Movies Joker Trailer and Discussion Thread

[RedSoxFan9]

 

Now people should be afraid of a shooting

[TwinIon]

With the release tomorrow and 182 reviews in, Joker is sitting at 76% on RT.

[thewhyteboar]

I just saw it. It was good. Better than I expected it to be.

[Bloodporne]

Come to think of it, I really like Joaquin Phoenix so maybe I should watch this. A friend of mine is really excited for it and going in the next few days so I might see it then. 

 

His role in Inherent Vice is one of my favorite, and most memorable, character portrayals I had seen in quite some time so I'm curious to see whatever he does next really I guess. 

[Keyser_Soze]

37 minutes ago, Bloodporne said:

Come to think of it, I really like Joaquin Phoenix so maybe I should watch this. A friend of mine is really excited for it and going in the next few days so I might see it then. 

 

His role in Inherent Vice is one of my favorite, and most memorable, character portrayals I had seen in quite some time so I'm curious to see whatever he does next really I guess. 

He’s really worth watching in anything he does. I expect the same from this film.

[Bloodporne]

27 minutes ago, Keyser_Soze said:

He’s really worth watching in anything he does. I expect the same from this film.

I know the film itself was widely panned, which I don't agree with one bit, but his performance in Inherent Vice is amazing if you haven't seen it. While he's incredibly funny at times as well, he gave that character so much depth and I did not expect that out of that movie. I have a feeling most audiences didn't either and didn't know what to make of it. 

[Keyser_Soze]

Just now, Bloodporne said:

but his performance in Inherent Vice is amazing if you haven't seen it. While he's incredibly funny at times as well, he gave that character so much depth and I did not expect that out of that movie. I have a feeling most audiences didn't either and didn't know what to make of it. 

I’ve seen it. But this is the case for a lot of his movies.

[RedSoxFan9]

 

[GeneticBlueprint]

 

Don't need a Mindhunter to know they can probably just go ahead and charge him with mass murder now.

[Bloodporne]

13 minutes ago, GeneticBlueprint said:

 

Don't need a Mindhunter to know they can probably just go ahead and charge him with mass murder now.

My money is on full-blown meth addiction ending in a great mugshot somewhere in New Jersey. 

[nublood]

4 hours ago, GeneticBlueprint said:

 

Don't need a Mindhunter to know they can probably just go ahead and charge him with mass murder now.

Pfft. Jack Nicholson did it better.

 

[Jason]

 

[TheLeon]

Gut reaction: not particularly fun or interesting outside of the lead performance. 

[RedSoxFan9]

 

[johnny]

I’ve seen some truly awful reviews from critics who are criticizing the premise of the movie as well as why this movie shouldn’t exist and aren’t really bothering to talk about the movie itself.

 

im basically ignoring every review that uses the word incel. 

[Bloodporne]

16 hours ago, Jason said:

 

I don't know who the fuck Jamie Palmer is but I completely agree with their sentiment. Reviews have very much been veering towards barely even discussing the film, and/or media in general, at hand and instead indulging self-aggrandizing antics. 

[skillzdadirecta]

Lol at everyone pissed at reviews... reviews have sucked for the last 20 years AT LEAST. I haven't paid attention to reviews since college. They ALWAYS been terrible and rarely discuss the film. People are extra sensitive about this because most have already decided they love the movie without having seen it. I will probably see it today at some point just so I can discuss it intelligently.

[Greatoneshere]

Movie was bloody fantastic. It's not amazing but it's certainly very good with moments of brilliance with a mesmerizing lead performance from Joaquin Phoenix. It is beautifully directed, shot, scored and a lot of the film really is firing on all cylinders. The film's points get a little redundant and the final message is a little muddled but otherwise this is a powerful film people will be talking about come awards season (as they should). Same with Ad Astra. As for the alt-right/white supremacist/incel aspect, eh, that seemed like a whole much ado about nothing when watching the film. Arthur Fleck/Joker is clearly mentally ill from the start and anyone who sympathizes with the actions he ultimately takes knowing he is sick from the start is a bizarre sort of relatability to me but not something the film should be blamed for. It's certainly not "pro-incel" by any means. In fact if anything it's anti-incel.

