Movies Thread

[superrific]

Has the new Knives Out movie been discussed?

Very smart very tightly packaged mystery. Maybe too smart and too tightly packaged for me as far as having a chance at solving the mystery. Felt like it was really aimed as a homage for everyone who has read every single Agatha Christie novel ever. But with that being said, every single clue made perfect sense, and was perfectly obvious, but to me only in retrospect. That to me is kind of the hallmark of a good mystery, I only prefer them where I have a bit more of a sporting chance of figuring the whole thing out. I never really had a chance in this one.

I think what I liked about it was it completely avoided "red-herring" clues which I find really distasteful in mysteries (it takes zero effort or talent to sprinkle in 6 clues of which 5 are red herrings and only one is real, with no way to tell which is which until the denouement).

Instead this mystery is complex because of the sheer number of clues continuously dropped, all of them perfectly valid. So many that you lose track of them all and forget about important ones when it comes time to figure out the mystery. I really admire that, even if my short attention span meant I had zero chance of solving the mystery.

I just watched it last night. I'm not a "murder mystery" person so I don't take any special interest in the whole clue-unraveling, solve-it-yourself aspect of the film. If that's your jam, I have nothing to say. As a movie, I felt it was fairly poor, though not without redeeming features:

The Good:

1. Josh O'Connor. Actually, everything about that character was good. The character was written well. The acting was pitch-perfect. The actor allowed the character's depth to pour onto the screen, which is an achievement given that everyone else is a shallow caricature.

2. The setting. Rian Johnson does use the gothic cathedral backdrop to great effect. No question there, even if he did rip off a scene from Dracula. But . . .

3. There was one other acting performance that was excellent but to say it ruins the ending.

The Not-Good.

4. Rian Johnson said that he grew up Evangelical but he used Catholicism because of the aesthetic effect, that the churches of his childhood looked like "Pottery Barns." I agree with the aesthetic choice, but he probably should have updated the script. Nothing about the church feels Catholic at all, starting from the fact that a) it was founded by a rich guy; who b) was the priest until he died; and c) passed the priest position to his descendants; and d) seemingly operated completely outside the Catholic hierarchy. That is the profile of a non-denominational evangelical church. Everything about the church, other than its cathedral (origins mysterious), is modern-day Calvinist.

5. I guess one problem with murder mysteries is that the characters can never be well drawn, since the whole point is to obscure their real motivations. So maybe this is a genre complaint . . . but the characters are incredibly weak. Jacqueline du Pre the cellist who looks like Emily Watson was utterly useless and generic. Kerry Washington and Andrew Scott were completely wasted. The "Sy" character was worse. Josh Brolin did a heroic job rescuing his badly drawn character and made the character watchable, but he was no foil at all to the young priest.

6. The casting of Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc has always puzzled me. The character is written as some sort of New Orleans patrician who solves mysteries almost as a hobby, so why the hell would you get a British guy to play the role? At least in the first movie, Craig tried to play Blanc as a character instead of as a dialogue delivery device, but in this film, he's terrible. Blanc has lost all distinctiveness, and nothing about him is relevant to the movie at all. You could have plugged in any rando detective and the movie would have been the same. Bad look for the so-called leading man.

7. The MAGA angle is far too strong and on-the-nose. Normally, I'd be in favor of using a format like this to explore the ramifications of a political movement, but there's absolutely nothing sly or clever about this, in part because there is nothing sly or clever about MAGA. But it's a dead dead dead horse. All the time spent watching Brolin do ordinary MAGA stuff and pretend it's some sort of biting commentary could have been used to explore why Wicks was the person he was. He could have been an interesting character; instead, he's a cult-of-personality.

I guess Rian Johnson has always preferred over-explanation to subtlety or wit. He makes movies the way I post on message boards-- which, to be clear, is not how I would make movies.

8. This is really a minor point, but how the fuck did the young priest mount the new cross by himself?

 

[superrific]

I felt it was too long.

Also, it seems to me to be an unsolvable mystery. That's why they basically have to explain it at the end.

It was way too long. Structurally the movie fails because it starts with the formula of "here are all these people who could be suspects" but then quickly makes clear that they couldn't have done it. They should have done the mystery with the main suspects as the young priest, Glenn Close, and somebody from outside. The cellist was a waste of film. The novelist was a joke. I still don't understand who Kerry Washington was or what the character was doing there.

They could have saved half an hour of pointless glances and tears by cutting out the filler characters.