Joker: Folie à Deux

[MeatHookGekko]

I love Heath joker but I’ll never understand the need for people to always have him be literal perfection in toy form. As long as he looks like Heath joker I’m happy.

Something I've learned about this hobby long ago, and this is even with a nearly full decade hiatus, is that every collector has something they get wonky about when it comes to this stuff.

For example, I can live with a sort of not so great body type. Or even the uniform/clothes aren't so perfect. But I need the guns right. I need the guns made well and I need all the guns that the person carried in the TV show or film. I'm probably more senstive to the weapons loadout of a modern current set than most other collectors.

But everyone is different. Some people get hard edge about the face sculpt. But the general rule is as the price point goes up, the expectations go up. Another collector I know bought a TMNT figure from like Burlington, a discount outlet. When he got it home, after messing with it a little, one of the arms fell off. I mean that sucks, but it's like a 10 dollar figure on a clearance rack. But even myself, when I got the first HT Samurai Predator, many years ago, I went over that MFer with a fine tooth comb when I got it. I had never spent that much on a set in my life.

My take is once you get a certain price threshold, you are also buying, as a collector, the right to no longer hear any more excuses from a brand. I also get that. If it's a personal grail or something you'll use as a centerpiece, you want to look at it and not have to wish it was just a little different.

Every collector is that donkey in the video I posted above. Even me. We all have a "red ball" in this hobby that drives us nuts. When does passion become toxicity? I don't know sometimes. We all value different things in this hobby. For example, I am often perplexed when people in this forum section, for film, start panning a movie before they've even seen it, or before it's even released. But I also don't know what that franchise might have meant to them as kids. It's hard to gauge sometimes.

We are all that donkey sometimes. Our hobby is that red ball sometimes. Just how it works.

 

[Felinx]

Wow, a full-meta movie about the end of entertainment after 100 long years that movie fans just didn't get.

The big idea that movies are in reality underpinned and driven by mental illness, perversity and pathological delusion transferred to millions of people (as in the real folie a deux psychological phenomenon - inducer and induced...) and that even musicals, the most "movie" of all movies, are in brutal reality driven by extremes of darkness, loneliness and madness. And when people try to turn their real life into a musical, it sounds and is terrible - when you stop singing, you're just a crazy person trapped in a delusion who can't sing a note, and nobody's singing with you like they appeared to be.

It's also about the end of America, underpants around its ankles, now that Hollywood is finally finished with it, that "nation of laws" that somehow became the nation of lawyers, along with the nation of criminals and their adoring fans.

The only thing the movie was missing was Lee's home life - her doctor father and doting mother, her privileged existence, the counterpoint to her edgy made-up victimhood. Maybe she could have been a grad student at Columbia by day, psycho activist/arsonist/murderer by night. Like a comic book alter-ego.

Ah but but but... where's my big leering joker moments, strutting on top of a bunch of dying cops or Wall street "bullies" with that cocky psychopathic glee? Go check at the end of your street next week, or next month or next year., whenever the next pschopathic violence spreads yet again to burn the city down for that righteous psychopathic cause.

And when it's your building they set on fire, remember: movies were put here to bring joy and laughter, just like Arthur. So just smile and put on a happy face and join in. Hahaha... hahahaha

 

[Scout Trooper]

Oh man.

I watched it.

Help me.

 

[Mr. Awesome]

Oh man.

I watched it.

Help me.

 

[jye4ever]

“Joker: Folie à Deux” bombed with critics and at the box office, but not with Quentin Tarantino. The filmmaker recently appeared on “The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast” and raved over the divisive “Joker” sequel, which is barely at the $60 million mark domestically after nearly a month in theaters. The movie’s worldwide total stands at $201 million, a huge nosedive from the 2019 movie’s billion dollar gross.

“I really, really liked it, really. A lot. Like, tremendously, and I went to see it expecting to be impressed by the filmmaking,” Tarantino said. “But I thought it was going to be an arms-length, intellectual exercise that ultimately I wouldn’t think worked like a movie, but that I would appreciate it for what it is. And I’m just nihilistic enough to kind of enjoy a movie that doesn’t quite work as a movie or that’s like a big, giant mess to some degree. And I didn’t find it an intellectual exercise. I really got caught up into it. I really liked the musical sequences. I got really caught up. I thought the more banal the songs were, the better they were. I find myself listening to the lyrics of ‘For Once in My Life’ in a way I never have before.”

Tarantino said that he saw a bit of his “Natural Born Killers” story in the “Joker” sequel, comparing Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck and Lady Gaga’s Lee Quinzel to that movie’s disturbed serial killer couple Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory (Juliette Lewis).

“As much as the first one was indebted to ‘Taxi Driver,’ this seems pretty ******* indebted to ‘Natural Born Killers,’ which I wrote. That’s the ‘Natural Born Killers’ I would have dreamed of seeing. As the guy who created Mickey and Mallory, I loved what they did with it,” Tarantino said. “I loved the direction he took. I mean, the whole movie was the fever dream of Mickey Knox.”

