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. ⚂

Ah, one of these old films with Liza Minnelli and Grace Kelly… or something like that.

Paris! This movie may be paid for by the French tourist board.

Grace!

Hey! That’s Leslie Caron! I saw a movie with her just the other day… what are the chances… And that was with Fred Astaire. So she only needs to do a movie with Ginger Rogers now.

That’s how I always read my books.

Minnelli was having fun with the framing here.

And in general, everybody’s goofing it up to the max.

*gasp* Modern art!

Did I Got Rhythm originate with this movie? Sounds unlikely.

Ah!

MGM executive Arthur Freed bought the Gershwin musical catalog from George’s brother Ira in the late 1940s, since George died in 1937. Some of the tunes in this catalog were included in the movie, such as “I Got Rhythm” and “Love Is Here to Stay”.

Yeah, I thought that was an older song…

This is most amusing. It’s got a more solid storyline than these things usually have — there’s at least a couple love triangles and stuff, and a struggling painter and a struggling composer and a struggling dancer.

Such very film trickery.

But… while this is amusing and exceedingly well made (it won All The Oscars of the year), it’s more than a bit staid. It started off so well, with zany bits, but it’s seriously lost its zip and panache.

The final ballet thing was nice, though.

An American in Paris. Vincente Minnelli. 1951. ⚃

Heh heh. This starts with this shot for a couple of minutes — like a cheeky comment on Akerman’s way of filming. Then a rumble that we understand is an elevator, and then Akerman appears. It’s fun.

“And a camera there? Oh my god.”

Yay. She said “a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” the correct way! People never do that.

Heh, they’ve just told her she can’t smoke here. “Don’t worry.”

So this is basically just a filmed interview. The questions he asks are inane like “what is cinema” and “how do you do framing” — reading them up from a sheet of paper, obviously, one after another, and not engaging in any kind of conversation. I think if we’d get a closer shot, we’d see Akerman’s eyes rolling all the time, but she gives really good answers, about not being interested in naturalism, and ways of making a movie as tense as a Hitchcock movie without anything much happening.

It’s a fun conceit — doing an interview that tries to mimic an Akerman film, but they mostly manage to illustrate how difficult it is doing this sort of thing in the way Akerman does it and make it have tension.

And he’s really a kinda bad interviewer. Akerman soldiers through and says interesting stuff, and that saves it.

Chantal Akerman, From Here. Gustavo Beck & Leonardo Luiz Ferreira. 2010. ⚃