JOKER

JOKER is such a hyped movie - both positive and negative - that I felt I needed to watch it and form my own views before I drowned in the commentary.  I also recognise the irony in me now adding to that cacophony of praise and outrage.  But for what it's worth, these are my thoughts.

Todd Phillips has - with his production designer and cinematographer - created a really evocative view of late 70s/early 80s pre-Giuliani New York.  His Gotham City is full of filthy streets, piled-up garbage bags, sleazy sex shows and petty crime.  There's discontent and inequality. Thomas Wayne is proposing he fix the mess, bringing his business acumen to bear as Mayor, but he's not the shining beacon of decency we've come to expect.  He has little sympathy for the "clowns" who haven't managed to make anything of their lives.

In the midst of a city on the edge, we find Arthur Fleck. A mentally ill man who has delusions and narcissistic personality disorder. He also has a kind of Tourette's where he laughs at inopportune moments.  He works as a clown, and aspires to be a stand-up comedian, but he clearly has no gift for comedy, or even simple human relationships. Beaten up; dismissed from his job; feeling abandoned by his father; and mocked by his hero - a late night TV show host, Arthur snaps. But his violence isn't the anarchic chaos of Heath Ledger's Joker. Rather, it's targeted vengeance at those he thinks have wronged him. Twice in the film he has a chance to kill people who have been nice to him and he doesn't.  So his mental illness does not exculpate him from charges of murder:  he very much knows right from wrong and chooses to cross the line anyway. 

Joaquin Phoenix is superb in the role of Joker, although his career best remains in THE MASTER. He physically transforms - losing weight, making himself small and twisted, showing us a desperation and anger - a desire for connection and adulation, and an anger that the world simply doesn't "see" him.  Robert de Niro is also good as the late night host: in a  final confrontation with Joker he is admirably cool, perceptive and interrogatory, asking the questions and making the points that the audience might well want articulated. I certainly did.  But the other characters are very thinly written. Poor Zazie Beetz has very little to do as the Joker's neighbour and purported love interest. Similarly Frances Conroy as Joker's mum has little to do other than deliver a single brutal line.  

No, this is very much Phoenix's film. And at times I found that claustrophobic and actually a tedious. I think Phillips wants it to be claustrophobic He wants us to be immersed in the Joker's head.  But I just didn't want to be there. I found it (rightly) uncomfortable. The fundamental structural issue with the film is therefore, for me, that Phillips has made Joker the protagonist, and therefore wants us at minimum to understand his descent into violence, and at most to empathise with it. And I don't want to empathise with it - I find it almost irresponsible too - and therefore I also didn't want to spend time understanding it.  I felt Robert de Niro spoke for me when he accused Joker of just making excuses.  Yes life sucks for him, it sucks for many, we don't all shoot people.

There's another structural issue in this film: the unreliable narrator. I quite like a good unreliable narrator drama, but I felt this was so obvious and heavy handed as to be patronising.  I know Joker is imagining his relationship with his neighbour, I don't need Phillips to show me this in flashback scenes that cut between Joker with her and without her.  I also think you get to a point where you start doubting everything.  Did Joker really dance on the car bonnet for his radical minions at the end? Or was he just driven straight to the asylum?  Is Bruce Wayne really a shit and is Gotham City really so grungy or is this just Joker's projection?  Was Joker's mum really delusional or was she actually just gaslit by Wayne?  There are so many of these choose-your-own-interpretation moments that at some points it all just collapses in on itself, and I found mysel not caring. In the words of one of my friends, mocking this unreliability, "Maybe Joker just commits suicide in the fridge and everything after is just a dream".  

My final major issue with this film is the same one I had with Noah Baumbach's MARRIAGE STORY.  I get that great directors are cineliterate and inspired by the greats of history. But simply to recreate an iconic style from a single past director isn't enough. Baumbach makes a great late 80s Woody Allen film.  Phillips had made a great mash-up of TAXI DRIVER and KING OF COMEDY. But it isn't enough. In his interpretation of Batman, Christopher Nolan took all that cinema history and added his own originality to make something truly pioneering. Joker features a great performance and great design, but it just isn't that. 

