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

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?