Dismissing Bradley Cooper

It's been a couple years since I've seen Bradley Cooper in anything. In fact, if I had thought of him at all in the past few years, which I haven't, I might have said "Hey, what happened to that guy?" His last movie prior to the last few weeks was in 2019, but he wasn't on screen, as that was just voice work in Avengers: Endgame. Before that it was A Star is Born in 2018, which feels like ages ago. 

It turns out it was just one of those weird issues of COVID timing, as it's now been a Bradley Cooper December. He's in both Licorice Pizza and Nightmare Alley, neither of which I've seen yet. 

So why am I writing about Bradley Cooper today, you ask?

While scrolling through Facebook on my phone the other day, I came across an article that asked if it was finally time for an "overdue Oscar" for Cooper. 

Overdue? What are they talking about? This is a guy I only first became aware of 16 years ago in Wedding Crashers, and he's only 46. He might score an Oscar nomination every now and again, but that's usually because of the strength of the films he's been in, nothing front runner-y about the performances he's given.

Well, I got some clarification on that "every now and again" frequency of Cooper's Oscar nominations: He's been nominated EIGHT times.

What the hell?

I thought it was a misprint. But I have gone back and confirmed. And surely, any person who has been nominated eight times for his industry's most prestigious award could reasonably be described as overdue to receive it.

He doesn't feel overdue, though, and when going back and considering the roles that have earned these nominations, I think you'll agree with my assessment.

The first thing I discovered, though, was that they were not all roles. Three of the nominations were not acting nominations. That's cheating a bit, don't you think? Cooper was a producer on American Sniper, A Star is Born and Joker -- the latter of which being the only one that was not accompanied by a best actor nomination for the actor, who does not appear in it. As all three of these movies felt like underdogs to get a best picture nod, they were easy for me to forget -- had I even been considering producer credits when my eyes first jumped out of my head at the eight nominations.

Five acting nominations is still pretty impressive, so I had to dig further into that.

His first acting nomination came in 2012 for Silver Linings Playbook, a film I had as my #3 of the year, but which I have not since rewatched. A friend had it has his #1 of the year. But he didn't include it in his best of the decade and I've never felt inclined to go back to it, so I suspect this one has not aged well. Cooper does give a pretty nuanced performance if I remember correctly, with a good mixture of comedy and the anger that highlights the character's mental health issues.

Next up was American Hustle the following year, where Cooper received his first and so-far only supporting actor nomination. It was a second straight nomination in a film directed by David O. Russell. This one didn't work for me nearly as much as Playbook, as I gave it only a marginal thumbs up. I don't remember Cooper either hurting or helping this film. All four of the leads got nominations so he may have just been swept up in the general furor of interest in the film (which, deservedly, did not win any of its ten nominations). 

It was three years in a row for Cooper with American Sniper in 2014. I didn't see the film at the time, but I always remembered that one of the hosts of the Slate Culture Gabfest went nuts for it, so I knew I should get to it at some point, and finally did in 2019. Clint Eastwood has made some good films in his dotage, but this is not one of them. I gave it 2.5 stars on Letterboxd.

Ha, I needed to read Wikipedia more closely before starting this. There were actually three separate nominations for Cooper in A Star is Born, one of which was an adapted screenplay nomination. So he actually only has four acting nominations, which is finally starting to sound more correct. This might be his most deserved acting nomination, though I find this film falls apart pretty significantly down the stretch after a powerhouse first hour, of which Cooper is a crucial part. Actually he's a crucial part in both the movie's initial ascent and eventual downfall.

Whether Cooper has eight nominations, or only half that number in terms of the nominations that really "count" (I've always found producer nominations a little suss, even though films obviously need a producer), is besides the point. The article was clearly misleading when it mentioned Cooper's eight nominations very prominently in the text. (And if I needed to read Wikipedia more closely, I probably needed to read the original article more closely as it likely would have saved me some trouble writing this whole post.) I think you can be "overdue" to win an acting award, but you can't be "overdue" as a producer, as your role there is less quantifiable and it's hard to know to what extent your fingerprints are on the final film. For example, do we consider Brad Pitt an essential voice on 12 Years a Slave? I don't think we do.

