Jojo Rabbit (Taika Waititi, 2019)

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bdsweeney
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Re: Jojo Rabbit (Taika Waititi, 2019)

#76 Post by bdsweeney » Sat Jan 04, 2020 9:33 am

This isn’t quite the maudlin mess I thought it could be (and it isn’t offensive) but it isn’t particularly good either. Someone earlier in the thread used the word inert to describe the film and that’s pretty much correct. The majority of scenes (humour but especially the drama) just play out on screen to little or no effect. This is mainly due to the director never properly settling the tone and many of the dramatic beats being so predictable.
In terms of comedy, I thought only Sam Rockwell aimed his performance well and got some low-level chuckles from me. On the other hand, Johansson, Alfie Allen and the kid with the spectacles were poor. And Thomasin McKenzie was great other than when the script required her to mug a bit.
Mainly, for a film that’s receiving largely audience rather than critical praise, I just found it pretty meh (and certainly didn’t earn its use of a certain song at the end).

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Finch
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Re: Jojo Rabbit (Taika Waititi, 2019)

#77 Post by Finch » Wed Jan 15, 2020 11:12 pm

Jojo Rabbit is Reverse Shot's Biggest Offense of 2019.
If it’s unthinkable for me, sitting here in an open-plan corporate marketing office in the last days of the second decade of the 21st century, to identify with the awful passivity of victimhood, surely it’s even more so for a multimillionaire celebrity like Waititi to feel himself inside that waiting, that dependence, that powerlessness. Elsa has no agency, a terrifying and alienating prospect if you bother to think about it, which is probably why my grandmother preferred not to, and why Waititi, despite his Jewish heritage, places us inside the headspace of the pimpf who sees Elsa first as subhuman, then as an object of Oedipal erotic fascination, and gradually as a real person deserving of compassion.

Taken to its logical conclusion, this should be a warning. Yet JoJo Rabbit is anything but a warning. It's an empathy machine gone into autopilot override, and the only obstacles to our pity for JoJo are naughty-naughty jokes in a sweet lispy coating, and celebrity-roast caricatures of Nazis as “vaguely effeminate.” JoJo Rabbit ends with a Live Laugh Love meme and two kids dancing like no one from the Gestapo is watching. The audiences who’ve embraced it should really be asking themselves why Waititi makes it so we have an even easier time identifying with a Nazi than JoJo has identifying with a Jew. —Mark Asch

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Brian C
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Re: Jojo Rabbit (Taika Waititi, 2019)

#78 Post by Brian C » Thu Jan 16, 2020 12:01 am

Finch wrote:
Wed Jan 15, 2020 11:12 pm
The audiences who’ve embraced it should really be asking themselves why Waititi makes it so we have an even easier time identifying with a Nazi than JoJo has identifying with a Jew. —Mark Asch
I'm not being obtuse when I say that I don't understand this line of criticism at all. Why shouldn't an audience have an easier time identifying with JoJo than JoJo has identifying with a Jew? God help us all if our empathy abilities aren't more developed than a 10-year-old Nazi's.

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Mr Sausage
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Re: Jojo Rabbit (Taika Waititi, 2019)

#79 Post by Mr Sausage » Thu Jan 16, 2020 6:52 am

Brian C wrote:
Thu Jan 16, 2020 12:01 am
Finch wrote:
Wed Jan 15, 2020 11:12 pm
The audiences who’ve embraced it should really be asking themselves why Waititi makes it so we have an even easier time identifying with a Nazi than JoJo has identifying with a Jew. —Mark Asch
I'm not being obtuse when I say that I don't understand this line of criticism at all. Why shouldn't an audience have an easier time identifying with JoJo than JoJo has identifying with a Jew? God help us all if our empathy abilities aren't more developed than a 10-year-old Nazi's.
It's especially funny given that his very first sentence is about how impossible it is for us in the cushy modern world to identify with a victim like Elsa.

Poor Waititi can't win. How dare he think he can identify with victims, and how dare he not identify with victims.

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Luke M
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Re: Jojo Rabbit (Taika Waititi, 2019)

#80 Post by Luke M » Fri Jan 24, 2020 12:44 am

I thought this was almost Cats-level awful. It was not funny which I didn't expect considering What We Do In The Shadows and a lot of Thor Ragnarok was hilarious. The performances were poor, mostly I thought Scarlett Johansson was the best part and I don't know if she was actually good or just good compared to everyone else. I don't quite understand all the praise it has received. Its somehow even less deserving of it than 1917.

