Author: Beck-Z-Markham

Moving Pictures: An Introduction to Cinema companies shots, scenes, and sequences to letters, words, and sentences. A single shot is a letter to a scene’s word in a bigger sequence or sentence. The book constantly talks about how the skill of making a film is similar to a language, called cinematic language. Moving Pictures brings to the front the importance of the juxtaposition of shots. Monty Python and the Holy Grail use this Juxtaposition to great effect. There are multiple instances where one shot follows King Arthur and his knights and the next shot shows a pair of 1975 British police investigating an earlier scene as a crime scene committed by King Arthur. Neither of these scenes is unified by space, time, or even genre. Monty Python has many shots that can stand alone as scenes. If I had to pick one, the stop motion animation god is essentially a single shot and acts as a scene alone.

Monty Python and the holy grail is a hard movie to use as an example of good dramatic structure, as it breaks those rules on a consistent basis. The protagonist is King Arthur, he is the most promote character, the first character seen in the film, and the “plot” has him as the most important character. However, the movie doesn’t really have a core antagonist. And because of this, the movie doesn’t follow the common “three-act structure”. When critics write about this movie in reference to the elements of a dramatic structure, it’s always in how the movie successfully breaks those structures for comedic effect. The film famously doesn’t have a resolution. It has a climax, with all of the people King Arthur gained favor in, rushing towards the camera, but that climax is anti-climatic removed as the previously stated 1975 British police arrest King Arthur. The police then place their hand on the camera, ending the movie. The movie ends with what it was doing the entire time, subverting expectations, confusing the time period, and a laugh

“Here’s the recipe for a good story: 1 protagonist. 1 goal. A whole bunch of obstacles. That’s it. Pretty much every story ever told can be boiled down to those three elements: A protagonist pursuing a goal confronted by obstacles. Cinematic storytelling draws from this same narrative source, and in that sense, is not so different from a good novel or even just a good yarn spun around the campfire.” (Sharman 100) Monty Python and the Holy Grail follow this simple recipe. 1 protagonist, King Arthur, 1 Goal, find the Holy Grail, and A whole bunch of obstacles, with each obstacle being hilarious and subverting expectations. The story in Monty Python is purposefully messy, the time period is never consistent, which adds to its surrealist comedy. The plot is supposed to push a story, but the story isn’t the main point of Monty Python. I wouldn’t hesitate to say that Monty Python’s story is its comedy with the plot supporting that.

Joker (2019) takes a different approach to a DC film. It’s not a superhero or comic book movie, it’s a movie with a comic book character. Joker is a movie first, comic book second. This isn’t how other movies in the DC catalog go about their films. Justice League was a Superhero Movie, it was promoted as having superheroes first and a movie second. Justice League is an action movie without anything to say or tell. Joker has a message to give to its audience, that message being that society doesn’t help those who need it. Joker has few similarities to other comic book movies, even those outside DC. There isn’t really a similar comic book movie, DC or Marvel, that follows the same film structure that Joker does. Most of the DC or Marvel catalog are action movies, while Joker is a film that is structured like a character study.

As a film, Joker is a conventional film. As a comic book movie, it’s straight out of the left field. The audience sees the full transition from Arthur Fleck to Joker, and how society does not care for those like him. The ending gives a possible origin story for Joker, which is different from most other Joker origin stories, those involving a vat of acid and chemicals. The world of Joker is very clear, it’s uncaring and unsupportive. The world around Arthur Fleck is the origin of Joker, a man turned evil due to his surroundings. The society around Arthur Fleck is one that the film criticizes, in fact, that the basis of the film as a whole. Joker is a critique of our modern-day society and its inability to help those with mental illness. Arthur Fleck’s actions are seen as morally ambiguous. Is it his fault for his actions, or is it the society around him that gave him nothing else?

