What is a glass bulb? First of all, one The Beatles track from The White Album, from 1968, which in just over two minutes refers to so many other Beatles songs, the members’ lives in Liverpool, and even the fans’ obsessive collection of interpretations of the text (“The Walrus Was Paul”) that its content almost became a parody in the end. And secondly, the subtitle of the sequel Tőrbe ejtvet, and even the important location of the story, is a veritable glass building in which the “fool on the hill”, the fool on the hill from the Beatles song, and the fool from the hill, from our daily lives, live there. He’s also a classic tech billionaire who aims to improve the world.
And what about falling into the dagger – the glass onion? First, the 2019 sequel to Dagger, which was writer-director Rian Johnson’s interpretation of what it’s like to be Agatha Christie, who eats storytelling tricks for breakfast.–Crime thriller of the 2010s. First of all, the obvious politics: it was not the detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) who pulled the wet lid on the terribly well-mannered Republican family, but the migrant inspector (Ana de Armas) who was on good terms with the victim, who explained By the end of the movie that what he said, it’s his castle from now on.
Blanc, who speaks with a typical Southern accent and is especially enthusiastic about solving puzzles, was such a terrific character in this segment that it was a shame not to bring him back for another round. Dagger – The Glass Onion is the next outing, and if the previous one was a trot around a mansion on the edge of the woods on a long weekend, this one is, by the nature of the sequels, an all-out vacation on a luxury island with plenty of everything: a crime case, a suspect tags, twists and curves. , from playtime, fun, blind spots, motivation, sunlight, getting ready for the day. And sometimes for fun.
As thin as it was in Tőr, the sequel has become very bloated, which already contains in its foreground many characters, clues, background information and even puzzles, which we can only win with patience. In various parts of America, a mysterious box reaches a group of people who seem to have nothing in common. Politician (Kathryn Hahn), operator fighting for men’s rights (Dave Bautista), employee in charge of a tech giant (Leslie Odom Jr.), real-life celebrity (Kate Hudson), his long-suffering assistant (Jessica Hendricks), unknown woman (Janelle Monet) and, of course, the best detective in the world, Benoit Blanc. Blank is about to go crazy under covid, when we first see her, she’s playing among us in the bathtub, with Angela Lansbury among others (if anyone has unbearable memories of early 2020 in this scene, nail their nervous system in time the appropriate).
Edward Norton, Madeline Cline and Daniel Craig – Photo: John Wilson/Netflix
After a few mysteries, it turns out the box is an invitation to Miles Bronn’s (Edward Norton) island, where palm-climbing billionaire Paul McCartney strums his guitar and awaits his guests at the end of a Banksy-designed dock. Miles Bron is the kind of geeky, geeky person who faxes his stupid ideas to the workers in the middle of the night to get something done. An early, quick gag reveals that one of his most profitable ideas was to fax his classmates a “kid + NFT”. Bron is the head of a company called Alpha, I’m sure he thinks he is, and he’s invited his guests to the island to play the killer. Everything turns out differently when the best detective in the world appears.
In addition to enraging half the world with The Last Jedi, writer-director Rian Johnson is a better than average craftsman at manipulation and is able to keep the viewer’s attention so they don’t realize they’re being tricked. Fallen to the Dagger 2 reviews. Crime fiction gadgets: Our characters arrive, they spend time with each other, crime happens, and then it has to be solved.
But Johnson repeatedly pulls the rug out from under his story: What we think of as a fixed point in the story is in fact quite different, the moment we witnessed has a very different meaning, and in one passage or another he does not hesitate to cheat our memory cheat him as well. His film is so dense and full of disturbing elements, exhausting jokes and tumultuous moments that sometimes we don’t even notice what’s in front of our eyes. What we see with our blind eyes, what we hear with our deaf ears.
The first tool of absurdity is that the movie is like a particularly well-crafted comedy, with the actors skipping their scripted lines, which is directed by Johnson. Rushing against tech gurus, mischievous influencers, and even the rich in general is pretty old fashioned nowadays, and I wouldn’t be so excited either if the way he does it wasn’t so irresistible: constantly returning to himself, reinterpreting scenes, their own structure, meanwhile, with patterns Linear like a tough face (Noah Seguin, who appears in all of the director’s films) who hangs around harmlessly on the island, or a bell that sounds at the most unexpected of times and can be heard all over the island. voiced by Philip Glass himself as lord of the island.
Tőrbe has up to two brash personalities, but none of them is as exhilaratingly interesting to watch as Miles Bront. Johnson wrote the script two years ago, when Elon Musk was far from the one sending his bullshit to the unsuspecting world with such intensity as in the second half of 2022 — and Brunette is clearly modeled after the current Tesla and Twitter boss. Not his looks, but his mannerisms and worldview, how esoteric secrecy mixes with yachting, how saying big words hides emptiness, how he makes statements meant to be an earth-shattering novel, like John Frusciante being the heart and soul of Red Hot Chili Peppers. Norton is also active as a technology investor in the civil sector He was probably more about these characters than I will – he probably didn’t have to use his imagination so much to play out the mannerisms.
chiefly because, except for him, everyone plays with such gestures that even Robert Rattoni would cover up on stage. By far the lead is Daniel Craig, always more likable as a dumb character with a weird accent (see Logan Lucky) than in any of his other roles. Here, too, he can give special pleasure by talking like a mixture of a cartoon character and a landowner of a hundred years ago, and musing with complete devotion about how he had nothing to do during Covid. I get that if everyone doesn’t like Benoit Blanc, who vacations and swaps cool jackets in a private group for a pool party, but I’ll always be interested in what kind of climate he’ll be in next time he’ll be arrogant and stupid shit again.
Tőrbe tvetve’s sequel seems to take on the same goals as many of the year’s other films (The Triangle of Sadness, The Menu) or series (The White Lotus season 2), but doesn’t content itself with laughing at their shortsightedness and limitations. Glass onions are just a good excuse to tie our heads.
Dagger – The Glass Onion is available on Netflix.