“On top of all that, I thought it was really funny,” Tarantino added, saying that he saw the movie in an “almost empty IMAX theater” and therefore could “laugh without bothering everybody. I know I’m laughing at scenes that other people wouldn’t be laughing it.”

Tarantino had particular praise for Phoenix, whose performance as the Joker in the 2019 movie won him the Oscar for best actor (over Leonardo DiCaprio in Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”). The director said Phoenix gives “one of the best performances I’ve ever seen in my life in this movie,” referring to “Folie à Deux,” and he also commended director Todd Phillips for being a joker himself.

“The Joker directed the movie. The entire concept, even him spending the studio’s money — he’s spending it like the Joker would spend it, all right?” Tarantino said. “And then his big surprise gift — haha! — the jack-in-the-box, when he offers you his hand for a handshake and you get a buzzer with 10,000 volts shooting you — is the comic book geeks. He’s saying **** you to all of them. He’s saying **** you to the movie audience. He’s saying **** you to Hollywood. He’s saying **** you to anybody who owns any stock at DC and Warner Brothers […] And Todd Phillips is the Joker. Un film de Joker, all right, is what it is. He is the Joker.”

 

[Mr. Awesome]

“Joker: Folie à Deux” bombed with critics and at the box office, but not with Quentin Tarantino. The filmmaker recently appeared on “The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast” and raved over the divisive “Joker” sequel, which is barely at the $60 million mark domestically after nearly a month in theaters. The movie’s worldwide total stands at $201 million, a huge nosedive from the 2019 movie’s billion dollar gross.

“I really, really liked it, really. A lot. Like, tremendously, and I went to see it expecting to be impressed by the filmmaking,” Tarantino said. “But I thought it was going to be an arms-length, intellectual exercise that ultimately I wouldn’t think worked like a movie, but that I would appreciate it for what it is. And I’m just nihilistic enough to kind of enjoy a movie that doesn’t quite work as a movie or that’s like a big, giant mess to some degree. And I didn’t find it an intellectual exercise. I really got caught up into it. I really liked the musical sequences. I got really caught up. I thought the more banal the songs were, the better they were. I find myself listening to the lyrics of ‘For Once in My Life’ in a way I never have before.”

Tarantino said that he saw a bit of his “Natural Born Killers” story in the “Joker” sequel, comparing Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck and Lady Gaga’s Lee Quinzel to that movie’s disturbed serial killer couple Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory (Juliette Lewis).

“As much as the first one was indebted to ‘Taxi Driver,’ this seems pretty ******* indebted to ‘Natural Born Killers,’ which I wrote. That’s the ‘Natural Born Killers’ I would have dreamed of seeing. As the guy who created Mickey and Mallory, I loved what they did with it,” Tarantino said. “I loved the direction he took. I mean, the whole movie was the fever dream of Mickey Knox.”

“On top of all that, I thought it was really funny,” Tarantino added, saying that he saw the movie in an “almost empty IMAX theater” and therefore could “laugh without bothering everybody. I know I’m laughing at scenes that other people wouldn’t be laughing it.”

Tarantino had particular praise for Phoenix, whose performance as the Joker in the 2019 movie won him the Oscar for best actor (over Leonardo DiCaprio in Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”). The director said Phoenix gives “one of the best performances I’ve ever seen in my life in this movie,” referring to “Folie à Deux,” and he also commended director Todd Phillips for being a joker himself.

“The Joker directed the movie. The entire concept, even him spending the studio’s money — he’s spending it like the Joker would spend it, all right?” Tarantino said. “And then his big surprise gift — haha! — the jack-in-the-box, when he offers you his hand for a handshake and you get a buzzer with 10,000 volts shooting you — is the comic book geeks. He’s saying **** you to all of them. He’s saying **** you to the movie audience. He’s saying **** you to Hollywood. He’s saying **** you to anybody who owns any stock at DC and Warner Brothers […] And Todd Phillips is the Joker. Un film de Joker, all right, is what it is. He is the Joker.”

His opinion of it isn't swaying mine. That's for damn sure. Joaquin's performance was fine but it doesn't make it a good Joker movie.

 

[Felinx]

“Joker: Folie à Deux” bombed with critics and at the box office, but not with Quentin Tarantino. The filmmaker recently appeared on “The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast” and raved over the divisive “Joker” sequel, which is barely at the $60 million mark domestically after nearly a month in theaters. The movie’s worldwide total stands at $201 million, a huge nosedive from the 2019 movie’s billion dollar gross.

“I really, really liked it, really. A lot. Like, tremendously, and I went to see it expecting to be impressed by the filmmaking,” Tarantino said. “But I thought it was going to be an arms-length, intellectual exercise that ultimately I wouldn’t think worked like a movie, but that I would appreciate it for what it is. And I’m just nihilistic enough to kind of enjoy a movie that doesn’t quite work as a movie or that’s like a big, giant mess to some degree. And I didn’t find it an intellectual exercise. I really got caught up into it. I really liked the musical sequences. I got really caught up. I thought the more banal the songs were, the better they were. I find myself listening to the lyrics of ‘For Once in My Life’ in a way I never have before.”

