A musical horror?

Joker: Folie à Deux (Madness shared by two; 2024)
Director: Todd Philips

No matter how much they suck at anything, adults are not supposed to tell children they are wrong. They are supposed to be encouraged, only showered with positive vibes. It is believed to give them self-confidence and stretch them to greater heights beyond their capacity. 

Nobody is graded. Everyone gets a medal for participating. Everyone is a winner, and he is exceptional and made to believe. 

I have news for you. Go into the world and realise that nobody gives two hoots to you. Everybody is in a hurry. Nobody has time to listen and talk to you. Every man is an island.

To make matters worse, the others have no qualms about stepping on or over you to achieve their goals. Losing you is just one step closer to their goals. There is no time to coach or wait for you. It is a man-eat-man world out there.

Living under the hawking eyes of helicopter parenting or even chip-implanted surveillance, these snowflakes find themselves naked, exposed to the cruel elements of humankind. They once thought everyone was laughing with them all. Much to their disappointment, they realise that they were laughed at. They were not the Joker that everyone loved, but the butt of everyone's joke.

The question is when they will realise that reality and how they will handle it.

After the successful run of Joker in 2019, the filmmakers decided to push their luck. Joker (2109) did well as an evil, dysfunctional character from society's low rung, venting his anger in broad daylight in front of TV cameras. The audience felt for the Joker, and the movie garnered much attention and accolades. Riding on Joker's popularity, the scriptwriters must have taken his fans for clowns (or idiots). They roped in Lady Gaga to pair as Harley Queen, Joker's love interest. We get it that both characters were discontented with their parents and turned out dysfunctional. Both of them blame their respective parents for their predicaments. We get it. 

The shared madness between them and the periodic bursting into songs did not go well with fans. There should be something more concrete than occasional glancing between characters, falling in love, songs and soliloquies. 2/5.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Lost it!

Wonder Woman @ WW84 (2020)

I remember my school teacher telling me this. Doing well at the first attempt does not ensure that things will pen nicely the second time around. In fact, it is more difficult to excel on the second occasion. There is mounting pressure to prove that the first win was no flash in the pan. These pearls of wisdom rang so clearly as I restless laboured through the two and a half-hour of scenes after scenes of a disjointed story whose plot did not make any sense. 

After an exciting outing with the first of the current franchise, I thought this would be like its predecessor. I expected a well-crafted story with visually pleasing cinematography ending with a message sprinkled with philosophy or meaning of life. It was a disappointment.

To the followers of the DC Cinematic Universe, the story might be confusing. According to Batman vs Superman, WW was supposed to be missing somewhere after World War 1, and Superman had to search high and low to trace her in the 1990s. She was doing so much stuff and damage in 1984, but the man in cape obviously missed it in his research. 

The story seems disjointed, and the scenes appear inserted in like an afterthought. The power that the maniacal villain is so vague and the premise of another Superhero manifestation is unwarranted. A wishing crystal as a weapon of mass destruction to control people, President of the USA and nuclear warheads is all too confusing.

As we saw over the recent years, we saw superhero movies develop complex stories where the heroes struggle with worldly and personal issues. It tends to leave with a public message and food for thought. But, not this one. It seems like this film was churned out just to con the audience to depart from their hard-earned moolah in the name of fandom.

Bruce Wayne got hold of this rare photograph to locate the whereabouts of WW.

Wonder Woman of another era.