 

The film felt like a stealth adaptation of The Catcher in the Rye, which has a ton of similarities to this (no surprise, given this movie draws from Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, with the former also clearly having been inspired by The Catcher in the Rye). I really enjoyed it. I need more time with it, and I don't think it's some 9/10 or a 10/10 film, but certainly an 8/10. Todd Phillips upped his game hard for this film. And as I guessed writer Scott Silver on board, the film comes off primarily as a really good biopic of the Joker, if one actually existed.

[TwinIon]

My overly long, kinda spoilery take:

Spoiler

 

Joker is a movie of competing narratives. Ostensibly, the film is an origin story about a well known villain, but it largely fails in that context, instead finding some success as a character study of a mentally ill loner. However, those dueling ambitions never find a happy medium, resulting in a confused film that both goes too far, and never quite far enough.

As a character study, Joker is a worthwhile trip down a familiar road. Owing its existence to Martin Scorsese, Joker is a not so subtle mix of Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy. Joker doesn't match up to the excellent films its emulating, with the possible exception of the central performance. Joaquin Phoenix continues to prove he may be the best actor of his generation, making Arthur Fleck a thoroughly bizarre but entirely absorbing character.

 

Phoenix is saddled with quite a task, being asked to pile affectation upon oddity without devolving mental illness into absurdity while also remaining empathetic even through fits of violence. It's a tall order, and while Phoenix can carry that burden, I can't help but think the film would have been better if he'd been asked to do a bit less. Here is a character who is a clown that can't stop laughing, a stand up comic who doesn't understand comedy, a loner who relates only to his mother and his own imagination, and who is about as likely to randomly move like a dancer as he is to murder innocent people. It's a lot, and an example of when perhaps, less would have been more.

 

It's an especially tall burden since we have very little sense of anything outside Arthur Fleck's own headspace. While Taxi Driver makes you see 1970's New York through Travis Bickle's eyes, we have very little sense of what a clearly period Gotham is like. There are hints here and there, but largely that world is left to our own imaginations. It becomes a real limitation when the world seems to react so suddenly and fervently to Fleck's initial killings. I think we're meant to imagine this Gotham as something between Bickle's New York and our own, a place of terrible crime and incredible disparity, but nearly everything has to be extrapolated from repeated claims that everyone else is crazy.

 

We get so little that the social movement around the clown killer that emerges always feels anomalous and out of place. This isn't V inciting a rebellion, it's background noise,  an incomplete thought of surface level social commentary. It's a problem that stems from the film's other primary cause: its desire to also be an origin story of Joker.

 

For a character that has seen so many iterations on screen and on the page, it's pointless to be dogmatic about what the character of Joker should be, however it is worth exploring how this movie being a Joker origin story affects it. For one, it means we're in this alien city of Gotham, rather than somewhere recognizable. It also necessitates certain things from the character, such as his clown outfit and his laugh. It also seems to be the only reason that we get other tie ins, such as seeing Tomas and Martha Wayne's death.

 

While I have no doubt the box office take would lose a few zeroes, it's hard to escape the feeling that this film would have been better off it it wasn't trying to be a Joker movie at all. Not a single bit of DC accoutrements make this a better movie, and for what? By the end, viewers aren't left with a satisfying transformation of Arthur Fleck having become Joker. While he certainly looks the part, nothing about the character we've seen on screen suggests he's a villain, much less a super one. This Joker doesn't even seem capable of planning a crime or avoiding Gotham's overworked detectives, much less confronting any given incarnation of Batman. Instead, Joker is entirely symbolic. A battle standard for a movement we're never given the opportunity to understand.

 

Such is the fate of Joker. It's a film that wants to be small and subtle, but is too busy fighting with its own grandiosity to be entirely successful. There are beautiful moments crafted by cinematographer Lawrence Sher, but even those get drowned out by an overbearing score. It's a movie that makes both too many affordances to it's comic book sources to be the movie it wants to be, and too few to be the film that I think comic book fans are expecting to. Joaquin Phoenix ensures that no frame is wasted, but even his herculean efforts aren't enough to settle the internal conflicts this movie is never able to rectify.

