Review: The Clumsy Anti-Muskism of Glass Onion

Hating tech billionaires is The Current Thing.

Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) is back. The eccentric detective and his endearing, exaggerated Southern accent have a new case to solve in Glass Onion, the sequel to 2019's beloved whodunit Knives Out.

The mystery unfolds in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, bringing Blanc to a private island owned by the tech billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton). Bron is clearly a broad—sometimes very broad—caricature of Elon Musk, and he's not alone: A men's rights YouTuber played by Dave Bautista is channeling Joe Rogan, or perhaps the accused sex trafficker Andrew Tate. A bought-and-paid-for Democratic politician (Kathryn Hahn), a clueless fashion influencer (Kate Hudson), an amoral scientist (Leslie Odom Jr.), and a rival tech mogul (Janelle Monáe) round out the cast of characters/list of suspects.

Writer-director Rian Johnson has once again assembled all the elements of a classic Agatha Christie–style detective story, added modern trappings, and poured glitter all over it. Glass Onion is a bit more straightforward than its predecessor, but there are still plenty of fake-outs, surprise killings, and flashbacks that reveal everything you thought you knew was a lie.

All that said, some viewers won't like this entry as much; its self-indulgent ending falls comparatively flat. And there's no getting around Glass Onion's hectoring progressive agenda: a ceaseless, flashy reminder that hating white male tech billionaires is The Current Thing. The film's politics date it, even more so than the COVID masks the characters wear before arriving at the crime scene.

Comments

[A Thinking Mind]

I don’t get the appeal of Rian Johnson. He does things like give the villain a nonsensical stupid trait-that he communicates almost exclusively through fax machines-to allow the investigator to access confidential information he needs. It’s terrible writing to get out of a writing hole you’ve dug yourself into. All it’s got going for it is the twist that the villain is really stupid, which justifies everything the writer needs to make him do.

[Nardz]

He’s just so kooky!
Audiences love that!

[A Cynical Asshole]

I don’t get the appeal of Rian Johnson.

Me neither, and not just because I haven’t (and will never) forgive him for ruining Star Wars (although to be fair, J.J. Abrams had already started it on the road to ruin before Round Head Rian got his hands on it). He’s an overrated hack, especially as a writer. I remember when a lot of people were sperging out over Looper. I watched it and remember thinking it was one of the dumbest concepts ever put to film. Why the hell would they send people back in time to be murdered? That’s fucking stupid, and it has all the same plot holes and time travel paradoxes that every other time travel movie has. Just another ~2 hours of my life I’ll never get back.

It’s terrible writing to get out of a writing hole you’ve dug yourself into.

Almost all of his movies have something like that in it. Some stupid, non-sensical bullshit contrivance that he obviously just put in because he wrote himself into a corner.

[Leonremi]

Seriously ?
you are defending Musk, Rogan and Tate? No shame at all then.

[Don't look at me!]

Blind hatred is something to be proud of.

[Mother's Lament]

Are you being sarcastic? It’s so hard to tell these days whether it’s sarcasm or the ravings of prog tankies.

[A Cynical Asshole]

I used to give people the benefit of the doubt and assume sarcasm, especially in these comment threads, but I don’t anymore unless it’s a name I recognize who has a reputation for being sarcastic (yes, I really do live up to my screen name).

So, when I see a comment from someone who’s name I don’t recognize I assume they’re being serious. In this instance, I assume it’s probably a drive by Rian Johnson fan-thing who somehow came across this review of Glass Onion and thought to themselves “Ooh, Rian Johnson! He’s so cooky and eccentric! He’s my fave! Well, him and Taika Waititi, I should totes go read the review and leave a comment!” And then got triggered at the mere mention of Musk, Rogan, and Tate that wasn’t complete hate (I wouldn’t say Soave was defending them, just pointing out the obviousness of the caricatures).

[Sandra (formerly OBL)]

“hating white male tech billionaires is The Current Thing”

Odd.

You’d think supporters of Current Thing would realize billionaires are on their side.

#BillionairesForBiden
#CheapLaborAboveAll

[Sandra (formerly OBL)]

“Writer-director Rian Johnson”

Although it’s nice to see Disney gave him some time off before making the new Star Wars trilogy that got greenlit because they were so impressed with The Last Jedi. Those are still listed on his IMDB page so they must still be happening.

