting was hilar

Duke’s Mom boredly solving all the puzzles was great too “…Fibonacci”

Birdie's mask was one-upping Lana Del Rey

lol

Enjoyed this more than I thought I would. Laughed out loud several times, while watching it alone on a laptop wearing headphones.

https://twitter.com/sannewman/status/1602039776424722435?s=46&t=b822EJTbUUBowG8Ps_6e2A

Oh that’s good. Couldn’t put my finger on it when it happened.

maybe my favorite reference in Glass Onion pic.twitter.com/sjNOGhklQo

— Dave Itzkoff (@ditzkoff) December 23, 2022

oh shit

YESSS

omg

Ha, was just reading about that:

That contagious fun was evident when Norton completely surprised Johnson by appearing on set for a flashback scene dressed exactly how Tom Cruise looked playing macho motivational speaker Frank T.J. Mackey in Paul Thomas Anderson's 1999 movie "Magnolia," complete with shoulder-length hair and a black leather vest over a velvet shirt with the top buttons undone. Norton's idea was that his billionaire character, Miles Bron, is so unoriginal that he would copy the look from a movie he just watched.

"He and Jenny Eagan, our costume designer, came up with the look and I had no idea," Johnson said. "I started cracking up. But then I thought, 'Is this too much?' I also thought, 'What is Paul going to think of this?' Hopefully he takes it in the right spirit."

https://www.insider.com/rian-johnson-interview-glass-onion-star-wars-2022-12

So! This was...fine. Not anywhere as satisfying as the first one.

Hudson and Monae were MVPs.

whenever i watch a rian johnson film i feel like i’m in the hands of a very good filmmaker and i especially felt that when the lights went out

less sure i’m always in the hands of a good writer, the story doubling back on itself kinda gave me a headache, and i only accept ludicrous twin sister reveals in horror movies and pretty little liars

hudson and bautista were excellent

The doubling back annoyed me too, worth it (for a while) to watch Monae give serious movie star vibes.

Bautista is an underrated actor. If he looked just 10-15% more human he could follow The Rock's path and be a man for all markets.

Monae’s acting was a real surprise to me too, also she’s super adorbs in this film.

"SHITBALLS!"

I'm no doubt alone in thinking so, but I've always found Norton hot and more so as he's hollowed out with age.

funny thing is he always struck me as phony as an actor around his American History X days but I've grown to enjoy him much more in his later career.

I thought he was the real deal as early as Primal Fear and I loved him in Everyone Says I Love You but I never thought about him twice until the late '00s.

He was fun in "Moonlight Kingdom." In some ways he's the most insufferable when he's doing Serious Acting, and the most enjoyable when he's doing silly character stuff (like this or Wes Anderson or iirc "Birdman").

yeah josh otm i feel the same way,

he was good in MOtherless Brooklyn (as an actor at least), even though the movie/adaptation wasn't good

and in The Grand Budapest Hotel.

This was our Christmas brunch movie with the kids, everyone enjoyed it. I agree it's more cartoony than the first one, although the first one was pretty silly too. The twin sister plot was creaky for sure, but it was also a relief because I was afraid for a minute that Monae was actually going to be out of the movie. I enjoyed getting to see her do so much. (Also agree she and Hudson were the clear standouts, aside from Craig.)

I don't think these are exactly great movies, but they're good entertainment. And the timing of this one hitting just as Elon Musk is showing his ass every day is pretty stellar. When Benoit Blanc goes into his rant about how Norton's character is actually just an idiot, who in the audience isn't thinking about Musk?

Thought this was a big improvement over the first, ie actually funny. Not sure it's worth any consideration beyond that but entertaining adult comedy w/ big names hamming it up is worth 2 hours of time.

I also agree he’s a better filmmaker than writer, he should get a good co-writer to punch up his scripts.

Was anyone expecting this one to be more than fun, or, for that matter, think the first one was aiming for more than fun? I thought they both were a blast, more or less grown up entertainments that are smart, unpretentious, well-made, fun for the whole family and bear (and seem designed for) repeat viewings. Couldn't ask for more, really, especially for a genre that's surprisingly hard to pull off, let alone a sequel with literally every single person watching closely, trying to figure it out in real time. It's a neat trick, surprising people perpetually primed for a surprise.

Fwiw, I thought the twin stuff was amusing for its pro forma audacity. It's such a murder mystery trope, but tackled here with some degree of novelty, imo.

yeah I enjoyed all of that, it’s definitely a movie that is mostly just celebrating the fun of its genre tropes & going a bit silly with it all

who in the audience isn't thinking about Musk?

Or Sam Bankman-Fried, or for some us Liz Truss... it's been a weird year.

We rewatched it tonight, the writing really is amazing.

Watched this tonight. MVP is the costume designer, big laugh when Craig appeared in the blue and white striped top and revealed a moment later he was wearing matching shorts.

craig’s costuming was deliriously good

So, is Blanc gay? A cameo by a Certain Star who acts as his boyfriend suggests so.

yah

that striped bathing suit was excellent

cameo by a Certain Star who acts as his boyfriend suggests so.

That plus hollering Losing My Mind to himself in the car in Knives Out.

I did enjoy Derol’s introduction of just wandering thru things with a half-full 12-pack of coronas on the beach

is there a breakdown of all the artwork?
i’d do a rewatch just to try & catch all of that

Yeah Johnson confirmed the queer Blanc a few months ago.

A particular scene in the sequel, seen by Insider, indicates that Blanc is living with a man. When asked during a press conference at the London Film Festival, whether this means the character is queer, Johnson replied: "Yes, he obviously is."

Johnson added, referring to the actor who cameos as Blanc's lover: "And there's nobody in the world I can imagine in bringing me more joy for Benoit Blanc to be with."

Rewatched Knives Out last night and Glass Onion tonight with the family; in the latter case I was the only one who had seen it already, and it passed the same test that Knives Out did for me in that the beats and moments, now that you know to look for them, all still land just right. And both films are heightened reality character types a-plenty; that’s why they land, and little surprise the ‘real’ lead in both films, carefully hidden by the marketing, is someone who comes across as an actual person who could exist (though admittedly in GO’s case we don’t get to know that person as thoroughly due to the plot mechanics, an unavoidable weakness in comparison).

I have to add this as well: there’s a certain moment I can’t discuss in GO without spoiling but let’s just say my entire family absolutely loved it because there’s someone in my family history who was saved from death in an incredibly similar circumstance. Best private unplanned in joke ever.

I thought that was something that only happened in movies/Tv!

Good piece on the artwork in the movie https://news.artnet.com/art-world/glass-onion-art-collection-production-design-2233174 I thought that the Rothko looked a bit odd.

Anyone know who did the eskimo painting with multiple ice holes? Thought it may be Miguel Calderon but seems not.

london's prince charles:
https://imgur.com/a/JgcWSM5

i mean:
https://i.imgur.com/DMW3vKo.jpg

I thought that was something that only happened in movies/Tv!

the Blanc bathing suit (and the "DONG"s) seem like Evil Under the Sun references and also good Last of Sheila vibes

haven't seen this yet so I'm trying to avoid the Ben Shapiro thread but LMAO at him complaining about the movie's "misdirection". like have you ever seen a movie before dude

Helen had her sister's diaries with her and in her room didn't she. I think she mentioned going through them. Definitely had had one in her jacket pocket so not going to be around for any further perusal.

THIS IS A NON SMOKING GARDEN

(I think I liked this even more than the first one, certainly more over-the top with the ending)

"It's a dangerous thing to mistake speaking without thought for speaking the truth" was an all time zing

And her reaction too, deciding to take it as a compliment.

THIS IS A NON SMOKING GARDEN

― sleeve, Monday, December 26, 2022

A line with resonance -- someone said it to me not long ago

PLEASE KEEP OUR WATER CLEAN ALFRED

Pretty much everything was smoking by the end innit.

lol

heh

I thought that was something that only happened in movies/Tv!

