Joker Review

After a few weeks of buffering (what I’ve taken to calling the practice of spending weeks-long stretches of Tuesdays with Cory posts discussing old streams and retrospectives), we finally have some live ones on tap: next week I’ll be talking about El Camino, which just dropped on Netflix last week, and the week after that I’ll be talking about my experience with Midsommar (alright, fine, that one’s not particularly new, but it just hit the rental cycle last week and so I’m calling it new-ish at least) in honor of the approaching Halloween holiday.  This week, though, I’m going to break down a recent release that I actually made a pilgrimage to my local theater to see: Joker.  The latest comic book adaptation to add to the massive pile is clearly one that’s unique in its approach to its ubiquitous and notorious titular subject, and with director Todd Phillips (The Hangover, Due Date) making some real waves in the past few weeks about how humor apparently isn’t OK anymore (LOL) along with Joker‘s apparent resonance with TIFF crowds a while back, this feels like the one I should tackle first.

Murray Franklin: seemingly an amalgam of all late-night talk show hosts, played by Robert De Niro and designed (I think) to embody societal vanity.

What you need to know: visually, Joker is at least fine, and perhaps even beautiful at times, though it spends a lot of its money shots on slow-motion interpretive dance sequences and nauseating displays of varying intensity.  Tonally, it’s black as night, awkward, unsettling, and at its height, disturbing.  To say the least, it’s not a movie you’ll leave the theater feeling remotely good after watching, and that’s 100% by design.  The pacing is slow, with gruesome and visceral (though also effective) moments of violence shaking you awake after long stretches in which not a lot of non-depressing action happens.  Humor-wise, Joker has its moments, as you’d possibly expect from a movie titled as such, but for the most part any attempts at getting a laugh are purposefully hard to watch.  There’s also definitely an American Psycho-like quality to almost everything; that is to say, the film’s protagonist, an anti-hero by all accounts if you could even get away with calling him a hero of any kind, is clearly guilty of heinous crimes throughout and conveys as much through appearing visibly guilty and troubled at essentially all times – yet no one sees him.  As you can perhaps imagine, this is more than likely in keeping with the film’s theme (as was the case in American Psycho), and is given a voice with a line at around the midpoint of the movie (“people are starting to notice”).

Yikes.

Because ironically, I’d say that Joker isn’t primarily about the Joker at all, nor is it about the origin of a character that’s typically depicted as something of a criminal savant – it’s about the various troubles of today’s society and its treatment (or non-treatment, to perhaps put it more aptly) of people with mental illnesses and, more generally, people who are left feeling disenfranchised by life itself.  As much as Todd Phillips doesn’t seem to want to admit it, it’s also a film that possesses at least an undertone of political-mindedness, if only to say that as a governed populace we all need to do better than not acknowledging major issues that are very clearly there.  Giving a stark face to these issues is Joaquin Phoenix, who indeed gives what might be considered the performance of a lifetime as the crown prince of crime, finding a way to bring a fresh perspective to the character in his collaboration with Phillips that’s worthy of Oscar consideration to say the least, if even just for the laugh, which is a chillingly stifled mix of mirth and pain while possessing the high pitch that often serves as the character’s calling card.  He’s menacing for sure, though not remotely as cagey or cerebral as any of the past renditions of the Joker, and for that he gets docked a few points, but I’m willing to cut Phoenix some slack as he also clearly starved himself for the role to get himself to a point that’s physically hard to look at.  Mostly, I just hope he’s OK.

How does Arthur Fleck get so trim? Why, gun Pilates of course.

