The Menu: A Review - A Deliciously Dark Comedy/Horror Experience

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A clever, entertaining and darkly comedic swipe at foodie culture that is buoyed by solid performances.

A lot of people seem to love the Knives Out movies and often describe the reason for doing so being that the movies are “fun”. These people of course are unrepentant philistines and incorrigible buffoons as both Knives Out movies are utterly appalling and are the antithesis of entertaining.

The Menu on the other hand, is exactly what the Knives Out movies should be but aren’t, as it’s clever, funny, dark and above all else, entertaining.

The Menu, which is currently streaming on HBO Max and is still playing in some theatres, stars Ralph Fiennes and Anya Taylor Joy and chronicles a collection of rich assholes and food snobs as they shell out big bucks to attend an exclusive restaurant on a secluded private island operated by celebrity chef Julian Slowik (Fiennes).

The prestigious dining experience is limited to just 11 people, and they are all sinners in one form or another. There are the three-frat boy/hedge fund crooks, the rich couple with the philandering husband, the narcissistic faded movie star (John Leguizamo) and his assistant, the big-time food critic (Janet McTeer) and her sycophantic editor (Paul Adelstein), and finally devout foodie Tyler (Nicholas Hoult) and his last-minute date Margot (Anya Taylor Joy).

Julian Slowik is less a chef than a cult leader, and his staff, most notably his maître d’ Elsa (Hong Chau) are a militant group committed to obeying his each and every command. On this particular night Chef Slowik, who despises both the uncouth and the too couth, has the ultimate menu prepared for his unsuspecting guests.

I’ll refrain from going any further in describing the plot but I will say that The Menu is sort of a comedy/horror/thriller that skewers foodie culture and keeps you guessing, and intrigued, from the get go.

The comparison to the most recent Knives Out movie Glass Onion, is obvious since the film begins with a group of pretty insufferable people going to a private island for a special dinner and then a whole bunch of stuff is revealed.

The difference between the two movies though is that The Menu is better crafted and considerably more effective due to a far superior script, direction and most of all, performances.

Anya Taylor Joy plays Margot, the protagonist of the story, and she is simply a very charismatic and magnetic screen presence. The luminous Taylor Joy knows how to fill a screen (despite the fact that she appears to have never eaten a cheeseburger in her life – which is a joke you’ll get once you see the movie) and how to tell a story with just a simple glance.

Taylor-Joy is aided by the sublime Nicholas Hoult. Hoult, who is absolutely spectacular on the Hulu series The Great, once again sparkles in The Menu as the dedicated, die-hard foodie. Hoult’s commitment to his comedy is unwavering, and he never winks at the camera and lets you know he’s in on the joke.

Ralph Fiennes has long been a superb actor, but in recent years he’s transitioned to roles in more broad-based movies, and The Menu fits him to a tee. Fiennes’ Chef is an artistic avenging angel, filled with copious amounts of self-righteousness and self-pity.

Janet McTeer, who was so good on Netflix’s Ozark, is terrific as the pompous, know-it-all food critic, and Paul Adelstein is a subtle scene stealer as her ass-kissing editor.

Usually when a movie features John Leguizamo, one of the worst and most annoying actors of his or any other generation, I either refuse to watch it or am resigned to hating it. The Menu is the lone exception because it uses Leguizamo’s repugnance as a feature not a bug by casting him as an annoying, has-been actor.

The Menu, which is written by Will Tracy and Seth Reiss and directed by Mark Mylod, isn’t a perfect film by any stretch of the imagination, but for what it is, it’s mostly well-done.

For example, the movie’s premise is very clever and its politics are clear but never heavy-handed, and to its great credit it never becomes self-indulgent are self-aware, which makes it devoid of preachiness and results in a rather enjoyable viewing experience.

The best part of the movie is that, unlike the Knives Out movies, it earns almost all of its moments, and never insults the intelligence of its audience because it takes its premise and its plot seriously and never diverges from that. There is a scene, in fact, where any questions about the reality and veracity of the scenario playing out in front of viewers is directly addressed, and it’s very smart.

Mark Mylod has mostly directed TV prior to The Menu, as his credits include a bevy of Shameless, Succession and Game of Thrones episodes. His direction on The Menu is solid but not spectacular, and he gets the job done with minimal flair.

While The Menu has some plot points that don’t quite work, and some characters that aren’t totally fully formed, and some performances that could maybe have used better actors (I’m mostly thinking about Reed Birney’s role of Richard – the cheating husband), overall, the film works as a compelling and amusing piece of entertainment.

