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

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

“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!”