Good, but overrated.

Rating: 6/10 (30 October 2019)

The movie was decent, but 14th best movie of all time (according to this website)? I don't think so. Joaquin Phoenix gave a great performance and there were certainly some awesome moments, but there were a lot of issues with the story (NOT because I find it offensive, hear me out). First of all, while this movie was definitely going for something different, a lot of plot-points were nearly directly ripped off from Martin Scorsese's "The King of Comedy". This isn't to say there can't be two movies with very similar stories and have them both be good in different ways, but some scenes are almost word-for-word identical, the only differences being character names (especially any scenes involving the two main character's shared quirk of rehearsing conversations ahead of time), and that got pretty distracting whenever it happened. Even if "The King of Comedy" didn't exist, there was still the issue that there were several plot threads that really didn't go anywhere. The main character's neighbor and especially his mother have way too much screen-time for the amount of effect they have on the plot, and they spend a LOT of time giving answers to things where it probably would have been better to just let the audience figure it out themselves. I'd say the two peaks are the subway shooting and the talk-show/riot climax, and everything else is pretty hit or miss. It's definitely good, but it's overrated.