fantastic_four

Fleck is the protagonist of the film. Protagonists don't have to be heros, just the central character. Merriam-Webster is the oldest and most widely-accepted dictionary, and it doesn't use heroism as a part of any of its connotations of the word: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/protagonist He's certainly not heroic, but a fringe of people will look at him that way. Many mass killers consider previous mass killers heroes. I find it difficult to imagine anyone thinking of him as anything approaching heroic; he seemed mostly pathetic to me. But I'm sure a small minority will find him appealing. Ledger's Joker probably has a wider appeal as a hero since he's a far more polished and capable version of the character than Phoenix's Joker is.

What? That's just him giving his hypothesis. By the way...my "what" above wasn't meant pejoratively, it was meant specifically as a question. As in "what are you amazed at," not as in "PREPOSTEROUS!" Just a question mark at the end with no implied exclamation points to go along with it.

Argh...maybe so, good point. So was the ENTIRE movie a back story that he has manufactured for himself?

I'm a huge fan of Stan, but an action figure of him seems weird. He'd make a good random person in a display for heroes to save, I suppose, which is the same way he was often used during his dozens of film cameos.

WOW!!!!! What? That's just him giving his hypothesis. It's not him confirming that's the way the screenwriters intended it to be. It seems clear their intent was to make it open-ended for viewers to decide for themselves. I have no opinion myself, it could have been either way, but I've never seen Thomas Wayne depicted as such a villain before, so I'm assuming he's not lying, didn't cover anything up, and isn't Fleck's father until they show more information to contradict that.

How do we know that?

Not all psychological disorders are genetic. The entire idea they were going for seems to be that Joker is a product of one of the most awful possible environments to raise a kid in. Something like the one Francis Dolarhyde was raised in during Thomas Harris's book or the movie for "Red Dragon."

"It was all just a dream!" movies are a huge stereotype for lazy screenwriting that is infamous in Hollywood. I doubt that Phillips is unfamiliar with that stereotype, so I doubt he would've ever wanted to base a film on that idea.

Completely moral-less has no long game which spares the innocent. Yes, but he's not fully the Joker at this point. He's still transitioning from his normal life, so his compassion for someone who helped him makes sense. He just probably won't even have the chance to form those types of relationships from now on.

Maybe, not sure yet. But for now I still rank Dark Knight Rises higher than this one. I may decide differently later. I did like Joker better than all the others since 2008 though including Wonder Woman. I enjoyed Man of Steel more, but that was before Dark Knight. But that's a personal preference/bias, Joker was a better film than Man of Steel from an objective perspective.

I heard some laughs in my theater and while I wasn't sure what motivated them, I found the scene absurd so I assumed they did too. Two hours of watching him build up into a killer and how he's just a total loon now, eh, whacking everyone around him on a whim?

How did they establish that?

They left that open, but the film implied strongly that's not the case. Or I suppose you can assume Thomas Wayne really is a monster and was lying. If so, that's the most unsympathetic version of Batman's dad I've ever seen.

I'm more likely to enjoy a sequel than this film, so I hope they do it. In my mind I'm envisioning something with Batman that works well in a similar way that Dark Knight did, but I don't particularly trust Phillips to do that well so meh, I sorta hope that doesn't happen. Phoenix is 44...did they ever establish how old Arthur Fleck was in the film? Bruce looked to be about 10, so what's the age difference between them? 35 years? Nicholson is only 14 years older than Michael Keaton, and Caesar Romero was 21 years older than Adam West. If they do Joaquin and a 10-year old Bruce 10 to 20 years in the future that's the biggest age gap between the characters yet on screen, probably also in the comics.

ditto! i expect he will get the oscar. the direction and cinematography were outstanding and will be nominated at least. i loved it. even the music was great. I'll be surprised if he isn't nominated, but I don't get the idea of people chalking up a win in a vacuum. A quarter of the potential nominees aren't even out yet.

The film as a whole doesn't hold a candle to Dark Knight, but Phoenix's performance does hold up well against Ledger's performance. Having said that, I still prefer the Ledger version. Watching Joker as a criminal mastermind is more thrilling than watching him struggling with mental disorder. Taxi Driver is a similar hard watch to Joker, both films are full of moments where you're torn and inspired to wince and/or turn away due to how pathetic the protagonist is. I may end up only seeing Joker once for the same reason I only saw Taxi Driver once, I'm just not sure I'll be able to make it through the discomfort of a second viewing.

I need a few more viewings to figure out how good the film is, but I'm not particularly motivated to get those viewings in for this exact reason--it's not an easy watch at all.

