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

the pop stuff is maybe meant to be jarring but didn’t quite jive for me

the score is obviously great, good composer!

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-men-who-still-love-fight-club

I used to rewatch Fight Club a lot and it’s fine but, overall, worse at gauging it’s audience’s ability to read between the large print lines than anything Scorsese ever did.

It’s very pretty. I get the fantasy of looking (but not smelling) like Pitt’s character, and Jared Leto gets beat up. Helena Bonham Carter is attractive. Zeroing out credit debt is cool but doesn’t work like that, although buildings collapsing is shocking. In the end, the fuck-up seems to acknowledge a middle ground, although it’s the last thirty seconds.

The first sign that “Fight Club” might inspire men to do anything other than quote “Fight Club” on their Facebook walls came in the mid-two-thousands...

Can I just

https://www.indiewire.com/video/todd-phillips-cut-zazie-beetz-joker-scene-fate-1202187212/

Recently, when I checked out Palahniuk’s novel from my local library, the librarian, a woman in her thirties, visibly struggled to hide her displeasure

the correct response, shoutout to this librarian

you know, I really enjoyed Lullaby but that's mostly because I've long harbored the fantasy of being able to murder people with my mind

Palahniuk's not a horrible writer, but he's a one-trick pony and iirc has expressed some alt-right/libertarian leanings, although maybe that's just part of his edginess shtick

"I have a few extremely basic questions as to how (or if) the story here jibes with the Burton and Nolan films on a timeline, but I'm just a novice, so I'll look up the answers myself." Yes it has nothing to do with those films. And I'm hjoping it doesn't have a sequel.

Frankly I kind of like this approach that DC may be taking with their characters; they dont' really need to build a universe, it wasn't working anyway. You can use these characters and do one off movies. It's really ok.

Fight Club is a fine novel and also a good film. I have to ignore any cult that has sprung up around it because like all of these things, it seems to me that people who do that aren't really getting the point (see: using Joker masks in big protests).

Can't wait for the Supes movie where he's 48 and doesn't know he has super powers and works as an insurance adjuster with manager Lenny Luthor.

sounds like a significant improvement on visionary director zack snyder's take on the character tbf

Frankly I kind of like this approach that DC may be taking with their characters; they dont' really need to build a universe, it wasn't working anyway. You can use these characters and do one off movies. It's really ok.

― akm, Wednesday, November 6, 2019 8:34 AM (seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Another way to say it is that DC has moved in this direction not so much as a conscious, strategic choice but because their attempts to ape the MCU model have been inept af.

people wearing Joker masks isn't missing the point, it *is* the point depending on the protest- he only really loses it when he loses his social security

A senior White House official confirmed to Yahoo News that Trump screened 'Joker' for guests including “family, friends, and some staff.”

The senior official said Trump liked the film https://t.co/w7KEGfQEl4 by @hunterw, @BrettRedacted pic.twitter.com/bQfnnViBoC

— Yahoo News (@YahooNews) November 17, 2019

the oval office insider went on to claim that trump's chest pains were 'almost certainly' caused by the movie's twisted take on the iconic character

i guess you could say the joker played... THE TRUMP CARD! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHEHHEHEHEHEEE IT'S THE JOKER!

There’s no possible way that guy can sit and watch a whole movie

Au contraire, he's had a toilet installed front and center in the WH screening room, so

The "toilet" being whichever of his family members he's angry at at that particular moment.

hope you guys who bought tickets are looking forward to LEX in 2020, Captain Cold in 21 and grim-and-gritty Jonni DC in 22
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/joker-sequel-works-as-todd-phillips-eyes-more-dc-origin-movies-1256255

Fingers crossed for Crazy Quilt

Calling it now: minimum of two Oscar nods.

― Furter-Bursting Tater Squirter (Old Lunch), Monday, October 7, 2019 1:06 PM (three months ago) bookmarkflaglink

TBH, this power of mine is more curse than blessing.

Joaq deserves a nom, BP for sure too
Gerwig got robbed for director

Just saw this. I think it had too many memes & thinkpieces in front of it for it to have any impact. It wasn't bad, in the sense of being badly made, but it seemed pretty pointless and if it was meant to be entertaining the only sense of entertainment I could liken it to is a horror movie where you're just like "ugh oh god ok I guess" the whole time. If it was supposed to be about the Joker, from a Comic Book Guy perspective it was a whiff since this Joker wasn't clever or even mischievous, just a witless psychopath from beginning to end. Really repetitive and no ending to speak of. Had I not been trying to see all the Oscar nominees I would have been fine to give this a miss.

It wasn't directed.

