"Joker"

 ☆½ 

Joker is a phony, a cheat, a fraud. It mimics – no, mocks –– legitimate films and tries to pass off their style and techniques as its own.

There is not a single scene, not one moment, in Joker that feels like life, not a single shot that carries even a whisper of humanity, rendering its committed central performance by Joaquin Phoenix meaningless. His Arthur Fleck begins the film as a crazy psychopath and ends the film as a crazy psychopath. No amount of forced, uncomfortable laughter makes this anything more than a shameless bid at an Oscar, one meant to legitimize comic-book films -- a form that needs no legitimization. Some comic-book movies have been wonderful, stunning, transcendent. Joker is none of those things.

In place of plot, Joker substitutes a grotesque, unforgivable exploitation of mental illness; a shockingly tone-deaf depiction (not an "exploration": Joker explores nothing) of mob violence; a cynical, depressing assumption that we understand its violent, depraved and grotesque world because we live in one. It's distressingly forgiving of misogyny and racism, and through all of it Joker thinks it is being "important."

Some will try to claim that Joker updates the despairing tone of '70s Scorsese into our world, but that's bull: Those movies boldly explored humanity that had been wounded by war, corruption, neglect and poverty. Joker is just a comic-book "origin" movie, one not even brave enough to look at its own fascination with violence and anger and come up with anything other than self-satisfaction.

"A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood"

 ☆☆☆½ 

Into the messy, unhappy life of a harried middle-aged man struggling with wife and child comes a preternaturally insightful, wise person, appearing at just the right time to say just the right thing. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood presents American TV giant Mr. Rogers as a modern-day Mary Poppins, which is both the film's strength and great flaw.

Director Marielle Heller and screenwriters Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster are fully aware of last year's captivating documentary Won't You Be My Neighbor? A traditional biopic route would doom this film to failure. So, it tries something different.

Mr. Rogers, played with exacting attention to detail in tone, rhythm and cadence by Tom Hanks, is a plot device here, the way Walt Disney was a plot device in Saving Mr. Banks. The movie isn't about him. Beautiful Day is about a fictional journalist named Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys), a stereotypically frumpy, cynical journalist angry at being assigned to write about Mr. Rogers.

That's how the movie contrives the two of them to meet, and for the rest of the film, Mr. Rogers is the wise counsel who flits in and out of an unhappy and unconvincing story of Lloyd's family discord.  Beautiful Day needs more Mr. Rogers, even if kept him at arm's length. The movie ends on a lovely, dark chord (literally), a final reminder of how much more satisfying this sweet, often delightful, film could be if it were actually about Mr. Rogers instead of, you know, someone else.




Viewed Oct. 12, 2019 -- AMC Century City

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"Parasite"

 ☆☆☆☆½ 

What an overused word "thriller" has become; you see it everywhere for films that neither thrill nor excite, and just as the word may feel, in this streaming age, to have lost much of its meaning comes Bong Joon Ho's Parasite, a thriller in every sense of the word.

It is thrilling to watch this film so masterfully and carefully move its story from one scene to the next, making such perfect sense even when the result seems impossible. It is thrilling to watch its characters learn the myriad truths buried in its story. And there's the thrill of realizing just how fully it has explored some hard societal truths -- while never once seeming preachy.

Most thrilling of all is the way that Parasite keeps its audience in a vice-grip of emotions, and it has taken me a while to understand just how thoroughly this movie worked on me, in large part because of its cool, visually detached style. But midway through Parasite, I found myself sitting tall in my chair, leaning forward, at one point even moving forward until I was, indeed, on the edge of my seat in every possible way.

If I haven't mentioned anything at all about the story of Parasite, it's because the less you know about its surprises before you go in, the better. It is a film every viewer should be allowed to discover in the moment, to appreciate the sly and devious ways it gets under your skin and stays there.

Viewed Oct. 13, 2019 -- ArcLight Hollywood

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