- Marcus Theatres and Movie Tavern locations have reopened and safely welcomed thousands of guests back for a comfortable moviegoing experience. Watch Testimonial Videos For the past year, healthcare workers and first responders have done so much to keep our communities safe.
- Knives in the cinema have always been present. Anyone who loves knives can probably name a movie or two with a knife they liked, or one of the best knife scenes they'll never forget. So I want to show you a list of movies to see if you remember these blades beyond the movie. Each maker has some reference knife or knife maker models that inspire shall inspire or inspire him. Of course it's not.
- 'Knives Out' has quite a starry cast and lots of death. Jamie Lee Curtis. Slashed throats. This whodunit is an A-list-turned.
In Knives Out, writer-director Rian Johnson’s fun, carefully plotted whodunnit, the mystery changes halfway through the film. At the start, the rich, spoiled Thrombey family gathers together after.
Knives Out had me with the directness of its setup: a fancy manse; a rich, dysfunctional family; and a shocking murder in need of a solution. In walks Detective Benoit Blanc (played by Daniel Craig), a master crime-solver with a résumé as thick as his southern accent. “I suspect foul play … I have eliminated no suspects,” he intones when asked why he’s there. The writer and director Rian Johnson, who assembled this project quickly after spending years in the franchise-filmmaking trenches with The Last Jedi, initially seems to be seeking out simplicity—a traditional drawing-room whodunit right out of Agatha Christie’s library. But the fun really begins when Knives Out starts flouting its genre’s rules.
That inventiveness shouldn’t be too surprising given Johnson’s career. Starting in 2005 with his breakout debut, Brick, a teenage noir homage, he’s been a filmmaker who draws from the classics but gives them sparkly new packages. Even The Last Jedi challenged the storytelling conventions of the long-winded Star Wars saga with humor and pique, rather than just reaffirming them (and stunned many a fan as a result). While Knives Out is a more straightforward proposition, a murder mystery that ties up every loose end, many of its best thrills come in the narrative hairpin turns Johnson makes along the way.
Recommended Reading
Ready or Not Is a Clever Horror Comedy About Entitled Rich People
David SimsOrdeal by Innocence Is the Darkest Agatha Christie Drama Yet
Sophie GilbertThe Unlikely Hero of Rian Johnson’s Knives Out
Hannah Giorgis
Recommended Reading
Ready or Not Is a Clever Horror Comedy About Entitled Rich People
David SimsOrdeal by Innocence Is the Darkest Agatha Christie Drama Yet
Sophie GilbertThe Unlikely Hero of Rian Johnson’s Knives Out
Hannah Giorgis
The film keeps the crucial tropes of a Christie plot, namely ostentatious wealth, a cast of colorful characters with blaring personality disorders, and a cunning detective who lives only to crack the case before him. Yet it’s set in the present day, dispensing with the antiquated fortunes of Poirot’s usual suspects. Instead, Johnson conjures a coterie of modern, rich buffoons—all of them related to the successful crime novelist Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer), who is found stabbed on the night of his 85th birthday.
Who could’ve done it? There’s Harlan’s daughter-in-law, Joni (Toni Collette), a self-styled lifestyle guru who dispenses quack medical advice that even Gwyneth Paltrow would wrinkle her nose at. His daughter, Linda (Jamie Lee Curtis), is a real-estate mogul who constantly brags about being “self-made” despite receiving her father’s support. Harlan’s son, Walter (Michael Shannon), runs his dad’s publishing company, where his entire job seems to consist of printing and selling his father’s latest masterpiece. Even the grandkids, who include the handsome-jerk playboy Ransom (Chris Evans) and the taciturn alt-right-troll teenager Jacob (Jaeden Martell), are curdled in their own ways. Amid all the chaos and bickering, Marta (Ana de Armas), Harlan’s live-in nurse, gets patronizing head pats from the rest of the family but is otherwise largely ignored.
Detective Blanc is ostensibly the film’s hero and serves as the audience’s surrogate, interrogating family members and sniffing around for clues. But Marta is the heart of the movie—a character who might easily be dismissed as a stock supporting role, but whom Johnson plants in the foreground. There’s no subtlety to Johnson’s message: The film champions a hardworking daughter of immigrants in a film about upper-class snobs scrambling to secure their inherited wealth. This is 2019, and one of the villains is a pale teen boy who posts offensive invective on Twitter.
But the detective genre has never been subtle. It’s a world where the investigator is intelligence personified and the suspects (as well as the viewers) are his captive audience, waiting for the answers to be revealed after two hours of careful deduction. Through Marta and Detective Blanc, who become impromptu partners in search of the truth, Johnson is telling a story about what justice might look like in America today—while also having plenty of fun.
The film’s advertising has obscured almost every detail of the plot besides the absolute basics, a difficult achievement today. So I’ll say only that while Knives Out is a whodunit with a twist ending, it’s just as concerned with why and how the murder was done as it is with the killer’s identity; the seemingly huge pieces of information dropped early on turn out to be small pieces of the puzzle. The art of a cinematic murder mystery is to make the act of putting clues together seem suspenseful and worth watching. In the hands of Craig at his most gleeful, de Armas at her career best, and Johnson oozing love for the genre, Knives Out rises splendidly to the task.
