Joker (This Thread Made by Gang Weed)

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McSpanky: Jan 16, 2005

iamsosmrt posted:

I feel almost the opposite. It's like a C comic movie and a B film. I felt the comic stuff felt a bit tacked on, but it was an interesting portrayal of society's treatment of mental illness and even how people try to frame every person's actions into a bigger political mold.

As for comic movies, I think of them as larger than life by nature, and something like the Avengers 1 or 3 is probably the pinnacle of Hollywood fully embracing comics in film IMO.

I believe if you rename every single character in Joker and change his final costume up to not look like the Joker, and it wouldn't even be remotely a comic book movie anymore, but the movie itself would be almost the same except the audience would now lack their own emotional connections and bias towards those DC characters and the movie would make much less money.

As it stands, it's ostensibly a comic movie because it references people in name.

Road To Perdition must've froze you up like a Star Trek computer being told a paradox.

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McSpanky: Jan 16, 2005

It's a comic book movie that is very accurate to both the spirit and specifics of its source material.

That material being a drama about a Depression-era mob enforcer trying to raise his son while working for, and then being betrayed and hunted by, a brutal organized crime syndicate.

# ¿ Nov 1, 2019 09:31

McSpanky: Jan 16, 2005

LORD OF BOOTY posted:

God, this movie whips rear end.

Like, I didn't know Todd Phillips had this in him, god drat. For all the hurfa-durf surrounding it, this is a really astoundingly empathetic movie and one of the loudest and angriest "eat the rich" statements I've ever seen. It's fundamentally a movie about how hosed it is that Reagan destroyed public mental health services, and how the rich need to have loving vengeance wrought upon them for doing that.

It was frankly refreshing as hell.

My favorite little thing about this movie is how Thomas Wayne's position on the poor includes some condescending save-them-from-themselves rhetoric that tries to make it sound like taking agency away from the disadvantaged is in their best interest whether they like it or not. It's so infuriatingly self-righteous, perfect for a doctor-turned-businessman-turned-politician. And all too true to reality from my own experience, people who think the poor are too stupid and lazy to manage their own lives pass off those kinds of "it's for their own good" platitudes all too easily.

# ¿ Nov 6, 2019 08:13