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Gotham Has Seen Better Times in the Final JOKER Trailer

By Mike Julianelle
The Joker Trailer
(YouTube/Warner Bros)

You might not have heard, but superhero movies are pretty popular these days. Not only did Endgame rewrite the record books when it comes to cinematic success, toppling all previous MCU movies as well as James Cameron’s huge Avatar and Titanic blockbusters, but they revealed their plans for Phase 4, which includes approximately 50-100 more superhero movies over the next decade.

I’m a big fan of a lot of those movies (even going back to Christopher Reeve), but I have been happy to watch the output diversify with goofier entries like Thor: Ragnarok, more political flicks like Black Panther, and even gritty character studies, like the forthcoming Joker, which finally debuted its final trailer today, in advance of its premiere at the Venice Film Festival this weekend (August 31).

Lest my intro confuses you, I want to be clear: this is not a superhero movie. And I don’t say that merely because it focuses on a super-villain; that’s just semantics. It’s neither a superhero movie nor, despite its source material, a comic book movie. At least, it doesn’t look like one. Director Todd Philips and star Joaquin Phoenix don’t seem the slightest bit interested in anything so outlandish as tights and flights.

Yes, this is ostensibly a movie about the Joker, Batman’s iconic foil, last brought to legendary life by the late Heather Ledger, but this is not Christopher Nolan’s Gotham. Judging by how dilapidated, bleak, and just plain ugly the city is in this trailer, it looks more like Martin Scorsese’s Gotham, which makes sense, seeing as the celebrated director is a producer on this film.

The trailer doesn’t reveal much by way of plot, but when your take on a well-known character is this different, leaning on the atmospheric world-building makes sense. This isn’t an action blockbuster, it’s a character study.

JOKER tracks Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck, a failed stand-up comedian who makes his living as a clown and feels increasingly alienated by the world. In the trailer, he tells his therapist that he only has negative thoughts and clearly feeling beaten down by an indifferent, if not outright cruel world. My dude can’t even make a little kid laugh without being yelled at. The trailer shows Fleck progress (though who knows how linear this trailer is) from laughing stock – Robert DeNiro’s Johnny Carson/King of Comedy-esque talk show host literally laughs at the dude – to fully-made-up clown about to take his star turn on that same talk show.

Given the feel of the trailer, what promises to be a fully-committed (is there another kind) creep-out performance from Phoenix, and the history of the character itself, something tells me jokes aren’t the only thing my man has for the crowd when he finally gets the spotlight on October 4th.

Father Figures: Cannot Wait

By Mike Julianelle

“I’ve known my wife since we were 13.

Throughout the years we kept in touch. She had a daughter with someone else, so when she and I started dating, I took on the dad role. It came naturally for me.

When she asked me to adopt her daughter I was over the moon. I never thought I would have any kids of my own, so being a stepdad was just fine for me.

Well, two years later we found out we were pregnant.

My wife dealt with so much during her pregnancy. Between having complete placenta previa and being on bed rest, it was a rough time. At 31 weeks her water broke and we were in antepartum for 3 weeks.

My son was born at 34 weeks and is doing great although he’s been in the nicu his whole life. He is 3 weeks old and today they took his feeding tube out and he is one step closer to coming home.

We cannot wait to start our lives with our newest addition once he is home.”

– Frank Mester (IG: inkedsparky

Want to share a story about fatherhood? Email fatherfigures@thedad.com

Check out the previous editions of Father Figures here

Tennessee Offers Full Scholarship to Boy Bullied for Homemade T-Shirt

By Mark Chalifoux
Tennessee Offers Full Scholarship
(Twitter/tennalum)

Earlier this week, a story about a university and its fanbase rallying around a bullied student captivated the nation. A boy in Florida wore a homemade University of Tennessee shirt at his school for “college colors day.” He was devastated after getting bullied for his design, which is when his teacher posted about it on Facebook. Vols Nation came through, and the University engineered an outpouring of support. Most importantly, it made the boy’s design an official t-shirt in their shop.

The fansite crashed from so many orders, as Vols fans gobbled up the shirt whose proceeds are being donated to an anti-bullying charity (more than 50, 000 have been ordered). And now the story has taken another turn, as the University of Tennessee has offered the bullied boy a full scholarship.

