Review: "Joker: Folie à Deux" needs double the Folly and more Gaga, too!

by Cláudio Alves

Back in 2019, Todd Phillips accomplished the seemingly impossible, taking a DC Comics movie to the Venice Film Festival and walking out with the Golden Lion. Predicted to be a dangerous provocation by alarmist critics, Joker soared to brilliant box office results and Oscar glory to boot. From its eleven Academy Award nominations, it won two – Best Original Score for Hildur Guðnadóttir and the Best Actor trophy for Joaquin Phoenix. Sure, there were naysayers, but the project's success was undeniable by most metrics. Cut to 2024, when Joker: Folie à Deux was received with polite dismissal at the Lido before clumsily dancing its way to theaters where it's bound to disappoint just as many people as its predecessor entertained—maybe more.

Philips does all but spit in the face of the first movie's fans and comic book aficionados, too. Musical maniacs may well balk at the reedy vocals and uninspired staging, while Little Monsters have plenty of reason to ask for more Gaga. It comes to a point where one almost has to respect the director for his commitment to displease. If only he did anything worthwhile with it…

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Links/News

• NYT Fun Avatar Way of the Water discussion with James Cameron, Sigourney Weaver, Zoe Saldaña, and Sam Worthington
• Mashable a list of family-safe horror movies if you like spooky but hate gore (this describes me!)
• IndieWire first gushing reactions to Black Panther Wakanda Forever
• Parade Comprehensive Jessica Chastain interview. She wants to remake Death Becomes Her which... sorry, why not just a legacy sequel with new character? Streep & Hawn are still with us

More after the jump including Paul Mescal, Lupita Nyong'o, James Gunn, Jennifer Lawrence and Everything Everywhere All At Once Oscar campaigning...

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The Fantabulous Style of "Birds of Prey"

by Cláudio Alves

There was a time when super-hero movies were colorful circuses of artifice and joy. Remember the pop iconography of Christopher Reeves' Superman, Tim Burton's Batman or the Punk stylings of Tank Girl? It all changed with the dawn of the 21st century. X-Men brought on an era of heroes dressed in many tedious iterations of leather jumpsuits, while Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy made grittiness cool again. Explosions of poppy color were out and grim pseudo-realism was in.

The DC Comics flicks took the trend to its desaturated limit, but even the MCU is guilty of indulging in this aesthetic stagnation. Fortunately, some films break the convention, be it the Afrofuturistic haute couture of Black Panther or Aquaman's glitzy excess. We can add Birds of Prey to that elite club of stylish super-hero flicks…

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Review: Birds of Prey

by Chris Feil

Cathy Yan returns Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn to the screen after the regrettable Suicide Squad, and it’s somewhat of a rebirth in more was than one. Now single but not fully exorcized from her sublimating relationship with the Joker, Harley is looking to stand on her own two feet. Yet Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) again aligns her with a newly birthed group of crimefighters, this time in an all-female set of not-so-anti heroes.

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The Look of "Joker"

by Cláudio Alves

In 1989, Tim Burton envisioned Gotham City as an Expressionistic nightmare, something necessarily unreal. Three years later, Batman Returns showed a different sort of urban reverie, one tainted by quasi fascistic imagery, an appropriate dark meaning for a darker film than its predecessor. Joel Schumacher's sequels would see Gotham go through another transfiguration, from a gloomy nightmare into a candy-colored hallucination. This process of growing artificiality would end when Christopher Nolan revitalized Batman for a 21st-century audience.

Nolan's trilogy shows us a Gotham that's a foreigner's idea of an American metropolis and one can almost chart, throughout the films, how the city goes from being a dream of Chicago to New York City 2.0. Todd Phillips' Joker perpetuates this configuration of Gotham as DC Comics' version of Manhattan, but he isn't looking to the real contemporary city for inspiration. The film is set in a New York of yore, a fantasy built from nostalgia and the cinematic legacy of New Hollywood's urban dramas. Gotham is never just a city, rather the idea of one…

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