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.

Aquaman Review

I’ll just come right out and say it: here at Tuesdays With Cory, we’re kicking off 2019 with a bad review.  For Christmas, I was gifted a three-month subscription to AMC’s A-List program (RIP Moviepass – thanks Santa), and while what I really wanted to see was Vice (hopefully will be reviewing this soon), it wasn’t playing at what’s really the only AMC in my area, so Aquaman was in theory the next best thing (sparse offerings in theaters overall this holiday season, I’d say).  Directed by James Wan (The Conjuring, Saw, Furious 7) and featuring a star-studded cast of Jason Momoa, Nicole Kidman, Amber Heard, Willem Dafoe, and Patrick Wilson (among others, including Julie Andrews in a bizarre voice cameo), Aquaman serves as one of the big-budget tentpoles of 2018’s holiday season, and also serves to show that a big budget might not mean as much as it used to.

“Permission to come aboard?”  Just one of the many cringey lines this movie brings to the table.

Let’s start with the very limited amount of good that Aquaman brings to the table and say that the visuals are every bit as incredible as billed, with the Atlantis sequences especially being Avatar-good.  I can’t remember the last time I watched a movie and wished that I had been seeing it in 3D (in fact, that may never have happened after I saw my only 3D film ever, which incidentally was Avatar, and yes, it was amazing), but I’ll admit that that was the case with certain chunks of Aquaman.  James Wan not only does great things with CGI (save for one inexplicably cringey scene of a mountain exploding, which, per a friend I saw Aquaman with, looked like it had been made in Adobe AfterEffects) and with the challenge of getting principle characters to fluidly speak, act, and fight underwater in a believable way, but the diverse and vibrant color palette he uses throughout this 142-minute exercise is especially impressive.  While I’m about to trash Aquaman for a much larger set of (valid) reasons, it could definitely be argued that the visuals alone are worth the price of admission.

Willem Dafoe in his underwater mentor role.  Oh, Green Goblin, how far you have fallen.

Because here’s the thing: when I walked out of the theater and started typing some short notes in my phone about what to write about with regards to Aquaman, the first thing I wrote was “a colossally irresponsible waste of stellar visual effects,” and rereading that now, I’m certain that I can’t summarize my experience with the film any more clearly than that.  The sad truth of Aquaman is that its visuals are complemented by a disastrous one-two punch of extremely unimaginative writing and wooden acting essentially across the board.  With a plot that somehow has both no twists (even though it seems to think it has at least one – which, as a matter of fact, could be seen miles away) and is also at times needlessly confusing, along with dialogue that is either cut-and-pasted from other scripts or written by a 12-year-old boy, what you get is a movie that’s clearly at its best when no one is opening their mouths.  Indeed, the fight scenes are satisfyingly electric in brief spurts, but they’re positively drowned (pun intended) by ridiculous lines sputtered by cardboard characters that left my friend and I (and, based on what I heard, a solid portion of the theater I was in) belly-laughing at the absurdity.  It’s hard to even repeat them, but these lines range from blood-chilling cliches (Amber Heard’s Mera: “Are you waiting for an invitation?” when beseeching Aquaman to hop into her sea-mobile, unpleasantly capping what was otherwise a decent fight scene) to lines that there’s just no way not to laugh at (Patrick Wilson’s King Orm describing his dream of becoming “ocean master” had the audience in stitches).

Amber Heard’s Mera – one of many characters that are likely deserving of far better writing.

Beyond that ultra-low hanging fruit, another major problem that I had with Aquaman is that it takes one of the DCEU’s more flawed characters (in my opinion – for starters, the DCEU’s Aquaman could not be more different than the one presented by the source material) and somehow makes him worse.  Momoa’s character’s first standalone film gives him little depth to work with, and no truly formidable antagonist to drive his growth (Black Manta’s depiction was pretty rough overall), instead seemingly and bafflingly opting for the lovable brute routine.  This, along with the fact that Aquaman features no DCEU cameos or crossovers to speak of (possibly a good thing, given the quality of this film), leaves me wondering where this leaves the franchise.  For most of it, Aquaman feels more like a Pirates of the Caribbean movie, or even a Power Rangers movie, than a superhero movie, and this fact may resonate with some of the folks seeing it, but it didn’t with me.  It’s true that Aquaman would probably fare better in my critiquing if it were even a standalone movie, let alone a part of one of those other franchises, but at this point, given how many superhero movies I have seen, my standards in that department are high – and Aquaman didn’t come close to hitting them, while films like Infinity War are showing that even after dozens of comic book movies have been shoved down our throats, it’s still possible for them to be good, even if not altogether original.

Arthur and Mera reading a map to try and figure out which way leads out of the bad movie they’re trapped in.

My current hypothesis is that Aquaman is doing as well as it’s doing because as DCEU movies go, it’s better than most (here’s to you, Wonder Woman) in one critical area: its sense of fun.  Justice League and Batman v. Superman especially seemed to pride themselves on taking no joy in what they were doing, instead presenting a view of the DC comic universe – one that is every bit as colorful and jovial as Marvel’s, if not more so – as an oppressively dark and brooding environment.  If there’s one thing Aquaman does well, it’s that it simply has fun, and while that fun in my case was largely garnered at the expense of filmcraft, and due more often than not to laughs that the filmmakers surely did not intend, it was at least mildly fun nonetheless.  I guess at this point I still just don’t see why or how this movie has a 64% on Rotten Tomatoes (with an even higher audience score at 81%).  To me, it embodies a lot of what’s currently wrong with the superhero genre, and if anything it insults its contemporaries by being as cookie-cutter as any film in the Marvel or DC universe has ever been.  Based on the literal billions Aquaman is making at the box office, though, it seems as though the lucrative target presented by the opportunity to make a movie and slap DC or Marvel IP on the front of it is becoming increasingly easier to hit, and our standards as a moviegoing populace are suffering for it.  End rant.

Just Black Manta trying to figure out why his helmet has to look so ridiculous.

Here’s hoping 2019 offers better fare than this (I have high hopes – I’m especially excited for Glass, which comes out in just a few weeks time) – and as always, thanks for reading!

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.