KNIVES OUT -- dir. Rian Johnson; Daniel Craig, Michael Shannon, Jamie Lee Curtis, Chris Evans, etc. etc.

What other murderers are there besides Hugh?

I just think Meg is designed to be a wealthy young liberal who is perfectly kind to Marta and seems genuine enough in her sympathies that she gains Marta’s trust, and then when Marta becomes a threat to her own financial interests Marta’s trust in her is useful ammunition against her.

i think this movie is surprisingly powerful because of how marta responds to meg. she isn't shocked in the least by how meg is responding. you get the feeling that she has already considered the depth of meg's 'sjw' convictions just by nature of what her character has already seen in life, and yet she decides to forgive marta anyway -- she sees who these people are objectively and yet decides to show them kindness. and then it seems that meg would accept 'help' from marta in the end without feeling threatened by her. the power of the movie comes from the fact that there is this potential for absolution from marta even as she becomes the boss. de armas's performance balancing those two sides, clear-eyed understanding of exactly who the family is with a deep empathy for them, is the best one in the film imo (and daniel craig was abominable). the scene between her and christopher plummer in the attic was just beautiful -- you could sense exactly the reasons they were so close and the honest tension from their different positions in life.

ugh that was confusing ... and yet she decides to forgive *meg* anyway

michael shannon was also really good i think. oh don johnson too, what a filthy performance. jamie lee curtis and toni collette were a little too broad for my taste but they had some really hilarious scenes. i was a smirk-ass and laughed at the gravity's rainbow exchange. my theater was dumb as bricks (old white utah in the richer suburbs) and no one laughed. they probably felt attacked lol.

Michael Shannon literally shows up to her house to threaten her!

With the information he got from Meg: the shared confidence is what made Meg dangerous.

What other murderers are there besides Hugh?

well, there’s Ransome

(one is enough!)

a third of my downtown multiplex audience laughed at the Pynchon gag, I was startled

shannon's mouth twitch when he first mentions his son to the detective was perfect

xxp Isn’t Michael Shannon’s leverage when he threatens Marta just Meg’s information?

too slow

Yeah, but he's also physically threatening (those close ups of menacing Shannon gripping that cane), and he's the one who weaponizes the information to threaten her family. But yeah, he gets the information from her first, sure.

he’s pathetic

In the eyes of someone of much smaller stature?

He’s a pathetic creep, but Meg knows that she can count on another family member weaponizing the information when she provides it.

michael shannon manages to exude the pathetic-ness like fine wine

He's a weiner to us because he basically earned off his dad's book and created nothing himself, but he practically has a Nazi son and is the only person of the non-murderers to confront her at her own home, choosing the one place she felt safe (the back door).

Ima wager Marta didn't think he was pathetic or non-threatening.

Tho i agree Meg posed the bigger threat by possessing the damaging information.

Some of you maybe never been threatened before IRL i take it

him going ham on ransom ('have a cookie!') was great projection.

it felt honest to me that marta was scared of him in that scene. i don't know if there's supposed to be an argument here or what i lost track.

i didn’t mean that he wasn’t threatening. he was. threatening and pathetic. the point isn’t a league table of danger the point is that meg is as on the hook as any of them, and in a particularly disappointing and creepy way.

meg is a child though, you get the impression that she might change with some growth. the others are children in old peoples' bodies, calcified and disposable wastes.

I have no reason to believe she might change with some growth--there isn't an example in this movie where someone otherwise bad surprises you with their goodness.

true

I'm also not sure it's something we're supposed to consider about her character? It sort of runs counter to Meg's function in the story; to demonstrate how someone will call out Nazis until it's their neck on the line, and then they'll leverage the same power they previously admonished.

Yea, just a jab at some of the performative woke folks really.

it's pretty obvious that meg is not marta's friend at all and that hers is the worst betrayal. i do think the fact that she said "thank you" when marta offered to keep paying for her school instead of flat-out screaming at her or w/e, plus her response that she just needed to smoke a lot of weed to forget it all, demonstrates that mostly her response is born out of unthinking childishness, immaturity and fear, that she hasn't accumulated the excuses and conscious maliciousness and "sense of the correct order of things" of her older relatives, that youth presents a slightly more innocent and malleable shade of hypocrisy. it doesn't make what she does any better, in fact it probably makes it worse, but, idk just my experience with human nature here and not the diegesis of the film or w/e, childishness when one is young (she is like 21 in the film iirc) is more likely to grow into consciousness when one is older if the steps toward independence from family happen early. all i'm saying is that her youth has a function in the film that isn't just "even people of your generation in a different class will betray you" but "there is space for change and growth in young people that there just isn't in older people who have made a long series of choices."

