The Joker movie - starring Joaquin Phoenix (MOD: May contain Spoilers)

tigger123

Bring back Bernard Manning and Roy Chubby Brown.

peteeeed

tigger123 wrote: »

Bring back Bernard Manning and Roy Chubby Brown.

Haha( I'm not laughing with them )

blinding

tigger123 wrote: »

Bring back Bernard Manning and Roy Chubby Brown.

Isn’t Roy Chubby Brown still alive and well and perhaps performing for all I know , not that I want to know , and have not been looking , and in no way would go , even if some one told me , etc etc etc .

tigger123

blinding wrote: »

Isn’t Roy Chubby Brown still alive and well and perhaps performing for all I know , not that I want to know , and have not been looking , and in no way would go , even if some one told me , etc etc etc .

Could be actually. Not that I'd give a f*ck.

But yeah, sumtin sumtin, millennials.

peteeeed

blinding wrote: »

Isn’t Roy Chubby Brown still alive and well and perhaps performing for all I know , not that I want to know , and have not been looking , and in no way would go , even if some one told me , etc etc etc .

He is, always had a live following and was the mayor in ' the league of gentlemen' the town ' Royston vasey ' is his real name

The White Wolf

tigger123 wrote: »

The use of a Gary Glitter track in the film is also an odd choice. Feels like he's trying to troll people a bit perhaps.

Weird at the time for me but in retrospect, I love the fact that a monster is literally unleashed to the sound of well....another monster.

tigger123

The White Wolf wrote: »

Weird at the time for me but in retrospect, I love the fact that a monster is literally unleashed to the sound of well....another monster.

Yeah, I know what you mean actually. I thought the track was used in quite an interesting way. I was thinking maybe that's what he was getting at perhaps?

peteeeed

The dance/strut to the track, it just fits and it's his full transformation into the joker

Pineapple1

peteeeed wrote:

The dance/strut to the track, it just fits and it's his full transformation into the joker

Love it

Penn

The Phantom Pain wrote: »

Which is rubbish because people have made successful comedies since. Taika Waititi just made a comedy where he's playing Hitler FFS and the critcs like it.
Phillips is just bitter that Hangover 2 and 3 were critically panned.

Agreed. I actually thought Todd Phillips gave up comedy after The Hangover 1.

gebbel

Apologies for my lack of a good review. Saw it yesterday for the first time.
Outstanding. That’s all. Thanks for reading.

johnny_ultimate

The Phantom Pain wrote: »

Taika Waititi just made a comedy where he's playing Hitler FFS and the critcs like it.

Ironically a lot of the feedback I’ve heard about JoJo Rabbit has been critics giving out about it for being quite mild and safe given the subject matter and concept :pac:

The problem people like myself have with Todd Phillips as a director isn’t that he’s a provocateur. Lord knows I welcome mainstream cinema being more provocative! It’s that he’s more of a shock jock than anything. The Hangover films - or the Joker for that matter - are hardly the epitome of bold, biting cinema.

Classic Chris Morris is provocative comedy done right - it’s outrageous and probing and headline-baiting while still being riotously funny. Louis CK’s work is insanely crude and un-PC, and he was one of the world’s most successful and near-universally acclaimed comedians until he was rightly shunned not for his comedy, but for being a creep.

Good comedy will still be warmly received if it deserves it, no matter how crude or provocative it is. The only difference in recent decades is that people have been more willing to call out comedy they perceive as lazily punching down for cheap shocks. Are some people overly sensitive? Sure. They’re happily balanced by the people who will go to bat for any old ****e comedian in the worst possible faith. The vast majority of people - critics and audiences alike - happily split the difference.

The White Wolf

tigger123 wrote: »

Yeah, I know what you mean actually. I thought the track was used in quite an interesting way. I was thinking maybe that's what he was getting at perhaps?

Possibly but the Guardian had a good article about how Americans have a completely different relationship to Glitter in regards that tune. Over there it's the "hey" song played in sports arenas.

dublinman1990

I saw this today. It was a wonderful piece of film making by Todd Phillips.

The Joker's laugh is one of the best pieces of acting that I have ever seen as a comic book fan from Phoenix. It was exhilarating. I hope that I will be forgiven for this opinion; but I think the multitude of different things coming out of the film had really tried to not make so much sense of it because it was attempting to pull away from the origin story of Joker. It did it so well as it portrayed the anarchy of Gotham so bloody brilliantly in every facet of the film. To my mind it made it on with a lot of tension which made the message of the film where Arthur Fleck's career as Joker was the perfect moment it all came crashing down.

All I can say is wow. I would gladly pay so much more money to go & see it again & again in the cinema. It's just so bloody good.

But seeing this in the cinema once is enough for me on this occasion. Buying the Blu-ray of this film is absolute must for me when it comes out in the stores.