If you’re looking for dark fun and some laughs at the expense of pretentious foodie culture and the uber-rich, then The Menu will be a tasty and very satisfying meal, I recommend you dig right in.

©2023

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery - A Review/Commentary with Spoilers

****THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS!! THIS IS NOT SPOILER FREE!!***

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An insulting, insipid and insidious cinematic venture that is abysmally written, directed and acted.

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!! IF YOU WANT TO AVOID THEM READ THE SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!

Back in 2019 I wrote an article about the blockbuster murder mystery movie Knives Out, and it caused quite a kerfuffle.

The article, titled “Knives Out Sharpens the Blade of Anti-White Racism”, made the argument that the Rian Johnson directed, Daniel Craig starring whodunnit featured a pernicious anti-white racism hiding in plain sight.

This article pissed a lot of people off, but curiously, no one actually refuted its thesis, instead deciding to attack me personally - the good old argument-ad-hominem in action.

It's true that some people attempted to argue that Knives Out wasn’t anti-white but was just targeting the rich for denigration, but they obviously didn’t watch the movie or fully read my article as that assertion was factually incorrect (a poor white maid and a working-class white cop are both deemed bad - greedy and moronic respectively).

Regardless, as I wrote in my review, I found Knives Out to be “poorly constructed, abysmally executed, politically trite, culturally patronizing, profoundly racist and exceedingly dull and predictable.”

My opinion was most definitely in the minority as Knives Out raked in $312 million at the box office and boasts a 97% critical score and 92% audience score at Rotten Tomatoes.

That said, I still I think I was right, not just about the film’s odious racial politics but also about its quality.

Which brings us to Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, the newest Knives Out movie currently streaming on Netflix.

In a case of ‘the more things change the more they stay the same’, I found Glass Onion, written and directed once again by Rian Johnson, to be poorly constructed, abysmally executed, politically trite, culturally patronizing, profoundly racist and exceedingly dull and predictable.

The film, of course, stars Daniel Craig as the ‘world’s greatest detective” Benoit Blanc, or as I call him Benoit Ballz. I liked Craig as James Bond, but his Benoit Blanc, who is officially out of the closet in Glass Onion (will Craig himself soon follow?), is like the bastard son of Foghorn Leghorn and Forest Gump who got his own Murder, She Wrote franchise.  

Craig’s southern accent is so excruciating it would be cringe-worthy in a dinner theatre performance at a truck stop in Saskatchewan, in a major studio feature film it’s an absolute abomination.

Thankfully though for Craig, Janelle Monae arrives in Glass Onion with a different but equally amateurish southern accent too. Yay!! Bad acting definitely rules the day in Glass Onion.

In addition to Monae, the entire cast is a who’s who in this whodunnit, with Edward Norton, Kathryn Hahn, Leslie Odom, Dave Bautista and Kate Hudson playing prominent and poorly-written roles as the soon-to-be suspects.

The plot of Glass Onion is as derivative as it is predictable as it involves Miles Bron (Edward Norton), a tech billionaire, and the collection of sycophants who rely on him for their success who come to his Greek Island to have a murder mystery weekend that ultimately ends up being a real murder mystery. These include governor/mom Claire (Kathryn Hahn), Men’s Rights Activist Duke (Dave Bautista), former model /current influencer/entrepreneur Birdie (Kate Hudson), scientist Lionel (Leslie Odom), and Miles’ former business partner Cassandra (Janelle Monae).

Through circumstance, Benoit Ballz…oops, I mean Benoit Blanc – the world’s greatest and now gayest detective, also arrives on the island and does what he does best…solve a murder…but what murder? Well, that’s a long, and ultimately, not the least bit interesting story.

As for the mystery of this Knives Out Mystery - I literally knew who the bad guy was, and what his dark secret was, the second I saw him, and I’m not exactly the ‘world’s greatest detective’.

The truth is that Glass Onion is a horrifically flawed film in almost every way. The writing, directing and acting are notable only due to their glaring inadequacies.

As for Rian Johnson’s writing and directing, the structure of Glass Onion, and the mystery it unravels, is so poorly constructed and executed as to be cinematic malpractice. The audience is never given a character with which to connect and share a perspective. In fact, every single character in the story knows more than the audience does almost throughout the entire film.

In a murder mystery it’s best to have the audience share perspective with the detective or another protagonist, and that gives viewers an opportunity to solve the crime along with the detective/protagonist as they learn new information – this is filmmaking and storytelling 101. But in Glass Onion, the audience is deceived and left in the dark by being shown one version of events in the first half of the film, and then in the second half they’re shown that the first half was all a ruse played on them by Blanc and Cassandra/Helen.