JOKER is rated R and has a running time of 122 minutes. It is on global release.

THE WOLF OF WALL STREET

THE WOLF OF WALL STREET is crazy gonzo fun for about an hour.  And then it's still sporadically funny but the complete lack of character or indeed plot development starts to nag at you.  And while it's nagging you think, haven't I seen all this before, thematically at least, in GOODFELLAS and CASINO?  And then, in the final half hour of this over-long three hour film, you get the first indication of the dark side of the excesses of greed and addiction - the first actually profound exploration.  And it's just too late.

Which is not to say that Martin Scorsese hasn't achieved a great deal with this film. No-one depicts hedonism with his sense of energy, flair and superb synchronisation of music cues. And my god, Leonardo diCaprio and Seth Rogen really commit to their performances.  To see the two rookie stockbrokers sneak out the back of a restaurant, smoke crack and then go skipping and jumping through the car-lot like naughty children is a joy.  To see them, now super successful, crippled by quaaludes, bodies spasoming, fighting over a kitchen counter is physical comedy of the highest form.   To be sure the intervening two hours contain many a funny scene.  The serious discussion about dwarf tossing, referring always to the dwarf as 'it' is funny as hell.   But there's an uneasiness in the gonzo nature of this film, and Scorsese's resistance to any dark backing.  Surely it must be possible to make a movie about superficial greedy people that is not itself superficial and egregious?

Because, make no mistake, the tone of this film for the majority of the run-time is one of admiration for these charming gonzo folk.  It's swallowed the hype for the most part.  It makes zero attempt to show the impact of these swindlers on the ordinary folk whose money they have invested in worthless stock, while taking massive commission. The 'hero' has an earnest first wife who is dispatched in a divorce quickly and is never seen again.  What's even worse is that Scorsese clearly isn't actually interested in the con.

Jordan Belfort (DiCaprio) was a real life broker who operated a 'boiler plate' scheme - that means you set up a call centre and randomly cold call dumb schmucks and get them to invest their money with you. It works because they are ignorant and greedy. The so-called investments are actually in worthless 'penny stocks' - companies so small that they aren't on the main stock market and so fly under the radar of the big investment banks.  And the real con, is that the brokers take 50% commission. So they take your $10,000, invest $5,000 in stuff  that's worthless, and keep the other $5,000.  In addition to this con, Jordan also ran two other cons. First, he would bring a new company to the stock market, but instead of selling the new shares in the market, he would pocket them himself, in secret, drive up the price and then sell.  Second, he was wholesale exporting cold hard cash to a secret bank account in Switzerland.

Scorsese barely tells you any of this. In fact, time and again in Jordan's speeches to the audience he says something like 'You don't understand what I'm saying, or care, so let's just flick to another picture of me snorting coke from a hooker's arse.'  I find this just as patronising as the original boiler plate scam - assuming the audience is as gullible and greedy for excess and dumb as the scammed investors.  Scorsese is truly giving a massive Fuck You to all of us.  Compare the approach taken here to J.C.Chandor's marvellous MARGIN CALL - the only movie to really GET Wall Street.  The tragedy here is not that Scorsese fails, as Oliver Stone did with WALL STREET 2 - the tragedy is that Scorsese doesn't even try.

So when you strip out any interest in Wall Street, and any interest in what's really behind all this excess psychologically, what you basically get is a gag-reel full of drug-fuelled pratfalls and brilliantly kitschy 1980s clothes.  It's funny but it's empty and too long given the paucity of its ambition.

But is it worth seeing anyway? Here I'd have to say 'yes'.  The Matthew McConaughey cameo is genius - as if anyone isn't already convinced that this is truly HIS time in the sun.  The physical comedy is fantastic.  DiCaprio's quaaluded-up attempt to get to his car is worth awards glory on its own.  But be prepared, amid these wonderful set-pieces, for boredom. And don't expect Scorsese to move beyond the thematic work that has, by now, become cliché - sudden wealth, hot wife, doofus sidekick, hubris, nemesis.  Where's the personal growth? Both on the part of Jordan Belfort AND on the part of Scorsese?