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[Cyto]

You missed the “why”.

For the “why” behind the hate, one need merely watch the Taibbi testimony from yesterday on capital hill.

The vitriol and panic displayed by the democrats in defense of the security state was intense. Horrifying, even. They went full fascist.

Glenn Greenwald had some excellent rants on the topic

[Cyto]

For some reason, Reason is withholding links to Rumble, so you will have to search up Greenwald’s “system update” yourself.

[Cyto]

Kind of odd that Reason blocks the “we allow free speech” video site. I mean, that is kinda in the libertarian wheelhouse.

Odd coincidence that they also have been remarkably quiet about the revelations that the federal security state has been controlling news and social media coverage from behind the scenes.

Also something that should be right in Reason’s wheelhouse.

[Sandra (formerly OBL)]

It’s almost like, despite the leather jackets and “we’re rebels because we like weed” posturing, Reason is just another cog in the billionaire-funded #Resistance.

[Cyto]

Maybe they would cover it if Bari Weiss found an illegal immigrant prostitute who was censored on YouTube…

[Cyto]

Also in Taibbi’s testimony…. Twitter had weekly meetings with all of the tech giants and the Federal 3 letter agencies and a raft of quasi-private “watchdog groups” about how to streamline requests for censorship on all platforms.

[Cyto]

And no, it was not about “misinformation”, and it was not only about partisan politics…. they also censored “true but inconvenient” information, dubbed “malinformation”. Things like stories about the side effects of the various covid vaccines. Could not be discussed online.

Anything that might inspire “vaccine hesitancy”… banned at the insistence of the federal government.

[chemjeff radical individualist]

Cyto, you are forgetting a very important point here though.

The tech companies didn’t censor their own platforms because they were forced to by the government.

They censored their own platforms because they WANTED to. Because, in their minds, it was the right thing to do to censor stories about COVID vaccine side-effects. The government agencies just gave them additional motivation and rationalizations to do so.

[Don't look at me!]

Idiot.

[Cyto]

You are just flat wrong about that.

Taibbi has discussed many of the methods used by the government, including the suspicious placement of large numbers of ex FBI and CIA officials in high office.

But beyond that, this hearing also highlighted another tool in use. The regulatory powers of the state.

Several democrats made a point of mentioning $150 million in fines leveid by the FTC against Twitter. Part of that “settlement” was a consent decree that gives the FTC expanded powers.

And what did the FTC do this past week?

They demanded all communications, internal and external, about these “Twitter files”. They also demanded the names of every journalist Twitter personnel spoke to.

And in a very public demonstration of the true nature of this action, the democrats on the panel repeatedly demanded that Taibbi and Shellenberger name their sources at Twitter.

The message is clear… the state and the party are one. You will not speak of things the state and party deem “misinformation”. They will use the full power of the federal government to make sure you fall in line.

And as they have clearly demonstrated… that power goes far beyond the state, far beyond the law, and far beyond what is public.

[chemjeff radical individualist]

As usual, you interpret current events in the most conspiratorially minded manner possible. It’s people like you who give libertarianism a bad name as being full of just a bunch of paranoid cranks and loons.

Taibbi has discussed many of the methods used by the government, including the suspicious placement of large numbers of ex FBI and CIA officials in high office.

Or, a more reasonable explanation is that the companies hired these ex-agents for their expertise in online security and law enforcement.

But hey, yeah let’s pretend that it’s a giant long operation to infiltrate Twitter with government spies.

Several democrats made a point of mentioning $150 million in fines leveid by the FTC against Twitter. Part of that “settlement” was a consent decree that gives the FTC expanded powers.

This consent decree was in *2011*.

The “expanded powers” happened in May 2022, BEFORE Elon Musk bought Twitter.

Here is the link to the 2022 order, so you can read it for yourself, instead of having it filtered through bad-faith ‘journalists’ like Taibbi.

https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2022/05/twitter-pay-150-million-penalty-allegedly-breaking-its-privacy-promises-again

They demanded all communications, internal and external, about these “Twitter files”. They also demanded the names of every journalist Twitter personnel spoke to.