This approach is, frankly, insulting to the audience, as it undermines the credibility of the film by leaving viewers alone out of the loop for the duration. Making the audience into fools for believing what they are shown, and then repeatedly, unbelievably and moronically altering the reality that has been established throughout is truly, truly insulting.

Also insulting are, once again, the vacuous politics of the film. Glass Onion desperately tries to be so of the present moment that it feels like a twitter argument between thirsty twenty-somethings trying to grow their follower count…and that’s not a compliment. The painfully trite politics are so shallow, so vapid and so reactionary, the movie feels like it was written during a teenager’s furious tantrum post a Thanksgiving shouting match with their conservative grandparents.

The vapid political and cultural immediacy of Glass Onion ends up being tedious and tiresome, with, shock of shocks, Miles Bron being an obvious Elon Musk (scapegoat du jour in current liberal circles) stand in and the movie’s super villain and stupid villain.

Then there’s Dave Bautista’s Duke, the meathead, men’s rights bro du jour who’s a stand-in for internet lightning rod of the moment Andrew Tate.

And there’s also Kate Hudson’s Birdie, who is every empty-headed internet celebrity/influencer who tweets politically incorrect things and claims they’re “speaking their truth”.  

What an original and compelling collection of characters. Yawn. The truth is these people aren’t interesting in the least on the internet, why would I want to spend two hours and twenty minutes with them in a movie?

The most painfully obvious and cringe-worthy bit of white self-loathing and virtue signaling by Rian Johnson though comes in the fact that the crux of the story is that tech guru Miles Bron is not really a genius at all but rather a conman who stole the idea for his trillion-dollar tech company Alpha from the true genius – a black woman…Cassandra, and then used his money muscle and a corrupt judicial system to get his other friends to back his claim of having come up with the brilliant idea.

By the end it’s revealed that, just like in Knives Out, the white people, and in this case in particular the white guy – Miles, are irredeemably awful. And the minorities, most notably a black woman – Cassandra/Helen, are the real heroes and geniuses. And of course, the white women (Claire/Birdie) and black guy (Lionel) end up siding with the black woman (Cassandra/Helen) at the crucial moment because they, unlike Miles, definitely are redeemable because they aren’t white men.

That the ultimate revenge on Miles by this collection of minorities and white women comes in the form of destroying one of the greatest works of art ever created by man – just because Miles loves it, feels like an argument ISIS or the Taliban would make when they destroy the art of their enemy – or the rationalization used by those climate catastrophe clowns when they glue themselves to paintings. How about this…let’s keep art, particularly great classic and ancient art, out of political debates, arguments and activism? Art is about beauty and Truth, so let’s not desecrate it with our petty political bullshit.

Speaking of petty political bullshit, my article declaring and bemoaning the anti-white racism of Knives Out looks more and more brilliant and insightful as every moment passes as it was proven correct by the obvious racial preferences also on display in Glass Onion. You may agree with the film’s racial preferences – they are certainly very fashionable at the moment, but you can’t deny them.

There is one not-evil white guy character in Glass Onion, Derol, a slacker who lives on Miles’ Island. Derol is an acceptable white man because he’s a mindless loser who’s nearly invisible to everyone else – his catch-phrase is literally “I’m not here!”. That he’s played by Noah Segan, the actor who played the buffoonish white cop in Knives Out only buttresses my original thesis further.

My argument all along is that the blatant anti-white racial prejudice on display in Knives Out, and now Glass Onion, is repulsive and unacceptable and would be just as repulsive and unacceptable if it were targeting blacks, Latinos, Asians, Jews, gays, lesbians or the transgendered.

The reality is that anti-white racism (with racism defined as "prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against other people because they are of a different race or ethnicity") is not only tolerated nowadays but celebrated. This is an unhealthy, toxic and dangerous turn of events and it can only lead to very bad things.

Speaking of bad things, Glass Onion, despite its 93% critical and audience score at Rotten Tomatoes, is a shitty movie. I keep hearing and reading people calling it a “fun” movie and that’s why they like it. I found it not fun at all, but entirely insulting, insipid and insidious.

After watching this movie, I couldn’t help but ponder the current state of our culture where raging sub-mediocrities like Glass Onion and Top Gun: Maverick, are celebrated as being “great” movies. Even the people who like those films admit on some level that they are absurd and ridiculous, but yet they still claim they’re “great” often times because of the absurdity and ridiculousness.

