I threw up at every scene.

Rating: 1/10 (30 November 2019)

The feeling washed over me of just how nasty the film actually was. It is both literary poison and too obsessed with getting good grades to get its hands dirty, bridging the polarities with an aloof and misanthropic superiority. It wants us to hang it on the fridge. Problem is the effect is more like a brother hitting the other then crying he was hit back. The film takes Trump America and splits it with left v right, within this dishonest frame of neutrality while his agenda couldn't be more clear. Of course, he's too passive-aggressive to be forthright. Then the patriarchs epiphany is as if Scrooge lost his mind; but even Scrooge stopped short handing Cratchit his fortune settling on giving him a duck. Today the artistic acts of millionaires must be greater because money is twice as shameful. So it's about capital and globalization. The transfer of power is societal and economic and race is a funnel of that, a symptom, a copout, an excuse. She becomes Queen. The world is now a different guard--now this could be effective as do you break the code and go with rage the hyperbole entertains and provokes. Poison is fun. We love a murder mystery. But I'm not sure Rian Johnson in his great position quite knows what he's trifling with, attacking the giant bodies of society through the frame of the erudite whites v underclass. Rather society is a disguise for his personal grudges and failures, then it all makes a little more sense. I think he's obsessed with internet culture. I think he's furious Star Wars fans came at him and he made this film as some grand revenge saying, 'I get the last laugh trolls.' Knives out, plainly. The film is then a tantrum from the very wealthy 'white male' he seems to be sending up, for how the others didn't take his blockbuster properly, so let's destroy the world. Its pettiness is a kindness I offer because the alternative is even worse, and that is its politics. Because if there is honesty to this piece it is that he belongs firmly within the family ranks, not directorially outside of them. He hides, per usual with his oeuvre, through deceptive frames, one-upping and manipulating us with narrative trickery doing anything he can to avoid giving us a sincere experience. We're just there for Rian's entertainment. As he's incapable of anything but frames (a common trap for the midwit) we are suddenly forced to see Johnson himself as the frame--the ultimate irony they don't quite learn is the more you hide the more we see you. So the director as moral arbiter hides in the 'statement', its politics and the personal are so fused, they are echoes, holograms, projections of the other, then relishing hurting wicked people can only be an act of artistic sadism, same as Plummer. Then, the film's dishonesty is it never questions he was a lousy father who raised these very kids he's chosen to punish. See the indignation of the brother speaking of the sister: "Self-made? She had a million dollar loan" inadvertently damns Johnson who goes with no self-reflection, mercy or pity at all within the mud-flinging. Constantly it's saying they don't deserve it. They botched it. They didn't earn it. Did you, Rian?