Tag: Joker

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Who Will Win at the Academy Awards? The Flyer’s Critic Has No Idea.

I have a confession to make: I’m not very good at the Academy Awards.

Oscar night is a big deal in the Hocking-McCoy household. We clear off the coffee table and put out a big spread of sushi. We parse each acceptance speech down to the syllable level. We print out ballots and compete to see who gets the most categories right. The prize for the winner is bragging rights for the year.

I can’t remember the last time I held bragging rights. Have I ever bested Commercial Appeal writer John Beifuss in his annual “Beat Beifuss” competition? I got close once.

You’d think that someone who reads about, watches, and occasionally makes movies for a living would be better at predicting Oscar winners. But, it turns out, my tastes rarely match the outcome of the Oscar voters’ poll. I’ve tried voting strategically, making my choices based on the conventional wisdom in the trades and among critics with bigger circulation than me. I’ve also tried voting my conscience, picking the ones I thought should win and letting the chips fall where they may. Neither method seems to work.

This is, of course, very similar to the choice voters face in the Democratic primaries. Do you vote your conscience or do you vote for the candidate you think has the best chance to beat Trump? Let my experience be a lesson to you. You simply don’t have enough information to vote strategically, so use the system the way it was designed to be used and just vote for the candidate you think will do the best job.

My Oscar ineptitude is one of the reasons I usually don’t do a preview pick-’em column. But the voices of my writing teachers are in my head saying, “People love it when you make yourself vulnerable.” So here goes: my picks for the 2020 Academy Awards.

Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role: Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker is the only truly great part of that film, but Adam Driver’s clueless art-dad Charlie in Marriage Story is the year’s best naturalistic performance. I’m going with Driver.

Supporting Actor: Tom Hanks plays Mr. Rogers better than anyone else could have in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, but Brad Pitt elevates Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood to greatness. Plus, his T-shirt clearly says “CHAMPION.” Pitt is it.

Little Women could clean up in multiple categories.

Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role: This is the hardest category for me. Cynthia Erivo’s Harriet Tubman is close to perfect. Scarlett Johansson is Adam Driver’s equal in Marriage Story. I’m going with Saoirse Ronan as Jo in Little Women.

Best Supporting Actress is a little easier. It’s down to Laura Dern as a divorce lawyer in Marriage Story and Florence Pugh as Amy in Little Women. I think Pugh nudges Dern.

Missing Link

Best Animated Feature: I desperately want Missing Link to win. The stop-motion wizards at Laika have been killing it for a decade, and this is their year for recognition!

For Cinematography, it’s Roger Deakins in a walk. 1917 is a next-level achievement. This is the only Oscar that film deserves.

For Costume Design, Jacqueline Durran for Little Women barely beats Arianne Phillips for Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood. Excellent work by both women.

Best Documentary Feature is Honeyland, an environmental fable masquerading as a character study. Highly recommended.

Any other year, Achievement in Film Editing would be Thelma Schoonmaker’s for the taking, but The Irishman is more than three hours long. Jinmo Yang’s work on Parasite should carry the day.

Honeyland makes a strong case for Best International Feature, but I’ve got to go with Parasite.

I’m going to take a pass on makeup because I haven’t seen two of the nominees. Best Original Song is “(I’m Gonna) Love Me Again” by Elton John and Bernie Taupin from the underrated Rocketman. Original Score should and probably will go to John Williams for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, so he can retire a legend. Go ahead and give Skywalker Best Visual Effects, too. Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood‘s 1969 mixtape should take home the two sound awards, as well as Production Design.

Greta Gerwig’s tear-up-the-floorboards reimagining of Little Women deserves the Adapted Screenplay statue. I’m giving the Original Screenplay to Knives Out … probably because I’m giving everything else to Parasite.

Best Director goes to Bong Joon Ho. I was willing to give it to Quentin Tarantino, but then I found out that the Parasite house was a set with CGI background, and I was shook. Masterful execution is what this category is all about.

Best Picture has to be Parasite. This was a very good year for movies. Little Women, Marriage Story, and Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood are all worthy films. But Parasite captures the spirit of 2019, and it deserves the biggest prize of all.

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Film Features Film/TV

Joker

Hollywood legend has it that during the heyday of the studio system there was a sign over the water fountain in the Warner Brothers writers building that read: “What does the bad guy want?”

Writing for the hero is easy — or at least it used to be. Superman stands up for “Truth, Justice, and the American Way.” Wonder Woman watches over the weak and innocent. Batman protects Gotham City from evil weirdos in costumes.

Writing for villains is harder. The worst kinds of villains are the ones who are simply there to serve as a punching bag for the hero. They may look menacing and throw the occasional one-liner, but their goals are nonsensical and their psychology nonexistent.

Send in the clown! Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck in Joker.

