Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song

Hallelujah:  Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song (Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine, Netflix 2022) is the sort of thing that you watch when you're not in the mood for something ambitious or daunting, when you're tired and don't want to pay much attention and, when explosions and murder aren't the vessel to carry you across a bit of mild depression on a sub-zero weekend night.  The movie is the sort of genteel, mildly interesting documentary that you might watch while waiting for the cold opening to Saturday Night Live.  That said, this documentary is well-made, thought-provoking, and provides some interesting insights into the life and times of famous Canadian singer-songwriter.  And, of course, the show features about twenty versions of Cohen's justly renowned "Hallelujah," and, so, it's worth watching for that reason alone.  (It's a bit frustrating that the documentary doesn't show any complete performance of the song -- we're left with suggestive snippets; presumably, the filmmakers think everyone knows the song, more or less word by word, and, further, there are many variations with respect to the lyrics.  Cohen wrote the song over 7 years and, then, continued to tinker with it, introducing some fairly explicit sexual snarkiness when the tune had been in currency for about ten years -- these are the so-called "naughty bits" that were eliminated from the family-friendly version that is best known to most people from the movie Shrek.) I can't recall when I first heard the song, probably it was on TV, Scrubs or The West Wing or, perhaps, in the movie Basquiat.  

Hallelujah provides a thumbnail sketch of Cohen's career, narrated by a Rolling Stone writer, "Ratso" Sloman (seen interviewing Cohen in the mid-nineties) with commentary by various women that he knew -- any biography of Cohen will likely include several former paramours; he seems to have had affairs with vast numbers of accomplished and articulate women.  One of these women, Susan Pacal, also from Montreal and a lifelong friend, is particularly eloquent; like Cohen, she speaks in complex fully formed sentences, her voicetrembling a bit with Parkinson's disease.  Like most of the witnesses, she is now very old.  After beginning with a sequence in which Cohen sings "Hallelujah" on his knees, the film chronicles the singer's life in a manner that is, more or less, "sperm to worm".  The initial concert footage is from one of the old man's tours after he had to return to the stage to recoup money embezzled from him.  (Like Bob Dylan, Cohen toured, more or less, continuously in the last fifteen years of his life.)  We see Cohen commenting on his disastrous encounter with Phil Spector (the eccentric producer mixed "The Death of a Ladies' Man", more or less vandalizing the singer's spare and aphoristic lyrics with his bombastic "wall of sound.")  A former girlfriend seems reluctant to participate in the venture and offers enigmatic remarks about Cohen's life in the nineties -- she resists the interviewer's questions.  There are some interesting shots of Cohen as a Zen monk at the Mount Baldy Zen Center -- Susan Pacal says that the place was "a primordial heap of rubble" and that it was not for "the meek."  Sharon Robinson, one of Cohen's backup singers but also a collaborator, tells us how the artist announced to her that there was no money in his ATM account.  After being defrauded, Cohen began touring and, of course, there is plenty of footage of  him performing all over the world.  The film includes montages of "Hallelujah" being sung by various artists and performers, including on American Idol.  There is clip of Shrek singing the song with Cohen's French girlfriend, saying with a sniff:  "It's a cartoon, right?  Of course, I haven't seen it."

We learn that the song was first recorded for Columbia in the late eighties on a record called Various Positions.  (Cohen's music always traffics in sexual innuendo to the extent that even, more or less, innocent lyrics get interpreted as risque or, even, scandalous.  The film exec who bought "Hallelujah" for Shrek says that she eliminated the line about being "tied to the kitchen chair" -- actually, one of the few lyrics in the song that isn't sexually suggestive:  Cohen is singing about being forced into domesticity, not some sort of kinky bondage session.)   For some reason that remains inexplicable, a Columbia executive killed Various Positions and the record was never released in the United States (it was sold abroad and successful in the UK and France.)  This act was unprecedented.  Jon Issenauer, Cohen's recording producer noted that the record had "already been paid for" and that the executive who quashed Various Positions must have had some sort of uniquely virulent hatred for Cohen -- after all, the record contained three bona fide hits that would have made Columbia lots of money if the songs had been played in the United States.  Other artists knew the record and "Hallelujah" and began covering the song -- Bob Dylan, for instance, played the song in concert on many occasions; Dylan obviously understood the song intimately -- the sexually recriminations begin in its third line:  "But you didn't really care much for music do yah".  John Cale made the song famous on a Cohen tribute album. Later, Jeff Buckley performed a brilliant and haunting version of "Hallelujah" and it was this cover that ultimately catapulted the song to fame:  it was used in innumerable movies and TV shows including a famous episode of The West Wing.  (Someone remarks that previous 'grumbly' versions by old guys -- John Cale and Dylan -- didn't seem to interest most younger listeners.)  Since the song came out of nowhere and hadn't really been properly released, "Hallelujah" gave the impression of being a melody with enigmatic lyrics that had always been around -- a kind of sexually suggestive folk song.  

The documentary doesn't spend any time analyzing the song and doesn't attempt to explain its appeal.  This is a bit disappointing and I would have liked to hear some exegesis of "Hallelujah" along with musical commentary.  I suppose the filmmakers' concept was that the song should speak for itself and be perceived on its own terms -- but this is naive:  as I've noted, the song doesn't even exist in any stable version -- someone says that there may exist 150 stanzas to the song, most, of which, have never seen the light of day although the movie shows notations of variant lyrics in Cohen's notebooks.  Furthermore, like all masterpieces, the song can't be reduced to any particular meaning and, therefore, some remarks on what some of the lines seem to suggest or imply would not deface the tune in the slightest.  No one says anything about the fact that the song is a kind of "novelty" number in which Cohen has to find as many rhymes as possible for "hallelujah", a word that isn't really conducive to any rhymes at all -- hence, Cohen has to use phrases like "outdrew you", pronouncing the "you" as "yah"; anyone who has heard Cohen's grave and courtly diction knows that he would never pronounce "you" in the way that the song requires and, so, the lyrics set up a tension between the songwriter's formal eloquence and the slangy idiom necessary to make the rhymes work  The fact that Cohen pulls off this high-wire act without the song becoming ridiculous -- it's always on the razor-edge of slipping into self-parody -- is the miracle that he accomplishes with this song.

The film supplies an interesting metaphor for interpretative brilliance.  Cohen's grandfather was a renowned rabbi in Montreal.  He knew the Torah so well that, it was said, that if someone drove a pin through the scripture's scroll, the rabbi would be able to tell you every Hebrew word, even every letter, pierced by that pin.

