It’s been a while since I’ve seen a Woody Allen movie… he’s probably made some since this one…

That’s a cute meet-cute, but kinda totally phoned in? Kinda like a parody of one, without being funny?

I’ve been there!

*gasp* The the actor playing Woody’s wife is only 20 years younger than he is! Is that a record!?

This movie is slightly on the orange/yellow side?

But looks good with the green.

Heh. This guy is totally trying to do Woody 1976-ish.

Baldwin is great as imaginary friend. Or are the rest of them imaginary, and he’s the real one? Hm… I guess that sounds more likely.

Harsh. But accurate. I think he may be referring to the Italian-famous-schmuck-fantasy storyline? Probably.

Because this is the most boring of the storylines — it’s just a single joke that lasts half an hour. Perhaps if they’d cut each storyline down by a third?

Hasn’t somebody done this gag before? It seems really familiar.

It just gets more and more tedious. It’s like they forgot to actually write the movie.

It’s got a couple of funny bits, but it mostly feels interminable.

To Rome With Love. Woody Allen. 2012. ⚁

Heh heh, beating up Santa is so apocalyptic.

Anyway, I saw this in an actual cinema in the 90s. You know, one of those places where lots of people sit in the same room and watch the same film? I know! It sounds like science fiction, but it was actually a thing.

I remember liking this movie quite a lot?

The shakycam is kinda overwhelming, though.

Uhm… this isn’t as good as I remembered. It looks good, but slightly cheap?

Oh, wow — I was wrong there. It’s a big budget… and it totally bombed! Totally.

Well, they didn’t get their money’s worth on the sets — everything looks slightly back-lot-y, and I’m not even sure they’re actually back lots.

SO MUCH DRAMA

It just seems kinda fake? It’s like they had to put in a scene here like this for character development, and it’s just kinda dull.

Is that Nine Inch Nails? Doesn’t really sound like them, but perhaps it’s from after I stopped listening to them…

Looks like a fun club.

*gasp* The perversions!

This guy is a really bad actor.

It’s pretty accurate.

Man, the plot here is so… I don’t want to say convoluted. It’s just kinda silly. And the movie whiplashes between being kinda expressive and then dropping down into TV series cop show dialogue. It’s jarring.

SO MUCH DRAMA

And the basic mystery — “who’s the deranged killer” — there’s basically just a single person it can be, which is so sloppy. (I mean, I guess they want us to think that the killer is that other guy, so it’s not him, and there is only a single person remaining.)

I was really disappointed — I remembered this being a lot better. And it’s got some really memorable scenes, but then there’s all the rest which is totally forgettable. It’s not that it’s overly long, either — I mean, it’s two and a half hours, but it doesn’t feel padded, and you couldn’t really cut anything without losing some plot. It’s just that so much of it’s kinda boring.

Strange Days. Kathryn Bigelow. 1995. ⚂

Wow, this isn’t what I expected in a Knives Out sequel at all. But it’s a lot of fun.

This movie is so subtle!

It’s a testament to… something… that scenes like this don’t scream AAAH ALL THAT GREENSCREEN AND CGI when we’re looking at it in context — we’ve become used to scenes like this that we don’t blink an eye.

So the rich guy is a total moron? Sounds predefinite accurate.

I remember Knives Out being more of a straight murder mystery? This is more like an all out satire? All funny all the time?

Or… OK, instead of “satire”, it’s “broad comedy”.

It’s almost fascinating that they don’t even bother to CGI and composit shots to look more realistic than this. It’s like — “if all the movie looks like shit, then nothing stands out too much, eh?”

Sanctuary did this better 15 years ago.

Oh, OK.

This movie is just very frustrating. It started off as a broad comedy, and it was pretty funny. Then we’ve gone through all these tedious scenes of standard mystery TV series machinations, and while I recognise that they’re “sly parodies” of this sort of stuff, it doesn’t quite work on any level — it’s not actually funny, and it’s not good mystery stuff, because it’s structurally obvious who the murderer is.

(Well, I say that now, but I don’t actually know yet!)

But even if I’m wrong, I’m already annoyed and somewhat bored, just like I was with the first movie.

And it’s two hours and twenty minutes!!! I feel like they could already have cut a half an hour of the first hour and fifteen minutes…

But there’s a bunch of really amusing lines here; you gotta give them that.

Heh heh.

I admire them using the Netflix billions to take the piss out of billionaires and stuff — and they do it well and they do it thoroughly, with plenty of good gags — but the movie just doesn’t work for me. It sags and the repartee falls flat a lot of the time, and spending this much time on this extended joke just isn’t worth it.

So while I rate the thought process behind this ⚅ or higher, and the mystery itself was kinda fun, and the performances are good, I spent most of the time watching this bored out of my skull. The “cinematography” (i.e., compositing people standing in front of greenscreen onto scenery) was incredibly basic and at times risible (I wondered whether Johnson was taking a subtle dig the phenomenon at certain points, but I don’t think so), and the excessive length (they could easily have dropped an hour), so:

Glass Onion. Rian Johnson. 2022. ⚂