Joker (3/5 Stars)

Politically Correct Psycho Killer

Paul Schrader, screenwriter of Taxi Driver, once stated in an oral history of the movie:

“I had written the character of the pimp [that Harvel Keitel plays] as black, and we were told by Colombia we had to change it to a white guy because the lawyers were concerned “if we do this and Travis kills all those black people at the end, then we’re going to have a riot. And we’re going to be liable for this.”

Imagine for a moment that Taxi Driver had not cast Harvey Keitel as the pimp. That the movie instead had cast a black man and that Travis Bickle ends the movie by murdering that black man to save the thirteen-year-old prostitute played by Jodie Foster. Such a scenario would make sense for Travis Bickle’s character. He is a racist. That isn’t the end all be all of his personality, but it is there. He has a great disgust for the city he is living in (1970s New York) and black people are clearly a part of his disgust. If this detail were more overt, would anyone have had the guts to think of Taxi Driver as a great movie? Or would it have been completely overwhelmed by the political reaction? If Scorsese had made the decision to stick with the original plan in casting, would that have been an act of racism? Is it itself racist to make a good movie about a racist?

This kind of question is relevant now given the several controversies over the movie Joker, wherein the creators have been accused of providing a platform for incels and other kinds of gloomy white men to expound their hatred. Little do these critics know that they have already won the war. (Most have only seen the trailer). Joker preemptively self-censored itself. This gloomy white man named Arthur Fleck, played by Joaquin Phoenix, only targets rich white men and ends up creating a protest movement against income inequality. Now, who could argue about that?

There is a strange disconnect in the setting of this movie. Everything looks like it takes place in the “bad old days” of New York. It is painted in the bad fashion, subway graffiti, and super rats of inner-city decay. There is even a very important scene that initiates Arthur Fleck on his journey to become the nihilistic arch-villain of Gotham. He is jumped on the subway, pulls a gun, and kills the men who attacked him. Does this remind you of anyone? Clearly, it is Bernie Goetz, the subway killer, reborn in movie form. In the early 1980s, this man shot four would-be muggers in a city subway and was lionized by a large section of the city who were also sick of getting mugged. Of course, the difference between Goetz and Arthur Fleck is that Goetz shot four black teenagers. Here, Arthur Fleck kills three drunk white wall street assholes.

I’m making a big deal about this because of what Joker is supposed to be: a gritty realistic origin story of a villain. It would make sense if the audience didn’t approve of the man’s motives and it would have made the movie far more weighty and interesting if the motives matched the environment being evoked. But it seems that the movie’s creators were too scared to make the character controversial out of concerns that certain critics wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between the point of view of movie makers and characters within a movie. In effect, we have a movie that wants to instill a mood akin to great 1970s movies but lacks the emotional depth to actually do so. It’s like a player piano. It hits all the correct notes, but has no feeling. You won’t walk out of it unnerved like the way you felt when you watched Taxi Driver. It probably will make far more money though.

Joker contains a very good performance by Joaquin Phoenix, great production design, and an evocative score. It was directed by Todd Phillips, best known for comedies like Old School and The Hangover who shows that he can at least play the right notes in a drama. If anything, it is much better than all the recent D.C. comic fare. They ought to make more movies like this one, more character based and less effects driven. I only wish, well, that it wasn’t a comic book movie. That would be more interesting.

IT: Chapter Two (3/5 Stars)

I read Stephen King’s IT in high school and remember it provoking a couple of sleepless nights. It was a very good book, but it had certain flaws. For one thing, it was incredibly long, over 1000 pages. It seemed to me at the time, then and now, that the book had no editor. Noone at the publisher ever thought to read the manuscript and suggest that any portions of the book be cut for time. By this point, Stephen King had more than a decade of bestsellers behind him. Maybe as a rule the printers felt his words, all of them, were sacrosanct. Secondly, I never really understood IT. I wasn’t sure whether it was a form of imagination whose power would wane if someone didn’t believe in it, or whether it was a real thing that could kill you whether you believed it was real or not. And then there was the general weirdness of IT, which I will explore more later.