Unfortunately, it seems to me that our standards, whether they be for art, cinema, literature, music, TV, theatre, or politics and personal behavior, have in the last few years gone through a precipitous decline and a lowering of the bar to the point where we now except the most-base of garbage and consider it sublime and supreme.

I even find myself at times falling under the spell of this cultural degradation as I occasionally try to elevate my opinion of movies and tv shows I see in order to avoid constantly being the executioner lopping off one head of a movie/tv show after another. Believe it or not, that can become tedious even for an axe-wielding cinephile like me.

But the truth is, for good or for ill, I just can’t do it, I just can’t deny reality and lower my standards to say something mediocre is great or something shitty is mediocre. I can’t and I won’t. As I say to people who accuse me of being negative, “don’t blame me, I didn’t make the shitty movie/tv show. Blame the people who made the piece of shit!”

In regards to the “poorly constructed, abysmally executed, politically trite, culturally patronizing, profoundly racist and exceedingly dull and predictable” Glass Onion which I highly recommend you skip…don’t blame me for this piece of shit, blame Rian Johnson.

©2022

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery - A Spoiler-Free Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!!****

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. And insulting, insipid and insidious cinematic venture that is abysmally written, directed and acted.

Back in 2019 I wrote an article about the blockbuster murder mystery movie Knives Out, and it caused quite a kerfuffle.

The article, titled “Knives Out Sharpens the Blade of Anti-White Racism”, made the argument that the Rian Johnson directed, Daniel Craig starring whodunnit featured a pernicious anti-white racism hiding in plain sight.

This article pissed a lot of people off, but curiously, no one actually refuted its thesis, instead deciding to attack me personally - the good old argument-ad-hominem in action.

It's true that some people attempted to argue that Knives Out wasn’t anti-white but was just targeting the rich for denigration, but they obviously didn’t watch the movie or fully read my article as that assertion was factually incorrect (a poor white maid and a working-class white cop are both deemed bad - greedy and moronic respectively).

Regardless, as I wrote in my review, I found Knives Out to be “poorly constructed, abysmally executed, politically trite, culturally patronizing, profoundly racist and exceedingly dull and predictable.”

My opinion was most definitely in the minority as Knives Out raked in $312 million at the box office and boasts a 97% critical score and 92% audience score at Rotten Tomatoes.

That said, I still I think I was right, not just about the film’s odious racial politics but also about its quality.

Which brings us to Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, the newest Knives Out movie currently streaming on Netflix.

In a case of ‘the more things change the more they stay the same’, I found Glass Onion, written and directed once again by Rian Johnson, to be poorly constructed, abysmally executed, politically trite, culturally patronizing, profoundly racist and exceedingly dull and predictable.

The film, of course, stars Daniel Craig as the ‘world’s greatest detective” Benoit Blanc, or as I call him Benoit Ballz. I liked Craig as James Bond, but his Benoit Blanc, who is officially out of the closet in Glass Onion (will Craig himself soon follow?), is like the bastard son of Foghorn Leghorn and Forest Gump who got his own Murder, She Wrote franchise.  

Craig’s southern accent is so excruciating it would be cringe-worthy in a dinner theatre performance at a truck stop in Saskatchewan, in a major studio feature film it’s an absolute abomination.

Thankfully though for Craig, Janelle Monae arrives in Glass Onion with a different but equally amateurish southern accent too. Yay!! Bad acting definitely rules the day in Glass Onion.

In addition to Monae, the entire cast is a who’s who in this whodunnit, with Edward Norton, Kathryn Hahn, Leslie Odom, Dave Bautista and Kate Hudson playing prominent and poorly-written roles as the soon-to-be suspects.

The plot of Glass Onion is as derivative as it is predictable as it involves Miles Bron (Edward Norton), a tech billionaire, and the collection of sycophants who rely on him for their success who come to his Greek Island to have a murder mystery weekend that ultimately ends up being a real murder mystery. These include governor/mom Claire (Kathryn Hahn), Men’s Rights Activist Duke (Dave Bautista), former model /current influencer/entrepreneur Birdie (Kate Hudson), scientist Lionel (Leslie Odom), and Miles’ former business partner Cassandra (Janelle Monae).

Through circumstance, Benoit Ballz…oops, I mean Benoit Blanc – the world’s greatest and now gayest detective, also arrives on the island and does what he does best…solve a murder…but what murder? Well, that’s a long, and ultimately, not the least bit interesting story.

As for the mystery of this Knives Out Mystery - I literally knew who the bad guy was, and what his dark secret was, the second I saw him, and I’m not exactly the ‘world’s greatest detective’.

