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

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.

Audiences at “Bonnie and Clyde” are not given a simple, secure basis for identification; they are made to feel but are not told how to feel. “Bonnie and Clyde” is not a serious melodrama involving us in the plight of the innocent but a movie that assumes—as William Wellman did in 1931 when he made “The Public Enemy,” with James Cagney as a smart, cocky, mean little crook—that we don’t need to pretend we’re interested only in the falsely accused, as if real criminals had no connection with us. There wouldn’t be the popular excitement there is about outlaws if we didn’t all suspect that—in some cases, at least—gangsters must take pleasure in the profits and glory of a life of crime. Outlaws wouldn’t become legendary figures if we didn’t suspect that there’s more to crime than the social workers’ case studies may show. And though what we’ve always been told will happen to them—that they’ll come to a bad end—does seem to happen, some part of us wants to believe in the tiny possibility that they can get away with it. Is that really so terrible? Yet when it comes to movies people get nervous about acknowledging that there must be some fun in crime (though the gleam in Cagney’s eye told its own story). “Bonnie and Clyde” shows the fun but uses it, too, milking comedy out of the banality and conventionality of that fun. What looks ludicrous in this movie isn’t merely ludicrous, and after we have laughed at ignorance and helplessness and emptiness and stupidity and idiotic deviltry, the laughs keep sticking in our throats, because what’s funny isn’t only funny.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1967/10/21/bonnie-and-clyde

I tried looking for guidance on this going back further than Taxi Driver, and re-reading Pauline Kael's review of 'Bonny and Clyde'. A fantastic piece if you ask me, but (from 1968!) very much of its time. The parallel I thought I'd find about how bad an influence it was drew a blank, I did not find it at all. Because 1968 is not 2019. And 'Joker' is no 'Bonny and Clyde'. Kael's musings on America make me feel how much America and the world has changed. That there was a time when "some part of us wants to believe in the tiny possibility that they can get away with it. Is that really so terrible?" was a daring stance that needed to be expressed, whereas now it's the opposite. And yes, that is really terrible. Truth has surpassed fiction, and where Kael attributed liberation to going full "stop worrying and love the bomb", against the current at the time, nowadays it's the other way around.

But people also feel uncomfortable about the violence, and here I think they’re wrong. That is to say, they should feel uncomfortable, but this isn’t an argument against the movie. Only a few years ago, a good director would have suggested the violence obliquely, with reaction shots (like the famous one in “The Golden Coach,” when we see a whole bullfight reflected in Anna Magnani’s face), and death might have been symbolized by a light going out, or stylized, with blood and wounds kept to a minimum. In many ways, this method is more effective; we feel the violence more because so much is left to our imaginations. But the whole point of “Bonnie and Clyde” is to rub our noses in it, to make us pay our dues for laughing. The dirty reality of death—not suggestions but blood and holes—is necessary.

This is both beautiful and of a completely different time. How 'far' we've come. Rubbing our noses in violence has lost all affect.

So, yeah, I tried but this really is not helpful at all. Not at trying to find a historic parallel, at least. But it is realising things have turned upside down in fifty years. And do read Kael's review, it's worth the while, regardless.

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

Starship Troopers was incredible

robocop and starship troopers basically laid out the blueprint for America in 2019

otm x2

Golden Lion

I'm already dreading hearing about this film for the next six months

Starship Troopers was incredible

yes

I'm already dreading hearing about this film for the next six months

yes

I'm already dreading hearing about this film for the next six months

Glad we’re already on it

lol

Thanks, Lucretia Martel

holy fucking shit it won the golden lion

Wow

Eh, Venice is the mens club of the arthouse world. Roman Polanski won runner up award. Anyone who is surprised by this hasn't paying attention the last few years.

Their last two winners sucked so this actually makes sense

Yeah, it's become another launchpad for the Oscars + an extremely concentrated dose of Italian misogyny. This is where an attendee walked the red carpet wearing a shirt with pro-Weinstein slogans a few years back.

"You can't prove he did it!"

had no idea Martel was a hardcore misogynist!

ie stfu Fred

Cameron Bailey asked Robert De Niro a long, thoughtful question about echoes of De Niro’s past work in Joker, and got such an iconically disinterested shrug from De Niro in response that someone in the balcony yelled “Legend!” #TIFF19

— Sam Adams (@SamuelAAdams) September 10, 2019

I thought that was Tim Curry.

the last couple of decades of de niro’s career has been one long disinterested shrug tbh

apart from bad grandpa obv

Ahem DIRTY Grandpa

Came up with a rhyme to help me remember pic.twitter.com/W4nlszvkbM

— Nick Wiger (@nickwiger) June 25, 2017

Lol

Ahem DIRTY Grandpa

always knew that rhyme would come in handy

I hope I live long enough to see the release of the inevitable Shitty Grandpa.

starring TJ Miller

now more than ever we feel Olivier's loss

Lord, get ready for a sea of these masks this Halloween

Also apparently there is a movie coming out called The Death of Dick Long

Standing O at TIFF

The entire phenomenon around this movie is making me go full Comic Book Guy

everyone should be testing how “academy award winner todd phillips” sounds out loud just so we’re all prepared

— Nick Usen (@nickusen) September 10, 2019

I'm trying to think of another fictional character so thoroughly irredeemable that this type of treatment would enrage me as much and I am coming up blank. It's partially due to the nature of the Joker as an amoral agent of chaos; most other characters are written in such a manner that there is shade and ambiguity to their motivations and you could see their actions charting a spectrum that swings from "good" to "evil" but that is emphatically not the Joker. He represents the exact opposite of Batman's grim order; gleeful chaos. He exists to deconstruct; it's what fuels him. He's not tortured by what he does; he revels in it. A story where the Joker is yearning for acceptance and fighting against his destructive impulses is not a story about the Joker. That struggle doesn't exist and placing it on that character fundamentally misunderstands everything about him.

I would have much less of a problem if Phoenix's "Joker" was a copycat who used the actual Joker as a conduit for his psychosis.

the Joker is very important to the recovery community

xp DJP
SPOILERS!!!

...

I heard that's the case

okay lol, then I am not nearly as mad about this movie as I have been assuming that's true

So is this is a trend, then? Directors of dopey Hollywood comedies going Academy Award friendly? Adam McKay, Peter Farrelly, Todd fucking Phillips ...