JP Liz V1

Jared Leto unhappy

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/youve-got-stop-jared-leto-fumed-new-joker-movie-1247699

pixelburp

JP Liz V1 wrote: »

Jared Leto unhappy

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/youve-got-stop-jared-leto-fumed-new-joker-movie-1247699

Yeah, posted that HR article a page or two back & while denied, I believe it. And now that it's released, there's probably something especially galling for Leto to watch an actual Method Actor inhabit a role, instead of his affected & strained efforts at the same.

cdgalwegian

pixelburp wrote: »

Yeah, posted that HR article a page or two back & while denied, I believe it. And now that it's released, there's probably something especially galling for Leto to watch an actual Method Actor inhabit a role, instead of his affected & strained efforts at the same.

I don't normally pay attention to extra-filmic activity, but this got me thinking about the PoMo elements to this film (and unbeknownst to me how big a tit Leto is), and how extra-filmic elements come into play in it. The main power of the film (apart from Phoenix's performance) was the unreliable narrator aspect. If you look at, say, Memento, and the unreliable narrator aspect, this can be a powerful narrative tool; throw in extra-filmic elements into the mix and one's brain can go into overdrive with assumptions and speculations, making the film a masterpiece or a mess, depending on your standpoint.

Strip-way the extra-filmic elements though, and this a damned clever film; I'm in the camp that the extra stuff is also clever, being deliberately superficial- because of the 'fridge theory' of Fleck's post-fridge fantasy, which culminates in the fantasy of a dejected loner's popularist Joker.
Along with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, this can come to be seen as a postmodern classic.

.

MrStuffins

I went to see this for a second time at the weekend.

I think the movie is a masterpiece. Phoenix's performance is astounding.

Not only is there a lot of virtue-signalling going on with the negative reviews, but having read some of them I genuinely think that there's a horrible amount of bias going on, with a lot of the reviewers going into this movie with a negative opinion of the director, the star of both and allowing it to poison their opinions of the movie.

I genuinely believe that if Todd Phillips had've used the pseudonym "Martin Scorsese" for this, it would be being held up by these same reviewers like Simba at the beginning of The Lion King!

pixelburp

cdgalwegian wrote: »

Strip-way the extra-filmic elements though, and this a damned clever film; I'm in the camp that the extra stuff is also clever, being deliberately superficial- because of the 'fridge theory' of Fleck's post-fridge fantasy, which culminates in the fantasy of a dejected loner's popularist Joker.
Along with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, this can come to be seen as a postmodern classic.

.

For me, the fridge scene was another case of Phoenix ad-libbing some "eccentric" behaviour - in the same vein as the bathroom scene - with Phillips and the writers liking what he came up with, and just left it in during Arthur's lowest ebb.

It's fair to say Phillips is going to get pressed on every facet of the script & shooting of this for a while (presumably until he whinges that he can't make other films anymore?), so it'll be interesting what theories - if any - he confirms or denies. Honestly, with the info revealed thus far, I suspect a lot of this film was improvised, in relating to the specific "crazy" scenes with Phoenix, and beyond that don't hold any great narrative significance. That the only definitive hallucination was the fantasy girlfriend, maybe the "rescue" scene.

cdgalwegian

pixelburp wrote: »

For me, the fridge scene was another case of Phoenix ad-libbing some "eccentric" behaviour - in the same vein as the bathroom scene - with Phillips and the writers liking what he came up with, and just left it in during Arthur's lowest ebb.

It's fair to say Phillips is going to get pressed on every facet of the script & shooting of this for a while (presumably until he whinges that he can't make other films anymore?), so it'll be interesting what theories - if any - he confirms or denies. Honestly, with the info revealed thus far, I suspect a lot of this film was improvised, in relating to the specific "crazy" scenes with Phoenix, and beyond that don't hold any great narrative significance. That the only definitive hallucination was the fantasy girlfriend, maybe the "rescue" scene.

We'll never know what to believe then; iow's- it depends on what credence one gives to the Philips/Phoenix creative partnership- fiendishly clever, or cynical wait-and-see policy. Before the film, I would have thought the latter, but having seen it, I think it's the former; I don't think we'll ever know for sure, unless pre-release signed script-notes sealed in a vault come to light :pac:.