  

Man Facing Southeast (Hombre mirando al Sudeste)

Periodically, I need a reminder that my knowledge about films is parochial and circumscribed by availability and other arbitrary factors.  I had never heard of Eliseo Subiela's 1986 picture, Man Facing Southeast, even though, apparently, the movie is well-known in many circles and much-acclaimed.  Indeed, the director in an interview provided among the extras on the DVD that I watched (Kino Lorbeer) described the movie as a "mega-hit" and the film that established his reputation.  Of course, since I have also never heard of Eliseo Subiela, the latter comment is also moot.  Made in Argentina, about two years after the collapse of the nation's vicious military dictatorship, the film wasn't even shown in Subiela's home country --  there was little interest in the movie that was set in a notorious insane asylum and the actors in the picture were recruited from the Argentina theater (Shakespearian actors by and large) and not known from TV or movies in that country.  It seems that the picture was a big hit at the Montreal Film Festival and, later, gathered a following at the South by Southwest film festival in Austin, Texas.  Now, the movie is said to have a "cult" status and has been remade or pirated in K-Pax (2001) and Mr. Jones (1993).  (The director of K-Pax claimed that he had no knowledge of the film when similarities between his movie and Man Facing Southeast were noted -- as of 2001, Man Facing Southeast was said to be a "little-known Argentinan film".) In fact, Subiela's movie is ingenious and very compelling; it fully deserves cult status although, it should be said, that the picture has some deficiencies characteristic of "cult" movies -- it's very cheaply made and somewhat elliptical primarily due to budgetary issues.  And there's too much reliance on voice-over narration by the hero.  But the acting is very good and Subiela is a highly sophisticated moviemaker -- the film is intensely poetic although in a curiously understated and unobtrusive way. 

Dr. Denis is a staff psychiatrist at a large, intimidating insane asylum in some unnamed big city.  A feature of mental illness is that the victim of such pathology seems "stuck" -- that is, unable to progress beyond certain fixed ideas.  This is demonstrated in the initial scene in which Denis interviews a madman who has killed his lover in an unsuccessful suicide pact -- she shot herself and the patient also fired two bullets into his brain but somehow survived.  The poor insane patient repeats himself over and over.  Denis' mind wanders -- he flashes onto a famous Magritte painting of two figures with their faces wrapped in cloth trying to kiss; in his vision, blood seeps through the cloth.  Like the madman, Denis is stuck himself, a burnt-out case, who despairs of saving, or even helping anyone in the huge asylum.  We learn that Denis is divorced, the father of two children that he sees only intermittently, and, probably, an alcoholic.  He plays saxophone alone in his apartment to amuse himself and morosely watches home movies showing his family in happier days when he was still married.

A nurse tells Denis that "the count is wrong" in one of the wards that he supervises.  It's not an escape but an additional patient, one too many.  Denis is told by an old man who seems to be bed-ridden that the new patient comes from far away "but is a very good man."  The new patient, named Rantes, is discovered playing a Bach fugue on the church organ at the asylum -- a group of enraptured patients surround him.  Rantes, a handsome young man who looks very much like Lou Reed when he was in his thirties, tells Denis that the music is only  vibrations in the air and, therefore, he can't understand how it has an emotional effect on those listening.  Later, Rantes says that he is a hologram, a projection of some sort, sent from a somewhere in outer space to transmit data about human beings to his home planet.  Of course, Denis thinks the man is insane but, nonetheless, is interested by his case and, even, finds new purpose as a result of his interactions with the purported alien.  Rantes stands in the rather neglected and shabby courtyard of the huge asylum facing southeast -- he says that he is transmitting and receiving data from outer space.  Rantes is appalled by the cruelty and suffering on earth and can't understand why such things happen.  He is kind to everyone and expresses Christian values of gentleness and universal love to the extent that Denis calls him a "cybernetic Christ."  Rantes says that every day earthlings murder "god within them" and that he, together with other aliens, most of them also incarcerated in madhouses, are mounting a rescue mission.  Rantes has telekinetic powers and moves things around to facilitate escapes from the insane asylum.  In one scene, he slides dishes full of food across a restaurant counter to provide nourishment for a starving mother and her two children -- when the owner of the cafe discovers the woman and her child eating from other people's plates of food, Rantes causes a stack of glasses to topple to the floor to cover her escape.  Rantes is visited by a woman named Beatriz Dick -- she is sometimes called the Saint in the movie.  She tells Denis that she works with Rantes in the slums of the City where he has a reputation of being a living and accessible Christ figure.  (By this point, Rantes is spending a lot of time outside the asylum with the collusion of the psychiatrist.)  Beatriz and Dr. Denis, who are now attracted to one another, go with Rantes to a symphony concert -- it's an open air affair in a city park.  The conductor is directing the orchestra in the famous Ode to Joy from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.  Inspired, Rantes gets us and dances with Beatriz triggering hundreds of other couples to dance with them.  Then, he mounts the podium and conducts the "Turkish music" from the Ninth Symphony's last movement.  Somehow, the inmates intuit the music and begin to bang pots in time to the Turkish march; there's an uprising in the madhouse in which the patients storm about the halls.  Police have to be called to quell  the rebellion.  Meanwhile at the concert, everyone is dancing wildly.  The next day, the newspaper reports that a madman directed the symphony orchestra.  The director of the asylum meets with Denis and reprimands him severely (for what we would call "boundary violations"); the director, who means well, orders Denis to "cure" Rantes.  This leads to sedative injections and shock therapy.  Rantes' ability to receive and broadcast "factual transmissions" is disrupted and he no longer faces Southeast in the courtyard.  There is a fight about the quality of the food served in the asylum -- Rantes demands that the director eat the same food as the patients.  This leads to harsher treatment.  Ultimately,  it's reported that Rantes is dying.  Denis invites Beatriz, the Saint, to his apartment where they have sex.  She gushes some kind of blue frothy foam from her lips at orgasm.  (Rantes has previously told him about this phenomenon.)  Beatriz tells Denis that she is an alien herself and one of the agents trying to rescue mankind from itself.  Denis is inexplicably outrated and berates her as a lunatic, kicking her out of his apartment.  After she has left, he looks in her left-behind purse and finds a picture of her standing next to Rantes beaming at the camera -- the picture seems to have been taken ten or so years earlier and has been torn to eliminate one or more other figures.  Rantes takes his children fishing; on that day in February 1985, Rantes dies.  The patients at the asylum mourn his death and stand in a great ring in the courtyard, waiting for a flying saucer to come to bear the alien away.  

The movie's central crux is whether Rantes is just a madman or, really, some sort of space savior sent to earth to reform human institutions.  Rantes has said that there are many others like him on earth, but this can't be verified and, of course, Beatriz's status is ambiguous.  The director, Subiela says that he doesn't know if Rantes  is merely a mentally ill person or a true "man who fell to earth" space alien.  (Of course, insane people, no matter how clever and talented, don't have telekinetic properties and, therefore, the objective evidence in the movie suggests that Rantes is, indeed, likely a man from outer space; similarly, Beatriz' trick of squirting blue fluid from her lips at orgasm doesn't seem exactly earthly.) This is sort of a cheat and, I think, the picture would be better without the telekinesis (and blue froth), unnecessary elements in any event.  Dr. Denis understands that the message of the Gospel must always be suppressed and to follow in Jesus' footsteps, of course, is to invite crucifixion.  Indeed, Denis understands that in the world of the vast insane asylum, he is one of the oppressors and  equates himself to Pontius Pilate.  (He is more skeptical of the enterprise than his boss who admits that almost no one is cured but that if a single insane person's condition improves, then, the asylum and its discipline can be justified.)

