Joker - Folie à Deux

Great Fleckspectations

Joker - Folie à Deux
Directed by Todd Phillips
Canada USA 2024
DC/Warner Brothers
UK Cinema Release Print.

Well this was an unexpected, surprisingly brilliant movie. I admit I was going in with pretty low expectations but Joker - Folie à Deux, the sequel to the same director’s Joker (reviewed here) is a pretty marvellous film and far superior to the flawed and derivative first movie. Now, that being said, I had one big problem with this movie and it’s the exact same one as I had with the prior film. But also having said that, it really is the only problem I have with this one because, it’s one of those rare, damn near perfect concoctions that Hollywood manages to pitch up every now and again.

So that particular problem... and it is admittedly a huge one... is this: What the heck does this character and movie have to do with the DC character The Joker? Answer, like the first one, almost absolutely nothing. The Joker personae is very different, shares no similarity to the character’s background in the comics and doesn’t even have the tenuous connection to Bruce Wayne that the first film has (indeed, the Wayne family don’t even appear in this one except as a blink and you’ll miss it presence on a billboard). And frankly, name checking Harley Quinn and Harvey Dent as main characters and then having a set prop pushing the idea of Arkham Asylum... that does not a Joker movie make. So to say this is in the same universe as the characters which it exploits to get people into cinemas is a little cynical and misleading, at best, I would say. To their credit, DC are labelling this as an Elseworlds movie (in line with their very bold comic book strand of the same name) but they could have easily have called these two movies something else entirely and not had the links to the comic book universe clumsily used as a marketing proposition at all.

All that being said... I don’t really care because this film is an absolutely magical time at the cinema and is easily, at this point in the year, one of 2024s best movies. Not the best, certainly but, it’s on that list.

This one, once again, top lines Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck (aka The Joker) and he’s joined in this one by Lady Gaga as Lee Quinzel (aka Harley Quinn) who also, it has to be said, has very tenuous links to her comic book alter ego. They are also joined by such luminaries as Brendan Gleeson, Catherine Keener and, briefly, Steve Coogan too. And if you’re expecting more of the same of the first film I’m delighted to be able to say, you may be disappointed. I’m not the biggest fan of Phoenix but I’ve warmed to him in roles like this the last few years and his tender portrait of Arthur once again makes this a memorable movie. And, honestly, Lady Gaga is right there matching him with an equally solid performance all the way. Their respective characters’ love holds the movie together and, alas, I can’t comment on that too much for fear of spoilers but, it’s an interesting dynamic, for sure.

And, as I said, it’s not like the first movie... especially in terms of story. This just covers Arthur’s lead in to and eventual appearance at his trial for five of the six murders he committed in the last movie. But this is also an example of what has come to be known, over the last decade or so, as a Jukebox Musical. There are loads of songs, some of which even I could sing along too (mostly from the 1960s) and some of these transpire in what are the naturalistic settings of the movie and, others of them take place inside Arthur Fleck’s head, where the colours are wild and the glamour comes to the fore. And it’s good stuff. I loved Lady Gaga’s rendition of If They Could See Me Now from Sweet Charity (the Gwen Verdon stage show flagged, as opposed to the Shirley MacLaine movie version of Fosse’s remake of Fellini’s Nights Of Cabiria, both of which I talk about here) and, well, all I will say is, even if it’s just a clip from The Bandwagon, seeing Oscar Levant on the big screen again is awesome. That’s certainly entertainment, if you catch my drift.

Hildur Guðnadóttir’s score once again keeps the visual images and the musical interludes effectively threaded together and the cinematography is all levels of gorgeous, especially when utilising the MGMified colours of the 1950s and 60s musical palette. Plus, the brand new Joker themed Looney Toons short which starts off the movie is a wonderful piece of work too, it has to be said. So, yeah, that’s me pretty much done on Joker - Folie à Deux other than to say, I was genuinely impressed and riveted by the whole film as it slowly played out and I can’t wait to grab this one on Blu Ray when it gets a release. Definitely see this one on a big screen if you can.

Brand New Cherry Flavour

Once Kitten, Twice Shy

Brand New Cherry Flavour
Season 1 August 2021 - 8 episodes
Canada/USA

Warning: Very minor spoilers to give a flavour.

Okay, so Brand New Cherry Flavour is a series based on a novel of the same name by Todd Grimson. Once again, I have to forewarn you that I haven’t read the novel in question... yet, so I don’t know how good of an adaptation it is... I suspect there might have been some elements which were toned down for TV but that’s just a gut feeling.