The point is that I have always dismissed Bradley Cooper a bit, and may continue to do so until he gives me a real reason not to.

I don't have anything against the man. I like him as a screen presence. 

But I think the smarmy asshole we first met in Wedding Crashers has never really gone away in my mind. There's always going to be a bit of the aggro, entitled frat boy in him. There's malice in that smile. There's a part of me that always wants to smack that malicious smile off his face.

Maybe that's key to his work though. Maybe it gives him something either to dive into more deeply, or to play off of. 

Well, I'll have the opportunity to reconsider Cooper as I see Licorice Pizza (probably within the next week or so) and Nightmare Alley (maybe not until later, as it doesn't open here until later in January). Given the different setting of the two films, which seem to ask very different things of him, maybe I'll finally appreciate the range that has gotten Cooper a still impressive four acting nominations.

He won't really seem "overdue," though, until those acting nominations reach eight. 

I is for Incel?

A couple years ago I wrote a post about how The Shawshank Redemption was the #1 movie on IMDB, and how that made me self-conscious about my own affection for it. I may not have used these exact words at the time I wrote the post (I could go back and read it I guess), but what I meant to say at the time was that Shawshank was the equivalent of an arthouse movie for comic book nerds. Or maybe not so much an arthouse movie, since the people I am broadly generalizing about would have no use for the arthouse in this broad generalization I’m making. But instead, maybe it was a movie they knew counted as a “good movie” that didn’t have men in capes in it. Even comic book nerds being broadly generalized about know that they can’t only like movies with men in capes.

But now I’m wondering if my preconceived notions about IMDB users has a darker edge than I originally thought.

If you haven’t heard, Joker crossed into the top ten movies of all time on IMDB over the weekend. It must have been a brief incursion only, as maybe more people saw and rated the movie to bring its average score down a bit, perhaps even as a reaction to the news that it had reached that height. But it’s still knocking on the door of that chart’s hallowed top ten at #11, with an average user rating of 8.8/10.

I’m not sure how IMDB does its calculations, but I’d guess there’s a greater likelihood of a film nudging into the top ten based on an initial burst of enthusiasm, one that is typically tempered over time by a more measured approach to ranking. Or, in other words, the movie starts getting seen by the people who are not inclined to love it, and they rank it accordingly. If Joker is anywhere near this ranking two years from now, I will be very surprised.

But for it to even make it near or close to the top ten at any point in its existence means that it has to be a pretty acclaimed movie, right?

Er, no, actually.

I learned about it reaching this peak before I saw it on Saturday afternoon, and when I didn’t like it so much (that opinion may get even more negative the more I sit with it), I figured it must be yet another “me problem.” As with films like the recent Ad Astra (don’t get me started), I felt like I must have seen a very different movie than the vast majority of people.

Actually, many people – or many critics, anyway – saw the same movie I did.

Joker has a fairly lethargic 59 on Metacritic. That breaks down to 32 positive reviews, 15 mixed reviews and 11 negative reviews. So more positive than negative – hence the 59 – but only six more positive reviews than those characterized as mixed or negative combined. And even with some perfect scores of 100 mixed in there, it looks like the Venice Film Festival was more the anomaly than what we should expect from other awards bodies as the year goes on.

IMDB is a different story. On IMDB, Joker would have an 88, using approximately the same scale as Metacritic.

So that begs the question: Why is IMDB’s user base so different from the user base of critics?

I’ve suggested what I think it might be in the provocative subject I’ve used for this post. Is this, indeed, the Incel Movie Data Base?

