An Unbelievably High Number of People Think They’re Going to Die Because ‘Joker’ is Getting Rave Reviews
If I’m honest with you, Joker was never a movie with a concept that never much appealed to me. I’m not a huge fan of superhero origin stories and the Joker isn’t one of my favorite characters. Sure, he’s been in some really great stories, but you know what else those stories had? They had Batman. And no matter how good your Joker is, he’s not going to be better than Mark Hamill in Batman: The Animated Series. There’s just not a lot of compelling evidence that a Joker origin movie is going to be good.
But it shows what I know, because Joker is getting rave reviews. The movie received an eight minute long standing ovation after it’s premier at the Venice Film Festival and has so far been getting rave reviews. In fact, Joker has generated honest-to-God Oscar buzz for star Joaquin Phoenix, which as far as I can remember is a first for a comic book movie.
The reaction to this on social media has been absolutely insufferable. You know how sometimes people will write stories based on cherry-picked tweets from nobodies that don’t actually reflect a viewpoint held by any significant amount of people? This is not one of those times. Honest to god influential people are pooping their pants because they think someone is going to kill them because they saw a comic book movie.
Hard to read reviews of the Joker (and look backs to Heath Ledger’s performance) that make no mention of the Aurora shooting. Seems pertinent. Seems dangerous.
— Clara Jeffery (@ClaraJeffery) August 31, 2019
Anyway I never saw that (Heath) movie. Seemed impossible to contemplate doing so after. And I probably won’t see this one, certainly not in a theater. Great actors, both.
— Clara Jeffery (@ClaraJeffery) August 31, 2019
That’s the Editor-in-Chief of Mother Jones, a once-respectable news magazine. She is not some Twitter rando. Also worth mentioning that the Aurora shooter was neither dressed like nor inspired by the Joker, that’s basically just an urban legend because the place he shot up was showing a Batman film at the time. A Batman film the Joker wasn’t even in.
So this is a Twitter rando, but he has thousands of retweets and tens of thousands of likes. The “review” he’s highlighting is also obviously, glaringly a joke. And the guy doubled down when people pointed it out.
No, shut up. You got fooled by a parody. It’s happened to the best of us, we all get taken in by a fake headline or a satire that isn’t all that obvious to us in the moment, just take the L and move on.
“Comic historian.” And Gail Simone isn’t at all calling the movie toxic. Because she’s smart.
In addition, there’s a clip from an interview Phoenix did saying he “nearly went mad” playing the Joker. This is a lie. He “nearly went mad” because he had to lose 50 pounds, not because playing the Joker is so psychologically damaging, he’s not a nutter like Jared Leto.
The Joker has been around since 1940, and the character has a lot of different facets and interpretations over the years. So far, I’m not aware anyone has actually killed anyone because of the character in the first 79 years he’s existed. The weird fear-mongering around this movie is just that. It sounds like it’s going to be a really good movie. Maybe just relax and watch it. It’s about a guy who dresses like a clown in a suit and kills people. It’s not that serious.
