Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (3/5 Stars)

 

I had the pleasure of watching writer/director Rian Johnson’s first Knives Out mystery, appropriately entitled Knives Out, when it came out in late 2019. (This movie has nothing to do with knives per se, but the marketers perhaps wisely avoided the subtitle “A Benoit Blanc Mystery”). I wrote a review about it, which having read again, I believe holds up.

I can build upon and elaborate on the effectiveness of murder mystery tropes here. There is a moment in the original Knives Out which proves its status as a top-notch murder mystery. Like a lot of the stories in the locked room mystery genre, at the climax the Detective gathers all the suspects in the same room, reveals the killer, and explains how he figured it out. In Knives Out, I posit that one could pause the movie at that moment, rewatch the first 3/4’s of it again, think really hard about it, and actually come to the same conclusion as the detective. For that reason, even though the explanation was complicated, it didn’t come out of nowhere, and an astute observer would be rewarded for paying close attention for the first hour and a half.

The problem with Glass Onion is that when Detective Benoit reveals the killer and propounds his theory, I believe no audience member could possibly predict the killer no matter how many times they watched the beginning (at least with the reasoning given by Benoit). Why? Because Rian Johnson breaks his own Knives Out rules as to point of view and narrative.

I won’t give much away by explaining what I mean. In “Knives Out” the main characters are the maid (Ana De Armas) and Benoit. Their point of view are stand-ins for the audience. At no point, do those characters know or witness something that the audience also does not witness. There are no scenes left out that these characters are not sharing with us. This is not the case in “Glass Onion”. In both movies, we are introduced to Benoit Blanc showing up at an event not knowing who invited him. In “Knives Out”, Benoit didn’t know who had hired him and had no agenda. In “Glass Onion”, Benoit knew who had hired him and had an agenda the entire time. The movie keeps this detail from the audience until the climatic reveal.

The ultimate effect is a sense of deflation when one realizes that they have been tricked by a movie that was not as clever as it seemed. Now this, in and of itself, seems to be a theme here. A Glass Onion is apparently a metaphor for things that appear complicated, but are in fact, pretty stupid. Here, the murder and murderer is staring everyone plain in the face. This is true. The suspects involved, a politician (Kathryn Hahn), a scientist (Leslie Odum Jr.), a fashion influencer (Kate Hudson), a Twitch Star (Dave Bautista) have been summoned to the island of the Tech CEO/Genius Miles Bron (a la Elon Musk?) played by Edward Norton. On the surface, they appear to be successful and interesting people, but it turns out they are vapid and rather silly.

Then there is our hero. In Knives Out, this was the maid who physically could not tell a lie without throwing up. Here, it is Andi Brand (played by Janelle Monae) whose back story is that she was the real brains behind the tech genius’s success and got screwed out of the company in a recent court case. Dare I say it, the maid’s character even with her rare physical disorder made more sense. The problem here is that the explanation for why Andi Brand is the real genius is kind of dumb. We are told that the court case all hinges on an algorithm that she wrote on a cocktail napkin in a bar several years ago. The movie would have us believe that the information on this cocktail napkin is all it took to create a stupidly successful billion dollar tech business and that she could be frozen out of this business if she couldn’t prove that she wrote what was on that napkin. The actual tech on the napkin, (or for that matter what Alpha, the tech business, actually does) is never explained (because how could it be without sounding ridiculous), but given what I know about court cases, and the little I know about intellectual property, it all sounds pretty stupid. A more effective reason for trusting Andi Brand over Miles Bron, and maybe what the movie was relying on, is the modern audience’s inclination for believing that a white man has taken all the credit for a black woman’s work.

As Benoit explains with annoyed incredulity at the end, the murder and the murderer were really stupid and it was merely the inclination that we have as audience members to expect a more complicated mystery. Sure, I guess, but couldn’t this all just be a convenient excuse for writing a lazy and stupid murder mystery. After all, if the characters and the mystery are stupid, well, ahem, isn’t that because Rian Johnson wrote them that way?

Dune (5/5 Stars)

 

Frank Herbert’s epic novel “Dune” has long been the white whale of movie adaptations. After its popular publication in 1965, several filmmakers have attempted an adaptation only for their efforts to more or less fail. Jodorowky had great ambitions but lacked funding. This became the subject of a 2013 documentary. In 1984, director David Lynch successfully produced a feature film of the book, an absolute mess of confusing exposition and fast forward plot which stood as an expensive warning to the impossibility of a coherent adaptation for over three decades. I tried to watch that movie and did not venture past the first twenty minutes. The overarching problem, once solved, is Dune’s greatest strength. Dune is a fascinating, exotic and dangerous world, but in order to tell a story of anything that occurs there, much world-building needs to occur. The 1984 version attempted to accomplish this through voiceover, a tedious succession of name dropping that succeeded in explaining thousands of years of fiction, but not why the viewer should care. Like I said, I lasted twenty minutes.

