I think you can see the Chrysler Building from the balcony.
I don’t think Benoit comes from old money: he refers to himself as a “self-made man” in the first movie, which is also where he mentions that his father was a police detective.
I had not remembered those lines and stand corrected.
Self made or not, gay or not, Blanc is definitely a dandy and having a butler wouldn’t be out of character for a dandy.
“gentleman sleuths” does sound pretty upper-class, though. Admittedly he doesn’t call himself that!
About #2 : I agree that they cheated by having a good part of the info hidden from the audience, including of course the first murder. So it’s very entertaining, but it’s not a proper whodunnit.
The parts that were visible to us in the first half of the movie, and the underlying timeline, were very confusing. The time Miles Bron nearly crashed his blue Porsche into Duke’s motorcycle, and the time Miles gave Whiskey a piece of jewelry for her birthday, which were mentioned like distant recollections, apparently both happened on the same day – just a few days ago?
Even Benoît Blanc’s seemingly miraculous resolution of the staged murder-mystery happened without giving us any chance / reason to notice some of the elements. Was there any hint, from our point of view, that the crossbow was aimed at Miles, or that Birdie used to own the gem she was wearing on the magazine cover?
Something I noticed: Philip is wearing a tie-dyed apron when he opens the door while Benoît is on a Zoom call. When Helen introduces herself to Blanc, she mentions her work now involves Zoom and… tie-dying?
But that was, of course, not the real mystery anyway.
Uh… none of the shitheads were Millenials. Janelle is the only actor in her 30s, the rest are in their 40’s and 50’s. Now, character age doesn’t always match up with actor age but they seem to be playing mid-40’s at least. Kate Hudson is a past her prime model and Katheryn Hahn is a freaking governor.
I don’t think it’s physically possible to be more Gen X than Miles Bron.
[stern look]
You beHAVE yourself, now.
Well, obviously not Whiskey, played by Madisyn Cline, who is 25.
Peg wasn’t a shithead, so she doesn’t count. She was played by a 30-year-old, Jessica Henwick.
True, but I didn’t really consider Whiskey or Peg to be a shithead. Just the four plus Miles (who are also really the dumbest characters).
(Saw it last night)
The temptation to pull a Miles Bron and pass off other people’s cleverness as my own is strong, but I shall rise above it and share this critique, which argues that Glass Onion is not a whodunnit at all, but a thriller/heist movie in which Helen and Blanc put together and execute a scheme to steal Miles’ good name.
https://twitter.com/sqiouyilu/status/1610325589327769600?t=enWgVbGXfwBR2tr_YIT-7g&s=19
I will only add that the cavalier treatment of Miles’ murder game backs this up: elaborate scheme full of red herrings and subtle clues dispensed with instantly because that’s not what we’re doing here.
That’s a great take.
Yes, wish it were mine.
I do appreciate that as @Miller says, the central message of both films is that rich (privileged) people suck. Glass Onion went further, I think, and made the explicit point that:
Rich people will take and take and take and then discard you without ever doubting their right to do so.
When you see past their self promotion they are shallow vapid fools.
You cannot fight them in the courts or through the system because they have the resources to trample your truth under their lies.
Institutions and people who know better will compromise themselves in pursuit of the golden tit.
Your only option is BURN IT ALL DOWN.
…yeah, I read that last night, and I agree 100%. I think that also explains why, even though I think the first move was probably a “better” movie, I enjoyed the second one orders of magnitude better, because I love me a good heist. Leverage was always my favourite show on TV, not because it was (currently) seven seasons of non-stop-heists, but because they take on the rich and the powerful, and they always win. And in the world that we live in now, that’s all I really need out of my entertainment.
They weren’t hard-hard, but they rattled through them way too quickly because frankly no one wants to watch people sitting around solving puzzles when they’re just a trivial distraction.
I will admit that I was kind of hoping for a reappearance of Duke’s mother. She was freaking hilarious. And Helen’s Alexandrian approach to “solving” the box was brilliant.
Which was kind of the point of Blanc’s rant about how stupid Bron and his plan was. I mean, there’s clearly a potshot at the fanboys who insist their alpha tech / social media guru is playing 5D chess even when he’s doing incredibly stupid shit, but the twist here is literally that it’s not a cleverly planned murder plot at all, but just a lying dumbass winging it.
Because then he gets asked why he didn’t just burn it, which he then does, much like the “gun on the table in the dark” thing. Because that’s the kind of idiot he is.
Whereas Helen waves it around because she’s really pissed off.
Quite a funny scene, but sad too. I note that there was a dedication to Lansbury and Sondheim in the credits.
Is it that he’s mad about what happened to his piano?
He wears a neckerchief and Manolo sandals. I’m just saying.
I highly recommend Russian Doll (Netflix) which Lyonne co-wrote and stars in, if you haven’t seen it. S1 in particular is fantastic.
Yo-yo Ma took me a moment - it’s been a long time since I’ve seen him and (like all of us) he’s aged. And it was “Fitness With Serena”.
Ha! Me too!
But the improvised murder was itself incredibly stupid and unnecessary. He panicked and thought he had to do it right away, which he didn’t, and the whole thing would’ve unraveled and made him the prime suspect the instant autopsy results came in.
One of the videos I watched pointed out that early in the movie we learn that the guests were asked to provide a form with dietary restrictions, so that even if Bron didn’t already know about Duke’s allergy to pineapple from their long personal association, he got it from that form.
Is fatal allergy to pineapple really a thing?