I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist on Friday. With the release of Glass Onion in theatres, it seemed like a good opportunity to talk about Benoit Blanc, the film’s protagonist.
Glass Onion is built around the idea of murder mysteries and puzzleboxes. However, like Knives Out before it, the film is something of a criticism of a rigidly rationalist approach to detective fiction, of the idea that solving a crime is a strictly mechanical process. Instead, both Knives Out and Glass Onions are movies about the importance of empathy and humanism in understanding the true moral nature of crime. This is most obvious in Benoit Blanc, who is introduced as an outside observer of these crimes, but cannot escape their gravity.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
Filed under: Movies | Tagged: benoit blanc, crime, detective, detective fiction, empathy, glass onion, head, heart, humanism, in the frame, knives out, logic, morality, mystery, puzzles, rationality, Rian Johnson, the escapist | Leave a comment »
the m0vie blog 
New Escapist Column! On How “Glass Onion” Disrupts the Disruptors…
I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. With the release of Glass Onion on Netflix, it seemed like a good opportunity to look at Rian Johnson’s latest murder mystery.
There is a sly and self-aware gag buried at the heart of Glass Onion, one of the two Knives Out sequels that Netflix paid almost half-a-billion dollars for. Johnson’s latest film is a satire of tech disruptors, focusing on fictional visionary Miles Bron and his company Alpha. However, the movie’s social satire has a particularly pointed edge. Johnson is parodying precisely the sort of reckless tech disruptors that upended the cinematic landscape. In its own weird way, Netflix is perhaps the villain of Glass Onion.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
Filed under: Movies | Tagged: benoit blanc, commentary, disruption, edward norton, glass onion, in the frame, netflix, Rian Johnson, tech disruption | Leave a comment »