Who wants to hear my Joker hot take?

[sabotabby]

Hey, it's only, like, several months late.

I really enjoyed it, mainly owing to Joaquin Phoenix and Frances Conroy absolutely killing it on the acting front. But I have never wanted to edit a movie so badly in my life because it was so close to being perfect and argh.



So I've heard the bad politics hot take, and the glorification of incels hot take, and the demonizing people with mental illnesses hot take, and the not-matching-existing-Batman-canon hot take, and they are, in order, correct but not that relevant, missing the mark entirely, valid, and irrelevant. My feeling is that it needed a script editor.

First of all, it's doing Taxi Driver meets Network but set in the 80s and I'm not gonna lie, I am so here for that. I utterly love gritty 70s antihero character studies and I'm not even ashamed. It's like one of my favourite eras of film. And kudos for trying to pull that off in 2019, because it's not an easy task to do without having it come off as a pastiche. But it did, and that's where it should have stopped, because it did that very well.

As far as I can tell, they were attempting to take on three very pressing social issues:
• The Reagan-era defunding of mental health services
• Social media and viral shaming
• Wealth inequality and Occupy

All of these are interesting but only one of them is actually relevant to the time period that the story is set in. (Yes, wealth inequality was an issue in the 80s, but the response wasn't mass Occupy-style protests. You couldn't even manufacture that many of the same masks on short demand.) Focus on the first one, and you have a tight, powerful movie that keeps the stakes small and personal, you can still make it have contemporary resonance (it's not like mental health suddenly got re-funded), you can still touch on the wealth inequality themes and write Thomas Wayne as the complete bastard that he is, and it would be amazing. But the social media stuff makes no sense for the setting, and the protest movement just exposes all of DC's failures to understand how social movements actually happen and Hollywood's weird obsession with Occupy.

Also, I'd cut the scene of the Waynes going into the alley just as they are going into the alley. We all know what happens next. It felt like box-ticking.

That said, wow, what an excellent Christmas movie, would totally recommend.

Comments

[mistersmearcase]

I heard there was a scene of bros beating up the main character on the subway while singing Send in the Clowns and I definitely do not care at all about the movie but badly need to see this.

[sabotabby]

It's pretty great.

[lapinlunaire]

Ok now it's moved some spots up in my list because do I want to watch Joker getting beat up by singing bros? Maybe

[lapinlunaire]

... Do they actually include the masks in this? That's fucked up. I've always been wary of those because iirc the trend of wearing them to protests started with 4chan and I've never trusted those guys.

Anyway, your review actually sounds interesting. I've often thought that 99% of the problems in the Batman universe stem from wealth inequality and shitty mental health care so this sounds like a take I'd like. On the other hand, I don't really care about the Batman universe so it's not high on my priority list, to be honest.

[sabotabby]

Don't worry, the people who made this movie do not care one bit about the Batman universe either, and it shows. My mum, who doesn't like superhero movies except Black Panther, was totally into it.

They do include the masks, but not in the way it's suggested in the trailers. It was one of those things that unsuspended my disbelief. Well, the protest scenes in general, because Hollywood does not seem to know how to film a protest scene in terms of what happens, what signs look like, how many people show up in a North American protest, how controlled the crowds are, etc. It's very much a form vs. function but they don't really get the form right.

[lapinlunaire]

I'm totally convinced that North American protests are way more fun. The protests I've been to, including a really big one, just involved standing around and walking slowly and were pretty boring.

[sabotabby]

For the most part, no. They are really small, super disorganized, and there is never one targeted message because the usual suspects are always dropping in to link it to whatever they want to talk about (usually why you should buy their paper/join their group).