My main problem with Joker is that it features elements that go back on its own pervasive promise to be different.  It takes what often seem like great pains to separate itself from the DCEU label (refraining to even show the logo until after the end credits), and instead of taking the customary approach of framing the Joker as the criminal mastermind that he typically is, if even in a budding state, it instead portrays him as someone who kind of falls ass-backwards into notoriety and becomes a criminal and revolutionary symbol more or less on accident (I don’t agree with this depiction one iota, as to me the Joker is the yin to Batman’s world’s-greatest-detective yang, and that’s what makes him great, but that’s a whole other ball of wax).  This is what makes Joker‘s attempts to worm its way back into Batman territory – featuring the death of the Waynes at the end (in a totally non-canonical way, I’ll add) being the prime example – jarring.  It’s one of a few stumbles relating to the insistence of involving the Waynes that sticks out, with the other being a subplot about Arthur Fleck potentially being a Wayne himself –  this winds up frustrating in its conclusion and also raises a lot of dubious questions about plausibility – namely, why would Penny Fleck ever regain custody of that child?  Perhaps, though, seeming systemic flaws like these – and like a clearly sick man being refused medications because of funding cuts – are what Joker aims to highlight.

Get ready for a lot of this – slow motion hand-wavy “dancing.”

There are other plotting conundrums besides these, and all in all Joker ends up with a story that doesn’t feel particularly tight, gracefully featuring an ambiguous ending that more than likely signals no sequel, and no return of this rendition of the character to any future DCEU flicks.  What Joker is in its sole outing is a mix of shots of Phoenix slow dancing with himself, shots of Phoenix running wildly between places and doing a lot of arm-flailing, shots of someone on the ground being literally kicked while they’re down (maybe be a little more subtle with your metaphors, Mr. Phillips), shots of Phoenix emptying a fridge and climbing into it for what seems like no reason, and shots of Phoenix interacting mildly with Zazie Beetz in a predictable delusion and an overall vignette that makes you wonder why such an up-and-coming actress would take the part.  And sure, watching Arthur Fleck’s attempts to be seen in the world – be it through gut-wrenchingly awful stand-up comedy or incendiary and graphic violence – is usually compelling, but it’s hard for me to claim that the dramatic work of the film’s lead actor has Joker in anything above second gear for the majority.

Me when I go grocery shopping and see that Lunchables are on sale.

And so, as great as Phoenix is in the title role, and as artistic as Joker can occasionally be, the late Heath Ledger still holds the surely-coveted title of Tuesdays with Cory’s Best Joker, and The Dark Knight still holds the title of Best Batman Movie.  At bare minimum, Phillips’ creation deserves credit for being different in a genre that Martin Scorsese recently described as a theme park (if this movie is a theme park, it’s certainly not one I’d ever want to go to, but then again I’m not really a fan of theme parks in general), and his work admirably makes use of a comic book character and a comic book label to get a whole lot of asses into seats to see a movie that takes on challenging themes that people would likely otherwise never see, but at the end of the day Joker lacks much substance outside of an empty insistence (albeit maybe true) that the world is as dark a place as ever.  While it’s no doubt a daring film and an occasionally powerful character study, I think it’s as simple in this case as saying that Joker just wasn’t for me, and at the very least it also seems to be a movie that fancies itself more highbrow than it actually is.

Brightburn Review

As another filmgoing summer draws to a close (looking at my summer preview post, it looks like Hobbs & Shaw – an absolutely ridiculous over-the-top action flick that I reviewed last week – was where I drew the line between summer and fall, at least cinematically speaking) I’m trying to raise my tally of dog-day blockbusters that I can claim to have seen, and Brightburn – a movie that I actually rented on Google Play, given that it came out in theaters way back in May – is my latest effort on that front.  My viewing of the suspense-horror film designed to put an interesting and antagonistic twist on a thinly veiled Superman character puts me at 9/19 on the summer – just a hair under fifty percent, and looking back at my list, it looks like a lot of the films on that list that I neglected to see (Aladdin, Lion King, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Dark Phoenix, and Men in Black: International, to name a few) are ones that I’m glad to have missed.  As for the films on the list that I have seen, I’d rank Brightburn, which I’ll be discussing for the remainder of this post, fairly low among them, if not dead last.  They can’t all be winners.

Me when I see that the machine that I want to use at the gym is taken.

