Got this email from MNB reader Jesse Sowell in response to Friday's "OffBeat"…
I always look forward to your culture notes on Fridays. I, too, have loved "The Good Place" - haven't seen the finale yet…
I expected to hate Joker, but it turned out to be near the top of my list of the best movies I saw in 2020. For the first 2/3 of the movie, I found Joker to be a great individual acting performance in an underwhelming, even slightly boring, film. Then the final act moved into the public sphere, and, for me, became a brilliant reflection on the state of the world today. Joker acts out what you get when the world divides so starkly: into haves and have-nots, right vs left, the vulnerable vs the bullies, and all the other us-vs-them's we are devolving into. The movie should have ended in the streets and not gone on to the last scene, which was the only part of the movie that felt comic book-ish to me. In the end, Joker may not be "the movie for our times", but I think it may be the movie we deserve.
But I also totally get why you hated it. I think I could have seen Joker on a different day or in a different mood and felt the same way. Last year I hated Dunkirk, much beloved by everyone I know. To each their own.
We'll just have to agree to disagree. I loved Dunkirk. (Which, by the way, was made by Christopher Nolan, who gave us a much more intriguing Joker, courtesy of Heath Ledger, in The Dark Knight.)
