Well, I didn’t like Joker

so I saw Joker and I was so relieved I've had so little to say about proper click Beatty popular films that I was actually in the middle of drafting a video about the dogs purpose trilogy anyway I didn't think it was very good I mean actually I guess it was sort of good I mean it like there are so many movies I like less than this there is such a heavenly glow coming off my pork I'm gonna move the camera a little bit I'm trying to be more fair about my rating scale which admittedly does just consist of good and bad so anyway since this was entertaining I would like to designate it as good kind of but I'd like to talk about it a little more the setting the time period that's all really cool finally someone is acknowledging that the old timey showtune dancing clown man aesthetic just is kind of cool the story didn't really like do anything and back up before you get really angry you'll still get angry I'm not saying oh it's boring where's Batman that's not my criticism at all this whole movie kind of reads is one of those productions that like switch directors halfway through and they didn't get to complete their vision which is not what it is at all so that's bad it has a pretty compelling set up you like Garth er at the beginning the things that make his life sad are generally pretty believable but then the world around him just becomes so comically mean and such an over-the-top way any of these weird sad incidents on their own you'd kind of be like okay but they pile up so much that it just becomes absurd a good example is the scene where his social worker tells him that he's no longer going to be able to receive therapy or check-ins or whatever those were supposed to be or medication because funding has been cut from the program she tells him this and so okay but then unprompted she's like they don't care about people like you or people like me which was kind of what the implication had been but I guess the director didn't trust us to understand what was going on and I assume that second half the or people like me was to try to kind of clumsily justify why she would volunteer this kind of angry statement we're meant to understand her frustration that she can't help people at her job the way she wants to this line doesn't work because in all of their previous meetings she's never like connected with Arthur in fact she barely listens to him which is portrayed as part of the problem most of the time when he's talking in a cut ster she's just kind of looking at him in like bemusement or boredom so why now would she say something as on-the-nose and inflammatory is this - this brooding unstable man who's about to be taken off his meds it just feels clumsy and feels like it lowers the IQ of the whole movie that they have to tell you this in such certain terms it also makes her a very weird character we can't show her being very sympathetic to Arthur or connecting with him or really helping him because in order for the thesis statement of this movie to work I guess everyone in every facet of Arthur's life has to be dismissive of him or wronged him in some way another good example is at the very beginning he's hired out from his clown talent agency to go hold a sign at his stores closeout sale there's already a lot to unpack here I'll be generous and skip right over clown talent agency I'm not a child of the 80s and for all I know clowns really did have such a heyday back then that it justified operating clout and talent agencies I don't know but if I may indulge in a brief very nitpicky sidebar why did the sign holder have to be a clown couldn't it just be any temp worker if the job is only to hold a sign and the purpose of the clown costume is just to generate attention to the person holding the sign they want just an under qualified non clown temp worker get you much better bang for your buck especially if you're trying to save money because your store is going out of business there's nowhere in this city rent clown costumes to non clowns and does this store owner not have like an unemployed nephew he could recruit for this task but I digress Arthur is holding this sign and he gets mugged by some hooligans and to add insult to injury they take his sign and they break it and then Arthur like probably a full week later gets yelled at by his boss because the store owner wants his sign back what you're going out of business fine is it a sign like that by its very nature a sign that you only need for a limited amount of time anyway I'm not auditioning for cinemasins and I'm not counting that as like a real big strike against the movie I just thought it was kind of funny my beef is very unsurprising it's the same as it always is I don't like when movies carry themselves like they're very clever and like they have big themes and then fail to follow through and actually have well-developed themes I was really pretty disappointed because I was actually pretty excited going into premise I was here for the trailers I really liked the trailers were very good can we just acknowledge that so movie had two really solid trailers fortunately I'm able to compartmentalize and when this happens I can still go back and just enjoy a good trailer even if I have like no that the movie didn't turn out being that good I could just go back and watch the trailer and like remember how excited it made me feel it's like an anime music video like it's its own art you're just like one nice trailer looks very sad if you haven't seen it and for some reason you're watching this video I assume everyone that clicked it clicked it because they liked the movie and they like to feel anger for some reason anyway on the off chance that you haven't seen it let me break this down very quickly