Joker <img src="https://img.icons8.com/ios-glyphs/20/000000/star.png"/><img src="https://img.icons8.com/ios-glyphs/20/000000/star.png"/><img src="https://img.icons8.com/ios-glyphs/20/000000/star.png"/><img src="https://img.icons8.com/windows/21/000000/star-half.png"/>

Joker

A fairly packed house at Morley Event cinemas for this Saturday evening screening of Joker. Lots to chew over in this film and it's been fairly beaten around and praised in equal measure, from what I've read. Two people I know were pretty down on it and another really enjoyed it. Me? Kind of in the middle, actually.

The best aspect of the film was the atmosphere, the look, the similarity, in this regard, to films from the American New Wave of the 1970s. There are lots of influences here - Taxi Driver, The French Connection, Blow Out (incidentally seen on a Gotham City cinema marquee, along with Zorro the Gay Blade) and The King of Comedy are just the ones I can think of. The performances are mint, especially Joaquin Phoenix, who is really staking a claim to being the best American actor going around at the moment. His turn in Joker put me in mind of a film he made recently for Lynne Ramsey called You Were Never Really Here. Both films required physical transformations and intense explorations of the characters' mental health. And here's one of the major themes of the film - mental illness. Written in (future Joker) Arthur Fleck's notebook is this:

The worst part of having a mental illness is people expect you to behave as if you DON'T.

Fleck has an ailment whereby he laughs uncontrollably. He imagines things happening around him (more of this later). He takes a gun to a children's hospital. And he kills people. In the climactic scene on the talk show, he asks Robert DeNiro's host, Murray Franklin:

What do you get when you cross a mentally ill loner with a society that abandons him and treats him like trash? I'll tell you what you get! You get what you fucking deserve!

And this feeds into another of the major themes - a society's treatment of its poorer, less stable citizens. This is also where the nihilism ratchets up a few notches. Much of the bad press the film has been getting relates to both of these themes. I can't really comment on the accuracy of the mental illness angle but the anarchy of Gotham seems just a dog whistle away. And I quite liked this film's two fingers up to the establishment, but then I guess I always do.

SPOILERS AHEAD!

Back to the imaginings. We see that Fleck imagines himself in the audience of the Murray Franklin show. We know that isn't real. Later, we understand he hasn't been having a relationship with Zazie Beetz's character - a few Sixth Sense style flashbacks illustrate this. But please, don't tell me there are more fakeries. I'm not having it. That's a cop-out. It's too easy for film-makers to make the unreliable narrator a complete bullshit artist and nullify much of what we see in the film. But then again, as has been mentioned to me (Roly's reading), that's part of being immersed in the mental illness stream of the film. I'd still rather read it as most of what we see on film, actually happened - not a dream, hallucination or fudge of some sort.

Some more things to note. The talk show stuff is a direct lift from The King of Comedy, with DeNiro in the Fleck role and Jerry Lewis as the host. It also references Phoenix himself on Letterman during the I'm Still Here phase. I'm not sure the film needed to focus on young Bruce Wayne as much as it did and the retconning of his parent's death to blame the Joker was shite. Oh, and it needed a tighter edit, if only to trim some of those bloody dance scenes. Yes, Phoenix has found some creepy ways to utilise his malnourished frame. No, we don't need that much of it.

So, ultimately, I'd say it was an above average film with some controversial takes on thorny topics. The homage to earlier films was nice and it seems Joe Public is lapping it up as well, so there may well be a sequel of sorts. Something to look forward to?

See also:

A predecessor to Joker, Martin Scorsese's The King of Comedy (1982) and for more hard-core Phoenix, Lynne Ramsey's You Were Never Really Here (2017).

SPOILERS IN POD!!!

Listen to "Joker" on Spreaker.