Our recent comic book film obsession has brought a parade of idiotic villains. There is no worse offender than Thanos, the big bad guy from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He spent upwards of 10 movies trying to assemble a magical artifact that would allow him to bend reality to his will in order to stop what he saw as an out-of-control population explosion. Never mind that the universe is a brain-blastingly big place, chock-full of resources easily available to a civilization that drives spaceships like they were Bird scooters. If you can create and destroy like a god, why not snap your fingers and make enough food for everyone?

Which brings us to Joker. The Clown Prince of Crime’s motivations have historically been pretty thin, falling squarely in the “provide a punching bag for the hero” category throughout much of the character’s 80-year history. Frankly, this wasn’t much of a problem in the classic comics. But now, with Warner Brothers’ entire billion-dollar film operation resting on making Batman v. Superman: Our Moms Are Named Martha as gritty and realistic as possible, the Joker needs a Lawrence of Arabia-level character study.

Where did the Joker come from? What’s up with the clown schtick? Is his mom named Martha? All these questions and more are answered definitively by director Todd Phillips and Joaquin Phoenix, and it only takes two ponderous hours.

Spoiler alert: His mom is named Penny Fleck. Her son Arthur (Phoenix) takes care of her in a kitsch-filled apartment in a 1981 Gotham that bears a startling resemblance to the decayed New York of Taxi Driver. In that classic, writer Paul Schrader, director Martin Scorsese, and actor Robert De Niro asked, “What turns an ordinary man into a political assassin?” (“He wants to impress Jodie Foster” turned out to be a startlingly accurate motivation.)

De Niro is here, seemingly to add gravitas to the movie that asks, “Why does a guy dress like a clown to get his ass kicked by a guy who dresses like a bat?” He plays Murray Franklin, a talk-show host who delivers his monologue in front of a Johnny Carson-like rainbow curtain, and who inadvertently gives the Joker his name while mocking Arthur’s attempts at stand-up comedy in front of millions of viewers. Needless to say, this does wonders for our anti-hero’s mental stability.

To be fair, Arthur has apparently been a punching bag all his life. In the movie’s crushingly depressing first hour, he is beaten up twice by the roving gangs of thugs who apparently make up the population of Gotham — at least the ones who are not obscenely rich and named Wayne. Phoenix is an incredibly gifted actor, and his performance here is scarily committed. But the most realistic performance in Joker is by Brett Cullen who portrays Thomas Wayne, doomed father of the eventual Batman, as a condescending jerk.

The most memorable parts of the movie emerge from its lead’s bottomless pool of talent. Phoenix has covered this territory before as the mentally scarred veteran who falls for Philip Seymour Hoffman’s proto-Scientology cult in The Master. But without someone of Hoffman’s caliber to play off of, Phoenix is left to spin his wheels. It’s a tremendous expenditure of energy that goes nowhere. Joker feels completely unnecessary. We’ve seen two onscreen origin stories of the Joker. The first was in Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman, and it took about five minutes to set up Jack Nicholson’s Joker as an ambitious gangster driven to megalomaniacal insanity after being dipped in toxic chemicals. The second, and more chilling, was Heath Ledger’s conflicting recounting of multiple origin stories in Dark Knight, which really tells you everything about the character you need to know: He’s a nihilist, and he’s nuts.

Not to spoil the party, but that’s where we’re at when we finish Joker, too. It just takes two grinding, Batman-less hours to get there. Joker is by far the most depressing comic book movie ever made. On the one hand, it’s kind of amazing that all you had to do to gross $234 million was slap a brand name on a bland remake of The King of Comedy. But on the other hand, Joker is just downright unpleasant to sit through. But I guess we’ll reconvene here in a few years for the inevitable, grim-dark Poison Ivy movie.

Actually, I kinda want to see that.

Joker

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Film Features Film/TV

The Dark Knight Delivers

When director Christopher Nolan rebooted the long-dormant Batman film franchise with 2005’s Batman Begins, he sidestepped the pop-art goofiness of the cult-fave ’60s TV series and the dark-comedy fantasia of Tim Burton’s 1989 version for an unusually realistic approach to the comic-book material. The reaction was mixed: Some fans thought Batman Begins drained the fun and richness from the material. Others thrilled at the more serious approach.

Nolan’s follow-up, The Dark Knight, will not appease those already put off by the grim realism of his Batman vision. But those who thought Batman Begins was some kind of apex of comic-to-screen adaptation should prepare for a reassessment. Though only about 10 minutes longer than Batman Begins, The Dark Knight is far grander in scope and yet moves quicker and feels less bloated.

The earlier film was an impressive muddle, bracketed by an overlong origin prologue and a confusing, unsatisfying triangulation of villains at the end. By contrast, The Dark Knight has a much more elegant, satisfying, linear construction, with memorable action sequences (especially a street scene involving a flipped 18-wheeler) that aren’t set-piece breaks from the narrative but instead are woven into a story that deftly intertwines three primary characters: Batman/Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale), anarchic villain the Joker (the late Heath Ledger), and crusading district attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart).

The opening shot glides along the building tops of a sleeker, brighter Gotham City, swooping down to catch a bank robbery just as a horde of masked perpetrators begin executing their plan. Here, Ledger’s Joker gets the grand entrance he deserves, his violent assault on what happens to be a mob-connected bank complicating a Gotham police crackdown on organized crime aimed at money-laundering operations.

