Anna Daniels
Not content with having the highest-grossing R-rated movie in history, Warner Bros. has decided to put Todd Phillips‘ Joker back in theaters to capitalize on all of its recent awards attention. The Joker rerelease will hit more than 750 theaters in North America starting this Friday, January 17.
A Joker Rerelease is Imminent
Hey, did you hear? Hollywood made a movie about Batman’s arch-nemesis, and apparently the Academy loves it. On second thought, that may be understating things – they’re rabid for it. Like, so wild for it that Joker earned eleven Oscar nominations. That’s almost as many as a single film can get! What’s that, you ask? Why do they love it so much? That’s a good question, because the movie itself is kind of an unfocused mess. But it looks a lot like a Martin Scorsese movie from the 1980s, so I imagine that aesthetic familiarity played well to the largely old and white members of the voting body. And even people who really don’t care for the movie acknowledge that Joaquin Phoenix turns in another amazing performance in the lead role, and since actors are the largest section of the Academy, maybe that has something to do with it. Are we looking at our next Best Picture winner, and the first comic book movie to win that enviable award? We’ll find out early next month at the Oscars ceremony.
“With the continued interest in Joker as a result of its recognition during this exciting awards season, we wanted to give audiences the chance to see the film on the big screen, whether for the first time or again,” said Jeff Goldstein, WB’s president of domestic distribution.
Here’s the movie’s official synopsis and a trailer, just to refresh your memory of a movie that first came out a little more than three months ago:
Forever alone in a crowd, Arthur Fleck seeks connection. Yet, as he trods the sooted Gotham City streets and rides the graffitied mass transit rails of a hostile town teeming with division and dissatisfaction, Arthur wears two masks. One, he paints on for his day job as a clown. The other he can never remove; it’s the guise he projects in a futile attempt to feel he’s a part of the world around him, and not the misunderstood man whom life is repeatedly beating down. Fatherless, Arthur has a fragile mother, arguably his best friend, who nicknamed him Happy, a moniker that’s fostered in Arthur a smile that hides the heartache beneath. But, when bullied by teens on the streets, taunted by suits on the subway, or simply teased by his fellow clowns at work, this social outlier only becomes even more out of sync with everyone around him.
Directed, co-written and produced by Todd Phillips, “Joker” is the filmmaker’s original vision of the infamous DC villain, an origin story infused with, but distinctly outside, the character’s more traditional mythologies. Phillips’ exploration of Arthur Fleck, who is indelibly portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix, is of a man struggling to find his way in Gotham’s fractured society. Longing for any light to shine on him, he tries his hand as a stand-up comic, but finds the joke always seems to be on him. Caught in a cyclical existence between apathy and cruelty and, ultimately, betrayal, Arthur makes one bad decision after another that brings about a chain reaction of escalating events in this gritty, allegorical character study.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRjvmVaFHkk?feature=oembed&w=740&h=416]
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