I don't know if we're talking about the same thing, but my wife's uncle got in a motorcycle accident once where it's possible the only thing that saved his leg, or at least saved it from serious damage, was the phone in his pocket, which worked as a buffer when he slid across the street. The phone was iirc shaved down in half by the friction.

Pretty much everything was smoking by the end innit.

Which is a payoff to the no-smoking garden! At first it comes off as some stupid rich tech guy affectation, but then it's revealed there's a reason there's no smoking allowed, lol.

Live footage of Ben Shapiro tweeting about why he didn't like Glass Onion. pic.twitter.com/YXXLu50Plq

— Adam Lance Garcia (@AdamLanceGarcia) December 26, 2022

i thought parts of this were pretty cringey, as the kids say. It's alright I guess.

I havent seen anyone mention it yet but the vert start where they were all invited as his "closest circle of friends" to a private island to "be normal" was a clear swipe at Kim K.

Oh! And Benoit playing "Among Us" in the bath haha that one only just occured to me.

i disliked the breaking glass climax a great deal. happy to see the mona lisa consumed though

Benoit getting even more outraged as he realizes the "only idea with panache" was actually stolen from him was A+++, so many good little bits throughout this

"my therapist says this is a toxic relationship"

Was there any point to the painting's seurity screen going up and down constantly? (other than it being quite funny).

Rian Johnson is just online (the recurrence of "pancaked" is an I Think You Should Leave reference, i bet) and just funny enough to give these movies some teeth. While Star Trek and other franchises kissed Musk's ass (and even Herzog treated him seriously in one of his docs), Johnson is apparently one of the few people in Hollywood who realized he's an idiot, with no "but my Tesla" equivocation, full stop. That combined with how truly infectious Craig and Monae's enthusiasm is made this legitimately entertaining.

I was loudly outraged by all the malapropisms throughout the movie, so it was a nice payoff when that unexpectedly delivered

xxp I think being funny is enough, but it's possibly also there to give us a fair shot at realising what's going to happen just before it does, that it's not "oh yeah the Mona Lisa, they mentioned that an hour ago"

i thought parts of this were pretty cringey, as the kids say. It's alright I guess.
― I? not I! He! He! HIM! (akm)

Not sure I'd be even that generous, but thank you. Was waiting for at least one no before registering a second one.

The whole show of how to override the screen was a setup for the climax.

Busting something that everyone wants broken: All that glass sitting on pillars just waiting to be smashed. Breaking the thing that nobody wants you to break: Mona Lisa.

(Not counting you cynical fucks who DO want the Mona Lisa to go up in flames.)

I cackled when Birdy’s assistant was confronting her about the statement and had to read the incriminating email from the secret phone; also, “it was an HOMAGE to Beyoncé but they did NOT take it that way” basically Kate Hudson was a nonstop delight

otm

the treatment of the guitar the song that gives the title was written on might strike some as sacrilegious like.

That was “Blackbird” he played on the beach.

Also he faked her out, it wasn’t the real one.

i thought parts of this were pretty cringey, as the kids say. It's alright I guess.

― I? not I! He! He! HIM! (akm)

What parts? I wasn't mad about it either.

i liked this movie too (daniel craig is so so funny) but when people say "they should put out a new knives out every year!" to me that's just evidence that people are starving for studios to go back to regularly releasing comedies

anyways the whole cast is pretty great but almost all of my favorite moments were craig - him eating a spicy tamale and exclaiming "halle berry!," the striped bathing suit, blanc being characterized as literally being addicted to solving mysteries, his consternation at the stupidity of the mystery. my daughter got clue for xmas and as we were playing it all i could think about was blanc complaining about it being a stupid game

We play Clue with the kids too and we all cracked up when he trashed it.

people are starving for studios to go back to regularly releasing comedies

Also for just well made, well cast, well written, well produced (more or less) original entertainments in general. Does "Glass Onion" even really classify as a sequel?

yes

Yeah. Why wouldn't it be? If Johnson makes more, it'll be a series.

He's got one more on the Netflix contract and both he and Craig said they'll be happy to keep doing more if there's interest.

Worth remembering that Johnson's episodic mystery TV series with Natasha Lyonne debuts next month -- seems like he's happily playing around more with the general forms.

*search DuckDuckGo for Johnson's episodic mystery TV series with Natasha Lyonne*

I think the topicality of the characters is what kept me from liking this more than I did. as someone who spends too much time on twitter as it is, I'm already incredibly tired of the actual sorts of people this is lampooning, and I didn't feel like the satire cut quite deep enough to make up for me having to watch them for 2 hours. but I didn't watch this under ideal conditions; it was at home, my family has a short attention span, people got up and disappeared for up to 40 minutes with the movie paused twice, and it took 4 hours to finish.

oof yeah... if any type of movie can survive that, it's not this one.

Ha, my family regularly does a dinner/movie/break for dessert/rest of movie approach on Christmas night and since I had seen it already I pretty much said there was an incredibly logical break point halfway through this one. Which there is.

I had a horrible foreboding boxing day premonition that this franchise is going to become the Pink Panther de nose joorz.

I am lready incredibly tired of the actual sorts of people this is lampooning, and I didn't feel like the satire cut quite deep enough to make up for me having to watch them for 2 hours.

My complaint besides the doubling-over plot. These people are too dangerous to "satirize" -- they just ain't funny.

The Peg character is only a sketch, but clearly meant to operate as a nod toward that - how malign the influence of these types can be on normal ppl / society.

Interview with Johnson from yesterday

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2022/12/glass-onion-movie-rian-johnson-interview-knives-out-sequel/672558/

Re cringeness this made me think of BODIES BODIES BODIES from this year, which had a similar whodunnit setup, rich shithead milieu, enjoyable performances, & the script just deteriorates into an inane tombola of every zeitgeisty buzzword plucked at random & presented as “satire” (inc the unmistakeable hack watermark, a character has a podcast and that’s the whole joke)(story by the cat person author lol)

This was way better than that obv, I think Chris L’s “just funny enough” above is otm backhandedness and all; I got some solid laughs and enjoyed watching a film with the fan on Xmas eve where the whole premise is that elton musk is a dipshit. No part 3 please

*the fam obv, I have no fans

Well put.

I'd count it a not-a-sequel just because no knowledge of the previous film is required - a series is a good term, yeah. I was going to say "Like James Bond!" but the Craig films have actually had some connective tissue (and it's been TERRIBLE)

I am lready incredibly tired of the actual sorts of people this is lampooning, and I didn't feel like the satire cut quite deep enough to make up for me having to watch them for 2 hours.

I feel like what sets this apart from The Meal, Triangle of Sadness, and even Succession and White Lotus is that it's a satire of the ultra-rich and social elite for an audience that is not those people, whereas the movies and TV shows I just listed are "satires" of the ultra-rich and social elites aimed at those same people; they play at film festivals and in art houses or on premium cable, and watching them is satire-as-flattery, an auto-fellating kind of "aren't we terrible?" You're supposed to think, "These people are horrible assholes and I wish I was one of them." The message of Glass Onion, to the extent that it has one, is "these people are horrible assholes and you should be repelled by them."

Glass Onion is better than Triangle of Sadness, but even I thought, "Hm, how nice to get an invitation to a private island where Edward Norton knows my favorite cocktail!"

xpost hmmmm. does subscribing to HBO Max really place one among the "ultra-rich"?

incredible misread of succession there

actually pretty sure none of those properties are encouraging us to want to be the rich assholes in the picture (assuming “the meal” is “the menu”)

just invent the dumbest thesis ever for no reason and bam you got an ilx post

arthouses are cheaper than multiplexes too ime

TOS really is plutocrat-envy porn. It's to GO's credit that Johnson ensures we're in mind-meld with Craig and Monáe.