In a statement, the University said it’s offering the boy “honorary admission” to the class of 2032 in addition to the four-year scholarship. The boy’s mother told University officials the family “has been deeply touched by the overwhelming outpouring from people around the world.”

The anti-bullying lesson and its message have even spread to other schools, as one elementary school in Pennsylvania adopted the idea of wearing orange in honor of anti-bullying for their spirit day. The principal was overwhelmed when the busses dropped off hundreds of his students, many clad in their own homemade orange shirts.

And the boy’s teacher updated her Facebook post, thanking everyone around the world for their support. She said it’s been an awesome week about learning to be kind.

“We’ve had lots of discussions about being kind, and I’m really excited to see my students step up their acts of kindness,” she said.

It was a cool gesture for Tennessee to adopt the shirt in the university store, but I feel like the kid has earned the scholarship at this point, at least for all the great press that this story has generated for the school. They might as well also throw in an honorary degree in graphic design, as he’s probably the best-selling elementary school designer in history.

And if you want to join the movement, you can grab the shirt from the official team shop.

Man Brings an Emotional Support Clown to Exit Interview

By Devin Holdraker
Joshua Jack with Emotional Support Clown
(Joshua Jack)

What would you do if you knew you were about to lose your job? Sure, you could have a breakdown. Maybe send an email to your coworkers telling them how you really feel? Eh, It’s been done.

Why not take the opportunity to leave on a high note by showing your employer that they’re losing a true asset to the company? A creative thinker who knows how to turn a frown upside down. Someone who’s not clowning around. Recently presented with the opportunity, New Zealand native, Joshua Jack, answered the call.

Upon receiving an email from his employers saying they needed to discuss his role at the company, Jack was told he could bring someone for “support” to the meeting in order to help him weather the news. Being a smart businessman, Jack knew this role would best be filled by a professional.

Jack wasted little time, immediately researching viable options and eventually landing on Joe, a professional clown who Jack hired for $200.

(Joshua Jack)

Arriving in full attire and a blue wig, Joe was ready to stand by, sit with, and console Jack in any way he could. For the duration of the exit interview, Jack had Joe close by — giving both emotional support as well as two balloon animals the performer very slowly crafted during the meeting. “It was sort of noisy, him making balloon animals, so we did have to tell him to be quiet from time-to-time.”

(Joshua Jack)

When asked how management reacted to the tactic, Jack responded, “I mean he was one of the best clowns in all Auckland so they were getting something of a free service.” For his part, Jack told morning radio show MagicTalk “I did get fired, but apart from that it was all smooth running.”

As for Jack’s professional life, the recently canned comedic adman has already landed a new position, hopefully at a place that values his particular brand of expression more than the last.

The Bill That Could Change College Sports

By Mark Chalifoux
The Bill That Could Change College Sports
(Twitter/FirstTake)

The biggest story in college sports this week was the bill that passed the California Senate, allowing collegiate athletes to earn endorsement money. The governor of California has 30 days to sign the bill, which would go into effect in 2023. The bill could radically change the landscape of college sports.

A story of this magnitude draws plenty of takes, but Tim Tebow had one of the worst ones. He tries to make this about the purity of the amateur sporting experience and about school pride and some other nonsense. It’s an antiquated idea that exists mainly in fiction crafted by 65-year-old sportswriters. These days, it’s tough to argue college sports isn’t big business when the highest-paid employee at every major school is the football coach, usually followed in pecking order by a few other football coaches (and usually the head basketball coach, for good measure).


Most athletes are on the other side of the argument, including one of the biggest stars of all time.


Cam Newton is killing it this season. Sure, not on the football field where he’s had a rough start for fantasy owners, including a Thursday night loss to the Bucs. But he is killing it in the fashion department, where he has no parallel.


It’s certainly more interesting than some of the moves Tom Brady has pulled in the past.


 

Rob Gronkowski gave an interview this week where he revealed he’s had more than 20 concussions in his career. He also said brain damage was reversible, which is probably something you’d say as the result of getting 20 concussions.

Kobe ruthlessly dragged a child in an Instagram post. Coach Kobe was giving out accolades to his team when he mentioned one girl wasn’t in the team photo because she was at a dance recital, so you can ‘see where her focus was’. Coach Kobe, what a guy!

