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It's been a month, huh. Sure has! More than. Last week I flew out to the midwest for a family funeral, so that was a thing.

I'm not going to catch up and also Yuletide bears, so anyway, yesterday I went out with friends to see Knives Out! It was good. Also, discussing the movie afterward, I learned two (non-spoilery) things about myself:

1. I can't remember the last time I went to see a movie in a theater that didn't have any explosions in it. This is not on purpose, but maybe I should try to branch out (or maybe sff-adjacent directors should consider being less explosive-dependent in their plotting. Just a thought.) The last time may actually have been in high school when a friend asked if I wanted to see a movie Saturday and I was experimenting with having a social life so I said yes, and it was inexplicably a romantic comedy (I thought maybe he liked one of the actors or something) and I realized like two years later that he probably thought it was a date and was trying to do a date thing. That can't possibly be the last one I saw with no explosions, can it?

2. I always go into any plot like the one in Knives Out - intricate locked-room murder mystery with comedy, eccentric and manipulative victim, literally everyone has a good motive, etc. - with the assumption that the first person you should suspect of involvement in the crime is the corpse. My friends said this is because I am too optimistic and normal people do not even consider this, but on reflection, I blame Ellen Raskin. When The Westing Game and The Tattooed Potato are your introduction to the genre, apparently you pick up tropes that are not as standard as Ellen Raskin makes them seem?

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2. I always go into any plot like the one in Knives Out - intricate locked-room murder mystery with comedy, eccentric and manipulative victim, literally everyone has a good motive, etc. - with the assumption that the first person you should suspect of involvement in the crime is the corpse. My friends said this is because I am too optimistic and normal people do not even consider this, but on reflection, I blame Ellen Raskin. When The Westing Game and The Tattooed Potato are your introduction to the genre, apparently you pick up tropes that are not as standard as Ellen Raskin makes them seem?

To be fair, no one else in the Westing Game had any involvement at all in the death, and so the corpse had to be the one to tell people it was a murder mystery.

Sam Westing: I was murdered!!!!
Everyone: sounds fake, but you deserved it
Sam Westing: my ex-wife did it!!!!
Everyone: that's your ex-wife?????? anyway, still deserved it

But the thing about locked room mysteries is you already know it's a twist, and you're genre-savvy enough to know that it has to be confounding enough that someone wrote a story about it. It ties in with one of my annoyances with tv cop/mystery shows: they're so attached to the idea of doing a twist that they'll take things and then twist them into bizarre directions (the first kidnapped child of a serial childsnatcher ended up taking control of the situation and was abusing the kidnapper! The first child was the one who kidnapped the rest of them and framed the original kidnapper!) (and that was the least infuriating of the ones I remember), so you already know they're gonna do some shit, so why not blame the corpse for arranging it? You know you can put them in the room when it happened!

That is kind of also the setup in Knives Out though, to be fair - everybody thinks it's a natural death until someone sends an anonymous letter and fee to the Great Detective to investigate the 'murder'. So you can see why I was suspicious!!!

And yeah, you don't get into that kind of story unless you're in it for the ridiculous twistiness, preferably with lanterns hung on every turn, so I still don't think it's unreasonable that I always suspect the corpse first, especially when the dead person is presented as both endearingly eccentric and a massive fan of twisty murder mysteries. It's more likely than the butler! (Except when it's the butler and the corpse working together.)

Is the corpse ever the butler?

Sometimes!

I feel like I know exactly which episode of Elementary you're talking about.

It was in the first 13 episodes, since I'm pretty sure I never got further than that.

I can narrow it down further than that, because I didn't make it past episode 3 and I remember that episode too.

LOL, and the "sounds fake" LITERALLY applies to his corpse as well!

There are too few movies without explosions that don't make me fall asleep. Yet another reason to see Knives Out. Is there photography or spectacle that makes it theater-worthy, or can I wait til it's playing on the couch near me?

I would like it noted that I did not state either way whether Knives Out had an explosion in it! :P We didn't fall asleep though.

It has some beautiful shots of the gorgeous mansion it's mostly set in, and Chris Evans is very pretty, and they definitely did a good job on the lighting and staging things inside the sets, but it's not one like, say, The Martian with all its Martian vistas that I would say is worth a special effort to see really big.

Careless reader, me!

Thanks.

I assume I must have watched movies without explosions more recently than high school but I'm drawing a complete blank at the moment. Does Lord of the Rings count? >_>;;

Not if you count wizard fireballs and/or fireworks - Gandalf does a lot of that in 1, Helm's Deep is blown up in 2, and Mount Doom blows it's top in 3, at minimum. That was my first try too, but no cigar. Is there an HP movie with no explosions?

That seems unlikely as well. The third one maybe? I always remember that one as being the quietest one.

Edited (I'm sorry I couldn't leave that sentence period-less) 2019-12-16 21:27 (UTC)

I see movies without explosions, but the last one was IIRC Midsommar, LOL. I also typically only see movies in theatres with explosions, usually because I want to support something and/or it'll look bad on the small screen (Terminator Dark Fate, Atomic Blonde, Wonder Woman....). But I also have agoraphobia and panic disorder and got a migraine the last time we saw a movie in the theatre, so that's all probably way too outlier.

My friends had gone to see Midsommar! They said there was arson but not explosions, so they passed.

I usually only make it to a theater a couple times a year, so it's been superheroes and space mostly for a long time...

There was arson and AGGRESSIVE DANCING and really trippy greenery. And Florence Pugh. It was great!

I am not aware that they make movies without explosions.

I am, it is true, struggling to think of any!

Little Man Tate.

Is Hidden Figures with or without explosions? There is a lift-off, yes?

Dunno! Haven't seen that one. Not sure if rocket engines should inherently count or not, either.

I don't know either. I mean, they are an explosion, but it's a productive one, and technically so does every internal combustion engine.

It's good, on DVD. It does take some liberties with the book.

For the purposes of the present discussion, I submit that one of the criteria is "Does it make an exciting bright light and loud noise?", which rules out automobile engines while leaving rocket engines in contention.

So mundane explosions are a protected class that will not be counted. Check.

Rockets and rocket engines are still possible go. Check.

I like this.

Also this means that if, for some reason, you could actually see inside the combustion chamber in an automobile engine, it would still count, because there is an exciting bright light, but just seeing cars doesn't.

We were debating if molotov cocktails count or not too, and if seeing them lit and thrown but not land counts...

I was going back over the movies I've seen recently, and wondering whether it counted if the only explosions were the small ones that happen inside guns to push the bullet out, and it occurs to me that by this measure the answer might be "Depends how much muzzle flash there was".

I've seen a few movies in the cinema within the last year that didn't have explosions, but only if I'm allowed to include the documentaries. (A significant number of the movies I've seen in the cinema in the last year have been documentaries; the local movie house has a weekly documentary/art house stream, and I've been finding it easier to work up interest in the documentaries than in most of the mainstream movies.) And even then, some of the documentaries have had explosions, too, since the last year has included the centenary of the Armistice and the half-centenary of Apollo 11.

For locked-room murder mysteries in general, I always suspect the first person into the room after it's unlocked. But for the specific kind with the comedy and eccentricity, yes, it's either the victim or the butler or both (or both but it turns out the butler is actually the supposed victim in disguise).

Oh, I did see Cave of Forgotten Dreams! ... ten years ago. Pretty sure that one didn't have explosions! I'm not sure if documentaries count either though.

I'll admit I've actually encountered relatively few where it actually was the butler. Valets, now...

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