Man facing Southeast is poetic, even lyrical, although the film's lyricism is understated.  Dreamlike elements of the plot, the story's poetic features, are very restrained.  In this respect, the movie resembles mature Bunuel, obviously an influence on the moviemaker -- the film's eccentric or surrealistic details are in small details.  We  see the Saint's purse falling in slow-motion after Denis has searched it and found the strange photograph of Beatriz with Rantes.  In several scenes, Beatriz inexplicably withdraws into isolation and changes her shoes.  In his bachelor apartment, corners of rooms are full of draped furniture, ghost-like swaddled forms that recall the lovers trying to kiss although their heads are wrapped in burlap in the Magritte painting.  The asylum has a very real and palpable presence.  The scene in the choir loft with Rantes playing Bach involving a crane shot is particularly noteworthy for the details of stairway, cement block walls, and austere modernist stained glass revealed  in that location.  Subiela's first film, made when he was 18, was a documentary about the Borda Mental Hospital and, in the interview, the director says he was always afraid of the place -- but, nonetheless, the movie was made in that location with madmen standing all around the actors as scenes were shot.  "Schizophrenia," Subielo says, "has a very distinct odor." In a late scene, as Rantes is dying, Subielo keeps the camera far away from his subject.  We see an empty refectory, some pewter on one side of the room, and the two men huddled in the corner as Denis interrogates Rantes who is unable, it seems to speak.  The dialogue is often philosophical, concerned with ethical issues about justice and human dignity.  When the director of the asylum castigates Denis about the concert, he says what if you had gone to a "military parade, would the newspaper report 'A madman orders a military attack."  "But this has already happened," Denis replies, referring, I think, to the Falklands War.  At the end of the film, Denis speculates as to whether Beatriz and Rantes were lovers or siblings -- "Perhaps," he thinks, "the idiot children of a mad alcoholic father, they are unable to forget."  In the context of the military Junta and its "dirty war" in which 30,000 people just disappeared without a trace, this is a poignant and profound surmise.   This is a picture that embeds itself in your imagination.    

   

JUNG_E

 At some point in the last decade of the 20th century, many people began to wonder if they were merely robots programmed by mass media to act in certain specific ways.  If people didn't wonder about this as applied to their own actions, they ascribed robotic characteristics to others.  (For instance, in Tar, the heroine derisively calls her adversaries "robots.")  As a result, the robot movie (and its close cousin, the zombie film) is a genre of picture that is now ubiquitous.  Indeed, it seems that robot and zombie movies are the new "Westerns".  In the early sixties, every other show on TV was a Western, even though the form was falling out of favor in Hollywood -- Westerns could be cheaply made, had standardized plots, and didn't require much more than a desert and a few horses as props.  When TV-Westerns faltered, the media gave us crime shows featuring private detectives.  (These shows didn't even require horses -- fast cars would suffice.) It now seems that the prevalent genre is the robot show (with robotic, pre-programmed zombies following close behind.)  Apparently, these shows can be cheaply made as well since robots and, to a lesser extent, Zombies look more or less like ordinary folks -- robots tend to look better, at least, until they get scuffed up; zombies look worse.  The question that arises is whether these shows have progressed much beyond their most famous progenitor, Blade Runner, released in 1982.)  On the evidence of a recent South Korean example of this genre,  JUNG_E (20230, the answer is "no."

JUNG_E is a very tedious, mediocre robot flick.  The film's premise is complicated and it takes most of the picture to set up the situation.  So the movie seems to be comprised of some loud, poorly choreographed fight scenes bracketing lengthy and loquacious exposition.  The situation is that earth has flooded and humanity has gone into orbit to flee the ruined planet.  (This concept explained in some long titles is promptly abandoned and much of the movie seems to take place on Earth.)  The orbiting refuge satellites have devolved into a bloody civil war that is waged, largely, by cyborgs.  A woman-warrior named Jun has a small daughter suffering from cancer.  On the eve of her daughter's surgery, Mom goes into battle after bidding her daughter, Hsieh, farewell.  In combat, Mom is fatally wounded.  Her mind is exported from her dying body into a Class C robot. Class C means that the resurrected mind has no civil rights and can be endlessly replicated.  (Apparently,  if you have money, you can be reborn as a Class A robot with intact civil rights or, as a Class B machine with only some of your rights authorized.)  Jun has been made into an army of murderous Jun's by the evil Kronoid Corporation and its equally vicious Chairman.  Years later, the Kronoid Corp. is experimenting to improve its war robot models.  Poor Jun is placed in simulations where she is systematically mutilated -- the idea is to turn her pain into wrath (imagined to be a yellow color in the brain).  In an implausible coincidence, Jun's daughter, Hsieh, now fully grown is working on this project and, therefore, involved in torturing her own mother -- they shoot the robot mom in the leg repeatedly, make her battle a cyborg dog who hurls thunderbolts at her, and cut off one of her arms with a circular saw.  Of course, robot Jun feels this pain intensely as they ratchet up the misery to push her into some kind of Berserker frenzy.  The civil war has come to an end and the Defense industry (Kronoid in particular) is now engaged in radical reductions-in-force.  To add insult to injury, Jun is going to be converted into either a sex model robot or, possibly, a domestic worker -- from murdering enemies, she's going to be demoted to washing dishes and making beds.  A particularly vile boss from the Kronoid firm, a psycho named Sang-Hoon (a robot himself) takes pleasure in torturing Jun.  Ultimately, Hsieh, who has nothing to lose (her cancer has come back) puts Mom into Berserker mode so that she can take revenge on her enemies.  The movie ends with a noisy and completely witless fight between Jun and Sang-Hoon on a sort of box-car running like an inverted monorail out of the city and into some implausibly green, verdant and beautiful mountain wilderness (I thought the Earth had been destroyed). 

The movie is terrible.  Furthermore, it's pointlessly sadistic.  The picture has a kind of Black Mirror vibe about it -- Black Mirror also exploited sadism and suffering in most of its episodes.  At the end of the movie, Jun has been reincarnated into a sleek, Art Deco robot, who isn't much of an advance on the robot in Fritz Lang's Metropolis, the robot-Maria with her wink and leer, invented for the screen almost 100 years ago.  (Lang's robot is much, much better than the robots in this movie.)  The fight scenes are staged in trashy bluish-grey junk heaps that seem to have been imported into the movie from old computer games.  The entire show is humorless, nasty, and dull.  It also cheats on its climax.  At one point, we see a small army of Jun robots and, of course, we're primed to believe these automatons will take a horrific revenge on the evil minions of Kronoid (most of whom are 'bots themselves).  But, as  in Westworld, the audience is deprived of the pleasure of seeing the robots take their revenge on their tormentors.  The army of Jun warriors doesn't get unleashed and the movie ends with a low-budget and nitwitted battle on the equivalent of a subway car.  (I would have like to see the Jun robots, revamped as sex models, fuck their enemies to death -- now, that would be a spectacle worth paying to see.)   This mess is directed by Yeong Sang-ho -- he made the Zombie apocalypse film Train to Busan (2010) that I mildly admired.   

