I dare you to anticipate Joaquin Phoenix in Todd Phillips's JOKER (now with something that may or may not be a SPOILER)

both

Ms Hasagawa

stich

It probably is worth noting that spree killers and sociopathic vigilantes weren't a pervasive social ill when Natural Born Killers, Taxi Driver, Death Wish, etc. were released. This might be more comparable to the JD flicks of the '50s and '60s.

Ebert called Fight Club “the most frankly and cheerfully fascist big-star movie since Death Wish.”

a lot more people will leave this movie and get in fights than will leave it discussing Tyler Durden's moral philosophy

unfortunately i don't think it worked out this way

"Warner Bros just lookin to capitalize on that sweet incel 8chan market"

it worked with deadpool

a lot more people will leave this movie and get in fights than will leave it discussing Tyler Durden's moral philosophy

unfortunately i don't think it worked out this way

Sad and true.

It probably is worth noting that spree killers and sociopathic vigilantes weren't a pervasive social ill when Natural Born Killers, Taxi Driver, Death Wish, etc. were released. This might be more comparable to the JD flicks of the '50s and '60s.

Taxi Driver & Death Wish came from the height of the NY decline/Bernard Goetz/etc. landscape and American society even during Natural Born Killers was on the whole more violent and dangerous than it is today. They're as comparable to The Asphalt Jungle as Joker is.

Warner Bros just lookin to capitalize on that sweet incel 8chan market

― Οὖτις, Wednesday, 4 September 2019 19:52 (yesterday) link

Honestly they’re using the same tactic Disney used for Captain Marvel, just reversing the target of the outrage.

Captain Marvel: “All these alt-right incels are furious at this movie, so you must see it now!”

Joker: “All these uptight SJWs are mad about this movie, so you must see it now!”

It’s just a given part of the publicity cycle for these things now.

ding ding ding

landscape and American society even during Natural Born Killers was on the whole more violent and dangerous than it is today

Citation needed?

I think it's true that violent crime stats have dropped since then. You're just much less likely to know your murderer today, and your murderer is much less likely to have a coherent motive for killing you specifically.

‘Hi, welcome to the future. San Dimas, California, 2019. And I'm telling you it's great here. The air is clean, the water's clean, even the dirt, it's clean. Mass shootings are way up, violent crime stats are way down. And we have more excellent water slides than any other planet we communicate with.’

http://www.followingthenerd.com/site/wp-content/uploads/bill-and-ted-rufus.jpg

fwiw Goetz shooting was 1984, a decade after "Death Wish." "Taxi Driver," on the other hand, did come at the peak "NYC, drop dead" era.

What Natural Born Killers did sort of reflect was the hyper-tabloidization of the media landscape, and social media/internet has only exacerbated that. I don't know if people are necessarily more violent now or prone to violence, but there's never been a more readily available audience for that kind of misbehavior, even if chat rooms and forums and whatnot tend to over magnify their numbers.

The thing with Bernie Goetz, also, is that we know his name because, while I'm sure there were others who did likewise, he was pretty much an outlier rather than part of a larger vigilantism epidemic.

this doesn't go back to the 80s but
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a2/1999-2016_Gun-related_deaths_USA.png/800px-1999-2016_Gun-related_deaths_USA.png

Death Wish is an interesting one cause the guy who wrote the novel hated the movie -

Garfield was also unhappy with the final product, calling the film "incendiary", and stated that the film's sequels are all pointless and rancid, since they advocate vigilantism, unlike his two novels, which make the opposite argument. The film led him to write a follow-up titled Death Sentence, which was published a year after the film's release.

Shakey post it per capita you dingdong

also I would argue against the "end of Taxi Driver is a fantasy" argument - Taxi Driver feels to me like a specific reaction to Death Wish, showing us a "vigilante hero", but making it clear to the audience that he's a dangerous loony. The first part of the movie puts you on Travis's side, encourages the audience to root him on. And then Scorcese pulls the rug out, panning up to him at the Palatine rally with the shades and the mohawk, making clear that no, this guy is not a hero, he's a nut with a gun. The ending is the punchline - the vigilante hero is still celebrated by the public anyway.

Taxi Driver did notably inspire one shooting

hrrm

xpost That was always my take, but it's been a while since I saw it.

here's the image shakey was probably looking for
https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/FT_19.08.14_GunDeaths_2.png?resize=640,620

Pff, you can't fool me with that shoddy sharpie work.

mh's graph is much better yeah thx

The ending is the punchline - the vigilante hero is still celebrated by the public anyway

that taxi ride with Sybil at the end though, their exchange feels so unreal and so like something out of Bickle's screwy imagination

I think it’s like how early on in the film he was able to easily charm Betsy and then a series of events caused him to slide towards violence, and now he’s had a reset of sorts and he’s back to some easy level of confidence. That final mirror shot shows he remains a ticking time bomb though.

