Amph Rian Johnson's Benoit Blanc Mysteries (Knives Out, Glass Onion, Wake Up Dead Man)

Watched it last night. Fell asleep once they got to the living room scene at night. Woke up and then finished it.

I felt it was better than TLJ that's for sure. But it was also boring and slightly less interesting that Knives Out. I didn't really care for any of the comical side characters, or even Blanc himself this time. The film is totally pretentious, and RJ was very successful at being exactly that. It felt like RJ was more interested in making fun of mysteries, or showing how smart and talented he is, than offering any kind of authentic love for the story he's telling. There's just something oddly artificial and unloving about his movies that I can't quite get past. They feel more like exercises in filmmaking. Rather than actual stories.

 

I was in a book club once where we read And Then There Were None (Ten Little Indians) and someone in the club actually said that they felt like Agatha Christie "cheated" with the solution. I like to say that what made Agatha Christie a genius was her talent at "manipulation." It's realizing that you were looking at exactly the wrong thing that the author wanted you to be looking at that is exhilarating about the solution to a great mystery. Finding the fake solution that the author actually hid really well so you would feel so proud of yourself when you "figured it out" that you wouldn't think about it enough to realize it was fake. Thinking "This is a great book about this kind of a murder" and then finding out it's about an entirely different kind of murder. Those are the great ones. Knives Out is one of those. Knives Out tells you exactly what it is and then it turns into something else. Except, once you've figured out what that other thing is, then it turns out to be the first thing after all.

Some people watch a magician and try to figure out the trick. I watch a magician to be tricked. Same reason I read mysteries. That's the satisfaction.

And Then There Were None is the big Agatha Christie of course, but The Moving Finger is one of my favorite Miss Marples and Ordeal by Innocence is a fantastic stand-alone that has been really overlooked in her body of work. And then I also recommend The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides from just three or four years ago; it's the first time a twist has blind-sided me that completely in I couldn't even tell you how long. If you want four great mysteries, start there.

 

I don't see Glass Onion as a parody/satire/mockery of the genre (or its fans) at all. A satire of the sort of people in the film, absolutely. But the mystery – even in being a 'dumb' one orchestrated by a not-so-intelligent individual – is a real mystery at the film's heart. The film, like Knives Out, is very much an earnest part of its genre, not above it; it's contemporary (intetested in contempary politics, contemporary social norms, contemporary status symbols, etc.) in a way that most 'period' classics of the genre aren't really seen as now (though many were contemporary, at the time of their initial writing, of course).

 

Agreed. Johnson is not “sending up” the genre. He’s using a genre, which he clearly loves, to make a social commentary. This works for these stories. Really well. It didn’t work for Star Wars.

 

Was Brick actually Johnson's first movie? The mystery genre has been right there as part of his cinematic DNA right from the beginning. That was very much a riff on film noir and I think some people mistook Brick for a quasi-parody of film noir because of the language and everything, but really, Brick was played incredibly straight. You could argue there's a little satire in there in terms of high school, but the language isn't poking fun at film noir, it is just being film noir.

Is it sometimes hard to tell exactly what Johnson's making fun of? I'd say that, yes, sometimes it is, which is part of why I think the response to, shall we say, OTHER movies in his filmography has been more savage than deserved. His movies often poke fun at a lot of things and it becomes easy to extrapolate that he's poking fun at other things in those movies because of that.

He's mocking a lot of things in Glass Onion. Is he mocking mystery fans? No, but I see how someone could conceivably think it. I could say exactly those same three sentences about another one of his movies if I wanted to start a firestorm, but I don't.

 

It wouldn’t be that big a firestorm.

 

As an audience member I didn't feel mocked at all. IIRC, in Knives Out you have an *** **** family and in Glass Onion you have *** **** friends.

How so?

 

I would argue that if I'm reading or watching a mystery, I hope the author is my intellectual superior. I feel the same way about sci-fi, interestingly enough.

 

Yeah the guy writing the mystery knows the answer. We as the audience don't. The only thing that felt semi cheap is that

Spoiler

the mystery was dependent one the main character's having an identical twin sister. I thought the recording device was going to come back into play at the end. I'm glad it didn't and it was actually Bron's friends that would betray him in honor of their friend Andi's memory. Either way, they're hosed so if they're going down they might as well take Bron with them.

 

Well in a mystery story the author has spent months working out stuff that we only have a couple of hours to solve .

 

Yeah, I'm not defending the writing as perfect or anything. I probably sound like I'm a huge Rian Johnson fan. I wouldn't really consider myself overall a huge fan. I tend to like his movies, though I really hated Looper, and I think he's an interesting filmmaker with genuine artistic preoccupations. I think Knives Out is probably his most consistent film and it's not perfect by any means. I was really excited for Glass Onion because I genuinely thought it might be better than Knives Out. I feel like I am still waiting for his masterpiece. He's just almost gotten there a couple of times. I may eventually decide it's Knives Out; as I think I said earlier I do like Knives Out more every time I watch it and I think I'm going to do a KO/GO double feature this weekend, so it'll probably be climbing in my estimation again.

EDIT: TLJ has some masterful . . . just masterful stuff in it. It's the only SW film that isn't Empire that I think gets as good as Empire at its best. Unfortunately, it's just burdened with some absolutely terrible, prequel-level (admittedly, not prequel at its worst) stuff as well and feels punishingly long. Don't mean to get into it, but while I'm saying RJ hasn't turned out a masterpiece yet, I thought I'd just restate my very brief opinion on why TLJ isn't, even though it is a movie that I have praised a lot.

 

Did you not find the resolution to be satisfying?
How did you feel that you weren't thinking deeply enough? Wasn't the whole point that

Spoiler

Bron was the idiot?

 

"a lesson on the inner psyche of humans" ?????

 

Wait why did you dislike Looper?

 

I hated Looper, largely because it tried to do time-travel both ways -- which doesn't at all work for me.

 

I mean, I didn't find the GO resolution satisfying from a mystery standpoint. I get it thematically and it is what it is, but, yeah, it's not satisfying from a mystery perspective in my opinion.

Looper . . . man. I honestly really didn't like the performances, either Bruce Willis or Joseph Gordon-Levitt. I will say that it wasn't the plot mechanics or anything; it didn't make a lot of sense in terms of the time-travel, but, you know, that kind of thing doesn't bother me. I kind of liked the idea of the villain and how the movie backed into actually being an origin story for the villain. And that one scene where the kid kills that guy in the house by like lifting him up with his powers . . . that was an amazing scene. But I just didn't really care about the characters and didn't like the ending. "Hated" is probably a little strong. But I definitely didn't like it.

 

Are we supposed to want filmmakers to be dumber than us?

 

What do you mean “time travel both ways?”

Also for the record I am glad the genre of films whose twists can be explained as “Bruce Willis was dead the whole time” was expanded.

 

Immutable time travel theory (Bill and Ted) AND mutable time travel theory (Back to the Future) -- can't have it both ways my dude! That's where you lost me in the film...

 

Okay this film came out about 37 years ago. Can you refer to specific parts please?