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Re: Jojo Rabbit (Taika Waititi, 2019)

#81 Post by mfunk9786 » Fri Jan 24, 2020 10:31 am

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therewillbeblus
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Re: Jojo Rabbit (Taika Waititi, 2019)

#82 Post by therewillbeblus » Fri Jan 24, 2020 11:05 am

I honestly have no idea why ScarJo was nominated for this over so many other great supporting parts this year, other than because
SpoilerShow
she dies, and more specifically is killed by nazis, which is sad

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soundchaser
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Re: Jojo Rabbit (Taika Waititi, 2019)

#83 Post by soundchaser » Fri Jan 24, 2020 11:10 am

ScarJo is the worst part of the film, and it's baffling to me that she was nominated for it over Thomasin McKenzie. (I thought it was largely fine otherwise.)

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Grand Wazoo
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Re: Jojo Rabbit (Taika Waititi, 2019)

#84 Post by Grand Wazoo » Fri Jan 24, 2020 1:17 pm

mfunk9786 wrote:
Sat Oct 19, 2019 10:18 pm
Anyway, I think this might be my least favorite movie... I dunno, ever? More to come when I have time.
I've thought about this for some time and essentially agree with mfunk's hyperbolic-but-not-quite statement. I know I've seen objectively worse films but haven't actively disliked something to this degree in a long while. I actually saw this back in November as the opening night movie at the Hawaii Film Festival, and like mfunk I was in a massive sold out theater that roared with laughter, loving every mystifying second. I've rarely felt more outside the consensus as practically nothing worked and almost no joke landed for me except for Archie Yates' who I found genuinely funny. Scarjo is insufferable and Waititi's attempts at gravitas fail miserably, especially his eventual turn into Standard Screaming Bad Man Hitler.
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I thought the final battle was the worst offender as we are supposed to see the horror brought about by this ideology via the bloody mayhem engulfing everyone (including numerous children), but it's still shot in that glossy slo mo Hollywoodized style that so much of the film has. It never feel much different than a cable tv battle scene and completely squashes its presumed intended effect. Every punch feels pulled throughout and I think the major change from book to film mentioned by Knives re: the effect of the grenade on Jojo's appearance summarize my issues with the film as a whole, as it's far too timid to Go There. Even Degrassi would Go There! This feels like an adult version of that old cartoon Histeria!


It all feels like a spectacularly tame critique, and I can't think of anything less engaging and unnecessary than a lighthearted poke at nazis. I think it's all made worse in my eyes in that I loved What We Do In The Shadows and Waititi is obviously a gifted comedic director who ends up using his powers for evil here. Not a fan!

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Re: Jojo Rabbit (Taika Waititi, 2019)

#85 Post by Roger Ryan » Fri Jan 24, 2020 3:23 pm

I just saw the film this past Wednesday and enjoyed it more than most here, but I can't disagree with many of the criticisms. Everything is played too lightly for the film to rise above being merely amusing and this story demands the film to be something more than amusing. I found some of the ideas inspired (especially how the German versions of pop songs were used) and the child performances to be decent. The few times the tone turned more darkly satirical worked for me, but even with the often flippant approach, the middle portion of Jojo Rabbit becomes heavily repetitive with its one-note riffs on "Jewish evil".

In what strikes me as an extraordinary coincidence, I watched the final forty minutes of The Cremator on the Criterion Channel after returning home from the theatrical screening of Jojo only to discover...
SpoilerShow
...that both films feature a shot of the protagonist attempting to tie the shoe of a hanged woman!
I have to think the moment in Waititi's film is directly inspired by the shot in The Cremator. Or, if that action is described in the source novel, then I'd say the author must have been inspired by Juraj Herz's film.

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knives
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Re: Jojo Rabbit (Taika Waititi, 2019)

#86 Post by knives » Sun Jul 19, 2020 11:24 am

Finally saw this and loved it. It's a great example of adaptation as the events, tone, and purpose of the film are radically different from the novel. In fact some of the weakest scenes in the film are directly sourced from the novel, such as the meal, and the film would be better if they were stretched even further from the book.

I particularly enjoyed the comedy with has a lot of his typical silliness mixed in with a much more sophisticated then I was expecting laugh at idol building. I think this has lead to a misunderstanding of the use of the pop songs. The Beatles song which opens the film strikes me as rather simply showing the Nazi leadship as rockstars and getting us in the head of Jojo. The film severely pares down exposition so that it's not clear at first even what year the film takes place in, it seems to be '44, and so those cultural clues and other interior pointers of Jojo's mind become necessary for reading the film.

The book is about becoming an ugly person through an ideology illequiped to deal with reality while the movie presents the much more comfortable idea of being rescued from your evil inclinations through the complexity of life experiences. The surreal fantasia of what should be, that gorgeous shot of Sam Rockwell the cross dressing Valkyrie returning to the idea of Rock Stars, is ultimately unable to hide the muddy reality.

