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?

Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse (4/5 Stars)

Spider Man: Into the Spider-Verse war written in part by Phil Lord. This man has been instrumental in bringing to prominence a very 2010s subgenre of movies. Previous examples of his work are 21 Jump Street and the Lego Movie. What these movies have in common is a consciousness of previous source material that goes beyond being meta and continues into a weird quirking of the "suspension of disbelief". These movies are insisting that a fake universe is real to its characters and that the fake reality rules should apply instead of real reality rules. A good example is Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, whereby the characters are sucked into a video game and realize the world they inhabit is not governed by physics or biology but video game rules.

You wouldn't think that should work in a dramatic sense because when anything is possible, there should be no stakes or suspense. But the rules have kind of changed in the last twenty years, in part by gamer culture (which I will speak of later) and in part by a TV show named Community. (Obviously there are a million different threads that produce culture, but I do feel this show must have been instrumental). Community introduced a character named Abed who was so ingrained in the workings of genre storytelling that he could seemingly predict what would happen in the very TV episode he was in. Other characters would chide Abed that reality wasn't like a TV show, but they would generally be proven wrong becuase they were characters in a TV show. Over-time, Community became less a TV show about what characters did in certain situations, and more about how already established characters would react if they found themselves in a completely different TV genre. That is the situations didn't change in Community. The TV show's genre, and thus the cliche genre rules, changed.

This type of storytelling probably wouldn't be possible without something like gamer culture. By that I mean, the ability for an entire audience of people to have spent more time studying the rules of a fake universes to the point where it might make sense for a story to be using different rules of realty. I guess you could trace this back to J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-Earth, the enormity and details of which were so developed that the place became real in the imagination. Nowadays, vast landscapes of fantasy come out every couple of months. Much of this can be crowd-sourced, with different people contributing their own stories. Think of the expansiveness of the Star-Wars Universe. These are not simply movies. There are dozens of novels and several 30-50 hour video games. Wookieepedia, the StarWars encyclopedia has granular descriptions of various races, planets, languages, specifications of different weapons and vehicles. There are historians of these fake universes who curate online encyclopedias and obsess over what is canon, a mind-boggling absurd notion that tries to differentiate the fake-actual events from the fake-fake events of a completely fictional storyline.

But amazingly, if the universe becomes detailed enough, its reality can become something approaching real and drama/pathos/humor can be derived from it. Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse is such an example. Now you know this story as this movie will explain to you at least six separate times. Peter Parker was an unassuming teenager from Queens, New York. He was bitten by a radioactive spider and became Spider-Man, a friendly neighborhood crime-fighter who works as a photographer for the Daily Bugle and falls in love with his highschool sweethear Mary Jane. He has a particularly good origin story that involves a beloved uncle that counsels him the "with great power comes great responsibility" and whose death occurs because of Peter's inaction. The original Spider-Man story has been told three times already in the last twenty years, first with Tobey Maguire, than with Andrew Garfield, and currently with Tom Holland in the main role. (As a NY Times critic pointed out, Spider-Man's defining characteristic is his youth, thus he must remain forever young, and thus the many reboots). Over the last sixty years, there have apparently been many spinoffs and satires of this story. In this movie, all of those universes merge.

The science is hazy but goes something like this: Every version of Spider-Man that has been created in any comic book or movie lives concurrently but in different universes. A bad guy named KingPin is creating a big machine underneath Brooklyn that will meld this multiverse. Spider-Man (the original Peter Parker) tries to stop him but gets sucked into the machine. This sucks the other versions of him into the original universe. Now instead of one Spider-Man, there are at least six.

I had no idea how out-of-hand this universe had become. Apparently, none of these characters are original to this movie. But we've got Miles Morales, teenager from Brooklyn. Gwen Stacey, best friend of Spider-Man who becomes Spider-Girl after Spider-Man's death, Peter B. Parker the middle-aged version of Spider-Man recently divorced and out of shape (voiced by Jake Johnson), Spider-Man Noir a black-and-white private detective Spider-Man from the 1930s (voiced by Nicholas Cage), Penni Parker, an anime japanese school-girl from the year 3100 who utilizes a Spider-Man robot, and finally, the one and only Peter Porker, Spider-Ham, a cartoon spider who was bitten by a radioactive pig, works for the Daily Beagle, and can float through the air while smelling a delicious pie (voiced by John Mulaney).