Where is this letter? Do you have a link to it?

I’d like to see what the letter actually says, don’t you?

I tried searching for it online and I couldn’t find it. But maybe you will have better luck.

What I did find, though, was that “someone” (*cough* Elon Musk *cough*) leaked this FTC letter to House Republicans, which the WSJ claimed to see a copy of and report on it (but not provide the actual letter), and it was the House Republicans who made these claims about the letter being an act of harassment against Musk.

So really this whole story as you’ve presented it is not based on publicly available facts, but is based on the Republican narrative.

And if Elon Musk was the guy who leaked the letter to the Republicans who then used it in their committee display the other day, what does that say about tech-government collusion?

[Mother's Lament]

“What I did find, though, was that “someone” (*cough* Elon Musk *cough*) leaked this FTC letter to House Republicans… And if Elon Musk was the guy who leaked the letter to the Republicans who then used it in their committee display the other day, what does that say about tech-government collusion?”

Nothing.

Are you that fucking fascist to think that a veiled threat from a government department can’t be publicized? What the FTC is doing is utterly criminal and yet here you are pretending their the victims.

This is (one of the many reasons) why I call you Nazi without fear of hyperbole, Jeff.

[Mother's Lament]

You’re just always chock full of little lies, aren’t you. Amazing that you’re making excuses for it too.

“They censored their own platforms because they WANTED to.”

If you’d actually read the emails instead of relying on your ActBlue talking points for narrative clues, you’d realize that the government wasn’t making “suggestions” and Twitter was unaware of virtually all the posts until they were flagged by the FBI, DHS and the administration.

“it was the right thing to do to censor stories about COVID vaccine side-effects.”

Except mRNA injection side effects were only about 1% of what was being censored and Covid in general 10%.

The information that they censored about Covid invariably turned out to be true. The injections are now associated with myocarditis in youth, the injections didn’t prevent transmission, multiple boosters were required in the end, Covid didn’t come from the farmers market 300 meters from a coronavirus research lab, and two days ago the former director of the CDC told congress under oath that Covid-19’s creation was a project funded by Fauci and the NIAID.

But that’s irrelevant because Covid is just a small fraction of the censorship demands, whereas over fifty percent were political with many flagged for being critical of the government departments.

I’m pretty sure you’re actually cognizant of all this, but you’re here to twist and lie.

[Don't look at me!]

PrIvAtE cOmPaNiEs

[A Cynical Asshole]

Odd coincidence that they also have been remarkably quiet about the revelations that the federal security state has been controlling news and social media coverage from behind the scenes.

“Too local.”

[Fist of Etiquette]

For some reason, Reason is withholding links to Rumble…

Damn. Really?

[chemjeff radical individualist]

No. It is just Cyto being Cyto.

[mad.casual]

https://rumble.com/v2cel4c-system-update-show-52.html

Livestream begins at 10:11.

*Edit*: Link posted out of respect for the 1A, not as refutation of your claim. We’ll see how long the Koch suckers leave it up.

[mad.casual]

Additional note to Boomers and/or Luddites, a traditional Google search will not readily turn up the specific video either. You have to go to the-*other*-site-whose-name-we-dare-not-speak and search there.

[Cyto]

Of course, there was the comical….

This is not a parody.

Repeat, this is real.

https://twitter.com/townhallcom/status/1633874644955430921?t=2I8gCzkbYG2wMBXIPSa_jw&s=19

[Cyto]

But there were also not-so-veiled personal threats and even a Texas Democrat who went all-in on the fascist state, saying the FBI and the CIA are heroes for controlling what Americans can say and read. He went full “A Few Good Men” Jack Nicholson on the subject of deep state control of media.

They are terrified of even one platform allowing free speech.

The rep from Manhattan even claimed that they were only banning “illegal speech”. It was Orwellian in the extreme.