As the film opens, good cop Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman) is now head of the city’s major-crimes unit, where he is secretly in cahoots with the mysterious Batman, officially considered a vigilante and wanted for arrest. Crime is on the decline, but the presence of Batman has set off some unintended consequences — criminal copycats and an underworld moved to ever more desperate attempts to hold its ground against encroaching order. City government is still beset by corruption, with danger increasing for those on the good side of the thin blue line. Grandstanding new district attorney Dent suspects Gordon and Batman’s collaboration, but can he be trusted?

As that set-up might indicate, The Dark Knight is not a typical super-hero/comic-book adaptation. The Batman character is less central to the story this time out, making way not only for two, more-compelling points of a triangle in Joker and Dent but for an entire city apparatus of cops, courts, politicians, and criminals. These characters aren’t modern gods fighting it out across a landscape of civilian onlookers. They are exaggerated figures woven into the landscape and institutions of urban civic life.

In this way, The Dark Knight feels much closer to Michael Mann’s 1995 Los Angeles crime epic Heat (or even earlier Fritz Lang crime dramas like M and The Big Heat) than it does with other comic-book/super-hero movies, possibly including its Nolan-directed predecessor. There’s a procedural tension and insistent, palpable anxiety to The Dark Knight common to great crime films that’s unprecedented in comic-hero adaptations, which tend to follow the form of origin stories followed by oscillating bits of comic relief, psychological torment, and fight scenes. It’s grand, gripping, propulsive filmmaking — with a laudatory lack of obvious computer-generated effects — though not as distinctive shot-by-shot as it might be.

The Dark Knight is also a crime film whose central villain isn’t quite a criminal, at least not in the traditional sense. Ledger’s Joker seems to have sprung, fully formed, from the collective corruption and criminal desperation of the city. There’s no origin story (none that can be trusted, anyway), no name, no history, no explanation. His initial bank robbery isn’t motivated by money but as a way to gain entrance to the ongoing conflict among Gotham’s criminals, their law enforcement counterparts, and Batman. He’s an angel of chaos whose only goal is to be the creation of disorder and mayhem — with echoes of Osama bin Laden, Ted Kaczynski, and Brad Pitt’s Tyler Durden from Fight Club.

When Bale’s Bruce Wayne describes this new figure as a criminal like any other, Wayne’s confidant/assistant, Alfred (Michael Caine), responds, “Some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

In his last completed film performance, Ledger sidesteps the flamboyant humor of most of the character’s iterations (be it Cesar Romero on TV or Jack Nicholson for Burton), substituting a grim, bitter sarcasm. In a movie where Bale’s Batman is the title role and the emotional and narrative arc follows Eckhart’s Dent, it is Ledger who owns the screen whenever he appears. It would have been an iconic performance even if the young actor hadn’t died tragically earlier this year, leaving behind a string of indelible recent performances — from his mumble-mouthed cowboy in Brokeback Mountain to his avuncular surf bum in Lords of Dogtown to his late-Sixties Dylan in I’m Not There.

Here, Ledger seems to internalize the nameless madman, refusing to attempt to charm the audience or ingratiate himself in the manner of such overrated screen-villain performances as Nicholson’s Joker or Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter. Ledger won’t just scare audiences, he’ll rattle them.

More than a typical crime-film heavy, Ledger’s Joker is portrayed as a terrorist, albeit one without clear political motivation. He’s responsible for vicious individual murders, bombings, political assassinations, outlandish mass-murder threats, and shaky, menacing hostage videos. This new kind of threat is combated with rule-bending violence, illegal surveillance, rough interrogation, and at least the suggestion of torture. “When there was an enemy at the gates, the Romans would suspend democracy and appoint one man to protect them,” Wayne says to assistant district attorney and true love Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal, replacing and improving on Katie Holmes), by way of defending rough tactics in response to the Joker.

“Look what I did to this city with a few drums of gas and a couple of bullets,” the Joker says late in the film, as fear feeds into chaos throughout Gotham.

But, with all that provocative material in play, The Dark Knight manages to be resonant without straining too much for topicality. It isn’t preachy, and it leaves identifiable real-world politics and issues of patriotism out of the mix. Instead it grapples with elastic but relevant questions about ends and means.

“You’ve got rules. The Joker has no rules,” one character says to Batman. But does he? Ultimately, The Dark Knight is about the difficulty of combating disorder without giving in to it, questioning the ability of a person to self-impose limits on potentially unchecked power, even when well-intentioned, and also whether bending the rules isn’t sometimes necessary. As such, it could be taken as an almost sympathetic critique of post-9/11 government overreach.

In The Dark Knight, victories are short-lived and would-be good deeds are often counterproductive. “You die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become a villain” is The Dark Knight‘s mantra, one repeated by multiple characters, and it’s one that foreshadows the film’s print-the-legend denouement.

The Dark Knight

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