P.S. If in your publicity material you're making great claims for screenwriter Terence Winter's background in investment banking, don't show the tickers for Black Monday as GREEN when the RED was dripping on the walls, dumbass.

THE WOLF OF WALL STREET is rated R in the USA and 18 in the UK for very strong language, strong sex and drug use. The movie has a running time of 180 minutes.

THE WOLF OF WALL STREET was released last year in the USA, Canada, France, Albania, Croatia, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Lebanon, New Zealand, Macedonia, Serbia and Slovenia. It was released earlier this month in Egypt, Argentina, Chile, Israel, Uruguay, Finland, India, Poland, Belgium, Denmark, Kuwait, the Netherlands, Portugal, Singapore, South Korea, Mexico, Romania, Sweden and Vietnam. It will be released on January 17th in the UK, Ireland, the Czech Republic, Germany, Pakistan and Spain.  It will be released on January 23rd in Australia, Italy and Brazil; and on January 24th in Japan; on January 31st in Norway and Russia; on February 7th in Russia, Estonia and Latvia; on February 13th in Hong Kong; on February 21st in Lithuania; and on February 28th in Turkey.

This review is available as a podcast. You can listen directly below or subscribe to Bina007 Movie Reviews in iTunes.

London Film Fest 2012 - Day 11 - SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK (SURPRISE FILM)

David O Russell brought arthouse integrity and quality to the underdog sports movie with THE FIGHTER, and pulls the same trick on the rom-com genre with SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK. It's a clever, funny, superbly acted movie with a visceral, up-close and uncomfortable shooting style that almost fools you into thinking that it's a braver, more unconventional movie than it really is.  At its heart, the movie is a basic one - boy meets girl, girl loves boy, boy's too hung up on former lover to realise he loves girl, there's a dance contest, they kiss, the end. The twist is that he's bipolar and just out of a mental institution, she's a widow with massive SLAA issues, his dad's OCD  with anger management issues, and his mum's clearly an enabler. The film's plot is driven by the unhealthy quid pro quo: she'll help him contact his ex (against whom he has a restraining order) if he'll participate in a dance contest with her.

David O Russell's script (based on Matthew Quick's novel) is whip smart and crackles with energy.  Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper have real chemistry and seeing them spar is one of the joys of the film.  It's great to see her broaden her range beyond put-upon hardened teen and similarly it's great to see him move beyond pretty-boy wise-ass roles. There are mis-steps to be sure -  the age difference threw me off and I never really bought it.  The inclusion of an African American character (Chris Tucker is his most modulated and impressive performance to date) only to have him, per movie cliché  contribute to a dance scene by having the white characters "dance blacker". And that schmaltzy final declaration could've come out of a risible Richard Curtis movie.  But overall, it was fun to spend time with the main characters and feel the grunginess of working class Philadelphia through  Masanobu Takayanagi's (WARRIOR) frenetic camerawork. 

SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK played Toronto 2012 where David O Russell won the People's Choice Award for Narrative Feature. It was the surprise film at London 2012. The film will be released in the USA, UK, Russia and Iceland on November 21st. It opens in Portugal on December 6th, in Sweden on December 21st, in Germany, Norway and Turkey on January 4th, in Spain on January 11th, in France and Australia on January 31st, in New Zealand and Bulgaria on February 8th, in Argentina on February 21st, in Belgium and the Netherlands on February 27th, in Italy on March 14th and in Denmark on April 25th.  

London Film Fest 2011 Day 12 - TAKE SHELTER

Writer-director Jeff Nichols's psychological drama, TAKE SHELTER, has been winning rave reviews, and with screeners already sent out to the Oscar electorate, I am sure Michael Shannon (BOARDWALK EMPIRE, BUG) will be receiving Oscar buzz for his performance of a man conscious that he is losing his mind.  But to be frank, I found this movie near un-watchable - so languorous was its pace, so obvious was its plot trajectory.   

