For me 2019 was not a particularly memorable year for music. I found pleasure in some old favorites but made no significant new discoveries.
Mostly, female artists struck the strongest chords with me. Billie Eilish’s debut ‘When We Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go’ and Lana Del Ray’s ‘Norman Fucking Rockwell’ were rightly rated highly in many ‘best of’ lists.
I wrote around 10 reviews a month for Whisperin’ & Hollerin’ , about half of my output from the previous year. Continue reading
Tag Archive: joker
What’s this shit they’re writing about me on the internet?
The hyped backlash against Marvel superhero movies means these films stand accused, amongst their other sins, of being produced solely to make a handsome profit.
This manufactured outrage all stems from a casual comment by Martin Scorsese claiming that this brand of blockbusters are not ‘real cinema’. Frances Ford Coppola and Ken Loach have since weighed in to back up this elitist viewpoint.
Well, correct me if I’m wrong, but hasn’t box office success been one of the prime motivations among filmmakers for time immemorial.
Of course, they’ll always be a minority of auteurs who put merit before money but they face the problem that art for art’s sake doesn’t pay the bills. The arguments of Scorsese and crew are spurious and are akin to claiming that bestselling books by Dan Brown or J.K. Rowling are not real novels. Your may not like them but that doesn’t change what they are.
Even though corporate branded franchises inspired by Marvel (and by extension DC comics) spawn as many turkeys as triumphs this doesn’t justify trashing the whole genre. Dark Knight, Black Panther, Thor: Ragnarok and Joker are examples of movies that win audiences (and make money) without dumbing down the content.
There will always be a need for a steady supply of low culture for highbrows just as there will always be those who snobbishly regard all mass entertainment as beneath them.
JOKER directed by Todd Phillips (USA, 2019)
Who needs critics anyway? All of us have opinions so we don’t need to be told what to like and why.
The initial official press reaction to Joker was broadly positive but winning The Golden Globe in Venice seems to have provoked a bizarre backlash. How dare a popular movie win such an accolade over the latest worthy but dull art house fodder?
Roger Ebert.com has dismissed the movie as “pernicious garbage” and Time magazine’s hack even have the bare-faced nerve to attack Joaquin Phoenix’s stellar performance as “aggressive terribleness”.
On top of this, and in keeping with its liberal tendency for fence-sitting, the UK’s Guardian newspaper try to have it both ways. They currently have a policy of filling space in their culture pages by printing reviews with wildly opposing points of view. On one hand Xan Brooks praised the movie’s “glorious daring” but then Peter Bradshaw described it as “very shallow”.
Thankfully, ordinary punters have wisely disregarded the negative reviews. At the time of writing, the critic’s average rating at Metacritic is a paltry 59% while users have given it a resounding 9.3. Continue reading
Dark times require dark heroes and villains.
Bane in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, played by Tom Hardy, is the embodiment of all the worst horrors of terrorism, a figure so cruel and inhuman that you can’t even love to hate him. He inspires only fear and loathing.
Boring!
Other intelligent adversaries of Batman with master plans to rule the world and/or destroy Gotham City at least displayed a sense of humour.
Bane is just an ugly thug in an ugly mask.
He made me nostalgic for Joker, The Riddler or The Penguin who may have been demented and delusional but had some good one-liners.
The 9 year old son of a friend I visited while in England was mad on Batman. Not the latest dark incarnation or even Tim Burton’s gothic version, but the 1960s TV shows. He had all the episodes on DVD and watched them continually so was able to tell us what was coming next and quote key lines. I asked his Mom & Dad if he liked the recent movie versions and they said that he hadn’t seen them yet. This was a deliberate policy on their part to preserve the innocent pleasure he is getting form Adam West’s camp depiction of the caped crusader. I grew up watching these shows so could understand the appeal. They are hugely dated now and were oddities pretty well as soon as they were made.
Certainly, the contrast between the colourful comic strip action and the shadowy sense of menace in the new Dark Knight film could not be more pronounced. At the cinema in Brighton where I saw it, the parental guidance alongside the 12A rating said that the movie contained “moderate violence and continuous threat” which I’d say was quite accurate. Continue reading
