With all the wildness, it’s disappointing that the themes and questions of the film are so tame. A good chunk of the story is an extremely standard transition memoir in a Gotham skin. The skin maybe allows a little more familial resentment to come through than usual?

The movie jokes that SNL hasn’t been good for a generation and maybe never really was… and that joke has maybe been old for a generation. There is a *lot* of material about how the world of comedy is slimy and embarrassing. Is that a revelation to anyone? Is punching improv and alt comedy punching up, even when a trans woman is doing the punching? (I did come very close to a spit-take when Joker started a scene stirring a bowl.)

The bits about the comedy world remind me of a novel I read called _Search_, a thinly veiled snark piece about the ministerial search committee at the author’s church. I got why it might have been cathartic for the author to dish on how dysfunctional that world is, but the hiring process for ministers is incredibly dumb and nobody looking in from the outside would expect it to be un-dysfunctional, so the effort involved in the takedown felt a little sad. Likewise here - jokes about how cringe most improv is are nearly as cringe as most improv.

As snarky as TPJ is about comedy, it’s distressingly reverent for comics and movies. It’s preposterously dense with lines and shots and musical cues referring to other films (and Batman TV shows). Every extra has a DC counterpart. I don’t know what all of it is *for*.

It is exciting to see a movie this raw on the big screen. But I’ve seen enough slapdash student films/24h films that the mania of it isn’t *that* novel for me. I do get a ton of joy from a trans woman getting a weird movie into this many theaters. But while I’m hungry for trans art these days, I’m not starved for it - there’s way more good stuff than I can read and listen to and see - and trans content alone won’t make a thing great for me in 2024. I have a hard time relating to the mainstream critics who see TPJ as An Important and Brave Subversion of the Superhero Genre By Which We Might Understand and Finally Empathize with the Transfeminine Experience. The Matrix came out in 1999, people.

Glad I saw it, but I wanted something more - more insight, more ambition, more non-production-quality risks. Will be watching Vera Drew’s future work for sure.