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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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2nd half of the second act is usually a rough spot, but IMO Glass Onion wasn’t terribly egregious here. My big issue was the handling of the Mona Lisa. The protagonist destroyed a priceless work of art just to besmirch the name of her nemesis. There’s no gravitas, it’s just a tool she can use to hurt her enemies.

Yes, this reminds me of a non-political gripe I was going to include in my post, but left out, which was that I found it irritating the degree to which certain things were set up that I thought were clues, but ended up just being something more lazy. When I watched the movie, I was paying attention to all details thrown at me, believing that all would come to play in the murder mystery. I thought the mona Lisa and the hair-trigger shield would be a part of the murder mystery, like "they couldn't have been killed in this way because the shield was down, and if it made a sound then the shield would have been up" or something. Instead the Mona lisa had nothing to do with the murder and was just used to get revenge on Elon. Nothing clever about it. Same thing goes with the hot sauce, I thought it'd play in the mystery, but it was just used as a way to make people think Helen was dead. It seemed like these details were less like an intricately plotted murder mystery where everything plays on everything else, but instead just like "we need to fool the audience into thinking she's dead, let's go 3 scenes back and make mention of hot sauce".

It was a major weakness in the script for another reason: There was no reason to think that any of the characters valued it as anything other than a symbol of the antagonist's ability to acquire it, so it made no sense to paint the incident as particularly significant to anyone, including the audience.

he spoke about how seeing it as a child affected his whole life.

I think I recall that, but it seems to me that it came across as rather generic, in the way that it affects lots of people. But I might be misremembering. Still, I think it would have worked better with an item of more uniquely personal value to him. Like his first baseball glove or the like. But the entire ending didn’t work, starting with the silliness that the absence of the napkin would render prosecution impossible, after it was seen by, among others, the detective. And then the subsequent behavior of all the ancillary characters. The whole ending was a mess.

I think you meant to post this as a response to a lower post.

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