I feel like seeing this in a packed theater on Thanksgiving weekend added greatly to my enjoyment, not on a laptop.

Norton was kind of a new riff on Mark Rylance in last year’s Netflix Christmas Day satire.

I feel (this may be complete bullshit lol) that Peg was a red herring for people expecting Knives Out II - she's the Marta, if there is one, but there isn't.

I did love how the movie played a little on the 'southern hokum' in the first one, in the scene where Blanc is meandering through his explanation ("I keep returning, in my mind, to the Glass Onion") but we know he's just flannelling for time.

xp yes, a full theatre was great for this.

I prefer The Meal, Triangle of Sadness, Succession and White Lotus to this film by orders of magnitude.

(the menu, obv, I meant; I just copied and pasted there)

I laughed much more than I did at the first one, the doubling-back didn't throw me too much, but I was somewhat disappointed that the disruptors weren't picked off one by one And Then There Were None style

yeah i was kinda hoping for that too!

same

I think of what we got as an ending as a Last of Sheila nod instead, though. No stacks of bodies, more just a hell of a lot of vicious backstabbing complicity.

it was twistier to create that expectation and then go in a different direction

my other problem was the action movie finale with lots of shiny things blowing up but it was so carefully set up that it worked pretty well

Was just watching Breaking Bad again with my kid, and I noticed Johnson's name pop up as director! Even a Noah Segan cameo.

I genuinely find “these people are too dangerous to satirize” to be one of the most baffling statements I’ve ever read

yeah I'd disagree with that, I'd just say they are too annoying to want to spend lots of time with, whether they are being satirized or not.

Like Chaplin explicitly satirized Hitler

I genuinely find “these people are too dangerous to satirize” to be one of the most baffling statements I’ve ever read

Perhaps more along the lines of Jimmy Fallon giving Asshole a bit of a noogie

I didn't think Chaplin's Hitler movie so good either.

I genuinely find “these people are too dangerous to satirize” to be one of the most baffling statements I’ve ever read

― castanuts (DJP),

why?

Most of us here are aware of Musk's antics. I'm acquainted with several true believers too; they're funny in that they're pathetic would-be schemers too lazy to even aspire to charlatanism. Having lived through the Trump era, it's hard to take much delight in recognizing to what degree movie scripts have to catch up to match what I read on the NYT front page.

I mean, it's better for me to watch a picture like GO and imagine Norton, Hudson, etc. as 2020s versions of the malicious rotters from the old Agatha Christie adaptations and not think too much about what Rian Johnson intended.

To be fair, GO was a lot less specifically topical when it was written than when it came out. Elon would not have been quite so obviously top of mind if this had come out two years ago.

I genuinely find “these people are too dangerous to satirize” to be one of the most baffling statements I’ve ever read

the more dangerous someone is, the more richly they deserve satire, which is not! emphatically not! the same thing as "making fun of somebody." I have academic questions about what satire means/whether it's possible after a certain historical point but then there's plenty of examples from every era that say yes, you can do real satire in English (not Pope though nor any of that mild English stuff) -- Heller is a good example, Kubrick I think is good at it. I don't think GO is angry enough to really be satire, but I do think it's great. If somebody disliked both this & Everything Everywhere All at Once I'd consign them to the "your deal is you actually hate fun" bin for good.

I don't think GO is angry enough to really be satire

Boom. It's almost there thanks to Helen; she and Blanc are the moral centers.

Well that's partially why I invoked Last of Sheila above, which of course Johnson's never been shy about hiding -- Sondheim cameoed for several reasons -- but the difference between that film and the two Blancs so far is that there is NO moral center and the film is all the more delicious for that reason. Bemusingly the closest thing that film has to one might be Ian McShane's character, except he clearly isn't!

lol @ HBO Max being the domain of the ultra-rich rather than the place you go to watch shiplap evangelicals and Game of Thrones.

yeah but mind you alfred I think GO is fuckin spectacular, whether it's satire or not is a fun discussion to have about a movie that just gives love to the viewer from stem to stern

Crossing my fingers for an underrated aerosmith bootleg needle drop in the next one tbh

My Big Ten Inch: Another Knives Out Mystery

Blancin' on Bobo

the lighthouse effect was super well done

Fellow film tech nerds, if you can't get enough of the ol' Vitrum Cepa this holiday season, settle in for a LONG #NerdyFilmTechStuff post on the lighting rigs we built for the heightened, theatrical, impressionistic lighthouse effect in @RianJohnson's #GlassOnion. pic.twitter.com/RLxIxFesyE

— Steve Yedlin (@steveyedlin) December 24, 2022

xps It's not so much angry as disappointed

Yedlin's an absolute wizard & a great guy & that thread's terrific

it's a cliche to say that something is so ridiculous that it's impossible to satirize (see: trump) but i do think that having cute ed norton buy the mona lisa and make little puzzles for his friends is not really an effective satire of sad, lonely elon musk buying twitter and immediately destroying it. does it seem like musk has any friends at all? like even ones that he paid for? i'm sure part of it was the timing of the writing of the movie, and i think GO functions well enough as a comedy that it doesn't bother me that it's not lacerating its targets or whatever.

agreed, the timing of the writing of this movie did not set it up well to effectively satirize things that took place two years later!

also ed norton didn’t make the puzzles. that’s one of the (effective) jokes

Last night I rewatched Knives Out for the first time since it came out. I was struck by how much more naturalistic it was compared to Glass Onion. The new one really leans into the glitz and glamour and overall spectacle, and in doing so ends up being quite a bit more cartoony.

― Muad'Doob (Moodles), Wednesday, December 21, 2022 3:14 PM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

OTM. I literally groaned at the puzzle box invitation thing - right away you know you're in for something much more ridiculous than a parody of manorial murder mysteries. The whole "mad scientist on his island" milieu holds much less appeal for me - likewise I'm generally less interested in a character who is an obvious Alex Jones or Elon Musk parody than one who doesn't have those obvious connotations.

Nearly all of central characters being entirely unlikable doesn't help either. I know that's kind of the "thing" these days - look at these rich assholes - but it really holds very little interest for me.

I lost it at Bautista having a google alert set up for the word "movie"

(benoit blanc getting ratatouilled) muh gawd, this creatuh – well, this RAT – he's controllin muh ev'ry move like i'm some sortuh puppet! damn this infernal rodentia, movin me against muh will... but i'd be lyin if i said i didnt wannuh see wheyuh this goes

— zach silberberg (@zachsilberberg) December 27, 2022

Enjoyed this watch, and if he's said some details elsewhere in turn it's still a good summary of how he's approaching these films

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IM1AEbnGX4

Feel like there's a bit of Knives Out revisionism going on here - it's arch and artificial as fuck and super not subtle in its social satire, has exactly as many sympathetic characters as this one does. I don't mind any of those things but they're pretty dominant in both.

I think the fact that Knives Out takes place in a cozy New England mansion and centers on a family makes it feel like a charming update of a traditional murder mystery, whereas Glass Onion feels more like the setting of a superhero movie, with characters that feel more like a league of villains than an actual group of friends. It may be no more satirical, but it all feels more garish.

i disliked the breaking glass climax a great deal. happy to see the mona lisa consumed though

― flamenco drop (BradNelson), Monday, December 26, 2022 7:52 PM (three days ago)

i was unreasonably stressed by everybody running around in sandals during that scene. in janelle's slo-mo run towards the mona lisa at the end, noticed that every step miraculously landed in a non-glass covered area - so maybe the broken glass was added in post?

I kept thinking about cut bare feet too.

i enjoyed this, i don't think i'll think about it again. biggest difference between this and the first one was with the first one you felt you at least had a chance of figuring out who did it, invites the viewer in. here that's thrown out the window with the introduction of the twin sister and half an hour long flashback that turns everything that came before it on its head. it feels more like a rollercoaster on rails than a choose your own adventure. but whatever, it's fun!

https://i.imgur.com/oJucJKk.jpg

I thought the broken glass would pay off in some way (like, Norton's character would be hurled into it) and was disappointed in that respect.

