Go away for a few days and the blog is almost dead! I suppose persons had better things to do over the holidays. My wife and I were laid low by a nasty virus. Hard to say what it was but it hit us both with flu-like symptoms in the nose and throat and then migrated to our stomachs, leaving us incapacitated for the better part of two weeks. Doctor said it wasn't COVID. Not the best Christmas, but our daughter came home for a few days so that livened our spirits.
We ended up watching movies to pass the time. It was hard to concentrate on anything in particular. The only movie we managed to see all the way through was Glass Onion and that because no one had the energy to reach for the remote to turn the television off. Daina had fallen asleep. The cat was curled up on my lap and Akvilė didn't want to budge from her couch. She was also complaining of a sore throat. It's too bad as Netflix had a wide array of new selections.
Daina tells me I should read more, not waste so much time on these movies. She can't stand me scrolling through the Netflix repertoire only to end up watching movies like this. I suggested this one because we had more or less liked Knives Out.
The best thing I remembered about Knives Out was Ana de Armas, not Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc. The phony Southern accent reminded me of the accent Michael feigned in cosplaying Caleb Crawdad in a "Murder" episode of The Office. I thought Craig was purposely putting on a charade, but it turned out this was Rian Johnson's idea of a witty New Orleans detective to unravel far-fetched cases all over the globe. Netflix has paid nearly $500 million for the new franchise, so sadly there will be plenty more to come.
It must be a golden era for showrunners and screenwriters. Seems you can pitch virtually any idea and the studios will bite, as long as you have enough Hollywood heft to lure some A-list actors to the movie. Johnson has done pretty well for himself but his movies haven't really stuck out in my mind. Glass Onion is one of those movies you immediately forget, or so I thought.
It's a sad day when you find yourself having the same minority opinion as Ben Shapiro. I was met with similar indignation when I made harsh comments of a movie review on The Guardian. It's not because I was mad Rian Johnson took a pot shot at Elon Musk. Hardly. I just thought it was an exceedingly dull movie kept aloft by the many social media references and visual eye candy. Any time you have to back track for more than ten minutes in the middle of a movie to set up your ending you've done a pretty bad job laying out your movie. I expect too much I guess.
I also don't get this infatuation with the rich. There seems no escape. Even European movies offer up similar satires like Triangle of Sadness and The Menu, putting together international casts that appeal to European viewers. I would only be interested in the former because of Woody Harrelson as the "socialist" captain of this miserable voyage aboard a superyacht.
Apparently, to be rich is to be exceedingly bored. So much so that you have to invent elaborate games to keep you and your devious friends entertained. When you get so bored you can't take it anymore, you devise ruthless schemes to end this miserable social media cycle, as is apparently the case in The Menu. It almost starts to make you feel sorry for these kajilionaires. Maybe they want to die knowing someone cares, but in the end you are just left with a terribly empty feeling after having heaved all your holiday meals into the toilet.
We do seem to feed off the rich, especially in the social media. We become entranced by their lavish lifestyles, their absurd comments, the way they toss around money like confetti. We can't believe they got where they got because they look so damn dumb. So, we look for some little clue as to how they managed to succeed where we didn't.
Mostly, I think you have to discard any sense of shame. This is the greatest obstacle on the road to fame and fortune. Once you have dispensed with shame the sky is the limit. Ninety-nine percent of what you see and hear on social media is absolute rubbish, but it is told with such a straight face that you want to believe it. Only the worst wannabes are called out, the others skate through thanks to finding myriad ways to cheat the algorithms, like Andrew Tate. I never heard of him until Greta Thunberg brought him down over the holidays but apparently he was a major Tik Tok celebrity.
I hadn't heard of Sam Bankman-Fried either until FTX went belly up this past year, but he was well on his way to becoming the next Elon Musk before his glass pyramid collapsed. Outraged investors not only want to sue FTX but the celebrities that enticed them into buying crypto currency like Tom Brady and Larry David. It's times like these that make me feel good I don't follow social media that closely, otherwise I might let myself be sucked up in these schemes too.
As for Elon, it's not just Twitter that he has driven into the ground. Tesla stock has lost 70 percent of its value, but Musk is undeterred. He has vowed to plod on with many thinking he will overcome his massive losses. After all, he's a genius! It's not often a man loses $200 billion in one year. His companies more than $700 billion.
Movies like these can be good if they shed light on the social media pandemic that has swept the globe, but mostly they just feed into it. The studios have made huge investments and they are looking for the same gullible audience to buy movie tickets. How long can Netflix sustain these massive payouts for dubious franchises like Knives Out?
One thing is for sure. I'm definitely not going on a boat this year. That seemed to be the running theme through all these misanthropic movies.
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