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[Joker] Clown Prince of Cringe
Atomika
Live fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered User regular
Live fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered User regular
Talk about it here. Because you’re already talking about it in every other thread.
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Is it good? Y/N?
It feels like falling down or taxi driver.
It doesn’t feel like a comic book movie at all.
Joker is good! It's a tasty Scorsese stew with hearty chunks of Kubrick and a dash of Hitchcock.
That first dancing scene in the bathroom is so dang good and hypnotic and eerie.
I also loved that the movie turns
Though, while I liked that one scene with the social worker, I didn't really like that the movie portrays the Joker as explicitly mentally ill, with psychiatric medication that he's taking and stuff. That's the one thing that really bothered me about the movie, and yet it's something I'm not seeing much discussion about. I think it's long past time for movies to stop portraying mentally ill people as psychopathic mass murderers.
Still, overall, the movie is a good squirm-in-your-seat-with-discomfort nightmare of a time.
Maybe, uh, I shouldn't have brought my mom with me to the showing tho
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I’ll add: 1.
2. It is so dang nice to see a comic book movie where it didn’t feel the filmmakers were under pressure to add an action scene every few minutes. There is some action but it never feels shoe-horned in. It’s also nice to see one where nobody has a perfectly-sculpted six pack body.
Anyway I’m still processing the movie, maybe I’ll hate it tomorrow, but as of right now I’m very happy it’s doing so well at the box office
The turning point of the film is
the preachy, "society is to blame" speech on the talk show was very unlike Joker to me.
Just my initial thoughts/observations of the film.
I didn't like it, but I can't imagine that anyone would watch this and walk out with the view that Joker was a sympathetic character and justified in his actions (the "this will inspire incels complaint".)
A good point someone mentioned was that movies like Deadpool are much more violent, and yet because this isn't a comedy the violence is being treated as super violent and gross. So while Deadpool can dismember, decapitate, and mutilate, Joker gets a sideways look for a body count of... 6. Maybe 7? Like I legitimately think people forgot this is the same character who beat a Robin to death with a crowbar, for literal shits and giggles.
Train
Any other movie I'd say he reloaded off-screen but Arthur is such an unreliable narrator that I'm not sure it's that simple. We don't really know where the lies are and where they stop. Or if they stop.
If you think of the movie as a story the Joker is telling, especially a story he tells much later on, it makes more sense. It's "how I got these scars" all over again. Ever-shifting, horrifying, and usually casting the Joker as the victim.
Ultimately I think that is why I raise an eyebrow at the idea that this was a non-franchise movie with the Joker spotted in for marketing's sake. I don't think it would work nearly as well without knowing that the narrator (well, there's no narration, so maybe curator) is the goddamn Joker.
Everything the movie shows us is suspect. Was Arthur really mistreated and neglected by society? Was he really Thomas Wayne's child? Did he really spark the riots that got the Waynes killed?
I don't think this is a self-contained story about the rise of the Joker. I think this is the Joker's idea of what would justify his actions, but we don't know if any of it is even true, and I don't think that dynamic works without the audience knowing something about who the Joker is.
It's a little like Spider-verse in that regard. It's an origin story, but you kind of have to already know the story to get the most out of it.
He was having fantasies about having a supporting girlfriend at difficult times, but it felt like it was the least important part of his breakdown. His mistreatment and the mockery directed towards him by a man he had earlier fantasized as a supporting father figure were much more impactful.
The movie would have us believe that after Ms Fleck was hospitalized that the state took baby young boy arthur away. Would they really release him back to his mother after she got out? The newspaper clippings & case file don't really state what happened to arthur after Ms Fleck was institutionalized. I left wondering if Arthur Joker was lying about his identity after the fact.
This idea is a real stretch though, one that the movie doesn't hint at. I suspect that it won't hold water unless I can get some freeze frames of the newspaper and the case file notes.
And yeah the movie is starting to remind more and more of American Pyscho, where if you get into it you're not sure how much really happened or not.
This new film does a great job of telling a possible story, but it also has so much unreliability and vague allusions that a viewer who is familiar with the Batman mythos can appreciate the fact that coming out of this movie, no questions are really answered. It makes Batman's inability to solve this mystery very sympathetic. Batman can't figure out who the Joker is, because the Joker himself isn't sure who he is.
If you contrast "Joker" to "The Killing Joke", Alan Moore also did a really great job of telling a story about a possible Joker origin, but he also never actually says the story he's telling is Joker's origin. He's just telling a story of a down on his luck comedian and that story is running parallel to a story about Joker. But there's no concrete link between the two parallel stories.
