Joaquin Phoenix is the newest in the long line of cinematic portrayals of Joker. The Todd Phillips picture is in theaters now. Unlike previous portrayals, this movie is rated R. And theater chain, Alamo Drafthouse, has issued a warning to parents that this story of the Batman villain is not for kids’ eyes.
ComicBook.com reported about Alamo’s Facebook post regarding the R-rated movie. Though the post has since been removed, it said,
“Joker is rated R and for good reason. There’s lots of very, very rough language, brutal violence, and overall bad vibes. It’s a gritty, dark, and realistic, Taxi Driver-esque depiction of one man’s descent into madness. It’s not for kids, and they won’t like it, anyway. (There’s no Batman.)”
Indeed, there is no Batman in this flick. Oddly, I’m not hearing the same amount of complaints as I did of a movie about a Spider-Man villain.
There have been many other comic book movies with the restricted rating. Most recently, there was Deadpool and Logan. Also, there were Punisher and Blade. And, the three-hour-long director’s cut of Batman v Superman was rated R.
Despite Deadpool containing the language and violence faithful to the comics, I saw many kids in the theater I went to. Though, what Alamo wants to express is that Joker is a very different kind of R. Where Ryan Reynold’s Deadpool was a live-action cartoon, Joaquin Phoenix’s character is set in the real world.
Director, Phillips, put it this way in an interview with The Wrap:
“We didn’t make the movie to push buttons. I literally described to Joaquin at one point in those three months as like, ‘Look at this as a way to sneak a real movie in the studio system under the guise of a comic book film’. It wasn’t, ‘We want to glorify this behavior.’ It was literally like ‘Let’s make a real movie with a real budget and we’ll call it f–ing Joker’. That’s what it was.”
Joker is in theaters now. If it wasn’t stressed enough, don’t take your kids to it! If they want to see the Joker, sit them down to Jared Leto’s version in Suicide Squad. Actually, scratch that. Don’t subject them to such torture. Show them Jack Nicholson in Tim Burton’s Batman.
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