[Cecil Terwilliger]

I really liked it.

Loved the score, don’t need to even mention how good Phoenix was. Loved it that they stayed true enough to the character without needing a bunch of lame Easter eggs and cameos. The movie benefited so much by limiting the amount of direct Batman references. I read a comment that they should have had the psychologist at the end be Harley. Ugh that would have ruined it in so many ways. So glad they didn’t shoehorn in a bunch of silly fan service.

The black comedy was well done. It felt awkward to laugh at times. I knew going in thanks to stupid google news headlines spoilers that some of the movie may not be real but thought it was, for the most part, well done. Left just enough open to interpretation without undermining the story that we saw as viewers.

My only dislike was the portrayal of Thomas Wayne as a dbag. It would have had way more impact if his death was tragic. Instead I was ambivalent at best. You might even say his death was justified given what a scumbag he was. The movie, I feel, would have benefitted from having Wayne be more similar to Nolan’s version and by having a heartless scumbag like Rutger Hauer’s character in Batman Begins.

To address some points I’ve seen in the media and ITT. Anyone complaining about the senseless violence is crazy. This movie barely registered as violence compared to network tv. Even when factoring in the motivation behind the killings it wasn’t that dark. Are we really mad that he killed a few yuppie dbag Wall Street bankers? I’d only be slightly upset if that happened in real life! (j/k)

I don’t get the incel BS at all. Seems like media sensationalism to me. This movie has almost nothing to do with incel culture.

Mental illness I thought they handled perfectly. If you name a specific illness then the movie is destined to fail. There is no mental illness in existence that makes people into the Joker. If they’d chosen a specific illness or treated mental illness with 100% realism, then there’s no way they could ever turn the character into anything resembling the joker and then what’s the point of making the movie in the first place. Then again they didn’t totally dismiss it either and did portray some of the difficulties and stigma that people with mental illness have to live with. If they weren’t going to go for the whole chemical bath angle, which wouldn’t really work given the fact they wanted it to be more earnest and grounded, I don’t see how you make this movie without mental illness playing a factor.

It could have been worse. They could have done something like Silver Linings Playbook and used a real mental illness and just #### all over people with bipolar disorder by portraying them as these wacky loners who suffer from a minor annoyance that’s curable by falling in love with Jennifer Lawrence. Now that’s offensive.

The comments about the movie being better if it wasn’t joker related are baffling. Asinine even. Why would you even go if you wanted a movie that had nothing in common with the comic book world? Just go watch a film that does deal with mental illness in a more realistic way, one that addresses a real mental illness and has little to no fantastical elements to it. Its like saying suicide squad would have been better if it was a low budget indie flick about an impressionable psychologist who falls in love with one of her insane patients. Yeah it might have been a better movie but then it’s not Suicide Squad is it?

I don’t know if it’s best picture material but then again neither was TDK. I could definitely see an acting nom though. Wouldn’t be the first time two actors have won Oscars for portraying the same character in different movies.