For you to follow me on this one, we have to make what I acknowledge are a couple stretches in our logic. First we have to say that comic book nerds are disproportionately represented among IMDB’s users, which may not be the case. There’s reason to suggest it may be, though. Even 11 years after its release, another film featuring the Joker, The Dark Knight, is still #4 on IMDB, behind only Shawshank and the first two Godfathers. Two Lord of the Rings movies appearing in the top 12 bolsters the notion that people steeped in nerd culture are heavily represented.

Then we have to make the assumption that some significant percentage of the people who like Joker, like it because they feel like it is a call to violence for incels. Incels, of course, being short for “involuntary celibates,” who are considered to be a group of people prone to shooting up a school or shopping mall because the girl they like doesn’t like them. Of course, not everyone who’s unlucky with the ladies is going to shoot up a mall, but people who characterize themselves as incels are probably a lot more likely to do so. That it incites us to violence is not the only or probably not even the primary reason a person would like Joker, but to say it is no factor at all is probably not correct either, and to say the targets of this incitement are not incels is to overlook some of the ways the film is coded.

Then you have to say that there is a meaningful crossover between people who think of themselves as comic book nerds and people who think of themselves as incels. There would be some, of course, but as with anything, it’s more of a “few bad apples” scenario.

If you do go with me on all this, though, my query about the Incel Movie Data Base makes a little more sense.

Of course, as someone who doesn’t like Joker and thinks it puts bad things into the world, I’m going to question the perspective of a person who does – or their willingness to overlook some of its more problematic elements. But it could be very rational, non-violent thinkers who find the film’s filmmaking or acting first rate (they can be), or instead see a criticism of fatcats like Donald Trump. That’s in there too, which makes the messaging of this film ambiguous to say the least. Although I like it when a film can be interpreted differently by different people, in this case it feels sort of dangerous. It feels like another way it's difficult to grasp an "absolute truth" in this day and age.

But it's not a bully like Donald Trump who gets a gun and kills a bunch of people, his comments about shooting someone on Fifth Avenue notwithstanding. It's the victim of that bully. 

As I wade further and further into this post I realize I am not going to end with a totally coherent thought that I can fully defend. I suppose it takes a piece of art with some value to spin a critical thinker in circles, so they can never fully articulate their thoughts, and have to go back to just trusting the feeling they get from the art.

So Joker is that kind of art: provocative, conversation starting. Art like that should always exist.

But if Joker is engendering passionate fans, it hardly seems likely that they are most passionate about Joaquin Phoenix’s acting, or how Todd Phillips sets up a camera. It seems likely that the passion is coming from the film’s core ideas. And I feel like the uprising of the Joker is more a glorification of the loners who always felt that they were misunderstood, who might think about going to get a gun, than a criticism intended for people who feel forgotten and left behind by the rich. That second idea is put forward on a narrative level, but I don’t think it goes any deeper than that.

Not as deep as the accumulation of hate and disgust felt by mentally ill victims who see no other solution than to rise up and kill everybody.

That's not my reductive view of people with mental illness. It's the movie's. 

Incels, your hero scares me, and your apparent quantity scares me even more.

And I really hope I’m getting all this wrong.

Joker's got a Rogue One problem

SPOILERS for Joker. 

Joker puts bad things into the world. It's one of the reasons I don't like the movie, and reason enough.

But since I haven't yet figured out why I think Joker puts bad things into the world, but why I don't think The Dark Knight does that, I'm going to save my criticisms in today's post for something more superficial and plot-focused.

When I wasn't being bothered by the gratuitous shocks and tone deafness of Joker, I was being bothered by the way it makes mincemeat of the familiar Batman mythology.

Or, at the very least, the way it recontextualizes the most notorious moment in Batman's backstory, the one that gets parodied more than any other.

And this is something it has in common with Rogue One.

Rogue One -- which I also gave a milquetoast 2.5 stars as a way of acknowledging that I appreciated certain elements of the film without actually liking it -- does things I don't like, have never liked, with what functions as the inciting incident of the whole Star Wars saga.

Instead of the transfer of the Death Star plans from Princess Leia to R2-D2 serving as this almost quiet moment in an episode of successful espionage, we now know that it was preceded by a giant battle involving AT-ATs. So much for the innocent little space caper that led to a galaxy-defining narrative. It was always operating on the largest of scales, we now know.