The truth is that Glass Onion is a horrifically flawed film in almost every way. The writing, directing and acting are notable only due to their glaring inadequacies.

As for Rian Johnson’s writing and directing, the structure of Glass Onion, and the mystery it unravels, is so poorly constructed and executed as to be cinematic malpractice. The audience is never given a character with which to connect and share a perspective. In fact, every single character in the story knows more than the audience does almost throughout the entire film.

In a murder mystery it’s best to have the audience share perspective with the detective or another protagonist, and that gives viewers an opportunity to solve the crime along with the detective/protagonist as they learn new information – this is filmmaking and storytelling 101. But in Glass Onion, the audience is deceived and left in the dark.

This approach is, frankly, insulting to the audience, as it undermines the credibility of the film by leaving viewers alone out of the loop for the duration. Making the audience into fools for believing what they are shown, and then repeatedly, unbelievably and moronically altering the reality that has been established throughout is truly, truly insulting.

Also insulting are, once again, the vacuous politics of the film. Glass Onion desperately tries to be so of the present moment that it feels like a twitter argument between thirsty twenty-somethings trying to grow their follower count…and that’s not a compliment. The painfully trite politics are so shallow, so vapid and so reactionary, the movie feels like it was written during a teenager’s furious tantrum post a Thanksgiving shouting match with their conservative grandparents.

The vapid political and cultural immediacy of Glass Onion ends up being tedious and tiresome, with, shock of shocks, Miles Bron being an obvious Elon Musk (scapegoat du jour in current liberal circles) stand in. Dave Bautista’s Duke, the gun-toting, meathead, men’s rights bro du jour is a stand-in for internet lightning rod of the moment Andrew Tate. And Kate Hudson’s Birdie is every empty-headed internet celebrity/influencer who tweets politically incorrect things and claims they’re “speaking their truth”.  

What an original and compelling collection of characters. Yawn. The truth is these people aren’t interesting in the least on the internet, why would I want to spend two hours and twenty minutes with them in a movie?

I won’t get into the specifics in an attempt to avoid spoilers, but I will say that my article declaring and bemoaning the anti-white racism of Knives Out looks more and more brilliant and insightful as every moment passes as it was proven correct by the obvious racial preferences also on display in Glass Onion. You may agree with the film’s racial preferences – they are certainly very fashionable at the moment, but you can’t deny them.

My argument all along is that the blatant anti-white racial prejudice on display in Knives Out, and now Glass Onion, is repulsive and unacceptable and would be just as repulsive and unacceptable if it were targeting blacks, Latinos, Asians, Jews, gays, lesbians or the transgendered.

The reality is that anti-white racism (with racism defined as "prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against other people because they are of a different race or ethnicity") is not only tolerated nowadays but celebrated. This is an unhealthy, toxic and dangerous turn of events and it can only lead to very bad things.

Speaking of bad things, Glass Onion, despite its 93% critical and audience score at Rotten Tomatoes, is a shitty movie. I keep hearing and reading people calling it a “fun” movie and that’s why they like it. I found it not fun at all, but entirely insulting, insipid and insidious.

After watching this movie, I couldn’t help but ponder the current state of our culture where raging sub-mediocrities like Glass Onion and Top Gun: Maverick, are celebrated as being “great” movies. Even the people who like those films admit on some level that they are absurd and ridiculous, but yet they still claim they’re “great” often times because of the absurdity and ridiculousness.

Unfortunately, it seems to me that our standards, whether they be for art, cinema, literature, music, TV, theatre, or politics and personal behavior, have in the last few years gone through a precipitous decline and a lowering of the bar to the point where we now except the most-base of garbage and consider it sublime and supreme.

I even find myself at times falling under the spell of this cultural degradation as I occasionally try to elevate my opinion of movies and tv shows I see in order to avoid constantly being the executioner lopping off one head of a movie/tv show after another. Believe it or not, that can become tedious even for an axe-wielding cinephile like me.

But the truth is, for good or for ill, I just can’t do it, I just can’t deny reality and lower my standards to say something mediocre is great or something shitty is mediocre. I can’t and I won’t. As I say to people who accuse me of being negative, “don’t blame me, I didn’t make the shitty movie/tv show. Blame the people who made the piece of shit!”

In regards to the “poorly constructed, abysmally executed, politically trite, culturally patronizing, profoundly racist and exceedingly dull and predictable” Glass Onion which I highly recommend you skip…don’t blame me for this piece of shit, blame Rian Johnson.

