David Foster Wallace had a penchant for boredom. He had such a thing about it that he made it a kind of final legacy. According to a long (and pretty great) article in The New Yorker by DT Max, published a year after Wallace’s death by suicide in 2008, he left behind a third of his last novel, The Pale Kingfor which he had spent countless hours researching boredom. A typed note he also left spelled out the book’s central intent: “Bliss—a moment-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive and conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most boring things you can find (tax returns, televised golf game), and a boredom like you’ve never experienced before will come over you in waves, almost killing you. When you endure these, it’s like going from black and white to color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.”

This interest of Wallace’s is closely related to mindfulness, but the two things are a little different. Mindfulness is an awareness of things as they come Is a kind of endurance, but it’s not exactly the bliss that one finds through it, but rather a kind of acceptance – which, relatively speaking, can certainly feel like bliss to a person in constant distress. “Pay close attention to the most boring thing you can find.” I didn’t know it would be like this Joker: Folie à Deux.

Having read him lately, Wallace was the first thing that came to mind when I tried to describe Todd Phillips’ latest work and that “crushing, crushing boredom.” It’s hard to know where to start with this thing because it’s hard to describe Joker 2 as a film – it doesn’t really play like anything finished. It plays out like a bunch of thrown out half-ideas or impressions or something (and unlike the first jokerhas neither Scorsese to fall back on as an organizing speaker, nor does it come out at a time when the vibrations of the world can easily fall into its cracks. Joker 2 seems like a series of lines were written, a series of actors did what they could with those lines, a series of scenes were then shot and stitched together, and none of it for any reason that anyone who made it or sees it, fully understands it. There is no real story, there is no real motivation, there is absolutely no movement. In my notes I wrote several times, “What’s this about?”

“The goal of this film is to make it seem like it was made by crazy people,” Phillips said diversity. “The inmates run the institution.” According to Wikipedia, Joker 2 is a “musical psychological thriller”. And yes, while Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix, incredibly skinny) sits in Arkham Asylum (with Brendan Gleeson as a guard who basically has nothing to do, Catherine Keener as a lawyer who has little else to do), they both still make everything shine Absence through mere subject matter), where he meets his fellow patient Lee Quinzell (Lady Gaga) in music therapy, the musical interludes begin to come and come and come again, like a kind of never-ending attempt at a Hail Mary in which poor Gaga dies hard work does absolutely nothing. I can’t remember if it was me or my friend who said, “Not another musical number, please.” The chemistry between Phoenix and Gaga is great, but there’s no real relationship building here, and instead of any understandable connection, Arthur and Lee just keeps singing and dancing – in smoke-filled rooms, outside in lamplight, in dreams – Arthur as Joker doing his trademark, sitting back and exhaling when it turns out it was all a lie, for both of them, for everyone , because obviously the crux of the whole thing is that everything is a performance. “All we had was the imagination and you gave up,” Lee says at the end, which is perhaps why this film is so bad, because you can’t hang everything on something so terse.

However, I want to say this to return briefly to Wallace. There was a moment where I thought, “I want those two hours and 18 minutes back,” but almost as immediately, I didn’t. I was sitting in the movie theater with a friend I adore, eating popcorn, drinking a cherry cola, and I swear the boredom I felt in this movie actually made me… if not happy, at least at the risk to sound sweet, remembering what I had. And, OK, it wasn’t ALL bad. There’s a funny bit with Steve Coogan as a broadcast journalist’s vulture, whose perplexed expression as Arthur begins to sing was perhaps the most meta moment, and when Arthur mimics his rhythm (“H-what’s changed”) I have a hard time , not to laugh . But this film seems truest to itself when, out of nowhere, Arthur starts brutally beating people up in the courtroom. The violence, which turns out to be a fantasy, is sudden – it erupts during a musical number, if I remember correctly – and over the top. It’s disgusting. And there’s something about this senseless, almost banal male aggression that’s very reminiscent of Phillips – just mindlessly doing something because he can, because he feels the impulse.

The whole idea for Joker 2 However, it did not come from Phillips, who felt that the first film was all it had in it. But then Phoenix apparently had a dream even before packing up joker in which Arthur performs on stage, telling jokes and singing, finally able to express himself through music (and Phoenix has a decent voice overall). But I can’t imagine this film, as presented, as any kind of risk (“I’m addicted to risk. I mean, it keeps you up at night. It makes your hair fall out. But it’s the sweat that holds up.” keep you going,” Phillips said in the same spirit diversity Interview) without thinking about the risk that Phoenix actually didn’t take. I’m referring to his abandoning filmmaker Todd Haynes after he approached him, similar to how he approached Phillips, about a 1930s love story between two men. Haynes told diversity Last year, “it all started with Joaquin having a few ideas and thoughts and just questions and images.” He added: “Joaquin made it even more sexually dangerous.” Rewind to last month and at the San Sebastian Film Festival was Haynes ‘ Longtime producer Christine Vachon was visibly upset that Phoenix dropped out of the project weeks before production began. “Todd Haynes is 62, he’s not old yet, but there’s a limited number of films he can do in his life,” she said, according to Deadline. “The idea that his time was wasted and that a film is not the result of all the time he spent working with Joaquin is a tragedy to me.”

I was asked about this during one Joker 2 The spokesman did not want to discuss Phoenix’s departure from the Haynes film. “I would just give my opinion from my perspective and the other creatives aren’t here to share their input, so I don’t think that would be helpful,” he said. “So I won’t do that.” At least those words make as much sense when strung together as Joker: Folie à Deux– so maybe it fits joker 2 were made and one potentially interesting one wasn’t.