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Josh Brolin Explains What Makes 'Joker' Such a Great Movie

Josh Brolin Explains What Makes 'Joker' Such a Great Movie

Josh Brolin has taken to social media to share his thoughts on the new movie Joker and how one can truly appreciate the film.

The 51-year-old Oscar-nominated actor previously worked with the film’s star Joaquin Phoenix in the 2014 movie Inherent Vice.

“To appreciate Joker I believe you have to have either gone through something traumatic in your lifetime (and I believe most of us have) or understand somewhere in your psyche what true compassion is (which usually comes from having gone through something traumatic, unfortunately). An example of dangerous compassion would be to, say, make a film made about the fragility of the human psyche, and make it so raw, so brutal, so balletic that by the time you leave the theatre you not only don’t want to hurt anything but you desperately want an answer and a solution to the violence and mental health issues that have spun out of control around us. This film makes you hurt and only in pain do we ever want to change,” Josh wrote on Instagram. “It’s all in the irony of trauma — a fine line between the resentment of wanting to hurt society back for raping you of a decent life, for not protecting you, and accepting what feels like alien feelings with softening to those others who seem freakish in our era of judgment, and digital damnation.”

“Like kids in Middle School: man, they can just be mean. For no reason. And, sometimes, those awful little clicky kids breed an evil in someone that rages much later, when everyone pretends we are all back to normal, when we all thought it had just manned up and gone away,” he added.

Josh concluded, “We have a habit of hating and ostracizing and dividing and sweeping our problems under the rug. Joker, is simply lifting the rug and looking underneath it. Nothing more. Nothing less. It’s there.”

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Photos: Getty
Posted to: Joaquin Phoenix, Joker, Josh Brolin