Visually, the movie is very impressive as it utlizes all of the different animation styles from the various Spidermen in the same movie. Animation, especially computer animation, makes for great action sequences, and this movie is very impressive in that capacity too. The heart of the story belongs to Miles Morales who we see gaining his powers, going through the tribulations of high school, and losing his beloved uncle. Certain stories are special to us. "If it was never new, and it never gets old, it's a folk song" says Llewyn Davis in Inside Llewyn Davis. This too applies to Spider-Man.

Our Idiot Brother (4/5 Stars)

Good writing and nice people: A typical Paul Rudd comedy

The majority of comedies are about mean and obnoxious people. The idea being that gleeful and aggressive shocks of violence and rude behavior elicit laughs. And they do. Quite a lot of these movies are very funny. But every once in a while it is a pleasure to see a comedy take the opposite route and have the running joke be that the characters are too trusting, lovable, and sweet. Or in Ned’s case (played by the funniest nice guy in movies, Paul Rudd) all those characteristics to an idiotic degree.

What a good and compassionate heart Ned has. In the first scene we see him happily running a biodynamic vegetable stall at the local farmer’s market. He charges fair prices and lets little kids steal strawberries with a smile. A uniformed cop walks up to him and asks for marijuana. Ned is hesitant. The cop confides in Ned that it’s been a really rough week for him. Ned, ever so trusting and empathetic, decides to give him a bag of marijuana on the house. No, the cop insists, he wants to pay for it. Ned relents and gives a price that must be a rather large discount for that amount of marijuana. The cop pays and informs Ned that he is being arrested for selling drugs. It takes Ned awhile to realize that the nice cop had been lying to him all along.

Ned is thrown in prison for eight months and is released four months early for being “Most Cooperative Inmate” three months straight. Outside he finds that he has lost his job, his girlfriend, his place to live, and his much loved dog, Willie Nelson. The way he handles all this would make Socrates, Thoreau, and Jeffrey Lebowski very proud. He even makes dudely peace with his girlfriend’s new boyfriend, played here by the very funny T.J. Miller. He drops by his mother’s house where there are still family dinners routinely held. Around the table are his three sisters. One is Emily Mortimer, a wife and mother to an oily Steve Coogan and ten-year-old Dillon respectively. Another is Elizabeth Banks, a hard-working journalist on the verge of a career-making story. Finally there is Zooey Deschanel, a stand-up comedian currently engaged to Rashida Jones, a hipster lawyer with a must-mention sense of style. This is a very good cast. Most of them have worked together before and it has a way of showing. Elizabeth Banks was Rudd’s opposite in “Role Models” and Rashida Jones was Rudd’s opposite in “I Love You, Man.” Those movies too were very nice and funny comedies about good people. You can put this one up there with them. Good writing and nice people. I think it can be said that Paul Rudd is developing a solid reputation for these types of movies.

From there on, Ned couch surfs from home to home causing problems with his honesty and humility. Generally speaking, the problem already exists but Ned has a way of bringing them out in the open because of how his compassion and empathy (which makes him very easy to confide in) combines with his complete inability to tell a lie and childlike belief that the truth brings out the best in people. People tell him things he shouldn’t hear and he shares things to others he isn’t supposed to tell. Soon Emily’s marriage to Steve Coogan is on the rocks (as it should be because the guy is no good), Elizabeth’s career is put in danger (as it should be because her employers are telling her to do shady things), and Zooey’s relationship with Rashida is endangered (as it should be because Zooey has a bad habit of infidelity). All of this happens because of “our idiot brother.”

