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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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I sort of feel like Johnson is not a great screenwriter, just flashy, and pulling wool over people's eyes with simple lazy tricks.

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.

In general, I thought the plotting was really lazy, and not worth even being set up like a murder mystery.

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.