Continuity mistake: Arthur is taking notes during the standup comedian's performance. There are a cigarette lighter and a packet next to him on the table; in the close-up that follows, they have changed position. (00:25:45)
Sammo
27th Feb 2020
Joker (2019)
27th Feb 2020
Joker (2019)
Continuity mistake: In the close-up of the gun at the beginning of the scene when Arthur is watching "Slap that bass" from "Shall we dance", notice in background the bullets; there is one angled parallel to the gun and 3 more at a slightly different inclination, plus one at right angle with the first (plus other 2 not quite aligned with the rest). A couple seconds later he aims the gun at Fred Astaire, and that group of bullets changed angle entirely. (00:22:10)
27th Feb 2020
Joker (2019)
Continuity mistake: After the gig at the comedy club, Arthur and the neighbour Sophie pass in front of a newsstand. The copy of the Examiner saying "Killer Clown On The Loose" is kept in place by a clothing pin placed diagonally, top right-to-bottom left. In the close-up when Arthur looks at it, the pin is top left-to-bottom right. (00:45:25)
27th Feb 2020
Joker (2019)
Continuity mistake: Arthur gets on stage at the improv club and has one of his laughing fits. When the camera is behind him, facing the blinding stage lights, you can see that he is choking himself with the right arm and holding the book with the left. But it was the exact opposite in the previous shot. (00:43:44)
27th Feb 2020
Joker (2019)
Plot hole: Arthur's appearance on the talk show makes hardly any sense. The show is a close port of Johnny Carson's Tonight show, for a huge audience, and yet he receives no screening at all, they put him (someone NOBODY in the staff knows the first thing about) on the air literally without a clue of what he is gonna do or say, and wearing a highly controversial costume. And, when he murders Murray, it is implied that everyone was able to see him doing that right away and he is cut 'off the air' at some point, as if the show were really live, which is preposterous for this sort of program outside of specific events (similar to how in contemporary TV "Jimmy Kimmel Live!", is not live). Even earlier when Arthur opened the letter his mom addressed to Wayne, you could hear the end credits of "Live with Murray Franklin" with the announcer saying the show is "Taped live in front of a studio audience." (00:48:00)
27th Feb 2020
Joker (2019)
Continuity mistake: The last of the Wall Street Three is shot as he tries to flee; he falls down in two very different takes. In the side view he choreographically falls with the jacket rolling up his back, and with the left leg (initially) forward, foot on the ground. In the previous view, camera behind Joaquin Phoenix, he fell with the sole of that foot kicked back, and with the jacket still down his back. (00:32:25)
27th Feb 2020
Joker (2019)
Continuity mistake: Arthur finishes the last yuppie off, and he lies stone cold dead on the stairs. However, he is not lying in the same position the two times it is seen. The second time he has his left hand one step lower than the right (which was the only one visible earlier) and his knees are on the platform (in the first shot, only the tip of the shoes touch the floor). (00:33:45)
27th Feb 2020
Joker (2019)
Continuity mistake: When one of the Wall Street Three charges the punch to hit the not-yet-Joker, his buddy in the background holds Arthur's bag with the hand on top, to the point that right before the cut his thumb sinks in the bag making it bend. When the punch lands, he's holding the bag by the side. (00:32:15)
27th Feb 2020
Joker (2019)
Continuity mistake: Arthur tries to get up from his seat, but one of the yuppie bullies restrains him. Then the lights flicker for a moment, but it's an editing trick, as something else changed in the car; the chips' paper bag that was sitting on one of the seats in the row facing Arthur's, is suddenly gone. It comes back right after, when Arthur is struck down by the punch, and it keeps coming and going. For instance; Joker shoots the second guy dead? Bag's on the seat. Third guy runs away? Bag gone. (00:32:05)
27th Feb 2020
Joker (2019)
Continuity mistake: One of the Wall Street Three begins approaching Arthur, and doing so he grabs the vertical support and spins around it. There's a cut mid-spin and his buddy in the background is standing in different positions; first he is laughing leaning against the support closer to him, then he is in the middle of the subway car holding two poles. (00:31:20)
27th Feb 2020
Joker (2019)
Factual error: When Joaquin Phoenix and Zazie Beetz are taking a walk after Arthur's performance, between the arcade and the newsstand there's a modern video intercom with keypad, not quite fitting the 1981 setting, since the first model of its kind was introduced in 1984 (kinda odd to leave something like this in when they went through the trouble of placing appropriate arcade posters really close by). (00:45:25)
27th Feb 2020
Joker (2019)
Stupidity: After one of the policemen decides to jump over the railing and right into the angry mob (!), Arthur just easily sneaks by ducking under it and takes a nice stroll that will lead him through an unlocked door. Nobody in the mob he is part of decides to do the same, and you can also see that one of the policemen is turned towards him, but does not even yell at him or move. And of course, with the theater packed with the Gotham elite basically under siege by a mob and guarded by the police, the door is unlocked and unchecked. Why not. (01:02:55)
Upvote valid corrections to help move entries into the corrections section.
