Joker, seen in Hollywood’s historic Cinerama Dome, is as plain, satirical and chilling as its title. There is no article. No Cesar Romero, no Jack Nicholson, no Heath Ledger to animate and add antics to this version of what begins the terrible Batman comic book villain. He’s just joker.
Aren’t we all? This is what director Todd Phillips, who co-wrote the script, aims to provoke the audience to think about. You there, so-and-so with the laughing face, knee-slapping after 30 seasons of Simpsons and neverending cynicism on South Park, Sopranos, Seinfeld, Saturday Night Live and every slice of sinister humor embedded in this culture from sniveling Greg Gutfeld to sniveling Bill Maher and, in particular, the late night put-down set? You’re part of what’s driving man to madness and mayhem. Really. You are, Joker shows and tells. Here, Phillips depicts with a penetrating portrayal by Joaquin Phoenix (Her, Walk the Line) of the much-maligned, non-college-bred white male, which is why the “social justice” thugs hate this film sight unseen, the various factors that breed one of today’s most persecuted minorities, the American outcast, into monsters.
Comics fans, especially original Batman fans, and I am neither, will recognize the cues, though thankfully this isn’t one of those atrocious “Easter egg” Disney Marvel films in which the audience is expected to hunt and howl for ads, plugs and marketing tie-ins. But I see Joker as much as antifa’s origins story as Joker’s. Want to know how the masked anarchist and his roving gang of socialist, anti-wealth thugs comes to rule the streets? Here, again, have a look. This makes Joker less a great movie than an extremely disturbing social commentary, which is what I think it really is. It’s a good movie for what it is.
But it’s a scathing indictment of the cynical, Puritanical, maniacal axis which spawns attempts to sanitize the West of any sign of free thought, expression and association, including “social justice” types’ attempts to squash and suppress this film, which echo the irrationalism of the Me, Too and similar movements. Joker certainly gushes blood and gore but it owes more to 1976’s Network than other villain tales. In this sense, fanboys, geeks and mindless Rotten Tomatoes types may spin into dumbed-down withdrawal from all the thought that’s gone into Joker and what comes off the screen.
The setting, which is precisely accurate with one glaring videotape exception, is financially troubled New York City stand-in Gotham City in the 1970s, which the man deemed a joker listens to on the radio as he gets ready for work. The rich get richer in some vaguely cronyist society while everyone else gets poorer, especially the sick, weak and creative. That he makes a living from holding a sign saying “everything must go” sets up the film’s theme that making a joke out of what one ought to take seriously breeds an utter and total abandonment of optimism, benevolence and reason.
The lead character honestly does his best to remain human. He works. He takes help when it’s offered. He sees a mental health therapist. He keeps a journal. He takes care of his sick mother. He knows he’s losing a grip on reality and he addresses this, too. His sole vice is that he smokes cigarettes. But he remains an outcast. Like so many of today’s malcontents, such as the mass murderer a policeman pointed out had pleaded for help when he was caught in a downward spiral (read about it here), he is both spawned as monster and spurned as man.
“The worst part of having a mental illness is people expect you to behave as if you DON’T,” he writes with a prophetic all caps in his journal. But he shows up, again and again and again, for Mother, for work as a promotional and children’s hospital clown, for therapy. Phillips in his best choice depicts the Joaquin Phoenix character facing a long flight of concrete stairs. You almost feel his weary body shrink from the sight of it. Knowing it’s a slog, he climbs, day after day, perhaps like you do, striving to make ends meet, to meet the demands of the day. Draw a bath for Mother, watch the late night TV host (Robert De Niro, tying into his own performance in King of Comedy) check the mail, show up for work here, ride the subway there. Like those stairs, it’s a slog.
But the outcast, facing injustice, drudgery and worse, makes the effort. Perhaps like you do, too. This Joker counts upon. It’s like it knows one’s innermost struggles, shames and hardships. And the toll hardship takes on clarity. It’s hard to say where he crosses the line into delusion, like a Jesus or an eco-freak railing against the rapture or the weather, or, appropriate to Joker, a nihilist raging against “the Man”, the rich or the corporation. But Joker dramatizes the cackle in the climb (and, later, in the descent) on those stairs. And in a stunning marker of a horrible crime on a one-tracked train gliding toward Gotham’s skyline like a viral bug racing toward the nerve center.
Lights flicker and dim, on the subway and in the hospital, as art by Stephen Sondheim and Charlie Chaplin accompanies the batty, emaciated clown’s modern interpretive dance, dolloping the film with an impending sense of loopy dread, doom and chronic despair. Whether in a street riot against the rich or a men’s room confrontation with a businessman turned politician, Joker gives a great sense of the character’s being alone, completely alone, the lonely one being beaten down and ridiculed while he dies laughing and, as some or much of the world seems right now, goes slowly insane.
