Violent thoughts about a filmmaker are rare, and should be, unless that filmmaker is Rian Johnson. Why? What thoughts should you have if the dilettante manor-borne son of the elite without a tenth of the talent required to actually claim a chair amongst that elite were to take power and, say, set torch to everything his talented predecessors built. Then, sniffed at his detractors? Then bragged about the destruction in a pamphlet entitled “…And who’s gonna stop me?” That’s what Rian Johnson did, but his pamphlet was entitled The Glass Onion.
This smear of yolk on the lapel of popular art is the pure definition of late-stage collapse. Hollywood’s disfigurement of the cinema is not new, it has lurked for decades behind the air vents like a sinister, deformed child. It was wisely hidden in the attic, cloistered from normal society, but it made a game of peering out, waiting for the moment to reveal itself at the big party. A drooling punk convinced of its own beauty, it leaps from the shadows and slurps, shirtless “Behold, the glory of my visage!, all six nipples erect. Much to its shock, the women faint, monocles drop and Dad rushes for the net.”
That’s Rian Johnson.
” But Dad, it’s only 8 and tha–that guy’s eating all the shrimp!
The inbred mutant of a sinful house, sealed in a mirrorless gable, fed, through a slot in the door a steady diet of faux-radical brine, and from the lack of sunlight became the twisted wretch before us, but incapable of understanding his own abomination.
He murdered Star Wars, but not merely through lack of talent, but intentionally, for no greater reason than the thrill of destruction. He then admitted to the murder. Then took a loud sloppy shit in a stormtrooper’s helmet just to show his indifference and how glad he was that it was him who shat in the helmet and what joy it brings him to know that helmet will replace any memory that isn’t shit-filled, forever, you mewling man-child existence. The Glass Onion was his manifesto, his taunt.
A cheap stand-in for Elon Musk played by Edward Norton, invites his friends and a famous sleuth over to his private island for murder mystery party, but all of them except the sleuth (Daniel Craig) have serious motive to kill him, except it’s another guest that gets murdered (hack!*cough**cough*hack!*cough*).
For Rian Johnson’s benefit I have compiled a short list of titles which have also used the rich-guy-murder-party-but-there’s-a-real-murder-trope so we won’t have any more of these embarrassing blunders:
Scooby-doo
Murder She Wrote
The Jack Benny Show
Hung Kung Fooey
The Brady Bunch
Gunsmoke
Mutual of Omaha’s Wild America
The Facts of Life
Thundercats
The A-team
at least two Bensons
Mr. Belvedere
Night Court
Flipper
Hee-Haw
And one story arc in 80s professional Wrestling with ‘Mean Gene’ Okerland as the ‘rich guy’ (turns out Ric Flair killed Little Ricky Steamboat on behalf of Randy Savage who was then convalescing in the hospital from an illegal suplex by Roddy Piper…and that! wasn’t as hack as the Glass Onion).
“A gentlemanly weekend of whist befouled by murder…and those canapes ain’t sittin’ right, either.”
The sleuth is the same character from Knives Out, a southerner, a kind of Poirot from Georgia, except in this outing noticeably gayer, by design, Johnson took what was a perfectly functional straight character and, in his need to destroy, I dunno, our belief that gay people skulk in the forest like sasquatch, unseen except on Donahue…he tied a fruity bandana around his neck and has him cohabitate with an equally straight-acting Hugh Grant (slap a little fag-lacquer on there and the LA. Chuds feel appropriately fellated).
He said pre-release that “Obviously, that’s a LGBT character.” No, Rian. It was not obvious, nor do I believe he was originally conceived as such, as always, your artistic cowardice, or craven sycophancy, ret-conned a square character into the round hole of your clan’s dementia. But my complaint is not the same as Star Wars, Benoit Blanc is his character, ultimately, he has the right to mold him as he pleases, odd he doesn’t offer this indulgence to his predecessors, whose characters he dunked in molten Woke and sprinkled with powdered Suck.
Cannon can’t apply to him.
And the bastard flaunts it.
On the Island of the Billionaire, called the Glass Onion, there are all sorts of things a billionaire tech wizard might collect, including-wait for it-the Mona Lisa. He rented it from the Louvre during the pandemic since the Louvre was shut down and France might as well make a little cash off it. Matching his love of old things, the billionaire has winnowed his media presence down to an array of fax machines-which I take as a symbol that the Mona Lisa and the objects of artistic love of anybody that isn’t now, are as creaking and worthy of the landfill as those fax-machines (you’ll see why).
Those who like whodunnits will hate The Glass Onion. Think of the cheapest plot-dodge that ever wormed its way onto the genre, The Glass Onion beats them all.
Rian Johnson’s Moustache-Twirling Outline of Cleverness
- At first Mr. Detective doesn’t know why he’s there.
- He sees or overhears all of the reasons everyone has to kill the host.
- Then somebody else is murdered.
- Then we discover the detective knew all along and in fact one of the guests is the twin sister of an original invitee who was murdered…but nobody knows that…because she’s a twin…of a woman who never mentioned she had a twin…who was their friend of, like, fifteen years.
- Then we see the twin and Blanc conniving a scheme to out the murderer of her sister on this island, even though one of them killed her and would know she’s an imposter…this in middle of the movie.
I heard an air horn.
I’ve read Encyclopedia Brown mysteries more coherent, more engaging and more believable. Because the fact is this isn’t a mystery at all, it’s his personal manifesto about Rian Johnson, likely the only subject upon which he is competent enough to write.
The billionaire rigs his house for the murder mystery with all sorts of cheek explosives and effects and when a real murder happens, he doesn’t turn off the program.
This leads to blackouts and shattering glass and an explosion…and explosion that, as soon as we discovered it was him, the billionaire, who killed everybody (you think? Doy!) an explosion happens that completely burns the Mona Lisa to the billionaire’s slow-mo-hand-reaching-“Noooo!”
Serves him right, you are left to think…but wait, that was the friggin’ Mona Lisa, you troglodyte. And that’s what Rian Johnson just showed himself to be, in a film whose true plot was Rian Johnson destroying Star Wars, an act even he has realized will stain him with infamy forever, he self-soothes and entirely without humility sniffs at you, “I’d burn the fucking Mona Lisa if I could.” We are the wailing rich man so distraught over our ‘wittle painting gettin’ all burnt up’ and isn’t it our just deserts.
Violent thoughts against a filmmaker should be rare. Again, except in the case of Rian Johnson. This canker sore of mediocrity never had a job that wasn’t in the film business, every offering outside of UCLA has been forgettable, save Looper, which I have not seen but there’s people I trust that say it’s better than a 90-minute face rape by a feral marmoset, so…but that can’t be said of his other work.
Knives Out was the same garble of pretentious non-wit but with a vindictive White Replacement-is-Inevitable-and-Good message…the mystery is sloppy and again, it’s not really what the movie was about at all.
Rian Johnson’s Super-Secret Writing Trick has been gossip for years, until a neighbor’s son took this photo of him at the laptop, suspended three feet above the carpet a makeshift set of stocks. Added the boy, “And his privates had a moustrap on them.”
He isn’t an artistic rogue, he’s no creative hero, he ain’t Warhol. He ain’t Pollak. He ain’t Ibsen, but he tells himself he is, he obviously surrounds himself with chattering Muppets who sustain his illusion of beauty, but we see him objectively, an incestuous burden on an already fractured genetic strain of movie cretins who never made a sandwich for somebody else.
He’s sucked the brine of their baseless praise so long he can’t hear his own labored breathing as the sigh of monsters that it truly is…violent. Thoughts.
Should be rare.
Rare.