Review | Joker: Folie à Deux
Todd Phillips must think he’s either died and gone to heaven or is perpetually living in hell. The better part of a decade ago, the filmmaker behind The Hangover films had an axe to grind. He wanted to make comedies, but was becoming all too aware that comedies were no longer profitable at the box office; to his frustration, one of the only kinds of entertainment that people would still actually leave their house to see was the comic book movie, a genre that he hated. He began crafting Joker , a resentful satire of the comic book film, pulling DC’s most-known villain out of the pages of comics and dropping him whole cloth into the world of Martin Scorsese. In fact, he even approached Scorsese to help make the film, noting that it would be a meta-commentary on the ouvre of the man who invented the 1970s urban psychotic and thus a whole sub-genre. Scorsese ultimately declined..and don’t think that didn’t add fuel to the fire. Fast forward to 2019. Joker , conceived as the anti-comic-boo...
