Well, I LIKED Glass Onion, guys.

 I liked Glass Onion. I didn't like it as much as Knives Out, but it was still a sharp, funny, superior whodunit that made me laugh out loud several times. And crucially I didn't see the ending coming. I didn't really see the entire second half coming in fact. And maybe that's partly why I enjoyed it: relief. The first half had so many great bits and such a fantastic ensemble of types, that I worried that Janelle Monai's character was going to sink the entire enterprise. I knew her has a (superlative) singer: I'd not seen Antebellum. I didn't know if she could act. As she mooched around the island in fashion-forward get up, giving significant stares, talking in an oddly stilted manner and generally being pretty ruddy mysterious, I thought "Oh, that's a shame - this really isn't working."   

All of this is explained. In the end she is the film. This film is a blunt trauma satire, a camp-fest, a skewering of our peculiar modern value systems, and a dressing up box of full of Peter Ustinov's old hairnets and James Coburn's cigar butts. It has a plot, a reversal of fortune, a punch-the-air skewering of modern folk devils (rich ones, for a change) and a load of very funny jokes and performances. The first film had all these of course, but was set in an old dark house somewhere cold, and it had Christopher Plummer and Captain America in it. 

This is set in sunshine on a magical island powered by a tech billionaire's big Glass Onion. It has Agatha Harkness in it. Is this not enough? Are you not entertained? 

No. A lot of people pressed the "meh" button.  That's fine. We can't all like the same things. I, for instance, like practically nothing other people seem to like. And that's also fine. The world is huge and niche interests are catered for. So I'm fine that people didn't like the film I liked. 

Until they told me why. 

One on my New Year's Resolutions is not to let other people's opinions bother me*. They're entitled to them, of course they are. A wise meme once said that opinions are like arseholes - everyone has one. Though few of them are as useful and vital as fully operational anus. A working bum is a joy forever. Besides what's my opinion worth? It's just a few semi-informed prejudices and "I reckons". I mean...I know the terrain here. I know my stuff. I've seen a lot of whodunits. They're palpable nonsense, stemming precisely from the pages of Orwell's "Decline of the English Murder, full of the same cultural assumptions as P G Wodehouse books: giant houses in the country, an eccentric cast of village characters, suspect foreigners, wronged maids, ruthless industrialists, reckless younger sons and gangs of curtain twitching maiden aunts. Police detectives are damaged cockney war veterans who stand meekly to one side when the real sleuthing has to be done. Police officers are puffing, red faced yokels on bicycles. When the murderer is compelled to gather in the drawing room along with all the other suspects, they always comply, safe in the knowledge they have outwitted everyone. They haven't. When they are rumbled, a gentleman will offer a slow hand clap, a lady will change her accent and become arrogant.   

 It is a mechanism. A circuit to be run through. They are beautiful toys. They're also marvelously entertaining. I recently saw Agatha Christie's "Mousetrap" for the first time (in Oxford - the cast featuring Tucker Jenkins, Nasty Nick Cotton and Cassandra from Only Fools and Horses - it was great), a couple of weeks after I'd seen "See How they Run" (excellent) and only realised quite how the film is a "Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead" to the "Mousetrap".

I like whodunits of every stripe, from Ustinov's golden run as Poirot (he made far more of them than you think and the returns are somewhat...diminishing) to Suchet's connoisseur's version. There's Geraldine McKewan's twinkling Marple, Margaret Rutherford's jolly hockey-sticks model, and Joan Hickson's cat's bum one. There's the endlessly quotable "Sleuth" and the catty and mean-spirited "Deathtrap". There are the books by Dorothy L Sayers, Edmund Crispin, and John Dickson Carr. Even G K Chesterton had a go with his Father Brown stories, though I much prefer his "Club of Queer Trades" efforts, where his spirited inversion of Sherlock Holmes, Basil Grant, investigates mysteries based on intuition, bias and speculation. Though they are not true "whodunits" they are very funny. 

Then there's the spoofs: "Murder By Death", "Clue" and "The Cheap Detective", all wittily guying the conventions of the Whodunit: the staginess of the set-up, the plummy cast, the strange thrall of the unqualified amateur. I'd like to see how this plays out now, in the age of "If you can't handle me at my worst, you don't deserve me at my best." 

"Would you care to join me in the drawing room?" "Jog on, mate. I know my rights. If you can arrest me - and you can't - the evidence is circumstantial at best, then arrest me. But you can't make me sit there and listen that old gasbag talk about broken flower stems outside the pantry window. Laters."

There are two obvious points of reference for "Glass Onion": Ustinov's "Evil Under the Sun" and the sublime "The Last of Sheila". Directed by Herbert Ross and written by Anthony Perkins and Stephen Sondheim (there's a reason Sondheim gets a cameo at the start of Glass Onion - his last film role), it's the story movie producer Clinton Greene (James Coburn), a noted parlour game enthusiast, inviting a motley collection of grasping hangers on a Mediterranean cruise. It should be noted that it is the first anniversary of another party, during which Greene's wife, Sheila, was killed by a hit-and-run driver. Once the guests assemble, Greene hands them all cards - there is to be another game, a deadly game. 