remember in the trailer they had all these compelling shots of like the Joker dancing in a grandiose fashion and they're playing like a Bing Crosby song or something I'm 90% sure it's not Bing Crosby don't don't get on my case about this anyway you see those in the trailer and you get kind of hype because it feels like this kind of bombastic scene may be a emotional height for the Joker or a culmination of a lot of things that lead to him being on this staircase or backstage of this show and doing a grand little dance you kind of assume it's not like triumphant given the overall tone of the movie but then it's at least going to be some kind of cool standout scene but the truth is the Joker isn't dancing in like an interesting moment as part of a bigger scene he dances at several points in the movie actually in various settings and each time he does it there isn't really a build-up to it there's an unrelated scene that somehow indicates his descent into madness and then cut away to a different scene wherein he is dancing in front of a mirror or on a staircase or backstage of the talk show and you're like oh and it's it's slow motion it have fun like show tuning music the way it does in the trailer it just has very somber strings and each of these scenes is really sort of interchangeable with the other ones like it I'm very here for like slow boring character studies but it didn't feel slow and boring because it was intimate or because it was taking its time to really develop the character it felt like it was slow and boring because Todd Phillips had like a couple ideas for good scenes and then just repeated them a lot like he was trying to pad the movie sad thing happens to Arthur shot of Arthur in a dim room smoking and looking seriously at a wall shot of Arthur dancing in slow-mo but you play violin music over it also a scene of a man dancing doesn't automatically become poignant just because you slow it down and put spooky violins over it especially when you do it more than once and by the third or fourth time it starts to just feel tiresome like this could have been a half hour movie for how little ground it covers okay hold up before I go farther let me just like break down what I liked really quickly they have a couple nods to the famous Joker story I think this was all in The Killing Joke where he says that anyone can go crazy if they just have one comically exaggeratedly monumentally bad day they even have Arthur's say at one point I'm having a bad day so you know that's all there I noticed that I don't know if I liked it I noticed it I liked this one sequence where Arthur goes to a movie house and they're watching this old Charlie Chaplin movie I think it's the famous one that's like said in the Great Depression and he's like a downtrodden factory worker and there's like this major plot point where he keeps accidentally inciting these riots or uprisings I think there's a major part where he says that he'd rather be in jail like it's a comedic thing where he's trying to get thrown back in jail because the living conditions there are better than they are outside so as you've probably noticed there are enough overt big plot echoes between the two stories that that's kind of cool unfortunately if you want to look to that Charlie Chaplin movie as like an actual indicator of theme it doesn't really work because like it is a comedy it has a happy ending where I think it's just him like getting a girlfriend and going to make things work in the real world so it's it's not like a 1:1 core I just think it's kind of cool to reference an old movie but I don't think it necessarily tied the whole thing together I don't know that it was intended to though I don't know I call it like a little half-baked which isn't to say that it doesn't get points it gets like exactly half points it's half-baked you know a half baked chocolate chip cookie is still pretty good I really like the color scheme of the Joker's outfit I don't know if this particular color scheme is lifted from some already existing incarnation of the Joker but it's not familiar to me I don't think I'm used to like purple and green so I thought it was good also I'm going to praise the thing that everybody is praising that Joaquin Phoenix's performance is really good it was really good there's not a lot to say about that he does convincingly come off as somebody with some kind of social disorder and not just like a weird caricature like Eddie Redmayne and the fantastic movie sorry I can't stop coming for the fantastic beast movie and to give credit to the script as written I actually also liked a lot of the character details you see if Arthur at the beginning liked the fact that he is a little laminated card that he hands to people about his condition and the scenes of him at the comedy club where he's trying to like sit at the back and write physical notes about what topic of joke is getting laughs because he just can't understand like the nuances of comedy and can't figure out how to relate to people it's like your heart just really breaks for him in those scenes I thought those were really good there are all these scenes later that I think are going to be looked at as like his acting moments that I don't think indicate good acting I think it's all in the subtle stuff at the beginning but I'm sure everybody's gonna be like oh that scene where he's smoking and staring at the wall or that scene where he's like contorting his body a weird way to dance and it's like contorting your body and doing exhausting things exhausting does not equal good acting and I think people conflate the two a lot it's like that scene in Mamma Mia where Meryl Streep is doing the winner takes it all [Music] she's just flailing her arms and her scarf