Yeah it's the usual reading things that Phillips wasn't actually intelligent enough to willfully put in there.

they seemed to want to use a TV-length character arc in a two hour feature film which just doesn't work. even in the train scene, he quickly pivots from killing a guy in what might questionably be self-defense, before immediately committing murder, including pursuing a guy at Usain Bolt speeds and shooting him in the back. Might have been a little more effective if he'd only killed one guy, in self defense, as that's quite a leap.

the movement also made no sense. yes, movements sprout up all the time, but a bunch of clowns assembled and grew in numbers and began holding demonstrations due to what they could only *assume* were Arthur's motives. it was some Life of Brian shit. usually those type of movements need some form of charismatic leadership to grow at the rate the Clowns in Training did in a short time. it quickly goes from a handful of doofuses in masks to hundreds of people basically rioting in downtown Gotham.

he's a demagogue who hasn't even addressed his congregation until he goes on TV and blows DeNiro's face off and suddenly it's war in the streets.

xpost lol

With some time to process it, I pretty much agree with you Sparkle Motion, but I had a more negative opinion right after watching it given every one of my friends raved about it

the only real themes in the movie were "people are nasty to each other, including me, and that's why I snapped", which is...not very interesting, nor did it make sense, since fairly obviously, it wasn't society's cruelty, it was his own neglectful/abusive mother and her equally abusive boyfriend who were more to blame for his plight. his entire neurological condition came from a beating he suffered at their hands!

this is just a comic book movie, so no it doesn't require these heavy themes, but if yr gonna pretend you're 'transcending' the genre, you might wanna put on a harness first.

I was in the Philippines where it was a half day ahead so I got to see it before all of my friends, which I was glad to do.

in retrospect it may not have been written either

it is getting the defense that the shitty Zombie Halloween got - "it's a character study". Sure...a bad one.

I didn't even hate the movie either, but I could barely stomach the ending. not with what's going on now across the globe.

I finally got around to watching this, I had very low expectations but eh it was ok, a solid 6/10, slightly better than Fight Club.

Surprised that it reminded me of Requiem For A Dream in a few ways.

for all the Taxi Driver comparisons (I saw the latter a couple weeks ago for the first time in awhile), Joker is just a movie that doesn't hit any of the same notes except that it's a psychotic dude in a run-down NYC (-type) city. the creeping paranoia and dread and single-minded focus and the way in which Travis talks *around* his troubles w/other people and doesn't explain them overtly, just hints at them and occasionally lashes out briefly before collecting himself...it all seems very real, in the sense that despite his journey to the end of the film, it also reads like a consistently inconsistent way of life without an easy narrative. Even considering the heightened comic book drama of this type of film it just reads as false and also a fairly unsympathetic reading of mental illness.

not a fan of misery porn but this was fine as a heavy duty pastiche of the lone wolf psycho genesis using our guy

why it had to be the joker idk

didnt deserve any of the weight either the director or the thinkpieces demand of it

phoenix is good

otm

I watched it expecting it to be terrible, was pleasantly surprised. my wife watched it expecting it to be good, was disappointed.

that seems fair!

the scorsese ripoff stuff does nobody much justice, but i saw as much shyamalan in the actual direction as i did anything

interesting little effort and i hope that the writer/director hear me say it and are outraged tbh

i laughed real hard at the funny parts and i feel like nobody focuses on those in their thinkpieces

thinkpieces dont believe anyone can laugh anymore u monster

the jokers real crime....was joking

i saw this tonight & i agree w deems

in and of itself its ok if you unhook it from
all of the baggage. so much baggage, jesus.

todd phillips is an annoying preening nihilist & no-one should listen to anything he says about this movie. imo.

phoenix undeniably good. the involuntary laugh is such a tough thing to pull off convincingly & as a piece of acting, the physical exercise iself, i found it really fascinating. also it’s the thing that sells everything else about Arthur’s character.
the weightloss was terrifying to me though. not machinist-bale CALL 911 scary but close.

I'm kind of glad I didn't like it more than I did because the last 30 minutes of the movie would have ruined it for me anyway.

I still "enjoyed" it to some extent but it seemed to treat many of its tropes as part of a checklist they needed to complete to reach "important movie" status.

definitely more Shyamalan than Scorsese though. i think that’s why the end didn’t bother me, because it just felt like he’d given over to total delusion after the Brian Tyree scene at Arkham

i was mad that they wasted someone like Tyree in such a lame role, much like they wasted Zazie Beetz as a plot device. but just cos I love them both so much

agree! like, you’re basically benching your best players!

also I think Martha Wayne should have known karate in this version. since we were changing things up a bit

ain't nobody jackin' her pearls this time.

i laughed real hard at the funny parts and i feel like nobody focuses on those in their thinkpieces

― Hackers (1995) (Will M.), Wednesday, May 13, 2020 1

There aren't any funny parts to focus on.

The guy walked into a door that was kinda funny

The hospital clown bit was meant to be funny but didn’t really land for me iirc

I think there’s some unintentional comedy in how oppressive and tryhard and stupid this is most of the time. I’m with dmac & co tho this was passable enough for a serious funny papers movie and the takefest that accompanied it was far worse