Taxi Driver did notably inspire one shooting

hrrm

too bad he missed etc

Yeah I never bought the “everything after the shootings is in Travis’ mind” reading

With all of these, I'm always reminded of Anthony Swofford's bit in Jarhead about there being no such thing as an anti-war film - the beauty and grandeur of film still stokes the flame in the people who are going out to commit violence, whatever your intellectual takeaway is supposed to be.

To come full circle, this movie looks dumber than a bag full of breast implants

Vince Gilligan practically put an "I'm a terrible person!" sign on Walter White the last season and there are still subReddits devoted to how he is the hero

I'm always reminded of Anthony Swofford's bit in Jarhead about there being no such thing as an anti-war film - the beauty and grandeur of film still stokes the flame in the people who are going out to commit violence, whatever your intellectual takeaway is supposed to be.

thought this was Coppola's line

In conclusion, Jared Leto should be killed. Then we will call it square, Hollywood

To come full circle, this movie looks dumber than a bag full of breast implants

― brigadier pudding (DJP), Thursday, 5 September 2019 17:12 (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

"...or are you just pleased to see me?"

Coppola and others have probably said the same but it's a whole thing in Jarhead (memoir not movie, though I think they referenced it there) as the Marines get ready for deployment, feasting on a steady diet of Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket.

Truffaut - "I find that violence is very ambiguous in movies. For example, some films claim to be antiwar, but I don't think I've really seen an antiwar film. Every film about war ends up being pro-war."

I think war films from the POV of the losing side in a pointless conflict are arguably much less valorizing of the experience as a glorious one but even then the excitement factor can be present and if the usually-doomed characters go out heroically then it does glorify things.

I thought The Pacific on HBO was fairly good at depicting the terror and grisliness and inhumanity of war, and it wasn’t “rousing” in the usual sense.

Come and See is a horrific experience but it’s another type of war film entirely, from the POV of those on the receiving end of the invading German army.

I read some Coppola thing recently where this came up - his argument was that a real anti-war film would just be a rhapsodic depiction of average people living peaceful, happy lives

a true anti joker movie would just be pee wees big adventure

Apocalypse Now led to a whole generation of “I love the smell of Napalm in the morning” guys at parties.

this looks dope but i'm scared to see it in a theater

Putting aside whether the movie is actually any good or not, I found this interesting
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/joker-joaquin-phoenix-todd-phillips-venice-dc-a9088596.html

The thesis seems to suggest that if you want to make a mid-budget "serious" picture nowadays, you'd better find a superficial way to graft in a franchise superhero.

Truffaut - "I find that violence is very ambiguous in movies. For example, some films claim to be antiwar, but I don't think I've really seen an antiwar film. Every film about war ends up being pro-war."

― Screamin' Jay Gould (The Yellow Kid), Thursday, September 5, 2019 12:39 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

This is a great quote. Similar seems to apply to mafia flicks and movies about "wall street greed." Also much the same effect with Glengarry Glen Ross inspiring a generation of asshole salesmen.

There's a reason why so many people missed the satire of "Starship Troopers."

I read some Coppola thing recently where this came up - his argument was that a real anti-war film would just be a rhapsodic depiction of average people living peaceful, happy lives

― Οὖτις, Thursday, September 5, 2019 12:48 PM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

otfm

It is to my surprise, then, that Coppola hesitates to call the film “anti-war”. “No one wants to make a pro-war film, everyone wants to make an anti-war film,” he says. “But an anti-war film, I always thought, should be like [Kon Ichikawa’s 1956 post-second world war drama] The Burmese Harp – something filled with love and peace and tranquillity and happiness. It shouldn’t have sequences of violence that inspire a lust for violence. Apocalypse Now has stirring scenes of helicopters attacking innocent people. That’s not anti-war.”

He pitches his own alternative, by way of counter example: “I always thought the perfect anti-war film would be a story in Iraq about a family who were going to have their daughter be married, and different relatives were going to come to the wedding. The people manage to come, maybe there’d be some dangers, but no one would get blown up, nobody would get hurt. They would dance at the wedding. That would be an anti-war film. An anti-war film cannot glorify war, and Apocalypse Now arguably does. Certain sequences have been used to rev up people to be warlike.”

if you want to make a mid-budget "serious" picture nowadays, you'd better find a superficial way to graft in a franchise superhero.