4/5 stars

Joaquin Phoenix returns to the role that won him an Oscar and gave him the biggest hit of his career in Joker: Folie à Deux.

Director Todd Phillips takes the brave decision to turn this into a Hollywood musical. Yes, you read that right: Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck sings old standards, the clown turning crooner.

The film begins with an old-school, Warner Brothers-style cartoon, loosely replaying events as Arthur’s Joker persona shot dead TV interviewer Murray Franklin live on air.

Now incarcerated in Arkham Asylum, this deranged loner is awaiting to see if he will stand trial. Near-silent in the beginning, Arthur only brightens when a prison guard (Brendan Gleeson) admits him to a music class.

“We use music to make us whole,” says the teacher. And it’s here where he meets his soulmate, Lee Quinzel (Lady Gaga).

An arsonist whose mother had her committed to Arkham, Quinzel is familiar to all DC Comics fans as Harley Quinn, the character known as the Joker’s paramour.

First Half Report:

Plot- or presentation-wise until the pre-interval, there aren’t any exciting moments or action sequences that provide a high. Vijay is terrific in a couple of emotional scenes. The interval twist is interesting and raises the bar for the second half.

GOAT starts with an action sequence in Kenya and quickly shifts to Delhi, followed by a song featuring Vijay’s energetic dances alongside Prabhu Deva. Stay tuned for the first half report.

Vijay’s film, written and directed by Venkat Prabhu, who delivered the blockbuster Maanaadu and the disastrous Custody with Naga Chaitanya, is now ready with his big star film GOAT (The Greatest of All Time). This film comes at a crucial juncture for Vijay as he steps into politics, and it will be interesting to see how director Venkat Prabhu has made the best use of this significant opportunity.

Cast: Thalapathy Vijay, Prashanth, Prabhudeva, Mohan, Jayaram, Sneha, Laila, Ajmal Amir, Meenakshi Chaudhary, Parvati Nair, Vaibhav, Yogi Babu, Premgi Amaren, Yugendran Vasudevan and Akilan.

Written & Directed by Venkat Prabhu

Music : Yuvan Shankar Raja
Director of Photography : Siddhartha Nuni
Editor : Venkat Raajen
Banner : AGS Entertainment (P) Ltd
Producers : Kalpathi S Aghoram, Kalpathi S Ganesh, Kalpathi S Suresh

U.S. Distributor: Alerion (USA), Hamsini Entertainment Ltd

The GOAT (2024) Tamil Movie Review by M9

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2073, writer-director Asif Kapadia’s sui generis feature, is nothing if not ambitious. It offers viewers a numbingly bleak vision of the future 51 years from now, illustrated by a fictional framing device starring Samantha Morton, then explains how things got/will get that bad through actual recent archival footage and original interviews with an assortment of thinkers, journalists and activists. By comparison, George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984 looks as jolly as a Peppa Pig picture book.

You can’t help but admire Kapadia’s commitment to feel-bad cinema, his refusal to end on any false note of hope. It’s all part of a deliberate strategy, according to an interview in the film’s press notes, to motivate the audience to do something, anything, to stop all this happening. But given how sinister the forces sowing the seeds of our future destruction are — rising autocracy, unregulated technology and looming climate catastrophe — some might wonder if watching this might cause more people to feel even more helpless, freezing them like dodos startled in the glaring lamplight of invading hunters. Those who might be able to put aside despair and absorb this strictly as a work of persuasive rhetoric will be impressed with its intellectual scope, the economy of the storytelling in its fictional narrative, the bravura editing and visual panache as it builds a world full of dust, detritus and debased morals.

In the movie’s present, the year 2073, a woman known only as Ghost (Morton) lives deep in the subterranean levels of what was once a shopping mall in or near San Francisco but is now a squatter’s camp. Aboveground, the atmosphere is just about breathable in the arid climate, but surveillance cameras everywhere invigilate everyone’s every move. This is now a police state where people are suddenly “disappeared.” Traumatized by events from her childhood — particularly the disappearance of her own mother, and all the suffering since — Ghost is selectively mute. But her voiceover acts as a guide to recent history as she explores forbidden spots on the surface, like libraries or rooms full of taxidermy and redwood tree trunk slices that visually echo the natural history museum in Chris Marker’s La Jetée, a clear touchstone here.

When the film shifts into micro slivers of archival footage (montaged together by editors Chris King and Sylvie Landra) to explain how, for instance, the global rise in autocracies made this future possible, it makes for a somewhat awkward narrational adjustment. Interviewees like Nobel Prize-winning Filipino journalist Maria Ressa or Indian investigative reporter Rana Ayyub speak as if addressing someone just offscreen, Kapadia or a surrogate presumably, as in a more conventional doc. Some contributors are heard only in voiceover, such as pundits Anne Applebaum, George Monbiot and Ben Rhodes, pitching in with pithy observations that barely have a chance to reverberate before we’re on to the next thing.

Whereas many doom-docs of late tend to focus on just one bad thing happening in the world, like the climate crisis (An Inconvenient Truth), the unregulated rise of social media and dodgy but legal tech (The Social Dilemma, The Great Hack), or stupid evil billionaires and AI (acres of YouTube shorts), 2073 tries to pull them all together. It’s hard to argue that these issues aren’t indeed interrelated, but the film never slows down enough to draw out the connections clearly for the slower viewers in the back row. That makes the final triumph of a repressive state apparatus feel as inevitable as the predictable martyrdom of Ghost — a fate foretold in some of the clips spliced in from Morton’s earlier movies, including Minority Report, as if they were part of Ghost’s backstory.

In that latter movie, Morton played a “pre-cog” who could see crimes as yet uncommitted. But as with the prophetic Cassandra of ancient Troy, to see the future is a kind of curse if no one believes what you say. One can only wish that 2073 will at least help a few people reconsider how they vote, how they consume and where it’s all going, but our hopes are thin.