Shannon plays Curtis, a hard-working man, whose nightmares of violent storms and biting dogs start to seep into his waking life.  Convinced that a violent storm is coming he puts himself in financial jeopardy to extend and stock up a storm shelter in his garden, at the same time alienating himself from his sweet wife Samantha (Jessica Chastain).  Shannon is always committed and convincing in his performances, but has become typecast as the sympathetic insane person. I also feel that Chastain needs to move beyond roles where she is just an archetypal sweet wife to be adored and put on a pedestal. She needs to break free of this typecasting. I feel that I have yet to see her really act. But the story just moves at such a slow pace, and doesn't really go anywhere. Over-hyped tedium.   

TAKE SHELTER played Sundance, Cannes where it won the Critics Week Grand Prize, and Jeff Nichols won the SACD award for Best Feature.  It also played Hollywood 2011 where Jessica Chastain won Breakthrough Actress, and London 2011. It opened in September in the US and opens on November 11th in the UK. It opens in France on December 7th.

Random DVD Round-Up 2 - BARRY MUNDAY aka THE FAMILY JEWELS

I rather liked THE FAMILY JEWELS, although I must admit it was rather betrayed by its marketing. I was rather expecting it to be a gross-out frat-boy comedy in the manner of a Judd Apatow flick. After all, the central conceit is that Patrick Wilson's character - Barry Munday - is a promiscuous, misogynistic David Brent-style loser who gets his balls cut off by the vengeful father of a teenage girl. Just as he realises he can't father children, he's told that a plain-jane one-night stand (Judy Greer) he can't even remember fucking, is knocked up.  What then follows is actually a rather sweet, rather earnest little romantic drama, in which Barry comes to accept fatherhood and his baby-mama, Ginger, comes to accept his attentions. The movie may be rather predictable and the direction is certainly workman-like, but it's also peppered with some delicious cameos from the likes of Billy-Dee Williams as Barry's boss; Malcolm McDowell as Ginger's dad; and Cybill Shepherd as her mum. Overall, the movie is not particularly memorable but it was enjoyable enough at the time, and Patrick Wilson is so funny and convincing as Barry Munday I would love to see him do more out-and-out comedy. 

THE FAMILY JEWELS played a bunch of minor festivals in 2010 and had a very limited US release in October 2010. It is available to rent and own.

Overlooked DVD of the month - THE KILLING ROOM

Director Jonathan Liebesman followed up DARKNESS FALL and TCM: THE BEGINNING with a quiet psychological thriller called THE KILLING ROOM. It's an austere, tightly made, well-acted film that, while mining familiar material, still manages to hold our attention. The movie takes the same kind of approach as DAS EXPERIMENT - creating a fictional exploration of a real psychological experiment - in this case, the CIA's infamous MK Ultra programme. In the real life version, "volunteers" were subjected to mind-control experiments, often drug-induced, of the kind that led to Manchurian candidates. In this fictionalised version, four men have volunteered for a medical experiment run by the ruthless Dr Phillips (Peter Stormare) and the ambitious but morally uncertain Miss Reilly (Chloe Sevigny). They have to solve puzzles, and the man with the least correct guess is summarily executed. The prisoners try to outwit the system, and even escape, while the audience try to figure out what purpose such a sadistic experiment could serve. I liked the stark production design, gathering sense of claustrophobia, and Timothy Hutton's performance as one of the "volunteers". This movie is well worth a watch.

THE KILLING ROOM played Sundance 2009 and went straight to DVD.

FAST & FURIOUS - no alarms and no surprises

The latest installment in the FAST & FURIOUS franchise is a slick but vacuous affair, with none of the authentic drift-racing of part 3, TOKYO DRIFT, and none of the self-mocking ridonkulousness of CRANK 2. The movie plays with all the earnestness of a tragic love story despite the MTV visuals, misogyny, auto-eroticism, wooden acting and risible dialogue. Other than a quite brilliant lorry heist in the opening ten minutes, the movie is unwatchable. Basically, we're back in LA, with Vin Diesel and Paul Walker reprising their roles as a street racer and a Fed respectively. They both compete in a street race to win slots as drug mules for the infamous Mexican drug lord Braga. It's not entirely clear why a major drug dealer would want to draw attention to himself by organising big-ass illegal street races, or why he would want to ferry H across the border in day-glo cars. But what am I saying?  This is a movie of which it would be impossible to under-intellectualise. 

FAST & FURIOUS is on global release.