JOKER

Todd Phillips’ JOKER opens in cinemas in October.

Today, the final trailer arrived, accompanied with some very high quality posters.

You don’t listen do you? You just ask the same questions every week.
How’s your job? Are you having any negative thoughts?
All I have are negative thoughts.

This film looked fantastic from the beginning, with a wonderful cast (Joaquin Phoenix, Robert De Niro, Zazie Beetz, Frances Conroy, Marc Maron), a great colour palette and a very intriguing teaser trailer.

The final trailer is accompanied by another sweeping orchestration which evolves into Sinatra singing “Send in the Clowns“, but the music immediately sets a tone of imminent dread.

For my whole life I didn’t know if I even existed.
But I do.
And people are starting to notice.

My Media students really appreciated the first trailer – and spent some time decoding it: the tone, the use of colour, light and dark, the unsettling imagery, and the great orchestration of “Smile“. They even made an attempt at the narrative, wondering if Arthur’s mother ends up in hospital, contributing to his descent (the new trailer seems to confirm this).

Interestingly, both trailers start with sequences which show how Arthur Fleck is either downtrodden or ignored, or vulnerable. Sympathy for the devil perhaps?

What I also found impressive were the fleeting glimpses of words or signs in the trailers, as well as some lines of dialogue. The cumulative effect of these words really add to the atmosphere of the trailer and suggest a dark, deep and psychologically challenging movie.

If that doesn’t sound like your kind of “comic book” movie, I understand. For my part I love all comic book movies, and the wider the variety of tone, the better. It looks like DC have something special here.

Whether or not the film is “good” or well-received is neither here nor there (early accounts are that the film, and Phoenix’s performance are stunning). What’s important is that we can appreciate the art that has gone into the making of the film, the construction of the trailers, and the artwork of the posters.

Speaking of the posters, the same questions apply:

• Identify the “tone” of each poster. Serious? Comic? Light? Dark? Creepy? Exciting? Mysterious? Scary?
• Then think of the mode of address. Where are the characters looking? What difference does that make to your response? Why have they been designed like this?
• Look at the use of colour and think of the connotations. What thoughts or feelings do those colours provoke?
• Finally, look at the composition of each poster. The foreground and background. The positioning of the characters. Use of empty space. Busy or simple? Why?
• Consider the strapline: “PUT ON A HAPPY FACE“. Whose point of view is this? Is it literal? Is it a command?