The actor who portrayed Arthur Fleck, Joaquin Phoenix, gives a perfect performance for this type of joker. Many of the people who entered the theatre of Joker (2019) expected a Jared Leto, Jack Nicholson, or Heath Ledger Joker. In fact, Jared Leto, the actor who played Joker in Suicide Squad and Zack Synder’s Justice League, was mad that a different joker film was made with him as the lead. Joker (2019) wouldn’t have been as good as it was if it starred Jared Leto. The film was created with Joaquin Phoenix in mind for the role of Joker, With the writers even going to say that “The goal was never to introduce Joaquin Phoenix into the comic book movie universe. The goal was to introduce comic book movies into the Joaquin Phoenix universe.” – Todd Phillips

Joker is a character study of a man set in a society that doesn’t want or care to help him. Character studies aren’t a proper genre or at least, you can’t sell a movie with a genre as broad as a Character study. Joker is a Character study, because the writer, Todd Phillips, outright said it was a character study, similar to films of Martin Scorsese. Joker is a Drama, a series of unfortunate events towards Arthur Fleck that led him to his transformation into Joker. Joker as a name applies in a different way to this joker than the others. Other jokers are called jokers because they have a clown aesthetic. Arthur Fleck is called Joker because society sees him as a joke. 

Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a surrealist comedy film. It breaks the fourth wall very often, which is nothing new for surrealist comedy. Other surrealist comedy films, such as Airplanes! (1980) break the fourth wall all the time. However, unlike Airplanes!, Monty Python and the Holy Grail break the rules of filmmaking constantly. One of the rules of filmmaking is that every scene should either move the plot or develop the characters. So many scenes from Monty Python and the Holy Grail are just there to waste time and those scenes are hilarious. The rules of proper filmmaking just do not apply to Monty Python and the Holy Grail, no other movie has done this as well as Monty Python. Scenes that waste time, actors playing multiple characters in the same scene and constant genre changes are all different filmmaking rules that shouldn’t be broken but Monty Python ignores this and pulls it off perfectly. 

The style of the movie is somehow incredibly modern for being made in 1975. The jokes, gags, and humor were incredibly ahead of their time. There is one scene in particular that the style that is most prevalent. At 32 minutes into the film, the genre of the movie changes from fiction to documentary. The scene is a famous historian, that’s the name given to him in the scene, is retelling the story of King Arthur and his knights. This is quickly interrupted by one of the knights riding in from off scene and killing the historian. The time frame is mixed up. Is this happening during King Arthur’s story or in the present? This also shows the film’s ability to contrast with itself. The scene starts with under dramatics, simply a historian retelling a story. This leads into a knight killing him, overdramatic, and then back to under dramatic as his death is met with the silences of the forest he is in. 

This film is incredibly unconventional. It breaks every rule of filmmaking and turns them into hilarity. The film shows just enough of what it needs to do to the audience in order to make the jokes work. The ending resolve’s no one’s problems. It is a literal cop-out, with Arthur and his knights being arrested by cops and the film ends. No conclusion, no climax, all hilarity. The world of the film is unclear and ambiguous and downright confusing. The film mixes up its setting, time period, and the context in nearly every scene. The movie makes no sense and uses that lack of context, in reality, to be hilarious. The film is so abstract and absurd that you can help but laugh, it revels in its bizarreness and never lets the audience go from the confusion. As soon as the film starts, it attack’s the audience’s scene of context. And it refuses to let up in that attack.

Joker (2019) was a masterful film that not only broke the stigma that DC movies were facing at the time but all comic book movies as a whole. A stigma of simplicity and overly action-packed. DC movies before Joker’s release, the likes of Justice League, Batman V Superman, and Wonderwoman, were very simple movies with simple themes and received poorly by general audiences. Joker is none of these things. Joker was a box-office masterpiece earning 18 times the amount of money that went into its budget. From a 55 million dollar budget to a 1 billion dollar income, it was a financial success unlike any movie of its type. Justice League didn’t even come close to Joker’s profits or budget. Justice League only released 2 years before and had 6x the budget but made half of the profit Joker did. Justice League still made money, don’t get me wrong, but it could not compare to Joker’s success. If comparing just the Domestic box office success, then Joker was the 9th highest-grossing movie of 2019, but it had stiff competition with the likes of Avengers: End Game, Frozen II, and Toy Story 4. For the movies it was up against, it did a splendid job financially. 