It is then with considerable acclamation that I report that this Dune, directed by Denis Villenueve, is a coherent and dramatic work of art. Yes, I understood what was going on and the exposition was paced in such a way that it did not bore me. That is not an easy feat to accomplish. I am not about to try to explain the plot in depth here. Like I said, that is a near impossible task, but I can attempt the briefest of outlines: “Dune” is a story about power, a struggle between an emperor which we do not meet, several of his vassal states, a mystical sect, and an indigenous tribe of a desert world that holds the galaxy’s most valuable resource. The emperor sets his vassals against each other to weaken them, and fight and weaken each other they do.

The vassals connive and maneuver against each other in elegant architecture, dressed in impressive fashion and surrounded by distinctive cinematography. There are also very ugly bad guys and gigantic sand worms. The look and feel of “Dune” is an artistic achievement. Denis Villeneuve, I’m sure, is a great part of that process having already made several of the best looking films of the past decade with the great cinematography Roger Deakins: “Prisoners”, “Sicario”, and “Blade Runner 2049”. I half-expected Roger Deakins to be present here, but he is not. The cinematographer is instead Greig Fraser, who I did not know on a name basis before, but whose work I have admired in “Zero Dark Thirty” “Foxcatcher” and “Lion” (He also did this thing I’ve heard of “The Mandalorian” but which I have not seen).

As striking as the architecture, fashion, and cinematography, is the excellent cast which is filled with interesting actors like Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin, Jason Momoa, Stellan Skarskgard, Javier Bardem, Zendaya, David Dastmalchian and Timothee Chalamet (presently having his breakout moment). It is a truth acknowledged in movies that the best way to procure a great cast is to make each character a main character in the scene that they find themselves in. This is usually done in one of two ways: have an episodic story in which the main characters in each part are not the same actors, or to have a character’s arc begin and completely end within the movie. I don’t necessarily mean kill the character, but good actors that have many different plans and options for work I believe will be more willing to take a bit part in a larger story if they know they don’t have to stick around for the entirety of the production. With the risk of making this paragraph even more of a spoiler than I’ve already made it, I will only say further that I believe it will be difficult for Dune Part Two to have as good a cast as Part One.

As I said, I will not bother trying to explain the plot. I will merely state that Dune mainly concerns itself with power. There are not democracies or republics present. Just empires, feudal lords, religious cults and native tribes. Frank Herbert seemed to understand the dynamics present quite well. We are somewhat removed from the contours of this world and the behaviors that inhabit it, but part of what makes science fiction fun, is that you can set up your own rules and see how people act within the made up system. Sometimes this is as pretentious as you think it would be and the science fiction element seems to just be a disguise for a straw man argument (say Star Trek or The Twilight Zone). Other times, you get something like Dune, which is so different, it hardly seems to be a commentary on anything on Earth. Earth details may have inspired it, but it is its own thing, content to have its message stay on its desert planet. It has nothing to do with anything else. It is pure escapism, which brings with its own type of pleasure.

The Avengers: Infinity War (5/5 Stars)

The last time a movie franchise achieved something akin to what Avengers: Infinity War accomplishes had to be The Lord of the Rings. That epic multi-Oscar winning movie was itself the third installment of a cohesive and perfectly realized trilogy of movies based on revered source material. Avengers: Infinity War leap-frogs that accomplishment. This movie is the culmination not of a trilogy but a universe of interconnected movies that spans nineteen films. Perhaps the HBO series Game of Thrones is the closest thing, but that TV series is still not of the same scale nor found in so many variations as the Marvel franchises that have climaxed into Infinity War. No, there really is nothing quite like Avengers: Infinity War in the history of movies.

Avengers: Infinity War has seventeen credited writers. It has two directors, Anthony and Joe Russo. It tells a story that attempts to involve all of Marvel’s outstanding franchises. These include:

Iron Man: Robert Downey Jr. (Tony Stark/Iron Man); Gwyneth Paltrow (Pepper Pots); Don Cheadle (James Rhodes/War Machine), Samuel L. Jackson (himself)

Thor: Chris Hemsworth (Thor); Tom Hiddleston (Loki); Idris Elba (Heimdall); Mark Ruffalo (Bruce Banner/Hulk); Peter Dinkalge (Eitri)