 

 

3/5

[skillzdadirecta]

Just got back from seeing it and while it had a great performance from Phoenix and was beautifully shot and art directed, this film is kinda muddled and ultimately a mess narratively. There were times when I was really into the film and then something tonally would happen that would take me out of it. There are several plot contrivances that seemed like convenient and weak writing in some areas. The film wasn't that long, a little over two hours, but felt longer than that and the ending was telegraphed a MILE away. That said, I really wouldn't mind

 

Spoiler

if this was a stealth origin story for  a new Batman series given what happens with Bruce Wayne but they've said that this movie is a standalone.

 

Ultimately I'm not sure what the film was trying to say and I don't think Phillips is sure either but it definitely ISN'T a "pro-incel" movie and while it doesn't endorse Arthur's actions it DOES make the case that society basically created him. As I said before , Phoenix is amazing and I was REALLY impressed with the cinematography. Film should be in awards contention in those two categories for sure. Everything else was just... okay. This movie feels like a Joker origin story ALA Frank Miller when he was good and this Gotham is definitely reminiscent of Miller's Gotham in Batman: Year One. I'd give the movie a seven out of ten personally.

[skillzdadirecta]

5 hours ago, TwinIon said:

My overly long, kinda spoilery take:

  Hide contents

 

Joker is a movie of competing narratives. Ostensibly, the film is an origin story about a well known villain, but it largely fails in that context, instead finding some success as a character study of a mentally ill loner. However, those dueling ambitions never find a happy medium, resulting in a confused film that both goes too far, and never quite far enough.

As a character study, Joker is a worthwhile trip down a familiar road. Owing its existence to Martin Scorsese, Joker is a not so subtle mix of Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy. Joker doesn't match up to the excellent films its emulating, with the possible exception of the central performance. Joaquin Phoenix continues to prove he may be the best actor of his generation, making Arthur Fleck a thoroughly bizarre but entirely absorbing character.

 

Phoenix is saddled with quite a task, being asked to pile affectation upon oddity without devolving mental illness into absurdity while also remaining empathetic even through fits of violence. It's a tall order, and while Phoenix can carry that burden, I can't help but think the film would have been better if he'd been asked to do a bit less. Here is a character who is a clown that can't stop laughing, a stand up comic who doesn't understand comedy, a loner who relates only to his mother and his own imagination, and who is about as likely to randomly move like a dancer as he is to murder innocent people. It's a lot, and an example of when perhaps, less would have been more.

 

It's an especially tall burden since we have very little sense of anything outside Arthur Fleck's own headspace. While Taxi Driver makes you see 1970's New York through Travis Bickle's eyes, we have very little sense of what a clearly period Gotham is like. There are hints here and there, but largely that world is left to our own imaginations. It becomes a real limitation when the world seems to react so suddenly and fervently to Fleck's initial killings. I think we're meant to imagine this Gotham as something between Bickle's New York and our own, a place of terrible crime and incredible disparity, but nearly everything has to be extrapolated from repeated claims that everyone else is crazy.

 

We get so little that the social movement around the clown killer that emerges always feels anomalous and out of place. This isn't V inciting a rebellion, it's background noise,  an incomplete thought of surface level social commentary. It's a problem that stems from the film's other primary cause: its desire to also be an origin story of Joker.

 

For a character that has seen so many iterations on screen and on the page, it's pointless to be dogmatic about what the character of Joker should be, however it is worth exploring how this movie being a Joker origin story affects it. For one, it means we're in this alien city of Gotham, rather than somewhere recognizable. It also necessitates certain things from the character, such as his clown outfit and his laugh. It also seems to be the only reason that we get other tie ins, such as seeing Tomas and Martha Wayne's death.

 

While I have no doubt the box office take would lose a few zeroes, it's hard to escape the feeling that this film would have been better off it it wasn't trying to be a Joker movie at all. Not a single bit of DC accoutrements make this a better movie, and for what? By the end, viewers aren't left with a satisfying transformation of Arthur Fleck having become Joker. While he certainly looks the part, nothing about the character we've seen on screen suggests he's a villain, much less a super one. This Joker doesn't even seem capable of planning a crime or avoiding Gotham's overworked detectives, much less confronting any given incarnation of Batman. Instead, Joker is entirely symbolic. A battle standard for a movement we're never given the opportunity to understand.

 

Such is the fate of Joker. It's a film that wants to be small and subtle, but is too busy fighting with its own grandiosity to be entirely successful. There are beautiful moments crafted by cinematographer Lawrence Sher, but even those get drowned out by an overbearing score. It's a movie that makes both too many affordances to it's comic book sources to be the movie it wants to be, and too few to be the film that I think comic book fans are expecting to. Joaquin Phoenix ensures that no frame is wasted, but even his herculean efforts aren't enough to settle the internal conflicts this movie is never able to rectify.

