Tag: joker

  • Retro Movie Adventures: Princess Mononoke (1997)

    San, masked, in Princess Mononoke.
    Ashitaka & San in Princess Mononoke.

    Princess Mononoke was one of those “I hear it’s great but somehow I’ve never seen it” films. The last Studio Ghibli movie I saw was My Neighbor Totoro, which has significantly fewer flying body parts and worm-covered demons. This movie is a prime evidence that “animated” doesn’t mean “for kids.”

    The film is lovely, and the 4K transfer is stunning. I’m glad my first experience seeing it was on the main screen at the Chinese Theatre.

    Today’s parody poster is dumb, but after the first scene with San, her mouth ringed with blood, this terrible idea came into my head and I had to go with it. It doesn’t quite work unless I explain it, which means it doesn’t really work at all.

    A poster for Princess Mononoke that just barely resembles the poster for Joker.
    “Why so serious?”

    Today’s bit of working too hard on a part of the poster that no one will notice: While trying to find a font that closely matched the title on the original poster, I found a reddit post from the person who designed the original logo. They said they used wood blocks to hand print the original, but they also suggested a very similar digital typeface. I slightly re-scaled each of the letters individually, and gave each one its own texture. You can’t tell.

    Fediverse reactions

  • Movie Pass Adventures: Joker: Folie à Deux

    Lady Gaga as Lee Quinzel and Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck in Joker: Folie à Deux

    Spoilers below. Frankly, I’m not sure how I could talk about this movie without giving away at least one major plot point.

    I’m going to write using a bunch of one- or two-sentence paragraphs to give anyone who might read this a chance to bail before they read something they don’t want to see.

    First of all, the biggest surprise of the film: I didn’t hate it. It wasn’t great, but I thought it held together better that the first film.

    Second: Despite what Todd Phillips might say, this absolutely is a musical. A jukebox musical where the male lead isn’t a very strong singer, but a musical nonetheless.

    Joker (2019) showed that Fleck is a VERY unreliable narrator. This movie doesn’t try to hide that. Almost all of the musical numbers are imaginary. That’s fine and good, but they were too timid about Fleck’s grasp on reality. I really wanted more “wait- is this real?” scenes.

    There are some really silly moments – including some very unlikely decisions by the judge about courtroom behavior, and by some guards about inmate interactions – but the movie mostly stays in “real world” mode.

    Okay, let’s do the big spoiler.

    The spoiler for the end of the movie.

    Seriously, the last scene. Stop reading now if you don’t want to know how it ends.

    At the end of the movie, Fleck has declared that Joker was completely made up, and has admitted to killing six people. As he walks down a hallway, another prisoner stops him to tell Fleck a joke. As he tells the punchline, he stabs Fleck multiple times. Fleck falls and dies, and out of focus in the background the other inmate laughs and cuts his mouth to match Heath Ledger’s scars in The Dark Knight. Were these movies secret prequels to Christopher Nolan’s Batman films? Is that random prisoner the “real” Joker, and Fleck just a setup? It doesn’t quite make sense, and it doesn’t really need to. It’s also pretty funny for a director to say use the last five minutes of his film to say “By the way, nothing you saw up to this point had anything to do with the character you thought you were learning about.”