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The
child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.” – African
proverb
Just trying to gather my thoughts
and emotions about this movie makes me feel like crying. Those who are high in social intelligence/empathy
will find it hard to watch this movie. It is, contrary to what some might expect,
not the origins story of a maniac supervillain who only wants to watch the world
burn. Jokes tells the story of a man who has to go through one of the worst fates,
that of an outcast rejected by society, abandoned by those whose companionship
he seeks. Full posting over at
https://irevuo.art/2019/10/11/movie-review-joker-heartbreaking For more posting like this please visit https://irevuo.art
A great comic book villain
isn’t living up to his or her potential without a proper musical theme, and in
the case of Joker, he gets one courtesy of composer Hildur Guðnadóttir. Her score
for Joker is chillingly good and up there with the best of the genre, with an
intensity matching and complimenting Joaquin Pheonix‘s performance.
Again, the Emmy-winning composer behind Chernobyl elicits intense feelings
of horror and uneasiness, although she laughs when people – including myself –
tell her that her music has a horror quality to it.
“It’s definitely very common that my music is perceived as darker than what I
am feeling myself,” she told us, laughing. In her view, her music is more reflective
than horrific.
Prior to Joker, Guðnadóttir has produced several albums of her own (which you
should listen to on Spotify), performed cello on The Revenant and several other
films all movie nerds know, and collaborated frequently with the deeply missed
Johan Johansson (Arrival).
After playing cello on Sicario, years later she was composing the music for its sequel,
Day of Soldado. Now, she’s scored her first big comic book movie, and she told
us all about her experience, her collaboration with director Todd Phillips‘, and
the movie’s stunning final piece, “Call Me Joker.”
I read you were composing music before filming even began. Is that common for
you?
It’s definitely my preferred way of working, but no, you really don’t always get
to come in so early. No, it’s definitely atypical for most projects [Laughs].
So how’d the script and your conversations with Todd Phillips influence your
choices before filming?
Basically, Todd called me and told me he was started to work on the film and asked
if I was interested in reading the script, and of course, I was. After reading
it, he said, “Does it inspire you to make some music based on your feeling of
the script?” I was really inspired by reading it and had a strong reaction to
how he was telling the story, so I was definitely very excited to start working
right away. He didn’t really have much dialogue about the direction he had in
mind or what sort of pacing or music he was looking for; he was curious to see
how I experienced the story, musically. I sent him those early themes and demos,
and he was just really happy I experienced the...
So here’s the most controversial film of the year. When Joker premiered at the Venice Film Festival in August, it immediately attracted both five-star reviews and contemptuous put-downs. Time magazine denounced the movie’s “aggressive idiocy” and warned that the hero “could easily be adopted as the patron saint of incels”. Joker went on to win Venice’s top prize, the Golden Lion, nonetheless. Joker is unlike any other comic book film, deliberately hijacking the genre for its own purposes. There has never been a settled origins story for The Joker, a character introduced in the first Batman story in 1940 and originally intended to be bumped off in the second instalment. If there’s any accepted version, it’s that he fell in a vat of chemical waste and was driven nuts by the disfigurement. So the field was wide open for director and scriptwriter Todd Phillips, and his collaborator Scott Silver, to approach it as they wished, while ostensibly working within the DC Comics world. The standalone film they’ve made has nothing to do with superheroes. It’s a lurid pastiche and amalgamation of Martin Scorsese’s pulpy psychopath classics, Taxi Driver of 1976 and The King of Comedy of 1982, its star a toxic combination of Travis Bickle and Rupert Pupkin. Phillips, previously best known for the Hangover trilogy, which pushed being funny into new extremes of pain and damage, hasn’t made this Joker funny at all. This is high impact movie-making, with colours flaring in its ill-lit world, its action sequences full of dramatically framed shots from odd angles, closely modelled on cartoon images, cut together fast so they’re held only as long as you would look at them in a comic, all powered along by a thudding cello-centred score by Hildur Guðnadóttir. It’s 1981 and we’re in scuzzy Gotham City, or as it might be, Scorsese’s New York. Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) is a mentally disturbed loner, given to boutsof manic humourless cackling, handing out a laminated card to people who are annoyed that reads “Forgive my Laughter: I have a Condition”. He lives in a miserable apartment with his cracked mother Penny (Frances Conroy) who calls him “Happy” and has told him he was put in the world to… Full article – https://www.standard.co.uk/go/london/film/joker-film-review-dangerous-clown-a4253971.html