everywhere and like wailing out the song and that was a well-received performance everybody's like wow she really went for it on that song and it's like okay [Music] [Applause] [Music] I used to think that my life was a tragedy [Music] realize it's a comedy [Music] [Music] you just so what I'm saying is this was a similar performance but no I thought he was really good as Arthur even the end when I stopped liking the way Arthur was written and didn't think it was very consistent you could feel Joaquin Phoenix trying to like keep it together and feel like the same character like the fact that as he's giving his big grandiose speech on the talk show Joaquin Phoenix is still doing kind of a childish inflection I thought that was really good so the thumbs up it was good but to go back to criticism as they kind of just hinted out I didn't think there was enough of a through-line for his character the way it was written and also this is a character study so this question should be important but what are Arthur's motivations they go ahead and give Arthur lines where he says he's not political not trying to make a statement etc so if he's to be believed which I understand is conditional what does he want our best glimpses of what he wants are pretty obvious there in all of the delusions the fantasy sequences he has we can glean from the praise other characters give him what he would like to be or to be perceived as she wants the talk-show host he looks up to to validate him or almost be like a surrogate father he wants people to say that he's funny obviously but there's one that's a little weird this is the stand out it's something that his love interest says on one of the dates that he's imagining between them she looks at the newsstand and sees the headlines about all the riots that Arthur's been inspiring by shooting The Wall Street guys and she's like I think that guy's a hero so that leads us to believe that Arthur wants to be seen as a hero one would assume so that suggests that he does want to start a movement he's happy that that happened even if it wasn't in his initial goal and he wants to be like a hero or influential and I'm not saying it's bad that he contradicts this later I get that he's crazy that wasn't subtle so sure maybe he's not sure what he wants or he's being dishonest on the talk show but at the same time I'm pointing out that contradiction so all of the dude bros who defend the movie and the real IQ studies not political well there are in-text contradictions for that so they're in his fantasy sequence when his girlfriend says he's hero he even like smiles to himself it's very obvious and like I just wish that if that is what he wanted it was reflected at all in his actions like he engaged with the mob in some other way than just breaking out of the cop car seemingly by coincidence in the middle of the mob I just wish there was a straighter line between like his actions and his motivations you know like some kind of character study I get that the Joker is some kind of crazy supervillain so he doesn't have to do things that like make sense to us or that we approve of but they have to at least make some kind of internal sense and if they don't then he's not a good character to base the movie around like if you're gonna write this thing where the thing he wants to be an entertainer or get public approval it's not that hard to write a through-line from that with him being a clown to him being a crazy murderer because murderers do get attention you could make it this whole media meta commentary like he kills those guys on the subway in self-defense but then he sees that that's the first thing he's done that's gotten him positive attention and then he's like well maybe that's what I should do should just kill everybody they even have this shot where he like kills the talk-show host and then it shows all the TV monitors picking up the story of what he just did and it's like oMG he's famous and fine you know it's some kind of heavy-handed Oh media but the rest of the movie wasn't about that at all and that wasn't part of Arthur's motivation so what's the point of that so anyway that's not a thing like Arthur notices the media coverage and he like smiles about it but it doesn't drive any of his later actions each subsequent time he kills people it's for reasons totally unrelated to that usually just because they wronged him in some way and until the final kill he's not trying to get attention for it usually it happens somewhere in private and then he tries to hide that he's done it that's what's frustrating about Arthur's descent into madness is it doesn't really feel like a descent it's more like a point a point B and poignant dancing in the middle the Joker would like that his reaction to different catalysts often feels arbitrary and not like it's a gradual progression at all like one bad thing will happen and he'll respond violently and then another equally bad thing will happen he won't it's frustrating to even try to articulate this because there's such an easy fallback for anyone trying to defend this movie against any criticism they can just be like he's not supposed to make sense he's the Joker he's crazy and it's like well yeah but in a character study movie it's only interesting if you're willing to actually study the character there has to be some kind of emotional core or sense to what they're doing if you want to design a character who just kind of does stuff that doesn't make sense that's fine but not if they're the focal point of a character study because then you just don't have that much of a movie this motivation issue for me really came to a head in the Big Talk Show scene which I feel like is this scene that everybody's going to be talking about