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ruddiger posted:E: Yeah the comparison to Parasite seems apt. The biggest difference is Parasite has enough interpretative space that I've met quite a few people who read Parasite as "oh the poor people are parasites preying on the innocent rich people" but Joker has such a bald hatred of the rich that if you aren't willing to go along with "the rich are a destructive force" you wind up unable to interpret a very simple movie. Honestly Joker is so didactic and straightforward I don't know how there's any debate about its themes or content. Literal Maoist propaganda from the Cultural Revolution has more sympathy for capitalists than Joker. The interview with the social worker is so overt about the original sin of the fiction that I'm surprised it didn't have footnotes with page citations about deinstitutionalization.. That I run into professional film critics that call it cynical, confused, and unclear is the sort of thing that makes me think "it is impossible to make a movie immune to willful misinterpretation." I liked the movie but it's incredibly direct and unsubtle.
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Jan 7, 2020 05:54
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 09:15 |
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CROWS EVERYWHERE posted:There were people in this very thread who thought "he's just imagining being in a romantic relationship with his neighbour!" was ambiguous or straight up didn't get that they weren't actually dating. You could hit people in the face with a sledgehammer that says "KILL THE RICH - JOKER (2019)" and someone would go nah I think maybe the film sides with the capitalists??? I wonder if the superhero baggage lead to some of this? Like, the movie really, truly hates Thomas Wayne, but if you're thinking of this as a "Batman movie" you have this meta-textual information that Thomas Wayne is a good guy because, hey, Batman's dad. The Batman stuff felt pretty tacked on and non-essential. Thomas Wayne felt like this unholy Ed Koch-Michael Bloomberg-Jeff Bezos character, and he's very comprehensible as a representation of "financiers who got into politics as a means of hurting poor people," but the superhero elements didn't add a lot.
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Jan 7, 2020 08:18
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Roman posted:Another thing to get off my chest: One critique I keep seeing over and over is that Arthur, a mentally ill uneducated uncultured loner, was incoherent and had nothing profound to say on Murray's show. I would argue that him not delivering some eloquent "clever" Aaron Sorkin speech was a sign of good writing, as opposed to bad. My conviction that critics were confused by the movie because they outright refuse to believe that class war is real only grows stronger Roman posted:But bleeping out the naughty word lol
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Jan 14, 2020 14:05
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Sinteres posted:I don't buy that interpretation just because if the ending is saying that none of what you watched actually happened, what was the loving point? Unreliable narration can be used to good effect, but shrugging off the entire plot without revealing any layers underneath isn't that. It's pretty obvious which parts are Arthur daydreaming and which parts actually happened. It's also pretty obvious that Arthur isn't 'the joker' in any specific batman move canon but that's b/c it's pretty clear that 'the joker' isn't a singular person and also b/c it isn't seamless with any current batman canon.
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Feb 1, 2020 04:15
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Joker's really more a Maoist propaganda film than anything else at its core.
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Feb 11, 2020 19:59
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 09:15 |
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I felt the worst part of the movie was that it was too rosy optimistic about American's willingness to do anything about anything, so it's retroactively gotten better.
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Jun 3, 2020 14:52
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