Posted on 10/03/2019 12:14:40 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Where does evil come from? Joker offers the most banal answer imaginable — budget cuts for social workers — but it’s a devastatingly effective portrait of a serial killer in formation, bringing to mind a long, sickening line of American psychos.
More than any comic-book movie to date, Joker, directed with a fierce commitment by Todd Phillips, eschews entertainment and dares to repel a sizable proportion of the potential audience. With an awful foreboding, it drills into the psychic pain of Arthur Fleck — failed clown, failed standup comic, failed human. Joaquin Phoenix gives one of the creepiest performances ever put on film as Arthur, a product of the manifold breakdowns of 1970s New York City, here barely disguised as Gotham City. Phoenix’s rancid torment jangles the nerves and turns the stomach.
Set in a 1981 urban hell piled with garbage and overrun by rats, Joker channels the notorious misfits of the era, including fictional ones: Mark David Chapman, John Hinckley, Bernhard Goetz, Travis Bickle (whose actions inspired Hinckley, the failed assassin of President Reagan), and Rupert Pupkin (an entertainment-industry isotope of Bickle). The presence in Joker of Robert De Niro, as a talk-show host much like the one who obsessed Pupkin in The King of Comedy, signals that Phillips wishes to re-create a bleary vision of urban squalor that inspired a singular period of cinema, perhaps the bleakest and most potent one ever.
Though Phillips has previously specialized in comedies such as The Hangover, he has made the least funny of the DC or Marvel movies. Joker is brilliantly done, searingly filmed, and so drenched in its seamy milieu that you can practically feel the roaches skittering under your feet. The score by Iceland’s Hildur Guonadottir and production design by Mark Friedberg are spectacular. But a word of caution: Many viewers will find it more nauseating than enthralling. Women in particular are likely to find Phoenix and Phillips’s relentless nastiness too much to take. Although the Bruce Wayne family makes several appearances, there is none of the usual comic-book movie catharsis, none of the leavening jokiness of a Marvel movie, no roguish charm, no Joker delightedly sticking his head out the window of a truck like a golden retriever. Phoenix’s Joker is merely a greasy, mentally unbalanced loser of the kind best avoided on trains or a dark urban block, the kind that women in particular want nothing to do with, maybe not even in a movie.
As is most often the case, Arthur’s problems are traceable to an inability to connect with women; he is alienated from the mom he still lives with (Frances Conroy), who once worked for the business leader Thomas Wayne (Brett Cullen). He yearns for a kind word from a cute single mom (Zazie Beetz) who lives down the hall in his squalid apartment building. He also has a bizarre tic: He bursts into laughter for no reason, completely out of context. Phoenix’s utterly mirthless laugh is one of the most chilling details of this amazingly detailed film.
Arthur scratches out a living in clown attire, doing odd jobs such as trying to attract customers outside of stores or doing sad gigs at children’s hospitals. When he comes to suspect that Thomas Wayne is his father, he begins to plot revenge, but meanwhile a Johnny Carson–like TV comic (De Niro) mocks a tape of his standup act, and he has an encounter with three Wall Street guys on one of those eerily desolate, graffiti-covered subway cars of the era. Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck couldn’t possibly be a worthy challenger to someone like Batman (who hasn’t been created yet), but what he has is something more chilling than cartoon super-villainy: an army of fellow incels, all of them dressed as clowns and ready to make the world burn. Arthur embodies the question of what happens when the folk-hero status of Bernhard Goetz and other vigilantes gets taken to an extreme. A Batman series set in such a morally and literally filthy city, a Sodom of diseased souls that can’t be fixed by cleaning up a few criminals, seems to beckon. What if Batman had a city full of Travis Bickle–Bernhard Goetz loners to deal with?