I'm already irritated by this scene because suddenly Arthur is like cool and confident and doesn't really display his nervous laughter take for much of it and sure that's supposed to convey that he's transformed or whatever but an earlier scene goes out of its way to imply that Arthur isn't really mentally ill in like a brain chemistry kind of sense and all of his psychological problems are implied to be strongly linked to this head trauma he received as a child when he was abused by his mother's abusive boyfriend which by the way is framed as his mother's fault so if this is all the result of some kind of physical lesion in his brain I don't understand how some kind of aha moment where he decides to be a murderer is going to suddenly cure his inability to present as normal in social settings but anyway this scene is where Arthur is basically saying his thesis to the audience and it's a mess it's all over the place right out the gate Arthur it's very heavy-handed he comes out and sits on the couch and tells an inappropriate joke it's like a mean-spirited knock-knock joke about someone's son dying in a drunk driving accident and they've written in this pearl clutching old lady character to sit next to Arthur and it's so heavy-handed she goes you can't joke about that what a mean offensive thing to tell jokes about and this was the worst moment of my viewing experience this was the mom I had my own arthur styled illusion in which todd phillips was sitting next to me and like nudging me with his elbow and being like do you understand see writer director Todd Phillips has been going on every interview for the last several months and like complaining about how he can't make another hangover ask the movie because people are too easily offended by his jokes these days as if there aren't a million movies getting made every day that are equally as trashy as his hangover movies and that there isn't a huge thriving audience for them I'm sorry I have no strong feelings about the hangover I haven't seen any of them they might be funny they probably are they made a lot of money it look like Bilbo Baggins it's just when I hear a comedian say nobody likes my jokes because they're offended my brain just filters that so all I hear is nobody likes my jokes which is a good warning to receive from a comedian I already thought it was weird that he was complaining about that so much because like what does that have to do with Joker the film that he's promoting and the answer is it has nothing to do with the Joker there's nothing at all to do with that Arthur's comedy career is not failing because his jokes are too offensive he's not failing because he tells off-color jokes he's failing because he has brain damage a few clips we see of his comedy performances he's bombing because he has an uncontrollable laughter tick that happens when he's nervous his jokes are inappropriate they're like baby joke book jokes they're almost tragic in how earnest and childish they are but no they have the old lady say that and then in his speech Arthur is even like you decide what's right and wrong just like you decide what's funny and what's not then it's like having this weird you can't joke about that grandmother sitting next to Arthur on the talk show and having that be the thing that kicks off this confrontation is just the moment that writer director Todd Phillips comes out of the screen like a 3d movie to complain to you about his career the whole speech is just a hot mess you can't have it both ways you can't make a movie about a mentally ill man's tragic descent into further madness and then also have an ending where he gives a big coherent speech where he's a mouthpiece for you the writer director about how nobody wanted a fourth hangover movie and then in this very same scene where you have the Joker paradeen the exact thoughts and feelings of the director as expressed in every interview you also have a line where he says what do you get when you cross a mentally ill loner with a society that ignores him and treats him like trash you get what you deserve and then he shoots the talk-show host in the head and it's like well does the writer director also believe this is this what the movies about is it in support of the Joker's shooting the host in the head because contextually it kind of seems that way so aside from the poor implications of that line I also just don't like that line I think it's messy and I will explain I just think it feels clumsy and unrealistic for a mentally ill movie character to outright state that they are mentally ill in order to give some kind of movie thesis statement I also think it's weird that even though he's like in full Joker mode and shooting people he says mentally ill instead of crazy as though not wanting to offend anybody anyway for me the only redeeming quality of that scene is that the Joker uses werewolf as a verb I love that I feel like I say this about so many movies but like what was the theme what was it about it sure presents itself as though it has something to say and it half says many things but it doesn't commit to any of them is it about the unfairness of class disparity Thomas Wayne definitely seems pretty generically evil I mean he's confronted by a seemingly nonviolent mentally ill man and he punches him in the face and he calls poor people clowns on the news that's what incites all those riots which are kind of a focal point of the movie but Arthur has that whole bit on the talk show where he insists that at least according to him he's not political didn't mean to become a symbol for that movement doesn't have strong feelings about it one way or the other but then he contradicts that by getting mad at Thomas Wayne for not caring about the little guy so