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A Complete Unknown is far from the worst thing you'll see this Christmas season, and many people will probably like it simply because of the various performances.
Posted in: Movies, Netflix | Tagged: glass onion, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, Knives Out, knives out 2, netflix
Glass Onion Is A "Primal Scream Against the Carnival-Like Idiocy"
A handful of films came out in 2022 with very anti-rich and anti-1% sentiments, and Glass Onion was one of them. That isn't that surprising considering that the first Knives Out film didn't exactly have a high opinion of its rich characters either [i.e., no matter where they might fall on the political or ideological line, they are all willing to do whatever it takes when the money is threatened]. Glass Onion is even louder positing that all of these rich people, and the rich tech billionaire, are all some level of idiot or fraud. While in an interview with The Atlantic, they brought up that this movie is louder and maybe even angrier than the last film.
"The whole movie, for me, is a bit of a primal scream against the carnival-like idiocy of the past six years," Johnson explained. "I think it's absolutely an angrier movie, for me at least. I hope the experience of watching it doesn't feel like an angry, hateful thing. But it's definitely coming from a place of just wanting to scream about a lot of things."
Glass Onion takes place during the worst of COVID lockdowns down a rich billionaire is able to get all of his friends on a private island so they can all pretend everything is normal again [sound familiar?] So the film has some rather obvious and maybe not-so-obvious targets, but the movie doesn't stop there. The interview points out that sometimes people can be frustrated with mysteries and that, in the end, the bad guy is taken away by the cops, and everything is all right again. That is more or less what happened at the end of Knives Out, Ransom was caught and taken away, but things are even more complicated by the end of Glass Onion. Johnson explained that the conclusion, the "here is how the bad guy did it" moment, is the heart of the genre.
"That gets to the heart of the genre, though," Johnson explained. "It's an essentially conservative genre. Chaos is created, and then the paternal detective finds the truth and solves it all. Look at the periods where this genre has spiked in popularity, the golden age of detective fiction, which peaked in the '30s during the rise of Hitler and the uncertainty in the world. You look at today, and the genre's having a little bit of a resurgence—right when the whole concept of a truth that, once revealed, sets everything right is being shaken to its foundation."
Without getting into spoilers, it's a little more complicated than just figuring the mystery out by the time Glass Onion comes to an end because that's, unfortunately, how it usually ends up working out in the real world. Much like the Thrombey family probably spent years making Marta's life hell over that will, when you're dealing with the 1%, it's not always as easy as figuring the mystery out, and that is something you can be angry about.
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery: Summary, Cast, Release Date
Benoit Blanc returns to peel back the layers in a new Rian Johnson whodunit. This fresh adventure finds the intrepid detective at a lavish private estate on a Greek island, but how and why he comes to be there is only the first of many puzzles. Blanc soon meets a distinctly disparate group of friends gathering at the invitation of billionaire Miles Bron for their yearly reunion. Among those on the guest list are Miles' former business partner Andi Brand, current Connecticut governor Claire Debella, cutting-edge scientist Lionel Toussaint, fashion designer, and former model Birdie Jay and her conscientious assistant Peg, and influencer Duke Cody and his sidekick girlfriend Whiskey. As in all the best murder mysteries, each character harbors their own secrets, lies, and motivations. When someone turns up dead, everyone is a suspect. Returning to the franchise he began, Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Rian Johnson writes and directs Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery and assembles another all-star cast that includes a returning Daniel Craig alongside Edward Norton, Janelle Monáe, Kathryn Hahn, Leslie Odom Jr., Jessica Henwick, Madelyn Cline with Kate Hudson and Dave Bautista. It played in theaters from November 23rd to 29th and streamed to Netflix on December 23rd.
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