[mad.casual]

She got him! It’s there! She’s got proof, personal confession under oath, that Weiss, Musk, and Schellenberger were engaged in a threesome! So you must ignore all the evidence of Hunter’s “Sheening”(? crack-cracking? whorecokesnorting? It really feels like there’s a specific term for this and I’m missing it* or there ought to be if I’m not), the COVID lies, the Ukraine narrative, the influence and money shifting hands, the anti-Constitutional violations of Oath and Office, the global reach of the corruption, the billions of dollars funneled in and paid out to maintain it all, and all the excess deaths that resulted from all of it!

*And fully deserving of a corner being torn off my Libertarian Card for doing so.

[Cyto]

Simply on the issue of covid policy… all discussions of which were aggressively blocked on all social media platforms and by all corporate press outlets…. we just witnessed the release of a chart of “excess deaths” in all of Europe since the start of the pandemic.

The very lowest? Sweden.

By a mile.

They are the ones who protected old folks and did nothing else.

After a couple of weeks, we were not even allowed to discuss that option.

Millions of excess deaths resulted. Because Top Men knew that they were right, because science. So discussing the science that the Swedes relied upon was forbidden.

The results are in. Censorship killed tens of millions across the globe during the pandemic.

[A Cynical Asshole]

Barri Weiss was a journalist for the New York Times before going independent, and although she may not have been one of the most prominent journalists there, I guaran-fucking-tee you that cunt knew who she is. She was just pretending to not know so as to imply that Weiss is an irrelevant nobody. I also strongly suspect that the whole “so you’re in this as a threesome” wasn’t some Freudian slip or accident. She intended to imply that Weiss had been spit roasted by Taibbi and Shellenberger.

[Cyto]

Another interesting development during that hearing was that the representatives took full advantage of their congressional immunity. They stepped way over the line of defamation more than a few times, lying rather boldly about is Taibbi and company, repeatedly.

[Nardz]

https://twitter.com/WarClandestine/status/1634056673848336385?t=En5FPOjLBAGHM0Xmx40q-w&s=19

What good is The Constitution if government entities can brazenly violate it without consequence?

As Shellenberger said in testimony, this is “Stasi East Germany stuff”. This isn’t some media scandal. This is an unprecedented Orwellian attack on the American People.

[Link]

[Nardz]

And yet Shellenberger voted for Biden.
None of these play-actors actually give a shit

[chemjeff radical individualist]

Cyto, I think the larger point here deserves some serious consideration though, beyond the posturing and the tribal hate.

If you run a social media platform, what should you do if people start posting information on that platform that, if acted upon, could potentially harm others or themselves?

The free-speech absolutist would claim that nothing should be censored, not even by the site owners themselves.

The censorious ones would claim that everything should be filtered through “experts” and “fact checkers” to make sure only the “valid” information makes it through.

I don’t like either of those extremes, what do you think the sensible libertarian position should be?

[Don't look at me!]

If you run a social media platform, what should you do if people start posting information on that platform that, if acted upon, could potentially harm others or themselves?

Nothing.

[chemjeff radical individualist]

I disagree. For example, if I ran a social media platform and someone posted “Here’s a recipe for making cyanide cookies for children”, I would remove it. Without hesitation. Because I believe I have a moral obligation to use my own property in a way that doesn’t knowingly cause harm to others. Letting my property be used to spread messages that can, if acted upon, be used to cause real harm, is not right in my view. There is also the issue of legal liability – what liability would I bear if someone really did use that recipe and wind up harming children (or anyone)?

But I understand why someone might disagree. If that is the case, then in this example that I posted above, should the site owner bear legal liability if someone used that recipe and wound up harming people?

[Don't look at me!]

No. You could go to a library and get that recipe.

[chemjeff radical individualist]

I’m pretty sure the local public library doesn’t have a recipe for “cyanide cookies for children”.

Now, if a person really wanted to know how to put poison into cookies in order to kill children, all of the information needed to do that is publicly available in some form or fashion, yes. But (1) it requires work on the part of the killer to gather up all of those independent pieces of information to create the recipe on his/her own, it’s not put together into one handy recipe, and (2) any particular platform owner should not be under any particular obligation to host any of that information if they choose not to.

Do you see any potential liability for hosting information that could be used to harm others? Moral liability even?

[Cyto]

You are clearly a disinformation specialist.

No, there is no “important discussion” to be had about whether the head of the CDC should be allowed to talk about his well-founded suspicions that Covid-19 was the result of a lab leak.