 

 

3/5

 

Just read your take... bravo. I agree 100% with practically everything you wrote. 

[LazyPiranha]

21 hours ago, johnny said:

I’ve seen some truly awful reviews from critics who are criticizing the premise of the movie as well as why this movie shouldn’t exist and aren’t really bothering to talk about the movie itself.

 

im basically ignoring every review that uses the word incel. 

 

Those are totally fair standpoints for a review.  If someone made a movie that took a remarkably pro Al Qaida standpoint and genuinely pushed suicide bombers as heroes, would you roll your eyes at a review criticizing the premise and claiming it shouldn't exist?  I'm not saying these are in the same league, but talking about a film in context with its cultural moment is kind of the point of a film critic.  

[johnny]

1 hour ago, LazyPiranha said:

 

Those are totally fair standpoints for a review.  If someone made a movie that took a remarkably pro Al Qaida standpoint and genuinely pushed suicide bombers as heroes, would you roll your eyes at a review criticizing the premise and claiming it shouldn't exist?  I'm not saying these are in the same league, but talking about a film in context with its cultural moment is kind of the point of a film critic.  

It can be part of a review but your review of the movie should talk about, um, the actual movie 

[johnny]

Got back from seeing the movie. Agree with a lot of you guys. A lot of the movie is freaking great but there are a few narrative issues holding it back from true greatness. There are points before the intensity ratchets up where it meanders a little. Joaquin Phoenix is amazing and I agree that the score was awesome. Don’t see how this could be seen as pro-incel since he is clearly mentally ill in the movie. A lot of stuff put out about it seems very overblown. Todd Phillips making dumb remarks about comedy and woke culture certainly didn’t do him any favors. 

[Keyser_Soze]

Everyone after seeing the reviews: Reviews are a joke don't pay attention to them

 

Everyone after seeing the movie: The reviews were right!

[skillzdadirecta]

Sign at Joker screening theater targets "incels"

[RedSoxFan9]

 

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

On 10/3/2019 at 2:38 PM, nublood said:

Pfft. Jack Nicholson did it better.

 

and more coherently. 

 

 

 

 

I wonder how pissed Jared Leto would be if Phoenix gets an Oscar for his performance in Joker, Heath Ledger posthumously won one for playing the Joker, but ‘ol Leto just gets scorned. lol

 

anyways, I liked the movie. It felt weird that he seemed less crazy when he was killing people. I don’t mean the portrayal and behavior. I mean more in a “yeah, saw that coming.” kind of thing. Maybe because of the history of the character, he seems more “normal” when he killed.

 

also, this got me thinking even more ... (spoiler for end of movie)

we know he day dreamed and fantasized, and it appears he was not always aware when that was happening. So, how many of the events in the movie were real, and how many were imagined that made him feel better? I could see a case being made for him fantasizing about all the killings. The subway murders did happen, but committed by somebody else, and he imagined he had done it because it made him feel strong and in control. Maybe the only person he killed was his mother. And really he had been locked up since he walked into his neighbor’s apartment. Everything after that was him escaping reality to feel in control.

[Greatoneshere]

On 10/4/2019 at 1:39 PM, TwinIon said:

My overly long, kinda spoilery take:

  Reveal hidden contents

 

Joker is a movie of competing narratives. Ostensibly, the film is an origin story about a well known villain, but it largely fails in that context, instead finding some success as a character study of a mentally ill loner. However, those dueling ambitions never find a happy medium, resulting in a confused film that both goes too far, and never quite far enough.

As a character study, Joker is a worthwhile trip down a familiar road. Owing its existence to Martin Scorsese, Joker is a not so subtle mix of Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy. Joker doesn't match up to the excellent films its emulating, with the possible exception of the central performance. Joaquin Phoenix continues to prove he may be the best actor of his generation, making Arthur Fleck a thoroughly bizarre but entirely absorbing character.

