I Found One Of The Best Movies Of The Year, But It's Not 'Joker: Folie à Deux' Or 'Megalopolis'
#292: "Joker: Folie à Deux," "Megalopolis," "It's What's Inside," "The King of Comedy," "Crawl"
Edition 292:
Hey movie lovers!
This week: A pair of big expensive flops at the box office, and one hidden gem on Netflix that might just be the best movie of the year. Plus, some very topical streamers on Amazon! In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” I’m incredibly excited for a Jude Law-led thriller coming in December.
Joker: Folie à Deux // Megalopolis
Joker 2 and Megalopolis make for a nice double pairing, and not just because they both massively flopped at the box office this week. Though they certainly did do that. Joker will be lucky to cap out at $250 million by the end of its run, taking a massive chunk out of Warner Bros. fourth quarter corporate projections, and Megalopolis has grossed just $10 million so far, against a $120 million budget that is thought to be mostly from director Francis Ford Coppola’s own pockets. Ouch.
Dollars and cents aside, these movies sort of represent the same kind of failure in the moviemaking process. It’s the failure of unchecked vanity.
That’s not to say that Todd Phillips and Coppola didn’t earn their status. Phillips’ first Joker did absolutely everything a movie could do, grossing over $1 billion against a lean $50 million budget AND earning 11 Oscar nominations, turning into a cultural sensation (controversial though it may have been). And Coppola is Francis Ford Freaking Coppola, the living legend who made not one but two movies often mentioned as the greatest of all time (The Godfather 1 and 2), not to mention Apocalypse Now after similarly bankrolling the whole thing on his own dime and hearing it was going to be a disaster.
But both men cannot seem to accept the possibility that the system might exist to help them. They used whatever juice they had accumulated to enact their singular vision, shutting out any feedback that may have led to a shred of redeemable quality in either of them.
Joker 2 all but spits in the face of viewers, who might come to it either hoping for some comic book villainy or a prestige character study, and instead get a croaky musical (yes, musical) about how one guy’s life goes from bad to worse.
The weight of the first movie hangs by this movie’s ankles like a 500-lb. chain, stopping it from any forward momentum. The plot, such as it is, is nothing more than a series of interviews, interrogations and courtroom hearings reviewing the actions of the Joker 1 (which apparently were even turned into a TV movie within the world of this movie). There is nothing advancing that story forward.
That leaves the audience to see the movie as a two-hour comment section to Phillips’ reactions to the first movie and his own commentary on the state of the world, as our titular Arthur Fleck bounces around like a ping pong ball being volleyed by abusers at each turn.
Of course, Joker 1’s depiction of a class people who felt oppressed rising up in rebellion against “the system” struck a nerve with Americans in October 2019 (cue the Jan. 6 insurrection a little over a year later), but this movie doesn’t even stick to its dangerous mantra. Fleck is punished again and again until the point behind it is completely lost.
The injection of life was supposed to come from Lady Gaga, who plays Harley Quinn who falls in love with Joker, but her own storylines and motivations are hard to pin down, and are equally without any redemptive qualities. I suppose she was supposed to be redeemed by the musical numbers, but they’re dull and lifeless, and in order to fit in with Joaquin Phoenix’s talk-sing atrocity, she decides never to dial up her otherworldly skills.
Somehow, all of that was still better than Megalopolis, a movie that is incoherent to the point of self-parody. In my screening (and judging based on online memes, every screening), about 30 minutes in the audience began laughing at all the ridiculous storytelling decisions Coppola made.
At 2hr20min, which feels closer to four hours, the movie truly believes itself to be profound, unwinding an epic about the state of the country (noticing a theme here?) through a kind of dystopian parable set in “New Rome,” where a genius inventor (and clear Coppola stand-in) is trying to save the crumbling empire from rot and chaos by….well, in my reading, by building a big public garden whose biggest invention is a … moving sidewalk?
The logic of this story and its characters is gonzo, obscuring any directorial flourishes that Coppola may have harnessed. Each of the actors — big names, like Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Dustin Hoffman, Laurence Fishburne, Jon Voight, Nathalie Emmanuel — are so tonally inconsistent that they seem to be dropped in from entirely different movies.
It’s incredibly obvious that both of these directors began to believe that their projects were very “Important,” and forgot (or ignored) the side of filmmaking which is making something entertaining or fun to watch. Because there is zero fun across the combined five hours of programming here. I wouldn’t recommend wasting that amount of time on them this week.
Something New
It’s What’s Inside (Netflix): Now here’s a deep cut for the real newsletter heads who reach down beyond the featured section. It’s What’s Inside is one of my favorite movies of the year (it should probably be No. 1, but I’m too cowardly to replace Dune 2). It’s the kind of incredibly inventive and unique hidden gem movies that I already know I’m going to be recommending to friends and newsletter readers for years to come.
The story is set at a reunion for eight college friends on the night before one of them gets married. As is always the case in these kinds of setups, they’ve got sort of interweaving former romances and grudges, but what makes this different is that the weirdo of the group has brought with him a mysterious suitcase, which allows them to swap into each other’s bodies for a souped-up game of Mafia or Werewolf (guess who’s who).
You can already see how that could raise some interpersonal issues, but I promise you won’t be able to predict the absolutely wild plot twists that go on from there. This is one of those mind-bending psychological thrillers that relies heavily on its cleverly constructed plot (in the end, I’m still such a softie for good plot), and with the help of a cast of unknown actors, really achieves that full immersion into the world and rules of this story.
By the end, you feel like you know each of the characters and what they want — a testament to the acting in addition to the writing, especially considering the actors have to act like someone else inside their body for parts of the movie.
From there, it’s further turning of the screw until we get a Soderbergh-esque rewind through the story as the truth gets revealed with one final, massive twist. This movie is awesome and I already feel like I want to rewatch it. What a find!
Something Old
The King of Comedy (1983, Amazon Prime): You can’t talk about Joker without mentioning this movie, which is so much of the inspiration for the first Todd Phillips installment that I think you could reasonably call it a knock-off (I did). Robert De Niro stars memorably an aspiring stand-up comedian who obsessively stalks a successful talk show host (played by Jerry Lewis), hoping to land his big break. It’s a satire, and you could even say a cynical one at that, but the difference here is that Scorcese wants to balance the darkness and desperation with some hope and light, which at the very least complicates a sad story. Heads up to anyone who doesn’t deal with cringe content very well — this can be a pretty difficult movie to watch (much like both Joker flicks).
Something To Stream
Crawl (Amazon Prime): My heart goes out to anyone affected by Hurricane Melton this week, or Helene a few weeks ago (my own parents were displaced temporarily by that one). It’s a true natural disaster that is going to have lasting impacts for years to come. I am in no way minimizing that by picking out a hurricane-related movie for this week’s streamer choice, and to be totally honest there aren’t a lot of hurricane movies out there to be found, but hey, movies have always been one way I relate to and understand the world.
This one from 2019 is one of those tactile horror/thrillers (think Don’t Breathe) following a family stuck in the crawl space of their flooded home during a category five hurricane in Florida. The catch? The house is also inhabited by several alligators. Oof. The movie flirts with its heightened stakes right to the edge of turning into ridiculousness, but rides that fine line to a pretty fun and adrenalized thrillride.
Trailer Watch: The Order
As much I wanted to gush about the new, extended A Complete Unknown trailer, which is slowly winning over my skepticism, there’s only so much to be said about being super-served by the system.
Instead, I picked this hardcore genre movie that looks like a relic of the 90s or early 2000s in the best possible way. It’s a cat-and-mouse crime movie with Jude Law’s FBI agent chasing Nicolas Hoult’s bankrobber in the Pacific Northwest, with the added layer of a white supremacist movement rising in the background. It’s like A Time To Kill, but instead of Grisham legalize it look like a Hell or High Water, Taylor Sheridan-style caper. It’s not prestige-y enough for awards, but straight up this movie just looks right up my alley.