I guess he does support that movement but then why not just say he supports the movement he's he has an opportunity he has a platform to say it and why not kill Thomas Wayne when he had the chance if he's violent now he kills the talk host instead for being mean to him which is a pretty feeble reason he just kills mean people that's his thing if we are meant to believe Arthur that he doesn't stand for anything which i think is kind of a big if is that what the movies about is it about how violent criminals are just unhinged shouldn't be looked to as as heroes or symbols but then why does he get to have a big speech at the end of the movie about how the world has wronged him why suddenly make him capable of delivering a coherent mission statement at the moment in the film that he's supposed to be the craziest is it literally just a deconstruction of Batman they have this line at the beginning where the news stations are talking about this epidemic of giant super rats because like no one's been cleaning up the garbage the city keeps getting worse the rats are getting bigger and meaner and scarier and then one of the hosts jokes that the way to take care of the super rats is now they're gonna bring in super cats and it's like a meta commentary on Batman like he's a band-aid solution he doesn't actually fix what's wrong you bring in a Batman to beat up the criminals you don't address why there's so much crime you don't address the class disparity in Gotham City whatever this is not a new concept if anything this is like baby's first Batman critique it's been talked to death and it's like yeah that's what happens when you try to make serious movies out of like a thing made for kids 80 years ago or whatever maybe that's part of the theme because like Arthur's and actually getting any treatment that he needs when he's sick it's not until he manifests as like violently crazy and then he's just arrested and taken away like the cat solution well why give Arthur that line where he says he found things easier when he was still locked up as if he's in favor of that solution why allude to the Charlie Chaplin movie with the same kind of plot element like is him being locked up bad or good why don't I get to watch a scene where Arthur has to ward off three-foot-long super rat with a baseball bat you promised me super rats bring me the super rat is the movie really about the underfunding of mental healthcare because even when Arthur was in treatment his doctors seemed apathetic it didn't appear to be helping and they even suggest that when he's off meds he's healthier and more Puran and more in control of himself and it's like what so is the message nobody should be on meds are they always a negative and why make a point to clarify that arthur has physical brain damage is that to also support the idea that he shouldn't be on meds and meds are bad I have that whole theme of Arthur trying to present as normal we have that line in his notebook that they zoom in on where it says the worst part about having a mental illness is people expect you to behave as if you don't so is the message to embrace the idea of people having strange tics or social disorders and not expect a degree of normalcy because that's fine but that can't be the theme because for Arthur accepting himself and liking who he is directly correlates to him murdering people so I hate to say it but given the choice between murdering people and conforming I personally would kind of prefer that Arthur conform maybe I'm alone in this the movie gives so many of its characters statements that sound like they're the theme about like what's wrong with society what needs to be fixed but then it can just as easily back away from any of them by being like well that wasn't a good guy or that characters crazy and it's like well then say something there was so much talker on this movie about how it's going to encourage mass murderers or insell murderers or whatever same thing I got and I don't know time will tell I guess but honestly this movie is so devoid of a message and such a blank slate that yeah I guess people could just make it be about whatever they want it to be and it doesn't really mean it's guilty of that it just means that it's irresponsibly vague and like weirdly unnecessary I will say this when I saw the movie I didn't get to hear any kind of audience reactions because I saw it and closed in my car at a drive-in movie theater because I didn't want to get shot but then in order to talk about this movie I felt like I had to look it up and like rewatch certain scenes primarily the talk-show scene because it's so dialogue heavy and because it feels like it's given a lot of importance by the movie so anyway I looked up a lot of like fancams of it and you can hear the audience reactions in that and I was a bit surprised there were like three different uploads of varying quality and in every scene one at the moment that he shoots the talk-show host you literally hear dudes like clapping and in one of them the guy behind the camera is even like that was great haha that was so great and it's like what [Music] [Applause] great I'm not trying to say that makes you a murderer because it definitely doesn't but it does kind of suggest that you can't follow the emotional cues of any story more complex than like Ironman like you sat through that whole Joaquin Phoenix performance and you made it to like the one hundred and ten minute mark still thinking this was some kind of feel good underdog story did you process that is a triumphant scene do you think things are gonna go well for Arthur from here what were those people even doing for the rest of the movie are they just sitting there like bored out of their skulls like what we're actions scene