Copenhagen Cowboy by NWR

 Copenhagen Cowboy by NWF doesn't seem set in Copenhagen and has no cowboys.  The name is arbitrary, a phrase that intrigued the show's creator Nicholas Winding Refn, a bad boy director from Scandinavia. I suppose the title for this Netflix limited series (six episodes) is better than a name descriptive of the show -- that is, Miu, the extremely skinny and small woman with no expression who acts completely indifferent except when she is killing everyone.  No doubt invoking cowboys and Copenhagen with a stylish trademark (NWF) of the kind you might see on designer jeans is a better title.

As was once said, "something is rotten in the State of Denmark."  This doesn't begin to describe the wretched conduct shown in Copenhagen Cowboy.  On the evidence of the show, Denmark is filled with gangsters, sex-traffickers of the most vicious kind, Serbian brothels, Chinese restaurants that feed people to pigs, and, even, pale and handsome nobility that are apparently bloodsucking vampires or, at the very least, phallocentric serial murderers.  The level of depravity depicted in CC is so ridiculously exaggerated that any account of the show's sordid plot will read as comical parody -- the whole thing is totally cartoonish, an impression off-set by the director's extremely pretentious and abstract style; Refn's camera moves implacably in slow pointless circles swooning over blasts of super-saturated color.  Everything occurs as if in ultra-slow motion -- most of the characters look on impassively and stand still as statues as all sorts of mayhem occurs.  The program's characteristic shot slowly tracks a thug through a shadowy subterranean space blazing with inexplicable blue and red highlights, the gangster strutting past people who are beating each other to death for no good reason.  The program's opening sequence is indicative and diagnostic:  the camera slowly pans at floor level past a dozen or so confinement crates in which big, slobbering hogs are trapped; the pens are so tight that the animals can't turn around and, predictably, about half of them seem to be deranged.  At the end of the sixty-second tracking shot, the camera angle changes to show a handsome, if somewhat porcine, youth strangling a beautiful young woman to death -- the two characters are motionless, posed like mannequins in front of the metal hog crates full of suffering porkers.  (Apparently, the level of animal cruelty in the first shot was so extreme that even a brutish director like Refn couldn't tolerate it -- in later scenes, the  pigs are running free, some of them even described as "free-range.")  The alienating element in this opening scene is that we sympathize with the hogs in their horrifically confining metal crates but don't feel one iota of emotion with respect to the human characters who are killing one another.  

