melannen: Commander Valentine of Alpha Squad Seven, a red-haired female Nick Fury in space, smoking contemplatively (Default)
melannen ([personal profile] melannen) wrote2019-12-16 01:56 pm
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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?
lannamichaels: Astronaut Dale Gardner holds up For Sale sign after EVA. (Default)

[personal profile] lannamichaels 2019-12-16 07:20 pm (UTC)(link)
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!
peoriapeoriawhereart: blond and brunet men peer intently (Napoleon & Illya peer)

[personal profile] peoriapeoriawhereart 2019-12-16 11:41 pm (UTC)(link)
Is the corpse ever the butler?
kitewithfish: (Default)

[personal profile] kitewithfish 2019-12-16 09:03 pm (UTC)(link)
I feel like I know exactly which episode of Elementary you're talking about.
lannamichaels: Astronaut Dale Gardner holds up For Sale sign after EVA. (Default)

[personal profile] lannamichaels 2019-12-16 09:13 pm (UTC)(link)

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

pedanther: (Default)

[personal profile] pedanther 2019-12-16 11:55 pm (UTC)(link)
I can narrow it down further than that, because I didn't make it past episode 3 and I remember that episode too.
kore: (Default)

[personal profile] kore 2019-12-16 09:30 pm (UTC)(link)
LOL, and the "sounds fake" LITERALLY applies to his corpse as well!
jesse_the_k: harbor seal's head captioned "seal of approval" (Approval)

[personal profile] jesse_the_k 2019-12-16 08:41 pm (UTC)(link)
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?
jesse_the_k: Baby wearing black glasses bigger than head (eyeglasses baby)

[personal profile] jesse_the_k 2019-12-16 09:01 pm (UTC)(link)
Careless reader, me!

Thanks.
sylvaine: Dark-haired person with black eyes & white pupils. (Default)

[personal profile] sylvaine 2019-12-16 09:18 pm (UTC)(link)
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? >_>;;
sylvaine: Dark-haired person with black eyes & white pupils. (Default)

[personal profile] sylvaine 2019-12-16 09:26 pm (UTC)(link)
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)
kore: (Default)

[personal profile] kore 2019-12-16 09:35 pm (UTC)(link)
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.
kore: (Default)

[personal profile] kore 2019-12-16 10:24 pm (UTC)(link)
There was arson and AGGRESSIVE DANCING and really trippy greenery. And Florence Pugh. It was great!
isis: (la la shep)

[personal profile] isis 2019-12-16 11:38 pm (UTC)(link)
I am not aware that they make movies without explosions.
peoriapeoriawhereart: little girls are stinkers (sweetness and angles)

[personal profile] peoriapeoriawhereart 2019-12-16 11:45 pm (UTC)(link)
Little Man Tate.
peoriapeoriawhereart: Sam Wilson in modified Cap shirt (These Arms Show)

[personal profile] peoriapeoriawhereart 2019-12-16 11:45 pm (UTC)(link)
Is Hidden Figures with or without explosions? There is a lift-off, yes?
peoriapeoriawhereart: Cartoon Stantz post-kafoom (Default)

[personal profile] peoriapeoriawhereart 2019-12-16 11:48 pm (UTC)(link)
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.
pedanther: (Default)

[personal profile] pedanther 2019-12-16 11:57 pm (UTC)(link)
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.
peoriapeoriawhereart: little girls are stinkers (sweetness and angles)

[personal profile] peoriapeoriawhereart 2019-12-17 12:06 am (UTC)(link)
So mundane explosions are a protected class that will not be counted. Check.

Rockets and rocket engines are still possible go. Check.
pedanther: (Default)

[personal profile] pedanther 2019-12-17 12:24 am (UTC)(link)
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".
pedanther: (Default)

[personal profile] pedanther 2019-12-16 11:53 pm (UTC)(link)
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).