BEFORE: I just heard the news last night that a couple movie theaters in Manhattan have closed, one's the big Regal in Union Square (I just walked by there a few days ago...) and the other is the Cinepolis on 23rd St. That last one hurts, because it's where I worked as an usher in the summer of 1989, right after graduating from NYU. It had a different name when it opened, the Cineplex Odeon Chelsea, but I was there when only three theaters were finished and they were still building the other 6 on the higher floors. Now I work at a different theater just down the street, and I don't know what this means for the Tribeca Festival and DocNYC, which have held screenings at Cinepolis - but who knows, that theater has changed hands and changed names about 6 or 7 times, so maybe another company will buy it and run it under another name, or maybe it's just done, and they'll convert it to warehouse space or a homeless shelter or something. I got out of there after three months because I got an office job.
I can always go back to work at movie theaters when times are tough, but then again, between streaming and the pandemic, maybe the days of movie theaters are over, or they will be soon. Every time a blockbuster like "Top Gun: Maverick" or "Avatar 2" comes out, it seems like the exhibition game has a new life, but maybe they're just fooling themselves. I still hear people say that they haven't been to a movie theater in three years, whether that's due to an abundance of caution or those people just prefer to watch movies on their computer, I can't really say.
BUT, a little over a month ago, I managed a screening of "Glass Onion", and there was a panel after with the director and some of the stars - Edward Norton, Kate Hudson, Janelle Monae, and it was moderated by Griffin Dunne. I didn't get to interact with them, of course, I just had to climb on stage and put their chairs out while the credits were rolling. They don't pay me to bother the talent or get star-struck, honestly there's no time. But I was THIS close to Rian Johnson, who of course directed "Star Wars: The Last Jedi" and sorry, but that's always going to be there in the back of my brain - I had to hold back and not embarrass myself. Anyway, it's an experience I had and it goes on my list of famous people I've been in the same room with. So far that list includes three "Star Wars" movie directors - Irvin Kershner, Ron Howard and now Rian Johnson. I guess for me that's three down, and three to go (Gareth Edwards, J.J. Abrams, and the Almighty one)
Leslie Odom Jr. carries over from "Needle in a Timestack".
THE PLOT: Famed Southern detective Benoit Blanc travels to Greece for his latest case.
AFTER: Right now I think there's a battle going on, with Kenneth Branagh as Hercule Poirot and Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc, to determine who is the "World's Greatest Detective". Bring it on, that's all I can say, I'm here for it - hand me the popcorn. They can keep both franchises alive for years before they wear it out. I'll keep introducing the stars at the panels after the screenings, so really, it's a win all the way around.
So anticipations were extremely high today, not just because I worked that screening, but because I'm eager to get to this before hearing any spoilers, because you really only get one shot at that sort of thing. Umm, yeah, which reminds, me, I've got to issue a SPOILER ALERT today because this is a recently-released film, it's like #3 on Netflix this week so a ton of people have already seen it, but if you're not one of those people, please, turn back now. It's a murder mystery, and you really don't want one of those spoiled for you, right? There was a woman on Jeopardy! last month who claimed to always read the plot summaries on Wiki before watching a movie, and I just want to know, lady, "Who hurt you? Why are you so damaged?"
OK, now let's proceed, don't say I didn't warn you. We're checking in with detective Benoit Blanc during the pandemic, and things are not going well - oh, sure, he's playing online games with his famous friends on Zoom (cameos listed below) but he also hasn't left the tub in over a week. (He must be very pruney - but well moisturized!). If only there were a solid murder among a group of diverse wealthy people that he could sink his teeth into! Actually, this kind of tracks because while certain forms of violent crime spiked during the pandemic, due to stress, paranoia and mistrust of police, I think you'll probably find that intricately planned murders among wealthy people were way, way down - simply because wealthy people weren't gathering on remote Greek islands in diverse groups because of travel restrictions and fear of catching COVID.
But according to this film, the wealthy people had the vaccines before the rest of us, they just administered it in a strange way - clearly this was filmed before anyone knew that a vaccine would be available and administered via an old-fashioned shot in the arm, and perhaps they could have changed this (now-bizarre) sequence, but it was already filmed, and it includes another cameo (listed below) so at some point, what's done is done. You just can't cut that actor from the film, it would be a shame.
OK, so an eccentric tech billionaire invites his five closest friends (which includes his ex) and one assistant to his remote Greek island for a weekend of maskless fun and a murder mystery game, where they get to solve his "murder". The invites were delivered via an intricate puzzle-solving box, and God, I love puzzles. This part of the film was just too short, it could have gone on for half and hour and I would have enjoyed every minute. But that's not everyone's cup of tea, I get it, so we have to move on to the murder mystery. And honestly, it's not that hard to see where this is going, it's going to be a fake murder mystery that probably turns into a real one at some point. Right?