©2022

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 98 - Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

On this episode, Barry and I jet off to a private Greek island to try and solve the mystery of who murdered cinema as they talk all things Glass Onion - A Knives Out Mystery, the new star-studded Rian Johnson movie on Netflix. Topics discussed include the structure of successful whodunnits, the absurdity of Daniel Craig's egregious Foghorn Leghorn impression, and the tragic lowering of cinematic standards.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 98 - Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

Thanks for listening!

©2022

Knives Out Sharpens the Blade of Anti-White Racism

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 48 seconds

Knives Out is not the seemingly innocuous piece of mainstream filmmaking it pretends to be. Beneath the movie’s welcoming veneer hides a shamelessly pandering, politically trite, vicious and virulent piece of racial propaganda.

I recently watched The Birth of a Nation (1915), D.W. Griffith’s century old ode to the Ku Klux Klan. Griffith’s masterpiece is a disgusting piece of racial propaganda, but it was a huge box office success and no doubt kicked off Hollywood’s long and ugly history of demeaning and belittling portrayals of people of color in its movies.

I thought of The Birth of a Nation while watching Knives Out this week. Knives Out, a star-studded and fun-loving murder mystery that boasts a 92% audience score at Rotten Tomatoes, has banked over $128 million at the box office.

You may be wondering why on earth something as seemingly innocent as Knives Out made me think of The Birth of a Nation? Well, when I went and saw Knives Out I fully expected a light-hearted and comedic take on the whodunit genre, but what I got instead was a politically charged, thinly veiled allegory of immigration in America fueled by a pernicious anti-white racism. The racial animus on display in Knives Out is certainly not as vicious as anything seen in The Birth of a Nation, but it is just as gratuitous.

The plot of Knives Out revolves around the death of successful crime writer Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer), who may or may not have committed suicide. Harlan’s Latina immigrant nurse, Marta (Ana de Armas), is the protagonist of the story, and she works with famed private detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) to try and solve the case.

The main suspects are Harlan’s adult children Walt and Linda, Linda’s husband Richard, a widowed daughter-in-law Joni, and the grandchildren, chief among them Ransom. The Thrombeys all have a reason for wanting Harlan dead, the most notable of which is inheriting his vast fortune and palatial estate.

The Thrombeys are the picture of spoiled white privilege as they live off their father’s largess, and are so self-absorbed they can’t even be bothered to remember what Latin American country Marta originally came from. They are a conniving and scheming bunch whom without hesitation, threaten to have Marta and her family deported when she becomes a threat to their fortune.

Knives Out drips with a visceral hatred for white people that permeates its every scene. All the white characters are portrayed as morally, ethically and intellectually revolting. It isn’t just the rich Thrombeys who are held up for scorn by Knives Out, as the film’s anti-white animus crosses class barriers as well. For example, even the Thrombey’s white housekeeper, Fran, is shown to be greedy and duplicitous. Another example is Trooper Wagner, a dim-witted white police officer obsessed with pop culture who provides comedic relief by being an empty-headed buffoon.

In contrast to the loathsome and irredeemable white characters, the Latina immigrant Marta is portrayed as a near saint, so much so that she is literally incapable of lying without vomiting. Marta is inherently noble and good, which is very evident when the watchdogs do her the courtesy of never barking at her, and also when the esteemed Benoit Blanc simply declares her to be “a good person” upon meeting her and takes her on as his accomplice in solving the crime. But even Blanc is not up to Marta’s intellectual standard as she consistently outwits him in some of the movie’s most funny scenes.

I enjoy it when a film has a political perspective, and I think making the immigration debate a part of a film’s text or sub-text is a noble venture, but that venture loses its moral authority when the politics put forth are as racially-driven, odious and insipid as that on display in Knives Out.

Hollywood has long misrepresented minorities with cheap caricature and stereotype because it is the easy path. The hard path is that of nuance, where characters, regardless of race, are comprised of differing shades and motivations that highlight their humanity. When even the most villainous of characters are multi-dimensional, art flourishes and insight is soon to follow…look no further than the artistic and commercial success of Joker for evidence of that. But when characters are stereotyped and caricatured, especially out of racial animosity, art stagnates and insights recede, Knives Out is proof of that.

What is seemingly contradictory about Knives Out being insidious anti-white propaganda is that the film is written and directed by a white man, Rian Johnson, and the cast is majority white. This should come as no surprise though, as it has become de rigueur out here in Hollywood for white people to consistently self-loathe over their whiteness.

White social justice warriors basking in self-loathing is the most vacuous and common form of virtue signaling nowadays. Woke white self-flagellation has become performance art posing as racial sensitivity that, in actuality, is the most pernicious form of cheap grace as it costs the self-loather nothing and reduces fighting racism to mere narcissism and masturbatory theatre.

