Bear with me as I launch my DIFF 2024 coverage with a film that has nothing to do with the festival. I discovered a few days before the launch of the fest that the Texas Theatre was to screen The People’s Joker, and it was set to begin at the exact same time as DIFF’s opening night movie. I came home from Fantastic Fest 2023 raving to Rae about this little Molotov cocktail of a movie.
Because of threatened lawsuits from Warner Brothers over their precious Batman IP, the film – which was supposed to appear on screens in 2022, but, due to the big, bad media conglomerate throwing their weight around, didn’t debut until the following year – was one I was afraid might never see the dark of a cinema outside of a film festival.
Thanks to fair use law and the concept of parody (and a WHOLE bunch of free publicity from WB), The People’s Joker is now playing in limited release in select theaters. I was excited to share the movie with Rae, and my discovering that the director of the picture, Vera Drew, would be in attendance for the screening sealed the deal.
The People’s Joker takes a ubiquitous part of our media landscape and repurposes and repackages it for ultimate post-modern effect. To paraphrase critic Josh Larsen’s observation on Letterboxd, this is a movie that would have made Andy Warhol proud. It’s simultaneously clever, incendiary, hilarious, and touching in equal measure.
During the earliest days of COVID, Drew took on the task of re-editing Todd Phillips’s Joker at the request of a friend. During the project, Drew saw parallels between the character’s experience and her own perception of the world as a transgender woman. So, Drew and her team set about creating a Gotham City in which all comedy is outlawed unless it comes from one approved source. A trans woman (played by Drew) adopts the persona of Joker the Harlequin, using Marxist-tinged anti-comedy, to upend the cishet hegemony.
The DIY approach to the movie is nothing short of exhilarating. It’s practically a mixed-media piece, using liberal amounts of CGI, green screen, and other cost-saving measures to get Drew’s vision onto the screen. As a result, The People’s Joker creates a disorienting world in which the mise-en-scène is constantly shifting within the frame and where the characters must often walk in place so that the world can move around them.
The People’s Joker wrestles with identity, abusive relationships, anesthetizing pain with narcotics, and the intricacies of T4T relationships. But this isn’t a trauma dump that leaves you walking out of the theater in a state of depression. On the contrary, it also hilariously skewers Bruce Wayne, anti-trans bigots, and Lorne Michaels, whose main concern in the movie is “easing” his audience into Joker the Harlequin’s transgender “situation.”
What I’ve written here barely scratches the surface of how delightfully bonkers this movie is. If you’re able, give Vera Drew some of your money to watch it. Here’s a few minutes of her pre-screening remarks:
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The films I’ve seen so far at DIFF haven’t quite matched the zany yet moving antics of The People’s Joker. I was worried going into the fest that I might have trouble getting into screenings, or, at the very least, that I might be spending a significant amount of time standing in lines. When trying to set my lineup in the DIFF ticketing system, I learned that my press badge wasn’t authorized to reserve tickets, as is the case for other film festivals like Fantastic Fest and SXSW. After a few email exchanges, I was informed that paying customers were the priority, and that I would need to queue up in the waitlist line for any movie I wanted to see. But, as is often the case in my charmed life, a magnanimous benefactor swooped in and gifted me a regular badge so that I can bypass the waitlist line, making my odds of getting into each screening much better. Many thanks are owed to my Dickensian guardian angel who did me a solid. I am eternally grateful.
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I saw a documentary, a debut narrative feature, and a block of short films on my first night of the fest. Shaking It Up: The Life and Times of Liz Carpenter is a documentary that would have benefitted immensely from finding a way to capture the inventiveness and creativity of its subject.
As it is, I enjoyed learning what I did about Liz Carpenter, a Texas journalist-turned-political-operative who blazed a trail for women in positions of power at a time when men expected the fairer sex to be nothing more than homemakers or secretaries.
While the subject matter of Shaking It Up is worthy of exploration, the presentation is about as exhilarating as a press release. The film suffers from a slight case of talking-head syndrome, in which the audience is pummeled by an unending string of clips featuring interview subjects talking into the camera. There are copious amounts of archival footage of Carpenter and her life and times included, but they often stray far afield from the main purpose of the movie.
The film dashes down numerous rabbit trails – including the JFK assassination – and stops to focus on Lady Bird Johnson, to whom Carpenter served as both press secretary and staff director, for so long that it forgets about Carpenter for lengthy passages.
The film picks up steam when it examines Carpenter’s passionate feminist work in the 1970s and ‘80s, including her push to get the Equal Rights Amendment passed, which, as we all know, she wasn’t able to achieve. After the screening, the film’s codirector, who is Carpenter’s daughter, announced that Shaking It Up will be available on PBS stations and (I’m assuming) via the PBS streaming service after it finishes its run on the festival circuit.
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We Strangers is the feature debut of director Anu Valia, who has directed episodes for television shows like A.P. Bio, And Just Like That…, and She-Hulk: Attorney at Law. Her star, who also served as a producer, is Kirby Howell-Baptiste – credited here with the mononym Kirby – who you might know from my beloved The Good Place and Barry.
A still from We Strangers.
The movie tells the story of Ray Martin, a woman who works for an office cleaning service. Ray is pulled into the lives of a dentist, his family, and their neighbors when the dentist hires her to clean his house as a side gig. On a lark, Ray pretends to be a psychic medium who can communicate with the dead in order to relieve her rich, white employers of some of the extra money they have lying around. Things, as you might imagine, go a bit awry.
The problem is, things don’t go enough awry. Leaning on better race and class critiques like Parasite and Get Out, the opening minutes of We Strangers tricked me into thinking it would be way more bonkers and filled with dark humor than it was. The film’s brief 80 minutes build and build and build but We Strangers ultimately goes nowhere and does almost nothing. Kirby’s Barry costar, Sarah Goldberg, does the rich, insulated white lady thing like it’s second nature, and Kirby crafts a mischievous, slightly self-destructive character in Ray. The writing ends up letting Kirby down because we never get the sense of ever really knowing who Ray is or why she does what she does. Valia uses striking compositions and art-house aesthetics, but the problem with We Strangers is that there isn’t much there there.
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I finished out my first night of the fest with a block of shorts that were also underwhelming. This collection, titled Late Night Shorts, brought some sharp shocks to the screen, but not much else. The challenge with a short is telling a complete story in only a few minutes. The problem with most of the seven films I saw – I bailed on the last three, because it was after 11PM and I am very old and tired – was that they had a great central idea, but that was it.
One of the standouts of the set was Perfect City: The Bravest Kid, an animated film from students at UCLA. The animation, which focuses on paper doll characters, is either stop-motion or CGI that’s made to look like stop-motion (I would bet it’s the latter) and it’s utterly entrancing.
A still from Perfect City: The Bravest Kid.
The film that convinced me to commit to the screening, Mr. Feets, about a gym rat who leads a double life as an anonymous online fetish content creator, in which he is paid to make bespoke videos smashing food with his feet for adoring fans, is as bonkers as the description sounds. As wacked out as the movie gets in its brief 12 minutes, like We Strangers, Mr. Feets doesn’t have much in the way of an ending. Instead, it sort of peters out. Still, seeing a pair of feet destroy a bundt cake and a banana on the big screen was a sight to behold.
I’ll check back in as DIFF continues with select updates on what I’m seeing during the fest. As always, if you want the complete list, you can find it on my Letterboxd profile.
Onward!