That didn't sit well with me at all. It was complicating a story I admired for its simplicity, and it was all in the spirit of mining our nostalgia to sell us "additional breadth and depth" on what we already knew. Or thought we knew, it turns out.

I think the agenda in Joker is a little different, but the result is the same.

I think Todd Phillips and company set out to make a movie about how the world can mold a deranged supervillain in its cruel crucible, and knowing that it was the Batman villain the Joker helped us understand exactly what type of psychopath we're talking about, because we've known that psychopath for more than 50 years. In its ideal form it would have been beholden to no other story or existing narrative timeline.

But we live in a world of cinematic universes, and the suits at DC just could not resist continuing to ram the connections to the story of Bruce Wayne down our throats.

Which I guess is why they ultimately have Thomas and a pearl-clutching Martha Wayne killed on the same night in which the Joker announces himself to the whole world by killing Gotham City's version of Johnny Carson live on air, launching a citywide riot.

Come on.

Look, this origin story for the Joker does not have to fit in perfectly with what we know about the character. Looking him up on Wikipedia just now, I found that his origin story has changed to fit the needs of whichever of the umpteen stories someone was telling about him at the time. I'd appreciate something close to the story where he falls into a vat of acid that turns his skin white and his hair green, but I'm okay if you don't want to give me that. There's only so many times you can film that scene.

I'm even okay if you give me a Joker who's "just some joker," to quote late night host Murray Franklin -- who has no "particular set of skills" that allows him to marshal an army of freaks, create all kinds of poisonous weapons, and evade capture for as long as he does and as often as he does. If you want to make Arthur Fleck just a failed clown with the remnants of childhood brain damage, I can work with that as well.

What I can't work with is the idea that the Joker would be on the scene for something like 15 year before Batman even becomes Batman. I mean, how old can Bruce Wayne be in that scene in the alley where his parents are killed? Eleven? Twelve? And what's the youngest Batman can be when he first emerges? Thirty?

So in Todd Phillips' and Joaquin Phoneix's Gotham City, Bruce Wayne grows up with a hatred for the Joker his whole life, with a single focus for all his efforts toward shaping himself into a tech-savvy vigilante. No, this Joker does not pull the trigger that killed his parents, but he might as well have. He incited those copycats to violence, and besides, he came to my damn house and talked to me through the gate. He's the face on my voodoo doll and my punching bag. He's the last face I look at when I go to bed and the first I see each morning before I wake up.

It's a problem because I can't abide by a world where the Joker is on the loose for 15 years, menacing Gotham City, begging for someone to rise up and do something about him, until someone finally does. If he's on the loose for that long, it speaks incredibly poorly of the Gotham police -- though it speaks even worse of the prisons and the justice system if he keeps getting caught and keeps escaping.

I had always thought that the killing of the Waynes was a random crime, a robbery, not some vendetta on the rich launched by the villain who would become the future Batman's greatest nemesis. I had always thought their alley demise was the narrative equivalent of Leia Organa hunching over and surreptitiously sliding a disk into a slot on an R2 unit.

Rogue One tried to tell me something quite different about that scene, and now Joker is trying to do the same, and I don't like it.

I agree with a friend of mine who stated that the movie would have been better off leaning away from, rather than leaning into, the Bruce Wayne stuff. Like if they had to get Bruce in there for a cameo to make the audience chuckle, make it like Wolverine's five-second cameo in X-Men: First Class. Not everything has to be related to everything else. If Joker were more of a standalone, I might have liked it better.

Or, I might have just written this post about why I think it puts bad things into the world instead.

Layer upon layer of really real-ness

I haven't seen Joker yet -- today, probably -- but I have a theory why we continue to hunger for this material even though DC seems intent on forever screwing it up.

It's because each new incarnation of the DC comic book characters purports to be the "really real" version.