Miu, the series' protagonist, is a tiny, rail-thin woman with a boyish haircut, big emotionless eyes with a thousand-yard stare.  She's reputedly good luck and people pass her around as a sort of talisman.  At the outset of the film, the semi-catatonic heroine is brought into a Serbian brothel, operated by a crime family whose scion is a shaven-headed thug notable for his resemblance to Andrew Tate, the British -American  kickboxer recently busted by Greta Thunberg and, now, charged with sex trafficking in Romania.  Miu is supposed to use her magical talents to make the thug's sister pregnant.  The Serbian crooks are flamboyantly loathsome, torturing their captive prostitutes (who are all as beautiful as fashion models or the girlfriends of NBA stars), and beating up their host, Sven, who is unhappily married to the gangster's sister.  (When Sven is beaten, he squeals like a pig; his wife whips him with a belt and it's not clear that he doesn't enjoy this abuse -- Sven gets what he deserves because he periodically rapes the hapless super-models held prisoner in this house of ill-repute.)  Miu's magic is negotiable -- she gives and takes away.  When the gangster's sister (Sven's wife) has a miscarriage, Miu is dragged into the basement for rape and torture -- she's forced to record a video promoting her sexual services.  Miu remains completely catatonic until she buys time by informing (I was about to say "squealing") on the thug's daughter who is having an affair with some of the henchmen.  Then, she stabs a burly strong man bodyguard (the other prostitutes enthusiastically join in the murder) and escapes.  Previously, Miu's only friend among the captive prostitutes has fled the compound.  She accepts a ride with a serial killer (and possibly vampire) and ends up getting strangled in a hog house.  Miu, who may have the ability to bilocate, goes to sleep in a Chinese restaurant while simultaneously burning down the whorehouse, roasting everyone in it.  At the Chinese restaurant, Miu again demonstrates her magical powers by bringing to life an infant who seems to have been still-born.  (Refn doesn't bother to explain why a young woman has to give birth in a weird, strangely lit Chinese restaurant -- maybe this sort of thing is common in Denmark.)  As it turns out, the Chinese restaurant, an inexplicably vast enterprise with a sort of murky jail attached, is operated by -- you guessed it! -- Chinese gangsters and sex-traffickers led by the formidable brute Mr. Chiang.  Chiang has kidnapped the proprietor's small daughter for some inexplicable reason.  Miu makes a deal with the Chinese crime-lord to get the little girl back.  But she has to pay him a huge sum of money and massage his shaven head to help him with migraines.  Simultaneously, she visits the castle where the serial killer vampire lives with his phallocentric (literally) parents, both of whom are movie-star gorgeous.  Miu, who turns out to be a skilled kickboxer herself, kicks the shit out of the vampire youth and leaves him to be devoured by his own hogs.  (Since pigs are the film's totem animal and its theme, of course, the Chinese restaurant comes equipped with a herd of porkers to whom the proprietress morosely feeds human heads and limbs of the dismembered victims of the Triad, the Chinese gang.)  In order to fund her deal with Mr. Chiang apropos the child hostage, Miu becomes a drug mule working for a Black dealer.  This gives Miu the chance to mingle with picturesquely vicious criminals whom she periodically savages by beating them up.  (No one expects to get their ass kicked by an eighty-pound autistic woman.)  Back at the gothic castle, Niklas, the vampire, has somehow survived getting about 30 percent of his body and face eaten by the pigs.  The porkers devoured his penis and so his phallocentric vampire dad hires a bunch of scientists to create a majestic super-phallus for the unfortunate youth.  Miu tells people that she was abducted by aliens when she was seven, an event that explains her magical powers and bizarre catatonic demeanor. At this point, she's living in the elaborate mausoleum-style office suite of a Serbian lawyer, Mr. Miroslav, who seems to be the head of all the Balkan crime cartels operating in Denmark.  Miroslav and his gangster buddies are very tired, probably exhausted by their nefarious behavior, and they seem to spend most of their time snoring away the hours in leather recliners in the lawyer's enormous and mostly empty luxury office.  A gang war ensues shown in archaic 30's montage -- close-ups of guns firing intercut with people dropping dead in splashes of red and orange neon.  The cause of this gang war and its stakes are never explained and the violence is presented as a fait accompli -- this is how gangsters act.  Miu gets to kill a half-dozen crooks in a showy battle on a dark Copenhagen street; this fight leaves her mentor in the drug business, the Afro-Dane Danny, dead on the street. Meanwhile back at the vampire castle, Niklas (now in disco get-up and wearing a stylish Phantom of the Opera mask) hobbles around, more or less completely disabled since the pigs have eaten most of him.  He spends his afternoons tending to a casket in the basement of the castle.  Using a samurai sword, Niklas apparently beheads his beautiful mother, who seems enthusiastic about the act, catches her blood in a goblet and, then, opens the casket to drizzle gore on the mouth of the dead princess sleeping therein.  She is Niklas' sister and, immediately, revives.  (This stuff, elaborately staged, is right out of a forties Universal picture like The Bride of Dracula.)  This sister, also a Nordic goddess, intuits that Niklas has killed lots of girls and says he's been a "very bad boy."  Mr. Chiang keeps moving the goalposts on his agreement with Miu to restore Mor Hulda's daughter to her mother -- he dumps Miu's tribute of 8 kilos of cocaine down the toilet and, ultimately, demands that Miu sleep with him.  (Ultimately, he does release the eight-year old girl who, we learn, is actually his daughter; Mor Hulda is revealed to be some kind of serpent woman and, so, it's not clear that Miu has done the child any favors by putting her in the custody of Dragon Restaurant's proprietress.)  Niklas engages the family's huntsman, a new character, to gather human prey for his sister to devour.  The huntsman, who has worked for Niklas' family for hundreds of years, uses a high-powered rifle to murder some poor Englishman who has inexplicably gone into the vampire family's woods to make an annoying (business) cell-phone call.  The huntsman sautees the dead Englishman's heart and serves it to the Niklas' vampire daughter.  (The preparation of the heart seems implausible -- it would be impossible to effectively sautee a big chunk of muscle tissue in a small frying pan, the meat would be overdone on its surface and raw inside; rather the heart should be slow-cooked with beef broth in a crock pot until tender or possibly roasted with au jus sauce and root vegetables; at least, this is the way that I've always cooked human hearts.)   In any event, the heart, as eaten by the vampire girl, has a revivifying effect on her and she goes into her wardrobe to select a spectacular red jumpsuit, suitable for vigorous exercise as well as formal occasions -- her wardrobe seems to be filled with corpses or very lifelike mannequins wearing party costumes (although it's hard to tell due to the pervasive glowing neon fog in the room).  Mr. Chiang had demanded that Miu sleep with him, something meant literally since the two of them don't have sex but just slumber and enjoy a communal dream together -- Miu and Mr. Chiang are in the Vampire's Forest where they make rococo gestures at one another.  Awaking, Mr. Chiang, inexplicably decides to beat Miu to death -- this is bad mistake because she thrashes him, of course, and, then, kills him by delivering about forty punches to the heart.  Miu goes into the Vampire Forest where either she multiplies into six more skinny girls in blue jump suits or, in the alternative, encounters more of her tribe.  The Vampire girl in her resplendent red jumpsuit goes on her verandah and utters an imposing, terrifying roar that Miu hears and that causes her great pain.  Back in the perpetually dark office suite above Copenhagen, poor Miroslav, the Serbian gangleader, learns that Miu has killed Dusan his friend (oy vay!) and that Miu is on the loose.  He's chatting with a Japanese Yakuza who cheerily admonishes him:  "Off to the Giants!"  The Vampire girl is now blasting lasers out of her eyes. Obviously, the show comes to its end without any plot resolution, although one questions how this kind of idiocy could ever be resolved, and the show is set up for Copenhagen Cowboy by NWF redux, presumably a battle between the blue jumpsuit girls and the red jumpsuit vampire.

The show is casually xenophobic to an astonishing degree implying that Denmark is infested with foreigners who are all engaged in hideous crimes.  There's a funny scene at one point in which the Black drug dealer says:  "I'm trying not to be prejudiced against Balkan people.  I'm sure some of them are okay" -- although on the evidence of the show, Denmark's green and pleasant land is completely dominated by Chinese and Serbian and Albanian criminals.  Refn, apparently, thinks he can refute  charges of xenophobic bigotry by making his most spectacular bad guy a depraved representative of Danish nobility.  (These vampire folks live in an iconic structure that looks like a smaller version of the famous Fredericksborg Castle, a place shot in luminous twilight so that it mimics Christian Kobke's fa,pis painting of that estate -- the place even seems to have a moat.)  The show lags after its first two episodes -- in the beginning of the series, we're intrigued by Miu's bizarre passivity (and her strange behavior -- at one point, she amuses herself by trying to open her mouth so widely as to dislocate her jaw.)  Miu turns her strange impassiveness into a weapon and manages to outwit the bad guys in a minimalist way by simply doing nothing at all.  This is interesting and clever.  But once we know that Miu is also a world-class kick-boxer and has other mysterious powers, the show becomes markedly less interesting.  For instance, we see her kowtowing to Mr. Chiang, the Chinese gangster -- why?  She could get her way with him by massaging migraine headaches back into his skull (she's been shown treating his migraine with some kind of Reiki therapy) and, if that fails, of course, she has the capacity to simply beat him into submission.  Once a character is established as having, more or less, limitless magical powers, the energy leaches out of the plot -- there's no menace; the heroine can simply kick-box and enchant her way out of danger.  