Comments

Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning

This eighth entry in the Mission: Impossible franchise feels like a good place to end things. The series is rapidly ripening and it's possible that any more and we might be getting into the fruit fly stage. It's not going out on a limb to say they will probably continue until Tom Cruise is in traction but, by the looks of this warlock, he'll outlast us all. The Final Reckoning is many things to many people. On the one hand, it's great fun, packed with tension and brilliantly edited to within an inch of its celluloid life (kudos to the editor with a name like a British snooker player, Eddie Hamilton). On the other hand, it reeks with honking dialogue and convoluted exposition that wastes an awful lot of its lengthy run-time (170 mins, no thanks Mr. Bladder). One character actually says, "It's the end of the world as we know it." At this stage, I didn't feel fine. And for your bingo card, make a cross in the square for 'characters saying the name o...

The Tasters

My final tilt at the 2025 German Film Festival turned out to be a Swiss/Belgian/Italian co-production, directed by Silvio Soldini. It's based on a book by Rosella Postorino called At the Wolf's Table , about a year or so in the life of Margot Wölk. This luckless woman was one of 15 official food tasters for Hitler when he was staying at the Wolf's Lair in East Prussia (current day Poland). Rosa Sauer (Elisa Schlott) arrives at her parents-in-law's house in the town of Parcz to await the return of her husband from the Eastern Front. Not long after, she is co-opted into a perverse gig at the military compound just outside the town - Rosa and several other young, healthy women must taste the Fuhrer's food before he eats it, in case it's poisoned. The dynamic between the women is well played. Some are suspicious of Rosa, due to the fact that she's from Berlin; one is young and naive; one is blindly loyal to the Reich; one is staunchly discreet. All are bricking ...

Münter and Kandinsky - The Blue Rider

Artist biopics are few and far between these days. Mr. Turner in 2014 and Daaaaaali! in 2023 come to mind as relatively recent examples, and Van Gogh and Picasso are always popular subjects. This German production, directed by TV stalwart Marcus O. Rosenmüller, looks at the life of Expressionist maestro, Wassily Kandinsky, but crucially, via the perspective of his lover and ex-student, Gabriele Münter. The film starts and ends with her and Vanessa Loibl gives the character a vivid intensity. We see Münter's dissatisfaction with the lot of women in turn of the century Munich. She wants to study and practice her art and so is chuffed when she hears of a studio called the Phalanx, where women are allowed to attend. This is where she meets the intense Kandinsky, a lecturer at the college. After some visible romantic tension, a painting excursion to picturesque Kochel brings them together. Post coitus, Kandinsky tells Münter that he wants her to leave the trip early as his wife is com...

Top twenty WWII films

The Guardian recently ran an article on the ten best World War II films, as voted by respondents to a Deltapoll for The War Movie Theatre podcast (see their list and link at the end of this piece). As this year is 80 years since the end of hostilities, I thought it might be interesting to run down my top twenty World War II films. Here we go: 20. Empire of the Sun (Steven Spielberg - 1987) This China-set drama of expats during the war in the Pacific theatre was Christian Bale's first big role at the age of 13. He's pretty bloody good too, as are most of the cast, including John Malkovich and Nigel Havers. Spielberg saw this J.G. Ballard story as a chance to make a comparatively 'darker' film about the loss of innocence and it turned out to be one of his very best. 19. The English Patient (Anthony Minghella - 1996) All the press for this film was the love story angle between dreamy Ralph Fiennes (pre-Voldemort, of course) and elegantly icy Kristin Sc...

Sinners

Hats off to Ryan Coogler for turning out this vibrantly bloody cracker with only his fifth feature. It's also quite a hand brake turn after two Black Panther films and one Rocky spin-off to deliver a singular story like this (I'm presuming there'll be no Sinners Cinematic Universe but I could be wrong). I say singular but actually, this owes a lot to Tarantino, and many other genre directors. I'm dancing around the issue here as the best way to watch this is to be completely unaware of what you're going to get. What I can say is that this is great fun. It really zips along, there's hardly a scene without forward momentum. Even the wonderfully ambitious musical numbers (relax, it's not a musical) add background to the story. Coogler's script crackles, especially in the mouths of the excellent cast - more on them later. One of the best things about this is that it disguises itself really well, you're not sure where it's going until it arrives the...