Suggested correction: The point is they were all too distracted by the tussle to notice Arthur ducking behind the barrier. No cop sees him. The angry mob is controlled by the barrier and not all that large so they haven't taken extra precautions to keep the mob at bay, yet. The door Arthur gets in is probably a fire escape and can't be locked for safety reasons.
I think that with an angry mob worth putting barriers and a big police dispatch, they'd tend to lock the door that is like a 20 feet of walk in a straight line. I mean, they have barriers in front of the stairs, but at the base of the stairs there's an unguarded, unprotected, unlocked door. It's just funny. Not even something in the back or around the corner, no; literally one step to the right of the blockade.
27th Feb 2020
Joker (2019)
Factual error: Following Zazie Beetz, Arthur arrives in front of the bank. The crossing is using red colored tactile paving. While technically already invented, truncated domes paving was not adopted in the US in the early 80s, but began appearing in the early 1990s at public transportation stations, and it was not until 2001 that they were used in curb cuts. (00:24:35)
Upvote valid corrections to help move entries into the corrections section.
Suggested correction: By the directors own admission, the date the movie is set in is never mentioned, nor is there any mention of a real city it is set in. This movie is set in Gotham City, a city that exists only in the Joker universe, where this paving could have been invented years earlier than the corresponding year in our (real) universe. This is more of a trivia than a mistake.
By the director's own movie, everything about the setting is specific to the early 80s. It's a marginal part of the urban scenery that they didn't find important (or did not think of, it's not exactly obvious) to fix for consistency. I don't see why we have to think that a movie that deliberately puts real life advertising, technology, aesthetics specific to the 1980s (Philips even mentioned specifically in interviews that he had in mind New York City of the year 1981) and flaunts the marginalization and cruelty of society would encourage leaving in deliberately something that improves quality of life for the handicapped. It's the classic mistake of something not supposed to be there that needed to be covered but was not.
27th Feb 2020
Joker (2019)
Continuity mistake: The first time we see Randall, he hangs his clown suit next to his locker; his right hand drops, but in the next shot it starts still up. (00:15:50)
27th Feb 2020
Joker (2019)
Continuity mistake: Talking with his social worker Debra Kane, Arthur is moving his legs nervously as she asks him about the journal. In that shot his cigarette is almost smoked to the filter, but in the next one there's still an inch to go. (00:05:35)
27th Feb 2020
Joker (2019)
Continuity mistake: When Joker is beaten up at the beginning of the movie, he changes position on the ground between shots. The pieces of the sign next to him also change position; in the last shot that lingers till the movie title pops up, the part with the letters "ST GO!" is face up, it was not in the previous one. (00:03:05)
27th Feb 2020
Joker (2019)
Continuity mistake: Thomas Wayne is speaking on TV. Arthur shushes his mom. In the close-up that follows, suddenly there's an extra lock of hair against his forehead. (00:38:50)
27th Feb 2020
Joker (2019)
Continuity mistake: When Arthur is choking Alfred Pennyworth through the bars, in the shot when he says "Let go, let go!" you can see behind his head the flowers from the magic wand, absent in the previous views. (00:54:50)
27th Feb 2020
Joker (2019)
Continuity mistake: During the opening credits, while the main character is clowning around with the sign the same passersby (in particular two women - one with a blue coat, the other with a plain light brown one) keep walking past him in multiple shots. (00:01:35)
27th Feb 2020
Joker (2019)
Other mistake: Arthur watches Murray's show in the hospital room, he is able to see himself in the Pogo's Comedy Club performance. Forgetting how very contemporary this whole "viral video of person making a fool out of himself" dynamic is, and how astronomically unlikely it is that there would be taping of some open mike session in a club, it still makes in fact sense that there could be a recording of Arthur's performance, since there is a monitor backstage and in an earlier scene there was a guy with a camera on a tripod far in the back of the room when Arthur was taking notes. But in the video shown during Murray's opening there are 2 different angles of the performance, which are also different from the one show in the monitor backstage. Amateur night with 3 cameramen and a director/editor? Come on. (00:59:50)
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Suggested correction: I don't see this is a problem due to the fact that we can't be sure what really happens as apposed to what only happens in Arthur's mind. So if the whole TV show appearance is just another fantasy, he would have skipped the who screening process.
You are free to treat the whole movie as something where things don't make sense because in the fan theory of your liking it's all meant to have subtle hints that the movie is all a fantasy, but the movie does not present that particular talk show scene as a dream sequence. It'd be silly to nitpick the logic in the scene when he is picked from the audience by Murray at the beginning because it's obviously presented as nothing more than his fantasy, but his appearance on the show is what the movie built up to up to that point and is not treated as a parenthesis where logic should be suspended, nor disproven like the scenes with his girlfriend standing in.
Sammo ★