Tarantino said that he saw a bit of his “Natural Born Killers” story in the “Joker” sequel, comparing Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck and Lady Gaga’s Lee Quinzel to that movie’s disturbed serial killer couple Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory (Juliette Lewis).

“As much as the first one was indebted to ‘Taxi Driver,’ this seems pretty ******* indebted to ‘Natural Born Killers,’ which I wrote. That’s the ‘Natural Born Killers’ I would have dreamed of seeing. As the guy who created Mickey and Mallory, I loved what they did with it,” Tarantino said. “I loved the direction he took. I mean, the whole movie was the fever dream of Mickey Knox.”

“On top of all that, I thought it was really funny,” Tarantino added, saying that he saw the movie in an “almost empty IMAX theater” and therefore could “laugh without bothering everybody. I know I’m laughing at scenes that other people wouldn’t be laughing it.”

Tarantino had particular praise for Phoenix, whose performance as the Joker in the 2019 movie won him the Oscar for best actor (over Leonardo DiCaprio in Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”). The director said Phoenix gives “one of the best performances I’ve ever seen in my life in this movie,” referring to “Folie à Deux,” and he also commended director Todd Phillips for being a joker himself.

“The Joker directed the movie. The entire concept, even him spending the studio’s money — he’s spending it like the Joker would spend it, all right?” Tarantino said. “And then his big surprise gift — haha! — the jack-in-the-box, when he offers you his hand for a handshake and you get a buzzer with 10,000 volts shooting you — is the comic book geeks. He’s saying **** you to all of them. He’s saying **** you to the movie audience. He’s saying **** you to Hollywood. He’s saying **** you to anybody who owns any stock at DC and Warner Brothers […] And Todd Phillips is the Joker. Un film de Joker, all right, is what it is. He is the Joker.”

Me and Quentin, alone in a world of Joker haters.

This didn't work for Joker fans at all, but it will emerge as an important film in the future.

It's not at all what it appears to be, a completely separated entity to the first film, a sequel in name/marketing only.

 

[Wor-Gar]

Tarantino is joking.

 

[MeatHookGekko]

Me and Quentin, alone in a world of Joker haters.

I enjoyed the Joker 2. But I acknowledge the overall narrative had some major structural flaws inherent in it. I get why many people didn't like it, or even hated it. I also get why some people would enjoy it.

The critical failure point I see is not setting the film through the POV of Gary. I though Leigh Gill was incredible in both films. Todd Phillips could have told the exact same story, but through the lense of Gary, and I feel it would have had his intended impact and reasonated much better with more of the mainstream audience.

Unfortunately, as a current culture, there is less acceptance of "I didn't like. But you liked it. Both viewpoints are valid" If some people hate Joker 2, that's fine with me. If some people loved it, that's also fine with me. One of the benefits of the old days in these forums, when there was far more participation, more active members, more traffic, it was easier to have 5-6 different side conversations in a thread at the same time. It was easier to pull away from the crowd and not have it so present to others.

Using film as an expression of grievance by high level creatives, those that have proven "bankability", is happening in part because there are no other practical outlets for it. Which lines up with the Joker itself, and even Batman. Even though the Joker embodies chaos, the net effect is also regulating functional social order. The irony is the Joker helps to create the system he seeks to destroy. There's a duality where both Joker and Batman hide behind costumes and "masks", but in doing so, they are actual liberated to be more of their true selves in a very limited scope.

There's a huge difference between copying another good story versus being a good storyteller inately. But it's incredibly hard to do. To have the skill to be an instinctive good storyteller on a base level. People get exposed real fast. What works about Joker 2 is when Phillips plays to his strengths ( i.e. economy with characters). What doesn't work is when Phillips ventures outside of his practical wheelhouse ( i.e. lack of economy with broad scale social themes) .

 

[SwedishHeat]

Watching the movie tonight, I think it works much better knowing what's going to happen, going in. I can understand how folks were taken aback, but I mean ... the guy murdered multiple people, he's not a good guy. 'You get what you deserve' is right there.

I think the jump from the guards assaulting Arthur, to Arthur giving up was not really "earned." I'm guessing the movie was showing that he wasn't really insane, and that kind of pain brought it home for him. But there were other times were he faced hardship and just reverted to his laughter, so that part didn't work for me.

Of course, the judge even allowing Arthur to defend himself in court, much less allowing him to put on his clown makeup, strains credulity, but I allow it for the sake of the story.

I'm guessing this movie suffered in the same way Matrix 4 did, "Hey, we're going to make this movie, you can make it, or we'll find someone else." I'm guessing most folks went into it expecting Arthur and Lee go off on a crime spree ... but that would be pretty silly considering what the first movie was all about. It would've been nice to see Arthur get some help to deal with his issues, but that probably also would've been unbelievable.

 

[intothevoid]

It was a crap movie. End of story. There’s a limit to how much can ‘interpret’ a character with 80 years of history. Phillips shat on every joker fan, and thinks he’s really cool for doing so, well, he’s probably torpedoed his career

 

[Nick D]

The funny part is -

Phillips and Phoenix are at the absolute bottom of a Hollywood “cool list” and have been since their beginnings. They’d never cross my mind as cool kids even if they were surrounded by nerds.