Detective Blanc gets an invitation, too, somehow - though he's not part of this group of friends. So even the event's host wants to know, what is he doing there? Again, as the audience we can probably surmise the reason before the characters do. And come on, the guy just wants to leave the house, get out of the tub - we've all been there, right? At some point we get a glimpse of Blanc's home life, and we get to meet his domestic partner, I think. And I think they make a cute couple (again, cameos listed below) - the conservative fans may lose their minds over this, but come on - there's anything wrong with it. I'm surprised nobody's written an updated version of "Sherlock Holmes" where he and Watson are domestic partners as well as crime-solving ones.
(I thought it would be funny if Benoit Blanc had a completely different outrageous accent in this film from the one he had in "Knives Out", like it's part of his cover each time - but I guess I'm the only supporter of this idea. No, actually this was the director's idea, he considered it at one point, but probably fans of the franchise would have lost their minds.)
My main problem with the movie "Knives Out" was the endless back-and-forth over ONE piece of evidence - I swear, the movie focused on the intricate details of that label on that bottle of pills for what seemed like 20 minutes - enough, already, I stopped caring about this at some point. Maybe the director learned something after hearing some criticism, but there's nothing like that in the sequel. Well, there kind of is, there's the envelope with the bar napkin, but there's so much other good stuff here that I barely noticed. Is the plot complicated? Well, of course, there's a lot of ins and outs to this case, and I don't really want to get into all of that because HOW these people are connected is very important, and it all plays out in a specific way.
If I've got an issue, it's with the major revelations - once or twice there are things that divert the whole direction of the movie, and at one point it's so game-changing that the film needs to go back and show us the last 10 or 15 minutes of the film AGAIN, but with the new information we have. Obviously everything's different the second time around. It's a storytelling method, for sure, and it almost evokes "Pulp Fiction" at that point, maybe it's not quite as complex as all that, but on some level, showing the same scenes twice is a big no-no. Maybe there was a better way to do this, but it would mean re-structuring the whole film to accommodate, so perhaps not. STILL, with a better solution than repetition, maybe they could have shaved 10 or 15 minutes off of the running time (2 hours, 20 min.)
If you're going to take the traditional elements of locked-room mystery - a loaded gun, a power outage, a roster of suspects who hate each other and all have motive and opportunity, then you'd better bring something new to the table, or at least make the whole thing so much fun that we don't care. "Glass Onion" does at least one of these two things, I'm just not sure which. And it does it well, considering that I don't think the film will hold up to repeat viewings - watching it again knowing what you learned the first time seems rather pointless. The director knew, therefore, that he'd only get one chance to knock your socks off, and thankfully he went for it.
There's a dozen Easter eggs that I need to check out - from the name of Miles' company to all those celebrity-endorsed products, and I'll have to go find a list of them online. I really hope this film gets some Oscar nominations, then I'll be sitting pretty and I'll have something to root for. I guess we'll find out in just 2 days. And they're already developing another sequel to "Knives Out", so yeah, bring it on.
Also starring Daniel Craig (last seen in "Spielberg"), Edward Norton (last seen in "Kingdom of Heaven"), Janelle Monae (last seen in "Harriet"), Kathryn Hahn (last heard in "Hotel Transylvania: Transformania"), Kate Hudson (last seen in "Clear History"), Dave Bautista (last seen in "Thor: Love and Thunder"), Jessica Henwick (last seen in "The Matrix Resurrections"), Madelyn Cline (last seen in "Boy Erased"), Jackie Hoffman (last seen in "Legally Blonde 2"), Dallas Roberts (last seen in "My Friend Dahmer"), Noah Segan (last seen in "The Brothers Bloom"),Dan Chariton (ditto), Eddie Gorodetsky, Coco Shinomiya, Dilcia Barrera, Mark Newman, N.J. Gentry, Ali Goksoy, T. Florian Karnowski
with cameos from Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Hugh Grant (last seen in "The Gentlemen"), Ethan Hawke (last heard in "The Guilty"), Angela Lansbury (last seen in "Nanny McPhee"), Natasha Lyonne (last seen in "Irresistible"), Yo-Yo Ma (last seen in "Won't You Be My Neighbor?"), Stephen Sondheim (last heard in "Tick...Tick...Boom!"), Jake Tapper (last seen in "Mayor Pete"), Serena Williams (last seen in "King Richard") and the voice of Joseph Gordon-Levitt (last seen in "The Trial of the Chicago 7")
RATING: 8 out of 10 Google alerts (or racist tweets)
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