The Whetstone 7/8/24
The Whetstone
A weekly newsletter where Maddie Weiner hones her thoughts about media and culture. Movies, books, television, music, and more.
Long time no talk, everyone! You may have seen on social media this week that I’m bringing my newsletter back, just for fun! I always have a lot going on so what’s one more thing? Lolllll anyway, since I last wrote I co-produced a feature film, LandLord, and I went with director Remington Smith and our co-producer Abi Van Andel to Cannes, where it was featured in the Frontiéres Buyers’ Platform! I’ve done some accounting since then as well, and I’m producing a couple of shorts right now. Speaking of which, it would mean SO much to me if you’d head over to Seed & Spark to support our crowdfunding campaign. I met Noah Griffin on the set of LandLord, where he was the script supervisor, and we’re working with a great team on his new short, Always Were. Head to the campaign page and check it out, and support us if you can!
In other news, we released a new episode of The Smartest People in the Room today — that’s my podcast with my bestie Rachel Casey. We’ve freshened up the intros and outros and we hope to release episodes more often! You can listen anywhere you listen to podcasts, but here’s the Spotify link:
I’d also like to tell you about two fun series I’d like to start doing on this newsletter. The first one is a little Shakespeare-a-thon — if you didn’t already know, I’m a huge Shakespeare geek. My greatest acting accomplishment to date is getting cast as Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 6th grade (that, or getting cast as Miss Hannigan in Annie…), and I went to Shakespeare camp when I was a kid. /nerd Last year I read Maggie O’Farrell’s amazing book Hamnet, about William Shakespeare’s life (sorta), which is being adapted into a film by director Chloé Zhao and starring Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley. This revived my interest in the Bard, so I decided to watch at least one adaptation of each of his plays, with some extra attention devoted to the biggies (Romeo & Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth): I made a list here with my selection!
The other series is one I’ve been threatening for a while now (this plan predates the release of 2022’s The Batman), something that no sane person has ever attempted before: a plan to watch every single feature film with Batman as a character. You can view that extremely ambitious list here. I think I’ll combine the Batman movie plan with the Shakespeare movie plan and call them Twelfth Dark Knight (shout out to Spencer Campbell for the name!) And we can start that series off right now with…
#JOKER (2019)
I watched this back in April and logged it on Letterboxd, but I took some notes so I could get back in that headspace for when I wrote this longer review. I was not a fan. Spoilers ahead!
(If you’re surprised that I’m deciding to start my Batman series with a negative review, then it’s good for you to learn right now how much of a hater I am.)
Much has been said already about how Joker is doing a lot to, erm, “pay homage” to the far superior films The King of Comedy and Taxi Driver. It also owes a lot to Fight Club and Dog Day Afternoon (I’m still furious that Zazie Beets’s character was imaginary because it was a completely unnecessary sublot). Todd Phillips has many wonderful films which have clearly influenced him to reference, and reference them he does. In fact, this entire film is mostly made up of surface-level references to other films — beyond that, its themes and goals are pretty muddled. On the one hand, you have the film trying unsuccessfully to examine what a clown is, mostly through references to The Man Who Laughs and through the extremely unnecessary addition of a medical condition that makes the Joker, aka Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix in one of his worst performances, and he’s my favorite actor), laugh at the most uncomfortable, inconvenient moments.
The clown references, film references, derivative and predictable plot, and heavy-handed soundtrack (“Everybody Plays the Fool”? “My Name Is Carnival”? Seriously?) are all working overtime to repair the film’s fatal flaw, the problem that handicapped it from minute one: Batman isn’t in it.
Sure, a young Bruce Wayne features in the film, which has chosen to go with the version of the Batman mythology wherein his parents are killed by Joker associates (not always, in fact not usually, the case). But the Joker doesn’t work without a Batman to go up against. Joker is Batman’s foil - Batman is the “world’s greatest detective”, a traumatized man with a rigid, albeit arbitrary, set of moral codes that he lives by, a man whose past drives his present and who is always precariously balancing between sanity and insanity. The Joker is a mystery that Batman can’t solve, an evil he can never defeat, a man whose moral codes change with his moods and who is continually trying to drag Batman (and Gotham, and the whole world) over the edge of the cliff into madness. They’re a beautiful team!
Introducing the Joker as just some guy doesn’t work. I don’t think it matters whether the Joker is a common criminal who Batman accidentally shoved into a vat of chemicals, or a mysterious crime boss who shoves pencils in people’s faces - the Joker functions best as a character who introduces a challenge to Batman, not someone who creates Batman (directly or indirectly). On top of all that, you could remove all of the Batman details from Joker — the character names, locations, everything DC Comics — and it wouldn’t affect the plot of the film. All of the Batman details are pretty much entirely superfluous. The Batman universe is an inherently science fiction universe, and in many instances a fantasy/supernatural one as well, but the closest thing Joker has to this is the D-plot of the “super rats”. Ultimately, I believe Todd Phillips wanted to put his own stamp on the Joker mythos - emphasis on “his own”. He’s not doing anything interesting with the source material besides bringing references to other films into it. Emblematic of this is the film’s depiction of the Joker’s costume, which is devoid of the classic purple (what I can only imagine is an intentional glaring omission, something to differentiate Todd’s Joker from all those other Jokers). I look at the final ‘fit and I don’t see the Joker: I see some guy dressed up as the Joker.
Rating: 2/5 BATS
This Week I'm...
WATCHING: House of the Dragon; Maxxxine; The Bikeriders; Mi Vida Loca at the Speed Cinema with Alison Anders!!!
READING: Transcendental Style in Film by Paul Schrader; Cuckoo by Gretchen Felker-Martin; Orlando by Virginia Woolf
LISTENING: What A Devastating Turn of Events by Rachel Chinouriri
##Links:
- Trailers: Emmanuelle (NSFW), a new trailer for Trap, Close Your Eyes, My Old Ass, Last Summer, The Devil’s Bath (SFW but scary!), The Outrun
- The AV Club’s Beyond the Canon: Soviet Cinema
- Mia Hansen-Løve’s next feature is about Mary Wollstonecraft 😍
- Harmony Colangelo on the ways people are talking (and not talking) about I Saw the TV Glow