Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022)

Here it is, folks: the first movie I've seen set during the COVID-19 pandemic, specifically May 2020. That said, we don't see people wearing masks or keeping apart for long, thanks to an oral spray that supposedly protects everyone from infection. Either they put too much confidence in a dubious treatment, or it's a sci-fi premise. It wouldn't be the only one herein, despite the previous Knives Out not having any.

Eccentric industrialist Miles Bron (Edward Norton) invites five pretty close acquaintances, along with a couple plus-ones, to a weekend on his private island, home to a mansion aptly called the Glass Onion, to solve the mystery of his "murder." PI Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), the only returning character, also gets an invitation, tho Bron didn't intend it. Almost equally out of place is Andi Brand (Janelle Monáe), Bron's former business partner, who's bitterly disenchanted with him and all his suck-ups in attendance. Blanc notes that every guest besides himself has a motive to make the pretend murder a reality. Well, someone dies before long....

Moonlight (2016)

It's unlike me to go to a screening on a whim, but I had walked past the theater in the afternoon and made a note to see something in the evening. I still have a lot of films to catch up on before the Academy Awards. This one had a more convenient timing than Arrival, as well as more esteem in the AFI's book.

The movie is set and authentically filmed mostly in the Miami area. None of my sources say which decades it takes place in, but from the opening song, I suspect the '70s to the late '80s or early '90s. At any rate, it focuses on Chiron (pronounced shy-ROAN) at three stages: around nine, when most people call him "Little" or "Little Man"; in high school, when he's transitioning between nicknames; and as a twenty-something, when he's adopted the alias "Black" from a...sort of friend, Kevin. In the first two stages, he faces verbal and physical bullies, partly for his scrawniness and partly for his mother's earned disrepute. (Naomie Harris had had a policy against playing such a woman, but she caved upon learning that director Barry Jenkins based her on his own mother.) His best support comes from a relatively noble drug dealer and his girlfriend (Mahershala Ali and Janelle Monáe, again), the former of whom has the only line about moonlight. Then Chiron and Kevin come to occupy special places in each other's hearts....

Hidden Figures (2016)

We shouldn't hear many #OscarsSoWhite complaints next month. While I have yet to check out Moonlight, Fences, or Loving, they get enough positive press outside the Black community to suggest a few nominations at least. But only HF presents a focus on Black women in particular, facing sexism as well as racism.

Specifically, they're three NASA employees in the early '60s, more united than the other Black women in their position if only because they ride to work in the same lemon. The one with the most screen time is Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), whose mad math skills get a room full of White men to rely on her to check vital calculations. Despite exhaustion, she is receptive to the hints from everyone, including her young daughters, that she should hook up with one Col. Jim Johnson (Mahershala Ali). Meanwhile, Dorothy Vaughn (Octavia Spencer) has been pulling her weight as an unofficial supervisor in the "colored" female mathematician division without the benefits; when NASA finally installs a room-sized computer, she takes the initiative in learning how it works, not just to help NASA but to avoid layoffs. Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe) doesn't appear to make any great contributions to the space race in the course of the film, but she does pursue an engineering education and career -- in a Virginia that does not respect Brown v. Board of Education.