You were a Luke Skywalker person or you were a Han Solo person. It was like the Beatles or the Rolling Stones must have been. Luke was Apollonian, it was in the name, celestial, blond, monkish, probably celibate; Han was Dionysian, disreputable, a smart-ass, a ladies’ man, in the swamps with a hairy monster. Han was also the human being, a would-be Bogartian presence among the demigods, aliens and robots, too old to be play-acting with the kids and never…

Watching Taxi Driver again, a couple of nights after watching Joker, I noticed something I don’t think I’d paid attention to before, something that hadn’t ever been important: a few lines from one of the other drivers in the all-night diner about midgets being funny. Did Todd Phillips pick that up and make it a Joker plot point? His Joker is almost an essay about Taxi Driver, its effect and afterlife, its reputation and its seductions, its status as a…