Joker: Folie à Deux bombed at the box office and most critics, fans, and audiences didn’t like it. Do you know who did like it, though? Quentin Tarantino.
The filmmaker recently appeared on The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast and raved about the Joker sequel, saying: “I really, really liked it, really. A lot. Like, tremendously, and I went to see it expecting to be impressed by the filmmaking.
“But I thought it was going to be an arms-length, intellectual exercise that ultimately I wouldn’t think worked like a movie, but that I would appreciate it for what it is. And I’m just nihilistic enough to kind of enjoy a movie that doesn’t quite work as a movie or that’s like a big, giant mess to some degree.
“And I didn’t find it an intellectual exercise. I really got caught up into it. I really liked the musical sequences. I got really caught up. I thought the more banal the songs were, the better they were. I find myself listening to the lyrics of ‘For Once in My Life’ in a way I never have before.”
Tarantino went on to kind of take credit for the inspiration of the film and said that he saw a his Natural Born Killers story in the Joker sequel, and compared Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck and Lady Gaga’s Lee Quinzel to the serial killer couple Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory (Juliette Lewis).
The filmmaker continued: “As much as the first one was indebted to Taxi Driver, this seems pretty f–king indebted to Natural Born Killers, which I wrote. That’s the Natural Born Killers I would have dreamed of seeing.
“As the guy who created Mickey and Mallory, I loved what they did with it. I loved the direction he took. I mean, the whole movie was the fever dream of Mickey Knox.”
Tarantino also said that he thought the film was really funny and that he watched it in an “almost empty IMAX theater” so he could “laugh without bothering everybody. I know I’m laughing at scenes that other people wouldn’t be laughing it.”
When talking about Phoenix’s performance, he said the actor gives “one of the best performances I’ve ever seen in my life in this movie.”
He then says that the movie is a big F-you to comic book geeks: “The Joker directed the movie. The entire concept, even him spending the studio’s money — he’s spending it like the Joker would spend it, all right?
“And then his big surprise gift — haha! — the jack-in-the-box, when he offers you his hand for a handshake and you get a buzzer with 10,000 volts shooting you — is the comic book geeks.
“He’s saying f-ck you to all of them. He’s saying f-ck you to the movie audience. He’s saying f-ck you to Hollywood. He’s saying f-ck you to anybody who owns any stock at DC and Warner Brothers […] And Todd Phillips is the Joker. Un film de Joker, all right, is what it is. He is the Joker.”
I guess that’s one way to look at the movie and what director Todd Phillips was trying to do with it. I seriously doubt that Phillips went out and spent 200 million dollars on a movie to tell everyone to f-ck off, but I do like Tarantino’s spin on it!