The program is static and tedious although it's lurid subject matter kept me from falling asleep more than a couple times during the six hour course of Copenhagen Cowboy.  Although the slow circular tracking shots look great, the effect is repeated so often that it becomes profoundly irritating -- it's as if the director is simply buying time by rotating the camera 360 degrees through interiors bathed in unmotivated swaths of glowing neon light.  It's clear that the show's narrative is wholly improvised.  Pervasive pig imagery in the first three episodes is completely abandoned after the porkers eat Niklas' penis.  The fact that Niklas is tending to his sister's casket, a key element of the last two episodes, is never revealed in the first four parts of the show.  The elaborately operatic mise-en-scene disguises the fact that Refn and his screenwriter are just making this stuff up as they go.  The quasi-realistic, if stylized content of the first three episodes, is, more or less, abandoned in the second part of the show.  The Serbian brothel is remotely plausible as rooted in some kind of reality -- the second part of Copenhagen Cowboy with its inexplicable kick-boxing battles and utterly bizarre settings (the Chinese gangsters seem to inhabit some sort of subterranean bowling alley that encompasses acres of empty space) can't be normalized into any sort of plausible narration.  It's all effect for effect's sake. And it's very repetitive -- for instance, when someone has a vision of Niklas' murder victim (the blonde escapee from the brothel) submerged in a forest pond, we see the corpse from three or four different angles, each time suffused in a different color in the green murky water -- it's very pretty but pointlessly so and, of course, the shot makes no sense in any realistic way -- how deep is this pond? it looks like a bottomless abyss; and why does the color change radically between different shots?) In general, Copenhagen Cowboy demonstrates the extraordinary effect of David Lynch's second Twin Peaks series.  Film-makers who watched that program are inevitably influenced by it and Refn's series recycles many thematic and stylistic motifs in Lynch's series.  (It's now widely understood that Lynch's Twin Peaks, at least, in its second iteration, was a lavish underground experimental film masquerading as a crime drama.)  But Refn is completely humorless, while Lynch, even at his most extreme, is wry, funny, even satirical with the bizarre contrast between his "aw shucks!" Norman Rockwell scenarios and the most outlandish horror keeping the audience in a state of radical disequilibrium.  The intriguing critical dilemma here is to work out why Lynch's brand of this stuff succeeds and seems, even, visionary, while Refn's version of the same material is unpersuasive and annoying. This is probably an important crux to explore since I suspect that Lynch's second Twin Peaks series will have a continuing and massive impact on younger filmmakers -- just as Raging Bull was a definitive (if much concealed) influence for the thirty years or so after its release, I suspect that Twin Peaks II will be similarly influential in the coming decades.  Refn isn't providing us with anything new -- he's just recycling standard movie material (gangsters, serial killers, a waif-like girl assassin, vampires), presenting these cliches in a spectacular, if hollow, package.  The show often seems like a barren episode in style.  But Refn has real talent, albeit perverse, and it could be that a second series of Copenhagen Cowboy might just be a masterpiece.  

3000 Years of Longing

 3000 Years of Longing is an unusual literary adaptation produced and directed by the Australian director, George Miller.  Audiences accustomed to the mechanized vehicular frenzy in Miller's iconic Mad Max movies will be disappointed by this film's relatively staid and sober mise-en-scene and the movie's rather deliberate pacing.  The movie is handsome and filled with perverse details, but it's a bit uninvolving and rather abstract:  the film feels a little bit like an adaptation of a theater piece and revolves around a long and intricately developed dialogue between a reserved professor of narratology (Dr. Alithea Binney played by Tilda Swinton) and a melancholy jumbo-sized Djinn (Idris Elba).  The film's subject is how narrative is related to eros -- passion is confined by stories; stories somehow regulate passion.  These ideas lead to broader concerns about freedom and confinement, allegorized by the various bottles in which the hapless djinn finds himself confined.  The djinn has spent three-thouand years longing to be released from the glass and clay prisons to which he has been consigned by reason of his own desire; Tilda Swinton's professor, Alithea is emotionally "bottled-up" -- she's put herself into a bottle in which she finds herself comfortable enough, until the intervention of the genii.  Miller characteristically engages with ideas of chaos and order -- all of his films, to some degree, involve a social order (or psychic disposition) collapsing into chaos and the regeneration of order from that violent disorder.  3000 Years of Longing, adapts a story called "The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye" (by the renowned author A. S. Byatt)  and internalizes these themes of order versus disorder.  Alithea has renounced passion to the extent that, at first, she can't even wish for anything -- she seems to thwart the earnest djinn by refusing his offer of three wishes; there's nothing that she desires.  As the film progresses, she becomes increasingly passionate and, at the end, desires an erotic relationship with the charismatic djinn, but only on her own rather strict terms.  The movie is highly intellectual, complex, and not particularly interesting -- in truth, the picture (only 108 minutes long) drags a bit.  

Alithea Binney travels by air to Istanbul where she attends a narratology conference.  At the airport, she encounters a strange figure who "manhandles" her luggage before vanishing.  During a lecture, she sees a sinister giant clad in static-washed white who also threatens her to the extent that she faints.  In the bazaar, she finds herself drawn to a curiously coiled vessel.  Back at the hotel, the djinn appears from the vessel, at first, a giant figure of desire whose clenched fist is so huge that it fills an entire room.  Gradually, the mighty djinn shrinks -- and this is thematic, as the movie, progresses the djinn seems to become less and less powerful until a late scene in which he is half-comatose and crumbling into dust and sand.  (Djinn, it is said, are made of "subtle fire" -- human beings are made of "dust and sand.")  Of course, the djinn is honor-bound to offer Alithea three wishes, subject however to certain rules.  As a professor of narratives, Alithea knows the drill and expects that, if she wishes for anything, the djinn will somehow trick her -- these wish-bestowing creatures are sly and enjoy turning human desire against its possessors, demonstrating in the canonical stories, that desire is frivolous, impulsive, and ultimately perilous.  Instead of using her wishes, Alithea tells the djinn about her lonely girlhood and an imaginary friend that she invented to console her -- there is a suggestion that the djinn now plays this role.  She provides a flashback narrative of her marriage, a relationship which ended in betrayal -- she has carefully boxed up the evidence of her marriage and put it in a cardboard box stored in the basement on which the name "Jack" is written.  (Of course, this is a way to confine desire and its disappointments in a sort of vessel, although here in a prosaic cardboard box.)  The djinn has better stories and he tells three of them.  First, we learn that he loved the Queen of Sheba, saw her making love to Solomon, and, for his jealousy, was confined in a clay jar for 2500 years -- the jar has ended up at the bottom of the Red Sea.  (This first episode is full of ornate details -- the djinn's have black fur on their legs and Solomon courts the impassive Queen by playing a strange lute that develops hands to play attached instruments, bony fists to drum on hollow vessels, and a monstrous little face so that the lute can sing and hum and whistle).  In the second episode, set in the medieval Court of Suleiman the Magnificent (another Solomon), a slave girl desires a royal prince -- she gets pregnant with his child with the djinn's connivance, but the Sulieman suspects his son of treachery and has both the young man and the girl murdered.  The djinn is now trapped in a hamann (a bath chamber) with his bottle buried under a slab of floor tile.  There are two warriors competing for the throne -- one, Murad IV, is a violent and bloodthirsty general, his "soul rotted by war"; his brother is fat and collects a seraglio of enormously heavy and voluptuous women who inhabit a chamber with sable pelts covering the walls.  This episode is baroque but seems to go nowhere; one of the immense fat women (called Sugar Lump) slips on the slab and her huge buttocks break apart the stone revealing the djinn's bottle.  In the third episode, the djinn is released by a 12-year old girl who is a genius.  (She is married to a nasty, if ineffectual old man).  The girl studies the cosmos and becomes very wise; the djinn falls in love with her, but when he proclaims her love for her, conflict ensues, and, in the end, she wishes that she had never met him in the first place.  Alithea has now become smitten by the djinn and wishes that he would love her -- of course, her wish is his command and we are treated to some showy embraces between the tiny, slender  pale woman and the huge and bronze-colored mountainous djinn.  Alithea brings the djinn back to cold and rainy London where gradually, it seems, their ardor cools.  The djinn takes to sleeping all day (djinn's don't normally sleep) and begins to decompose.  Alithea puts souvenirs of her relationship with the supernatural figure in a box and puts it on the shelf with the box containing evidence of her first marriage.  Then, she utters her third wish, freeing the djinn forever.  In the end, Alithea and the djinn have, apparently, opted for an occasional and intermittent relationship -- she and the djinn meet from time-to-time in public parks and hold hands, but, perhaps, that's as far as it goes.  