It's there as cover for breaking the bar, I think?

None of the twist has anything to do with the initial whodunnit, though. They play absolutely fair with that - the "Duke don't dance with pineapple", Myles handing Duke his drink, whatever Birdie's drink was. We don't know what the other mystery is until after the twist introduces it.

yeah but reveal of the second mystery by the twist steamrolls the initial whodunnit and also delivers the answer to you in a bowtie - the denouement isn't really that satisfying, hence needing the climax of glass breaking etc.

also, pineapple is a pretty distinct flavor, surprised that duke didn't pick up on it in his drink immediately but maybe he was already pretty wasted / preoccupied with how to blackmail miles at that point. rian johnson in shambles at these plot holes.

also, obviously should have been a soy allergy, not a pineapple allergy, duh

An interesting take from Ethan Iverson, a jazz pianist, huge crime fiction fan, and small-c conservative (which is why it's surprising — to me anyway — that this is running in The Nation instead of The Bulwark or The New Criterion).

i enjoyed this, i don't think i'll think about it again. biggest difference between this and the first one was with the first one you felt you at least had a chance of figuring out who did it, invites the viewer in. here that's thrown out the window with the introduction of the twin sister and half an hour long flashback that turns everything that came before it on its head. it feels more like a rollercoaster on rails than a choose your own adventure. but whatever, it's fun!

― 龜, Thursday, December 29, 2022 9:53 AM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

having seen it twice now, this is where i am with it too. i enjoyed it, i found it funny and i loved the ending and several performances. i think my biggest issue is that the movie has no justification for withholding the helen/blanc backstory aside from shocking the audience with a fun twist. there's no formal reason for us not to be aware of helen and blanc cooperating from the start, those scenes on the island are withheld from us simply because the film wants to withhold them. it does make for a fun rollercoaster ride but a weird detective story where machinations of the detective himself are used to misdirect us, to the extent that we don't even know whose murder he's investigating for half the movie.

i have other issues with it, probably more complaints than praise at this point, but i'm also 100% on board for more benoit blanc movies and will devour whatever comes next

Agree that the mystery part was more muddled than KN1 and whoever it was here who suggested that Johnson get a co-writer next time.

lol the Nation piece refers to it as “Jerold Leto hard kombucha.” Great proofreading!

xpost *calls up Gillian Flynn* Er wait.

good old Benoit deciphering the entire murder mystery party game instantly was pleasing

"what the hell, man?"

machinations of the detective himself are used to misdirect us, to the extent that we don't even know whose murder he's investigating for half the movie

This is completely true and completely awesome.

also, pineapple is a pretty distinct flavor, surprised that duke didn't pick up on it in his drink immediately but maybe he was already pretty wasted / preoccupied with how to blackmail miles at that point.

Dude was handed a drink, sipped it, and immediately started choking

fair enough! i guess my point was i expected a spit-take, but yeah the choking is immediate.

Really enjoyed this. Appreciated the bit of misdirection which seemed to be leading towards Ed Norton getting offed early on, so Duke being the victim was a genuine surprise there, and really liked the constant noise of the party scene leading up to the poisoning. Reminded me of the Boogie Nights firecracker scene. I would want to watch it again, not even for the mystery but the sheer pleasure of watching the cast do their thing.

great cast

had the thought today that knives out is like the oceans eleven franchise, rotating ensemble casts anchored by a star riffing on a fun genre stalwart

I was disappointed that Johnson didn't go with the idea that Benoit Blanc would have a totally different accent in each film.

So what milieus/mystery settings are we going to be in in the next one, now that we’ve done Mystery Mansion and Remote Island? Ski resort seems like an auspicious choice and good for outfits.

Boat or train or train-boat

Def gotta be a hydro-train.
Or I'm thinking "impossible" museum caper

Christie liked boats and trains, obv. Some kind of culty New Age weekend spa maybe. Or a first-class cabin on one of those superluxe planes?

I’d love to see a blimp-related locked room mystery.

picturesque rural scandinavian pagan festival

“I do declare, is that a White Lotus hotel?”

Le Lotus Blanc

Helen/Blanc backstory felt like an inner ring to the onion. I was glad things were peeled back in order and not quickly during the end reveal.

Saw this last night, really liked it. I'm not sure if the timeliness of the movie is necessarily a good thing - it's amazing this movie came out right at this moment but at the same time we're all fucking sick of these kinds of people. Still I think it works because it focuses so much on Janelle Monae's character. I thought she would just be part of an ensemble cast but she feels like a bona fide movie star here. Too bad for those waiting for more music from her, I guess.

As for the movie itself I thought it was really well done. You expect these movies to deceive you so I thought some of the details were really clever. The first half had a lot of odd visual clues that make you think "wait, did anyone else see that?" which of course get explained way down the line. I thought it was great that the movie had two characters who were basically red herrings. One is particularly clever if you've seen the first one (my guess was that Peg was gonna factor greatly into the plot b/c that's sort of how the first one went but it turned out she was entirely irrelevant). It was just a really well made movie in general. I loved a lot of the visual details - the scene where Monae is just going to town on the invitation box with a hammer and you can see all the little game pieces fly out was amazing. It was full of subtle funny bits as well. Like Duke's gun being pointed directly at his dick and balls for most of the film. I also loved the grand reveal that most of these characters were just not very smart, which is the opposite of how these films usually go.

rly liked the first film. made it 13 minutes into this. what the fuck

if I wanted a barrage of hip internet nonsense I'd simply post here more!

"Active participants in a text-only message board are summoned to pub in Camden Town..."

There should be more modern movies that pretend the internet doesn't exist

this was good but not as good as the first. the big twist here was fun but twists that exist solely in the framing to mess with the audience are ultimately less satisfying, without any sympathetic/pov character to actually be surprised/impacted by the twist it ends up having less narrative weight

The fantastic thing about this movie is watching it a second time and seeing everything play out in real time exactly how Blanc pegged it before the denouement

A solid holiday watch but everyone who called it cringe otm - I am always in for a bit of hating on billionaires but at times it felt like it was a bit “see? See????”

Re the post upthread where they compared Miles having friends - isn’t the whole point by this stage in their lives that he is not their friend? He’s their meal tickets, and he’s got the means to take everything away as easily as it was given too. I wouldn’t call them friends in any meaningful way.

Also, everyone in this with blue eyes except Kate Hudson looked like they were wearing really fake looking contact lenses, I blame whatever filter they used. Isn’t the smarmy awful politician Sinema? (Sorry if that was said upthread but I didn’t read all 200+ comments.)

However I really love Janelle Monaé a lot, I will forgive a lot for her. But yeah, it’s not the kind of thing I see myself ever wanting to watch or think of again.

Agree w DJP re: rewatching.

The annoying stuff is minor notes compared to the overall fun the performers are having and the structure of the thing, which I enjoyed a lot as another take on a common mystery storytelling trope, re-seeing things from the POV where all is explained. Daniel Craig is clearly enjoying this role a million more times than Bond (post-Casino Royale movies that is) and really do hope they make a few more of these. If they can crank out three MCU films per year and ten-plus Fast and the Furious flicks I don’t think that’s too much to ask.

politician could be anyone, really. I was reading her as a Gillibrand but the recent FTX hijinks colored my perception

biggest laughs i had were the brief moments of Miles's clear shitlordness - playing "Blackbird" and "Under the Bridge" on acoustic, Frank Mackey cosplay, etc.

"Blackbird" was perfect, but the chili peppers song had to be "Soul to Squeeze".

