I’ll be getting to share such titles by Cate Shortland and Chloe Zhao later this year, too, but for now, I’m getting to recommend Birds of Prey director Cathy Yan‘s feature directorial debut, Dead Pigs. One of the great things about little-known, rather new women filmmakers getting a shot at blockbusters like Birds of Prey is that they introduce audiences to these talents’ relatively obscure prior works. Rent or buy Joker from Amazon Dead Pigs (2018) and Bumblebee (2018) And they both very much reside inside and are filtered through the mind of their main character. They’re each other’s antithesis, but they’re also clearly kin. Both movies deal with toxic masculinity in very different ways, with Joker almost seeming aligned with incels and men’s rights activists while Birds of Prey is a starkly feminist film. Never mind the Jared Leto incarnation of the Joker whom we’ve seen on screen opposite Margot Robbie‘s Harley Quinn it’s the latest version of the character that Birds of Prey offers emancipation from. This Oscar-nominated drama offers a version of a character heavily referenced in Birds of Prey as it depicts an origin story of the titular Batman villain. As multiple reviews have noted (and surely many think pieces to come will analyze), Birds of Prey is a perfect sort of antidote or (less negatively) successor to Joker. Regardless, they are the yin and yang of DC comic book movies with regards to tone, theme, and style as well as their connective tissue. Maybe they’re both good and bad in their own respective ways. I’m not saying Jokeris the bad or that Birds of Prey is the good.

Sometimes to appreciate the good, you have to appreciate the bad.

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