There are no “important conversations” to be had about the value of having the federal government direct YouTube to block Stephen Crowder from covering the election returns (he had more viewers than CNN, MSNBC or Fox… and he was pulled from the air during the broadcast).

This is not an honest discussion. It is a nakedly partisan and weak-minded attempt to derail the legitimate discussion – that the CIA and FBI, flanked by many other federal agencies and an armada of quasi-public groups are right now, as we speak, directing all of the corporate media and every tech platform of any size (except twitter… for now) and every online payment system (!) to block the speech of American citizens.

This is a violation of the constitution of a scale not seen since the era of Jim crow. And that was state and local actors, not the feds.

No, there is not a valid debate to be had on the merits of censoring dangerous or illegal speech in the context of this attack on our republic.

This is a direct assault on the very first pillar of democracy… freedom of speech.

In case you missed the point, that has *already* been seriously degraded in a way that *already* is having serious impact on our ability to have free elections. We are *already* well down the road to tyranny. This is not some hypothetical slippery slope. It already happened. Years ago.

These “but what about this edge case” obfuscations had some merrit in 2013. Ten years later? No.

[chemjeff radical individualist]

You have nicely summarized the paranoid right-wing version of events. But what about the truth?

Why should I believe even one word of your paranoid nuttery? Why don’t you start with providing direct proof and evidence of your assertions. You can begin with your claims about Steven Crowder being blocked on Youtube over his election coverage.

I went here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_suspensions

and saw no evidence of Crowder being banned *while covering election returns on election night*.

I think you get your information from bad-faith right-wing sources and, after applying your paranoia filter, accept them as fact.

[Cyto]

I was watching with my own eyes. Ot happened twice.

Once during the election.

Once just before the 2022 midterms.

Suspended without explanation. Reinstated without explanation.

Didn’t your teachers ever tell you not to use Wikipedia as a source?

(Bonus… Crowder did a whole bit exposing the extreme political bias and lack of adherence to the TOS on Wikipedia… so, we brought it back full circle.)

Nice attempt at obfuscation by failing to address the issue for a second time and attempting a second diversion into yet another ancillary and irrelevant detail.

You suck. Your motives suck. The people you shill for suck.

(Congratulations… my first ad-homenin, not offered as argument, just as colorful invective in response to a horrible attempt to divert attention from this dangerous attack on our republic)

[chemjeff radical individualist]

I don’t believe that what you observed happened in the way that you describe it.

I think that people like Crowder are paid liars who will say anything to appease his followers. And his followers, like you, demand content that validates the right-wing victimhood narrative. So any technical malfunction is blamed on “government censorship” and people like you lap it up, because that is what you want to hear.

Like above when you couldn’t post a Rumble link and you claimed that “Reason is withholding links to Rumble”. Turns out that isn’t the case, mad.casual successfully posted a link to Rumble, but your inability to do so combined with your paranoid nuttery to conclude that there was some deliberate effort afoot at Reason to censor Rumble links.

That’s you. A paranoid loon.

So post your proof of your claims, because I am not interested in buying into your paranoia.

[chemjeff radical individualist]

And is this the important discussion that we ought to be having in your view?

the CIA and FBI, flanked by many other federal agencies and an armada of quasi-public groups are right now, as we speak, directing all of the corporate media and every tech platform of any size (except twitter… for now) and every online payment system (!) to block the speech of American citizens.

If you want to have this discussion, then maybe you should start by providing some actual proof. Instead what I’ve seen, is that these tech companies are, for the most part, *willfully cooperating* with government agencies to censor their own platforms.

There ARE some exceptions, and those exceptions are disturbing, I will agree with you. But they are exceptions.

The main point, pursuant to your ‘discussion’, is that these tech companies are censoring their own platforms because they think they are providing a public service by doing so, and the cooperation with government agencies serves as an extra rationalization for their actions.

I have seen zero evidence thus far that leads me to believe that Google, pre-Musk Twitter, Facebook, etc., would have cheerfully and happily permitted, say, COVID vaccine conspiracy theories or election denial conspiracy theories, to freely spread and be disseminated, in the absence of any government coercion.