It is understandable with the ugly history of racism in Hollywood that filmmakers would want to push in the opposite direction, but countering the demeaning and belittling portrayals of minorities with equally demeaning and belittling portrayals of white people is not a solution to the evil of racism, but a continuation of it.

What I find so unnerving is that audiences are so enamored with Knives Out. I guess the film’s success at getting white people to cheer their own degradation, and by film’s end, their own demise, is a testament to American’s susceptibility to propaganda and their addiction to celebrity culture.

Sadly, Knives Out teaches us that the knives of racism are still out in American culture, they are just pointing in a different direction. Some people want to celebrate that notion…I’ll hold my cheers until the knives of racism are sheathed and not pointing at anybody.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2019

Knives Out: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!***

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This is an unoriginal, predictable and painfully dull two hour and ten minute episode of Murder, She Wrote laced with pernicious racism.

Knives Out, written and directed by Rian Johnson, is a murder mystery about the death of murder mystery writer Harlan Thrombey, and the search for his killer among his scheming family. The film stars Anna de Armas as Marta, Harlan’s nurse, with supporting turns from Christopher Plummer, Daniel Craig, Jamie Lee Curtis, Don Johnson, Toni Collette, Michael Shannon and Chris Evans.

Sometimes the Gods of Cinema Smile Upon You…and Sometimes They Don’t

On Monday morning I had a block of free time and, as I often do when time permits, I headed to the movie theatre to partake in the cinematic sacriment. The film options on a Monday morning were pretty slim, and the only movies that worked for my schedule were Honey Boy and Knives Out. Honey Boy is Shia LaBeouf’s pseudo-auto-biography, and while I hold no animus toward Shia, I hold no love either. In addition, I just wasn’t in the right headspace to commit to a heavy movie about the tumultuous existence of the guy from Transformers. Knives Out is not a film I had any previous interest in seeing, but I did hear it was “fun”, and so in the search for some mindless entertainment I made the leap and went to see Knives Out.

My quest for mindless entertainment was only partially fulfilled, as with Knives Out I certainly got the mindless part but didn’t get any entertainment. I found Knives Out to be anything but fun. Now, to be fair, in general I am not a fan of the murder mystery genre, it just isn’t my thing. That doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy a murder mystery movie on a technical level though and appreciate it for its craftsmanship and skill though. The problem with Knives Out is not its genre, but rather the fact that it is poorly constructed, abysmally executed, politically trite, culturally patronizing, profoundly racist and exceedingly dull and predictable. The best thing about Knives Out, and this will become more and more evident as you read this review, is that it forced me to take my knives out against it.

One of the biggest issues with Knives Out is that it thinks it is incredibly clever but in reality is incessantly imbecilic. The film is an thinly-veiled allegory for the immigration debate in America, and is little more than a piece of virulent propaganda whose politics are obstinately Manichaean and frankly, repulsive and disgusting. Tackling the immigration issue is certainly a worthy undertaking, and I would love to see a well-made film navigate the nuances and intricacies of that topic in its text or sub-text, but the politics of Knives Out are so ignorant, arrogant and infantile as to be odiously repugnant.

The most damning part of the film’s politics is that the movie drips with a visceral hatred of white people. The film’s denigration and belittling of white people is aggressively heavy-handed. The Thrombey family are presented as a collection of conniving and deplorable whites marinated in privilege, which makes sense since they are the villains, but make no mistake, the film isn’t just about hating the rich, white Thrombey family, it is about hating and belittling ALL white people regardless of class. Evidence of this is that Fran, the Thrombey’s poor white housekeeper, and white police officer Trooper Wagner, the two most prominent non-rich white people in the film, are portrayed as a money-hungry schemer and a pop culture obsessed nincompoop, respectively. The white people in this movie are all morally, ethically and intellectually revolting.

Whites in Knives Out lie, scheme, and are compulsively duplicitous, whereas Marta, the Latina immigrant with a heart of gold, is portrayed as literally being physically incapable of lying or doing anything bad. In addition, Detective Eliot, who is black and is essentially Trooper Wagner’s partner, is calm, cool and rational next to Wagner’s empty-headed buffoonery.

