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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?
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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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!
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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.)
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It was in the first 13 episodes, since I'm pretty sure I never got further than that.
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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.
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Thanks.
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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...
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It's good, on DVD. It does take some liberties with the book.
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Rockets and rocket engines are still possible go. Check.
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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...
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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).
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I'll admit I've actually encountered relatively few where it actually was the butler. Valets, now...