While some comic book movies have been made with an eye for approximating an actual comic book, DC has taken the opposite approach, and it seems like we are at least in theory open to it.

Since Batman is the throughline here, let's look at it from his vantage point.

The first Batman movie was in 1966, and it was total camp, even for the time. I haven't actually seen it, but I feel like I can say this without second-guessing myself. The way you approximated a comic book at that time was to have words like POW! and BANG! on the screen in big letters. That was about all you could do because there was no way to really approximate the look of comic book panels, or anything but the most basic special effects.

When Tim Burton's 1989 Batman came out, it promised to be dark and brooding, which moved it a step away from the original comics, giving it the feel that the comics had taken on since then (or so I assume -- again, I was not a reader). "Dark and brooding" was, of course, more "realistic," as a real person forever avenging his parents' death in a spandex outfit would probably not have the groovy vibe of Adam West's version.

By the time Batman and Robin, the fourth film in that series, came out, the series had descended back into a cartoonish type of camp that almost resembled the 1966 film (if only it could have been more like it, we might have actually liked it). That meant the world was ready for Christopher Nolan's take on the character in 2005, which matched an increasingly sophisticated filmmaking with an even darker take on the character set in consummately realistic settings. This was what Batman would really look like in the real world.

Then Batman got caught up in the attempt to make Superman more realistic. You could argue Bryan Singer tried to do that with Superman Returns, but Zack Snyder again pitched that as our reason to get interested in Superman again with Man of Steel, in which we see a lengthy back story of Clark Kent working on a deep sea trawler and the like. How can you get more realistic than Superman working on a deep sea trawler? But by the time Batman got involved in this with Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice, Snyder's "even darker" (is it possible?) take on the characters backfired and became kind of ridiculous, again creating the conditions for another reset, another stab toward greater realism in the conception of this character.

I have to assume that reset will be what we get with 2021's The Batman, but for now, we're seeing it in the form of Joker, which will surely be simpatico with the vision of the DC anti-hero that Matt Reeves has planned for his film. (Will Joaquin Phoenix's Joker even be in that film? Not sure.)

What I believe we will be seeing in Joker is the most "realistic" version of this character yet, though you'd have to think Nolan did a pretty good job back in 2008 with The Dark Knight. And by that it seems to mean an independent film-style psychological profile of a character who will later be fighting characters in spandex, though I don't expect to be seeing them in this movie. In fact, I kind of wonder if the intended audience for a DC film will even like it -- a supposition supported by the fact that the movie won the top prize at Venice.

Given that many of DC's movies have been very poorly received -- Batman v. Superman, Justice League, Suicide Squad -- I have many times wondered why they haven't just sent these characters into hibernation for ten years. The most obvious answer, the one we don't even need to go beyond, is that these movies will make money no matter how terrible they are. The second most obvious answer is that they've made movies that have been received extremely well (Wonder Woman) and "better than their worst" (Aquaman). But if you are being less cynical, each time out there seems to be a genuine aesthetic argument to reenvision these characters. And most of the time, that aesthetic is based on the idea of further imagining "what this would really be like in real life."

Joker seems to be a hit, so maybe that means the next wave of DC movies -- which I feel like we are hearing about constantly -- will be tolerable. Because lord knows reviews from critics haven't slowed them down. Birds of Prey, an attempt to reclaim Harley Quinn even though she was portrayed by this same actress in one of DC's biggest turds, hits theaters next year, followed by The Batman and at some point James Gunn's reimagining of that aforementioned turd, Suicide Squad.

Then again, Gunn didn't succeed with Guardians of the Galaxy because it was "realistic." So maybe instead of going forward with a consistent artistic vision, they'll just give each film to the filmmaker they think is best suited to tell the story, and hope for the best. Perhaps that straddling the worlds approach starts with Todd Phillips, who is not the type of "visionary" I would have expected to be given a movie that does a deep dive into the Joker's psychology, with the help of one of the best actors working today. If this works, which it appears to have, maybe anything they try will.