'Joker' Starring Joaquin Phoenix Receives Eight-Minute Standing Ovation At World Premiere At Venice Film Festival

Venice Film Festival was the place where Joaquin Phoenix's full talent was on display with Joker and audiences agreed, giving the movie a eight minute standing ovation!

Joker received an eight-minute-long standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival, and this news is sure to put a smile on DC film fans faces. The movie directed by Todd Phillips and Joaquin Phoenix was a massive hit at the film festival which resulted in people getting up to their feet and screaming “Bravo!” at the screen.

The movie is making taking the origin story of the prince of crime from Gotham and making the story their own, which is going down well with the critics as well as fans. The biggest news coming from the festival though was the Oscar buzz which was already prevalent when the final trailer for the movie arrived for the still waiting to be an Oscar winner, Joaquin Phoenix.

Watch: The Final trailer for Joker released by Warner Bros.

Todd, along with Joaquin was at the festival and keeping them company, was the neighbor of Joaquin’s character 'Arthur Fleck' in the movie played by Zazie Beetz. One notable absentee was the two times Oscar-winning actor Robert De Niro who plays a late-night talk show host in the film.

Arthur is just a clown for hire by day and a struggling stand-up comedian by night, and he wants to take care of his mother. But the society of Gotham turns the struggling to make ends meet character into the crime prince of Gotham. After Arthur does a bad thing, the slow unraveling of sanity from the life of Arthur is shown in the movie, and the whole thing is resonating well with the audiences at the film festival.

Source: Todd Phillips, Instagram

Joker was screened for two different periods in the day with both press screenings for the film, jam-packed and the second screening was the location where people started to cheer when Joaquin Phoenix’s name appeared at the end of the movie during the final credits.

The actor did say in a past interview; he didn’t take inspiration from the past Oscar-winning iteration of the character by Heath Ledger. He said he was not influenced by the performance and wanted to create his own story and his own way of livening up the character.

Watch: The amazing performance by Heath Ledger as Joker which was not an inspiration for Joaquin

“I didn’t refer to any past iteration of the character,” when asked about the influences, Joaquin said. “It just felt like something that was our creation in some ways.”

People who saw the movie at Venice said the portrayal of Joker in the film was both sympathetic and haunting with the parallels being drawn with the current state of the world and the prevalence of mental health issues in people who commit crimes most of the times. Joker is also being lauded for being the first comic book movie where the issues portrayed in the film are more of a real-world problem and not just caped heroes doing heroic stuff.

Source: Deadline

It was also a praise worthy factor for the movie; the apparent lack of Batman or any caped or masked superhero in the film was applauded. The story was purely about Arthur Fleck and his slide from reality into the darkness where he feels more comfortable; there are no high tech gears or modified vehicles, it a character study of how one of the greatest villains of the comic book was born.

The film was so impactful the director of Venice Film Festival Alberto Barbera said Joker is going “straight to the Oscars.” It is the same consensus most of the fans are arriving to; it seems to be Oscar or bust for Joaquin when it comes to the portrayal in the film.

Source: Geo

In one of our favorite reviews for the film, critic Owen Glieberman wrote, “Joaquin Phoenix is astonishing as a mentally ill geek who becomes the killer-clown Joker in Todd Phillips’ neo-Taxi Driver knockout: the rare comic-book movie that expresses what’s happening in the real world.”

Joker is set for worldwide release on 4 October 2019 and most fans are sitting with the day marked on their calendars so they can bear witness the brilliance of Joaquin Phoenix and join the chorus of Oscar buzz surrounding the actor.