That makes for a choice at the end of the film which is the one piece from the novel that needed to be kept in form, but changed in result. It's the hardest choice of the film essentially choosing between an easy reformation or the stains of ideology being dyed like the scars on Jojo's face. What Waititi ultimately chooses is bizarre, but given how the implications are spelled out in the book I can't believe he didn't realize what the ending means here.


Also the Stephen Merchant scene was phenomenal with me laughing too hard.

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Re: Jojo Rabbit (Taika Waititi, 2019)

#87 Post by DarkImbecile » Sun Jul 19, 2020 8:21 pm

knives wrote:
Sun Jul 19, 2020 11:24 am
That makes for a choice at the end of the film which is the one piece from the novel that needed to be kept in form, but changed in result. It's the hardest choice of the film essentially choosing between an easy reformation or the stains of ideology being dyed like the scars on Jojo's face. What Waititi ultimately chooses is bizarre, but given how the implications are spelled out in the book I can't believe he didn't realize what the ending means here.
Can you expand on this a little? I haven’t (and am unlikely to) read the book, but I’m curious what exactly is spelled out in the novel in regards to the ending and how the film interacts with it.

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knives
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Re: Jojo Rabbit (Taika Waititi, 2019)

#88 Post by knives » Sun Jul 19, 2020 8:35 pm

SpoilerShow
This is a big spoiler for the book as well. The short of it is that where the film ends is the turning point of the book and the scene of him talking about the war ending plays out identically in the book with him telling Elsa that the Germans won. Instead of taking her out like in the film Johannes keeps her locked up in the house as part of a larger mind game where she becomes something like a sex slave. Obviously the film can't go in that direction so I was expecting the film to show its optimism and have Jojo tell the truth. He doesn't though and rightfully gets slapped for it which I think complicates the film's view of Jojo.

So the book makes its explicit that the Nazi ideology was a long term poison by having him lie. It makes it impossible for Waititi to have read the book and think that Johannes was a heroic character. This lie is the crux of that and Waititi must know what keeping the lie in must be doing to his character. He's not reformed fully and can't be dismissed as a cute kid.
Though you are doing yourself a disservice by not reading the book which is probably the best fiction of this century.

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Re: Jojo Rabbit (Taika Waititi, 2019)

#89 Post by MichaelB » Mon Jul 20, 2020 12:41 pm

knives wrote:
Sun Jul 19, 2020 8:35 pm
Though you are doing yourself a disservice by not reading the book which is probably the best fiction of this century.
I assume this is insane hyperbole? On what legitimate, evidence-backed grounds are you making this claim?

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domino harvey
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Re: Jojo Rabbit (Taika Waititi, 2019)

#90 Post by domino harvey » Mon Jul 20, 2020 12:45 pm

It seems completely insane to me too, but what evidence-based needs arise from knives expressing his opinion as his opinion? “Here’s a witness’ signature and a notary public’s stamp affirming I love this book”

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knives
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Re: Jojo Rabbit (Taika Waititi, 2019)

#91 Post by knives » Mon Jul 20, 2020 12:46 pm

I like it. It's a subjective opinion. I don't know how anyone could formulate evidence for an opinion.

Now, of course I haven't read everything from the century, all twenty years of it, so of course something could come up that I like better, but that would have to be a truly incredible story if so.

Edit: what Dom said

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Re: Jojo Rabbit (Taika Waititi, 2019)

#92 Post by MichaelB » Mon Jul 20, 2020 2:30 pm

My point is that you don't just like it, you think it's "the best fiction of the century", which seems to me to be an utterly extraordinary claim about a book whose existence only registered with me as the source of a film that I didn't like very much. Given that my main objection to the film was that it galumphingly misjudged the tone over and over again, does the book improve on this to a noticeable extent?

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knives
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Re: Jojo Rabbit (Taika Waititi, 2019)

#93 Post by knives » Mon Jul 20, 2020 2:55 pm

The tone of the book and the film are as two separate entities as Buster Keaton and John Ford. The book is primarily dramatic though it uses an arch irony as well as some absurdist situations. Above I believe I compared the book to Bunuel and Thomas Bernhard if you want a more clear idea of its tone.

I likewise only became aware of the book because of the movie. If things line up correctly I think the book only got published in the US because of the movie so it would have been very hard for me to have read it otherwise. If exploring art has shown me anything though its that the greatest treasures can be hiding anywhere.

As a PS I wouldn't have reacted so offended if you had phrased things differently. The way you said it it made your question sound to me as one of dismissal that my opinion could be valid for some reason or an other. This second post seems more reasonable reading to me like, "That is a strong opinion to have about a book I haven't heard any real praise before. What lead you to hold such a strong opinion?"

