Jokers (Todd Phillips, 2019-?)

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mfunk9786
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Re: Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019)

#151 Post by mfunk9786 » Tue Sep 10, 2019 6:10 pm


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Never Cursed
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Re: Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019)

#152 Post by Never Cursed » Tue Sep 10, 2019 6:14 pm

God, the pre-release discourse surrounding this movie is going to be so embarrassing to look back at in two years/a year/immediately after the film comes out.

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domino harvey
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Re: Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019)

#153 Post by domino harvey » Tue Sep 10, 2019 6:17 pm

I’m still waiting on those Do the Right Thing riots

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Brian C
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Re: Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019)

#154 Post by Brian C » Tue Sep 10, 2019 6:38 pm

Leah Greenblatt @ EW wrote:But in a moment when internet culture can cancel a movie as minor as The Hunt for fomenting “anger and hate”...
Way to pick an example that had nothing to do with "internet culture."
Last edited by Brian C on Tue Sep 10, 2019 7:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Big Ben
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Re: Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019)

#155 Post by Big Ben » Tue Sep 10, 2019 6:56 pm

To be added to the list of dangerous films like The Last Temptation of Christ which as we all know caused the world to end because some Evangelical Christians said it would happen. And of course Do the Right Thing which domino mentions above, the infamous riot causing film.

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Re: Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019)

#156 Post by swo17 » Tue Sep 10, 2019 7:03 pm

As opposed to a prediction of mass riots, I totally wouldn't put it past one guy to put on a Joker costume and then go on a shooting spree (not that this movie would have been the cause of it)

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Re: Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019)

#157 Post by DarkImbecile » Tue Sep 10, 2019 7:14 pm


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domino harvey
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Re: Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019)

#158 Post by domino harvey » Tue Sep 10, 2019 7:17 pm

I Googled Greenblatt and found her weekly write ups of Seattle-based DJs from 2000. If she can live through the pure hell of listening to late 90s house music for a living, surely she can find the inner strength to give this movie a grade. It seems to me she’s only holding back because she knows her grade wouldn’t be an “F” and thus whoever she’s trying to impress online wouldn’t validate her

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Re: Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019)

#159 Post by domino harvey » Tue Sep 10, 2019 7:21 pm

DarkImbecile wrote:
Tue Sep 10, 2019 7:14 pm
Again, you mean?
He wasn’t dressed as the Joker— I only recently learned this too, so it’s a pervasive misconception

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Re: Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019)

#160 Post by DarkImbecile » Tue Sep 10, 2019 7:25 pm

I knew he hadn’t dressed as the character, but my understanding was that he dyed his hair and called himself the Joker when first detained by police, which seems close enough.

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domino harvey
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Re: Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019)

#161 Post by domino harvey » Tue Sep 10, 2019 7:26 pm

He dyed it pink. The Joker’s hair is green

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Re: Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019)

#162 Post by DarkImbecile » Tue Sep 10, 2019 7:28 pm

True enough. I’m not invested in this having been a thing, but it still seems close enough to swo’s hypothetical to be worth noting.

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Re: Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019)

#163 Post by erok910 » Wed Sep 11, 2019 2:36 am

Never Cursed wrote:
Tue Sep 10, 2019 6:14 pm
God, the pre-release discourse surrounding this movie is going to be so embarrassing to look back at in two years/a year/immediately after the film comes out.
Not a common poster here. Really dig these forums, rather exclusively if I may add. I read through very very often. But my lord- this is so on point. See ya'll in two years.

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Re: Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019)

#164 Post by quim_font » Wed Sep 11, 2019 9:30 am


Those comments...I think it’s now it the cycle where the anti-outrage outrage becomes more insufferable than the original.

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Re: Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019)

#165 Post by Never Cursed » Wed Sep 11, 2019 9:53 am

erok910 wrote:
Wed Sep 11, 2019 2:36 am
Never Cursed wrote:
Tue Sep 10, 2019 6:14 pm
God, the pre-release discourse surrounding this movie is going to be so embarrassing to look back at in two years/a year/immediately after the film comes out.
Not a common poster here. Really dig these forums, rather exclusively if I may add. I read through very very often. But my lord- this is so on point. See ya'll in two years.
Thanks, but not quite my point - this is probably the best/least insufferable place to read about the film I've encountered yet. The preponderance of awful Joker takes coming from all corners of the internet has only made me pay attention to this site even more.

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Re: Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019)

#166 Post by quim_font » Wed Sep 11, 2019 10:20 am

Has anyone read a defense of this movie as the most deserving of the Lion? That seems to have been lost in all the shuffle, while I've seen middling-to-good reviews, I don't think I've read any that have heralded this as a major achievement,

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Re: Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019)

#167 Post by Dr Amicus » Wed Sep 11, 2019 10:40 am

quim_font wrote:
Wed Sep 11, 2019 10:20 am
Has anyone read a defense of this movie as the most deserving of the Lion? That seems to have been lost in all the shuffle, while I've seen middling-to-good reviews, I don't think I've read any that have heralded this as a major achievement,
Xan Brooks in the Guardian has a go.

