Tag: Todd Phillips

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Film Features Film/TV

The Franchise

Dysfunction abounds in The Franchise. (Photo: Courtesy HBO)

The big news in film this week is the dramatic box office underperformance of Joker: Folie à Deux. Todd Phillips’ sequel to his 2019 mega-hit “only” made $40 million over its first three days of release in North America. But since this courtroom drama musical cost about $200 million to make, that’s a problem.

Maybe it’s time to ask why anyone would think it’s worth paying $200 million for a courtroom drama musical starring one of our greatest living actors, Joaquin Phoenix, as an evil clown, and Lady Gaga, an innovative pop star, as the evil clown’s psychiatrist/girlfriend/also evil clown. Surely these extraordinary talents could be put to better use, not to mention the thousands of other artists and craftspeople whose hard work went into making yet another picture based on Batman. But that’s exactly why this misfire was green-lit by Warner Brothers, when so many better, cheaper ideas are left to rot in the field: because it’s based on a superhero comic book. 

For most of this century, comic adaptations have been popular with mass audiences. Some of the films have been good. Most of them have not. Several of them are among the worst movies ever made. But they all cost a fortune to produce. The mainline studios have put all of their eggs in one basket because, as the old Hollywood saying goes, lots of people have gotten fired for saying yes to a new idea, but no one ever got fired for saying no. The studios’ extreme risk aversion has resulted in an avalanche of same-y products aimed at a deeply jaded audience. 

Ironically, the new HBO Max series The Franchise was also green-lit because it’s about superheroes. But The Franchise comes not to praise flying men in tights, but to bury them. This is not the first time someone has trained a satirical lens on the superhero plague; The Boys has been going strong for four seasons over at Amazon. But Veep creator Jon Brown’s series is the first deep dive into the deeply dysfunctional environment at the studios where the product is extruded. 

The Franchise’s first episode, “Scene 31 A: Tecto Meets Eye,” is the tightest comedy pilot I’ve seen in recent memory. There are some heavy hitters involved, like Sam Mendes, director of two James Bond films. Like his stunning 1917, Mendes leads off with a series of sweeping long takes. We follow Dag (Lolly Adefope) as she arrives for her first day on the set of Tecto, the latest big budget studio picture starring Adam (Billy Magnussen) as “The Earthquake Guy.” She reports to Daniel (Himesh Patel), the first assistant director. Putting an AD at the center of the story is a good move. Like the Army is run by sergeants, film sets are run by the ADs — even though no one involved would ever admit it. Daniel says his job is to “… keep the actors from killing each other, or themselves, and everything else.” 

This means Daniel knows where all the bodies are buried. “You could run a children’s hospital on all the waste,” he muses. That’s why, when the studio head Pat “The Toy Man” Shannon (Darren Goldstein) pays an unexpected set visit, he corners Daniel in the bathroom to give him the skinny on how director Eric (Daniel Brühl) is doing. “I want to crack open your head and feed on the juice,” says Pat.

Eric is a familiar figure to anyone who reads Variety. His debut film The Unlikening is a low-budget masterpiece which won the Golden Leopard at Locarno. This is his opportunity to break into the world of eight-figure paydays. But to The Toy Man, Eric is a semi-disposable rage sink who is mostly there to be blamed in case of a $40 million opening weekend. With 83 days to go in the shoot, Eric is beginning to understand how screwed he is. Everyone around him is either a sycophant, like Steph (Jessica Hynes) the script supervisor, or a social climber like Anita (Aya Cash), the new producer Pat’s putting in charge of the flailing production. 

The cast is already purring like a well-oiled machine, with Richard E. Grant a highlight as the aging Shakespearian actor whose transphobic jokes make him a ticking PR time bomb. The writing is sharp, with a keen eye toward the interpersonal power dynamics and an ear for sneaky one-liners, like when Eric tells Adam to walk “like a panther on its way to a job interview.” Sure, The Franchise is inside baseball, but it’s also a lot of fun. 

New episodes of The Franchise stream Sundays on HBO Max. 

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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

War Dogs

“Bush opened the floodgates in Iraq,” Efraim Diveroli (Jonah Hill) tells his junior-high best friend turned gun-running associate David Packouz (Miles Teller) over breakfast in a Miami, Florida, diner. “It’s a fucking gold rush.”

War Dogs, Todd Phillips’ first film following The Hangover trilogy, is a true story about the Bush administration’s brutalized American dream. As it became apparent that corporations supplied munitions to the United States military through sole source contracts, biddings opened to small businesses — allowing them to rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars running guns for Uncle Sam.

Enter Packouz and Diveroli, two aimless and ambitious 20-something stoners reminiscing on their glory days (“I miss not taking shit from anyone,” Packouz says). Packouz is a part-time masseur who empties his savings on a business selling bedsheets to senior citizen homes, and Diveroli, a spray-tanned, sociopathic bro who discovers Pentagon contracts that let the little guy in on the military industrial complex’s “crumbs.” Diveroli and Packouz reconnect at a funeral, to Packouz’s fortune, and partner under Diveroli’s business moniker AEY — a name that stands for nothing, as Diveroli’s life stands for nothing, as the long-drawn out Iraq war came to stand for nothing.

Packouz and his pregnant girlfriend Iz (Ana de Armas) are anti-war, but he can’t really support her selling bedsheets. As Diveroli tells him, “The war is happening. This is pro money.” Packouz lies to Iz. Money rolls in, but trouble mounts at AEY. The two-man business is forced to travel overseas to right a deal trafficking Beretta pistols gone awry. “God Bless Dick Cheney’s America,” Diveroli says during a chase scene through Fallujah, Iraq, as a squad of U.S. soldiers save them from machine-gun slinging rebels while Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son” plays overhead. A taste of success carries Diveroli and Packouz to their demise when they meet global gun dealer Henry Girard (Bradley Cooper) at an arms convention in Las Vegas. Girard helps AEY land their biggest deal yet, a $300 million contract selling 100 million rounds of AK-47 ammo to the Afghan military.

Teller and Hill lack the chemistry to create a believable duo. During the nearly two hours spent with Packouz and Diveroli, the surface is scratched, but their relationship never digs deeper than a shallow good-guy-bad-guy rapport. Independently, they shine. Teller’s best when his moral compass points north, and Hill’s performance as an over-the-top cerebral calculator with a Tony Montana admiration lands at the top of his resume. In Packouz and Diveroli’s web of deception and more — themes that drive the film — Armas shines with a grounded portrayal of Packouz’ girlfriend. While Packouz’ humility corrodes, she remains unmoved. Cooper’s charisma is fine-tuned, but don’t get it wrong, this is Hill’s show: a coked-out, conniving looney tune who makes deals with a blade ready for the back.

Those looking for the hijinks and one-liners that characterized The Hangover will be disappointed. With shots from clubby Miami Beach to desolate Albania, cinematographer Lawrence Sher (The Hangover trilogy) keeps Phillips’ vision consistent. Phillips pulls pages from Martin Scorsese’s playbook — all while peppering War Dogs with the gags that have branded his adolescent comedy since 2000’s Road Trip. His latest effort asks to be taken seriously, though, and falls short. War Dogs, a worthy attempt, spends too much time redeeming Packouz and Diveroli. In Scorsese’s hands, a more gripping film might have been made. It’s an important step for Phillips, though, one that shows he should improve with time.