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

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