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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Bradley Cooper will play Leonard Bernstein

by Murtada Elfadl

Did you know that Bradley Cooper is now an 8 time Oscar nominee? He received his eighth nomination as a producer of Todd Phillips’ Joker. Only half of these nominations are for acting: Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle, American Sniper and A Star is Born. Three are for producing, writing and starring in one film, A Star is Born again. Now he has a chance to add four more nominations with his next project...

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Did Scorsese actually score five nominations?

by Cláudio Alves

Officially, Martin Scorsese received two nominations for this year's Oscars. He's a contender for Best Picture, as a producer, and the Best Director statuette for his long-gestating epic The Irishman. However, there's a fellow nominee whose movie is noticeably indebted to the old master's filmography. So much so, that some would go as far as to say that these other project's nominations are due to nostalgia for the Scorsese of yore as much as they are to this new movie's actual quality.

We're talking about Todd Phillips and his triple nomination for the Joker…

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Name 5 things you're currently obsessing over!

Apologies for the sparse posting the past couple of days we've been buried in screenings & events and the like. I'm currently obsessing about five things...

1) How wrong I was assuming the character of Amy could not be the MVP of any iteration of Little Women (hi, Florence!) so our SAG screening guest was correct. 

2) Potential trickery in the Original / Adapted screenplay placements with Ford v Ferrari attempting a Gangs of New York 'no, we're an original! a category in which they have virtually no chance of scoring... (so what is the campaign reasoning? Bizarre) and The Two Popes attempting a 'never mind that play the screenwriter wrote, we're an original)

3) TODD PHILLIPS DIRECTING STYLE ON JOKER WHICH IS THE MOVIE EQUIVALENT OF CAPS LOCK FOR AN ENTIRE DOCUMENT. 

4) How we're seeing Glenn Close on the campaign trail tonight stumping for Jonathan Pryce in The Two Popes and how lovely that is that she is undeterred by her own horrible recent loss and right back out there. 

5) We've updated Picture / Director / Screenplay / Actor and Supporting Actor Oscar charts but we know you're just waiting for the ladies and we'll do them tomorrow! 

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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