Captain America: Chris Evans (Steve Rogers/Captain America); Scarlett Johansson (Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow); Paul Bettany (Vision); Elizabeth Olsen (Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch); Anthony Mackie (Sam Wilson/Falcon); Sebastian Stan (Bucky Barnes/Winter Soldier)

Guardians of the Galaxy: Chris Pratt (Peter Quill/Star-Lord); Zoe Saldana (Gamora); Karen Gillan (Nebula); Pom Klementieff (Mantis); Dave Bautista (Drax); Vin Diesel (Groot); Bradley Cooper (Rocket); Josh Brolin (Thanos)

Dr. Strange: Benedict Cumberbatch (Doctor Strange); Benedict Wong (Wong)

Spider-Man: Tom Holland (Peter Parker/Spider-Man)

Black Panther: Chadwick Boseman (T’Challa/Black Panther); Danai Gurira (Okoye); Letitia Wright (Shuri)

Any of these franchises can and have carried a great movie on their own. (In particular, since 2013 Marvel has made a stretch of great movies including Guardians of the Galaxy, Captain America: Civil War, Dr. Strange, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Thor:Ragnarok, and Black Panther). So one of the great obstacles Infinity War had to overcome is how to fit all the above in the same movie giving each and every character their own moment to shine. Amazingly, this is done. All of the above share this movie in equal heft and have their own moments to shine. I’m not sure how seventeen writers and two directors go about doing something like that, but its time to start handing out Oscars.

What may to be the hardest thing to accomplish is how consistently funny the movie is. I say this because there are two big things fighting against it. The first is that the main villain, Thanos (played by Josh Brolin) is trying and succeeding throughout the movie to kill off half of the universe. It is heavy stuff and is taken quite seriously, not least by Thanos. Two important characters from the Thor franchise, Loki and Heimdall, die in the first fifteen minutes. Another important character from the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise dies at the half-way point. At the end, well, it seems like half the characters die. I won’t tell you which half, that would be a spoiler. The second is that this is an action-heavy blockbuster and huge spectacles and jokes generally do not generally complement each other. A good example of blockbuster spectacles and laughs working is the first Ghostbusters movie. A good example of blockbuster spectacles and laughs not working is the Ghostbusters remake. But in Infinity Wars, every joke lands. Dr. Strange is funny, Thor is funny, Star-Lord and Drax are funny, Spider-man is funny. Some characters are generally funnier than others. For instance Captain America and Black Panther were never particularly humorous, but almost everyone has their moments. There is also the added pleasure of seeing various characters interacting for the first time. At one point Thor meets up with the Guardians of the Galaxy. Bruce Banner has a scientific conversation with Shuri in Wakaanda. Dr. Strange and Tony Stark have this dialogue upon meeting.

Tony Stark: Nice cape. What's your job, again?

Dr. Strange: Protecting your reality, douchebag.

Infinity War is supposedly only the first of a two part movie, the other coming out next year. In that case, it is hard to judge the overall story at this point. But really, given how well this movie did what it set out to do, how could it be bad? Marvel is at its peak and the movies it has been making deserve to start getting serious recognition and not just for special effects. I expect Black Panther will run away with a serious amount of Oscars next year. Perhaps the year after Infinity War 2 will take the ultimate prize. As far as I’m concerned, Marvel has already earned it. At this moment, They are the best in the business.

Spectre (3/5 Stars)

It would be unfair to comment only on the drawbacks of Spectre without at first highlighting the things it brings to the table that other films simply cannot accomplish. That would be the epic globetrotting landscapes of the James Bond franchise. This movie directed by the returning Sam Mendes (Skyfall, American Beauty) with a new cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema (Her, Let the Right One In) is especially impressive in this regard. It was shot on film in the classic style and plays great on a big screen (I saw it at the Ziegfeld). The exotic locales include Mexico City during the Dia de los Muertos festival, Rome bathed in a nighttime orange-green glow of conspiracy, London in a chilly bureaucratic blue, a supervillain headquarters in the middle of the desert, and at least one beautifully soft lit train interior great for white tuxedos and fistfights. It really looks good but enough about that.

Spectre seems to be the culmination of the last three Daniel Craig Bond films. At various times in the movie the images of past characters find themselves on screen. Included are Eva Green from Casino Royale and Judi Dench from Skyfall. Conspicuously absent are any characters from Quantum of Solace; a movie that I really liked for reasons everybody else hated i.e. a realistic supervillain scheme. All of the shadowy bad guys in the previous movies are connected to a secret organization called Spectre that has an octopus as a mascot. It’s really big and does a lot of things. And here is where the last series of movies finally experiences a thematic disconnect between the reactionary pedigree of the franchise and the radical version of the Daniel Craig James Bond.

