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

You Were Never Really Here was dope. Also very prescient about the Epstein/sex trafficking stuff

Some great points here worth considering. The unimpressed & scornful reviews only make fans more attached. The vibe I felt in that theater was real.

my hot bff with no twitter takes on the joker pic.twitter.com/XP50mUbf3Z

— talichka💕💕 (@itstalgirlyea) October 6, 2019

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— talichka💕💕 (@itstalgirlyea) October 6, 2019

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— talichka💕💕 (@itstalgirlyea) October 6, 2019

CHAOS REIGNS

i know nothing about this movie beyond the trailer but i hate the whole tortured anti-hero version of joker. not because of any actual social concerns but just because i'm a snob

I mean, that presupposes people are shitting on it for vanity only, though.

Takedowns always endear the fans to 'their' movies more.

Xpost

It's definitely not much of an incel movie. Arthur doesn't seem preoccupied with sex. His imagined romance with his neighbor is almost completely chaste. There's little indication that he resents women as such. He's not upset at the world because he thinks people see him as physically ugly. Virtually none of the incel subculture's obsessions are represented in this movie.

yeah it's much more of a forgotten & mocked white male movie

in a way the movie's thorough mediocrity is what makes it even more chaotic. because now you have all the hysterical pre-release criticism plus more measured and reasonable reviews, most of which rightly criticize the movie for being too ill-equipped to handle its subject matter. but it comes close enough to matter to many, many people.

He stalks a woman just because she smiles at him a bit, though. Then he enters her apartment, terrifies her, she asks him to leave, and then there's a weird cut and he sits down in his apartment and we hear sirens outside. So... There's a bit of resentment, I'd say.

Not sure that incel culture is just about loss of explicitly sexual power, tho I admit I can’t be bothered to do any serious research on it

Xpost agree.

Like none of us should agree with Arthur's actions, but incels generally don't go through the over-the-top physical and emotional birth from childhood that Fleck does, then immediately lose all seven medications he takes.

If we take the movie at face value, of the people we see him kill:

3 people on the subway that are literally kicking and beating him in a prone position (pulling the gun was probably all that was needed as opposed to shooting, and he outright executed the third guy)

Mom (smothered her, cos he found out she lied to him about her father and allowed her boyfriend to physically abuse him growing up, leading to permanent brain damage)

Co-worker (stabbed, got him fired from job by lying about source of gun, was trying to corner him about coos questioning him in subway murders)

Murray (cos he embarrassed him by showing his comedy footage and mocked him on live TV)

One was what he felt was self-defense, one was due to rage and feelings of betrayal, one was probably equal parts self-preservation plus revenge for getting him fired, one was revenge for being mocked.

Only two of them were even pre-meditated. He isn't even a spree killer, though we are lead to believe he becomes more random with his violence after he's locked up.

It's weird that audiences are more forgiving to Sweeney Todd, who gets revenge after pushed to insanity, but comes up with an abstract reason to start killing loads of innocent people first. Just cos they came to get a shave.

Which is where the withholding information bit comes in.

I have a hard time thinking he killed Sophie, because the detectives were already suspecting him and he stayed at home. No way they wouldn't have come by or arrested him the next day.

If anything I thought the film was taking a more critical eye against his followers, who invent the Joker's ethos based on a sliver of information on who he is, but when they get their moment and riot, seem to have no actual scruples. They're just mindlessly looting, blowing shit up, stealing ambulances,killing and terrorizing random people while wearing masks, but it's not about any actual movement. You wouldn't see Occupy fuckers doing this shit.

His followers are incels!

Yeah, it doesn't really make sense, but at that point he has also just killed his own mother, so I don't really think the competence of the cops was that well thought out by the scriptwriters. The bigger question is what the fuck is going on in that scene, though, and why we don't get a clear answer as to what happens.

I mean, I get why it's there. Without it, he is, as you say, just avenging wrongs done to him, and that's not 'dangerous'. But if we openly saw him murder a woman just because she rejected him, then everybody would see him as a supervillain. So, it's kinda in there, but it's not really in there, but it might be?

Yeah the cops really are inept fucks in this ting

It's a lil unnerving to see smart people itt who can't figure out what actually happened in the movie. Almost as if it were constructed to encourage the bad faith fringes of the general audience to fill in the gaps with whatever best flatters their absence of critical faculties.

https://www.boxofficemojo.com/news/?id=4552&p=.htm

With an estimated $93.5 million, Warner Bros.'s Joker delivered the largest October domestic opening ever, topping the $80.25 million opening for Venom just last year, not to mention coming very close to the $93.8 million opening for Justice League in 2017, which it could very easily top once actuals come in on Monday.

thinking about this movie too much is kind of a waste of time

So odd that this was released in the same weekend that the overtly-queer Batwoman show premiered. Almost as if WB's right hand doesn't know what its left is doing.

both hands are doing the same thing, reaching for $$$

With an estimated $93.5 million, Warner Bros.'s Joker delivered the largest October domestic opening ever, topping the $80.25 million opening for Venom just last year, not to mention coming very close to the $93.8 million opening for Justice League in 2017

Now predicting the 2020 October release of the Harley Quinn movie cracks $100 mill

is it too late to apologize for liking comic books to mr scorcese? i'm so ashamed.