Finally, the misanthrope rides a graffiti-riddled bus crossing a bridge symbolizing perhaps his last moments of semblance before the mob subsumes his soul, as matters of motherhood, madness and mayhem collide in one perfectly logical prelude to what putting on a happy face really means in practice. Smile or don’t smile; in Joker, the joke’s on you. More exactly, it’s on the cult of today’s code of Nothing Worship, which aggregates men’s thoughts, sneers at honesty and blurs the serious and the sniveling to the point of delusion while turning what Victor Hugo once called “the man who laughs” into the one who’s no longer able to distinguish what ought not to be destroyed.
The summer’s big hit, Wonder Woman, features a heroine and certainly has some wonderful moments, though it leaves me underwhelmed. From the start, when the main character, Diana, admits in voiceover that she “used to want to save the world” before delving into the World War 1-set story, the DC Comics-based fantasy hints at an anti-romantic theme.
While it is decidedly mixed with larger than life action, Wonder Woman lands its anti-romanticism on the mark. Girl meets boy but barely has him to lose. They go to war after an extended mythology setup, though it never gets to the roots of war. Conflict never lets up, as is often the case with comics-based pictures, the earliest of which (Captain America, Iron Man, Thor) I’ve enjoyed, though they’ve become bloated, artificial and generic. Wonder Woman is warrior Diana’s origin story, so it’s all about war.
Except that there’s not much war in Wonder Woman. Other than a beach battle, a village countersiege and two protracted military assaults, the long running time doesn’t contain the battle action one might expect. Like Xena the Warrior Princess TV series, and Wonder Woman is episodic and televisionary, it’s focused on woman at war. In this sense, because of the novelty, it’s often involving.
But the goddess-superheroine contemplates, prepares for and talks about war (superficially, I must add) more than she wages it. Diana (extremely fit and sufficiently expressive Gal Gadot as an adult) trains as a warrior thanks to her aunt (Robin Wright, A Most Wanted Man). Diana goes off to war with a downed spy pilot (Chris Pine, The Finest Hours, Into the Woods, Star Trek Beyond) to find the god of war and slay him in a subplot with a resolution that’s not hard to guess. Diana gets a London makeover, enlists, helps and surpasses Pine’s spy and his requisite band of misfits and they go off to stop World War 1’s chemical warfare. Some of the music, photography and scenery is stunning. Gadot’s natural and engaging, especially with snappy comebacks such as “I’m the man who can.” Pine’s well cast, too.
Early on, there are clues that the larger than life mythology and episodic story won’t exactly meld. After all the buildup on the elusive, warrior women’s-only island, where Diana’s queen mother (Connie Nielsen, Gladiator) rules, everyone looks fit and fabulous in their skirts, headgear and hairdos but no one appears interested in keeping up with the rest of the world, for self-defense if nothing else. Diana ages from child to young adult and, inexplicably, stops aging after that. The trip to London from the island on a sailboat looks and feels as artificial as it sounds. Being paid to deliver exactly what the boss wants is compared to slavery. It’s easier to overlook these shortcomings because the cast, including David Thewlis as a pacifist and Lucy Davis underused as a secretary named Etta, is spot on under Patty Jenkins’ direction.
Part of an entire Justice League series for Warner Bros. with at least four credited writers — all men, incidentally, not counting the character’s male creator, which I mention because much has been made about the fact that this hit movie is directed by a woman — Wonder Woman is thrilling and fun in spots, such as when Diana steps into the battlefield to lead and inspire others to charge and fight. Diana doesn’t know her own power which I think is intended as the movie’s theme. The world is lacking movies about heroes, though Snowden and Sully are good recent movies about heroes in this regard, let alone heroines. So, a movie about a goddess who fights for peace certainly has enjoyable charms. The way Pine’s spy looks at Diana after she shows her strength and innocence is a welcome twist on the comic superhero genre.
Wonder Woman is not more than that, though, and, when it introduces ideas it never addresses or resolves, such as free will and an undefined conflict between belief and whether humankind deserves to be saved, it’s as lost and fantastic as that island of primitive women somewhere out at sea. That and a mass murderer whom, it’s implied, was a victim of the patriarchy and the lack of suspense inherent to a movie with a plot climax about a world war which some people may know something about mean Wonder Woman is best viewed as another comic book-based movie which entertains with light, occasionally marvelous heroism never made realistic and with flat, bleak outcomes for man and woman alike, if you think about it.
The hype for Hollywood’s first major competition to Marvel Comics’ Avengers movies begins today with the release of a Comic-Con trailer for Warner Bros.’ forthcoming Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (watch the trailer here). The long trailer is exciting, overblown and sufficiently enticing in terms of generating interest based on plot, character and action.
The new teaser is also relatively conventional. Done in that Wagnernian-operatic, apocalyptic score reminiscent of music for The Omen (1977) that everyone with a big action movie seems to use, certain situational settings and scenes dissolve in and out, introducing main characters and reintroducing those based on 2013’s Man of Steel. This is DC Comics’ entry in the comic book-based movie wars and it looks to be big, bloated and foundational to a huge new franchise for the San Fernando Valley studio.