I definitely laughed at the line "The Red Hot Chili Peppers are kinda underrated!" but that joke has been used enough that it's almost become true at this point

I am really struggling to get my head around the fact that—according to the internet—Glass Onion had exactly the same budget as the first movie: $40mil

Honestly the film gets better the more I think about it. And yeah if I hadn't said it already the second watch showing how everything came together and if it hit all the beats just so was a treat. Honestly I want Johnson to do his usual thing ASAP and release a watchalong commentary here.

My own subtle bit I caught the second time through, maybe someone already mentioned this too: so the second watch was with my folks and they prefer to have subtitles on as their hearing can be rough, don't blame 'em. So when Blanc meets Helen out on the staircase after the blackout he specifically says "Helen," which I simultaneously caught in both the dialogue and the subtitles. I hadn't noticed it the first time through at all, or rather, I'm sure I did somehow but must have just shrugged it off or thought I misheard something. Anyway that surely was anything but a mistake on Johnson/the editor's part, making it a big ol' clue about something that was going to be revealed in more detail in the next few minutes anyway, but only if you were really up on the tropes in turn. And I'm sure some were! So when we get the scene again later in the film him saying "Helen" that of course makes sense fully, and avoids it being a cheat or editing trick (and they did similar with the glass switch-off).

There's a good interview with Johnson that goes into all the ways he doesn't trick you, as long as you're paying attention.

thought this was fun, funny, and don’t have an issue with the overlapping flashback structure, but i do think that the characters were thinner and much less surprising this time around.

my biggest laugh was the payoff to the sweat shop storyline haha. also thought the deadbeat friend was a great gag who kept popping up at the perfect times

I love that Derol is played by Noah Segan, who basically is Johnson's friend from way back that he keeps around.

he's in every Johnson project, iirc.

I definitely laughed at the line "The Red Hot Chili Peppers are kinda underrated!" but that joke has been used enough that it's almost become true at this point

He says specifically that Frusciante is underrated, which (while also not untrue, perhaps) is a better joke.

the rian johnson/muppets knives out shd be jfk

(BB as garrison obv, dialogue unchanged obv obv)

Ned, I absolutely caught that during the second watch, along with most of the other things in the party confrontation scene. I missed the bit with the recorder, though.

There's a good interview with Johnson that goes into all the ways he doesn't trick you, as long as you're paying attention.

― but also fuck you (unperson), Monday, January 2, 2023 1:54 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I didn't notice any of the stuff he writes about but I did suspect something was going on with Monae's character right from the beginning - the scene where she's dressed down, with a Southern accent, violently smashing the puzzle box contradicts everything we see from her the rest of the first half. I didn't think the twist would be that dramatic but I figured there was some sort of double life thing going on. Also there's the bit where the other characters are watching her asking "what is she up to?" and you can see her stumbling down the hill? So here I thought the twist was that she had some fatal illness or something.

fwiw I did really appreciate the plot's other central "twist", that Miles Bron just isn't that smart - I was really expecting some "I expected you to solve the murder mystery all along, so I could move on with my real plan!" thing and I'm really glad it didn't happen.

I figured out Miles was an idiot early on when he tells Birdie that he's playing the guitar Paul McCartney wrote "Blackbird" on. McCartney is left-handed. So either he's dumb enough to believe that, or thinks his friends are dumb enough to believe it.

tbf I thought his flippant attitude implied he was just messing around with her there, but considering what we find out about him later maybe not lol

Great movie - fun, funny, just what I was in the mood for tonight. Make 5 more please, Johnson and Craig

watching with subtitles made it very easy to notice the malapropisms, which was a fun clue

ha those drove me CRAZY, I was so outraged.

"that's not a word!!"

it predefinitely is!

The payoff for the malapropisms was so good, especially since I kept turning to my partner with this increasingly aggravated nonverbal expression of "He fucking did it again! Is none of the other characters going to acknowledge this?!"

I noticed some of those too and was pretty amused by it, figured it was just commentary on how nobody ever corrects these guys even when they say something obviously dumb

it's not relevant to the plot but one thing I was curious about was Hugh Grant as Benoit's partner/husband (?) - was it actually supposed to be Hugh Grant? I can never tell in these movies which feature numerous celebrities playing themselves.

I was also confused about the Angela Lansbury came, was she one of the people on Benoit's bathtub Zoom call?

"cameo"

you can restring a left-handed guitar and play it right-handed, or vice-versa

subtitles named him "philip" xps

on the zoom were Stephen Sondheim, Natasha Lyonne, Angela Lansbury, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

i enjoyed GO a lot but i rewatched KO after it and KO is so much better as a movie - it's better structured, has a more satisfying conclusion, there's an emotional core, and it looks a lot nicer. GO has that netflix movie thing where it looks more like a tv show than a movie. only advantage GO has is as a comedy, it definitely has more straight-up jokes and is funnier.

ty Modlös! I caught Kareem but not the others

lol Modlös

the official Hopelandic translation

you can restring a left-handed guitar and play it right-handed, or vice-versa

This movie is absolute dogshit wtf

He says specifically that Frusciante is underrated, which (while also not untrue, perhaps) is a better joke.

He does make surprisingly good electronic music these days

Well this was rollicking. An absolute salve on New Year's Day to go with my hangover. Watched it in two sittings and finished it last night.

Not got anything to bring to the table, and apologies if it's been mentioned upthread, but what was the whole thing with Helen Brand developing a taste for the Hard Kombucha and being drunk? It felt like that plotpoint had no particular reason for itself, other than to maybe alert some of the other characters to the fact she wasn't Andi?

a) it made her loose-lipped enough to call out the rest of them in the cabana

b) that experience made her cautious enough to accept Blanc's warning not to drink again in the art gallery


GO has that netflix movie thing where it looks more like a tv show than a movie.

Steve Yedlin has shot every one of Johnson's features, one of his TV episodes, and at least one of his music videos

that's great, this still looks like a tv show. i've heard that netflix has specific visual requirements for content created for them so that shows/movies look bright and crisp on home tvs, and you can tell that's the case with GO, especially compared with KO which actually has darkness and shadows in it

Well, that's the setting for you. Evil Under the Sun is little different on that front.

I didn't really get that part either. She says that she doesn't drink, and I thought it was mentioned they were 9%, so I reckon someone of her size would be feeling pretty wasted after 2 of them. Unless she literally never had alcohol I am guessing she would have figured it out before Blanc said anything. But she doesn't really act drunk, outside of that one brief scene where she's stumbling around. idk maybe thats the one knock on Monae's performance. though tbf acting convincingly drunk in a movie is pretty hard. the only movies that get it right are the ones where the actors probably ARE drunk, like in Super Troopers

Kombucha is a pretty strong taste, particularly if you don't drink, why would you assume that you're getting drunk? She's keeping a lid on everything and acting minimal and contained, and inside she's a country mouse surrounded by opulence and assholes and one of them killed her sister - there's plenty of reasons that her head would be spinning. And she does act drunk in the scene where Blanc figures out that she is ("That's hard kombucha! That's Jared Leto's hard kombucha!"), and then she slams one just before she goes in on them.

