‘Joker: Folie à Deux’ Part 2 or — My Real Thoughts?

So somebody asked me this morning what I really thought of ‘Joker: Folie à Deux’ (2024) as opposed to using it to flippantly talk about myself and I have to admit that I kinda liked it. In fact, it’s easily Todd Phillips’ best film.

This is for a couple of reasons, the first being that it genuinely feels like the work of a mature human being as opposed to that of an obnoxious child. It has the bravery and guts to open itself up to a very important emotional state — vulnerability — so there’s a real sense of tenderness and sensitivity here, and I respond to that way more than any gritty posturing. This film legitimately CARES!

It also drops the whole 1970’s fetish the first one had which is a blessed relief because there’s nothing that gets on my nerves more than men (and it’s nearly always men) who bang on about the 1970’s being the greatest decade of cinema when it most certainly bloody wasn’t. Sure, it took risks and produced some excellent movies but it was also frequently shallow, adolescent, grating, idiotic and psychologically backward. Quite frankly, 1970’s cinema is nothing more than a middle-aged filmbro cos-playing as a thirteen year old edgelord. No wonder Quentin Tarantino loves the decade so much.

‘Joker: Folie à Deux’ is also a musical which is great because as everybody knows men who love 1970’s cinema can’t stand musicals so anything that’s going to annoy them even more is music to my ears (I love the thought of them squirming in their seats thinking they’re here for another ‘Taxi Driver’ jerk-off fest but getting subjected to an onslaught of show tunes instead).

This is a masterstroke by Phillips as anybody who claims not to like musicals isn’t being “deep” or above such nonsense but simply demonstrating their profound cinematic immaturity and ignorance. You don’t like musicals? Movement, motion, music and emotion? Then why not just reject cinema itself wholesale? And you have the audacity to pontificate about 1970’s cinema when you’re THIS ill-informed? Besides, did you not know the first thing Coppola, Scorsese and Bogdanovich — these titans of the seventies you claim to admire so much — all did when they got the opportunity was to make a bloody musical? God, men are stupid.

Anyway, I’ll get off my high-horse long enough to say that, for all its flaws, ‘Joker: Folie à Deux’ isn’t just good but might be the only comic book movie of the last twenty years of any actual worth or merit.