REVIEW:
The dance of the madman.
Is slow.
Is emotional.
Is gripping.
Is the insidious dripping of water that finally drives you insane.
Is akin to slowly painting on a mask in wide, calculated brush strokes.
His reality remains skewed and sharp and sour.
Comes from a long festering narcissism.
Is fueled by fear and devastation, longing and loss, abuse and pain.
He’s alone and aware of it.
He’s had enough, and then he snaps.
Joker (2019) is a slow building crack in one man’s glass persona. So intensely introverted, the long-suffering soldier, son. Arthur says he feels he never existed until people started taking notice of his first acts of violence. Now people see him and smile, or better, they fight. He becomes the hero he’s always dreamed of being.
The smile motif also carries through into the classic crying clown, ever masking true emotion with a painted expression.
His small world shatters slowly, in tiny pricks to his subconscious that he fights until he has little fight left.
Therein lied the fear of the fateful masses who watched this color-soaked film on its first weekend of play as I did. He is anyone with a long-laden life of abuse and neglect. He’s the potential product of his poverty, of an angry society a-smoke with crime fascination.
Joaquin plays the role of a lifetime, memorable, wrenching, wicked, vain. He really lives it and we are left leering at his laugh-lines as they deepen.
He is to blame for his crimes, yet we can take up the mantle as caregivers for our neighbors, help them people feel seen, show all a kindness, so-called deserving or not.
Only the children in this film have time for him. They look without judgement beyond the mask into his childlike eyes blurred by abuse.
It’s a dance on a triple tiered stair and a late night subway ride. Joker’s loner journey of broken dreams and bad luck becomes a midnight rampage of death-tolled insanity. You never would have known that this writer /director also made The Hangover. The Hangover, then this.
RATING: R (for raw & rough, and for remind me to pick up a psych text book and read it next time instead of sitting again through this exhaustingly tragic film)
The Silver Linings director offers real-to-life hand-cam perspectives, inside scoops, and deliciously complex…cartoon characters. Almost caricatures. We love them for their hearts mired deep in the muck of their flaws. We love them because we don’t know them. We get to watch the ditches they dig fill up with possibilities. They have potential and they win on some level, so we go back in for another dose as soon as he releases one.
Joy begins perfectly. Set up, character development, story, buy in and build. The soap opera scenes stand alone as genius.
We wait for payoff …until the very end, but by then we are tired and older because it is a long movie.
Anne Hathaway, I am convinced, is Shakespeare’s vampire-bitten wife by the same name, ageless and continually remaking Princess Diaries and the Devil Wears Prada. She’s finally made it as her own boss in this one, and she is determined to show that she can run a company all by herself without becoming a hateful, bitter, or too busy to have a family. 
This film promotes the positive business model of improving a work-life balance. It examines the pitfalls of start-ups, the benefit of experienced voices in the workplace, and the process of mentoring. Obvious from the previews, it’s an anti-agism play, but DeNiro rises as the professional for his kindness, his offering of time, his gracious attitude, and his personal initiative. He alone proves that gentlemen do exist and pocket squares are proof. The office falls for him, and his reward is helping each co-worker find success. If that were every worker’s personal motto, the face of business would be changed. Seeing this on the heels of Steve Jobs (2015) proved a fascinating study on growing businesses, sharing ideas, and becoming a business leader. Where Jobs repulsed, DeNiro wooed. 
The Intern, which feels a great deal like an attempted sequel to The Internship (2013) is full of Home Alone hyjinx and freshmen boys bathroom humor. Not enough to be sorry I saw it, but enough to never really need to see it again.
Splatter: on FILM 