The James Bond supervillains have historically been colorful silly things. They generally have some outlandish goal like wanting to take over the world (or blowing it up). They have exhorbitantly expensive secret lairs. They have exotic henchmen with quirky ways of killing people. None of these things are all that believable. The Daniel Craig series of movies took the silliness out of the franchise. They took away almost all of the gadgets. They took away the scene stealing physical deformities of the villains. They involved evil schemes that were more or less real (in fact the scheme in Quantum of Solace actually happened which is the main reason I thought the movie had some serious chutzpah.) Heck even the blatant promiscuity is gone. I believe Daniel Craig refuses sex at least once in each of his movies. In this one, the refusal takes place within the first ten minutes during an impressively long tracking. It feels like a nice inside joke. The effect of all this seriousness combined with the retention of superior action sequences and decent character development has produced, I would argue, the best Bond movies in the franchise. Spectre has the look of the last three art house Bond movies but the plot of one of the old sillies. The whole thing feels like a setup to the production of more of the forgettable kind of Bond movies. It seems counterintuitive to me that the last three great James Bond movies would culminate into a standard James Bond movie. But that is me. James Bond movies do have a structure and the franchise has been around for a very long because that structure works for the most part.

If you have many Bond movies there are plenty of tropes here that you will recognize. The running joke of Bond’s propensity to destroy all of the equipment built by the continually annoyed Q (Ben Whishaw) is on full display here. Bond flirts with Moneypenney (Naomi Campbell). Bond rebels against M (Ralph Fiennes now). Bond gets captured by the bad guy, tied to a gurney, and uses a trick watch to escape. There is even a scene involving the love interest (Lea Seydoux) tied to a chair with a ticking time bomb and Bond has to decide whether to save her and probably die or just save himself. You have seen all of this before, but rarely in the Daniel Craig series, (or shot so beautifully by a great director and cinematographer team), which always took itself more seriously than the previous installments.

Nowhere does the disconnect present itself so glaringly then when the evil scheme presents itself. Spoiler alert I guess although I don’t think you will care so much by this reveal. The scheme is a world dragnet of surveillance, the sort Edward Snowden told us about and is in vogue currently as a supervillain plot. James Bond’s part of the British Secret Service MI:6 is portrayed as the responsible old fashioned way of doing spy stuff. Of course it isn’t. I mean the first scene of this movie has James Bond going AWOL in Mexico City having a fistfight in a helicoptor over a parade of several thousand innocent bystanders. It is a seriously dangerous irresponsible stunt by a agent going rogue agaist all orders. I know this is a James Bond movie but I wouldn’t judge the scene on its safety to the public if the movie itself did not intend to grandstand against the surveillance issues of our times and take the position that those are worse. There are too many dramatic conversations where characters inveigh vaguely against the danger of a police state in between set pieces of extraordinary violence that only with movie magic would not kill scores of innocent bystanders.

But let’s be positive about some of those set pieces because they are very good. My favorite parts of the movie have to do with the henchmen, played by a former pro wrestler named Dave Bautista who first came on the movie scene in last year’s Guardians of the Galaxy. He is a big brute of a man. After an awkward introduction he becomes the antagonist for a great car chase through Rome. It’s thrilling and very prettily shot and I was impressed that they got access to the Vatican. James Bond gets away but Dave Bautista catches up on a train as James Bond, in a white tuxedo, and Lea Seydoux, in an elegant dress, are sitting down to drinks. He bursts in from another car and havoc ensues. The fight is interesting in that it becomes clear that James cannot win it. Bautista is too big and too strong. It is a very cool thing to watch. I was wondering if they could end it in a way that wasn’t bullshit. They did.

I wish Cristoph Waltz was more entertaining as a Bond villain to me. On paper he would seem to be perfect. But I can’t say it was a particularly memorable performance or character. Oh and the bad guy from BBC's Sherlock Holmes is in this movie as well. He had far more potential on paper too. 

The Guardians of the Galaxy (4/5 Stars)

Our Hero, the Awesome Chris Pratt, lands his intergalactic spaceship on a desperate and dangerous alien landscape. He steps into a derelict and cavernous ancient cathedral overgrown with dangerous fauna. Chris Pratt puts on his Walkman and plays his “Awesome Mix Tape #1.” The song, played loud and funky is “Come and Get Your Love,” by Redbone. And to this tune, the opening credits of our movie come on the screen as Chris Pratt dances and shuffles through the many dangers of his archeological mission. That’s when I knew I was watching something new, something interesting, and most importantly something undeniably fun. And you know what, it was.  

