the god
and he hated prisons
watched midnight run a couple months ago though, didn’t do much for me
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yeah I don’t really love midnight run
imo the top 3 are real life, heartbreak kid, and clifford
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well, and this
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whoooa i haven’t watched real life in years, didn’t realize that was grodin, definitely queueing that up soon
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Finally watched Joker. Worse than I even expected, and I expected it to be bad.
Loads of people have already criticized its politics and vibe and shallow content better than I could, but something I didn’t expect about it was how bad it was at depicting, like, the Joker? The Joker is a character with plots and plans. He’s a guy who is REALLY into schemes and tricks and surprises that he plans in advance. But this movie Joker is a purely reactive guy totally lost in a haze at all times. He makes only one real plan at all: to kill himself, and that plan doesn’t even work. I kept waiting for his big Joker Scheme to appear in the third act and it just never does.
I also didn’t expect the plot to be so full of gigantic plot holes. As I gather, the secret of The Joker in this movie is that (warning: abuse discussion) his laughing symptom is actually the symptom of a TBI he got while being physically abused as a child. There’s some indication that the scar on his upper lip is also from this event. But he doesn’t remember this, doesn’t remember his mom going to jail for her involvement, doesn’t remember being separated from her, despite his involvement in the court case doesn’t remember the fact that he was adopted was central to this case… and based on the photo of him from the medial file, he was like 5 years old when it happened? Or around there? It seems completely impossible to me that his mom would have gone to a criminal mental hospital while he was a preschooler and then finally returned from the hospital and somehow got him back as her son again, presumably from foster care, and he doesn’t remember ANY of this? It would have been a family saga at least a decade long and he has zero memory of it at all and apparently doesn’t even know why he has his laughing symptom until he reads the medical file?
It just makes no sense. The Joker is bad but also it makes no sense as a story! Did not expect that!
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been screaming at solondz movies like it’s the superbowl. welcome to the dollhouse - palindromes - happiness - life during wartime back to back is basically like watching one movie
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I love Happiness so so so much. It took a watch or two before I noticed that was Twin Peaks’ Lara Flynn Boyle. Which makes me think she passed on Fire Walk With Me but still did this??!
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yeah id drop everything in the world to do a solondz movie too
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the last time I watched life during wartime it was when it just came out with someone who HATED IT so I thought I didn’t like it that much but on rewatch it’s so breezy. Michael kenneth williams fills philip seymore hoffmans shoes perfectly. it’s ALSO awesome to see solondz actually mad about something, and to be like OH YEAH REMEMEBER ALL THOSE CHARACTERS YOU HATED? ZIONISTS. EVERY ONE.
mark 2 is PERFECT by the way. I’m going to tell people ‘it’s irrelevant. China is the future, everything else is history’ any time they try to talk to me about masks or online drama or anything I don’t want to argue about from now on
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Given my knowledge of my kid’s past versus his memory of it, I can totally believe that Joker kid story. This doesn’t make it a good movie at all, but yeah a lot of foster systems super prioritize reunification, and kids have a really sad way of just not remembering shit that happens to them very young specifically with parents, specifically when they end up in the foster care system, even if they have very obvious physical and emotional signs of trauma.
Which is not at all to imply Joker was a good movie. More just that particular thing read more as an exaggeration than an outright fabrication/plot hole to me.
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I’m tempted to give the GG Allin doc guy the benefit of the doubt and take this as being intentional. The Joker in this movie is a total fuck-up but his vaguely defined public image unintentionally inspires everyone to take up his mantle and riot at the end. It’s more of a Being There kind of thing?
It’s not a good movie or a good Batman thing or anything, but I gotta believe they built in him being totally unsuccessful as an intentional move.
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been thinking about this song
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GG Allin would have been a much cooler inspiration for the Serious Joker than a Taxi Driver/King of Comedy mashup!
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That’s 1000% what I was hoping for.
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Yeah, I agree and know that it follows some patterns that are true to life, but I think the scenario the movie depicts is something that probably would have concluded when this character was in his teens, and if you’re gonna describe a situation that huge and lengthy as a secret thing the character has forgotten, you gotta at least add some foreshadowing of it, or some indication that he has forgotten things, for the benefit of the audience. I have been in plot review meetings for games where we are working through character history stuff and making sure it is intelligible and clear to the people who want to understand it, and if I had suggested “guy forgets his whole childhood but the story doesn’t say this, foreshadow it, hint at it at all, etc,” I would not have earned much respect from my colleagues haha
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Yeah, at the very least, they could have clued the audience in as to what was happening even if the Joker himself had no idea.
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Deranged birthday clown who turns to a life of crime after parents complain about him cutting himself and pooping in front of kids
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IMO, they should cast Dave Chappelle as the joker and then make the plot all about being an aging comedian who can’t admit that his jokes aren’t any good any more so he keeps escalating until he plots to cause as much violence as possible to the people he considers ‘humorless wokescolds’
Just really revel in the sociopathy inherent to being a hack standup who lost their touch and doesn’t want to fade into irrelevance, who rather than living as an elder statesman of the genre, chooses instead to destroy themselves in an attempt to spite a phantom of their own imagining
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I can’t think about this movie or the Detective Comics character without meldac’s seminal Super Pinball flashing before my eyes
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watched Dick Tracy, kind of a chore in ways both admirable and less so… i did appreciate the very perverse decision to soundtrack all the big gangbuster montages with midtempo stephen sondheim numbers, and to fill the cast with character actors either given nothing to do or else almost unidentifiable beneath weird makeup. and the sheer volume of guys! mandy patinkin as 88 keyes?? steve the tramp?? real labour of love stuff.
on the other hand i do feel like beatty himself was maybe too blandly handsome in it, i wish they’d made tracy a weird looking monster guy as well. he’s halfway there in the script already what with his penchant for the third degree and the way he responds to sexual invitation by threatening to arrest people. having all the Crime Men look like mutants from a different species is very chester gould but they mostly act like generic uninteresting batman mooks, apart from a good sequence at the very end when they finally go for broke after finding out they’ve been framed for the one crime they didn’t commit.
i liked the big primary colour sets in theory but in practice, idk, they had that weirdly flattened second order abstraction of a movie that takes place inside another movie. i did like this shot though
i guess they wrote novelisations for some sequels but in my head the real Dick Tracy 2 would involve Moon Maid and our protagonist’s ongoing efforts to arrest the concept of desire. good luck, dick tracy!
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