Featuring Amy Adams (Her) as Lois Lane and Henry Cavill as Clark Kent/Superman, with Diane Lane (Secretariat) as Kent’s mother, Batman v Superman sets the tone by evoking the previous movie, though the teaser is framed primarily by the new character, Bruce Wayne/Batman (controversially cast Ben Affleck), bearing no relation to previous Warner Bros. Batman movies. What else is evident in the trailer is abundant: The Joker, Lex Luthor and other evils are implied as the conflict between superheroes takes shape, this happens as Bruce Wayne is apparently harmed by Superman, who is revered as a god, and Diana Prince/Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) comes into the picture. Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network) apparently portrays Lex Luthor (“the red capes are coming”) in the trailer’s least successful tease. Jeremy Irons (Casanova) plays Alfred the butler. Laurence Fishburne (Blackish) reprises his role as the newspaper publisher. Holly Hunter (Always) plays a politician. Scenes and subplots appear to include major military involvement, crumbling skyscrapers and possible sidetracks to comics characters for DC Comics’ the Justice League.
Batman v Superman is directed by Zack Snyder (The Watchmen, Sucker Punch, 300), whose record is mixed to bad in making movies and there are already several credited writers. Whether this movie, which is gaining enormous audience awareness based on the social media-driven release of this trailer at Comic-Con, is a flop or a hit depends upon the relevance and coherence of the story and whether Affleck (The Company Men) and other cast members, especially Eisenberg judging by the teaser, pulls off a clean, convincing performance. With a hint of an element of hero worship, at least there’s the hope that Batman v Superman could beat Marvel’s increasingly incoherent, convoluted Avengers series by putting old-fashioned American heroism for justice back on top, though Warner Bros., DC Comics and Snyder ought to consider turning the volume, hype and disclosure of circumstance down, not up, before the picture goes to theaters.
One of the reasons I don’t consume others’ reviews before I write my own is to avoid any influence or predisposition on my thoughts about a motion picture, which studios and artists generally work hard to create, so now I have a better understanding why some of my own friends don’t read my reviews before they see a movie that’s on their list (I try to write mine with a minimum of “spoilers” and also strive to make it worth reading after one has seen the picture). In the case of Warner Bros.’ Green Lantern, starring Ryan Reynolds (The Proposal), it was impossible to avoid exposure to the fact of negative reviews, which I did not read. Let me just say that I have a low regard for most other reviewers, with a few exceptions, such as Rex Reed and Ed Gonzalez, for a variety of reasons; most critics tend to be snide, sell out, or have a pack mentality or, worse, they have no mentality, saying nothing at all. I don’t know why they don’t like Green Lantern, which is hardly a great movie, but I do like it and here’s why.
Green Lantern is the story of a young aviator (Reynolds) who is haunted by his past, loved by a woman with a mind to match his own, and committed to a certain reverence for life. He has to overcome his flaws, which come with a dose of New Age claptrap about energy that has a core of truth about it, accept his power in full and choose to be his best. That he does, and while Green Lantern is choppy, flawed, and takes too long to set up, I’m enjoying this spate of comic book-based movies that are like old radio serials and this movie’s fine for what it is, like Thor. The downsides are that there’s not enough of Reynolds doing his witty banter, there’s too much of the college professor villain, overplayed but delectably so by Peter Sarsgaard (Kinsey), and the overworked script fails to line up myth and reality as well as Thor does.
But DC Comics’ Green Lantern‘s upsides are an American hero, who uses his brains but blasts his guns, firing upon the enemy at will, evoking the response we should have had after 9/11 to the jihadist Islamic enemy, and wiping out bad guys without mercy while unifying the good in spite of doubts of the commander of the Green Lantern Corps (Mark Strong). Free will powers up the movie’s corps of good guys, who come and go too fast, and Reynolds’ character chooses to activate his inner strength with a carefree sense of humor that makes this matinee outing an enjoyable action movie. The picture’s Ferris Aviation business, run by his spitfire love interest, Carol Ferris (brown-eyed Blake Lively), looks like a marvelous place to fly, work and create, which comes across when Reynolds shows up for work and tells her: “Now let’s get my pants off and fly some planes.” If only director Martin Campbell, who did banter nicely in Mask of Zorro, had been able to pull that sensibility through the rest of the movie. Despite its shortcomings, Green Lantern has a kind of glow.
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Comics fans, especially original Batman fans, and I am neither, will recognize the cues, though thankfully this isn’t one of those atrocious “Easter egg” Disney Marvel films in which the audience is expected to hunt and howl for ads, plugs and marketing tie-ins. But I see Joker as much as antifa’s origins story as Joker’s. Want to know how the masked anarchist and his roving gang of socialist, anti-wealth thugs comes to rule the streets? Here, again, have a look. This makes Joker less a great movie than an extremely disturbing social commentary, which is what I think it really is. It’s a good movie for what it is. 
One of the reasons I don’t consume others’ reviews before I write my own is to avoid any influence or predisposition on my thoughts about a motion picture, which studios and artists generally work hard to create, so now I have a better understanding why some of my own friends don’t read my reviews before they see a movie that’s on their list (I try to write mine with a minimum of “spoilers” and also strive to make it worth reading after one has seen the picture). In the case of Warner Bros.’ Green Lantern, starring Ryan Reynolds (