The premise of Brightburn holds a lot of promise, and in the age of billion-dollar superhero bonanzas asks the possibly much more subdued question “what if Superman turned out to be a bad guy, or even just not that good a guy?”  What I think Brightburn does right – both in the sense of answering this question and in the sense of differing itself from, and perhaps even subverting, the comic-book genre – is keep the sets small and the stakes low.  Looking at its overall execution from this angle, I think what the film yearns to be more than a blockbuster is a more thoughtful study on the characters involved in answering such a question – the boy himself and his parents, mostly – with the horror-suspense elements coming from things taking a turn opposite that of the conventional “this extremely powerful being is here to help us” take.  The problem – well, the main problem; I’d say there are quite a few problems with Brightburn – is that the film then inexplicably favors turning on the blood faucets over addressing its own dramatic question with any subtlety, especially in the last twenty or so minutes.  I know that in a genre like this, subtlety is rare – and in fact, a lack of subtlety in the violence shown in the trailer is probably what drew people to Brightburn in the first place – but it’s something I certainly would have liked more than the final result, which at times employs a grade of CGI to achieve its body count that I feel is subpar.

A tip for Mr. Breyer in the future – maybe don’t leave such a recognizable calling card at the scenes of your heinous crimes.

Throughout the course of Brandon Breyer’s possibly puberty-driven descent into evil, we find both moments that are genuine fun and moments that are funny when they aren’t supposed to be, eliciting guffaws out of me during sequences that were probably supposed to be quite serious, though this isn’t altogether uncommon of the horror genre in general in my case.  For lack of a better term, it’s the definition of a mixed bag, and that bag sadly also isn’t devoid of holes (plot holes, to be specific – this is especially true of the end, which I’ve already mentioned isn’t great).  I don’t think the problem is necessarily the writing – while it’s painfully light on characterization and occasionally features clunky exposition crammed into a few lines that’s probably more deserving of an entire scene, the dialogue is for the most part good, and the bones of the story are in the right places.  For that reason, it’s a bit challenging for me to diagnose what my exact issues with Brightburn are, but a quick look at Rotten Tomatoes shows that I’m not remotely alone in the feeling that the film’s promise winds up squandered – even the positive reviews that the film have gotten claim as much.  With that said, I know that in my case the quality of the performances was a contributing factor in nearly any lack of enjoyment that I experienced.

This dream sequence near the middle of the movie was maybe the high point in terms of non-jump-scare horror.

As the cast of Brightburn goes, there are a few recognizable names – namely David “Roy From The Office” Denman, who by the way is a brick house of a man in this movie, and Elizabeth Banks, who both play the parents of the film’s central child-alien figure – but their performances could most aptly be described as unimpressive, and the obviously pivotal role of said child-alien Brandon Breyer is played by Jackson A. Dunn in a way that I wish was forgettable but is instead memorable for all the wrong reasons.  But Michael Rooker has a fun Alex Jones-y cameo at the end that’s probably borne entirely by his relationship with producer James Gunn, and also appearing briefly is Matt Jones, who some of you may (like me) know him as Badger from Breaking Bad, and who is featured in arguably the film’s most fun sequence, so it’s not all bad.  I’d say that Jones is one of the only actors in Brightburn who actually seems care about what he’s doing/making, and he makes the most of minimal screentime, right down to his final scene, which ends in an overly grisly demise.  Which, by the way, to any movie producers/writers/directors out there who for some reason read this digital rag: I think there are some situations in which the use of gore for dramatic effect and maybe even shock value is completely appropriate, but with that said, I don’t think there are any prospective Brightburn audience members who wanted to see a grown man’s jaw get essentially ripped off, and for that matter, I doubt they wanted to spend any time watching said man try frantically to keep the lower half of his face attached.  To that end, I also don’t think anyone wants to see a woman pull a piece of broken glass out of her own eyeball, but hey, it’s not like this is supposed to be a family film, and at the end of the day this is just one moderately squeamish guy’s opinion.

David Denman preparing for his amazing performance in the incredible “sex talk” scene.  It might be worth watching Brightburn just to experience the weapons-grade awkwardness on display here.

