by Mattie Lucas
Cinema from a Decidedly Queer Perspective
Joker: Folie à Deux | 2024
If Todd Phillips' Joker (2019) was the origin story of the Joker, then his latest film, Joker: Folie à Deux is the story of his deconstruction. It's an admittedly bold move for a comic book movie to spend its entire running time dismantling the character it just spent a whole movie setting up, and there's certainly some interesting thematic ground to cover here; unfortunately, Folie à Deux suffers from some of the same issues of self-importance that plagued its predecessor.
For most of its life, the Cannon Group was a minor studio known for brawny B-movies like Death Wish, Cobra, Missing in Action, and Masters of the Universe. But during the 1980s, under the direction of co-owners Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, who bought the company in 1979, Cannon also used some of its profits to take chances on risky auteur-driven projects in an attempt to gain some prestige. One such project was Jean-Luc Godard's King Lear, a deal Golan and Globus infamously made with Godard on a napkin at the Cannes Film Festival, where the pair were tenaciously courting filmmakers.