After I read this review I passed.
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Meanwhile, I thought the movie was perfectly OK. Not an amazing masterpiece for the ages, but not awful in any way at all. Not boring either.
The pre-release hysteria had been so over-the-top, so polarizing, and played so hard along community fault lines, that I’m finding that at this point people’s opinions about the movie are more about their perception of its audience, about what they assume other people think of it, and not the actual movie itself. That’s why it’s either WORTHLESS AWFUL SHIT or AMAZING PIECE OF GENIUS ART.
It’s the perfect example of that particular phenomenon where most people go see a movie with expectations already in place, and they’ll walk out feeling validated, regardless of the qualities of the actual movie. If you go watch it expecting an incel mass shooter apology that was unnecessary and shouldn’t have been made, then that’s what you’re going to take away from it. If you go watch it so you can confirm that it is indeed a high art masterpiece that is too much for the bleeding heart leftists to handle, and that makes it a perfect movie for you to champion and trigger the libs with, then that’s what you’re going to take away from it. Meanwhile, in actuality, the movie is neither. (And I still don’t get how incels came into the picture in the first place.)
(It’s kind of like the people who, having never seen a Scorsese movie before reading his comments on Marvel movies, went and watched Scorsese movies like “he looks down on our favorite movies? let’s see how good his movies are”, and walked away with “ugh, these are shit, why is this guy so highly regarded?!”)
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I’d say it looks great, in that it is a pastiche of Martin Scorsese films from the 1970s. However, I didn’t feel that the film had any kind of coherent message. I got to the end of it, and sat in the cinema thinking, “What was that all about?”
I’ve heard that the director actually wanted to do a remake of “King of Comedy”, and it really shows. It is a bit like a Zach Snyder film, in that it pays great attention to surface effect and I couldn’t find much depth.
Joaquin Phoenix really throws himself in to the role.
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It is, yes. As long as you don’t go into it looking for validation for your already existing expectations of it, anyway. I thought it was perfectly fine. It had some dodgy moments and some great moments, great performances, great visuals, and I think its overall “message” such as it is, was overall mostly well-conveyed, it just wasn’t particularly clear-cut, and it wasn’t quite without some issues depending on one’s interpretation thereof.
For disclosure though, I wasn’t interested in any kind of Batman/DC/origin story aspect, so if it failed on those accounts it didn’t bother me.
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I don’t think there was supposed to be a clear-cut message, other than “so yeah, this is the world of way too many people, and it’s fairly shitty, for them and potentially for everyone else, too, so hey, how about becoming a bit more decent to one another before things get to a point of no return.”
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It is the kind of edgelord flourish I’d expect from Mark “Such Grim, Much Dark” Millar.
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If one is going to spend $50-70 million on production, plus a pile more on promotion and distribution, I think it might be worth spending some money on getting a subtext. 
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So just like the rest of the movie then?
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Why, though? What message and subtext it had was enough for it to say what it wanted to say. This is of course subjective, but personally I don’t need a movie to have a clear-cut message, or to be an allegory, or to suggest solutions or just to tell me what exactly I should think about a particular issue (and I don’t mean this in a negative way). Sometimes a movie just wants to tell a story, present us with characters doing stuff in a given situation, and make us think about it and draw conclusions. And that is fine.
I saw Joker and Ad Astra back to back, two very different movies. Ad Astra had plenty of subtext that resonated very deeply with me and made me think a lot (not the obvious daddy issues part, the part about loneliness, alienation, desperation and selfishness), while Joker wasn’t subtle whatsoever but still it touched something in me that made me appreciate it overall. As far as I’m concerned both movies worked.
Obviously this is just me and my subjective interpretations, and everyone’s free to draw their conclusions about my taste in movies (or lack of it, if you will). But I’m not going to dump on a movie I didn’t dislike at all.
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I saw it with high hopes and was greatly disappointed.
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I assume you mean superhero monikers, and not ordinary human surnames? Like, it wouldn’t exclude a biopic on Morgan Freeman?
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Thank the horus heresy for birthing it
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Why is the opinion of Kevin Smith worth mentioning? His trade mark; wearing a ball cap backwards , keeping eyebrows raised and nodding a million times a minute.
Admitting my opinion doesnt matter but atlest im not trying keep the general public aware of my eyebrow raising abilities.
Because he once made a excellent nature documentary about Odobenus rosmarus?
The comments were more interesting than the article.
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With that alternate ending that last part is quite literal.
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Wasn’t there an alternate storyline where young Bruce Wayne set his parents up, hiring a hitman to kill them in an alley so he could take over the Wayne fortune?
So, my takeaway from the very last scene was that it had an abrupt tonal shift toward slapstick.
That was the moment, and not the scene with Murray, that Fleck truly becomes the Joker, Clown Prince of Crime and whatnot. The moment he truly and finally snapped, and departed our reality for good. I thought it was a wonderful little capstone.