When I look back on my viewing of Brightburn, I think what I feel most strongly is a sense of missed opportunity, given that it’s a well-intentioned film with a strong premise that has a reasonable amount of powerful names attached to it.  Due to the strong inkling of a sequel (or maybe even more than one, unless there’s grappling with DC for the rights to turn what are very obviously pastiches of their noble heroes into evildoers), I’m curious to see if future films in this vein won’t be largely undone by poor acting and occasional CGI choices that I’m willing to deem unforgivable.  In the meantime, what I have to report about this potential franchise-starter – and every studio is after franchise-starting IP these days instead of higher-quality standalones, sadly – is that it’s still a reasonable amount of horror-driven fun in spite of its clear execution flaws.  A similar, albeit now-aging film that’s created with a similar intent is pre-Fantastic Four Josh Trank‘s Chronicle (2012), and I’d certainly recommend that over this, provided you can stomach a found-footage format.

Justice League Review

In spite of the fact that I quite literally fell asleep while watching Batman v. Superman, and that I have yet to see Suicide Squad, I somehow felt at least semi-obligated to see Justice League, and so I joined the crowds and went this past weekend.  As a result of that, I’m about to type a bit of a rant, adding my own voice to the chorus of misgivings about the DC universe’s latest flop.  As usual, I’ll try to keep it light in terms of spoilers.

The Justice League 2017 yearbook photo.

Starting with the extremely limited good: as a lover of good fight scenes, this is a difficult review/rant to write, as the action scenes in Justice League come off as incredibly competent overall.  While lacking the fast-paced hand-to-hand electricity of, say, Marvel’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier (seriously, check out this, and this), the visual style and use of slo-mo gives the fighting a similar feel to that of Wonder Woman (which I lauded here), and while the use of the Flash and Cyborg might not be as nifty as the filmmakers expected the result to be, the coolness and wow factor is there overall, with one real exception.  Well, two exceptions.

Ben Affleck returns as a largely ineffectual and somewhat derpy Batman.

First: Batman.  While Ben Affleck certainly isn’t bad as Bruce Wayne, he’s hardly good either, and on the whole I’d describe him as forgettable.  Setting his performance aside for a moment, though, the problem that looms even larger is the role Batman is forced to play in the central conflict of Justice League.  I’m not the biggest comic book fan in the world, and so I’m not sure if these are situations into which Batman is typically thrust, but his inclusion in grandiose cosmic fights against demi-gods, aliens, and various other mythical creatures comes off as silly, and in many cases his role in the fights themselves is way too minimal for such a central character (and arguably the Justice League’s leader) to have.  Even considering the film’s addressing of this quandary with the tongue-in-cheek “my superpower is that I’m rich” line early on, the scale oftentimes seems simply too large for the Dark Knight to operate effectively in, and watching him helplessly stealing an alien’s gun and shooting at the bad guys with it during Justice League’s pivotal ending scene just made me long for the simpler days of Nolan and Bale’s more grounded but more potent Batman (also addressed by Justice League in Alfred’s line about wind-up penguins).

Second: Aquaman.  With perhaps the most disappointing overall character arc, the most unexplained and unintelligible abilities, and saturated with some of the film’s many misses as far as humor goes, Jason Momoa’s rendition of Arthur Curry fell completely flat, though arguably not through any fault of the actor’s.  For starters, save one underwater scene, Curry operates entirely on land throughout the film.

One of the few scenes in which Aquaman is actually in water, which, you know, makes sense.

What?

I can understand wanting to use Aquaman, and I can understand the unique take on him being attempted, but what this take needs to do is at least try to make sense.  I was (perhaps mistakenly) under the impression that Aquaman and his fellow Atlanteans drew their godlike powers from the ocean, or being in the ocean, and I highly doubt I was the only one mystified by the DCEU’s Aquaman-related choices in this respect.  Watching him sky-surf a deceased bug man into the roof of a building and emerge unscathed, holding a super out-of-place-looking trident, is hardly what I envisioned.

