Watched any good mystery/detective shows/movies?

[KyriakosCH]

Fernando Pessoa did write some detective stories - but I haven't read any of them in full.

[cat]

Because of this thread, we recently watched Knives Out and Glass Onion. Thanks for the recommendation!

Knives Out was brilliant

Spoiler

The story was clever (if a bit far fetched), the characters were interesting (I loved Linda and the Detective), the plot twists were fun and the genre switch was well done. We thoroughly enjoyed watching it. When the detective started about the donut with something missing, we realized that the bottles must have been swapped - it was also suspicious that he didn't show any symptoms after getting the medication. So we had a at least a bit of the "guess what happened" that eri0o was missing.
The resolution at the end was well done and satifying.

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Considering this, Glass Onion was somewhat disappointing.

Spoiler

The beginning was great, I got strong "Evil under the sun" vibes from the setting. However, it was too much over the top for me. The plot fell flat soon - I thought the crime game story was much more interesting than the real crime - and Raeff suspected immediately that the Duke died because of the allergy. The whole "the detective has huge amounts of information that the viewer does not have" also felt unfair in retrospective and if it weren't for this element (i.e. we knew what the detective knew), the whole story would have been even more boring. The ending was boring and unsatisfying. At least, this story had a very good reason why the people and the detective would stay on the island.
While the first part was still enjoyable for various reasons, we agreed that the movie would have been much better if the last third of it had been cut.

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[Mandle]

All good points, cat. I too preferred Knives Out far above Glass Onion. In fact, I would go as far as to say that it was instantly in my top ten favorite murder mystery films of all time, if not top five.

I did love Glass Onion, but not so much for the mystery as for the characters and setting. It was a nice breath of fresh air to watch a movie with over-the-top characters set in a vibrant colorful location after sooooo many movies recently try to be as grey and brooding as possible. Glass Onion remembered to be fun.

It felt like old-times a lot for me and even a bit reminiscent of movies like "Clue" and even the original "Sleuth", although not quite as obviously in-your-face insane as those. (That being said, "Sleuth" is my favorite mystery movie of all time, just for how batshit insane it gets)

[cat]

I fully agree with you, Mandle.

I gave the movie another thought: It is probably because of my expectations, that I didn't like it that much. This can change a lot how media is perceived.

A few years back, I read "Pride and Prejudice" and knew nothing about the book except that it was very famous and the most downloaded book on Project Gutenberg. I didn't even know the genre. I think one of the reasons I enjoyed the book so much is that I read it without any prejudice (pun intended) and made up my mind as I went along.

Spoiler

Glass Onion is actually a fun movie. That gong was hilarious, I was laughing every time I heard it.
At first, I thought casting Edward Norton as the crazy evil guy was a bit boring, because that's just the role he has played in several movies already. But actually, exactly this image helped hiding Miles' stupidity. So in retrospect, it was a great casting decision.
Also the theme was disruption, so maybe they were just taking it a bit further by disrupting the murder mystery and thus the whole movie, leaving nothing but a big (enjoyable) mess behind?

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After considering this, I still think that Glass Onion fails as a murder mystery movie but it is a great society critical comedy.

[KyriakosCH]

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Pride & Prejudice is vastly overrated   

Anyway, I watched Resurrection (it's somewhat mystery, but not really - more in the spoiler). Overall it is worth a watch, imo, but I did have an issue with it.

Spoiler

Seems to be a delusion-story, but the problem here is that it's not very believable that one would manage to mass-delude themselves at 19. Would be more realistic if she was in pre-puberty when she did, or at least early puberty - to go with the child plot. Imo the ending was severely botched stylistically too, but I did like the rest of the movie

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[cat]

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Pride & Prejudice is vastly overrated   

Just like Poe is 

[KyriakosCH]

Well, sort of ^^
But at least Poe was the one who made Europeans bother to read an American writer...
(Borges later on did that for Latin America)

Anyway, not sure how you wouldn't get that there's a nested meaning relating to how the prototype's opening sentence is meant - not entirely in earnest.

[Snarky]

I watched Park Chan-Wook's Decision to Leave this week.

It's more of a psychological thriller (with strong echoes of Vertigo and Basic Instinct) than a whodunnit, but there are some fun investigative twists, and I enjoyed it. The combination of very stylized noir and quirky comedy reminded me a little of the Coen brothers.

I've also checked out the first couple of episodes of Rian Johnson's Poker Face, the Columbo-esque "inverted mystery" series with Natasha Lyonne. I'm not entirely sold yet: her gimmick is that she can immediately tell when someone is lying, and since she's not a detective who has to provide any evidence for her conclusions, it renders the investigations pretty trivial, so far. I've heard the next two episodes are better, so I'll give it another chance.

And I recently read Seishi Yokomizo's The Honjin Murders (1946), a classic Japanese locked-room mystery recently available in English. I found it more interesting for its portrayal of Japanese society before and after WWII (the main narrative takes place in 1937, with a frame story set right after the war) than for the mystery itself, which is convoluted and strained.

[Ali]

And I recently read Seishi Yokomizo's The Honjin Murders (1946), a classic Japanese locked-room mystery recently available in English. I found it more interesting for its portrayal of Japanese society before and after WWII (the main narrative takes place in 1937, with a frame story set right after the war) than for the mystery itself, which is convoluted and strained.

I really enjoyed the 1975 film adaptation, called Death at an Old Mansion in English. The title is particularly enjoyable, because that's the premise of every whodunit. It's a little plodding, but I suspect that the solution is one of those explanations that are more plausible when you see it happening. That said, the whole concept of a locked room mystery is somewhat different in a country where walls can be made of paper.

[Snarky]

I really enjoyed the 1975 film adaptation, called Death at an Old Mansion in English. The title is particularly enjoyable, because that's the premise of every whodunit.

Nice! Maybe I'll try to find it, if only to check out the scruffy bohemian stammering detective.

The book explains that a "honjin" in olden times was a family mansion used as a place for the nobility to stay during official travelâ€"i.e. a very exclusive innâ€"and that families running this kind of establishment were a privileged class, a kind of gentry. So "Old Mansion" is a pretty literal translation into English.

… Although weirdly enough, (at least in the book) the deaths do not in fact take place in a former honjin, the family in question having sold theirs several generations ago and moved to a new homeâ€"though they still jealously guard their status as an historical honjin family.

It's a little plodding, but I suspect that the solution is one of those explanations that are more plausible when you see it happening. That said, the whole concept of a locked room mystery is somewhat different in a country where walls can be made of paper.

Yeah, I can imagine that the solution would play better when you can see it. The written explanation is ludicrously complex and hard both to visualize and believe.

Spoiler

And I don't know if it's meant to be self-deprecating or what, but early on in the book, the detective criticizes just this kind of locked-room solution, saying he finds it disappointing and is "totally unimpressed" by it.

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