Quentin Tarantino Enjoys One Of The Biggest Failures Of The Year

By Matthew Swigonski | Published

quentin tarantino

From picking out your favorite type of candy to choosing the perfect toppings for family pizza night, personal tastes are highly subjective, and our movie preferences are no different. Just ask Quentin Tarantino, who has come out and said that he actually enjoyed Joker: Folie à Deux, even finding comparisons to the 1994 film Natural Born Killers.

While it’s not exactly a secret that Joker 2 is considered one of the biggest failures of the year, Quentin Tarantino says that he found the flaws in the film to have endearing qualities that clicked with him more than he imagined.

Quentin Tarantino On Joker 2

While appearing on the October 22 episode of The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast, Quentin Tarantino and his Pulp Fiction co-writer Roger Avary were sucked into a conversation regarding the box office flop, Joker 2. Despite the universal consensus that the film was an absolute disaster, the iconic filmmaker couldn’t help but view it from a different angle, admiring it for what it really is, a flawed movie that closely imitated the character it was centered around.

“I really, really liked it, really. A lot. Like, tremendously,” Tarantino told The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast host Bret Easton Ellis and Avary.

Appreciates The Flaws

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Joker 2

To explain his reasoning, Quentin Tarantino said that he went into Joker 2 “expecting to be impressed by the filmmaking,” but he ultimately began to see the film as much more approachable than he originally envisioned. The Kill Bill director noted that he expected the movie to be “an arms-length, intellectual exercise that ultimately I wouldn’t think worked like a movie,” he told Ellis and Avary. “And I’m just nihilistic enough to kind of enjoy a movie that doesn’t quite work as a movie.”

Supporting one of the biggest failures of the year isn’t exactly an easy task, but if anyone has enough pull to successfully defend Joker 2, it’s Quentin Tarantino. Granted, he still called the film a “big, giant mess” that was a bit simplistic in its approach, but almost like watching a car crash in slow motion, Quentin Tarantino says that Joker 2 still managed to pull him in, admitting that he “really got caught up into it.”

Enjoyed The Musical Numbers

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Joker 2

One of the aspects of Joker 2 that Quentin Tarantino liked the most was probably the one feature of the film that audiences across the globe have panned the most; the musical numbers. He revealed that for whatever reason, the music inside the film caught his attention and never let go, claiming that the more “banal” the song, the more engrossed he felt watching them.

As of October 29, Joker 2 currently holds a dual 32 percent critic and audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, with many reviews pointing to the film’s odd pacing and uneven musical numbers as the biggest negative.

While Quentin Tarantino seems to be alone in his praise for Joker 2, he says that the film resonates with him on a personal level, which could explain his affection for the movie. He explained that while writing Natural Born Killers, he felt inspired by the film Taxi Driver.

While watching Joker 2, Quentin Tarantino says that the film “seems pretty f***ing indebted to Natural Born Killers, almost as if a torch has been passed between misunderstood films.

Source: The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast

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