Speaking more generally, another thing Justice League suffers from is a lack of connection to the characters.  While skipping origin stories can work (see Spider-Man: Homecoming), it can only work when the audience is already familiar with the characters being introduced.  Having never really been featured on the big screen, Cyborg is simply not on a level playing field with Peter Parker in this regard, and throughout Justice League I found myself wondering why I was even supposed to care what happened to Victor Stone if I barely knew who he was.  While other new characters get slightly more in the way of backstory (namely the Flash), Justice League feels incredibly rushed overall in this regard.  It knows it has 2 hours to get from Point A to Point B, and it differs greatly in the careful world-building of the MCU in that it seems to know that it’s late to the superhero movie party.  The Avengers was as great as it was because it brought together a team of heroes that had already been well-established in individual films.  Conversely, DC opted to skip this chore, and Justice League suffers greatly for it.

Wonder Woman and two other guys.

It’s not all bad, to be fair – Gal Gadot‘s Wonder Woman, who we already know and love, is as great and captivating as ever, especially in her opening scene and in basically all fights.  The future is similarly bright for Ezra Miller’s Barry Allen, who is sure to please audiences in a standalone film where his campy antics don’t clash so horribly with the ostensibly dark tone DC (and mostly Batman) continues to propagate.  In such an environment, Miller’s comedic brushstrokes just seemed forced, whereas they would have been more than welcome in a previous, more lighthearted origin story, or in any Marvel (or non-DC in general) joint.

While he could be smashing baddies with super speed, Barry Allen instead decides to playfully boop Wonder Woman’s sword.

Truly the most damning aspect of Justice League, though, is its absolutely preposterous dialogue, which ranges from the shameless and repeated use of badass hero colloquialisms (basically Batman in any fight scene) to the just plain weird (see literally any interaction between Henry Cavill’s Clark Kent and Amy Adams’ Lois Lane, namely the historically bad and completely pointless “you smell good” scene).  At times, the dialogue felt as though it wasn’t written, but instead was being uttered live by a seven-year old playing with Justice League action figures, which adds to the overall plastic feeling of the whole endeavor.  The good news is that there are plenty of unnecessary-feeling scenes to plop this dialogue into, and mixing this with the breathlessly rushed pacing results in an uneven and strange combination of a movie, the tone of which seems hopelessly confused throughout.

For now, what continues to ring true is that the DC cinematic universe remains the rudderless trust-fund kid of Hollywood franchises – it’s sitting on a veritable mountain of movie gold, but it’s either incapable or unwilling (or both) to capitalize on it.  Maybe – just maybe – the departure of Ben Affleck (and the subsequent rumored arrival of Jake Gyllenhaal) can get this crazy train back on track, but until then, the Warner Bros. tale of box-office woes appears doomed to continue.

Review: Wonder Woman

As the summer movie season winds down, I decided this past weekend to finally endorse the sole remaining stalwart bastion of the early-summer blockbuster parade and hit the theater to see Wonder Woman, and I wanted to leave a few thoughts on my experience here.

First off, I want to say that I was surprised by the number of people present in the theater, given that Wonder Woman had been initially released way back in June, exactly 3 months beforehand.  While the theater wasn’t sold out, and wasn’t exactly a megaplex either, it was definitely crowded, which for such a holdout has to be considered at least a mild achievement.  I had read in an article published on the first of the month that the Patty Jenkins-helmed DC venture had become the third-highest grossing Warner Bros. release ever (behind two other mammoth DC hits, Christopher Nolan‘s The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises), but there’s a different between reading those words and seeing the evidence of the numbers in the form of a crowd.

Gal Gadot’s “I run the summer 2017 box office” face.  Also her Wonder Woman face.

Second off, when talking about this movie, I’m planning on drawing what I think are cogent parallels to the MCU, so if you’re a DC fanboy who has a problem with that – well, tough.  Having seen almost every comic book movie that has come out in the past ten years (only Thor: The Dark World, Suicide Squad, and Fox’s absolute stinker Fantastic Four have slipped through my fingers, as far as I’m aware), and having personally fallen asleep during both Man of Steel (which I expected more from, given Nolan’s production involvement) and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, I feel at least remotely qualified to discuss Wonder Woman in such context.