This is pretty cool as a piece of production trivia:

#KnivesOut subtly features art by Matt Mania, Key Grip. We had many closeups of characters with eyeglasses, so he cleverly sculpted mattes to reshape our lighting equipment into scenery you'd realistically expect to see reflected in the glasses.#NerdyFilmTechStuff pic.twitter.com/n3ZrGcEOIJ

— Steve Yedlin (@steveyedlin) December 7, 2019

that's fucking fantastic.

That's awesome. Years ago I interviewed Bill Paxton, around the time of "A Simple Plan." That was around peak Raimi but his direction was seemingly restrained, yet Paxton told me about all kinds of insane tricks shots you'd really have to pay attention to to catch.

boy this movie was a ton of fun. exactly what i wanted from this or any other "caper" movie. johnson talks about sticking a hitchcock movie in the middle of a whodunit (can't recall if that was discussed upthread) and boy does that work well to keep things exciting. did not find meg the least bit sympathetic, for all the reasons given above - our attention is specifically called to her putative allyship early on, but it's dropped like a hot potato when her fancy school tuition is cut off, and her betrayal opens the threat of the one thing marta most fears, that her family will be *fucking deported*. she's awful!

and as far as her fate, the film is generally on harlan's side: ALL of these inheritance brats (remarkably blind to their own privilege when they call other people trust-fundies) would be better off if they had to actually work for a living etc etc, so why not her?

Makes sense, but she's not even out of school yet. Maybe she would have been better written a little older, in perpetual grad school or something?

Are we ever given much of a reason why JLC in particular would be cut off? She seems to be the closest to her father, what with all the secret note writing and whatnot. Seems more like a whim of the plot than anything else.

She is also (unless I missed something) the one who is independently wealthy and had no motive for murder - her rage seemed to be Defend The Family rather than anything else.

JLC is not getting cut off, her husband is, by the threat of his infidelity being revealed

Yeah, I think when we talked about it earlier on this thread we determined that while yes, she needed a million-dollar loan from her father to start her business, she was currently independently wealthy and no longer needed him to underwrite her endeavors. Unlike Michael Shannon, or Toni Collette. And Don Johnson was perhaps the biggest asshole of all and ultimately the target of Harlan's ire.

P sure she expected to get to have a stake in the house though

For sure.

she is cut off, it just doesn’t leave her high & dry

If there's one thing we know about rich people, it's that they always want to be richer and get extremely pissy when denied an opportunity to do so.

yup!

saw this yesterday and liked it quite a bit. the structure was really clever--you come in thinking it's gonna be a whodunnit, but it seemingly solves the crime for you in the first 30 minutes, before pulling the rug out over and over again. i actually really enjoyed daniel craig's performance once i got used to the accent, and enjoyed how feral the entire family became once they realized they weren't getting anything.

The ability to win at go translates as being a good tactician doesn't it.
Need another look to see how that works for Marta.
Or is there a near fairtyale like level there where her essential goodness is the main factor which I guess holds true at the end. Like she is apparently thinking of looking after the people who are expecting her to just hand over what is now her inheritance.

The game proceeds until neither player wishes to make another move.

Man my friends and i have apparently been playing Go my whole life

The "jokes" in the trailer are cringe to the max

the little detail of the white detective being a fan of thromby's, dropping all these little fanboy comments throughout, pays off so perfectly at the end when he shushes the other detective as benoit blanc is doing his big reveal.

i saw this a second time this weekend and it seemed a lot lighter than the first time i saw it. i don't know why i took it so seriously the first time, probably just a mood.

i love that the shush turned out not to be in the script, the actors asked if he could do it on set

(he did it for real in rehearsal, then pitched it to be in the film, and Johnson finally agreed to one take at the end of the shoot day)

A nice touch.

I’m thrilled to announce the #KnivesOut in-theater commentary! Yes, now you can enjoy another round of whodunnit goodness with me squawking in your ear. Did this on Bloom & Looper, happy to try it again. Audio file and instructions here: https://t.co/0VZ453YYs7 pic.twitter.com/Cc8DvgjyCb

— Rian Johnson (@rianjohnson) December 19, 2019

ah, I'd been checking his Soundcloud to see if this was gonna happen!

yess I went to Looper a second time with that one, I recall learning Fun Facts about very young child actor Pierce Gagnon

now I have to go to Knives Out again when I'm back from vacation

fun fun fun