Instead, what I have seen is that these companies were spooked by Trump’s win in 2016, concluded (wrongly IMO) that a major reason why he won was because they did not moderate their own platforms enough to stop the spread of ‘misinformation’, and so when 2020 rolled around and the election and the pandemic occurred, they were determined to be more active in their content moderation to see that their platforms were used for what they perceived to be a more beneficial public purpose.

No one had to force them to censor their own platforms. They willingly did it on their own. And they were happy to cooperate with government agencies who also wanted to crack down on ‘misinformation’.

So, based on this analysis, I think the more important question remains about the degree to which these large platforms ought to be moderated to serve whatever public good that the owners wish it to serve. As I posted above.

But I am sure you will ignore all of this though. Do carry on.

[chemjeff radical individualist]

And what I posted is a very valid question that deserves serious consideration if we are going to have an adult conversation on the topic of online censorship.

But you don’t want an adult conversation, you want to push the right-wing paranoia narrative.

You should join Jesse and ML and the other right-wing trolls around here.

[mad.casual]

No, there is no “important discussion” to be had about whether the head of the CDC should be allowed to talk about his well-founded suspicions that Covid-19 was the result of a lab leak.

Civillian gun violence, which arguably in the total of American history, doesn’t total more homicides than COVID alone, *requires* the CDC to investigate *all* avenues of prevention in violation of the 2A, but COVID can only be investigated along one narrow line of thought in line with The Party’s wishes.

[chemjeff radical individualist]

No, there is no “important discussion” to be had about whether the head of the CDC should be allowed to talk about his well-founded suspicions that Covid-19 was the result of a lab leak.

Was the head of the CDC forbidden by law to talk about the lab-leak theory?

Or, was the head of the CDC forbidden by the nature of the employment contract/arrangement from talking about the lab-leak theory *in public*?

The difference is important.

[Mother's Lament]

“If you run a social media platform, what should you do if people start posting information on that platform that, if acted upon, could potentially harm others or themselves?”

The fact that you think “doing something” is the answer to adults doing risky acts shows that you don’t belong here.

[Mike Laursen]

I do like what Musk has done with adding “community notes” to tweets with disputed facts.

Does harken back, though, to times conservatives have claimed that this or that tweet was “censored” on pre-Musk Twitter, and you go look at the tweet and all that happened was that it was tagged with a content warning.

[chemjeff radical individualist]

And, quite often, when a tweet from a conservative was “censored” or even had a note applied to it, it was because the tweeter in question was *being an asshole*, and not based on ideology.

It is the “bomb thrower” strategy that was alluded to the other day:
1. Throw a bomb into the conversation.
2. Predictable reaction occurs.
3. Whine and claim victimhood over “censorship of conservatives”.

It’s a bad faith strategy all around and they have gotten way too much mileage out of it.

[Cyto]

This is not true.

We were all here for the argument that “shadow bans” don’t exist. We all liked through dishonest claims that nobody was suppressing political speech.

Elon Musk has helpfully documented just how byzantine the censorship mechanisms were at Twitter. Dozens of hidden flags only available to certain people could hide tweets or accounts.

Their new system is transparent and requires a consensus from multiple viewpoints, in an attempt to prevent mob rule censorship . I agree that it is pretty good, but I doubt it will survive attempts to hack it for nefarious purposes.

[chemjeff radical individualist]

We were all here for the argument that “shadow bans” don’t exist. We all liked through dishonest claims that nobody was suppressing political speech.

This is just an example of the dishonesty inherent in the whole Twitter Files “expose”.

Bari Weiss in the Twitter Files #2 documented that Charlie Kirk had a secret “do not amplify” tag associated with his account. But we are never told WHY his account had that flag. Furthermore we are never told if there were left-leaning accounts that also had these same tags applied to them. This is Weiss lying by omission by not telling the whole story and leading you to “fill in the blanks” with your own biases and narratives.

[A Thinking Mind]

We don’t need to know why, you fucking hack. Twitter said they weren’t shadowbanning and were doing precisely that. And if he had violate terms of service they could have just banned him.

He was put on a list and without being told he was on a list. That’s a disgusting business practice.

