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The Joke’s On You

Joker: Folie á  Deux  is a comic book movie and a musical made by Todd Phillips, a director deeply embarrassed by both genres. That should tell you all you need to know about why it so dramatically doesn’t work. Phillips made the choice to dot this movie with musical sequences, and yet publicly resists the Musical label in what appears to be a fear that it makes the film seem less serious. And just as in his 2019 Joker , he does everything possible to keep the comic book origins of this material at a distance. In fairness, it’s an approach that worked out for him on the last movie, which despite being particularly bad and derivative was a huge hit, and even won its star Joaquin Phoenix an Oscar for one of the worst performances of his career. But Phillips seems to dislike the people who loved the earlier film as much as those who hated it, if his portrait of their in-film analogue is anything to go by. Honestly, it’s difficult to parse why he made this movie, short of the blank cheque
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The Criterion Channel Presents: Häxan (1922)

The most fascinating thing about Häxan  is that it  is  old enough now (at over a century) to be looked at with the same lens that it itself uses to examine the Middle Ages. Just as it posits that the apparent witches of centuries ago were simply women with "hysteria" that the people of that time didn't understand or care to diagnose, we now know hysteria itself to be a pseudo-scientific understanding of mental illness derived from juvenile psychology and plain old misogyny more than any accurate medicinal basis. It is still an intriguing and utterly mesmerizing film though, perhaps because of this fact that so squarely places it in history by its own measure of historiography. But it's also spontaneously fun and wild in a way that dispels any misconception that the silent era was drab and boring. This is a movie about witchcraft and demons, that depicts torture and hell, features nudity, sacrilege, and the Devil constantly flicking his tongue perversely, masturbating
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Will & Harper is a Tender Roadmap for Friendship and Understanding

The quickest cure to transphobia is knowing a trans person. It’s a conventional idea but it’s not an untrue one. Even for those who may not be transphobic but don’t really understand the transgender experience or transgender issues, just talking openly and honestly with someone of that identity can make a whole lot of difference. Especially considering all of the propaganda and misinformation and hate that is routinely promoted about the trans community, it’s so important that those empathetic human connections are made. Will & Harper  is a documentary about making that connection; and one that hopes to vicariously be that point of understanding for its audience. It is essentially in documentary form a Driving Miss Daisy  or Green Book  kind of movie, in that it’s less for an LGBTQ audience than for the cis straight folks as a crash course in how to be an ally to the transgender people in their lives. Unlike those kind of movies though it is both relevant in this time of increased
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The Wild Robot is a Rare Display of Original, Dignified Studio Animation

In the modern sphere of American studio animation, in which brand recognition either by specific franchises or standardized pandering style dominates with no end in sight, a movie like The Wild Robot is a breath of fresh air. It belongs to that dying breed of genuine originality in that medium; though it most likely would not have been produced at all if not for the track record of its director Chris Sanders, who co-directed one of  the best acclaimed post-Renaissance Disney movies ( Lilo & Stitch ), and one of the best DreamWorks movies period ( How to Train Your Dragon ). And The Wild Robot  sees him back at DreamWorks to deliver for them perhaps their last great original movie. It’s the fairly nifty story of an advanced robot crash-landing on Earth in a dense boreal forest wilderness where in efforts to abide by her programming to serve and complete tasks, she accidentally kills a goose and crushes all but one of her eggs. After the gosling hatches and imprints on her she determ
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The Grandeur, the Folly, the Dream of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis: Another One from the Heart

“Don’t let the now destroy the forever.” In Orson Welles’ other masterpiece F for Fake , there is a scene in which, in his discussion on the transcendent value of art irrespective of its creators’ authenticity, he observes the Chartres Cathedral. “It might just be this one anonymous glory, of all things” he said. “This rich stone forest, this epic chant, this gaiety, this grand choiring shout of affirmation, which we choose, when all our cities are dust, to stand intact. To mark where we’ve been. To testify on what we had on a list to accomplish.” Art is what survives when all is said and done, its expression of the human spirit will far outlive us. Welles takes comfort in that. F for Fake  was Welles’ last statement on authorship and art (at least until his true final film was completed more than four decades later), and its themes are likewise echoed in the final bow of Francis Ford Coppola -an entirely self-financed  high-concept, messy and metaphor-drenched epic called Megalopolis
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Futurama Reviews: S09E10 -"Otherwise"

It always ends with Fry and Leela, as it always should. Like “The Devils Hands Are Idle Playthings” , Into the Wild Green Yonder , “Overclockwise” and “Meanwhile” before it, “Otherwise” was likely written as another potential series finale -before it was confirmed Futurama  would indeed be getting more episodes (at least two more seasons on Hulu). Like three of the aforementioned episodes, it was written by the series’ VIP writer Ken Keeler (still under a bizarre pseudonym though), and like those same episodes it is a particular highlight of the season, even if it probably wouldn’t have made for a good series finale (“Meanwhile” just left gigantic shoes to fill in that regard). Perhaps a part of it is that, though it is a good episode -potentially the best of the season- it does feature a lot of one of this revival’s crutches in its callbacks to the past. Specifically, it feels like an episode in part written to get around the now awkwardness of “Meanwhile” not being the show’s final
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Back to the Feature: The Big Chill (1983)

For many years now I’ve had an appreciation for a little-seen, little-talked about early Kenneth Branagh movie from 1992 called  Peter’s Friends . It’s a charming comedy-drama about a group of university friends who were in a comedy troupe together reuniting for the first time in over a decade when one of them inherits their father’s estate. Mostly I’ll admit I was drawn to it because it features the only ever movie reunion of Cambridge Footlights stalwarts Emma Thompson, Stephen Fry, and Hugh Laurie. Eventually I became aware however that it is essentially a British version of an American movie that already existed and was far more acclaimed. And watching The Big Chill  for the first time, I couldn’t help notice all the ways that Peter’s Friends rips it off, and that it is honestly the better movie. Co-written and directed by Lawrence Kasdan hot off of writing Return of the Jedi  it very much feels apiece with an early film of his compatriot George Lucas. Where in American Graffiti ,
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