***I AM BREAKING MY NO SPOILER PLEDGE IN THIS NEXT PARAGRAPH!! YOU’VE BEEN WARNED!!***

SPOILER ALERT: The coup de grace in terms of the film’s propaganda is that in the final shot the white Thrombey’s are all gather in the driveway, and standing high above them on a balcony is Marta, the new Queen of the Thrombey estate. The white people look up at her with resentment, and also with hope, that she will be gracious and benevolent towards them now that she is in power even though they did not treat her with respect and grace when they ruled the roost. The final shot of the film is Marta looking down on the white people and drinking from a coffee cup that reads “my house, my rules”. Message sent and received.

****END OF SPOILER****

I don’t mind a film having a political perspective, in fact I prefer it, but what I do mind is a film that has such a pedestrian political outlook infused with such a blatant animus towards one group, whatever group that may be. The politics of Knives Out are so insidious, insipid and pernicious I couldn’t help but think of Leni Riefenstahl, the Third Reich’s documentarian, when I watched it, not for the quality of the film making, Riefenstahl was a genius, but for the racial viciousness that fueled it. The animus towards whites on display in this movie would be absolutely unacceptable if it were aimed at any other group, be it Jews, blacks, Latinos, Asians, gays, lesbians or the transgendered. That this movie is gaining so much traction in the culture, is adored by critics and is considered “fun”, is a very ominous sign for the what lies ahead for us all.

As for the cast of Knives Out, they are an appealing bunch who are very unappealing in the film. Daniel Craig is an actor I genuinely like and is the best James Bond of my life time, but his Benoit Blanc private detective character is painful to behold. Never has a Southern drawl been so brutally mistreated or a caricature so stretched beyond credulity.

Anna de Armas is easy on the eyes, and you could find worse things to do than look at her for two hours, but beyond that she doesn’t bring a whole lot to Marta. She is not assisted by the script in any way, which flattens her character into a one dimensional saint. In a way Marta’s sainthood diminishes her and is, ironically, racist in that it dehumanizes her. Marta is not so much a full fledged, multi-dimensional person as a glowing orb of noble intentions…maybe she’d be more interesting if they let her be an actual human being.

Chris Evans took time out of his busy booger eating schedule to bring his extra special brand of vanilla to the movie. It is astonishing, considering that he is so white he’s nearly transparent, that Evans is a black hole of anti-charisma from which no magnetism can escape. Evans out of his Captain America costume is like Donald Trump naked…painfully unappealing and hysterically underwhelming.

Don Johnson, Michael Shannon, Jamie Lee Curtis and Toni Colette all appear in the film and I assume got paid handsomely, and I am happy for them, they are quality actors who deserve respect and admiration. I hope they find more substantial projects with which to make their living in the future.

Rian Johnson is best known for directing the much maligned Star Wars : The Last Jedi in 2017, and Knives Out is an equally vapid, vacuous and politically correct enterprise. Johnson’s filmography is glaring proof of his allergy to nuance and character development. It would appear that Johnson is a Hollywood white knight who overcomes his lack of talent and skill by getting hired simply for being the most self-loathing white man at the pitch meeting. Johnson is among those self-loathing white people who pose at racial sensitivity because it costs them nothing, but who are actually racist because they promote themselves over whatever cause they pretend to care about.

I did not care about a single person in this movie, and thus didn’t care about the movie at all. There is no tension, no surprises, no twists, no turns, no drama and no insight or interest generated in this film. Knives Out is not a well made murder mystery, it is a two hour and ten minute long episode of Murder, She Wrote crossed with an MSNBC inspired woke telenovella. If you love murder mysteries maybe this movie will hold your attention, in which case I recommend you wait to see it for free on cable or Netflix. As for everyone else who is either minimally interested or actively disinterested in murder mysteries, my advice is to never waste your time on this piece of abhorrently dull nothingness.

With Knives Out the gods of cinema seemingly abandoned me in my Gethsemane…but then, in a twist much more interesting and substantial than anything that happens in Knives Out, the gods smiled upon me. You see, during my screening, for no apparent reason, the house lights came up about midway through the film. The movie never stopped, it just kept rolling with the lights on. Needless to say the view of the screen was obstructed and it was all very distracting. After a minute or so a patron near the exit left the theatre and informed staff of what was going on and after about five or ten minutes the lights went out.

I realized during this incident that this was my get out of cinema jail free card. By intervening and “ruining” my screening of Knives Out (which was already ruined by the movie being awful), the cinema gods had smiled upon me after all by giving me the excuse to get a refund for my ticket. And sure enough, once the credits rolled I made a beeline for the manager and calmly explained what had happened and he gave me a free pass to see another movie. I will never get the two hours and ten minutes of my life back that Knives Out took from me, but thanks to the cinema gods, I will now get to drink the art house nectar that is Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life for free! Thank you cinema gods!

©2019