By the way I love (and it reminded me of Knives Out) that Peg takes the Kombucha off her as soon as she starts.

that's great, this still looks like a tv show. i've heard that netflix has specific visual requirements for content created for them so that shows/movies look bright and crisp on home tvs, and you can tell that's the case with GO, especially compared with KO which actually has darkness and shadows in it

looked like a movie in the cinema ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

yeah this wasn't like The Blind Side, looked plenty cinematic to me in the theatre

acting convincingly drunk in a movie is pretty hard

otm. you have to project drunkenness strongly enough that the audience can't miss it, but real drunks usually try hard not to project drunkenness

Seeing this thread for like a week on Site New Answers and not opening it until I watched it, I assumed everyone was just dunking on what a piece of shit this was like Twitter was

itt Whiney hates fun, news at 11

i think the kombucha business is also pretty nice, subtle setup for the climax, when Blanc hands her a drink and some other hints. like, immediately she knows there's a message here, because earlier he was stopping her from drinking.

i think one of the reasons i got taken out of this bc i watched with my parents and they found the internet jokes incomprehensible

logan lucky a much more successful parent film

Whiney you’re basically a Republican now nobody cares what you think anymore

The Bernie Bro to Not Liking Netflix Movies pipeline

Well-spotted but our reference photo was actually this one:
😘 (took a lot of tries to get that weird ‘crossed eye while trying to project seriousness’ just right!) https://t.co/Q0otwAN0mT pic.twitter.com/8YhbDyGjEQ

— Edward Norton 🌻🇺🇦 (@EdwardNorton) January 4, 2023

agree with Whiney, I thought the story was clever but wasn't memorable, and the bad production made it seem like a Saturday afternoon kid's movie. Somebody above said something about "a mad scientist in his island lair" and that was what it felt like to me

I love Janelle Monae and want her to star in better movies

we need to Sneechify this thread asap

Somebody above said something about "a mad scientist in his island lair"

Surely...Bond villain.

Whiney you’re basically a Republican now nobody cares what you think anymore

― G. D’Arcy Cheesewright (silby), Wednesday, January 4, 2023 4:48 PM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

ilu silby

whiney has popped both collars & is here to beat up the squares

my dad was just like "wow this was wild" and he never used to be able to sit through an entire movie

my mom is 70 and my sister feeds her cultural stuff, she's reading the Carreyrou book on Theranos, and she was catching most of it

I just learned that “Glass Onion” is also the name of a Beatles song

Makes me like the title less frankly

If I didn’t hold it against the first one, you can get over this one

Wait what

they should just make this series an 8-10 episode TV show imo

Nah bc then I wouldn’t watch it

Knives Out is the title of a Radiohead song

The way the lyrics of the song Glass Onion semi-relate to some of the themes of the film really does it for me: "See how the other half live", "Standing on the cast iron shore", "Fixing a hole in the ocean", "Fool on the hill/living there still" and of course (as per the thread title), "Here's another clue for you all". Just such a great touch

no Pauls were harmed in the making of this film

Lots of walruses harmed tho

https://i.imgflip.com/41ncmq.jpg

Lol...one of my favorite R&S bits

the day after seeing this movie, we went to a "museum of contemporary art" that had some kind of karaoke booth by the entrance and some guy was absolutely butchering "Knives Out", it was... fitting?

I wish they had worked it into the first movie somehow though it would've been a tough sell. Maybe next one. Or whenever it is that Benoit will noooooot be cooooooming baaaaaaaaak

used to be annoyed by “glass onion,” but i’ve come around to thinking that it’s a great song

knives out = radiohead song

I'm hearing that knives out might be a song by a band called "radio head"

"Radio Head" is a song by Talking Heads, there are many layers to this (glass) onion

also: the walrus was Paul

Working title for the third movie is Whither Sturridge

relevant E Costello song plays as Craig inveigles his way into a Cheyne Walk supermansion

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQAF5W6NS88

Best Glass Onion imo

and Stephen Tobolowsky = "radio head"

Maybe the third in the series will be called Truckin'.

definitely wouldn't be able to beat Flirting With Disaster for use of "Truckin'" as a musical cue

Oh I don’t mind it being named after a Radiohead song. I feel like “knives out” is just a phrase people say anyway. As long as the third one isn’t “Yellow Submarine” or “Eleanor Rigby”

johnson is way too "hip" for a grateful dead reference. my first thought for the next one was a queen reference, but that's more of an edgar wright thing. wait, is rian johnson the american edgar wright?

next one will be called Larks Tongues in Aspic

Oh I don’t mind it being named after a Radiohead song. I feel like “knives out” is just a phrase people say anyway. As long as the third one isn’t “Yellow Submarine” or “Eleanor Rigby”

this, uh, unhinged individual seems to be some kind of schizoid man. in this, the 21st of centuries. how peculiah

After Johnson revealed that in KO Joni is named after Joni Mitchell, and her husband after Neil Young, Linda and Richard after Richard and Linda Thompson and Walt and Donna after Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, I feel the existence of a Peg in the new one must indicate a Steely Dan theme which I am too dim/not quite nerdy enough to have registered.

next film will be called Barrytown

I thought it was gonna be called Old Brown Shoe.

meanwhile, trailer for Johnson’s mystery-of-the-week series with Natasha Lyonne:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4x2NzusLAqk

what???? i am all in!! the world wanted lyonne to play columbo and i guess netflix listened?!

lol, beat me to it

It’s on Peacock not Netflix, but yes! Johnson listened at least :)

lol yes

and a nice bit of symmetry that NBC was the original network for Columbo

Networks are people too, my friend

NBC is a song by Radiohead

It's kind of hilarious that universe fatigue is making people excited for non-serialized programming again.

Not that I dislike it myself but it's nice to watch something on occasion without having to recall its 700 tree branches

definitely wouldn't be able to beat Flirting With Disaster for use of "Truckin'" as a musical cue

my brain scrambled this into a suggestion that the next film be named for Molly Hatchet's "Flirtin' With Disaster," which certainly presents possibilities for Blanc-isms. this case has me utterly befuddled, ah am fluhrtin' with disaster, y'all!

lyonne to play columbo

Poker Face
P__er Fa__
Peter Falk

this one did a far worse job of setting up characters as the potential criminal. hahn and odom jr. had about as much potential of being the guilty party as birdie's assistant and that weed bum wanderer. by the midpoint death scenes you're left with only two options. there was a moment during blanc's decoding of the crime where he said "it's so dumb" and that's about where i was with this movie.

I thought they were both pretty obvious from the moment they introduced the worst white guy possible. Zero chance anyone else would be the villain.

As mysteries both are pretty garbage.

had about as much potential

unless every single character in a movie is exactly equivalent wrt morality / depravity, the movie sucks and fails

I suspected the bum wanderer from the get-go

Crossing my fingers for an underrated aerosmith bootleg needle drop in the next one tbh

Funny you should say that...

https://fb.watch/hTEzN2LDMx/

In March of last year I was bugging Rian Johnson about stuff because I am a guy who if I have you in my phone and you're into some of the same things as me then you're likely to occasionally get texts that say, for example, RIAN HAVE YOU READ JEAN-PATRICK MANCHETTE HOLY CATS MAN GET AT ME. I was thinking of you, says Rian last March, you wanna help write some music for a TV show I'm doing? It's like Columbo. Kids of my generation have a Pavlovian pleasure response to any Columbo reference so I said yes of course I'm in. One thing led to another and then I wasn't just writing lyrics and melodies for the tunes in the episode (with big help on the musical side from Jamey Jasta) but also acting in it. I play a rock musician, because that's how rock musicians generally ease their way into total Hollywood domination. Inch/mile stuff. I made new friends on set and learned how TV shows get made, which is bonkers stuff, and complained a lot as I was learning the routine and then ended up having a really good time and you can watch all this starting January 26 on Peacock TV. #PokerFacePeacock

Hot damn!

Astounding!

The craziest thing about that is (I have read elsewhere) JD wrote some of the music with Jamey Jasta of Hatebreed. Didn't know floor-punching breakdowns were part of his musical vocabulary, honestly.

i’m watching right now and good lord daniel craig is not good in this

he's good at wearing little outfits

Jean Patrick Manchette is great!!

it’s all pretty fuckin cute isn’t it? like he wandered in from a wes anderson movie

xpost

have you gotten to his bathing costume yet

indeed

If that’s not enough to delight you I can’t help you

his outfits are stupid i’m sorry. the character of “benoit blanc” is just kind of a gussied up nothing. it would have been nice to see someone do that role who isn’t needing to dedicate 40-60% of his mental powers to a pretty bad accent and the squinchy eyes that he thinks go with it

fun movie otherwise though

joe bang > benoit blanc

the character of “benoit blanc” is just kind of a gussied up nothing.

isn't that the joke

i was thinking that as i wrote it but if so to what end

The idea of the World's Greatest Detective is absurd, if you're going to have the WGD, Inspector Poirot in a crowd of contemporary American dirtbags, it would be strange if he wasn't as absurd as the concept.

