A still from the Malaysian movie 'Fly By Night'. This cool noir-ish effort has great cinematography and an amazing performance by Bront Palarae but didn't do well at the box office.
A few years ago, two members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that organises the Oscar Awards admitted to having voted for 12 Years A Slave despite not having watched the movie. A study in 2015 found that nearly 6% of academy members had not watched all of that year’s Best Picture nominees.
I think it’s this sort of blind voting that gets a movie like Joker 11 nominations in various categories. I mean, yes, I suppose it’s well-made, but my reaction when I first saw it was that it's more a triumph of style than substance. Contrast that with Parasite, a quirky South Korean film that even the director felt would do well to break even. Whereas I criticise Joker for trying to make a straightforward story complicated, Parasite succeeds in simply telling a story full of twists and turns.
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