DeAndre Hopkins had one of the best highlights of the young NFL season. The Texans receiver is unquestionably the best at his position, but he showed another level of his game in week 1 when he body-slammed a cornerback.

And in the lowlight of the week, the Panthers-Bucs game endured the dreaded weather delay. And fans handled it about as typically as you’d expect an NFL fan base to respond, with a massive brawl!

The 10 Best Comments of the Week 9/15

By Jimmy Applegath
Best Comments of the Week

Every week we pan for comedy gold in the comments section of our Facebook posts. If your comment cracks us up (or warms our hearts) we’ll showcase it here!

Here’s this week’s roundup of the 10 Best Comments of the Week:

1. Yippee Ki Yay Mouse Friends

2. Rude Awakening

3. The Roos Shall Inherit The Earth

4. Nothing to See Here

5. Wine

6. It’s All For The Kids

7. Bangers

8. Perfect Vision

9. He Rose to the Occasion

10. Measures Up

Check out the previous edition of The Best Comments of the Week here.

Dad Grades: Harry Wormwood From Matilda

By The Dad
(TriStar Pictures)

We’ve seen a whole variety of bad dads here on Dad Grades. From the axe-weilding Jack Torrance to the criminally inattentive dad from Home Alone, there’s certainly no shortage of substandard fictional matriarchs to rake over the coals. But this one, Harry Wormwood, the crooked, nasty, negligent dad from Matilda, seems to exist in his own category. A dad so cartoonishly antagonistic we’re not fully convinced he qualifies as a dad. Let’s take a look at this slimeball.

(TriStar)

STRENGTHS

Matilda is the story of Matilda, a little girl with a big brain. A responsible set of parents might reign in such intelligence, encouraging them to learn piano and speak foreign languages, Matilda’s parents, Harry and Zinnia, would much rather watch intellectually bankrupt game shows and belittle her.

The film’s premise is grounded in the neglect of its titular character, mostly by her father, Harry Wormwood.

(TriStar)

Harry Wormwood is the personification of sleaze. As such, the movie doesn’t exactly give us a lot to work with in the strength department. You rarely find morsels of good in men who scowl at their newborns from the maternity ward hallway.

(TriStar)

But if we really want to stretch, there is one way Harry Wormwood is accidentally a good dad. Gifted children learn best when they have carte blanche to do so. Studies have shown that, when left to their own devices, smart kids will blossom.

As a young child, Matilda is left home alone all day, despite her pleas to be enrolled in school. She learned to cook her own breakfast.

She taught herself how to read.

Her independence only seemed to accelerate her understanding of the world around her. She was in fact neglected so hard that her intellectual prowess sails right past piano prodigy and landed on telekinesis.

Obviously we’re not suggesting you ignore your child in the hopes that they cultivate mental superpowers. And even if it were possible, the emotional neglect is far more likely to produce a Carrie than a Matilda.

(United Artists)

WEAKNESSES

Harry Wormwood is a rotten man. The narrator (who is, inexplicably, also Danny Devito?) makes this known within the first couple of minutes:

“Harry and Zinnia Wormwood lived in a very nice neighborhood, in a very nice house, but they were not really very nice people.”

Eager to one day hand down the family business to his obnoxious son, Michael, Harry sells used cars, employing such deceitful practices as manually rolling back miles on odometers.


His parenting skills aren’t any less illicit than his salesmanship. He constantly chastises Matilda for being objectively smarter than him, quick to dismiss her a “smart-aleck” in lieu of praise.

(TriStar)

At one point, he catches his daughter reading a book. She tells him she’s enjoying Moby Dick by Herman Melville. Where a good dad might seize this opportunity to lovingly cultivate an interest in the printed word, Harry Wormwood just exclaims

“MOBY WHAT?”

and tears the book to shreds, insisting she instead partake in quality time with her family around the television.

Eventually, Harry relents and agrees to enroll Matilda in school. There are many things a good parent will consider when choosing a school for their kid: location, standards and curriculum, lunch menus. Harry on the other hand? Harry uses his daughter’s education as a bargaining chip, enrolling her only after selling a lemon to the school’s monstrous, tyrannic principal, Agatha Trunchbull, seen here shot-putting a kid by her pigtails.

