Music Review: Katy Perry Returns with the Uninspired and Forgettable ‘143’

 Katy Perry attends the MTV Video Music Awards in Elmont, New York, US, September 11, 2024. (Reuters)
Katy Perry attends the MTV Video Music Awards in Elmont, New York, US, September 11, 2024. (Reuters)
TT

Music Review: Katy Perry Returns with the Uninspired and Forgettable ‘143’

 Katy Perry attends the MTV Video Music Awards in Elmont, New York, US, September 11, 2024. (Reuters)
Katy Perry attends the MTV Video Music Awards in Elmont, New York, US, September 11, 2024. (Reuters)

Katy Perry's new album title, “143,” is code for “I love you,” based on the number of letters in each word of the phrase. She may love us, but the album is more like 144 — “I made mush.”

Perry's first LP since 2020’s lackluster “Smile” is just as lackluster, an 11-track blur of thick electronic programming and simplistic lyrics. There's none of her past cheeky humor, virtually no personality. Even the title is filler.

The rollout has been snakebit from the jump, with the artist under fire for collaborating with music producer Dr. Luke and the video for “Woman’s World” emerging as a sloppy, puzzling attempt at satire. Then her video shoot on a Spanish beach for “Lifetimes” was investigated for potential environmental damage.

It doesn’t help that the first three singles are just OK. “Woman’s World” is a frothy Lady Gaga-esque arena pop anthem, the techno-stomper “Lifetimes” smacks of Calvin Harris from the 2010s and “I’m His, He’s Mine,” featuring Doechii, lazily lifts Crystal Waters’ “Gypsy Woman (She’s Homeless)” from 1991. It’s a trio of tunes that doesn’t scream 578 (“Katy's totally relevant”).

“Gimme Gimme,” featuring 21 Savage, just lacks bite, a nursery rhyme from a new mother masquerading as a pop song (with crib-adjacent lyrics like “Say the right thing, maybe you can be/Crawling on me, like a centipede”).

“Crush” isn’t bad, but it’s built on the repetitive, unyielding synths you’d find in Eastern European discos in the ’90s. That’s a complaint for all the Dr. Luke tracks, really — Perry may rue their reunion simply based on the ugly, unsophisticated production. “All the Love” has the phrase “back to me” repeated 23 times during its 3:15 length.

“My intuition’s telling me things ain’t right,” she sings on “Truth,” a lyric that may sum up her album and a song that includes a fake voicemail at the end. Other artists are incorporating real dialogue and recorded snippets of their lives. Perry is faking it.

She has always preferred gangs of songwriters, but “143” pushes it to an insane level, with “Nirvana” credited to an even dozen. Listen to it and see if 12 songwriters were necessary for a song that sounds like a warmed-over club track from La Bouche.

If the best song on “143” is “Lifetimes,” the worst is easily the closer, a sticky-sweet, wide-eyed plea for innocence in “Wonder,” sticking out like a sore thumb. This is a cynical attempt to have moms in the audience wave their hands in unison as balloons float up, even as it decries cynicism.

“One day when we're older/Will we still look up in wonder?” she sings, name-checking her daughter, Daisy, who also makes a cute appearance. But by this point, she's lost our trust, with the 10 previous songs a sonic slog. “143” has no soul or emotion; it's just a number.



‘Joker 2’ Stumbles at Box Office amid Poor Reviews from Audiences, Critics

Todd Phillips, from left, Lady Gaga, and Joaquin Phoenix arrive at the premiere of "Joker: Folie a Deux" on Monday, Sept. 30, 2024, at TCL Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP)
Todd Phillips, from left, Lady Gaga, and Joaquin Phoenix arrive at the premiere of "Joker: Folie a Deux" on Monday, Sept. 30, 2024, at TCL Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP)
TT

‘Joker 2’ Stumbles at Box Office amid Poor Reviews from Audiences, Critics

Todd Phillips, from left, Lady Gaga, and Joaquin Phoenix arrive at the premiere of "Joker: Folie a Deux" on Monday, Sept. 30, 2024, at TCL Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP)
Todd Phillips, from left, Lady Gaga, and Joaquin Phoenix arrive at the premiere of "Joker: Folie a Deux" on Monday, Sept. 30, 2024, at TCL Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP)

