Quentin Tarantino stands alone as an auteur with praise for Todd Phillips‘ box-office disaster “Joker: Folie à Deux.” Where Paul Schrader couldn’t get through more than 25 minutes of the widely panned sequel, now sputtering out in theaters and headed to VOD, Tarantino adores Phillips’ anti-paean to comic book lovers, movie audiences, and fans of the first film.
Appearing on the “Bret Easton Ellis” podcast (via World of Reel), Tarantino praised Joaquin Phoenix‘s performance as one of the greatest he’s ever seen. Meanwhile, “Joker 2” continues to tank in theaters, grossing just over $201 million worldwide. Globally, the 2019 original “Joker” grossed more than $1 billion.
“I really, really liked it, really, a lot. Like, tremendously, and I went to see it expecting to be impressed by the filmmaking,” Tarantino said. “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 said he even saw echoes of his “Natural Born Killers” script — in which Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis share their own “folie à deux” as murderous lovers on the run — in Phillips’ latest film, co-written with Scott Silver. Funny, because in 2019, “Natural Born Killers” director Oliver Stone told IndieWire that the backlash to that movie in 1994 reminded him of the incel accusations against “Joker.”
Tarantino meanwhile said Phoenix gave “one of the best performances I’ve ever seen in my life in this movie.” He added that Phillips is the real Joker behind the movie due to the rug he cruelly pulls out from under the audience’s feet by delivering a sequel no one expected.
“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 fuck you to all of them. He’s saying fuck you to the movie audience. He’s saying fuck you to Hollywood. He’s saying fuck 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.”
“Joker: Folie à Deux” is now available on VOD and in theaters.