This one was fine and the first one wasn't very good but they'd be completely unwatchable if the detective was played straight or given any kind of weight.

done better before, though

https://prod-images.tcm.com/Master-Profile-Images/murderbydeath1976.4720.jpg

Murder by death an extremely racist movie

Also not funny when it's not being racist, just a parade of jokes dropping to the floor with a clang.

it’s fine for the character to be a gussied up nothing, a cipher or stand-in, but craig fills in the “blanc space” with a kind of…constipated modesty? which i guess he thinks is charming or interesting but is neither by my lights.

Yeah as funny and racist as a drunk old uncle at a family dinner. Love Maggie Smith in it though

xpost obviously

“What is reality?!?” was really funny

Five minutes in, and this is already fairly insane.

This was fun, but yeah, I probably prefer the first one.

I think I'm like them both about the same, for slightly different reasons.

I appreciated how Miles’ friend “who was going through some things” was never revealed as some central part of this story. He was just a non-detail.

He was fun in "Moonlight Kingdom." In some ways he's the most insufferable when he's doing Serious Acting, and the most enjoyable when he's doing silly character stuff (like this or Wes Anderson or iirc "Birdman").

― Josh in Chicago, Sunday, December 25, 2022 12:02 PM (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

He was the best past of “Birdman” and he was barely in it

xp he was just a good hang!

I kinda suspected he wouldn't be, I thought it would be a hacky move to make that guy somehow relevant. Peg was the one I expected to hear more from, felt like that character was mostly there to deceive clever viewers who were going "you know what, I bet you anything it's the assistant"

i think she was mostly there to land the jokes about how birdie is not allowed to use her phone.

it seemed obvious to me from how all the characters were introduced that this was going not going to be an intricate whodunit and while i enjoyed it, it's using the pretext of the blanc character to tell a story about some other stuff. what johnson does with the third one will be interesting.

I sense that I share a response with others. I was entertained, but don't like the film as much as KNIVES OUT. The Greek island setting already indicated a kind of decadence; I prefer cold autumnal New England. The characters didn't really belong together or interact particularly well. I was puzzled by how the obvious mastermind character, Miles Bron, was also the master villain, till I remembered that the theme was 'it's obvious, not complex' - hence the 'transparent' glass motif, replacing the knives motif I suppose. Echo of LINE OF DUTY last series ending here when the concept was 'an underwhelming person was the criminal mastermind'.

I think Janelle Monae acted well in that she performed sister 1, sister 2, and sister 2 pretending to be sister 1, and also being unsteadily drunk. Technically that seems to me a good demanding performance.

I started off with the impression of some buffoonery on Blanc's part but it seems to have been an act. By the end he is entirely composed. I like the way he does turn out to be brilliant at solving puzzles, notably with the murder mystery game crossbow itself.

But it strikes me that this wasn't much of a detective story in the classical sense; very little that the viewer could do to assemble or follow clues. More of a display with a lot of jokes along the way. Ultimately the amount of artifice and excess make me somewhat cool on it, whereas the fresh first film impressed me so much.

I think Janelle Monae acted well in that she performed sister 1, sister 2, and sister 2 pretending to be sister 1, and also being unsteadily drunk. Technically that seems to me a good demanding performance.

Yes! I'm glad you said it - she was easily the standout for me

there was something delicious about the first movie and that its death first appeared to be an inexplicable self-murder - that the planned murder didn't work as intended, that the intended victim happened to be a whodunnit expert who immediately envisaged a much more complex plan of their own which did work, that they seemingly had no idea that anyone had tried to murder them and that what they thought was a pre-emptive killing of themselves was actually, in the end, self-murder. very difficult to match that, which may explain why a sequel based apparently upon superficial complexity.

where we have two remarkable and sympathetic characters in the first, in the second we have one. the murdered sister has obviously been wronged (and then murdered to boot) but do we see anything that really portrays her as a sympathetic person? then the deaths themselves are, in the end, boring rather than obvious.

I'm fully invested in Benoit Blanc as a character and as a performance. It's Cage-ian

Cracking post from Conrad. 100%.

What would you consider a classical detective story movie, PF? I don't know that it's a medium that lends itself well to it - the projectors drags us onwards without much of a chance to revisit clues placed (and I think the film goes to some lengths to point out the clues dropped for the first muster, at least).

I agree that the medium may militate against the genre in that way, a way that prose fiction precisely does not.

However, there have, I think, been a lot of films (and TV) of things like Poirot and Holmes where it was still somewhat possible for viewers to pick up clues and formulate theories.

Here I don't think it's the speed that prevents that, more the lack of clues or mystery.

I enjoy mysteries and have rarely if ever felt like trying to solve the mystery with the clues made visible to the audience was what I was there for. What I relish is the experience of being strung along, watching the author’s contraptions execute

the thing is even if you did notice the clues it's not like that would help you figure out much of the mystery. outside of the glass switch I suppose, though I wonder how many people actually caught that?

I did figure something was up with Monae's character since when she first appears in the movie she does clearly have a Southern accent, but yeah I wouldn't have landed on THAT

i'm not a guy who can solve a mystery during the movie itself either, but i remember in the thread for the first movie somebody said they totally figured out the switched vials plot element, and i liked that somebody was able to figure out some of the big plot twists in real time there.

this was, like i said upthread, a movie on rails, which is fine, but not like the first at all.

i liked the mystery and Craig was great in it, i think johnson at one point maybe suggested he was a character who was slightly adaptable to his surroundings depending on the case. so here i think his intent at the beginning was to be a caricature, masking his real reason for being there. he wasn't a guy unexpectedly invited to a billionaire's party, acting the fool a bit, but rather a guy who was there to actually solve a murder no one else (but Helen, and the murderer) knew had occurred. so when he's watching everyone at the beginning of the film it's kinda to gauge them based on Helen's presence, and knowing what he knows about Andi being dead. i did like it less than Knives Out, which is a pretty uh sharp story and has that really amazing central performance by ana de armas. but i like it plenty for what it is.

I think Knives Out is a cleverer puzzle. I think the misdirection in Glass Onion is outstanding, though, particularly when you watch it a second time and try to catch the movie cheating. I think there’s very much a statement there about how little of our environment we actually perceive or process and how much received wisdom we allow to fill in the blanks in order to fit what we’re seeing into our preconceived narrative.

Ah, I should rewatch GO, which I watched first time last night. I like KO better on one watch because it did feel like a tighter story, more intense presentations of the players, who also were slightly more interesting than in GO, and more subject to viewer evals and consideration during the viewing process.

I thought the whole puzzlebox thing was annoying and over done, it started to just be like, oooh how's macgyver gonna do this one? the whole thing felt very made for tv to me, despite the opulence.

puzzlebox set up the hammer joke

yep, a metaphor for the whole shebang as well

I was bored by that sequence too (though the hammer bit did make me laugh a lot)...but yeah it's an essential part of Bron's character

I think Knives Out is a cleverer puzzle. I think the misdirection in Glass Onion is outstanding, though, particularly when you watch it a second time and try to catch the movie cheating. I think there’s very much a statement there about how little of our environment we actually perceive or process and how much received wisdom we allow to fill in the blanks in order to fit what we’re seeing into our preconceived narrative.