The story set up is of main protagonist Lisa Nova, played here by the wonderful Rose Salazar... who also co-produced this show. It’s the early 1990s and she returns to Los Angeles to crash at her ex-boyfriends place while she tries to pitch her first feature film, based on the short movie she’s just made of horrific things going on in the woods. Erik Lange plays film producer Lou, who buys her movie, with her agreeing to that on the condition she gets to direct it. However, after she refuses to let Lou sleaze his way into her panties as part of the deal, he steals her movie and employs another person to direct. Lisa is so infuriated that she hires the services of a local witch, Boro, played by Catherine Keener, to put a curse on him to ‘set his life on fire’ and get her movie back. However, there’s more to things than meets the eye and it’s a long and twisted road until the end game is in sight.

And it’s a fairly okay TV show to be honest. It’s not as weird, dark or sexy as I’d been informed when I got interested in it but it is fairly entertaining. There are a lot of different ingredients to the show which includes the main witch, a faceless lady who may or may not be related to someone in Lisa’s past, the bitter ‘actress with one eye’ who starred in the original short, more traditional zombies, hired assassins, a trail of bloody corpses, sex spells, blood spells and a heck of a lot of vomiting up kittens... Lisa’s price for Boro’s services.

However, with all these elements which go into the show, it manages to not go through any tonal shifts throughout the eight episodes and that’s a double edged sword. It’s great that the show is so focused but the story arc gets a little over explored by about episode five and, although Salazar and a whole bunch of other actors... such as Jeff Ward and Siena Werber... are really great in this, it does get a bit monotone on occasion. Not to say it gets dull but, yeah, the odd tonal shift or two might well have been a way of ramping it up a little towards the end, to be honest.

However, coupled with the great acting are some good special effects (there’s a fair amount of blood and gore on display here), some nice shot designs with some bright washes of Mario Bava style lightning on occasion (especially in the early episodes) and a fair few surprises here and there. I especially liked episode four, which delves deeply into the world of David Cronenberg at one point, even pushing the sexuality in that one a little further than Cronenberg might have gotten away with in his day (there’s some fairly unusual fisting going on in a sex scene but I don’t want to say too much about why it’s unique here because it would be a spoiler) and, for me, this was the high point of the series. Although, on the down side, who the heck takes a bath wearing their knickers?

There’s some great dialogue in here too. I didn’t think of this thing as a horror show to begin with but, after I’d watched the first six episodes, I was describing the plot to somebody and, yeah, they’re right, it absolutely is part of the horror genre. There’s even a scene where you can glimpse George Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead playing on a TV set in the corner of a room. And there are also some very fan pleasing genre references such as, when Lisa is trying to coax a good performance out of her lead actress when making the short (something we see later in flashback), telling her, “I need you full on Isabelle Adjani Possession level!”... which is going to bring smiles to a lot of faces of people who remember the ‘milk scene’ from that movie, I suspect. And, also, there are some unusual, epically quotable lines scattered throughout the show such as, “That bitch just puked a cat!”

The series is actually left a little open ended, in a way, although I’m not sure you’d really want to see a sequel to this and I can’t believe there’s a heck of a lot of the book left to adapt, to be honest. That being said, I would be curious as to seeing what the few surviving characters get up to next. There’s also the odd plot point left unresolved which, I suspect, might well have been something shot (and it’s too late to work it in now even if it was, because the specific plot point I’m thinking of had an expiry date in terms of the continuing mortality of one of the characters) but I guess that’s one we’re not going to see cleared up anytime soon. Either way, Brand New Cherry Flavour, while not as ‘out there’ as I’d been set up to expect, is still a fun watch and Rose Salazar, who I’d loved in Alita: Battle Angel (reviewed here) is definitely someone to keep an eye on. This one is worth checking out for Keener’s sense of Baba Yaga too, for sure.

Get Out

Sunken Do Nots

Get Out
USA 2017
Directed by Jordan Peele
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Right from the outset, there will be spoilers here.
If you want to see this movie then don’t be reading this review.

I will kinda half apologise right now because I know a lot of people really like this movie but... I wish I could’ve had a heads up and 'gotten out' of seeing Get Out when I had the chance.

The warning signs were clearly on the trailer. It looked like a truly obvious plot set up hiding no real surprises and I didn’t totally buy into the ‘happy couple’ of the trailer either... something definitely wasn’t as simplistic about that relationship as one of the characters obviously thought it was. In short, it looked like a truly forgettable attempt at a thriller with a possible racist bent and not something I would ever really need to see.

But then, much to my amazement, it started getting some truly great word of mouth on twitter and the like, the week before its UK debut. People and, even some organisations I trusted, were touting this as a modern day classic. Not only that... they were touting it as a classic ‘horror movie’. Really, did I miss something in the trailer which tagged it as a horror movie? Couldn’t see any non-human monsters or supernatural elements in there but if people were saying this was so and being as enthusiastic as they were then... maybe this one was worth checking out after all.

So I did and then, rather than write the review up as soon as I got home from the cinema, I put a good night’s sleep between the computer keyboard and me as that was my review equivalent of counting to ten to calm down because, frankly, I came out of that movie so angry at having such a non-film inflicted on me that I didn’t want to say things I’d regret in the heat of anger. So hopefully my enraged rant is somewhat tempered as I write this the next morning.