That factor has brought up a lot of discussion among the first audiences to see the film: By filtering the world through a Joker lens, is the film sympathetic to him? Does it tell diseased weirdos that there is an army of fellow angry losers out there who are waiting to mobilize and riot if only someone would fire the starting gun? Some critics are all but predicting that real-world violence will result from this movie. I’d say those who harbor the potential to be mass murderers have such nonlinear minds that it’s pointless to try to anticipate their reasoning, much less intentionally dilute one’s art to make it less disturbing. Joker does explore a real problem that is much on all of our minds, the problem of violent psychosis, and some will recoil from it. As a cinematic portrait of one shattered American, though, it is spellbinding.
The fact that the demented, Anti-American sicko, Robert DeNiro, is is cast member should be a good reason for everyone to give it a miss.
I absolutely hate comic book films, so this is an easy decision for me. Plus, I haven’t darkened the door of a movie theater since High School. Hollywood is complete garbage.
Give me Turner Classic Movies and Roku any day.
In many ways, a person’s spirit and mind don’t distinguish between real and fiction when a story is being told.
Secular humanists actually have used that line for decades, at the least, about something being fiction as a fig leaf for their perpetual “breaking new ground” in “breaking taboos” in entertainment.
They will always claim that they’re only reflecting society or truth and not trying to influence people and change people’s beliefs and practices, especially in order to lead them away from the Lord and into ever greater darkness, but that’s exactly what they do, and often after the fact, they admit it.
I remember after same-sex “marriage” was legalized, a liberal web site wrote about TV shows that it said changed the public’s perceptions and beliefs about homosexuality and helped paved the way to its acceptability, and among them Will and Grace and Modern Family.
All one has to do is look back over the history of entertainment in the last century and one sees that what wasn’t acceptable was depicted in entertainment first, and also committed by the “stars,” and then it became publicly acceptable.
Irreversible is a hard movie to watch.
The unsung hero was the Cherokee Chief that actually ran.
Goetz walked over to one of the wounded perps and said “You don’t look so bad, here’s another”. Even in a CC state that’ll get you in trouble.
I gather the MSM doesn’t like this picture. Neither does National Review. Does that make it good?
I had the misfortune of crossing paths with a serial killer.....Wayne Nance.
I don’t find anything entertaining about psychopaths.
But that’s just me.
If you really want a good scare, read about old Wayne.
The book is called To Kill And Kill Again.
Much scarier than fiction.
For me, ithe most disturbing was another Lynch film, “Eraserhead,” because I watched it while my wife was pregnant with our first child.
I thought the same thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_New_York_City_Subway_shooting#Shooter
One of his surviving attackers went on to rape and sodomize someone.
Clearly just another harmless Obama Son.
“o equate Goetz with a total psychopath is, itself, psychopathic.”
Well, it’s the National Review.
WFB’s once great magazine is a home for losers.
It is.
Bellucci is incredible.
But it is really rugged.
Just saw your CLASSIC tagline.
Well played!
“Blue Velvet is still the most unsettling movie I have ever seen.”
Watch Man Bites Dog. YOU WILL NOT THANK ME if you watch that movie.
I watched the whole film all the way through. By the end, I wanted every single person who had a hand in the making of that film to suffer terribly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_Bites_Dog_(film)
At Close Range with a young Sean Penn and Christopher Walken. What’s most disturbing is the fact it was based on real events. Walken’s portrayal of a genuinely evil gang leader is unsettling. It’s not “horror movie” scary — It’s just scary knowing that an individual like Walken’s character really existed in the world.
I saw Joker today at the first showing and I loved it. Joaquin Phoenix is outstanding and I was drawn in and didn’t want the movie to end.
My Son will love it.
Bernard Goetz isn’t in the same classification as the sadistic serial killers and stalkers in this piece of drek.
The assailants Bernie shot committed more offenses after the incident. It wasn’t enough to make them reassess their lives of crime.
Did you know that Monster makes water cans that so it LOOKS like the celebs onstage are chugging energy drinks when they are simply drinking water?
http://www.mtv.com/news/1887953/monster-tour-water/
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