'Joker: Folie à Deux' briefing

1 (out of 4)

            “It’s not about the money, it’s about sending a message.”

Why not hold off assessing the billowing, flaming clusterfuck that is Folie à Deux and just discuss Todd Phillips — this guy is what liberals means when they say toxic masculinity, and that’s before you get to the depressed loner incel version of the Joker. Everything he does endorses the stink of man-child cinema without enough wit or anchoring comic talent to justify it, certainly not Ken Jeong or Zack Galifinakis... the latter couldn’t save his Planes, Trains and Automobiles for dummies Due Date, and the two together couldn't redeem much of the Hangover trilogy for that matter. That first 2009 hit was a zeitgeist-wrangling fluke just like Joker, and similarly both “franchises” now thrive via insults to the poor folks who gave a shit in the first place, all in the name of some kind of subversive, nasty nothingness, like The Last Jedi only more repugnant, somehow.

He’s a crass, indulgent purveyor of lame male fantasies, his bread and butter still just a sadder shade of the Adam McKay, Judd Apatow and whoever was directing Seth Rogen’s stuff at the moment. At least they could actually make something memorable or regularly make you laugh. Road Trip and Old School are just paler National Lampoon knockoffs, School for Scoundrels isn’t far off… see his decently reviewed stuff is no different from most of his panned bunk — if Starsky and Hutch (transmuted 80s cliches lined with lazy improv) and War Dogs (like Lord of War, The Social Network and The Big Short had a collective miscarriage) can get a fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, oh boy I just don’t know how critics could be so easily swindled by a charlatan, a phony, a poor director — Joker, for me and many others, was accidentally good, carried like freaking Atlas by a gangled, giggly Joaquin Phoenix attaining peak method madness and earning him an overdue Academy Award.

But there was no first prize at the Venice Film Festival this time, and there will be no Best Director nominations next year MR. PHILLIPS because (and I’m so curious if you know this yourself) but Folie à pee yew is a TURKEY, a really foul failure, a perfect exercise in second-hand embarrassment, cinematic detritus posturing as even more of an avant-garde affair than last time. Joker circa 2024 has a tripled budget seeing a fraction of the returns, so WB went from making at least 10x their investment to likely losing tens of millions at least, damn even the Hangover flicks were printing money through the third. This 140 minute massacre of your Monday matinee really does make you wonder if it was all a farce (no pun seriously), if Warner or Todd somehow insisted on dismantling the cult created by the first film with a feature length epilogue (one made up less of elaboration and more erasure) meant to metaphorically put the audience on trial right up there with Arthur Fleck.

Lady Gaga has to stick her nose in things and in this putrid jukebox musical (I’d rather be watching Trolls, any of them) she’s somehow NOT doing most of the singing?? “And actuallyyy for art’s sake it’s best if your mouth is dry and you're off-key and, you know what fuck it who cares about tempo.” God save the editor of this epic junk as it bores the shit out of you in steadily unpleasant uncertainty, waiting for something to happen — when it does you wish it hadn’t, because it’s just more of the first film COMING FULL CIRCLE, oh I see the frat boy fancies himself a film festival frequenter now. You just want to tell Todd that, even though you may have enjoyed one of this film’s fantasy dream sequences for the decent song and a little violence and vindication (you know, like the first movie), YOU SUCK PHILLIPS. Your hackneyed effort, ironic or sincere, makes for such a mess that not even the greatest living actor on screen right now can do shit for you, so yeah no Best Picture nom this time, just humiliation to follow up your heyday.

I don’t even know what to think — oh wow the psycho who murdered people he was murdered by a psycho SO POETIC. This film is somehow an airy, crunchy, cumbersome concoction of courtroom show, prison drama and musical theatre — was the Oscar winning composer of 2019 Joker Hildur Guonadottir, did she have a say in maybe not reciting "That’s Entertainment" five times? Sure, with those sick ARRI ALEXA IMAX cameras you can get a few decent shots since Phoenix + cigarettes + dancing is somehow all that apparently inspired this movie to begin with and you can’t argue with what you get. But the terrible Harvey Dent crowbarring, Arthur’s “I was gonna blame society but maybe I’M the one to blame” breakdown at the end, Gaga’s smugness and this interpretation of the character’s reversal on Harley Quinn typically getting used by the Clown Prince, the tasteless thematic dissection of mental illness (again) and a dimwit’s examination of duality — it’s such pugnacious, self-indulgent sophistry, somehow even more ridiculously edgy than where we left off.

Why do the guards let him get a new suit after they beat him to a pulp, or let him cackle in the rain, or imply the prison rape, why? Why must this movie take you through every moment and character of the first movie? How little reason did Folie à Deux actually have to exist? The first film literally left you with “the end,” so the fact that Phoenix wanted to do something more "out there" is nice but this semi-gamble is simply asinine and alienating, especially as you drop projects with actual auteur’s like Todd Haynes days before production. Reboots aside, adjacent, outlier fans now solely have Matt Reeves' perpetually delayed Batman Part II to rest their hopes on.