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Re: Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019)

#168 Post by cdnchris » Wed Sep 11, 2019 10:49 am

quim_font wrote:
Wed Sep 11, 2019 9:30 am
Those comments...I think it’s now it the cycle where the anti-outrage outrage becomes more insufferable than the original.
I was dreading from the initial trailer the "incel" latch onto the character and the endless memes that I was sure were going to be flooding various places, though ultimately that could be ignored; it would just be annoying in the way people idolize Tyler Durden or Rick and Morty. But yeah, this is all way, WAY worse.

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Re: Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019)

#169 Post by ford » Thu Sep 12, 2019 12:56 am

Feeling extra confident in my “2010s woke professional class liberals are the new 1980s suburban conservatives seeing satanism in every daycare and hair metal album.”

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Re: Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019)

#170 Post by colinr0380 » Mon Sep 16, 2019 3:38 am

Whilst I am not particularly interested in yet another comic book origin story movie, I am quite curious to see this. Mainly because it sounds a bit as if the 'extreme performance artist acting out his personal pain in public' aspect of the film might be calling back to a figure such as GG Allin, given that Todd Phillips directed a documentary about that singer as his first feature.

Also of course Phoenix's antics in that I'm Still Here faux-documentary suggests an ongoing interest in that kind of thing on his side too. In some ways it seems that it could be the ultimate meta-joke that the surrounding media climate has been inspired into their own improvised pieces of dangerous bordering on deranged performance art in response!

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Re: Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019)

#171 Post by Finch » Mon Sep 16, 2019 1:04 pm

One of the better written reviews comes from Bill Chambers at FFC.

Among other things he says S Craig Zahler should have directed this film. That sounds about right to me.

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Re: Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019)

#172 Post by ford » Thu Sep 19, 2019 3:08 pm

Great piece in Jacobin on the freak-out.
Jacobin wrote:The implication seems clear that what’s wrong with Phillips is he’s a bro, too bro to be able to handle such volatile subject matter as a film featuring a psychotic man activating the angry masses. We’ve seen this figure in several films in recent years — see Exhibit A: Bane in The Dark Knight Rises. It’s a reliable source of topical terror to liberals as they contemplate with absurdly equal abhorrence the political rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.

But Phillips’s youthful endeavors do a lot to contextualize the emergence of Joker as an indication of greater filmmaking ambition and the possibility of his actually having made an interesting film. So far no one seems intrigued by Phillips’s early career, which includes a few years studying at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts where he made the documentary Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies, a portrait of the scabrous punk rocker that scored a theatrical and DVD release — almost unheard of for student films. Dropping out to finish Hated, he worked at the legendary, seedy, and comprehensive Kim’s Video and Music in the East Village, a rental house specializing in rare and esoteric films which “graduated” its own illustrious bunch of notable ex-clerks turned filmmakers, musicians, and artists. He co-directed a second documentary, Frat House, which took a darkly critical view of college fraternity life and won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival but foundered in release because of claims that frat members were paid to restage events. His third film, the rockumentary Bittersweet Motel, took Phillips on tour with the band Phish, which is where he met director Ivan Reitman, and the rest, as they say, is history.

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Re: Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019)

#173 Post by mfunk9786 » Thu Sep 19, 2019 3:23 pm

I can buy a lot of that, especially the idea that Phillips can have a second life as a more artistically inclined filmmaker now that he theoretically never needs to work another day in his life, let alone another day making Hangover sequels. He's as much of a wild card as this film is - I have no idea what to expect from a quality perspective or a value perspective from Joker or from Phillips. All I know is that I refuse to just dismiss this as "too much like" films that are now decades old, like some have. Pop culture from the 60s and 70s has had much longer legs than it probably should to begin with - I'm not so sure sure that similarity to a film from 43 years ago is a valid knock on anything made today. Phillips just might not have the chops to do this well.

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Re: Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019)

#174 Post by whaleallright » Mon Sep 23, 2019 1:49 pm

Hated, he worked at the legendary, seedy, and comprehensive Kim’s Video and Music in the East Village
What, precisely, was "seedy" about Kim's? Aside from its not being a Coconuts?

This reminds me of the festival boss who said that Uncut Gems was shot in "gritty" 35mm. Or everyone who characterizes everything that's not a Houlihan's as a "dive bar."

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Re: Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019)

#175 Post by quim_font » Mon Sep 23, 2019 3:44 pm

Have to wonder what the next "impart current social issue onto existing IP" film is going to be: Captain America going though a contemptuous divorce? Wonder Woman running to be the first woman U.S. president? Spider-man drowning under student debt?

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