Until now, I have not heard of the Marvel comic “Guardians of the Galaxy.” Apparently it is rather recent comic without much of a fan base. There are no recognizable characters. The team consists of a Firefly-esque band of misfits that have come together to do fun outlaw stuff, mostly salvage jobs. The leader is Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), a human who was abducted by aliens when he was a just a little kid in 1988. This particular back-story is a boon to people like me who are somewhat turned off by the complete arbitrariness of most way into the future science fiction. The most obvious perk of the story happening basically in current day even if we never see Earth is the soundtrack. It comes from the Walkman containing his Awesome Mix tape that young Peter was carrying when he was abducted. It has got Marvin Gaye, David Bowie, and even Blue Swede. These songs reflect good taste on the part of Peter’s mother who made the tape for him before she died of cancer. I was surprised and delighted that “Cherry Bomb” by The Runaways got an extended play over one of those getting-for-battle montages. It’s a killer song. Then there is the marvelous pair of digital creations Rocket Raccoon and Groot. They are originally a pair of bounty hunters. Rocket Raccoon is the product of a mad scientist who turned a raccoon into a living, breathing, sarcastic as all hell, and complete with a snarly Napoleaonic complex. Bradley Cooper voices Rocket Raccoon. Admittedly, I could not recognize him in the voice. Groot is, I guess, an Ent, a walking tree. Vin Diesel voices him in what can be safely be said is an underwritten role. All Groot can say is “I am Groot.” Although, he is a bit like Chewbacca in that apparently the Raccoon can interpret his connotations perfectly. These two characters are not muppet sideshows. They are so well conceived and artistically put together that after awhile I realized that I had forgotten that I wasn’t simply watching actual actors. We are at a point in movie technology where these characters are alive. It is an extraordinary to watch and given the progress I would think this might be the last time I comment on how well it is done. From now on, perhaps I’m going to judge these performances just how I would judge a human performance. On a very basic level what has been have achieved is a blurring of the distinction between the two. Joining the party late is the Pro Wrestler Dave Bautista as Drax. He does a very convincing job of being big and dumb and completely incapable of grasping metaphors. Finally there is Zoe Saldana painted dark green this time as a fierce warrior of some sort. She is the serious one of the bunch because you know she’s a woman.

The plot of this story is arbitrary and absurd and quite frankly really comparable to some truly awful movies like John Carter of Mars and the like. There are bunches of people with weird names in weirdly named places you’ve never heard of and they are trying to get this weapon that is going to kill everybody unless Peter Quill and the gang get it first. Motivations come and go easily for the people and not much makes sense in that annoying Science Fiction way you know where because it takes place in a far off place you don’t have to worry about making any of the technology realistic or plausible. But guess what? I did not care. I just did not care. Because what this movie does good it does awesomely great and I could forgive all the absurdity because the movie never really asked me to take it all that seriously. What it asked me to do was have fun and then it provided great music, good jokes, quirky characters, but above all abosolutely stunning things to look at.

The design of this movie is truly Oscar worthy effort. It is hard to assess who is exactly responsible for what. When you look up the crew on IMDB you are faced with the fact that hundreds of people have worked on the movie. But here are couple of names of the people in charge: Charles Wood of Production Design, Ray Chan of Art Direction, Alexandra Byrne of Costume Design, and whoever was in charge of makeup. There has not been a movie so vibrant and fun to look at since “The Fifth Element.” This movie makes use of a comic color palette. The prison jumpsuits are bright yellow. Several characters are of light blue and hot pink and orange hue.  My favorite design has to be the makeup of a character named Nebula (Karen Gillan). Now that is a sexy blue robot (I think she is a robot, maybe). If the makeup and hairstyling of this movie doesn’t win an Oscar I have no idea what I’m talking about. At one point I was looking forward to seeing new characters being introduced just to see what they looked like. What was better about Benecio Del Toro’s part in this movie? His performance or his white suit and hair?

This movie was directed by James Gunn and partially written by him too. I have not seen anything else he has done but given the size of these blockbusters, it is hard to say (and probably shouldn’t be said) that this is his movie. This is a corporate movie and as a corporate movie it has certain plusses and minuses. It does not, cannot have the personal touch that small movies have. But it does have the ability to apply lots of money for the employment of hundreds of artisans and designers. “Guardians of the Galaxy,” is a persuasive argument that summer tent-pole blockbusters can be worth the money spent to make it not just profit-wise but also in artistic merit. Yes, corporate movies can be quirky, original, and fun too. Attidude is all, i.e. the courage to play “Hooked on a Feeling” by Blue Swede in a science fiction movie and have faith that the audience is going to like it enough to ignore how the whole setup is completely absurd. Such courage in very expensive projects is rare but take a look, it exists.