In spite of routine attempts to murder her students, Harry views Ms. Trunchbull as the ruthless disciplinary figure who will once reign in his unruly bookworm of a kid.

Eventually, Harry gets busted. The FBI finally expose his shady dealings at the used car lot, prompting Harry to pack up and move the family to Guam. Matilda doesn’t want to go, as she’s grown fond of her sweet, exceedingly more maternal teacher, Ms. Honey. She suggests Ms. Honey adopt her, having secured adoption papers from the library at a young age, and Harry agrees.

And frankly, this is best thing he ever does as Matilda’s dad: stops being Matilda’s dad.

VERDICT

One of the worst fictional dads we’ve looked into. Just wholly unfit to raise children. It’s quite baffling that the FBI got to him before Child Protective Services could.

FINAL GRADE: F

Gamers Are Cross With PlayStation’s True Name for the ‘X’ Button

By Jordan Stratton
(Getty/Future Publishing)

We live in divisive times and, apparently, Sony is ready to pile on the debate train by casually tossing out information that has rocked the gaming community.

Ever since the release of the original PlayStation, we’ve been accustomed to the traditional Sony controller layout—triangle, circle, square, and ‘ex’—but as it turns out, we’ve been wrong… dupped… HOODWINKED.

According to PlayStation, their primary action button isn’t ‘ex’ but rather ‘cross.’

“If Cross is called X (it’s not), then what are you calling Circle?” PlayStation UK tweeted (not at all condescendingly).

Look, in the nearly 25 years that PlayStation has been around, I have never once heard someone call it the ‘cross’ button, and apparently, the stats are in my favor.

According to a Twitter poll posted by PlayStation (surveying an astounding 168,000+ accounts), a measly 8% claimed to call it a ‘cross’ button.

Fortunately, other big names in the gaming community have our backs when it comes to the ‘X’ button, too.

Xbox went ahead and weighed in on the controversy, effectively throwing PlayStation under the bus with a tweet of their own.

Notice, their console is not called the ‘Crossbox.’

In PlayStation’s defense, though, as Twitter user @SIECrimson pointed out, the spaces between the sticks in a cross are equidistant while those in an ‘ex’ are not.

So, whether you call it a ‘cross’ or an ‘ex,’ it only further proves that there’s always someone somewhere on the internet ready to tell you that you’re wrong. And don’t expect that to change with the release of the PS5.

Dad’s Post About Missing Sons While They’re at College Goes Viral

By Jordan Stratton
(Instagram/brandt727)

Facing that empty nest after all the kids are finally old enough to move out is about as bittersweet as it gets. Sure, you’re proud of their independence and your success in raising stable human beings (for the most part) who can fend for themselves, but they’re also your pride and joy and part of you wishes you could hold onto them forever.

This is the exact experience Bud Barber is going through as he sees his three sons off to college one by one.

Bud and the Barber boys had a weekly tradition of heading over the local Dairy Queen for a little post-dinner dessert. Sure, ice cream is great but the real treat was the quality bonding time between all four of them.

But Brooks had to go and make his family proud by going to college (the nerve of this kid, right?), effectively removing a quarter of the Barber ice cream gang.

Of course, to no one’s surprise, the younger Barbers—Bryce and Luke—went ahead and followed in their elder brother’s footsteps, leaving dad to wander to their DQ and sit in their family booth all by his lonesome. At least he had ice cream ready and available to soothe his sorrows.

“With them not here it’s just ice cream,” Bud wrote on Instagram, accompanied by no one and nothing but a proud yet melancholic smirk.

Reading his father’s bittersweet posts, Brooks couldn’t help but share the heartfelt words in a Twitter post, which has since gone insanely viral, garnering nearly 1 million likes.

People can’t seem to get enough of the Barber father-sons bonding time, even going as far as to demand they call it quits with school so they can go eat some dang ice cream with dear ol’ pops again.

Others volunteered to take the boys’ spots so they could finally get some quality time with a caring dad themselves.



Fortunately, Brooks has since reassured everyone that the Barber DQ runs will definitely recommence sooner rather than later, so no one needs to go storming the premises for some “hot eats” or “cool treats” just yet.


All this to say, cherish every moment with your kids. They will fly the coop before you know it.

PRO TIP: Ice cream certainly won’t hurt your time together either, apparently.