Transformers have never appealed to me. I was already a teenager by the time they came out, so I was past their target audience. My 3-year old son appears to like them. For you guys who like them, help me out here...how much of the appeal is actually transforming them, i.e. physically manipulating the bot to change it from one form to another? Is that an integral part of it, or is it more the idea of the figure having two modes? I'm the latter camp, and I do enjoy that aspect of them as I watch the movies. I ask because while my kid enjoys them, he can't transform them--so it's the job of me and his mom to do the transforming. So far I'm not enjoying doing the transforming much, but I might be approaching it from the wrong frame of mind. I can generally see how people might like them...they seem like a puzzle, but simpler. I ask this within the context of Unicron because does anyone look forward to transforming that thing? It looks like it might take an hour or more to change from one form to the other. There's a video of someone transforming the recent $450 Optimus Prime that's two feet tall, and it takes him half an hour on the video to do it. Do most Transformers collectors ENJOY that, a Transformer that takes a while to switch? Both of my kids claim that another kid at their daycare has a Transformer that lets you push a single button for the figure to transform to or from one form to another. Is that a thing with Transformers? THAT sounds more appealing, particularly for the age range my kids are in.

Looks like a bug to me. They got less than 100 backers more than their 8000 backer goal at the end is what I heard; that should mean something like 101% funding.

Broaden that out to EVERY studio is better off not trying to make a connected cinematic universe for any property without the equivalent of an Editor-In-Chief who is knowledgeable about the property to make it all consistently work. For Marvel that's Feige, but DC doesn't have that guy yet. Lucas filled that role for Star Wars for a while, although I really wish he wouldn't have actually written and directed the prequels but instead fill the same overseer role that Feige fills like he did for Empire and Return of the Jedi. For Harry Potter that guy was David Heyman. It's not the fact that the better DC films are standalones, it's that they lucked out and got a good writer/director for particular random films. Every studio does that from time to time. If you've heard of the Auteur theory of filmmaking the same applies to producing an entire universe of films--you need one qualified person keeping them all unified and true to their strengths. DC has nobody like that. Geoff Johns was the guy I hoped would fill that role, but it didn't last long for whatever reason. Until they get that guy you're right, they're better off not trying to create a universe and just taking their chances film by film.

Another reason I wish it wasn't an origin film is that almost nothing about what we saw him go through was at all surprising. Yep, if that's your life, I can see you being the Joker. But just about any of us could have filled in that kind of back story. After seeing "Silence of the Lambs" I was fascinated by what could make someone like a Lecter (or Dahmer) resort to cannibalism, so I rather enjoyed the part of Thomas Harris's novel "Hannibal" which wasn't shown in the "Hannibal" film but was in the "Hannibal Rising" movie that established how he became that way. And after hearing what happened to Lecter as a kid it made immediate sense as to how he might start doing that. So did we need a Joker origin tale? Probably not. I'm left preferring David Goyer's clear implication from "The Dark Knight" that he's just an evil, twisted guy who likes to "watch the world burn" whose origin didn't need establishing. It's not difficult to see how people might become that way.

Aside from just absorbing Phoenix's portrayal a few more times, this is the question I'm still pondering that I'm not sure I'd have an opinion on without repeat viewings:

Oh, and the criticism of the violence/message of this film seems laughable. It's easy to list dozens, probably HUNDREDS, of films whose violence and capacity to inspire dark thoughts in the unbalanced far exceeds what we saw in Joker.

Phoenix, yes. And maybe the cinematographer. Not much else. Wasn't a huge fan on the first viewing. He didn't creep me out nearly as much my other top 3 movie villains (Lecter, Ledger Joker, and Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh). I enjoyed it, but not a lot. There was a ton I need multiple viewings of to fully digest. Initial impression was that I can't really compare Phoenix to Ledger because the movie around Ledger was FAR better, so Phoenix's portrayal didn't stand out as much to me because the excellence of everything else in "The Dark Knight" amplified Ledger's performance so much that it biased me towards it. Phoenix also had a FAR harder job since he was on-screen almost every moment of the film, whereas Ledger's performance was far more rationed out. Had we seen two full hours of Ledger he may have seemed more mundane by the end. I wish this wasn't an origin film. One of the aspects of my favorite villains (Lecter, DK Joker, Chigurh) is that they seem like supermen, whereas this Joker seemed sad and entirely vulnerable. By the end he looks well on his way towards becoming the criminal mastermind we're used to, he was anything but that throughout this entire movie.

Haven't bought her yet because I figure Hasbro will be releasing a new one in either 2020 or 2021, but I like the look of it too. Think I'll go ahead and pick one up now that you've reminded me she exists.