I went to pee as soon as he got to his mom's hospital room. Got back in right after the smothering. whatdidimiss

if they make an NC-17 XXX hollywood Harley Quinn movie.... it might

It's a lil unnerving to see smart people itt who can't figure out what actually happened in the movie. Almost as if it were constructed to encourage the bad faith fringes of the general audience to fill in the gaps with whatever best flatters their absence of critical faculties.

― Furter-Bursting Tater Squirter (Old Lunch), 7. oktober 2019 01:51 (eight hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

This is almost literally the conclusion to my review :) And I'm happy people on here gets it, because the review went up last night, and the fanboys are NOT happy...

The film was in the news earlier today for using Gary Glitter's "Rock and Roll Part Two" in one scene, which means that Glitter gets a bunch of royalties. There's the old question about separating an artist from his actions, complicated by the fact that in this case the artist's actions were enabled by the revenues from his work. I have no idea if he actually wrote the song but he was at least smart enough to demand a co-writing credit.

It also raises the question of whether the film's going to have one of those song-track soundtrack albums that compiles all the songs from the film, and if it'll include Glitter's track. The actual musical score was written by a woman, and if I was writing for one of Kinja's platforms I could probably turn that into an entire article - "Joker's songs disrespectfully spunk over Hildur Guðnadóttir's soundtrack like incel bukkake" or something like that. I would try to get a bukkake reference in there.

Rex Reed: Joker 'borders on genius'

Does Rex get basic facts wrong in every review? AF doesn't kill Wayne. And correct me if I'm wrong but what award did Jack Nicholson win for playing the Joker

Either the music supervisor of this is an idiot, or the music supervisor of this thought it would be edgy as fuck, and so is an awful idiot. *shrug emoji*

Rex Reed: Joker 'borders on genius'

― flappy bird, Monday, October 7, 2019 8:51 AM (twelve minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is one of the worst movie reviews i have ever read, almost parody

Par for the course with Rex

here's a take for you:
https://slate.com/culture/2019/10/joker-movie-todd-phillips-gg-allin-documentary.html

watching the two (films) together reveals how little his insights have evolved in the intervening 26 years. Joker looks a hell of a lot better than (the G.G. Allin doc) Hated, and Phoenix is a fantastically creepy and compelling central presence. But Phillips hasn’t got free of his juvenile fascination with taboo-breaking. Hated ends with Allin’s funeral after a fatal heroin overdose, and rather than express sorrow at Allin’s death, Phillips mourns that he went out in such a hackneyed rock star manner. “Personally,” Phillips says, “I always hoped he would go out in a more glorious fashion: onstage suicide, five dead fans—something rock ’n’ roll could never ignore".

Rex Reed has been an error-prone ninny long before he turned 80

so just to lay out the "subtext": are people interpreting the closing scene with arthur in the mental hospital as saying the entire movie has been the product of an unreliable narrator?

that's the only way i can think of where the plot of the movie makes any logical sense

he should have died in the fridge

he lives in a version of our world where the punky brewster very special episode never aired

or he lives in the house of eternal return

lol i forgot about the fridge that was good

“Joker” is effectively the movie that “Fight Club” has often been mistaken for.

https://www.indiewire.com/2019/10/fight-club-is-best-joker-movie-1202179222/

Calling it now: minimum of two Oscar nods.

Calling it now: maximum of 30 Oscar nominations.

Holy poop, this movie ends with a "maybe it was all in his head?" twist? Would have been great if it ended with the revelation this is all taking place in the real world and he's a big fan of (fictional) Batman and fantasized of become the Joker. With Heath Ledger and Jack Nicholson and Cesar Romero and animated Mark Hamill Joker appearing next to him in the mental hospital as force ghosts.

within the movie, was it fantasy or reality when a character who can barely express himself verbally and says he has no interest in politics suddenly gives an eloquent statement on live tv connecting his random actions to his sociopolitical status and the state of the world?

i'm pretty fucking burned out on antihero narratives. so "edgy" when every single hbo show since the sopranos has done the same thing

prefer Supergirl's updated hero narrative tbh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzmZJcPlJlE

haha yeah uh not that one

The pop music transition scenes, where there's no dialogue and we're left watching the scene to play out, were jarring and felt like they broke the flow of the movie. Like they were stuck in from a comedy movie where one of the character is doing something crazy and everyone's lunging in slow motion going "noooo"

I get that it's a fictional city roughly inspired by 70s NYC but, having not lived it but having seen a fair number of films placed in that setting, it didn't feel coherent or fleshed out. I can't really remember anything about the extras on the street or anything that made it feel like a real place where people live.

Phoenix did well with the material, but he wasn't really given much to work with. Has his character just been going to therapy sessions and working as a clown his entire adult life? And the main catalyst is the city cutting social services the same week he's given a gun by a coworker and he unravels why his mom's been delusionally writing letters to her rich boss from decades ago

so just to lay out the "subtext": are people interpreting the closing scene with arthur in the mental hospital as saying the entire movie has been the product of an unreliable narrator?

well, the only thing dumber than a Joker-ed Taxi Driver is a Joker-ed Sucker Punch.

and that Rex Reed review sounds like a grade school book report.

Many homicidal acts of revenge ensue, including, at last, one that will knock you out of your socks ...

has there ever been a live late-night talk show on u.s. tv