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That's entertainment!
One week without my Bub. It still feels so wrong.
All the clouds got rained out yesterday, though, so I was finally able to get a clearer picture of the state of the morning/evening darkness. The walk home last night was still quite dark with just a streak of orange along the horizon, but there was a surprising amount of pre-sunrise yellow in the sky this morning, which was nice. It'll all be gone by my next work set, might as well enjoy it while I can.
Saw Joker 2! It was not a good movie! But it was a much more interesting movie than the first one was, so I kinda want to go into more, spoilery, depth than it probably deserves? It's Sunday and I'm cold and tired and sad, so fuck it, let's go.
Okay, so like, my biggest issue with the original Joker (aside from it being warmed-over Scorsese pastiche that somehow got nominated for eleven fucking Oscars, obviously) was how ridiculously dour it was, just this horrible slog of bleakness with no reprieve or any reason to care about any of it, and this movie fixes that right off the bat. It's a lot of things, but it's not dour! It's still a relentlessly bleak film about a sad, mentally ill man who is failed by the system at every step, but aside from the bit after he gets gangraped, it never really wallows in it like the first one did, which was the thing that really had me rolling my eyes every five minutes. So that's a good start!
Then there's the Gaga of it all. Let's be real, she's the only reason I went to see this thing, and I was mostly not disappointed in that respect! I think I was hoping for more of a deuteragonist situation given the title and the fact that it's a musical, but she's actually just a stand-in for all the people who liked the first movie for the wrong reasons (which is probably why so many people are BIG MAD about it, lol) and is a bit of a cipher beyond that. Still, she wears a bunch of cool outfits and sings a bunch, so I have no complaints there.
Also, Harley being more of a symbol than a character made me reconsider the title a bit; was the titular Folie between her and Joker when they barely actually did anything together? Or was it actually between what she represented and the first Joker, where people simply lost their minds and pushed a shallow homage with a half-assed comic book skin slapped on top to over a billion dollars at the box office and a Best Picture nomination? WHO CAN SAY? It's very much a movie that lends itself to whatever interpretation best suits your own opinions, probably because it's not actually that deep but seems like it should be, so NOT ME.
The biggest issue here is that the courtroom scenes are so very, very flat and it's mainly a courtroom drama, which is... bad. For entertainment purposes. Phillips truly has absolutely zero sauce as a director when he's not directly aping somebody better (eat it, Rob Marshall), and there's just... nothing there for the entire trial*, just a total nothingburger of a case, no tension because there was never any way he was going to be found not guilty, Harvey Dent smirking annoyingly, and then Arthur going off his nut and doing a weird Foghorn Leghorn voice for a while. This judge should not be allowing any of this nonsense!!! Nobody ever raises any remotely valid objections!!! I've seen My Cousin Vinny!!!
*WITH the notable exception of the scene where Gary Puddles takes the stand, which honestly kinda devastated me a bit? Dude is low-key the MVP of both movies.
There's gonna be a lot of cope from certain corners of the internet about how Todd Phillips made it bad on purpose because he didn't want to make it, and that's also why he killed Arthur at the end, so he couldn't be forced to make another one, but don't you believe any of it. He truly thought he was cooking with this, making a sequel that's really more of a long, artsy epilogue to completely recontextualize the original as the origin story for a villain who is not the guy we've been following this whole time. He is one of our generation's purest hacks and don't you forget it.
So, yeah. Joker 2. It's a movie! Did I like it? Hard to say! But I definitely enjoyed myself a lot more than I did during the first one and it's much clearer about trying to actually say something and exactly what that something is. You know, like a real movie! Also Todd I will take all the mean stuff back if you make Joker 3 and it's just a Harley Quinn concert movie. I don't care that this one's making Morbius money, let the white man continue failing upwards!!
All the clouds got rained out yesterday, though, so I was finally able to get a clearer picture of the state of the morning/evening darkness. The walk home last night was still quite dark with just a streak of orange along the horizon, but there was a surprising amount of pre-sunrise yellow in the sky this morning, which was nice. It'll all be gone by my next work set, might as well enjoy it while I can.
Saw Joker 2! It was not a good movie! But it was a much more interesting movie than the first one was, so I kinda want to go into more, spoilery, depth than it probably deserves? It's Sunday and I'm cold and tired and sad, so fuck it, let's go.
Okay, so like, my biggest issue with the original Joker (aside from it being warmed-over Scorsese pastiche that somehow got nominated for eleven fucking Oscars, obviously) was how ridiculously dour it was, just this horrible slog of bleakness with no reprieve or any reason to care about any of it, and this movie fixes that right off the bat. It's a lot of things, but it's not dour! It's still a relentlessly bleak film about a sad, mentally ill man who is failed by the system at every step, but aside from the bit after he gets gangraped, it never really wallows in it like the first one did, which was the thing that really had me rolling my eyes every five minutes. So that's a good start!
Then there's the Gaga of it all. Let's be real, she's the only reason I went to see this thing, and I was mostly not disappointed in that respect! I think I was hoping for more of a deuteragonist situation given the title and the fact that it's a musical, but she's actually just a stand-in for all the people who liked the first movie for the wrong reasons (which is probably why so many people are BIG MAD about it, lol) and is a bit of a cipher beyond that. Still, she wears a bunch of cool outfits and sings a bunch, so I have no complaints there.
Also, Harley being more of a symbol than a character made me reconsider the title a bit; was the titular Folie between her and Joker when they barely actually did anything together? Or was it actually between what she represented and the first Joker, where people simply lost their minds and pushed a shallow homage with a half-assed comic book skin slapped on top to over a billion dollars at the box office and a Best Picture nomination? WHO CAN SAY? It's very much a movie that lends itself to whatever interpretation best suits your own opinions, probably because it's not actually that deep but seems like it should be, so NOT ME.
The biggest issue here is that the courtroom scenes are so very, very flat and it's mainly a courtroom drama, which is... bad. For entertainment purposes. Phillips truly has absolutely zero sauce as a director when he's not directly aping somebody better (eat it, Rob Marshall), and there's just... nothing there for the entire trial*, just a total nothingburger of a case, no tension because there was never any way he was going to be found not guilty, Harvey Dent smirking annoyingly, and then Arthur going off his nut and doing a weird Foghorn Leghorn voice for a while. This judge should not be allowing any of this nonsense!!! Nobody ever raises any remotely valid objections!!! I've seen My Cousin Vinny!!!
*WITH the notable exception of the scene where Gary Puddles takes the stand, which honestly kinda devastated me a bit? Dude is low-key the MVP of both movies.
There's gonna be a lot of cope from certain corners of the internet about how Todd Phillips made it bad on purpose because he didn't want to make it, and that's also why he killed Arthur at the end, so he couldn't be forced to make another one, but don't you believe any of it. He truly thought he was cooking with this, making a sequel that's really more of a long, artsy epilogue to completely recontextualize the original as the origin story for a villain who is not the guy we've been following this whole time. He is one of our generation's purest hacks and don't you forget it.
So, yeah. Joker 2. It's a movie! Did I like it? Hard to say! But I definitely enjoyed myself a lot more than I did during the first one and it's much clearer about trying to actually say something and exactly what that something is. You know, like a real movie! Also Todd I will take all the mean stuff back if you make Joker 3 and it's just a Harley Quinn concert movie. I don't care that this one's making Morbius money, let the white man continue failing upwards!!