[chemjeff radical individualist]

We don’t need to know why

Oh yes we do, if you want to support the contention that these secret tags were applied specifically to suppress “political speech”, which is what was asserted.

[Mike Laursen]

For someone whose handle is “A Thinking Mind” there is an awful lot of emoting rather than thinking.

[Nardz]

https://twitter.com/FischerKing64/status/1634113046154182656?t=Rcytc4yXb825GApfxZSMxQ&s=19

The reason Disney hasn’t collapsed already is that it has huge backlog of cultural wealth. People really like Sleeping Beauty or Bambi even now. So it has a lot of revenue based on legacy goodwill. Same reason we can still have nuclear power for now – we have people to do it…
You can survive for a long time based on what much better people before you created. But when collapse comes, it will happen all of a sudden and come as big shock to many folks. Is still avoidable, but no one important seems to see the iceberg dead ahead.

[A Cynical Asshole]

You can survive for a long time based on what much better people before you created.

Whenever I think of modern Disney, I’m reminded of Ian Malcom’s “You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn’t earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don’t take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses…” monologue from Jurassic Park.

[chemjeff radical individualist]

Yeah, not as good as the original. Still entertaining though.

[Don't look at me!]

So are the three stooges.

[SRG]

Obviously the author of this piece has never seen a Bond film. where villains are often tech (by those days’ standards) billionaires, and if not, are billionaires nonetheless.

[Don't look at me!]

Also, actual criminals.

[mad.casual]

Obviously, once again, SRG can’t read. There is no criticism of the billionaire-as-villain plot device per se, the criticism is that the caricature(s) unsuccessfully bridges the gap between narrative and lecturing, being too direct to adequately tell a story and too indirect/cowardly to be an informative or thought-provoking lecture.

You may’ve interpretted Johnson’s billionaire-as-villain plot device as purely fictional on par with Auric Goldfinger or Dr. No but, as evidenced by the rest of the plot, whether the intent was to lecture or not, Johnson’s intent was not strictly fictional.

[SRG]

Oh fuck off. The villain in Tomorrow Never Dies was a Murdoch figure, for example.

The better criticism is that it’s lazy.

[mad.casual]

The villain in Tomorrow Never Dies was a Murdoch figure, for example.

You mean the one Bond film that consistently ranks in the bottom 5 (of 27) for the franchise? Huh.

[mad.casual]

Writer-director Rian Johnson has once again assembled all the elements of a classic Agatha Christie–style detective story, added modern trappings, and poured glitter all over it.

‘Writer-Director’. It needs to be capitalized because it’s a title. The rest is pretty accurate. Johnson assembled the elements the way you slap a melted clock on the scene of a sunrise in the desert, maybe add in a withered tree and you’ve assembled the elements of a Salvador Dhali-style painting. As usual, his work demonstrates not what the story is about or what the actors can portray but that he’s a competent personal salesman whose position has outstripped the shortcomings of his own Overconfidence Effect.

If he’d just written it as a novel, it would’ve/could’ve been competent. But Johnson then goes on to put it on screen where his incompetence as a director exposes his shortcomings as a writer. Whereas a novelist operates under a cognitive POV fog-of-war, the director actually shows us a POV and Johnson’s poor execution of this POV control vacillates between demonstrating the more mundane parts of his writing (I’d say *spoiler alert* but a character, I don’t even have to tell you which one, intentionally draws attention to himself by firing Checkov’s Gun) and convincing you that Johnson, rather than crafting an elaborate narrative, just crafted a crummy lie and followed it with the line “We’ll edit it in post.”

And while the all-star cast is good, several performances were, especially after Knives, similarly between mundane and reaching beyond their grasp. Personally, Craig’s accent shouldn’t quite cut it with anyone who’s been within ~500 mi. of either side of the Mason Dixon line (which isn’t to say my British accent would convince anyone who’s lived within 500 mi. of Manchester). It was good enough to carry Knives, but it hasn’t gotten any better and, again, Johnson doesn’t do him or us any favors by providing insight into Blanc’s personal life. And while casting Bautista in his role was a solid choice, somewhere between himself and the director, somebody should’ve said, “Doesn’t playing this character this way make the acting seen in the WWE days look good?”

