I found the entire Joker movie to be disappointing. Did we really need yet another version of his origin? Heath Ledger's was going to be hard to top in any case and I don't think Joaquin Phoenix accomplished that. I like how they left his origin a bit of mystery in The Dark Knight.
On a final note: When it comes to mother issues, no one can fault Doom on that one anymore.
QFT. I hope they use part of Noah Hawley's unfilmed script from the Doom solo project that he proposed just before the sale of the Fox movie division to Marvel/Disney. I have no idea what's in it but it has to be better than the Fox films version of Doom. Kevin Feige was given a copy of it last year.
Well... someone being awesome isn't a reason to give them an Oscar, and the King's Speech isn't awful purely on a technical level, at the very least.
I think that's a very unfair analysis of the Oscars. To break it down the nominations are done by category (for example ONLY costume designers in the Academy pick the 5 films up for Best Costume Design, ONLY Editors pick the 5 films up for Best Editing). Only the nominations are announced, all members of the Academy gets to vote on each category. It's a good way of breaking up cliques within mediums, while still also having a high end take on what should be up for nomination.
No system is perfect, so things can get missed, and A LITTLE politics comes into play. But by-and-large there is a lot of merit in what is picked. In the nicest possible way, they are the top professionals in their field. They do have a slightly more informed opinion on what is good in that field than the general masses. That doesn't mean they always get it right, but to say they are BS is incorrect.
"We are Shakespeare. We are Michelangelo. We are Tchaikovsky. We are Turing. We are Mercury. We are Wilde. We are Lincoln, Lorca, Leonardo da Vinci. We are Alexander the Great. We are Fredrick the Great. We are Rustin. We are Addams. We are Marsha! Marsha Marsha Marsha! We so generous, we DeGeneres. We are Ziggy Stardust hooked to the silver screen. Controversially we are Malcolm X. We are Plato. We are Aristotle. We are RuPaul, god dammit! And yes, we are Woolf."
Honestly the Joker portions of the movie felt really tacked on. For me, the movie was just a great depiction of a man with mental health issues gradually losing it through a series of unfortunate circumstances (and a few really bad decisions along the way). As Joker movie, it was so-so. But as a movie, it was great. If that makes any sense.
Caveat - the movie made me feel terrible though. Its depressing. Only with more and more distance do I come close to feeling good about it.
Every day is a gift, not a given right.
I have been coming around to that assessment too. It's film about a character study, albeit a very depressing as you say, that suddenly morphs into a short subject about the Joker.
I'd probably get bricks thrown at me but I just watched Doctor Sleep last night and found it to be in some respects a better movie. It was a good finale/follow up to the Shining. I feel like Danny Torrence became the Jack Torrence character Kubrick really didn't do justice to in the first film.
Last edited by Iron Maiden; 06-29-2020 at 03:36 PM.
Unfortunately, without the title and DC Comics connection, it likely does not make a billion dollars and I'd warrant a guess that many of the people on this site who saw it and loved it would never have bothered with it. Can't fault Todd Phillips and Warner Bros. for understanding that.
Been hearing more and more good things about Doctor Sleep lately. I've got it on my list now to watch. The Shining is, ironically, an underrated classic. It gets remembered for lots of the vignettes in it and the acting by Nicholson in particular, but as a psychological movie it stands among the best.
Every day is a gift, not a given right.
Again, I am undoubtedly in the minority but on Stephen King's side on this for the same reasons. He hated it when it was released. This article does a good job of expressing that. Jack Nicholson's Jack Torrence is not the one in his book in one key aspect. He never fights off the influence of the Overlook as he does in the book. In the film he dies a villain, in the book he dies a more heroic death. The article does bring up the interesting point that in the book Jack Torrence is King, who had a problem with alcoholism. It's probably why he hated it so much at the time since essentially the Torrence character loses the fight at the end. So it was King fighting his inner demons too. I often wonder how many film critics actually read the book at the time.
Last edited by Iron Maiden; 06-30-2020 at 11:26 AM.