Have you seen Joker yet? Then you should. It’s remarkable. Brilliant. Mesmerising. And a bit brutal. Joaquin Phoenix plays the eponymous hero(??) in a study of a sick, warped and abused mind. Mel found it too long and too slow. Pretty much as she finds every movie due to her lack of patience with everything except me. But it had to be slow. It had to smoulder, it had to explain the emergence of the sociopathic psychopath lurking underneath a tenuous veneer of mere strangeness. Joker is portrayed as a victim which, according to this version, he most certainly was. But victimhood can only get you so much sympathy. We’re all victims. My mum wouldn’t buy me the bike I really wanted when I was 2 and couldn’t even walk. Joker’s mum was an insane schizophrenic and physical abuser. So we all have tales of woe. Doesn’t make us all killers and Batman haters. I loved Batman. In fact (guilty secret) I kind’a still do. Ok, not as much as I loved Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman but the Caped Crusader was instrumental in making me the person I am today. Whoever the fuck that might be.

Do you have to be a nutter to play a nutter? Well as Marlon Brando, Heath Ledger, Jack Nicholson have shown, it certainly doesn’t hurt. Joaquin has had his own, personal mental health ‘issues’ but is such an amazing screen presence that you don’t care nor know where the man ends and the acting starts. He’s also a vegan, from age 3, so his mental health has always been questionable, if not his common sense.

Parallels have been mentioned between Joker and Taxi Driver. And you can see why. Both are studies of ‘injured’ men trying to cope with their own demons whilst the world around them turns to shit and compounds their despair to breaking point. Possibly ironically (even though its American) Robert De Niro is in Joker too, maybe a nod to Taxi Driver, maybe just because he’s Robert De Niro and if you can get him in a film you do. Though in Scorsese’s 1976 masterpiece the Taxi Driver was the ‘solution’ and in Joker De Niro’s character is more ‘the problem’.

But its all about that ‘breaking point’, when the psycho bursts free. And it simply has to be arrived at slowly or its just a slasher movie without screaming teeny babes running round half naked.

Taxi Driver is probably better. But mainly because its set in some kind of real world, rather than Gotham City. And because of the now immortalised ‘you talking to me???’ But Joker is brilliant too and if Joaquin doesn’t win an Oscar then there is no Santa Claus, no God and no hope of Spurs winning the League this year.

England to play South Africa in the final next weekend. OMGeeeeee…

Happy Sunday

A xxxx

PS. Everyone will always remember exactly where they were when Joey sat in a high chair for the first time.