The movie “IT: Chapter 2” is a good movie whose sum is less than its parts. It has problems, and to its credit, they are the same problems of the book. The movie is too long with too many scenes of two many characters that the Director Andy Muschietti did not have the courage to cut. And it isn’t really clear what IT is or how it really functions. And its weird. So the movie has the same problems of the book, which in turn make it a mediocre movie. However, if what you wanted to see was a faithful adaptation of IT, well, you got it, weirdness and all.

The book has been wisely separated into two chapters. The first chapter came out a few years ago and told the story of the main characters as kids. They had an initial victory against IT, personified by a nasty clown named Pennywise (Bill Skarsgaard), but did not ultimately vanquish IT. Then six of the original seven kids left town and generally forgot about their haunted town of Derry, Maine. As grown-ups they receive a message from the one person who stayed Mike Hanlon (played by Isaiah Mustafa). IT is back. The others don’t quite remember yet, but they all show up in Derry. Their numbers include Beverly Marsh (Jessica Chastain), Bill Denbrough (James McAvoy), Richie Tozer (Bill Hader), Ben Hanscrom (Jay Ryan), Eddie Kasparak (James Ransome). They called themselves the losers club back then and each had their pet “loser” qualification. Bill had a stutter, Ben was fat, Mike was black, etc. Of course, there were also seven of them and they were all friends, so how much of a loser could each possibly be. Like the heroes in Stranger Things (shout out to the cross-over Finn Wolfhard), who played ceaseless hours of Dungeons and Dragons together, I felt like this Losers Club had a lot of fun and support, besides, of course the evil town and its murderous clown.

It is hard to describe what IT is because it seems to have extraordinary capabilities (it can show up anywhere and look like anything) but weirdly unable to kill people when it really wants to. To put it another way, a lot of non-main characters die horrible deaths by IT. The main characters get put in the exact same positions but generally escape through no particular kind of sustained logic. Whether IT is harmful or harmless seems to gyrate wildly in the movie (as it did in the book).

IT the movie like IT the book is of a highly episodic nature. The talented cast are together in a few scenes, but generally move on to do their own things. Something that from a character development standpoint, is welcome, but when it needs to be done six times, takes a long time to do. It is interesting though how in the first chapter the most interesting characters were Bill, and Ben. The most interesting characters in this chapter are Richie and Eddie, who coincidentally also provide most of the comic relief. There are plenty of computer-generated effects in this movie. If it weren’t for the multitudinous amount of fantastical episodes, I could point to this movie as a good way to use special effects to develop character.

Then things get weird. It think Stephen King may have smoking a good deal of peyote when he wrote the ending to IT. There are giant turtles and weird rituals and at least one scene that would be very very illegal if it was adapted for the movie screen. The movie doesn’t get as weird as the book, but it certainly does get weird. I’m glad for it even though the weirdness makes the ending a whole bunch of nonsense. I rather they did it this way, got as close to the weirdness in the book, without breaking any laws, then to see something stupidly simplistic. The ending is not going to work either way because IT never really makes any realistic sort of sense. At least then you can make the climax memorably weird.

One last general observation: What is a movie star anymore? This is a very good cast with leading actors who I have seen in many movies. But is any one of them what you think of when you think of a movie star? Do we have movie stars anymore? The biggest movies out there are franchises with giant casts (James McAvoy and Jessica Chastain’s biggest movies sales-wise were in the X-Men franchise). Who do we have left that is a genuine movie star the way that Humphrey Bogart or John Wayne were movie stars? Perhaps Tom Cruise, Leonardo Dicaprio, and Brad Pitt. But they are all getting relatively old. Do we have any young movie stars? Such a thing has perhaps been lost with the general splintering of entertainment and culture.