Either way though, the end result- reflected in terms of box-office receipts at the very least- has been fiendishly clever; potentially bogus narrative intent notwithstanding!:)

peteeeed

a dvd commentary track with Philips and phoenix would be fascinating

cdgalwegian

peteeeed wrote: »

a dvd commentary track with Philips and phoenix would be fascinating

Yeah- a breakdown on how the permutations and combinations of varying narrative standpoints had to be whittled down in the most efficient way, where inner turmoil reflected outer turmoil in a dynamic way, and all reflected in Phoenix's portrayal... or... the two of them just saying: Suckers!! We just had a blast messing with people's heads.

pixelburp

cdgalwegian wrote: »

We'll never know what to believe then; iow's- it depends on what credence one gives to the Philips/Phoenix creative partnership- fiendishly clever, or cynical wait-and-see policy. Before the film, I would have thought the latter, but having seen it, I think it's the former; I don't think we'll ever know for sure, unless pre-release signed script-notes sealed in a vault come to light :pac:.

Either way though, the end result- reflected in terms of box-office receipts at the very least- has been fiendishly clever; potentially bogus narrative intent notwithstanding!:)

To my mind, what seems the likely scenario is that Phillips & co. had draft scripts prepared for specific scenes, then gave Phoenix latitude to experiment and play with how those moments could play out, depending on where the actor's headspace was (I'm not even going to pretend to understand the vagaries of Method Acting, but this is what it seems to be like). So a fairly loose set and potentially improvisational, with the other actors maybe sticking to their own direction - perhaps to get a better sense of "WTF? from the other actors unsure what to expect? Heck, IIRC I believe Iron Man 1 was very improvisational and went by that rough approach, and appears to be how other improvised productions go...

So my estimation is that the written script had a well defined sense of what was real & what wasn't - there has to be SOME semblance of structure in a script & shooting, as sets still need building, locations need scouting, the other cast wouldn't be so Method etc., you can't totally wing a story - with any ambiguity or interpretation coming from Phoenix's ... exploration of the role, and Phillips happy to include it (unless, presumably, it completely demolished the continuity or something).

cdgalwegian

pixelburp wrote: »

To my mind, what seems the likely scenario is that Phillips & co. had draft scripts prepared for specific scenes, then gave Phoenix latitude to experiment and play with how those moments could play out, depending on where the actor's headspace was (I'm not even going to pretend to understand the vagaries of Method Acting, but this is what it seems to be like). So a fairly loose set and potentially improvisational, with the other actors maybe sticking to their own direction - perhaps to get a better sense of "WTF? from the other actors unsure what to expect? Heck, IIRC I believe Iron Man 1 was very improvisational and went by that rough approach, and appears to be how other improvised productions go...

So my estimation is that the written script had a well defined sense of what was real & what wasn't - there has to be SOME semblance of structure in a script & shooting, as sets still need building, locations need scouting, the other cast wouldn't be so Method etc., you can't totally wing a story - with any ambiguity or interpretation coming from Phoenix's ... exploration of the role, and Phillips happy to include it (unless, presumably, it completely demolished the continuity or something).

This is the crux of it here though, isn't it? What was being played with was the sense of what was real and what wasn't. The film has a certain messiness after the fridge scene, where there is an increasing lack of believability in how things were playing out, reinforced- propelled even- by the realisation that the girlfriend was not in fact a girlfriend. If the fridge theory is correct, then nothing after this is real- there is (it turns out) only a semblance of reality; fodder for Fleck's wish-fulfillment fantasy.

I think either I give too much credit to Philip's script, or you give too much credit to the ad-libbing factor. Hopefully the DVD extra will shed some light on it.:)

pixelburp

Well if you want to REALLY indulge the Fridge Theory, then it's also possible that this Joker dies in his apartment, his emaciated body too weak to open the door after climbing in, and suffocates; the disjointed scenes afterwards merely his brain shutting down, with the final moments in the white-walled hospital taking on obvious symbolism, as Arthur is chased by orderlies down an unseen corridor

cdgalwegian

pixelburp wrote: »

Well if you want to REALLY indulge the Fridge Theory, then it's also possible that this Joker dies in his apartment, his emaciated body too weak to open the door after climbing in; the disjointed scenes afterwards merely his brain shutting down, with the final moments in the white-walled hospital taking on obvious symbolism, as Arthur is chased by orderlies down an unseen corridor

That's my take anyway. I was only thinking this morning as I retrieved the milk from the fridge to make a cuppa that gone-off milk would smell bad enough...:eek:

El Duda

One of the main things that convinced me that it was all fantasy by the end, was the way the TV broadcast went out. They would've cut him off live TV immediately.

It contrasts massively from the gritty realism of the films opening.

pixelburp

El Duda wrote: »

One of the main things that convinced me that it was all fantasy by the end, was the way the TV broadcast went out. They would've cut him off live TV immediately.

It contrasts massively from the gritty realism of the films opening.

Cutting him off? That hasn't been true about TV News since the days of "Network"

While the film is set in the 70s, I can absolutely guarantee that someone went that nutty on TV, they'd keep the cameras rolling. He was brought on as a joke guest anyway, nobody would have predicted that dark turn.