Ultimately, again as written and edited, the film comes off as a series of implausible or nearly implausible, but *extremely* convenient, series of events rather than a tightly-woven murder mystery. Unless you gave Knives a 10/10, in which case you probably don’t care how actually good or bad Onion is, this movie didn’t have as much baggage as Johnson’s other failures, but it still failed to carry about a third of it. Good enough to watch if you’ve already paid for the streaming subscription and don’t have anything better to do, or do have something to do while it’s on as the case may be, it’s not something I would expect people to be talking about next (this) year.

[Cyto]

A more reductionist take would be that his one trick is subverting expectations. So if you think simply “going the other way” is clever, you will think his films are clever.

[mad.casual]

A more reductionist take would be that his one trick is subverting expectations.

I would slightly disagree. If I had to sum it up in one sentence: Johnson’s “one weird trick” isn’t broadly capable of covering his other failures, especially for the breadth to which he aspires.

M. Night Shyamalan is actually a fantastic compare/contrast. He’s pretty much famous/notorious for the same “What a twist!”/”Expectations subverted!” “one weird trick” but, he’s otherwise more competent at more immersive film making and story writing that is (just maybe not otherwise interesting). Between the Horror-whodunit “Devil” and even the sprinkling of “for modern audiences” glitter sprinkled on “Knock At The Cabin” he still errs on the side of storytelling (again, if not being occasionally fractured or uninteresting) rather than heaping on an amount of glitter that highlights how massive the cracks in the story actually are.

[Fist of Etiquette]

The film’s politics date it, even more so than the COVID masks the characters wear before arriving at the crime scene.

Kaboom.

[Don't look at me!]

I make it a policy to not watch anything that shows people in masks.

[mad.casual]

So, anything out of Hollywood that isn’t 100% animated in the last century? Can’t say that’s an unwise decision.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

What about the adventures of Santos, the Mexican wrestler?

[Eeyore]

Agree. Not even free porn. If the girl is in a mask it is an instant boner killer.

[Mike Laursen]

Not sure Soave saw the same Glass Onion I saw. The one I saw poked fun at the excesses and ego of tech billionaires like Musk, in much the same way that Mike Judge made fun of them in Silicon Valley. Not seeing that it promoted “hate”.

[A Cynical Asshole]

The eccentric detective and his endearing shitty sounding, exaggerated obviously fake Southern accent

FTFY.

Actors who aren’t from the south shouldn’t try to do southern accents. They end up just sounding like a caricature of what non-southerners think people from the south sound like.

Kind of like how in Out for Justice Steven Seagal sounded like a caricature of what people who aren’t from Brooklyn think people from Brooklyn sound like. He once told his co-star William Forsythe, who was from Brooklyn, that he needed to work on his accent. Forsythe told him “No, you need to work on yours.”

[The Margrave of Azilia]

Does Seagal’s ego even allow his characters to have fights with equally-matched adversaries? Fights where his character looks, if only for a moment, like he might lose? Failing that, there’s a certain lack of dramatic tension.

[Bubba Jones]

Weirdo rich villains that “stole” their money are not new to movie plots.

[A Cynical Asshole]

Writer-director Rian Johnson has once again assembled all the elements of a classic Agatha Christie–style detective story, added modern trappings, and poured glitter all over it.

*barf*

An actual good mystery story doesn’t need “glitter poured all over it,” whatever that means.

[mad.casual]

Nor necessarily the addition of modern trappings either which, I think, is the point. As I indicated above, aside from not capitalizing Writer-Director to connote title rather than skill, craft, and trade, I think this sentence from Robbie was actually pretty tight.

[thepointlinds]

Appreciated your Agatha Christie express reference because that was what was on my mind as soon as I started reading the review

[Unicorn Abattoir]

a new case to solve in Glass Onion,

Well here’s another clue for you all – The Walrus was Diane Reynolds (Paul).

[mad.casual]

The final scene before they shut down the Reason forums, where they run through all the clues and reveal that SPBP2 is really Keyser Söze… brilliant!

[DollyMurray]

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[Eeyore]

I tried to watch it, but gave up. Boring. So much wasted talent.

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