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

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%.