Joker as a movie was liked by many of its audiences, many calling it the best film of the year along with the best DC film of all time, But that’s a pretty low bar compared to the other DC films. Journalistic reviews were afraid that the movie would cause riots, mostly due to the unfortunate and unfavorable community surrounding Joker as a character. This was only before the movie was released and afterward, most journals praised the movie for being different from other comic-book movies at the time and even to this day. Scholarly articles were targeting the possible misrepresentation of mental illness that this movie can be seen as having. Kamran Ahmed, a psychiatrist, was concerned that this movie would incorrectly connect violence and mental illness. She was worried that this would cause our society to see mental illness as something that causes violence and we would see less help for the kind of people that joker, the character, was supposed to represent.

Something that caught my eye during my watching of the film was Joker’s attire. The suit that Joker wears in the film, A red two-piece suit, an orange undersuit, and a green scarf, was a very strange outfit for Joker to wear. Jokers in other mediums usually wear purple suits, it’s almost iconic to his character. Green hair, clown paint face, and the purple suit is the outfit most jokers wore. If it was a tv show, movie, animated film, comic book, it’s usually those elements. But in 2019 Joker, they changed it. They changed it because this joker is not like the ones before. This joker needs to be different from other Jokers yet still recognizable. The purple suit didn’t fit this character. purple represents corruption, extravagance, and impatience, which are many of the character traits most jokers in any medium show, but not 2019 joker. This joker is angry at the world for not helping him. This Joker is passionate about making other laughs. This joker is malicious towards others. Anger, Passion, and Malice, all traits represented by red, just like the color of his suit.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail was an attempt to bring the British comedy group, Monty Python, into the US. Monty Python and the Holy Grail saw some success when it first came out, but it really gained its fame years later. The internet loved Monty Python and the Holy Grail and its surreal comedy. Many of the amateur discussions about the film praise its ability to turn its lack of budget into comedy. A quote I saw on a youtube video about Monty Python was “When you can’t afford horses, just create one of the greatest gags in history.” This is in reference to the coconut gag present in the film. Most Journalistic articles talk about how the film’s comedy is nearly identical to modern-day comedy, while Academic articles talk about how Monty Python and the Holy Grail breaks cinematics and editing rules in a way that is comedic that no other movie really has done before or after to the same success or level that this movie did.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail came out in 1975. Its budget was a comparable small 400,000 dollars. It made a total of 5 million dollars, which is 12.5 times the budget. This is a small amount of money compared to the monolith that was Jaws, released in the same year. Jaw’s budget was 9 million and it made 472 million dollars or around 50 times the budget. This is not really a fair comparison because Jaws was financed by Universal Studios, while Monty Python and the Holy Grail were financed by some surprisingly well-known rock bands like Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. But, these rock bands only gave a small amount, being 43 thousand and 29 thousand dollars respectively. The budget that Monty Python and the Holy Grail had, in my opinion, made the film better. 

The lack of budget required the movie to be far more creative in order to compensate. The lack of budget brought so many hilarious gags and jokes into the film that wouldn’t be there if they had a higher budget. It was stated by the crew that they could not afford a horse, so they used coconuts to make the same sounds like a horse. This might be the most famous gag from the film. This gag of coconuts isn’t just a visual gag, many characters in the film point out the lack of a horse. The film constantly sabotages itself like this, the genre of the film constantly changes, characters can change the score while in the scene, actors playing many different characters while in the same scene, the time period constantly changes, overdramatized scenes when nothing happens, and the last scene being a literal cop-out. The film’s lack of budget leads to all these hilarious jokes and gags that wouldn’t have been there if their budget was any higher.