Posted on Monday, November 25th, 2019 by Kalyn Corrigan
(Welcome to Knives In, a series about the movies to watch before Rian Johnson’s Knives Out arrives in theaters.) Can i download on netflix on mac.
Put on your murder-solving hat, because /Film has given me jurisdiction to dive deep into one film a day in preparation for the release of Rian Johnson’s Knives Out, which hits theaters this week (read our review here). Each film relates to Johnson’s “whodunit” in its own unique way, and each picture should hopefully be viewed prior to patrons watching the new movie on the big screen.
Today, we’ll be discussing the 2013 film Stoker, and how the movie is a perfect companion piece to Johnson’s modern day murder mystery.
A quaint birthday party is rudely interrupted by a death in the family. Name the movie – Stoker, or Knives Out? In short, both answers would be correct, as both director Park Chan-wook and Rian Johnson have crafted films which explore the idea of bereavement as a means to not necessarily growing older, but rather, morphing into a monster. In the midst of loss, one would expect a sort of coming together of kin, a call to action to sew up old wounds and let the water flow under the bridge. Sadly, as these two films show, when it comes to the passing of a loved one, more often than not, the only hatchet that gets buried is a sharp edge deep into the soft flesh of another person’s skull.
In Knives Out, a wealthy, self-made author named Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) finishes up his eighty-fifth birthday by taking his own life in the privacy of his favorite game room, much to the dismay of his loving family. Minesweeper download mac. Harlan started out with a rusty smith corona and built himself into one of the best selling mystery writers of all time. Thirty languages, over eighty million copies sold, and yet, the children he brought into this world are greedy when they should be grateful. Cold and procedural when they should be forgiving and compassionate. Long faces all around when the detectives show up, a pretense in humility, a mask so convincing, it puts Harlan’s decorative statues peppered throughout his study to shame. Like Anjelica Huston shedding her human ensemble once the coast in clear in the late and great Nicolas Roeg’s The Witches, so, too, do the Thrombey children reveal their true selves once the reading of the will comes into question. Claws come out, mouths water, razor sharp crocodile tears smudging thick makeup divulging the heinous demon within.
Likewise, in director Park’s tragically underrated 2013 film Stoker, the ugly reality of death is on full display. When India’s (Mia Wasikowska) father (Dermot Mulroney) passes unexpectedly in a freak car accident, she finds herself not held by her friends and family, but instead, solo at the funeral, caught up in a whirlwind of rumors. Why was her father driving so far away that day? Why isn’t her uncle wearing black? Why isn’t her mother crying? Are two of her relatives now involved? These are the whispers that surround and engulf India, a rare bird coming out of her shell just as the nest she once knew unravels and burns all around her.
Much like the mainly single location of the Thrombey grounds in Knives Out, Director Park also likes stories where the plot is set in a confined space, turning the Stoker house into a small universe unto itself. Based largely on Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, Stoker is an elegant thriller with heavy noir vibes about the blossoming relationship between India and her Uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode) in the wake of her father’s passing, characterized by an unusual cadence to dialogue. Since losing her father, India finds that not only is she suddenly surrounded by ghouls, but that she, too, is turning into a monster. “This goes against an ordinary coming-of-age story” director Park once remarked in an interview about the film. “Rather than leaving her nest in search of a commendable, positive, beautiful set of values, India leaves as a devil in search for evolution, into being a complete evil incarnate. So in this respect, this is a completely subverted coming-of-age story”.
India’s Uncle Charlie, who she is now meeting for the very first time, is arguably already a creature of the night. For one, we never see him eat – Charlie even goes to the trouble of cooking dinner for India and her mother Evelyn (Nicole Kidman), and yet, doesn’t take a bite of the meal himself. At school, when India is taunted by the local bully, Charlie seems to hear the disparaging discourse from all the way on the other side of school grounds, appearing suddenly like a watchful guardian. There’s even a highly suggestive piano duet shared between India and Charlie wherein he seemingly vanishes into thin air, just as their seductive crescendo reaches its sultry climax.
Although it is never blatantly stated that Charlie is a vampire, as the title of the movie may hint, the lust for the kill and the power of his thrall are still very present. After the loss of her father, Charlie manages to tease out the same sinister shine in his darling niece India, imprinting his dangerous nature on a vulnerable girl in a state of flux like a sire changing a child of light into a heathen of darkness. Soon, India is lying to law officials, beating up boys, engaging in lewd behavior and even committing murder. Suddenly, the shy little girl who doesn’t like to be touched is drawing blood and stealing rose tinted kisses, frightening her mother to the point where she asks, “India, who are you?” The truth is part of India died the day they put her father in the ground, and this frayed being is all that’s left.
In a similar manner, it’s all smiles at the Thrombey house while Dad is still alive. In fact, if you asked each member of the family where they were in the room when the gang sang happy birthday to the old man, they’d all argue they were the one setting the cake down on the table and telling Harlan to blow out the candles. However, once their cash cow has been sent out to pasture, the wolves swarm, each helpless lamb now turning on one another for the slaughter. Director Park may take a more direct approach when it comes to commentary on post mortem madness, but both he and director Johnson are dealing with some dark themes about death and the unexpected effect it can have on those left living. Download blizzard launcher mac.
Cool Posts From Around the Web: