movies
**Summary:** Arthur Fleck is institutionalized at Arkham, awaiting trial for his crimes as Joker. While struggling with his dual identity, Arthur not only stumbles upon true love, but also finds the music that's always been inside him. **Director:** Todd Phillips **Writers:** Todd Phillips, Scott Silver, Bob Kane **Cast:** ::: spoiler spoiler * Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck * Lady Gaga as Lee Quinzel * Brendan Gleason as Jackie Sullivan * Catherine Keener as Maryanne Stewart * Zazie Beetz as Sophie Dumond * Steve Coogan as Paddy Meyers * Harry Lawtey as Harvey Dent ::: **Rotten Tomatoes:** [39%](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/joker_folie_a_deux) **Metacritic:** [48](https://www.metacritic.com/movie/joker-folie-a-deux/)
Fans customized the Wicked movie poster to more closely match the original Broadway poster. Original Broadway Poster:  Movie poster:  > Some fans, disappointed by the poster, altered it to be closer to the original, moving Grande’s hand and lowering the brim of Erivo’s hat to cover her eyes. The edits prompted Erivo to respond. “This is the wildest, most offensive thing I have seen > “None of this is funny. None of it is cute. It degrades me. It degrades us,” Erivo continued. “The original poster is an ILLUSTRATION. I am a real life human being, who chose to look right down the barrel of the camera to you, the viewer… because, without words we communicate with our eyes.” So, this seems like a completely reasonable reaction to fans making fan content.
My kids haven't seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind yet and I thought it would be a fun surprise to recreate the meal eaten in the mashed potato scene and watch the movie with the movie dinner. (I can't wait to see if they put two and two together when that scene comes up lol.) Obviously there's mashed potato. And I can see sweet corn. Kids are drinking milk. But I can't tell what the little meat things are. I assumed they were crumbed rissoles but having not been raised or lived in the US, I'm unsure if I'm missing a common protein that was eaten at dinner around the late 1970s. Meatloaf has also been suggested but in my country we never have mini meatloaves that I've seen so I'm unsure how accurate that is. EDIT: Middle bottom, you can see a partially eaten meat thing which looks pink inside:  I also can't tell what is in the bowls beside Roy and his sons - to the top left of Roy's plate, right hand side of Toby and top right of Brad's plate. Maybe Ronnie and Silvia have one of these bowls too but I can't tell. You can see Brad eat out of his bowl at one point and it looks like something pale (I wondered coleslaw or macaroni). EDIT: Screenshot of side  Anyway, anyone know or have an idea of what the little meat things are and what are in the side bowls?
www.theguardian.com
> To quote Heath Ledger’s version of the clown prince of crime, maybe some wag should be scrawling “Why so serious?” on glass-fronted offices at Warner Bros Discovery this week, as executives there contemplate the box-office implosion of Joker: Folie à Deux. A catastrophic $37.7m opening weekend, the largest second-weekend drop for a DC film (81%), a worldwide take currently standing at a piddling $165m … how has the studio gone from the 2019 original, a billion-grosser that was then the highest earning R-rated film, to this? > > ... > > With bubonic word of mouth, Joker: Folie à Deux is now projected to lose $125m-200m, depending on whose budget estimate you believe. If it’s the $300m figure being generally touted for production and marketing, then this is clearly what has hobbled the film; it would leave it needing as much as $475m to break even. Risky reinventions of hallowed pop-cultural icons are a lot more feasible on the first film’s sensible $60m budget. > > $300m is a shocking amount. The money is up on the screen in the sense that director Todd Phillips and star Joaquin Phoenix were both paid $20m and supporting actor Lady Gaga $12m; over a quarter of the $200m production budget. But other than beautiful lighting and cinematography, and the climactic sequence, the film doesn’t look outrageously lavish. A cloistered affair set largely in Arkham State Hospital and the courtroom, there’s virtually nothing in the way of extended CGI pyrotechnics to explain the spend. The likeliest explanation is that it was a big bet born out of pandemic desperation for a surefire hit when cinemas reopened. > > ... > > Phillips evidently wanted to course-correct after accusations that he had indulged toxic fandom in the first film. Having Arthur Fleck definitively dismiss the Joker as a pathetic psychological crutch certainly gets his point across. > > But chastising the fanbase so openly is tantamount to box office self-harm (probably why the director refused to test-screen Joker: Folie à Deux). The impunity of a $300m budget seems to have led Phillips to mistake this for an auteur film, and shooting during a period of regime change at both Warner and DC reportedly allowed him to operate with weak oversight. According to Variety, he refused to liaise with new DC heads James Gunn and Peter Safran, saying: “With all due respect to them, this is kind of a Warner Bros movie.” But he also pushed back on new Warner president David Zaslav’s suggestions for lowering the budget, including moving the shoot to London rather than Los Angeles. > > ... > > The film’s nosedive will have repercussions for the still-floundering DC and beyond. This kind of overly conceptual punt will surely become verboten in blockbusters for some time, and you wonder if it will force more conservative reimaginings of other returning icons, particularly Bond. It’s another question whether this almighty flop will give pause for thought in Hollywood about squeezing beloved IP until it has no more juice to give. Could Phillips’ sluggishness in converting realism into expressionism be something to do with the fact that this is the fifth major outing for the Joker in just over 15 years?
www.wired.com
cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/45150403 > When Hollywood’s writers and actors went on strike last year, it was, in part, because of AI. Actors didn’t care for the notion that their likenesses could be used without their permission, whether by the studios that hired them that week or by someone at home with a computer in 2040. Writers didn’t want to do punch-ups on potentially crummy AI scripts or have their words (or ideas) cannibalized by large language models that didn’t pay them a dime. > > But while some Hollywood filmmakers came out of the strikes fearful of how AI might wreck their industries, others wanted to learn more. This week, many of those filmmakers gathered in a movie theater in Culver City, California, for the inaugural Culver Cup, a generative-AI film competition sponsored by FBRC.AI and Amazon Web Services.
www.theguardian.com
> With Gladiator II thrusting into cinematic arenas next month, we hand out laurels to the greatest sword-and-sandal movies of them all I. Spartacus (1960) II. Gladiator (2000) III. Ben-Hur (1959) IV. Cleopatra (1963) V. Caligula: the Ultimate Cut (2023) VI. Quo Vadis (1951) VII. The Sign of the Cross (1932) VIII. Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979) IX. Cleopatra (1934) X. Fellini Satyricon (1969) XI. Julius Caesar (1953) XII. Carry On Cleo (1964) XIII. The Eagle (2011) XIV. Sebastiane (1976) XV. Asterix & Obelix: Mission Cleopatra (2002) XVI. The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) XVII. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966) XVIII. Caesar and Cleopatra (1945)
Example of feet hidden: 
screenrant.com
> By the 1980s, the genre of fantasy martial arts had produced some of the best martial arts performances of all time. They present the best of both worlds – the action, mythology, and magic of fantasy mixed with the thrill of watching graphic martial arts combat. These films were often set in a fantastical world that allowed martial artists to defy physics and perform gravity-defying stunts. The special effects and the magnetic characters of the 1980s made it a golden age of this hybrid genre. Film-makers have taken the conventions of kung fu and transformed them into something exciting and different. > > These movies married martial artists to monsters, magic, and adventure, delivering over-the-top fight scenes and exciting storytelling, bringing with them rich folklore, lore, mythical creatures, and heroes on epic journeys. Films like Shogun Assassin and one of Kurt Russell's best comedy films, Big Trouble In Little China didn't just define the genre but helped define cinema in its entirety in the 1980s and beyond. The decades that followed would pay tribute to many of the moments and themes in these styles of film, and left an indelible mark on the pop culture of their era. 1. Big Trouble In Little China (1986) 2. Encounters Of The Spooky Kind (1980) 3. Shogun Assassin (1980) 4. Mr. Vampire (1985) 5. Fists Of The White Lotus (1980) 6. The Last Dragon (1985) 7. Zu: Warriors From The Magic Mountain (1983) 8. The Boxer's Omen (1983) 9. The Seventh Curse (1986) 10. Legend Of The Eight Samurai (1983)
If you grew up in the early 2000s, you probably saw a trailer for Kangaroo Jack. The trailer gives the impression that the movie is a screwball road trip comedy about two friends and their wacky, talking Kangaroo sidekick. Except it’s not that. It’s an extremely unfunny movie about two idiots escaping the mob. There’s a random kangaroo in it for like 5 minutes and he only talks during a hallucination scene that lasts less than a minute. Turns out, the producers knew that they had a stinker on their hands so they cut the movie to be PG and focus the marketing on the one positive aspect that test audiences responded to, the talking kangaroo, tricking a bunch of families into buying tickets. What other movies had similar, deceitfully malicious marketing campaigns?
https://collider.com/hellboy-the-crooked-man-jack-kesy/
www.theguardian.com
> The Lumière festival in Lyon in south-east France – the home of 19th-century movie inventor-pioneers Auguste and Louis Lumière – always serves up mouthwatering classic films on the big screen. This is true once again this year, with a retrospective season of works by Fred Zinnemann, famously the director of High Noon and From Here to Eternity. > >In one of its most interesting films, the festival also provided what could be the last remaining underexamined footnote in the history of the great Powell/Pressburger partnership that gave us Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. > > Zinnemann’s fascinating film Behold a Pale Horse (1964) is based on a novel that Emeric Pressburger wrote after his split from Michael Powell, called Killing a Mouse on Sunday. (Pressburger also wrote a second novel, The Glass Pearls, a psychological thriller, which was ignored at the time, but has been recently reissued.) > >Pressburger’s first novel was inspired by the Pimpernel-type bandit Quico Sabaté, a daring fighter for the Republican side in the Spanish civil war. After the anti-Francoists’ defeat he lived in exile in France, but infuriated the Spanish government with repeated raids into Spanish territory. > >Zinnemann’s movie is one that all Powell/Pressburger fans have to see. It is adapted from Pressburger’s book by American screenwriter JP Miller, and it’s an engrossing and mysterious drama of character and destiny, with a Greeneian slant, a story about the meaning of martyrdom in a secular world. And it’s a fascinating meditation on the long, strange history of European fascism in 20th-century Spain, the fascism that existed before and long after the second world war. > >Gregory Peck plays Manuel Artiguez, an ageing exiled Republican guerrilla living in France, who has for years been conducting amazing sorties into Spanish territory, more or less for the pleasure of tweaking the fascists’ noses. But now he has lapsed into melancholy inactivity. > > ... > > How would Powell and Pressburger have filmed this? Perhaps not so very differently: the story is as rich and complex and difficult to pigeonhole – and rooted in a distinctive and lovingly rendered landscape – as the projects that always attracted them. My guess is that Powell would have wanted a stronger female presence, apart from the mother on her deathbed. In the film, Manuel has an odd flirtatious moment with a barmaid just before he goes for his last confrontation with the forces of the right. But a Powell/Pressburger version would, I think, have created a love interest or former love interest for Manuel in the French village. This could be a woman who would chide or console Manuel, be protective of the little boy and then feel ruefully deserted when Manuel leaves for the last time, while recognising that he had to do it – the kind of role in which Powell might have cast his partner, Pamela Brown. > >At all events, Behold a Pale Horse is a must-see for Powell/Pressburger fans, and for everyone else.
www.theverge.com
> The next big release from A24 might also be its cutest to date. The studio just released the first trailer for The Legend of Ochi, a fantasy adventure that also happens to star a cute-as-hell creature to rival Grogu. > >While it looks like a somewhat familiar “kid befriends mysterious creature” story, the film does have some interesting aspects, including not only the titular critter, but also what appears to be some kind of post-apocalyptic fantasy setting. Here’s the official description: > >> In a remote northern village, a young girl, Yuri, is raised to never go outside after dark and to fear the reclusive forest creatures known as the ochi. When a baby ochi is left behind by its pack, she embarks on the adventure of a lifetime to reunite it with its family. > >The Legend of Ochi comes from writer and director Isaiah Saxon, who previously made a number of music videos for the likes of Björk, and is making his feature debut here. The cast includes Helena Zengel, Finn Wolfhard, Emily Watson, and Willem Dafoe. It doesn’t have a premiere date yet, but A24 says the movie is “coming soon.” [Trailer](https://youtu.be/_jTFLg3arYU)
www.joblo.com
> James Gunn shares the first image of the Man of Steel's crime-fighting canine companion, Krypto, for his anticipated Superman movie.
