Joker: Folie à Deux

r96sk 10/18/2024 1:14:47AM 8.4

Great title, great movie. I had heard tiny bits about <em>'Joker: Folie à Deux'</em> falling below expectations since its release, though they weren't substantial enough to know if the film was any good or not. I have to say, I really enjoyed watching it all play out. It admittedly isn't on the same level as the phenomenal predecessor, but that's OK - I wasn't expecting it to be. I will say that making this a musical of sorts was a bold choice, it wouldn't have been the direction that I would've went with it but to be honest I thought they executed it nicely. I presume that is one reason many didn't like this, as well as possibly the lack of craziness that seemed like it was on the horizon based on the 2019 flick. For me, mind, it all works. Joaquin Phoenix is as excellent as anticipated in his reprisal as Joker, while Lady Gaga is a neat piece of casting for Lee - obviously her music chops for one, though I do enjoy her acting too. Lee perhaps could've been used more, but what we got is more than sufficient in my opinion. Brendan Gleeson, elsewhere, does well in a more minor role. Is is slightly overlong? Possibly. Did we need a sequel? Probably not. All I can confirm is that I had a positive time viewing it, so I can't harbour any noteworthy complaints. It's a shame to now read that this film has seemingly bombed in more ways than one. C'est la vie.

Wuchak 12/23/2025 12:33:58AM 8.4

**_Joker falls in love in prison and goes to trial while singing songs_** Whilst the 2019 movie was intended to be a standalone film, Joaquin Phoenix said he felt there was more to explore with the character, which was augmented by his dreams that inspired the idea to make the potential sequel a musical. Since the original film was a mega-hit, the creative wheels started rolling and Lawrence Sher was reenlisted as cinematographer, citing Francis Ford Coppola's “One from the Heart” (1982) as an influence. The story is simple and condensed into my title blurb; it’s just a brooding continuation of the original film, with the addition of two thrilling sequences in the final act (which I’m not going to give away). If you took out all of the song & dance sequences, you’d have a 95-minutes movie. So, whether or not you’ll like this flick comes down to if you can stomach the imaginative musical pieces. If you enjoyed “Chicago” and “Into the Woods” or even “The Wizard of Oz,” and are open to that approach mingled with the dark side of the DC universe, specifically the Batman mythos, you’ll probably appreciate this. If not, you’ll rail against it. I get that ‘Lady Gaga’ (Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta) is an acquired taste, but she’s uniquely beautiful here and performs well. Surprisingly, there’s no physical exploitation, which I respect. At the end of the day, this isn’t as captivating as the original film, yet a lot of that has to do with the unpalatable or mundane nature of the plot; I’m talking about the setting of a prison hospital and the court room happenings. So, in my mind, the colorful song & dance routines perk things up from time to time. It runs 2h 18m and was shot from Dec-Apr 2022-2023 at the abandoned Essex County Isolation Hospital in northeast New Jersey, which is a dozen miles west of the Lincoln Tunnel. Other exterior places include New York City (the County Courthouse and the “Joker stairs” in the Bronx) and downtown Los Angeles. Studio stuff was done at Warner Brothers Burbank Studios. GRADE: B/B-

CinemaSerf 10/5/2024 5:01:49AM 8.4

I was going to go and see the first Joaquin Phoenix outing as the "Joker" (2019) to remind my self of who did what to whom, but I didn't have time. I think I am glad because I recall that being so very much better than this. Here, we pick up after "Fleck" (Phoenix) has been on his clown-faced slaughtering spree and is in prison supervised by prison officer "Jackie" (Brendan Gleeson). His lawyer "Maryanne" (Catherine Keener) is trying to have him declared competent to stand trial for his crimes so she can plead some sort of personality disorder defence - he's not "Fleck" when he's the "Joker" sort of thing. Thing is, he encounters "Lee" (Lady Gaga) at a prison sing-a-long and she manages to ingratiate herself with him and then to derail that plan ensuring the plot twists it's way into the courtroom where his conviction for multiple homicides quickly appears as inevitable as there being a song in the film. Now I did like the soundtrack, but by the way Todd Phillips has presented this, it might as well have been either Tony Bennett or Newley who took on the leading role as her part is largely a series of entertainingly photographed music videos with the thinnest slices of meat constituting a weak story in between. It's a love story, I suppose, but that wasn't really what I turned up to see. There's loads of excess, but no menace or jeopardy and the character's previous adeptness at treading the thin line between sanity and madness isn't really developed at all here. He comes across more as a pathetic, emaciated, prisoner whose flame has well and truly gone out. His legal antagonist (Harry Lawtey) looks about eleven years old but that doesn't really matter either as the judicial proceedings themselves offer us little by way of sustaining drama, even as we build to a denouement that offers the tiniest bit of hope then... It's a stunning piece of cinema, money has been spent and there's imagination a-plenty from the production's designers. It's just too much of a jigsaw of a film with too little plot serving as a vehicle for an album boxed-set that's doubtless ready to hit the shops.