when Joker fight Batman I also don't like that scene at the end where it cuts to him in a bright Hospital and he's like talking to a therapist and it's ambiguous as to whether or not the whole movie happen aha I bet like at least 20 of you thought I wasn't gonna mention that and you're typing fingers were warming up you were gonna be like it doesn't have to make sense because the story might not be true of course his story was maudlin or lacked internal consistency or didn't have a point it's a story invented by a madman or depending upon my preferences a comment or maybe part of the story happened and other parts didn't happen and I can just selectively decide and keep the ones I like to get rid of the ones I didn't and that's how movies work now but no and this is what I'm talking about this is the same thing as having the Joker outright say he's not political and then making a movie with many implied political themes and then also having him do a mission statement at the end you're doing like a cop out thing and you're affording yourself enough deniability that if any part of the movie doesn't make sense you can be like well it wasn't supposed to but then why did you make your movie it's disingenuous to claim that it doesn't have any point because you made it for some reason but like you're just afraid to commit to what it is what's the point of the framing narrative and the unreliable narrator thing even if we assume this whole movie was a delusion or like willfully made up by the Joker does that inform us of something in his worldview or like give us new insight into the story that might have even been an interesting framing narrative they set it up earlier or like did cutaways to it where he's talking to the therapist Princess Bride style and then maybe through the telling of the story you can get some kind of hint of maybe what would compel the Joker to make it up like what his it's our what what emotional impact he's trying to have or like maybe even the therapist could start noticing inconsistencies in the story or like commenting on them to make the audience start to doubt themselves and doubt the truth of what they're seen like how cool would it be if you have this love interest character the Sophie character and she's like in the movie and then at the halfway point suddenly she's still there but everybody's calling her Cheryl and like you notice or like the therapist notice and it's like I thought her name was Sophie what did you make that person up what's going on I don't know I feel like if you already decide that you want your framing narrative to be crazy guy telling the story there are ways to own it and have it improve the story in some way but saving it for the very end like it's supposed to be some kind of big shocking twist reveal it just falls flat because this is just not a good twist like the story is about a mentally ill character he's already had delusions and the rest of the story so like you can see it coming from a mile away and also like that's been done so many times it's just so old hat is that mixing my metaphors to say old hat no it's like an old hat that you can see from miles away the biggest oldest hat and in this instance it feels like an even bigger cop-out than it would be in any other movie if the narrative had served to convince you of some very specific theme or some very specific characterization of the Joker to get attached to it might have kind of worked as like a slap in the face to find out he's either malicious or crazy and it's not true but instead the rest of its so unfocused you're just kind of like okay like for example if the Joker's actions had followed some kind of internal logic and they had been presented in a way where they seemed to us to make sense in his very specific situation like oh he was a victim of circumstance oh he's just misunderstood he had no choice and the movies totally taken you in like you're really feeling for the Joker then at the end you're like oh he really pulled the wool over our eyes but instead it's just a story told by a crazy man wherein he acts like a crazy man look doc this may shock you because I'm in an asylum for the criminally insane but my origin story is I was insane and then I became a criminal you're like alright I guess that checks out ultimately if you do believe that everything that Joker is saying is true you have just been convinced that the Joker is crazy and if you don't believe that the story is true then the story has just informed you that the Joker is crazy why give the story of framing narrative is like a twist ending if it literally doesn't matter I guess it was a cool last line I mean I can't begrudge it that it was a cool last line this movie actually had a lot of cool lines like just good one-liners but also most of them were in the trailer trailers had better music - I guess that's my review is like if you saw the trailers and you were intrigued then like just re-watch the trailers it's a better experience than watching the whole movie doesn't take as long it's free it's fine and if you're like me and you just like to sit in the safety of your own car and eat movie theater popcorn and then like knock yourself out you I'm not gonna be too hard on it because I don't think it was meant to be that shocking of a twist but they have that reveal midway through where they find out that all of the Joker's dates with Sophie have been like delusions or daydreams or something and like dude I promise you every woman in the theater knew it was fake as soon as she agreed to a first date where she went to watch him do stand-up comedy at an open mic night do you know how many years of goodwill you have to build up for me to go watch you do stand-up comedy at an open mic night