It's a great film. I advise you to watch. Or listen to the podcast I did about it. Also good. https://soundcloud.com/stalemates_podcast/stalemates-half-cut-the-last-of-sheila

This is what I like. It's not for everyone. I know that. For instance, here's one review. It's slightly more idiotic and sub-literate than most, but features broadly the same ideas that a lot of the "haters" have. It's from an on-line magazine I won't name, so as not to lend it the oxygen of publicity. Though if I could deny it the food and basic shelter of publicity I'd do that too.  

"Beatles fans should stay away - and so should everyone else!" runs the title of the piece, as if this was a film about a Beatles' song. I would say the song "Glass Onion" does feature in the film, so even this is wrong. Beatles fans will find more to enjoy in this film than they would in, say, "The Thin Red Line" or "Cannibal Ferox" by a factor of one song. 

The review also mentions as problems with the film, Daniel Craig's muscle tone, (not as good as in "Layer Cake" apparently) and, once again, that the film is not about the Beatles' song, which is a "papered over plot flaw". Rian Johnson distracts us from this "with giddy set-pieces more interesting to watch than write about". I struggle to see the criticism here: it's a film, and it's interesting to watch. Whether it inspires your blunt little quill to spoil pages is neither here nor there. He then tells us how lazy mainstream audiences have become, because he prefers Rian Johnson's quiet art-house sleeper hit "The Last Jedi". 

The cast are berated for not being the same as the one in "Knives Out", James Bond is mentioned for some reason, the ensemble cast are called "extras...who bring nothing except a pretty smile or two". (Katherine Hahn, Kate Hudson, Dave Bautista). He's delighted by the queerness of Benoit Blanc - he considers it a "curveball" - and is disappointed we don't spend more time on his domestic set-up "because there's a mystery weekend to engage in". It's a whodunit, but fuck it, let's watch Daniel Craig and Hugh Grant have a relationship. That would be a movie - but it's not this movie. 

The reviewer then trumps his prior comments by calling Daniel Craig "Benoit Blank" and comparing his comic stylings to other Bond alumni, Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton. Craig is found wanting. 

Now. 

That's just one fuckwit's review in some no mark magazine. But it mirrors a lot of the criticism I read, which boils down to entitled fandom's eternal malaise: it's not the film they would have made. I don't know when this shift in the roles of artist and audience happened - I do - it was the internet, as usual - but today the comments section everywhere is made up of laptop pundits thinking they know better than the filmmakers, because they illegally ripped it from some pirate site, because "fans".

And you know, that's fine. No, really. I have have opinions on things myself, and often they don't chime with the spirit of the age. I do tend to try explain why I like things rather than why I don't like them. Things I don't like I just tend to ignore, a lesson I learned reviewing art in Northern Ireland: it's a small scene, everyone knows everybody, most of the art is bad. So I took to reviewing shows I had a positive bias towards, that way I wouldn't have to lie and I wouldn't have to be mean to people "who were trying their best". 

But the below-the-line reviews for "Glass Onion" (actually most critics have liked it) have tended to be smug, condescending and FINAL. Mics have been dropped. Peaces have been outed. Ends of-ed. It's the brooking no challenge that makes me want to...well, challenge. There's the idea Johnson has somehow pulled a fast one, that he's pretending that he's invented a new genre of film because young people (bless them) don't know about the past and have no access to it. And he's playing a kind of double jeu because he's also fan-servicing the elderly and giving them a hit of straight-up nostalgia, because they've been particularly starved of Poirot and Marple repeats these last few years. They've NEVER even heard of ITV3. 

Johnson is actively doing neither of those things. The film works as a film because the story works: there is deflection and sleight of hand. There are surprises. Equally, he never once hides his sources. Angela Lansbury (a minor Marple, a superlative J B Fletcher) is in it for God's sake. It's obvious to people who know Sheila, Nile, and Evil where he's taking these tropes from. The film works if you don't know, because the objectionable stock characters have been updated, but they're still modern analogues of nasty old rich people. If you do know, well, it just adds to to the richness of the gumbo. 

If you have no taste for camp, for broad(ish) satire, for trying to work out what's going on in a film, and for billionaires being portrayed as foolish (still waiting for that trickle down money to start leaking in) then I guess this film is not for you. But you sound a bit like right wing firebrand Ben Shapiro who noted "the first half of the movie is a complete misdirect and a waste of time...we're actively deceived by the writer...his take on the universe is that Elon Musk is a bad and stupid man, and that anyone who likes him - in media, politics or tech - is being paid off by him."

I mean, you don't sound as stupid as that. But, like, kinda. 

*I mean, clearly that hasn't worked out.