Rian Johnson – The Movie Gourmet

GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY: skewer the rich

January 5, 2023 by movie gourmet

Photo caption: Daniel Craig and Janelle Monae in GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY. Courtesy of Netflix.

Writer-director Rian Johnson follows his wonderful Knives Out with Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, another satirical drawing room murder mystery with super detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig). Again, the rich are skewered and, again, Blanc is overshadowed by a younger female of color. It’s all good fun.

Glass Onion is set on the extravagant private island (think the hideout of a Bond supervillain) of an untethered, narcissistic billionaire (think Elon Musk). The billionaire (a perfect Edward Norton) invites four of buddies from his past (Kate Hudson, Dave Bautista, Leslie Odom, Jr., and Katharine Hahn) for a weekend house party, plus a girlfriend (Madelyn Cline) and an assistant (Jessica Henwick – whose compelling presence is wasted in this often sniveling role). And Benoit Blanc comes, too, which is fitting because the weekend’s theme is a Clue-like mystery game. Another mysterious friend from the past (Janelle Monáe) shows up; her relationship to the others is complicated, and she puts everyone on edge.

There’s a murder to be solved and a Macguffin to be found. Along the way there are several massive plot twists. Clues dropped early hint that a fortune has been made, not by intellectual talent and hard work, but by manipulation and cheating. Rian Johnson loves to expose treachery among the 1 percent, and here he brings us a classic emperor-has-no-clothes comeuppance.

Knives Out was one of 2019’s smartest and funniest films, and Glass Onion is not in that class – but is still very entertaining. The first forty minutes of set-up are not that compelling, but the pace picks up once the plot twists start piling up and Janelle Monáe takes over the movie.

Janelle Monáe in GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY. Credit: John Wilson. Courtesy of Netflix.

The cast is excellent, especially Craig and Norton. But the most riveting performance is by the singular Janelle Monáe. The stunningly beautiful Monáe is a captivating screen presence. She’s also demonstrated serious dramatic acting chops in her who-is-THAT? performance in her first feature film Moonlight, and again in Hidden Figures. Monáe’s own music and fashion projects are startlingly original, and her artsy sensibility seems impervious to risk. I say, let her direct a movie if she wants – just get her back up on the movie screen.

Glass Onion looks several times glossier than its $40 million budget. Glass Onion has spent over a week as the #1 film on Netflix, which is excellent because it means that Netflix will likely fund another Rian Johnson movie.

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery is streaming on Netflix.

KNIVES OUT: born on third base and thought they hit a triple

December 8, 2019 by movie gourmet

Writer-director Rian Johnson explodes the genre of the drawing room murder mystery in the gloriously entertaining Knives Out.

Knives Out opens at the country estate of a multi-millionaire author (Chistopher Plummer), where he is found dead. If he was murdered, it had to be at the hands of his sweet caregiver Marta (Ana de Armas) or a member of his icky family of ingrates (Jamie Lee Curtis, Don Johnson, Michael Shannon, Toni Collette, Chris Evans). A Hercule Poirot-type consulting detective (Daniel Craig with a Southern accent) arrives to investigate, and the game is afoot.

I’ve met plenty of folks like the author’s family, who were born on third base and thought they hit a triple. That’s what Knives Out is really about – a wickedly funny send-up of totally unjustified entitlement. One of the running jokes is that they claim that Marta is “one of the family”, but none can remember which Latin American country she’s from.

Despite Daniel Craig’s turn as the famed detective, this is really Ana de Armas’ movie, and she is superb. All of the cast are excellent, but everyone except de Armas and Plummer play very broad characters. BTW De Armas plays Paloma, the Bond Girl, to Craig’s James Bond in No Time to Die (coming in April 2020).

I recently wrote about Rian Johnson’s 2005 breakthrough Brick, which inhabited the form of another familiar movie genre – film noir. In Nate Jones’ interview in Vulture, Johnson says “One thing I don’t believe in is the notion that this is a dusty old genre and you have to find a way to flip the old tropes on their heads. The basic machinery of it, the tropes of it, are why it works.”

Johnson slyly (and without comment) inserts a shot of Marta’s mom watching a rerun of Angela Lansbury in a Murder, She Wrote, dubbed in Spanish. And the great M. Emmet Walsh has a cameo as the aged security guy who proudly explains the VHS-based security camera system.

Knives Out works as a darkly funny murder mystery and as a pointed social satire. It’s one of the year’s smartest and funniest films.

Stream of the Week: BRICK – hardboiled neo-noir in high school

November 26, 2019 by movie gourmet

Writer-director Rian Johnson’s gloriously inventive 2005 debut, Brick, was inspired by Johnson’s love of Dashiell Hammett’s novels and his own dark memories of high school.

Brick is a hard-boiled detective story, complete with a femme fatale and a plot right out of a Dick Powell classic noir like Murder, My Sweet or Cry Danger.

The genius of Brick is that it takes place in the teenage culture of 2005 San Clemente. The characters roam the isolated school corridors where the nerd eats lunch by himself, the drama room, the vice-principal’s office, the empty football field where kids can meet after school the party at the popular girl’s house. The kingpin crime lord operates out of his mother’s basement; he and his gang emerge upstairs in the kitchen where his mom supplies breakfast cereal and dispenses milk from a pitcher shaped like a chicken.

The dialogue is Hammettesque:

I gave you Jerr to see him eaten, not to see you fed.
The ape blows or I clam.
Bulls would gum it. They’d flash their dusty standards at the wide-eyes and probably find some yegg to pin, probably even the right one. No cops, not for a bit
Brad was a sap. You weren’t. You were with him, and so you were playing him. So you’re a player. With you behind me I’d have to tie one eye up watching both your hands, and I can’t spare it.

The noir patter works because Johnson and the cast play it dead seriously, with no hint of irony.

In Nate Jones’ interview in Vulture, Johnson says “One thing I don’t believe in is the notion that this is a dusty old genre and you have to find a way to flip the old tropes on their heads. The basic machinery of it, the tropes of it, are why it works.”

Brick was at that point in Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s career, between Mysterious Skin (2004) and Lookout (2007), when it was becoming clear what a major talent he is.

The femme fatale is played by Norah Zehetner in an unforgettable performance. Zehetner works a lot, and did ten episodes of Grey’s Anatomy, but Brick may be her career-topper.

Rian Johnson went on to make another original feature with Gordon-Levitt, Looper, along with the 2017 Star Wars movie. Knives Out, Johnson’s new take on the drawing room mystery, hits theaters this weekend.

Brick is available to stream on Netflix, AYouTube and Google Play.