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Re: Jojo Rabbit (Taika Waititi, 2019)

#94 Post by whaleallright » Mon Jul 20, 2020 3:21 pm

Did John Ford adapt a Buster Keaton novel that I'm unaware of?

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Re: Jojo Rabbit (Taika Waititi, 2019)

#95 Post by knives » Mon Jul 20, 2020 3:31 pm

whaleallright wrote:
Mon Jul 20, 2020 3:21 pm
Did John Ford adapt a Buster Keaton novel that I'm unaware of?
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Mr Sausage
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Re: Jojo Rabbit (Taika Waititi, 2019)

#96 Post by Mr Sausage » Mon Jul 20, 2020 7:45 pm

If nothing else, knives’ passion has made me very keen to read a book I’d never heard of, either.

This is only a message board. It’s an appropriate place to have extravagant opinions.

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Re: Jojo Rabbit (Taika Waititi, 2019)

#97 Post by John Cope » Tue Jul 21, 2020 4:48 am

I think the book is superb as well though I don't know that I would make such an extravagant claim for it (if I did it would obviously only be within English language lit or translated into English lit that I have actually read and even then I'd have to really consider it). Still, I admire it enough that it entirely put me off from seeing the film (which is what I should have done with Austin Wright's genuinely great Tony & Susan and its shall-we-say utterly inadequate adaptation into Nocturnal Animals).
Christine Leunens wrote: "It took time to assimilate what she had said. Somehow, whatever one learns as a child in school leaves behind a solid core; and it's impossible to replace this core within oneself; one can only grow on from there. One's beliefs through life resemble the rings of a tree, each year solidifying what we successively thought, doubted and believed. Nature takes no note of the contradictory ideas, all of which are packed in, one after another, to make the trunk we are: the compact, unified remainder of our diametric past."

-"Caging Skies" p. 229
I very much doubt that we get anything like that in the movie. The book is about a certain kind of fantasy set against reality and yet a fantasy that intertwines with that reality till each is virtually indiscernible and inextricable from the other, which I also doubt gets much representation in the film, regardless of the whole Hitler as imaginary friend conceit (which ain't in the book at all). The main thing is that this is a genuinely perverse text, one that stopped me in my tracks at a number of points to think so (and that's saying a lot), which heavily pivots on the psycho-sexual dynamic between captive and captor. It's far more like a YA version of The Night Porter than the screwball sentimentality that the film projects. But maybe the most perverse (and therefore appropriate) thing that could have happened to this text is an adaptation such as the one we apparently got. If it inspires someone to read the book then it will surely fuck them up.

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Re: Jojo Rabbit (Taika Waititi, 2019)

#98 Post by DarkImbecile » Tue Jul 21, 2020 12:11 pm

Mr Sausage wrote:
Mon Jul 20, 2020 7:45 pm
This is only a message board.
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Re: Jojo Rabbit (Taika Waititi, 2019)

#99 Post by mfunk9786 » Tue Jul 21, 2020 4:53 pm

knives wrote:
Sun Jul 19, 2020 11:24 am
Finally saw this and loved it. It's a great example of adaptation as the events, tone, and purpose of the film are radically different from the novel. In fact some of the weakest scenes in the film are directly sourced from the novel, such as the meal, and the film would be better if they were stretched even further from the book.

I particularly enjoyed the comedy with has a lot of his typical silliness mixed in with a much more sophisticated then I was expecting laugh at idol building. I think this has lead to a misunderstanding of the use of the pop songs. The Beatles song which opens the film strikes me as rather simply showing the Nazi leadship as rockstars and getting us in the head of Jojo. The film severely pares down exposition so that it's not clear at first even what year the film takes place in, it seems to be '44, and so those cultural clues and other interior pointers of Jojo's mind become necessary for reading the film.

The book is about becoming an ugly person through an ideology illequiped to deal with reality while the movie presents the much more comfortable idea of being rescued from your evil inclinations through the complexity of life experiences. The surreal fantasia of what should be, that gorgeous shot of Sam Rockwell the cross dressing Valkyrie returning to the idea of Rock Stars, is ultimately unable to hide the muddy reality.

That makes for a choice at the end of the film which is the one piece from the novel that needed to be kept in form, but changed in result. It's the hardest choice of the film essentially choosing between an easy reformation or the stains of ideology being dyed like the scars on Jojo's face. What Waititi ultimately chooses is bizarre, but given how the implications are spelled out in the book I can't believe he didn't realize what the ending means here.


Also the Stephen Merchant scene was phenomenal with me laughing too hard.
Bearing in mind what I thought of the film, I am so glad that you of all people wound up enjoying it so much.

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knives
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Re: Jojo Rabbit (Taika Waititi, 2019)

#100 Post by knives » Tue Jul 21, 2020 5:27 pm

Someone on the board had to eventually.

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