Watched Joker because I'm late to the party but figured it might be worth it because man was there hype over the film.
It's not bad, but seems to fall into that kind of cliche brand of misery-porn oscar-bait movies just with the vague batman/joker allusions put on top? Falling Down did the 'societal commentary' with an unquestionably better ending in both moral and execution, and Joker seemed to be aping that with the Batman veneer (and, of course, the ever-aggravating two three instances of 'this thing we showed you was just in the person's mind ooohhhh, aren't we clever!" that were so absurdly telegraphed and cliche I guessed them as they were happening.)
Don't really see any of the really big lauding it had (or, to be fair, the condemnation). It's serviceable for what it is. Phoenix did a pretty good job acting the descending sociopath. Probably a different thing to do with a 'superhero' movie...But the different thing it actually did didn't stand out much to me. Would put it in that 5-7/10 nebulous zone of 'watchable and maybe worthy of mention on occasion'.
Falling Down is a movie that it reminded me of in another thread:
I don't think the film was depressing. It wasn't like a Requiem of a Dream style sadathon.
It was entertaining not in the action or excitement but just as beung engaged with the story and themes. It's like Taxi Driver or Falling Down. Its an interesting character journey with relevant themes not often explored in a major film but it's not artsy or preachy but its not so dreary as to be depressing either.
The Joker character had a spiraling downward journey through the film but I never felt depressed by his character arc. No more then I would watching some other drama with themes of loss.
And well like I said before, I thought
Falling Down was a fantastic film and while the themes kind of seem similar, with
Joker the journey is still dramatically different enough. Both D-Fens and Arthur Fleck had their issues but Arthur was kinda in the same general realm that D-Fens was in the beginning of the movie, but his character arc was still different and marked by far more intense psychosis and the like.
D-Fens from
Falling Down apparently always had a simmering and edgy temper, his ex-wife and Mother both implied as much but never approached that abusive state and only cracked the day of the movie and it boiled over into that sort of violence that wasn't exilharating but rather just more of a deflating style of release. He'd make awkward wisecracks and witticisms while dispatching of adversaries... or annoyances but it's he's never happy about it, he just seems more tired a few seconds later with it. His journey is a lot of ups and downs but he's always simmering and always tired.
Arthur's journey is more dramatic I guess, takes place over a longer period of time and actually involves a rather elaborate hallucination or multiple ones. I actually didn't "guess" all of the hallucinations in the movie and in fact the fact that they were in play had me more interested in the movie (ie it never felt cheap to me) because I wanted to figure it all out or see how it played out. The scale of Arthur's menace also (and in my opinion not really sold me) created a lot more disorder and public unrest so the social commentary either benefited or suffered because of it. I wasn't really sold on his actions causing that unrest until the climax of the film. But by then... the unrest was already happening.
With Arthur as a person, I did find his descent into sociopathy pretty interesting and the climax, while I'd agree wasn't as effective as
Falling Down, still worked for me. One of the things that bothered me about Joker's ending scene in the talk show is that the Joker never, ever stated why he actually killed those "three young men" in plain terms. He just says "they're awful" and that "everyones awful." It didn't really hit me why he didn't state the logical obvious until like weeks or months later. He's so lost in his descent, he's not even going to fucking bother explaining why he killed them either because he doubts anyone would listen or care, or because it should just be self evident.
There's bigger ideas swirling around in there, or maybe just personal interpretations of the film and that's something
Joker has over
Falling Down IMHO even though I do think the latter is still the superior film.