Lets get the good stuff out of the way first.

Get Out is nice to look at and is edited in such a way that it all manages to hold together... except in the case of one ‘what the heck, that’s not possible’ moment and I’ll detail that in a while. The main male lead Chris, played by Daniel Kaluuya, is really good in this and one of the few good things about the script is that he’s painted as a really smart and confident character who, frankly, you would want to go to the pub and hang out with. It’s a great performance and it feels a little wasted in this movie, to be honest. We also have Catherine Keener playing the mother of Chris’ current girlfriend Rose, played by Allison Williams. Keener is always a great performer to watch and, along with Kaluuya, is one of the few people in this movie who aren’t playing it way over the top. Which is more than I can say for the guy playing the father, who came off as channelling Bill Murray's character in Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums, it seemed to me. The last guy who is really terrific in this movie is Caleb Landry Jones, an actor I’ve come to admire over the years. I first saw him playing a villainous brother in The Last Exorcism (reviewed here). After a while I noticed him cropping up as a more pleasant and even heroic figure in films such as X-Men First Class, where he plays Banshee (reviewed here) and the incredible Byzantium (which I reviewed here). Alas, he’s back to playing a villainous brother again here and I really hope he doesn’t get typecast in this kind of role because, if he’s not careful, he’s going to end up as the Brad Dourif of his generation and that would be a shame.

That’s pretty much it for the good stuff, I’m afraid. The score is kinda nice but I don’t understand why it’s being singled out by people and, well, it’s not out on CD as far as I can tell, only download, so it’s not like I’ll get the opportunity to hear it away from the movie myself. It was nice to hear Flanagan and Allen performing Run Rabbit Run again on the soundtrack though.

Okay, the bad stuff.

Did I mention it’s really obvious? I’d picked up on all the main, so called ‘twists’ during the first watch of the trailer, including the stuff about Chris’ girlfriend which supposedly ‘comes to light’ two thirds of the way through the movie but which, in fact, is pretty much telegraphed right from the get go. I hate figuring out films ahead of time and maybe it’s because I’ve seen a fair few of them that it’s hard to surprise me but this one is truly not a plot you would need to understand rocket science for, people.

Another thing... this is in no way, shape or form a ‘horror movie’. It’s not even an American slasher. It’s squarely attempting to be a thriller and, if you want to get really technical, I’ll acknowledge that there’s a very soft science fiction tinge to the story, if you want to see it that way. I don’t know why people would buy into the idea this is a horror movie but I can only assume the kinds of people seeing this have no idea what a horror film even looks like. Also, the people loving this movie (and it’s good that they do, actually, because that means cinema is not dead and some of them will go on to perpetuate the industry/art form when they go to work, one would hope) must all be really young and naive cinema goers who don’t have that many films under their belts because, seriously? They didn’t see any of this stuff coming after the first ten minutes of the movie?

There was one thing I even saw coming even though it made ‘absolutely no sense’ for it to be happening. In order to stop himself being triggered by a certain sound which puts him back into a hypnotic trance (the sunken place), Chris, who is strapped down tightly in a chair, realises that the upholstery he has been picking at with his fingers contains cotton padding inside and it’s something that he can stuff his ears with. Which he promptly does? Um... what? So he manages, somehow, to unpick the big straps that have his hands trapped, which he’s already demonstrated is impossible, stuff his ears up and then, even more of a stretch, somehow replace these straps and make them look untampered with? I can only assume that a crucial sequence explaining just how this would have been possible was excised from the movie at some point because, frankly, this completely throws any semblance of credibility the movie was going for at this point. Absolutely no way that happens people!

That’s not all, either. After our hero successfully uses the cotton wool to block his ears at a key point and is looking to make his escape from hostile territory with similar dangers... he throws the cotton wool away! Really? You would throw your one chance at protection from this problem away before you’ve made it to freedom? I think not. This is a serious weakness in the movie and I really can’t think of a way of justifying this kind of plotting, to be honest. This isn’t just ‘not turning a light on in a scary movie’ levels of wrongheadedness... this is completely crazy. 

And I’m racking my brains to say anything else of any interest about Get Out here but I think I’m done. It’s a shame that such fine actors and a quite competent director have collaborated on a story which feels like it comes straight out of 1950s short stories and would make one of the less interesting episodes of The Twilight Zone but I equally can’t blame them because, well, sometimes things look a little rosier on the page than they turn out on the screen. I’m really glad, in some ways, that the film is doing well for them because then, at least, they’re getting something back from it. I just hope it doesn’t usher in a new golden age of truly dumbed down stories that insult the collective intelligence of the audiences like this one does, though, because that’s always a possibility when something like this is a hit. I just hope that next time I trust my gut instincts on the trailer and work out which films to let pass me by. We shall see. I’m not a fast learner.