The story has a number of structural defects.  Narratology is different from the study of myths -- these categories get mixed-up in the beginning of the film:  Miller is greatly influenced by Joseph Campbell's theory of the mono-myth, the world-wide tale of the quest of the hero "with a thousand faces."  It's this topic that Alithea seems to be lecturing on when she swoons -- and this subject is not, at all, the same as narratology, although, of course, now wholly unrelated.  Alithea's sudden passion of the handsome djinn comes out of nowhere -- she has been resisting the creature's blandishments for more than half the film when suddenly, to our surprise, she has fallen for him.  This is disconcerting.  The film's ending is highly unresolved, so much so that we sense that the writer and director simply didn't know how to end the movie.  Passion is different from a story about passion and, it seems, that Alithea has reduced her passion to a story or narrative that can be readily controlled -- that is, confined in a bottle of structure.  This seems to explain the curiously remote relationship between the protagonists at the end of the film, but this may be an erroneous interpretation of the film - this aspect is simply not clear..  The movie is wonderfully imaginative and generous -- Miller doesn't like to assign villainy to anyone.  At the end of the movie, Alithea gets into a bitter and obscene row with her two neighbors, mean and bigoted old maids.  But she reconciles with them by bringing a wonderful heap of sweet candy -- made with chick peas and pistachios ("it just melts in your mouth" the djinn says).  When the two old biddies eat the candy (or whatever it is), Miller focuses on their faces transfixed with utter joy and delight.  (That said, the whole byplay with the old ladies seems arbitrary, an unnecessary add-on to the movie.)

Some of the scenes in the movie reminded me of the wonderful horror-comedy series What we do in the Shadows?  In several episodes, one of vampires interacts with a djinn.  Of course, like Alithea, he is very wary of the trickster djinn.  The vampire wishes for a larger penis but he's canny enough to know that wishing indiscriminately for a "big cock" will result either in an misfortune or something even more grotesque.  So, he carefully phrases his wish:  "I would like a penis that is only moderately larger than normal."  

The Pale Blue Eye

 Atlhough slow-paced and, more than a bit lugubrious, Scott Cooper's The Pale Blue Eye (2023) is an atmospheric and occasionally exciting crime film.  The picture, produced for Netflix, boasts an all-star cast:  Christian Bale plays Landor, a famous New York detective who is nursing his sorrows in an isolated cabin in the woods around 1830 somewhere near West Point; the great British actor, Timothy Spall appears as a rather hapless and panicked general at the helm of the military institute; Gillian Anderson and Robert Duvall have small but important roles and an actor, previously unknown to me, Harry Melling, provides an eccentric, brilliant if rather mannered and stylized performance as Edgar Alan Poe.  Melling has a peculiar physiognomy -- he's delicate, with odd features that combine the handsome with the grotesque:  he has a skeletal triangular face and a pale high forehead and, when admitting that he's not popular at West Point, he gestured vaguely at his bony visage and mutters "aesthetics" in a high-pitched voice.  Melling looks a bit like an anorexic Truman Capote and talks in an exaggerated Southern accent -- it's like he's imitating, half unsuccessfully, a southern gentleman of the equestrian class.  It's a riveting performance and much of the film's appeal arises from Melling's excellent work -- he forms a brittle and neurasthenic contrast to the masculine melancholy that characterizes Bale's performance as the detective.  The movie is excellently shot, with fine, monochromatic landscapes limned with snow.  The bare trees and icy river and the stark bluffs overlooking grim watery abysses are all wonderfully portrayed -- there is a nightmarish aspect to the exteriors, like a typical Hudson Valley School picture that has been x-rayed by the harsh winter and left stark naked on the canvas.  The interiors within the rather Gothic edifices comprising West Point are also nicely photographed -- characters are drowned in dim brownish gloom like figures in a Rembrandt painting. 

The movie is very well-written with excellent period dialogue and its portrait of Edgar Alan Poe is compelling and persuasive.  Unfortunately, this finely appointed and detailed movie is burdened with an idiotic plot that is pure Gothic hokum.  The story is so absurd that its weakness drags the movie down.  Although I think the picture is very well-made with wonderful performances, The Pale Blue Eye is ultimately disappointing because of its mediocre and implausible story.  Briefly:  a cadet at West Point has hanged himself and, post-mortem, been mutilated -- someone has excised his heart.  Landor is summoned from his hermitage to solve the murder before a general scandal results in the demise of West Point.  Poe, who acts the part of a great poet, tells Landor that the removal of the heart was "symbolic" and, therefore, the work of poet, thus he says that he is uniquely qualified to assist in the solution to the crime.  Halfway through the movie, another cadet is found hanged from a grisly-looking and snow-draped cliff.  His heart has also been extracted.  Poe and Landor consult with an old man (played by Robert Duvall) who maintains a large library of manuscripts and ancient books on the subject of the occult.  It appears that devil-worshippers are involved in the mutilation of the corpses.  Poe falls in love with a beautiful young woman who is subject to fits of the "falling sickness" -- that is, epilepsy: she's the daughter of one of the officers responsible for administering West Point.  Landor, we discover, is mourning the suicide of his own daughter (she flung herself off a cliff); this young woman went mad in the aftermath of a gang rape inflicted upon her by three depraved West Point cadets.  Gillian Anderson has a very ripe, plummy role as the mother of the girl with epilepsy -- she seems to be concealing some awful secret and she quivers with scarcely repressed hysteria.  (Anderson's performance is also one of the film's pleasures -- but it's a "guilty pleasure":  she's so over-the-top in her intonations, lashing out at everyone under the pressure of the wicked and depraved secrets that she is  concealing as to be both startling and absurd.  There's a conveniently loquacious prostitute who seems to be servicing most of the characters and she provides information necessary to the solution of the enigmas posed by the movie.  (This role, requiring lots of pillow talk, is played by the formidable Charlotte Gainsborough.)

