umair kocha joker
I went into this film umair kocha joker high expectations.
Very high expectations.
I’ve done this a lot, only to be umair kocha joker disappointed later by over-hyped films. Suicide Squad was one such film. Jared Leto had done so many messed-up things to his co-stars in the name of method acting, so that he could mentally prepare himself for the role of the Joker. Surely his hard work would translate into a masterful umair kocha joker worthy of his Joker predecessors?
137 minutes and £12 later (plus an extra fiver for the train fare into Glasgow), I left that 2016 cinema theatre cursing myself.
Given my disappointment with that and other DC film properties, I don’t know why I allowed myself to hope with Joker. I really don’t. DC has been churning out mediocre (Aquaman, Shazam!) and atrocious (Justice League) movies for years now, after all. They sometimes get things right, like with Wonder Woman, and you have to give them props for the extended cut of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (or at least what they tried to do with it), but DC has had a rocky time of it as of late.
They tried too hard to copy Marvel when Zack Snyder’s Superman-level fetish for Ayn Rand fell through, and DC never really recovered from that.
And, to tell the truth, I hadn’t a great deal of faith in Joker until the Venice Film Festival happened. You know the one, where they all praised Joaquin Phoenix’s demented take on the character until they were blue in the face. Five-star reviews poured from Joker’s advance screening like a Biblical flood. Now, I wasn’t always the biggest fan of Jack Nicholson’s Joker (sacrilege!), but I did love Heath Ledger’s, so the question was this: how the hell were they going to top The Dark Knight?
The answer: by not trying to.
Please note: there are spoilers from this point forward.
Joker is wholly isolated in canon, a lone-wolf take on the story of Arthur Fleck, who is constantly trodden on by society. It’s all umair kocha joker reminiscent of Falling Down, wherein the main character William Foster endures slights big and small until he snaps and nearly shoots up his local burger joint. In Joker, Arthur is harassed by teens who beat him up, he’s thrown under the bus by his co-workers, commuters judge him, social services let him down. His mother Penny is of no help, either; he’s the one taking care of her, letting her live with him as he bathes her, cooks her meals, checks the mail for the millionth bloody time for a letter from a Mr Thomas Wayne.
That’s about as far as the DC connections go, though. Joker could have easily existed in a narrative vacuum, Arthur Fleck could have just been a wholly original character and it would have worked out just as well. In a sense, the film actually generates an unfair advantage by establishing itself in Gotham City, since we automatically identify its stre ]ets as being rife with crime and discord. But this is a minor gripe: while the world-building is lifted clean umair kocha joker from other sources, the tale that Joker weaves is entirely self-contained, and it makes careful, loving use of what it borrows from, be that the Batman mythos or Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver/The King of Comedy.
As for love itself, there’s very little to be found in this film. Arthur’s mother is an insane narcissist who allowed him to be abused as a child, leading to the development of his abrupt, uncontrollable laughter. His boss likes him to a point, but is manipulated by those around him who want rid of Arthur and his laughing fits. His healthcare worker has a passive interest, perhaps, but she doesn’t seem to do anything more for him than is required in her job description. There are no heroes to be found in Joker, and there’s no sense that anyone can solve Arthur’s problems before they get out of hand; indeed, the man promising to save Gotham City from itself in his mayoral campaign calls its biggest demographic a bunch of “clowns”.
That goes down about as well as you would expect.
And this brings me nicely onto umair kocha joker main story of Joker, the second masterpiece of the production (the primary being Joaquin Phoenix, who’ll get a section devoted to him later). I saw a lot of reviews from smaller papers complaining that Joker is too shallow to really say anything: to this, I say “bullshit”. The reason is precisely that Joker is not trying to say anything at all. At one point, Arthur (in full clown makeup, the mark of the revolution taking place in Gotham at the time) tells Robert de Niro’s character (Murray Franklin) that he doesn’t “believe in anything”, that there’s no politics behind his look, and that he just wants to boost his own act a little. After all, in his own words, he’s not the type of clown who could (intentionally) start a violent uprising! This is the point of Joker: Arthur is only in it for himself, because by the time he’s snapped, he’s grown so sick and tired of people beating him up and knocking him down.
So what if his accidental umair kocha joker of three boorish city executives spawns a wave of anti-rich sentiment? He’s not aiming for that, he’s really just trying to get himself noticed. A civil war in Gotham, rich against poor, masses versus elites, is only a means to an end in achieving this when his dreams of stand-up comedy fail him.
The lack of meaning instead umair kocha joker a meaning. Nothing matters! As Arthur’s story tells us, it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, and everything from Thomas Wayne’s callous condescension to the “clowns” he wishes to lead as Mayor to umair kocha joker Murray Franklin’s shameless attempt to use Arthur as an interviewee on his show after publicly ridiculing him demonstrates this rather splendidly. Out on the streets of Gotham, most people are just trying to survive meaningless lives in squalid apartments while the rich have it all; indeed, the film does a very good job of showing the divide between the haves and the have-nots while never making it the point of the story.
Neither is mental health the real umair kocha joker ; note the lengths the script goes to so that the writing does not betray precisely which illnesses Arthur needs seven kinds of medication for! His laughing condition is also described in similarly vague terms, and his stint as a patient in Arkham Asylum is rarely touched upon outside of the odd allusion. The umair kocha joker aren’t the issue, and so Joker smartly relegates them to the sidelines to showcase the true problem: society.
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