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After watching this movie, I think his calling card may be instead, trying to make the least timeless movies possible. This movie is so dated already. Looking at the entire first act which just has lazy COVID commentary after commentary. He doesn't make films with a lasting message.
In general, I thought the plotting was really lazy, and not worth even being set up like a murder mystery. See what I say here:
https://www.themotte.org/post/253/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/47269?context=8#context
I sort of feel like Johnson is not a great screenwriter, just flashy, and pulling wool over people's eyes with simple lazy tricks.
This is all a part of how I think Johnson is trying to implant brain worms. It's not the truth he's written, but people will walk away from this feeling like they understand Joe Rogan and Elon Musk better, even though they're just watching fictionalized versions of them. They'll feel inside like they can just write them off as well-connected lucky backstabbers. Whether the characters are actually similar in deep ways to Rogan and Musk doesn't matter, because they're the first people who will come to mind for the general populace when they see this movie, due to their cultural prominence.
I hard disagree. Brick and Looper are two of the better-written movies of the last 20 years. He has a good ear for dialogue and gets good performances from his cast. He was absolutely the wrong man to write and direct a Star Wars movie, but the sequel trilogy was doomed from the beginning due to structural problems with the story JJ Abrams and Kathleen Kennedy decided to tell.
Johnson’s problem is that he views himself as an auteur. He definitely makes his best movies when he is constrained by budget or a script supervisor who can put the kibosh on his desire to make “art” instead of telling a good story. He crawled up his own ass when making Star Wars and the fan reaction basically guaranteed he would stay there out of stubbornness. I wish he would come out again and make some good niche movies that weren’t full of swipes at the kids on Twitter who were mean to him for “ruining Star Wars.”
All of a sudden I got this image of Ben Stiller playing a Johnson-style director who wants to be the next Kubrick but really is the current Michael Bay (his movies are trash but they make reliable box-office returns). Anyone want to cast the script supervisor who is competent but exasperated at having to wrangle the guy into making the next instalment of the trashy-but-high grossing series instead of the arty-farty movie he wants to do? It's supposed to be CGI-heavy SF schlock with the baddie aliens invading Earth, but he wants a scene where the aliens destroy famous global landmarks (okay that is doable) but with heavy-handed social commentary e.g. tying it in to BLM protests (no way). Picture our Helen-type character above doing a Black Power salute and a long lecture on reparations and 'we built this country' while the aliens death-ray Mount Rushmore or something.
Kevin Hart, dead serious. He's got the range to from straight-man studio exec role to full Eddie Murphy-esque "what'ch you talkin' 'bout fool!?" in the space of a sentence, and if we're doing a proper send up of modern Hollywood I think it would be fun to have some privileged white guy going on about how he's "the voice of the oppressed" while an actual representative of "the oppressed" is like "dude, STFU, if we don't get peoples butts in seats we aint getting paid".
Didn't Kevin Hart play a promoter in a boxing movie with Stallone playing not-Rocky? I remember his character's line about getting another boxer a part in Hangover 4 during the credits.
If he did it's slipping my mind, but that's exactly the sort of vibe I was thinking of.
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The tricks work, however, that much is clear. And he's got a knack for dialogue that sounds natural even between characters with very different 'voices.' He likes his witty dialogue a bit too much but isn't as grating in this tendency as, an apt comparison, Joss Whedon (who has a few cognizable calling cards of his own).
He's not as visionary or innovative as Denis Villeneuve in terms of visuals, but almost any randomly selected screenshot from either Knives Out or Glass Onion (and many from The Last Jedi, Too) are at least artful and aesthetically pleasing.
Upon thinking it over, it would have been a better mystery if Helen had recruited Blanc while already in the guise of her sister and Blanc wasn't in on her plan from the start. Then we could have a moment, at the same point in the movie as the flashback, where Blanc has the realization, reveals the true situation to the viewer, and then solves the murder in short order. Thus there'd have to be clues to her real identity available to both Blanc and the viewer.
I don't think that I personally could write this version of the film satisfactorily, but I realized it makes Helen's triumph even more earned since she was able to fool the famed detective for far longer than the rest of the cast was, and didn't need him to help her along at every step.
Because when you take the movie we got, you could absolutely conclude that Blanc is basically Helen's crutch throughout the entire process, and that seems a bit condescending.
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