The first half of the movie is enjoyable but there were very few laughs. The movie did pick up steam, however, as it went along and by the end the laughs were big and numerous. The characters in general are so likable that laughing becomes a very easy reaction to indulge in. I especially liked the raid on the organic farm by Ned and Rashida Jones to steal back Willie Nelson. It goes bad almost immediately and they don’t get the dog back, but T.J. Miller is a really cool dude about the midnight trespassing and all. He even goes so far as to sort of apologize for not giving Ned the right information for when him and the girlfriend would be out of town to see a Dixie Chicks concert. “Next Thursday” apparently in Miller’s mind means every Thursday down the road that isn’t “this Thursday.” Ned kindly informs him that for future reference he should say “Next Next Thursday” if he means the Thursday after next. Sorry Dude, my bad. That’s totally okay, Dude, sorry for the trespassing. The movie did miss an opportunity in its underutilization of Zooey Deschanel though. This is an actress I have seen being truly hilarious before (The Good Girl, (500) Days of Summer). In this movie she plays a stand-up comedian. It would have been funny if she had a decent act that made people laugh or something.

Is Ned truly an idiot? The sisters treat Ned with that special kind of passive aggressive disdain women reserve for honest and humble men. Ned isn’t really an adult in their eyes. Ned tolerates this not only because he has to in that he is sleeping on their couches but also because he loves his family and understands their various problems. There is a very telling scene where Ned finally gets angry. Here is a man who was unjustly sent to prison via an act of compassion, lost his job, his home, his girlfriend, and essentially the respect and dignity in the eyes of his family. Does this make him bitter? No, he is still a good person, tries to do better, and spends much of the movie apologizing to those who are unfairly pissed off at him. What does he get angry about? He gets angry when on family night his sisters essentially ruin a game of charades. They break the rules, won’t have fun, and treat the concept of a family game as a stupid waste of time. It is easy to roll one’s eyes and claim that this is an idiotic thing to get angry about. Or one could perhaps reflect on their priorities in life.

One more thing, and I say this with but the expertise of a person who has seen an almost ridiculous amount of movies. Movies do not glamorize drugs, at least not the good ones. I have seen people drink themselves to death (Leaving Las Vegas), I have seen people ruin their lives with heroin (The Wire, Requiem for a Dream, Basketball Diaries), I have seen people make ridiculously bad decisions while on cocaine (Goodfelllas, Casino, Scarface, Boogie Nights, Bad Lieutenant). I have seen drug overdoses aplenty (Pulp Fiction, Traffic, Trainspotting, SLC Punk). Not once have I seen the movie where somebody smoked marijuana, became addicted, overdosed, or routinely went about their self-destruction. I think the worst I have seen was the case in Dave Chappelle’s Half Baked where one of the characters literally smoked himself retarded. True I have seen potheads that are lazy and stupid, but being lazy and stupid is not a crime and here is the point I want to make. We don’t need to be wasting the police’s time and the taxpayer’s money putting people like Ned behind prison bars. It has been argued that marijuana may lead to heavier drugs and more criminal behavior. You can say the same about losing your job, your girlfriend, and your home, which has a tendency to happen when someone gets thrown in prison. The problem isn’t being solved. Thank God that in this movie, Ned had a good family to fall back on. I think we must remember that there is a difference between behavior that is morally objectionable and behavior that is criminal. It can definitely be said that it would be better for the smoker or drinker to exercise prudence and refrain from intoxicants. But it must also be understood that indulging in mind-altering substances is a universal thing amongst human beings as a species. Basically every religion on the face of the planet has some kind of drug that they use in their functions or tolerate in society. It is a truth that people in general have rough weeks and look for a chance to escape every now and then. When this is made a crime, there will be a ludicrous amount of people behind bars that otherwise could be functioning productive citizens (ex. the United States of America). Drugs use is a very serious thing and those that are addictive, manipulative, and dangerous should be illegal. Marijuana is not one of those. If you would like to know exactly what it does, please read Michael Pollan’s “The Botany of Desire.” Of course, like anything else, marijuana may be abused. But that is a problem that should be dealt with by a family, a church, a support group, or a community. Using lawyers, courts, prisons, and parole officers to solve such a problem is akin to swatting flies with a baseball bat. You’re bound to cause far more damage than if you did nothing at all.