The two MCU installments that can almost immediately be compared to Wonder Woman, for better or for worse, are Captain America: The First Avenger – comparable largely because of its real-world historic setting – and Thor, with its similar discussion of the merits and mythos of gods and demigods living and fighting amongst lesser men and women.  Regarding comparisons with the first, I simply found Wonder Woman to be a far more fun version of Captain America in terms of the World War I hijinks, namely those that take place in no man’s land (a scene which, bafflingly to me, was apparently nearly cut from the final film) and in Veld.  The combat is more gleeful (if not a bit wantonly destructive – destroying an entire church steeple in an effort to take out a single sniper comes to mind) and far more visually stylish, peppering in what I felt was a proper amount of slow-motion interludes that Zack Snyder – a producer here – is somewhat known for by now.

Watching a hot chick wreck German soldiers with nothing but a sword and shield (and occasionally a whip) is what the summer movie season is all about.

The characters are also notably more magnetic when juxtaposed with both Thor and Captain America, with Gal Gadot standing out both physically and charismatically as the lead.  Chris Pine provides a more-than-suitable foil as the American spy Steve Trevor, who proves to be a worthy temporary love interest to Diana Prince, albeit the far less visually pleasing party of the two.  David Thewlis also performs well as a British statesman who eventually plays a pivotal role in the movie’s action, while other minor characters – Trevor’s secretary Etta Candy (Lucy Davis), Arabian spy Sameer (Saïd Taghmaoui), Scottish marksman Charlie (Ewen Bremner, whom I recognized from The Rundown, of all things), and Native American smuggler Chief (Eugene Brave Rock) – form a capable and diverse supporting cast.  Also of note for a solid performance, though underutilized, is Robin Wright for her turn as Antiope.

From left: Sameer, Steve Trevor, Wonder Woman, and the Chief.  Inexplicably not pictured: Charlie.

As for the parallels to Thor, they can more readily be drawn in both the early scenes of the movie – detailing Wonder Woman’s origin story amongst the Amazon on the hidden island of Themyscira – and in the final major battle scene, during which Wonder Woman is forced to do battle with Ares, the god of war himself.  The 300-esque fight scene on the shores of Themyscira between the Amazon warriors and the German soldiers hunting Steve Trevor, which occurs about a quarter to a third of the way into the film, marks a significant change in tone that persists well into the latter half of Wonder Woman.  I found this departure to be pleasant, as I’m never really one for subplots involving demigods and mythology, nor origin stories lacking any sense of brevity.  For this reason, I found Thor to be largely tiresome aside from its excellent use of fish-out-of-water comedy – as I’ve already said, I shied away from Thor: The Dark World because of this, and I’m still on the fence about the much-hyped Thor: Ragnarok coming later this fall.  Simply put, I have a harder time relating to the plights and successes of a hero who isn’t, well, human, but Wonder Woman did a better job navigating this issue than Thor did.

This early scene marks a tonal shift that persists throughout the rest of the movie.  It also marks one of Robin Wright’s more badass moments.

To me, and as I’ve mentioned above, the high points in Wonder Woman occur during the World War I centered combat, giving Gal Gadot a real chance to flex her muscles in both the literal and figurative senses.  Similarly, these scenes give Patty Jenkins – now the female director with the highest ever U.S. opening, besting Sam Taylor-Johnson for Fifty Shades of Grey – ample time and space to demonstrate an excellent ability to paint a very grey and very bleak picture of war, along with early 20th-century London, which in this instance has all the charm and color of a Lemony Snicket book cover.

Overall, this is clearly a film that, while hardly bucking the various tropes of the countless comic book movies before it, manages to produce a well-executed and undeniably fresh perspective on a much-needed strong female character that will doubtlessly play a huge role in DC’s upcoming jaunts.  It’s well worth checking out if you find yourself near a theater that’s still playing it.