The film is a master-class in more obscure aspects of Poe's literary works.  In one scene, Poe condemns "Fenimore Cooper" reminding us of his famous essay on that writer.  The detective, Landor, invokes a very late, languid, essay-like story called "Landor's Cottage" -- and, in fact, Christian Bale's character is shown inhabiting a bucolic cottage like that portrayed in the 1849 text.  Scenes involving the beetling cliff overlooking the river remind us of Poe's "The Imp of the Perverse" -- the essay in which Poe maintains, quite plausibly, that to stand on the brink of a precipice is to battle with the "imp of the perverse", an inner voice that counsels us to throw ourselves over the edge.  Of course, Poe's deductions resulting in the solution of the mystery recall to us that the writer, more or less, invented the genre of detective fiction with works featuring Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin such as "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Purloined Letter" and "The Mystery of Marie Roget."  The movie's title is a  line from one of Poe's poems about a doomed beauty, "Lenore" (published 1831 after Poe was expelled from West Point -- a figure who features in Poe's famous work, "The Raven."  The motif of young women who are mad, suicidal, and dying, of course, is central to Poe's later literary works.  There are probably lots of other references to minor and neglected works by the writer -- but these were the allusions that I was able to identify.  (Poe enlisted in the army in 1827 and, surprisingly, was a very good soldier -- he rose through the ranks to become a Sergeant-Major, the highest rank available without attending military school.  Upon becoming a Sergeant-Major, Poe enlisted at West Point -- but he didn't like the discipline there and stopped attending classes and chapel, for which infractions he was court-martialed after a few short months.)

Glass Onion

 Glass Onion's big budget is on display in the film's use of Lennon & McCartney songs; it's notoriously expensive to acquire the rights to Beatles' music and the producers of Glass Onion obviously have money to burn -- in fact, the song "Glass Onion" plays during the closing credits, a thankless role since Netflix encourages its users to click away from credits on the back end of a movie to access other content.  (This is an annoying feature on Netflix but speaks volumes of the attention deficit disorder that apparently afflicts many of its subscribers.)  In all respects, Glass Onion is competently crafted with spectacular sets and glossy, fashion-magazine photography; it has A-List players, Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc, a fey detective (he speaks with a Southern accent and seems to be channeling Truman Capote and Miss Marple at the same time) and Ed Norton playing the part of the villainous tech mogul Miles Bron; the strangely malformed Dave Bautista and Kate Hudson also are featured and there are numerous cameos by various celebrities including YoYo Ma, Kareem Abdul Jabar, and, of course, Hugh Grant, who plays Benoit Blanc's longsuffering house-husband.  The film is curiously tedious despite all its high-jinks -- there are acres and acres of exposition required by the ornate plot.  Everything is well-written, ingenious, and crafted to within an inch of its life, but the movie is so contrived and pointlessly intricate that it turns out to be tedious (the film is about two-hours and twenty minutes long).

To write about Glass Onion is to spoil the film since the entire proceedings involve various twists and turns that are supposed to intrigue the audience between bouts of long-winded explanations.  I'll respect the film's format and, merely, sketch the situation:  An arrogant, if dim-witted Tech mogul (think Elon Musk crossbred with Mark Zuckerberg) has invited his seven best friends onto a Greek island where he has built an elaborate pleasure garden and pleasure dome (the titular "glass onion.")  The island is more than a little creepy -- it will remind viewers of Jeffrey Epstein's "orgy-island" in the Bahamas.  Bron, the tech tycoon, calls his guests "disruptors" and wants to cast them as a merry band of free-thinking libertine geniuses  -- but, in fact, they are all sycophants and toadies and each of them has a motive to murder Bron.  (The plot is shamelessly derived from Agatha Christie's And then there were None, sometimes known as Ten Little Indians.)  Bron intends to stage a "murder mystery" involving his own fake homicide and has invited his old business associates to these festivities so that they can exercise their powers of ratiocination.  It's not clear why the ace detective Benoit Blanc is present; Bron denies inviting him.  Blanc is a genius at solving puzzles and he immediately figures out the murder mystery plot and solution even before Bron gets a chance to stage his fake demise.  But, then, one of the guests drops dead, the result of poison, and, as Sherlock Holmes would say "the game is (then) afoot."  The guests harbor considerable hostility toward Bron who treats them in a condescending manner as mere props.  Bron has a napkin on which one of the guests penned his tech-empire's business plan -- implausibly, this souvenir shows that Bron has not been the architect of his success; rather one of the guests invented his successful business model.  There has been intense litigation over Bron's misappropriation of the intellectual property of others and the scribbled-upon napkin becomes a MacGuffin that everyone pursues during the second-half of the movie.  In effect, the writer and director Rian Johnson provides three puzzles for solution:  first, who is imagined to have killed Bron in the fake murder?  Second, who committed the real murder by poisoning?  And who fired the gun killing another guest?  And, third, where is the fatal napkin hidden and who will end up possessing it?  

In an early scene, at a sort of depraved party, someone (YoYo Ma) defines a fugue as being the statement of a theme over which the same theme is superimposed.  This little bit of business is a self-reflective comment on the film's structure.  In the first half of the film, we see the events leading up to the poisoning and the subsequent death by gunfire of another guest.  The movie then launches into an extended flashback in which we are shown the exact same events but from different perspectives so that we can actually understand the secret cabals motivating the action.  Once, the explicative flashback catches up to the action on screen, the movie then shifts over into focusing on the pursuit of the napkin marked with Bron's business plan -- this aspect of the movie borrows from Poe's "The Purloined Letter."  Until the film's last 15 minutes, the movie is very theatrical and, indeed, would work as a stage-play -- in this regard, it appears to pay homage to Peter Schaefer's Sleuth and shows a similar interest in the solution of intricate puzzles.  (The movie, which is derivative of many other better films, stories, and plays, also toys with motifs from the sole film directed by Stephen Sondheim, The Last of Sheila --and Sondheim's photograph, together with Angela Lansbury, appears prominently in one scene.)  The film's ending is apocalyptic and seems to have drifted into the movie from some other source -- there's an entirely different paradigm in the movie's last fifteen minutes.  Glass Onion is very sharply written and contains excellent dialogue, but it's an odd combination of the baffling and overly explicit.  The film manages to be confusing and patronizing at one time -- the director doesn't seem to think that we're paying much attention because he has to reprise key scenes to make sure we see the clues installed in those sequences; at the same time, the plot is so pointlessly intricate that the viewer can't ever know exactly what is happening.  The movie is brilliantly edited -- in particular, there's crosscutting to a famous Old Master painting that keeps sealing itself into a crystalline protective case when phones ding that is very effective. In general, the movie's complex but coherent editing is its best technical feature.  There are numerous in-jokes, some of which are a little disturbing -- for instance, a hot sauce marketed by the celebrity actor Jeremy Renner plays an important role in the movie.  But Renner almost killed himself the weekend that Glass Onion was dropped on Netflix and blood-colored sauce assumes a sinister significance in light of the actor's real life accident and serious injuries.  The movie is a bit like Beat the Devil -- it's full of hammy bits of business and feels like a joke that got out of hand and has begun to regard itself with unflattering gravitas.  It's mildly amusing and, more or less, completely forgettable.