As you know, “Joker,” is now out in theaters and, despite the largest October opening ever ($93.5M), the reviews have been mixed for the Todd Phillips-directed movie. However, don’t despair friends, there are plenty of us that believe the film is indisputably great.
We can now add non-fiction filmmaker Michael Moore to the list of ‘Joker’ fans. The outspoken director wrote an outspoken and passionate defense of the film via a Facebook post on Saturday morning.
“The greater danger to society may be if you DON’T go see this movie.” Moore wrote, “Because the story it tells and the issues it raises are so profound, so necessary, that if you look away from the genius of this work of art, you will miss the gift of the mirror it is offering us. Yes, there’s a disturbed clown in that mirror, but he’s not alone — we’re standing right there beside him.”
“‘Joker’ is no superhero or supervillain or comic book movie,” he writes. “I loved this film’s multiple homages to ‘Taxi Driver,’ ‘Network,’ ‘The French Connection,’ ‘Dog Day Afternoon.’ How long has it been since we’ve seen a movie aspire to the level of Stanley Kubrick?”
Meanwhile, over at Variety, film critics Owen Gleiberman and Peter DeBruge go at it in regards to the film. Gleiberman loves it, DeBruge despises it. Gleiberman, always the thoughtful, perceptive writer, has a few fascinating takes on the way the film has been treated by movie critics:
“If you say you have trouble with films that create ‘sympathetic portraits of sociopathic characters,’ I guess that’s an argument. But it’s a terribly conservative one. The same argument, and outrage, was once used as a weapon against movies like The Public Enemy and Scarface, and you could easily wield it against a work of art like Bonnie and Clyde — as, indeed, the New York Times critic Bosley Crowther famously did at the time.”
“But when you call Joaquin Phoenix‘s Arthur Fleck a ‘poster boy’ for angry self-pitying incel types, I do think you’re onto something — not about whether he’s going to become a hero to the basement-dweller brigade, but about the true, underlying reason why there’s been so much hostility to Joker on the part of film critics who routinely greet utterly processed comic-book films with a wan shrug of approval.
“The movie is being treated by those critics as if it were a two-hour advertisement for the toxic white male. It almost doesn’t matter whether the film is glorifying or condemning Arthur’s violence. Everyone knows that Joker is going to be a huge hit — and, more than that, a phenomenon — and the fact that it places a toxic white male at the center of the conversation is somehow being slammed as a violation of the New Woke Rules.
Still no distributor for "Bucking Fastard," "Alpha Gang," "The Last Photograph," "Closing Night," and "The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd." The issue seems to be quality more than a lack of willingness to buy.