Channel: Jenny Nicholson

Views: 1,187,679

Rating: 4.1530118 out of 5

Keywords: todd phillips, spoilers

Id: 0tsdOo_wO44

Length: 33min 53sec (2033 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 17 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Collin_the_doodle]

Overlaying the joker dialogue on top of mama mia was a great editing choice that deserves accolades.

[u/KyloTennant]

The Joker is an anti capitalist movie whether or not the director intended it to be, and if you can't see that they you really need to get your eyes checked

[u/lenyxlol]

Jack Saint, Maria, & Damon analyze Joker from an explicitly leftist perspective if that's what you're looking for, each with a different take on the movie and would recommend all three. Not to say this video isn't good, just that it isn't really coming from a Marxist point of view.

[u/beer30]

TL;DR: I like Jenny, but dislike her take here. She doesn't see the narrative from a "society" viewpoint. Also I recommend Jack Saint's video on the Joker: https://youtu.be/4PAVr4V1suY

I like Jenny as a YouTuber, but I don't really agree with her take here.

The Joker is very much an anti-status quo movie. Admittedly, that does open it to both alt-right and leftist takes in what you see as the Joker being crazy vs him being correct, but I do think the leftist throughline is stronger.

I really see The Joker as getting to the heart of the same thing the "We live in a society" meme gets at. By setting the movie during the NYC garbage strike and the in-text commentary they clearly establish that society is fraying, and separating into the haves and the have-nots. People like Thomas Wayne and Murray joke about the situation and imply that people should get over it and pull themselves up by their bootstraps, but then they clearly establish how Arthur and most of the people he interacts with are struggling to get by and have no bandwidth for more obstacles in their lives.

The Joker shows people being marginalized by society, and the moralizing that the haves within that society do to justify why they're doing well when others aren't. It also provides a subtle critique of the movements that oppose the status quo by having the riots be crystallized by Arthur's murder of the Wall Street businessmen, in that at least a segment of these rioters come to view Arthur as the leader of their movement, but Arthur himself has been shown to be mentally ill, delusional and not exactly the best choice to lead people to a better society.

The thing that most stands out to me as mistaken about Jenny's take is the social worker saying, "They don't care about people like you, or people like me." She criticizes it for the social worker not actually seeming to care about Arthur, but I really see this in a few different ways: as pointing toward society not allowing people to empathize with one another, as the social worker recognizing Arthur as an untrustworthy person (and unreliable narrator), and the social worker could also mean a collective "you" and not Arthur in particular.

I much more agree with Jack Saint's video on The Joker: https://youtu.be/4PAVr4V1suY

[u/jofrazzer]

I like Jenny Nicholson but girl those lights are too bright she looks like voldemort

[u/DarthVamor]

Has a LEFTIST MYSELF I didn't see anything that felt like it was against capitalism. Seem to be addressing Neoliberalism more than anything and I agree the film is open ended and to me that's the problem with choosing the Joker has the character for the film. Joker is a Nihilist with a dash of Kirgargard spinkled in at least the comic book version and what makes his interesting is his relationship with Batman/ Bruce Wayne or Batman's legend.

The film didn't present Bruce Wayne has bad, in this film Bruce Wayne is just had miserable it's why Arthur tries to cheer him up and he is playing by HIMSELF. So imo it felt like Todd Phillips was saying even if Bruce Wayne was privaleged was he really happy being raised by a father like Thomas Wayne in this version? Nope doesn't look like it he too is isolated. I think the film is a masterpiece and wonderfully made story about a man losing his grip on reality. But if Todd Phillips really wanted a more political film the character would've been better suited if it was Harvey Dent / Two-Face becoming a vigilante and murdering the corrupt etc.

Two-Face begins seeing things in binary and could've been a great allegory to how someone can fall into right wing thinking in duality based on a coin toss. Two-Face feels like a better character to address modern political corruption we see in the US etc as well has Neoliberalism.

[u/PM_ME_MICHAEL_STIPE]

I haven't seen the movie but the responses I've seen seem to me that it doesn't make sense unless you have an ideology. Not even just a leftist ideology, but any ideology that accounts for why people might be alienated.

I like Jenny a lot but I don't think she's hiding her love for the Immortal Science in order to merely appear non-political. There were some ideological things in Trigger Warning that she didn't seem to get either, though it's been a long time since I've watched that video.

[u/asdtyyhfh]

Leftists need to understand that anti capitalist themes doesn't make things not toxic or fascist. The Trump campaign had anti capitalist themes.

An inciting incident of the movie was a white man being attacked by teens of color. It glorified toxic white male violence and then blamed it on the mentally ill. If you want to make this movie representative of the left you are throwing minorities and the mentally ill under a bus.

[u/DarthVamor]

Well another problem is just the Joker himself he is explicitly the only Batman villain where it's clear he is a monster. Every other Batman villain isn't like that that's why Joker is unique out of his rouges.