ARMOND TRASHES JOCKER

>Joker Is a Punishingly Self-Serious Mishmash of Borrowed Parts

>Todd Phillips’s Joker is a film that might have been dreamed up by one of the cynical bros at the center of the director’s Hangover trilogy during a blacked-out stupor. Not so much part of Warner Bros.’s ongoing Batman series as adjacent to it, Joker imagines a Gotham City that looks suspiciously like Manhattan in the early ‘80s, with crime-ridden streets, movie titles like Blow Out and Zorro, The Gay Blade on marquees, and trash piling up due to a garbage strike. The air is stinking with gloom and decay, and among the morbidly downcast populace is Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), our Clown Prince of Crime to Be.

>Fleck is a skeleton-thin jester who works the sidewalks and hospital wards while dreaming of stand-up stardom, and he gets viciously beat up by a group of delinquents in the film’s first scene. As he lays bleeding in a scum-soaked alley, the prop flower on his lapel drips out a pathetic, pissy stream of water. It would be funny if the direction and framing wasn’t so arrogantly humorless. “This is serious,” Phillips seems to be saying, as if he’s prosaically altered the anarchic mantra (“Why so serious?!?”) of Heath Ledger’s Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. Fleck, at one of his many low points, does something similar to the “Don’t Forget to Laugh” sign in his workplace, blacking out “Forget to” with a marker so that it now reads “Don’t Laugh.” His action sums up Joker itself, which is made almost entirely out of the preexisting parts of other films, the connections reworked just enough to avoid outright plagiarism, and the results then slathered in a patina of paranoiac solemnity.

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BASED

I love this lil nigga like you wouldn't believe

>The cinematic influences here have been well-documented, long before the film bafflingly took top prize at the recent Venice Film Festival. A little Taxi Driver, a little King of Comedy, with Robert De Niro making the Scorsese connection explicit as Murray Franklin, an officious late-night talk show host who’s Fleck’s idol and, eventually, his bête noire. A sequence of Bernie Goetz-esque vigilante violence concludes like The French Connection, while the loner Fleck’s relationship with his dotty mother, Penny (Frances Conroy), recalls a much superior Phoenix vehicle, Lynne Ramsay’s dissociative revenge thriller You Were Never Really Here.

>Phillips further tarts up his jaundiced vision with an ironic glimpse of a cheery Fred Astaire dance number on TV, a you-gotta-be-kidding-me needle-drop of the Stephen Sondheim perennial “Send in the Clowns,” and a contemptuous movie-theater set piece during which the affluent pricks Fleck eventually rails against watch Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. Among the heartless one-per-centers in attendance is billionaire Thomas Wayne (Brett Cullen), and if you think his son, Bruce (Dante Pereira-Olson), doesn’t somehow figure in all the combustible drama that follows then I’ve got an all-access Comic-Con badge to sell you.

Base

>Fears that Fleck and his very slowly revealed alter-ego would be incel manifestos made flesh are unfounded. Despite vague stabs at currency, such as a horde of clown-masked protestors that could be likened to Occupy or Antifa, the fairly explicit period setting pretty much neutralizes any significant link Joker has with our tumultuous present. The violence, when it comes, is probably the film’s most “now” element. It’s as head-smashingly graphic as Tim Miller’s Deadpool, and about as soul-numbing. Though it’s obvious Phillips thinks he’s harking back to Taxi Driver’s Grand Guignol expressionism, referencing that film’s finger-gun-to-the-head moment several times over, and imitating its reality-blurring qualities via Fleck’s interactions with his kindly neighbor, Sophie Dumond (Zazie Beetz).

>This brings us to Phoenix’s superficially impressive, yet incongruous Method performance, an awe-inducing black hole at the center of a film that’s otherwise all grubby surface. Fleck laughs at inopportune times due to a neurological condition. He does little soft-shoes and contorts his emaciated body into discomfiting, joint-cracking positions. This is probably the most pointless mass-weight loss—Phoenix took off a staggering 50-plus pounds for the role—since Christian Bale went cadaverous for Brad Anderson’s The Machinist.

cont.

fake news

Based Armond "Honorary" White.

>WORDS WORDS WORDS WORDS
literally retard tier writing.

The king has spoken. Phillips and co are hacks.