A ticking time bomb story that never quite feels like the timer is running – maybe they have 90 minutes until showtime, but the movie takes 110 minutes to get there. Lots of people playing famous people with uncanny valley impressions just strong enough to remind me how much talent the actual people had.
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.”
Oh, this movie. It makes no sense, but it’s a lot of fun.
Why doesn’t Vicki Vale know what Bruce Wayne looks like? What’s the time frame for the film? It feels like it’s a few weeks at most, but then how does the Joker have time to pull off his cosmetics mass murder? Why can’t Batman turn his head? Why, after Alfred casually gives away Bruce Wayne’s secret identity, is the focus less on “holy crap you’re Batman” and more on “I thought we had a love connection”? Why is Batman, flying a plane with machine guns, missiles, and precision targeting systems, unable to hit a man standing still in the open, but that man can take out his plane with one shot from a comically long handgun? Why is Robert Wuhl?
But Michael Keaton is a strong Bruce Wayne, much harder than being good at brooding in a rubber suit. Jack Nicholson is best when he’s playing more dark and creepy, but he’s not bad at manically chewing the scenery, either. Gotham City is dark, industrial, and very tall & claustrophobic. The Batman cartoon refined the look and feel, but it all starts here.
Oh, and this Batman definitely kills people. Throws them over rails, drops bombs at their feet, and ties gargoyles to them so they fall from great heights, all without a word.
The best movie with a focus on southwest LGBTQIA+ rodeo I have ever seen. Very sweet, and very comfortable and open with gender and sexuality. And it has Teen Witch as an alcoholic mother, so you know it’s good. A big plus: no one gets beat up for being who they are.
Part II of my Let’s Watch America-centered movies in Wales Tour.
Let’s play Guess What Happens!
There is exactly ONE direct reference to the original film.
This time I counted the commercials (not trailers, commercials) before the movie. There were FIFTEEN, including three for the armed forces, one for a cleaning product, and one misguided commercial for KFC. Is Kentucky Fried Chicken popular in Wales? I’ve seen a bunch of them- more than I’ve seen McDonalds.
I’ve liked most of Yorgos Lanthimos’s movies (I didn’t care for the “sex with someone who is effectively a child, played for laughs” of Poor Things) so I had a lot of hope for this. Unfortunately it was disconnected, arch, and stiff, with a lot of it feeling like weirdness purely for weirdness’ sake.
I saw both of these at The New Beverly Cinema, Quentin Tarantino’s movie theater that only shows movies on 35mm (or in rare cases 16mm) film, and it’s always a double feature. They also show old trailers, and it was wild to see something that actually made The Black Hole look like a serious, scary sci-fi film. The audience was full of neurodivergent socially awkward weirdos who talk too loudly about things they love, so I fit right in.
Somehow, I’d never seen this. I really enjoyed it. It’s a crazy mix of dated ideas (“we’ve known each other nearly two days, so of course we’re in love!”) and ahead-of-its-time concepts. The special effects hold up incredibly well for a movie that’s almost 70 years old. I bet Gene Roddenberry loved this movie. It was like an early Star Trek episode in all the right ways, all the way up to the “our greatest enemy is ourselves” ending. And dig that crazy score!
After Forbidden Planet ended, someone in the row in front of me told a friend: “Forbidden Planet is great, but The Time Machine is better! It’s a classic!“
He was wrong.
The Time Machine has its charms, but it’s a much weaker story (the final message seems to be “our blond-haired master race can save the world with genocide”), and more than once the special effects are either terrible mattes or “here is some stock footage that approximates the description in the voice-over.” Also: coming up with futuristic names is always a challenge, and there’s no way to know how language will shift over time, but Weena is an especially unfortunate choice.
I always make a graphic for the featured image of these posts. If I see two movies in a day I make a single combined graphic. But this one is different! I made two separate graphics, then mashed them together for the front page.
Why has it taken me 25 years to see this movie?
I teach digital media to middle school kids. One of the things they love is filming chase scenes, and I always end up telling them the same things: It’s too long. It’s too repetitive. You need a clear, sensible story to carry the action or the audience will get bored.
This movie is basically one long chase scene repeated multiple times with a story that shifts every time it repeats, but good golly it works. I may have to show this to my classes (in an edited-for-language form) and say “here’s why this long chase is engaging and yours are less so.”
Call it a crazy hunch, but I think Francis Galluppi (who directed this) is a fan of the early work of the Coen Brothers. It’s clear from the very beginning that things are not going to go well for pretty much anyone.