I think they did a good job of telegraphing very clearly the things that were imagined (the first show appearance, the relationship) and the things that actually happened (everything else)
Like, I doubt DC would commit to 5 movies pursuing the same idea without getting distracted by some other shiny object, but if they took that approach, it would immediately elevate the value of a Joker movie in my eyes.
Originally meant to put these here, kinda got confused
Sure portraying the mentally ill as dangerous as a trend is a big fucking problem, given the character we're talking about I'm not sure if there's another way to do it though.
I think part of the issue is that Arthur is misdiagnosed, his mother clearly told therapists from when he was younger about his "Condition", but probably not telling them that he was a normal boy until he suffered a traumatic brain injury from her abusing boyfriend. He probably wasn't on the right meds, and he lives in a society that doesn't care so much that his deranged mother was able to get him back after having him taken away, without her underlying condition having been treated
I very much liked this movie
As to the 7 bullets fired out of his gun, I don't believe it was a 6 shooter, I believe it was something like this
The unreliable narrator aspect....
It's part of why I don't really buy the notion that this is a "Joker movie in name only", in spite of the director's comments to the contrary
Yesss I love hearing about great scenes that were quasi-unplanned
That scene specifically was what I was thinking of when I brought up Kubrick: the way it shoves the plot aside and instead just lets you wallow in a sinister dreamlike haze
I don't even think the movie is all that good but the amount of self-righteous winge-mongering over this film has been asinine and the people who perpetuated it need a healthy dose of self-reflection and also might want to consider shutting the fuck up for a good minute.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
It's all just cynical click-bait bullshit. Op-eds get clicks, studios get sales, and people who just like to be outraged get something to be outraged about. Everyone wins.
I'm guessing this is exactly why it opened so well. *puts on tinfoil hat* The studio WANTED this kind of message to get pushed because it gets people into the theaters. I have no interest in seeing the movie but seeing all these news networks and random Twitter folk get upset by the message of the movie (EVEN BEFORE THE MOVIE WAS OUT) almost got me to buy a ticket to spite them.
Eh there's been plenty of levelheaded criticism, here and elsewhere
But notably lots of critics seemed to pile on the moral angle when the average movie fans seemed to enjoy it a lot, going by rotten tomatoes score
Nothing wrong with enjoying it, just like there's nothing wrong with feeling that we really, really don't need another violent white dude inspiring other white dudes to do awful things at this point in time. (Again: not outraged! Just icked out.)
You mean a movie of such? Because we don't need movies at all, if that's how you want to frame things.
...so much for reasoned criticism.
No, I'm not trying to have the movie jettisoned into the sun, don't be silly. I'm just saying it was poorly timed and would have been better received if it came out a few years ago.
We definitely don't need takes this hot, that's for sure.
....I didn't say that?
Regardless, I liked the movie a lot. Joaquin Phoenix was awesome. I think it's the first time I've enjoyed a comic-based movie since The Dark Knight .
Edit - I do agree with the "mentally ill = deranged murderer" criticism voiced in this thread though
I didn't say you were, just that to those hand-wringing over people being "inspired" by this movie to do violent acts, that is misplaced intentions at best
The biggest thing I saw was referencing how way too many disaffected white dudes saw Fight Club and took away a message/moral that was "Last Question In Billy Madison" levels wrong, basically glorifying Tyler Durden and not seeing how flawed and fucked up and Bad™ he was. This movie felt similar and people were worried how a similar movie might impact a much different (in very bad ways) generation of similarly disaffected white dudes.
Yea thats not what the movie is.
You want to point that gun at something, John Wick is probably your better bet.
Just a parade of clownish hot takes all basically boiling down to "This was an irresponsible movie to make, it will inspire real life violence". The demographic it was purported to inspire to violence, and the reasons anyone thought it would, were hardly unanimous. But the media, through weasel words and the usual headline telephone, seemed absolutely certain that someone would be shooting up a theatre in response to this film.
I think most notably Phoenix walked out of an interview where he was asked about the film promoting violence.
The only thing I can't make up my mind about was whether Disney was behind such a blatantly astroturfed media campaign to try to hurt a competitor, or WB was behind it because controversy moves tickets.
I mean origin stories are done to death, but there aren't really any supervillian ones or many ones at all where the villain is portrayed as anything other than a confident genius.
As evidenced by the amount of horrible fanart about him The Joker in popular culture is supposed to be "cool", and at some points when the makeup is on and the cameras are on him and he's in full flow talking weird nonsense he almost reaches it- but its kind of a performance on Arthurs part. His laughter is a medical thing, but hey if you're an outside observer you could see it as a full on evil cackle. Arthurs just kind of bumbling his way into supervillainy, even if to the eyes of the crowd he becomes elevated to kind of mythical figure.