Thunderbolts*

This is the sixth and final film in phase five of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and by my reckoning, it's the second best of the phase (after the third Guardians film). It's certainly an improvement on the flaccid Captain America: Brave New World from a few months back. Kevin Feige has done a good bit of business getting the right team together here, not unlike the film itself. The reasonably unknown crew includes director Jacob Schreier, writers Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo, and cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo. Schreier hasn't actually directed a feature for ten years (he's been involved in TV) but they all have some interesting credits to their names. The film picks up the story of Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), adopted sister of Black Widow. She's taking jobs for Valentina de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), mostly illegal cleanup gigs with high body counts, but is becoming disenchanted with all the drudgery. She's in a murderous malaise. A fatality funk...

The Surfer

The Surfer is an Australian/Irish co-production, filmed in the south of WA. If you can get over the premise that Nicolas Cage was born in Australia and gained an American accent after the age of about 15, then maybe you'll go with this a bit more than I did. Cage stars as the otherwise unnamed Surfer, who returns to Lunar Bay (Yallingup) to buy his old family home that overlooked the beach where he used to surf. Upon arriving with his teenage son, intent on having a surf, he find the beach occupied by a gang called the Bay Boys. He's very quickly told to fuck off and that if you "don't live here, don't surf here." After taking his son home, he returns to the carpark above the beach and here's where events start to go off the rails. The surfer's board is stolen, then his shoes, his car battery dies, his phone battery too, he trades his sunglasses for a pair of binoculars from an old beach bum with a grievance. This idea of him being unable or unwillin...

Two to One

Two to One (or Zwei zu Eins ) is a true life heist film that holds up a light to the haphazardness of German reunification but is ultimately about fairness and belonging. In short, the main characters are slowly losing their jobs as East Germany prepares to rejoin the West after the collapse of the Soviet Union and her satellite states. Maren (Sandra Hüller) and Robert (Max Riemelt) are having an unemployment party when an old friend of the couple, Volker (Ronald Zehrfeld) returns from years abroad. Disenchantment in the neighbourhood drives the trio to investigate the strange movement of army trucks to a local underground facility. A distant relative still works there and so is summarily co-opted to help them gain access to the 'bunker'. There they find bags and bags of disused East German marks, very soon to be out of circulation. Disappointed, they grab a bunch of notes anyway, more as a keepsake than anything else. When a door-to-door salesman offers to take the old curre...

80s Movies and their Songs

So I was driving back from down south and we decided to fiddle with the radio. A generic FM station appeared and my Gen X ears knew most of the tracks, some ok, some dire. But the thing that prompted me to start this post was that a couple of the songs were clearly linked to films from the 1980s. I began thinking that, as much as it doesn't really happen now (or even much after the end of that decade, with some notable exceptions), this 'movie/song tie-in' was a huge pop culture phenomenon back then. As a massive time-wasting technique, I decided to do a bit of research and try to find the film and song pairing that was the most popular of the era. Box Office Mojo helped with the film's takings, but how to discern a song's popularity? I've had a look at the US Billboard charts and the UK top 40, so we'll see if this goes some way to covering it. Ultimately, the song that YOU heard on the radio all the time, or watched on MTV (often with the film's actor...

F1: The Movie

As opposed to F1: The TV Show, or F1: The Book, or F1: The Function Key. Yes, this is a film about Formula 1 racing and it really wants us to love it, the racing even more than the movie itself. Brad Pitt is Sonny Hayes, a grizzled driver who jumps around from race to race, a drifter, a mercenary. After one of these races, Daytona, his old mucker, Ruben (Javier Bardem) shows up and offers him the chance of a lifetime. Come back to Formula 1. Hitting all the right beats so far. And continues to do so. If you've seen any sports film, you know this film. Just for the record, yes, there's a cocky young pup co-driver, Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris) and a gorgeous (thankfully middle-aged) love interest, Kate (Kerry Condon). It's no surprise that the writer/director combo here, Ehren Kruger and Joseph Kosinski, was also responsible for the underwhelming Top Gun: Maverick . This is a better, more grounded (pun intended) version of that film. It may be derivative but F1 is pretty s...

Film Shapes

Search This Blog