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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   28174 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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You don't go to a movie like Glass Onion for compelling characters. The movie is essentially Murder on the Orient Express, in which every character has a motive for murder. Nor do characters have to be sympathetic to be compelling.

As for the flashback, it did advance the plot, by retelling the story from a different perspective. As a result, we better understand the events and the characters.

All that being said, it was not particularly good.

You don't go to a movie like Glass Onion for compelling characters.

I did, because Knives Out delivered on that score. Blanc, Thrombey, Jamie Lee Curtis's character, and the lifestyle business lady were all endlessly entertaining. Even the cops were done really well, funny and possessed of interesting personalities despite their bit player roles. Marta was kind of an "empty angel," so pure of soul and good of spirit that there wasn't any room for personality, but everyone else made up for it, and even her role was played with charisma, to her actress's credit.

Nevertheless, they were all essentially stock characters, and the movie, like all those of its genre, is plot-driven, rather than character-driven, such as, say, Shoplifters. Or even a mix, like Fargo. Not that there is anything wrong with that; there have been many great plot-driven movies.

I reject your dichotomy: you can absolutely go to a plot-driven movie for the characters, if it has good characters.

Sure, except I found the characters in the first Knives Out to be compelling. Atleast significantly more so than in this one. So there is room for improvement there, and it is indeed why I went to watch this movie.

Also having no characters be sympathetic is really not compelling.

Well, it depends on the movie. Were there any particularly sympathetic characters in The Death of Stalin?

Besides, you are now saying something different: Whether a film with no sympathetic characters can be compelling is a different question than whether a character who is unsympathetic can nevertheless be compelling. I don’t really recall any of the characters from the first film (again, given the nature of the film, why would I?) but they might well have been more interesting, regardless of whether they were sympathetic or not.

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