― castanuts (DJP), Monday, January 9, 2023 3:58 PM (six hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is a good point! i was thinking about the in the context of how we initially don't see who is at blanc's door and how he actually got involved

yeah one of the dangling threads is how did he get that box and I thought well stands to reason that there's only one person there who could reverse engineer it but it turns out it wasn't him lol

there was something delicious about the first movie and that its death first appeared to be an inexplicable self-murder - that the planned murder didn't work as intended, that the intended victim happened to be a whodunnit expert who immediately envisaged a much more complex plan of their own which did work, that they seemingly had no idea that anyone had tried to murder them and that what they thought was a pre-emptive killing of themselves was actually, in the end, self-murder. very difficult to match that, which may explain why a sequel based apparently upon superficial complexity.

where we have two remarkable and sympathetic characters in the first, in the second we have one. the murdered sister has obviously been wronged (and then murdered to boot) but do we see anything that really portrays her as a sympathetic person? then the deaths themselves are, in the end, boring rather than obvious.

Yes to all of this. The extraordinary thing about Knives Out was that it presented a plot we'd never seen before while also staying true to the genre of country-house murder mystery, where you'd think all the existing plots had already been used. And the misdirection was the very best kind; the kind where the false plot seems real because to some of the characters it is real. We see the story first through the eyes of Ana de Armas's character, who really believes it happened this way, and so the gradually unfolding realization that she doesn't have all the information is both surprising and satisfying. And it fits with the characterization of her as a straightforward and decent person who doesn't know she's in a nest of vipers. Of course there's more going on than she sees. Of course we, who are in her head, wouldn't see it either. Of course it would take a Benoit Blanc, wise to the evils of mankind, to see what we're all missing.

I enjoyed GO, but it didn't have that quality of things locking together with an audible snap that Knives Out had. The twist in Glass Onion works, but that's all you can really say for it. It doesn't make you go "Ohhh, that makes sense!" It doesn't upend what we thought was happening. It's just more information about the story, withheld for no particular reason. GO also felt more depressing to me, in that it basically presents Bron as impossible to take down. I would have been okay with an ending in which Bron was somehow tricked into burning down his own mansion, but an ending in which the characters basically say "I give up, there's no winning against this complete idiot; he's too rich and powerful to bring down legally, so let's just commit arson and hope it embarrasses him," is a big old bummer. Knives Out had the satisfying quality of an episode of Columbo, where the rich and powerful are brought down by their own hubris and the detective's relentless common sense. Glass Onion basically says, "The law can't get these guys, so we have to go outside the law," which is a sort of negation of the whodunit genre, a swerve into noir, maybe, or the kind of thing you see at the very end of a series, where the writer and the detective are both exhausted, and the writer can only bring it to an end by blowing up the whole premise that the good guys can get the bad guys by figuring things out.

I thought that was kind of the point of the ending, they had to find a way to ruin the mythology of Miles Bron. having his 'clean' fuel source torch his own mansion and ruin one of the most famous artworks of all time seems like it would probably do it. not to mention the murder of two people close to him. it's hard to imagine "Alpha" sticking around much longer after that.

I guess on reflection Knives Out was probably the better movie, but I think it's a legitimately great one which doesn't come around very often anymore. Glass Onion is also great but less so. It's maybe unfair to compare the two - they're both murder mysteries, but I think they both approach the concept in very different ways

And to be fair, Johnson has explicitly said that he's taking a Christie approach where not every mystery/story/etc has to be the same or work the same or have the same tone etc. He wants to vary it up, and some things will work more than others depending on the viewer. I mean, I'm already very interested in whatever the third film will be regardless of what the hell approach/setting/etc he takes.

Lily, agreed very much about the overall differences - great description of why KO worked so well.

I do think I enjoyed GO just a little more than you did; I guess for me the ending pyrotechnics still have the 'satisfying puzzle' feel, because we're seeing the two heroes smartly put together several different pieces of information to identify exactly how this scorched-earth solution could be achieved, and why it would work.

Extremely minor point but I appreciate that Benoit quoted the line "my God, it's full of stars" as being from 2010: The Year They Make Contact, not 2001 (I know it's in the book 2001, but more importantly it's not in the movie).

I thought that was kind of the point of the ending, they had to find a way to ruin the mythology of Miles Bron. having his 'clean' fuel source torch his own mansion and ruin one of the most famous artworks of all time seems like it would probably do it. not to mention the murder of two people close to him. it's hard to imagine "Alpha" sticking around much longer after that.

― frogbs, Tuesday, January 10, 2023 11:56 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

No billionaire has nor would ever face consequences for anything ever

ok

Michael Milken was the equivalent of a billionaire in today's dollars

man I thought about it a little and a high school chemistry teacher wouldn't be able to defeat a cartel, so now I don't like Breaking Bad anymore

they literally have this conversation in the movie iirc

Extremely minor point but I appreciate that Benoit quoted the line "my God, it's full of stars" as being from 2010: The Year They Make Contact, not 2001 (I know it's in the book 2001, but more importantly it's not in the movie).

even more extremely minor point, miles wasn't playing blackbird correctly, or at least not how mccartney plays it. maybe accidental, but the camera did linger on the fretting hand right at the pertinent moment.

thats when i knew who did it

i think one of the reasons i got taken out of this bc i watched with my parents and they found the internet jokes incomprehensible

― flamenco drop (BradNelson), Wednesday, January 4, 2023 7:45 PM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yeah same, they didn't understand anything or know who the people being caricatured were.

pinefox and also dan SUPER otm about what makes mysteries interesting/good. Right after watching GO I thought about the really classic whodunnit and decided that the sleuth doesn't necessarily have MORE information than the others (or the reader) but they perceive/understand it differently, they're not misdirected by their expectations.

GO didn't give anything to go on and felt quite cold (funnily enough for being set on a mediterranean island). I loved the jokes but I didn't like any of the people.

I loved the subversion of the puzzle box, how in so many stories solving it would be the WHOLE story, it would be impossibly convoluted, etc, whereas here it was shallow and took minutes. When Monae smashed hers in the garage I knew right away she was going to be the only sane one! Great moment. I thought it had great moments like that but kept getting in its own way.

BB was way less of an idiot this time around, yeah? didn't love that.

I loved the jokes but I didn't like any of the people.

Yeah this was one of the key issues for me with GO. The Knives Out crew were equally reprehensible but they were flawed in a more relatable way and the film took care to give them some nice character moments e.g. Jamie Lee Curtis' relationship with her father; Meg the niece who is otherwise kind and reasonable as long as her own interests aren't being threatened; even Ransom was seen as somewhat sympathetic (or maybe we're just primed for that because he's being played by Captain America). I guess Peg and Whisky had their own moments too in GO but neither felt sufficiently fleshed out in comparison.

I also think KO was better served by having Marta as the main audience proxy rather than Benoit - it's much more fun watching how he works through someone else's eyes, plus we're constantly anxious for her so when the twist/reveal arrives, it's not just satisfactory but comes as a huge relief

Roz: I agree, I think it's not so much that those characters are more likeable (though you're right), more that they cohere as a group. The GO group didn't seem like a group at all, but a random assortment.

in orbit: It would be fair to say that in a detective story the sleuth should NOT have more information than the reader - if they do it is 'unfair', according to the (laughable if you like) classical rules of the Detection Club et al. While such strict rules are absurd, I think this principle stands.

in orbit: "Yeah same, they didn't understand anything or know who the people being caricatured were." Nor do I. I think that the Miles Bron character might be like Elon Musk, but otherwise the characters didn't remind me of anyone in particular.

I feel much in agreement with those for whom character was a problem in GO.

I think some of this is a proxy for the fact that the characters just stood out more in Knives Out - there wasn't really a lot for Leslie Odom Jr, or Katherine Hahn to do, they were slight variations on "dependent on Miles, but resentful of it" and without much screen time that couldn't have been amalgamated, the Thrombeys were more varied in their relationships with Harlan, and each other.

“I’m not here!”