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.

Ad Astra

I caught this oddity in Taipei at the Q-Square cinema near the Taipei Main Station. And the queue was actually a square, 25 minute waiting block. Just made it into the screening on time. Seeing a film in Taiwan was pretty similar to other countries, the main difference being the steep, stadium-style seating. And there were pricks with their phones on, just like any other place. Fucking philistines.

So, onto Ad Astra. This is one of those big(ish) budget 'indy' films so admired and supported by Brad Pitt and his production company, Plan B. Pitt stars in this one and James Gray directs, with Hoyte Van Hoytema as DP - and supremely well-shot it is. There are lots of things to enter in the positive side of the ledger.....and almost as many in the negative side. One of the highlights is the already mentioned cinematography. Vast space vistas juxtaposed with claustrophobic interior shots and weirdly tinted off-world living areas give Ad Astra a fairly unique look and feel. There are some discrete sequences that are worth admission - the moon chase and a Trek-ish mayday call are standouts. The performances are roundly solid, Pitt even reins in his excessive tendencies here. Tommy Lee Jones is quietly menacing, Donald Sutherland is just great to see any time and Ruth Negga adds some much needed female input.

But the main theme is where Ad Astra drifts for me. The pacing could be tighter too, but that's a minor issue. The through line of the film involves Pitt's ability to deal with his father's absence. Jones abandoned Pitt and his (non-existent) mother to go into space 30 years before and now it seems there's a chance that he may be alive after all. Jones, having gone all Space Kurtz, may also be responsible for cataclysmic anti-matter occurrences (that was as hard to write as it probably is to read). Now, Daddy issues are not uncommon in film and they can be done well. I'd say this attempt sits just above the watermark. I appreciate Pitt's emotional wranglings and his efforts to not emulate his father's personality and behaviour and there's an pivotal scene where Jones opens a box of bitter truth all over Pitt's space suit. My mini-gripe would be the meandering it takes to get to this point. Pitt must give vocal records for psychiatric evaluations and, though slightly reminiscent of Gosling in Blade Runner 2049, these scenes waft and repeat and float like Terrence Malick has infected a Star Trek film with his piss and wind.

Financially speaking, it hasn't washed its face yet and may not become profitable. I do appreciate Plan B, though, and Pitt's attempts to deviate from the mainstream ever so slightly. Hope he eventually bankrolls a winner.

See also:

This film's jungle forebear, Apocalypse Now (1979) by Francis Ford Coppola and, for a film with a similar mission, Danny Boyle's Sunshine (2007).