🍿56: Glass Onion

This week: SP turns 2! A rundown of the best films featured in SP and a special film fact to tribute a certain someone.

Dec 29, 2022

“Is he always this funny, or only on days when he's wanted for murder?”
~ Who Framed Roger Rabbit, 1988

Happy Birthday, SP! 🎂

Salty Popcorn has officially turned two years old and what a journey it has been! We want to take this opportunity to thank all of our readers and our patrons, your support is appreciated more than you know - without you, SP probably wouldn’t have lasted two months.

To celebrate, here’s a rundown of the best films we’ve featured over the past two years, ranked in order of stars given - though we must admit that we look back on all of them so fondly that we’d like to give most of them five stars now…

2022

Flee (5*)
Boiling Point (4.5*)
Triangle of Sadness (5*)
Everything Everywhere All At Once (4.5*)
The Worst Person in the World (4.5*)

An honourable mention for Brian and Charles (4*) which is one of the funniest and most heartfelt films we’ve seen this year.

2021

Have you got a favourite film of 2022 that we missed? Let us know in the comments.

Now for the headlines:

Avatar 2 managed to make $1bn at the box office in just two weeks. Read more.
A judge in the US has ruled that audiences can sue movie studios for false advertising when a trailer is deemed misleading. This follows an ongoing complaint from fans of Ana De Armas, who featured in the trailer for Yesterday but was cut from the actual film - they’re seeing for $5m. Read more.
A London-based filmmaker, Lorna Tucker, that was homeless for 18 months as a teenager returns to the streets for her upcoming documentary, Someone’s Daughter, Someone’s Son, which will be narrated by Colin Firth. Read more.

Salty Popcorn is 100% free, but if you enjoy SP, please consider buying us a cinema ticket for just £5 per month - or a bunch of tickets for just £30 per year. Thank you!

Upcoming Releases

Oppenheimer

UK: 21 July // USA: 21 July

Cillian Murphy stars as “the father of the atomic bomb,” J. Robert Oppenheimer, alongside an explosive cast featuring Florence Pugh, Emily Blunt and Rami Malik, directed by Christopher Nolan.

Fact of the week

To celebrate Salty Popcorn’s second birthday, this week’s fact is a tribute to SP’s most dedicated reader and unofficial (and unpaid) sub-editor. For two years, she’s been helping SP grow by reading, sharing and correcting typos (though sometimes they still slip through!)

She’s seen a lot of (mostly good) films that she wouldn’t have while putting up with the noises of me either scoffing salty popcorn or complaining about the lack of salty in a mixed box of salt and sweet. So here it is:

There are a lot of tricks employed by the makeup department of a film set and a lot of them involve food. But did you know how they make a “newborn baby” look like it’s fresh out of the womb?

Well, it’s usually a mixture of jam and cream cheese spread all over the baby (almost like a scone) just before filming. The process is strictly regulated and there are several flavours of jam banned to safeguard against an allergic reaction.

This may seem like a strange fact to honour a person with, but I think she’ll appreciate the creative use of food - she also loves a good jam and a cute baby…

Review: Glass Onion

Star rating:

3 (out of 5)

Where to watch:

USA: Netflix

UK: Netflix

Runtime:

2hr 19m

Director:

Rian Johnson

Blurb:

Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) is back to solve a murder mystery that takes place on the private island of tech billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton) while he hosts a group of his closest friends.

The review (NO spoilers):

Despite having a great metaphorical title for a murder mystery, Glass Onion doesn’t have as many layers as you might think. While the campness and the humour hit the spot for a fun film, it’s pretty transparent for a whodunnit.

The best murder mysteries — especially the light-hearted ones — work to surprise and delight the audience as the pieces of the puzzle fall into place. As the plot unravels, the characters you most suspect one moment suddenly appear the most innocent the next. Now I’m no Sherlock, but I wasn’t surprised at all about the ‘who’, nor too interested in the ‘how’ or the ‘why’.

What also bothers me is that this film has no shortage of unnecessarily intricate details that, to me, seem like an attempt to make the plot feel more complicated than it really is.

Daniel Craig is fine as Benoit Blanc, though his performance lacks the charm he had in the first film, Knives Out, which sets a high bar that Glass Onion doesn’t quite reach.

As far as easy-to-watch romps go, Glass Onion is a great film to watch on New Year’s Day with a box of chocolates and without high expectations, but if you’re looking for a real whodunnit, there are better murder mysteries to be had.

I’ve no doubt we’ll see a few more Knives Our Mysteries now that Craig has given up the vodka martinis and the whodunnit genre is making a comeback, but I hope they’ll resemble something closer to the first film.

Scroll down to see what’s in the next issue.

If you liked Glass Onion…

See How They Run

2022 | UK: Disney+ // USA: AppleTV ($3.99)

If you’re looking for another fun and light-hearted whodunnit that doesn’t take itself too seriously, See How They Run could be a great film to watch - and it featured in SP#48.

For a more serious murder mystery, you might look to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, or for a mystery with a completely different tone, Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight.