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

purposefully withholds information which is crucial to determine what is going on. Technically, it's very good, but as a political or social film, it's worthless.

so....its a movie

but not a film

Time was a movie cost a nickle

Then they took the Bible out the schools

its pronounced fillum

feeyulm

its pronounced fillum

Had a teacher (gym coach forced to teach actual classes) who pronounced it this way. We watched about three fillums a week in his "class."

Were these...dirty fillums

its pronounced durty

I can't help but notice that people like John Waters who make genuinely shocking, outrageous films don't go around whining in interviews how everyone is so mean and unfair for getting shocked and appalled at the film they made.

— Mario Bava's Green Gel Light Filter (@Ruby_Stevens) October 1, 2019

no one:

absolutely no one:

me: i fixed the joker trailer by putting it to "drama queen (that girl)" by lindsay lohan from the 2004 film, confessions of a teenage drama queen
— Anne Sundell (@anne_sundell) - 1 Oct 2019

i don't want to see this but i have some thoughts.

i think it's very possible the movie is sympathetic to joker, in some twisted way, just like todd phillips' first movie was sympathetic to its subject, GG Allin. america is soft on self-pitying narcissists who are willing to hurt others to get attention, especially if they're white men. or in any case, it encourages the behavior (cf. the current president, whose name escapes me).. in the trailer the joaquin phoenix voiceover mentions that he "didn't even know he existed" and felt like he needed validation in the mass media to feel "real" and this seemed -- not like an original idea at all -- but like an extremely american pathology. it's very possible the movie does end up saying something illuminating about why we're so broken.

i think the question of whether it will "inspire" violence seems a little alarmist. it's not like you can predict what will set people off.

i don't want to see this but i have some thoughts.

mods new board descrip pls

i mean, the movie seems incredibly glum and self-important and of all characters in cinema history none has been more mined to death than the joker, avatar of "chaos."

who would see this?

The Dark Knight was also incredibly glum, self-important, and a slog.

mods new board descrip pls

cosign

for sure it was alfred. every christopher nolan film is bad.

fwiw i like this for a new board description

Yeah I'm in the tank for this dumbass piece of shit

― president of deluded fruitcakes anonymous (silby), Wednesday, August 28, 2019 1:16 PM (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

gamers rise up

Saw it. It's bleak, practically a horror film.

I'm going to a baby screening of this on Saturday, seems appropriate amirite

to be clear, I am bringing a baby (my own)

Edelstein disliked it:

As Time’s Stephanie Zacharek put it, the film is less an exploration of a modern pathology than a symptom of it. It’s an anthem for incels. It brings to mind Stephen Metcalf’s incisive 2012 essay in Slate after a disturbed man opened fire in a theater showing The Dark Knight Rises. Metcalf didn’t blame the movie, exactly. But he did trace a connection between civil massacres and characters like Joker. The young men who had committed such acts believed “they had been grossly undervalued by the world—so much so, their lives had become one long psychic injury.” Metcalf suggests these men are drawn to supervillains, with their “charismatic malevolence” and ability to put modern technology to “creatively annihilative” uses, because it allows them to aggrandize themselves as Mephistophelean. Building on Hannah Arendt’s famous assessment of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann, who represented “the banality of evil,” Metcalf argued the best way to discourage incidents like the one in that theater (which have become way more frequent in the meantime) is to “divest evil of its grandiosity or mythic resonance by completely banalizing it.” In other words, make them look like the loser schmucks they are.

Although Phillips and the screenwriters sought to make Joker more realistic than its DC Comics predecessors, it exalts its protagonist and gives him the origin story of his dreams, in which killing is a just — and artful — response to a malevolently indifferent society. Arthur/Joker might be repulsive, but in a topsy-turvy universe, repulsive is attractive. I’m not arguing that Joker will inspire killings (it might, but so might a lot of other things), only that it panders to selfish, small-minded feelings of resentment. Also it’s profoundly boring — a one-joke movie.

Spoilers but....

...we get yet another Thomas/Martha Wayne shooting, replete with pearls.

Only he's a Koch bros asshole

Jokie is not an incel, he's severely abused from birth and mostly just fucks with his attackers, Frankenstein's monster style. His followers are the incels. He also kills a few cels.

Dude ain't Joker. It's not pleasant to watch. It's more Joker Todd, the Demon Clown of Gotham

I don't really get the "anthem for incels". The movie doesn't celebrate anything. It's joyless. The incel followers come across as mindless hypocrites.

It's not particularly intelligent but there aren't fist pumping moments. It's not something I will see again.

To be called an “incel” you have to subscribe to the ideology right? There are men and women that have dry spells, or just aren’t interested in sex and romance, and I don’t think that should be stigmatized.

I think it makes more sense to call them redpillers or something.

on cinema covered it in the new episode, which i haven't seen. hope it's a five-bagger

I like that edelstein passage alfred

Seems otm.

Anybody can choose to be absorbed by self pity. There’s nothing interesting about it—even when someone follows that path all the way “to the end”

The movie doesn't celebrate anything. It's joyless.

It can do both!

It can, but it doesn't really. The trailer was misleading.

Don't take that as a defense of Phillips, who is a dumbshit and basically just recreates Taxi Driver in broad strokes.

They're all not justifiable, but every Joker killing is either in the midst of getting his ass beat, self-preservation while being investigated, or a Sweeney Todd-ian revenge. Which is why he doesn't feel like Joker.

All other qualms aside, I appreciate that WB has responded to the pervasive criticism of DC adaptations as excessively grim & gritty by hurtling directly to bleak & nihilistic.

The dark knight version of the Joker mocked the idea that his sadism was rooted in any kind of psychic wound. It was just pure, iirc. Which was an aspect of the film Zizek praised.

xp

So, can we spoil details of the film now, because this:

They're all not justifiable, but every Joker killing is either in the midst of getting his ass beat, self-preservation while being investigated, or a Sweeney Todd-ian revenge. Which is why he doesn't feel like Joker.

― When I am afraid, I put my toast in you (Neanderthal), 3. oktober 2019 15:01 (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Is exactly where the film is withholding information :)

So the killings are not, in fact, as chaotic and random as we've been led to believe?

What even is this thing?

Who knows, the film isn't clear on how many people he kills... So it's impossible to say how random they are

What if the Joker's real victims are all of us?

Even thinking about the idea of this movie is bumming me out.

The weirdest thing to me is that this is a major studio release. If this had been an indie release with all the Bat-IP extracted, nobody would've batted an eye at its existence.

It's like if someone had an idea for a Saw sequel and was like 'but what if we used Riddler instead of Jigsaw'? And maybe we saw a batarang stuck in an alley wall at some point to remind people that this is supposed to be Batman-adjacent.

The Dark Knight was also incredibly glum, self-important, and a slog.

― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

i think this is why i'm more or less ok with "joker" existing. because films like this used to be taken as saying Serious Things about Society and I guess people are still doing that but more and more there's a recognition that this sort of thing is wallowing in unpleasantness. i mean shit i saw "henry, portrait of a serial killer", maybe this movie is 'worse' in some way than that film, i won't ever know for sure, but i'm not sure how it would be exactly.

I guess it’s theoretically worse because the antihero is iconic figure in pop culture so it is easier for antisocial types to rally around.

no, tho

p much every antihero is am attempt to create such an iconic figure, for a start

p much every such analysis projects the intent to do so or presupposes the sympathies of the director, for another

Nor was catharsis ever a thing, apparently.

The fact that the arc of this joker—feels mistreated, turns to terrorism in order to “be seen”—is sickeningly common now is the bigger thing. I think that’s what is bleak about the film.

p much any such angle of interpretation depends on not liking something irl, deciding that this work encourages the thing disliked, therefore that is the merit upon which the work is to be judged

"this is just taxi driver but with the joker" is as well to say "this is just taxi driver" is as well to say " if taxi driver was released today id criticise it for what it speaks to in our society" which i mean congrats but cmon