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Heh, when I heard Natasha Lyonne was going to be in a murder mystery series, my immediate thought was “holy poo poo, she was born to be a lady Columbo” and clearly Rian Johnson agreed. This is a fantastic show. I was a bit thrown early on as coming off the Knives Out movies I expected a subversion of what I’d expect from these mysteries, but instead they are relatively straightforward, with some clues extremely obviously highlighted as being important (oh, hey, let me show you my tiny GoPro recording my feet during the performance, sure this won’t come up later). But that lack of pretension kind of adds to its charm, and of course contributes to the Columbo/general 70s TV pastiche. I wonder how much of that rests on Lyonne though. The guest stars have been uniformly great, but I feel like it would get tiring if it wasn’t just so drat fun to watch Charlie bumble through everything. I really love the running joke of her being secretly present through the whole murder setup. I feel like Natasha Lyonne could somehow be on the periphery of any story trying to bum a smoke off someone. I have a personal theory that Rian is an outright Marxist and got to say, so far the show isn’t proving me wrong, which is cool!
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Jan 29, 2023 05:08
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 05:35 |
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Snooze Cruise posted:I found the reveal funny (and was expecting something like that because the way the flower scene was filmed) but yeah I also did found it a bit eye rolley. I want the person who said their theory was Rian is a Marxist to give their take on that lmao. Sorry to drag this post up from the past, but I hadn’t caught up on this thread in a while, and since I’m the guy who said that Rían was a Marxist I thought I’d respond. (This was in reference to the retirement home hippy Model UN bombers episode btw) I really saw this as more of a comment on generational politics than a condemnation of revolutionary ones. Boomers talk a big game of being radical, but the hippy movement is was incoherent bullshit that achieved little and most of the participants went on to sell out so hard they actively helped cause the terrifying mess we live in today. Charlie spends most of the episode being impressed by these two old counter-cultural ladies, but finds out in the end that actually she’s a more effective radical than they ever were, just by being a working-class woman living her life. That said, there’s no doubt that this was the least Marxist episode that’s come out so far. I was particularly disappointed that Charlie so willingly worked with the FBI, and that the agent was presented so sympathetically (although it also showed him as fundamentally incompetent). I think it’s pretty naive to expect a largely non-serialised corporate US TV show written by a team of people to remain Marxist ideological purity though. The FBI thing was odd though because in the first couple of eps (the ones actually directed by Rian), Charlie repeatedly stated that “I’m not a cop,” and they’ve otherwise been fairly studious in avoiding showing the police as solutions to the problems. And clearly they’re not actually solving the mysteries. It seems likely to me that Poker Face was envisioned as a more explicitly left-wing version of Columbo. That show has got props for its lefty vibe - a disheveled working-class man outwits the crimes of the high society who underestimate him. But obviously, this is flawed: Columbo works for the police, which gives him authority and props up a broken system. Poker Face is the answer to this issue. Charlie is, as repeatedly stated, not a cop. She is an itinerant working-class woman who flits from job to bottom-of-the-barrel job. The lie-detecting magic is basically just a plot device to allow it to feel plausible that someone with zero authority would be able to solve these crimes at all. Most of the crimes, even when committed by working-class people, are caused by the cruelty and contradictions of capitalism. I really should finally get the effortpost that I’ve been thinking about since Christmas about the Marxist message of Glass Onion (and retroactively in Knives Out) out of my system at some point!
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Feb 26, 2023 16:29
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