 

Phoenix is saddled with quite a task, being asked to pile affectation upon oddity without devolving mental illness into absurdity while also remaining empathetic even through fits of violence. It's a tall order, and while Phoenix can carry that burden, I can't help but think the film would have been better if he'd been asked to do a bit less. Here is a character who is a clown that can't stop laughing, a stand up comic who doesn't understand comedy, a loner who relates only to his mother and his own imagination, and who is about as likely to randomly move like a dancer as he is to murder innocent people. It's a lot, and an example of when perhaps, less would have been more.

 

It's an especially tall burden since we have very little sense of anything outside Arthur Fleck's own headspace. While Taxi Driver makes you see 1970's New York through Travis Bickle's eyes, we have very little sense of what a clearly period Gotham is like. There are hints here and there, but largely that world is left to our own imaginations. It becomes a real limitation when the world seems to react so suddenly and fervently to Fleck's initial killings. I think we're meant to imagine this Gotham as something between Bickle's New York and our own, a place of terrible crime and incredible disparity, but nearly everything has to be extrapolated from repeated claims that everyone else is crazy.

 

We get so little that the social movement around the clown killer that emerges always feels anomalous and out of place. This isn't V inciting a rebellion, it's background noise,  an incomplete thought of surface level social commentary. It's a problem that stems from the film's other primary cause: its desire to also be an origin story of Joker.

 

For a character that has seen so many iterations on screen and on the page, it's pointless to be dogmatic about what the character of Joker should be, however it is worth exploring how this movie being a Joker origin story affects it. For one, it means we're in this alien city of Gotham, rather than somewhere recognizable. It also necessitates certain things from the character, such as his clown outfit and his laugh. It also seems to be the only reason that we get other tie ins, such as seeing Tomas and Martha Wayne's death.

 

While I have no doubt the box office take would lose a few zeroes, it's hard to escape the feeling that this film would have been better off it it wasn't trying to be a Joker movie at all. Not a single bit of DC accoutrements make this a better movie, and for what? By the end, viewers aren't left with a satisfying transformation of Arthur Fleck having become Joker. While he certainly looks the part, nothing about the character we've seen on screen suggests he's a villain, much less a super one. This Joker doesn't even seem capable of planning a crime or avoiding Gotham's overworked detectives, much less confronting any given incarnation of Batman. Instead, Joker is entirely symbolic. A battle standard for a movement we're never given the opportunity to understand.

 

Such is the fate of Joker. It's a film that wants to be small and subtle, but is too busy fighting with its own grandiosity to be entirely successful. There are beautiful moments crafted by cinematographer Lawrence Sher, but even those get drowned out by an overbearing score. It's a movie that makes both too many affordances to it's comic book sources to be the movie it wants to be, and too few to be the film that I think comic book fans are expecting to. Joaquin Phoenix ensures that no frame is wasted, but even his herculean efforts aren't enough to settle the internal conflicts this movie is never able to rectify.

 

 

3/5

 

I think that's overly harsh but otherwise on point. This is an open discussion thread so I'm not spoiler marking things.

 

The scene after the Joker kills the subway guys in the bathroom was a scene that alone cannot be denied. When he begins dancing as the curtain pulls on Murray Franklin's show. There are so many mesmerizing scenes that it seems overly harsh to judge it for what it doesn't do than for what it does. 

[Greatoneshere]

7 minutes ago, Spawn_of_Apathy said:

also, this got me thinking even more ... (spoiler for end of movie)

 

  Reveal hidden contents

we know he day dreamed and fantasized, and it appears he was not always aware when that was happening. So, how many of the events in the movie were real, and how many were imagined that made him feel better? I could see a case being made for him fantasizing about all the killings. The subway murders did happen, but committed by somebody else, and he imagined he had done it because it made him feel strong and in control. Maybe the only person he killed was his mother. And really he had been locked up since he walked into his neighbor’s apartment. Everything after that was him escaping reality to feel in control.

 

 

I think other than the storyline with the girl in the other apartment, everything more or less happened as we see it. I didn't get a sense or vibe during the movie that the director was trying to indicate at the end that it was all made up, and I think if it isn't real the movie loses a lot of impact, especially the final joke where he in part made Batman, his nemesis. I have seen people read the ending this way though, but I don't agree with it. I think the Joker is an unreliable narrator just like Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye but the events in that book and in this movie both happened. 