“Joker: Folie à Deux” is the No. 1 movie at the box office, but it might not be destined for a happy ending.
In a turn of events that only Arthur Fleck would find funny, the follow-up to Todd Phillips’ 2019 origin story about the Batman villain opened in theaters nationwide this weekend to a muted $40 million, according to studio estimates Sunday, less than half that of its predecessor. The collapse was swift and has many in the industry wondering: How did the highly anticipated sequel to an Oscar-winning, billion-dollar film with the same creative team go wrong?
Just three weeks ago, tracking services pegged the movie for a $70 million debut, which would still have been down a fair amount from “Joker’s” record-breaking $96.2 million launch in Oct. 2019. Reviews were mixed out of the Venice Film Festival, where it premiered in competition like the first movie and even got a 12-minute standing ovation, The Associated Press reported.
But the homecoming glow was short-lived, and the fragile foundation would crumble in the coming weeks with its Rotten Tomatoes score dropping from 63% at Venice to 33% by its first weekend in theaters. Perhaps even more surprising were the audience reviews: Ticket buyers polled on opening night gave the film a deadly D CinemaScore. Exit polls from PostTrak weren’t any better. It got a meager half star out of five possible.
"That’s a double whammy that’s very difficult to recover from," said Paul Dergarabedian, the senior media analyst for Comscore. “The biggest issue of all is the reported budget. A $40 or $50 million opening for a less expensive movie would be a solid debut."
“Joker: Folie à Deux” cost at least twice as much as the first film to produce, though reported figures vary at exactly how pricey it was to make. Phillips told Variety that it was less than the reported $200 million; Others have it pegged at $190 million. Warner Bros. released the film in 4,102 locations in North America. About 12.5% of its domestic total came from 415 IMAX screens.
Internationally, it's earned $81.1 million from 25,788 screens, bringing its total global earnings estimate to $121.1 million. In the next two weeks, “Joker 2” will also open in Japan and China.
Second place went to Universal and DreamWorks Animation's “The Wild Robot,” which added $18.7 million in its second weekend, bringing its domestic total to nearly $64 million. Globally, it's made over $100 million. Warner Bros.' “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice" took third place in weekend five, Paramount's “Transformers One” landed in fourth and Universal and Blumhouse's “Speak No Evil” rounded out the top five.
The other big new release of the weekend, Lionsgate's “White Bird,” flopped with just $1.5 million from just over 1,000 locations, despite an A+ CinemaScore.
Overall, the weekend is up from the same frame last year, but “Joker's” start is an unwelcome twist for theater owners hoping to narrow the box office deficit.
Phillips and star Joaquin Phoenix have said they aspired to make something as “audacious” as the first film. The sequel added Lady Gaga into the fold, as a Joker superfan, and delved further into the mind of Arthur Fleck, imprisoned at Arkham and awaiting trial for the murders he committed in the first. It’s also a musical, with elaborately imagined song and dance numbers to old standards. Gaga even released a companion album called “'Harlequin,” alongside the film.
In his review for The Associated Press, Jake Coyle wrote that “Phillips has followed his very antihero take on the Joker with a very anti-sequel. It combines prison drama, courthouse thriller and musical, and yet turns out remarkably inert given how combustible the original was.”
The sequel has already been the subject of many think pieces, some who posit that the sequel was deliberately alienating fans of the first movie. In cruder terms, it’s been called a “middle finger.” But fans often ignore the advice of critics, especially when it comes to opening their wallets to see revered comic book characters on the big screen.
“They took a swing for the fences,” Dergarabedian said. “But except for a couple of outliers, audiences in 2024 seem to want to know what they’re getting when they’re going to the theater. They want the tried and true, the familiar.”
It has some high-profile defenders too: Francis Ford Coppola, who last week got his own D+ CinemaScore for his pricey, ambitious and divisive film “Megalopolis,” entered the Joker chat with an Instagram post.
“@ToddPhillips films always amaze me and I enjoy them thoroughly,” Coppola wrote. “Ever since the wonderful ‘The Hangover’ he’s always one step ahead of the audience never doing what they expect.”
“Megalopolis,” meanwhile, dropped a terminal 74% in its second weekend with just over $1 million, bringing its total just shy of $6.5 million against a $120 million budget.
Deadline editor Anthony D’Alessandro thinks the problem started with the idea to make the Joker sequel a musical. “No fan of the original movie wanted to see a musical sequel,” he wrote on Saturday.
The first film was also divisive and the subject of much discourse, then about whether it might send the wrong message to the wrong type of person. And yet people still flocked to see what the fuss was about. “Joker” went on to pick up 11 Oscar nominations, including best picture and best director, and three wins. It also made over $1 billion and was the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time, until this summer when Marvel's “Deadpool & Wolverine" took the crown.