![]() ![]() ![]() Through this desolate landscape dances Phoenix’s lonely man, treading a path from victimisation to vengeance previously trodden by everyone from Charles Bronson in Death Wish to Michael Douglas in Falling Down. Meanwhile, Hildur Guðnadóttir’s brilliantly brooding score seems to throb up from the pavements of these mean streets, full of ominous low strings and prowling bass growls – doom-laden voices prophesying war. When wealthy Thomas Wayne (Brett Cullen) calls Gotham’s impoverished masses “clowns”, his words echo around endless TV screens, providing a V for Vendetta-style mask to rioting protesters carrying “Kill the Rich” placards. The ghost of Pupkin hangs like a putrid spectre over Joker, from Arthur’s fantastical dreams of stardom to the narrative’s queasy themes of the media making heroes of villains in uncertain times. He dreams of becoming a standup comic but has no idea what other people find “funny” – a lethal combination. Bullied, abused and increasingly enraged, Arthur lives with his mother, Penny (Frances Conroy), in Gotham, a city befouled by garbage strikes and overrun by mutant rats. Reduced to a skeletal state (think Christian Bale in The Machinist, but worse) by a diet of nicotine and pain, Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck is a tragicomic nightmare, a beleaguered, sign-twirling clown who suffers from a medical condition that turns his internal screams into cackling laughter. Like Heath Ledger’s Oscar-winning turn in The Dark Knight, Joker has an ace card in the form of Joaquin Phoenix’s mesmerisingly physical portrayal of a man who would be king. The difference is, this time no one’s laughing. Joker, which seems to draw in equal measure on Martin Scorsese’s scabrous media satire The King of Comedy and Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s graphic novel Batman: The Killing Joke, has a similarly dyspeptic worldview, full of characters drunk on a destructive cocktail of enraged self-pity and self-gratification, the latter indulged with an obliterating disregard for consequences. Phillips has previously struck gold by appealing to his audience’s basest urges with the kind of nastily nihilistic gross-out comedies that he recently complained have been killed by “woke culture”. That such terms should be applied to a populist studio picture from the director of the Hangover movies is perhaps unsurprising. ![]() There’s also a book about political assassins that I thought was interesting, and breaks down the different types of personalities that do those sorts of things ," the actor said.S ince opening to an eight-minute standing ovation at the Venice film festival in August, where it scooped the top prize, Todd Phillips’s origins picture about the birth of Batman’s cackling nemesis has become the focus of a moral backlash, with critics using words such as “toxic”, “cynical” and “irresponsible” to describe its relentlessly embittered (and allegedly glorified) tone. As it turns out, that impacts your psychology, and you really start to go mad when you lose that much weight in that amount of time. "The first thing was the weight loss, that’s really what I started with. The Joker is not an easy character to prepare for, and his preparation consisted of losing a considerable amount of weight. Much like other actors before him, Joaquin Phoenix underwent some intense preparation before filming got underway. I think that genre, comic books, kind of lends itself to having different people play the same character and interpret it in a different way," said Phoenix. "Maybe it's like doing a play, like you always hear about people doing something, 'You should have seen this actor in this performance,' but then other actors do it, and it's a different kind of film. Joaquin Phoenix had a tall order to live up to as the Joker, but he made sure to do things his way as opposed to doing something that another perform had already done. ![]()
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