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

7 minutes ago, Greatoneshere said:

 

I think other than the storyline with the girl in the other apartment, everything more or less happened as we see it. I didn't get a sense or vibe during the movie that the director was trying to indicate at the end that it was all made up, and I think if it isn't real the movie loses a lot of impact, especially the final joke where he in part made Batman, his nemesis. I have seen people read the ending this way though, but I don't agree with it. I think the Joker is an unreliable narrator just like Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye but the events in that book and in this movie both happened. 

You’re probably right. I just think it is an interesting thought experiment.

 

He goes from not even feeling like a major character in his own life to suddenly being the hero of his own story. He got revenge on the guy that lied and got him fired. He bested the police by losing them in a crowd of people dressing like him, that eventually assaulted the police. He taught Murray and people watching a lesson about mocking people. He was praised and worshiped by a huge rioting crowd. 

 

lol the lesson if he’s not imagining it all could be seen as pretty terrible. “Toss your meds away, crazy people. Killing people who wrong you will make you feel better and become a hero.”

. 

 

lol maybe not really. I still liked it. Phoenix did a great job. This movie felt like it could be the precursor to almost any Joker. 

[skillzdadirecta]

The problem is that the movie is unclear in its narrative as to what happened and what is imagined. For example is it even clear that HE WASN'T Thomas Wayne's illegitimate son? As he's reading the files (which by the way was ridiculous that he was even able to get his hands on them in the first place) he imagines his mother saying that Wayne covered up the affair and paid people off... now I know that the implication is that she was in fact crazy, but the seed of doubt is still planted. I think the reason why some of this stuff is unclear is because we, as an audience isn't really sure who's perspective we're watching the film from. What both Taxi Driver and Catcher in The Rye have in common is that those stories are both told from the perspective of their unreliable protagonists. The Joker isn't. Sometimes we see things from his perspective and sometimes we don't and this is where the confusion comes in and why the narrative ultimately feels so muddled.

 

2 minutes ago, Spawn_of_Apathy said:

You’re probably right. I just think it is an interesting thought experiment.

 

 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

 

He goes from not even feeling like a major character in his own life to suddenly being the hero of his own story. He got revenge on the guy that lied and got him fired. He bested the police by losing them in a crowd of people dressing like him, that eventually assaulted the police. He taught Murray and people watching a lesson about mocking people. He was praised and worshiped by a huge rioting crowd. 

 

lol the lesson if he’s not imagining it all could be seen as pretty terrible. “Toss your meds away, crazy people. Killing people who wrong you will make you feel better and become a hero.”

 

. 

 

lol maybe not really. I still liked it. Phoenix did a great job. This movie felt like it could be the precursor to almost any Joker. 

 

it does and it doesn't. The one thing that this Joker is missing is the character's unpredictable cunning. There's nothing about this character outside of him being crazy that says "genius" criminal or otherwise. Like someone else in the thread said, this guy isn't much of a problem for regular detectives let alone Batman. 

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

26 minutes ago, skillzdadirecta said:

it does and it doesn't. The one thing that this Joker is missing is the character's unpredictable cunning. There's nothing about this character outside of him being crazy that says "genius" criminal or otherwise. Like someone else in the thread said, this guy isn't much of a problem for regular detectives let alone Batman.

Well, I guess it is just head fiction, but say it is all real, this is just his genesis. He’s never been a criminal before. And he was always so timid, afraid. Now he’s confident too. And in a similar fashion to many Joker moments, he didn’t care if he was caught. Getting caught and getting out was just part of “the game”, part of the joke. 

[skillzdadirecta]

On 10/5/2019 at 4:07 PM, Spawn_of_Apathy said:

Well, I guess it is just head fiction, but say it is all real, this is just his genesis. He’s never been a criminal before. And he was always so timid, afraid. Now he’s confident too. And in a similar fashion to many Joker moments, he didn’t care if he was caught. Getting caught and getting out was just part of “the game”, part of the joke. 

Maybe... I would have loved to see some glimpses of cunning in his character before he went full on Joker. Also some degree of manipulation as well. The Joker, in addition to being crazy, is also VERY cunning and a master manipulator and it seems like the filmmakers just focused on "the crazy" part. They NAIL that but miss other aspects of his character that make him unique and not just a mentally ill person who dresses up as a clown.

[johnny]

I thought the question of is he or isn’t he Wayne’s son not being explicitly answered was on purpose