Posted on 06/27/2008 7:50:22 PM PDT by Vince Ferrer
Heads up: a thunderbolt is about to rip into the blanket of bland we call summer movies. The Dark Knight, director Christopher Nolan's absolute stunner of a follow-up to 2005's Batman Begins, is a potent provocation decked out as a comic-book movie. Feverish action? Check. Dazzling spectacle? Check. Devilish fun? Check. But Nolan is just warming up. There's something raw and elemental at work in this artfully imagined universe. Striking out from his Batman origin story, Nolan cuts through to a deeper dimension. Huh? Wha? How can a conflicted guy in a bat suit and a villain with a cracked, painted-on clown smile speak to the essentials of the human condition? Just hang on for a shock to the system. The Dark Knight creates a place where good and evil — expected to do battle — decide instead to get it on and dance. "I don't want to kill you," Heath Ledger's psycho Joker tells Christian Bale's stalwart Batman. "You complete me." Don't buy the tease. He means it.
The trouble is that Batman, a.k.a. playboy Bruce Wayne, has had it up to here with being the white knight. He's pissed that the public sees him as a vigilante. He'll leave the hero stuff to district attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) and stop the DA from moving in on Rachel Dawes (feisty Maggie Gyllenhaal, in for sweetie Katie Holmes), the lady love who is Batman's only hope for a normal life.
Everything gleams like sin in Gotham City (cinematographer Wally Pfister shot on location in Chicago, bringing a gritty reality to a cartoon fantasy). And the bad guys seem jazzed by their evildoing. Take the Joker, who treats a stunningly staged bank robbery like his private video game with accomplices in Joker masks, blood spurting and only one winner. Nolan shot this sequence, and three others, for the IMAX screen and with a finesse for choreographing action that rivals Michael Mann's Heat. But it's what's going on inside the Bathead that pulls us in. Bale is electrifying as a fallibly human crusader at war with his own conscience.
I can only speak superlatives of Ledger, who is mad-crazy-blazing brilliant as the Joker. Miles from Jack Nicholson's broadly funny take on the role in Tim Burton's 1989 Batman, Ledger takes the role to the shadows, where even what's comic is hardly a relief. No plastic mask for Ledger; his face is caked with moldy makeup that highlights the red scar of a grin, the grungy hair and the yellowing teeth of a hound fresh out of hell. To the clown prince of crime, a knife is preferable to a gun, the better to "savor the moment."
The deft script, by Nolan and his brother Jonathan, taking note of Bob Kane's original Batman and Frank Miller's bleak rethink, refuses to explain the Joker with pop psychology. Forget Freudian hints about a dad who carved a smile into his son's face with a razor. As the Joker says, "What doesn't kill you makes you stranger."
The Joker represents the last completed role for Ledger, who died in January at 28 before finishing work on Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. It's typical of Ledger's total commitment to films as diverse as Brokeback Mountain and I'm Not There that he does nothing out of vanity or the need to be liked. If there's a movement to get him the first posthumous Oscar since Peter Finch won for 1976's Network, sign me up. Ledger's Joker has no gray areas — he's all rampaging id. Watch him crash a party and circle Rachel, a woman torn between Bale's Bruce (she knows he's Batman) and Eckhart's DA, another lover she has to share with his civic duty. "Hello, beautiful," says the Joker, sniffing Rachel like a feral beast. He's right when he compares himself to a dog chasing a car: The chase is all. The Joker's sadism is limitless, and the masochistic delight he takes in being punched and bloodied to a pulp would shame the Marquis de Sade. "I choose chaos," says the Joker, and those words sum up what's at stake in The Dark Knight.
The Joker wants Batman to choose chaos as well. He knows humanity is what you lose while you're busy making plans to gain power. Every actor brings his A game to show the lure of the dark side. Michael Caine purrs with sarcastic wit as Bruce's butler, Alfred, who harbors a secret that could crush his boss's spirit. Morgan Freeman radiates tough wisdom as Lucius Fox, the scientist who designs those wonderful toys — wait till you get a load of the Batpod — but who finds his own standards being compromised. Gary Oldman is so skilled that he makes virtue exciting as Jim Gordon, the ultimate good cop and as such a prime target for the Joker. As Harvey tells the Caped Crusader, "You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become a villain." Eckhart earns major props for scarily and movingly portraying the DA's transformation into the dreaded Harvey Two-Face, an event sparked by the brutal murder of a major character.
No fair giving away the mysteries of The Dark Knight. It's enough to marvel at the way Nolan — a world-class filmmaker, be it Memento, Insomnia or The Prestige — brings pop escapism whisper-close to enduring art. It's enough to watch Bale chillingly render Batman as a lost warrior, evoking Al Pacino in The Godfather II in his delusion and desolation. It's enough to see Ledger conjure up the anarchy of the Sex Pistols and A Clockwork Orange as he creates a Joker for the ages. Go ahead, bitch about the movie being too long, at two and a half hours, for short attention spans (it is), too somber for the Hulk crowd (it is), too smart for its own good (it isn't). The haunting and visionary Dark Knight soars on the wings of untamed imagination. It's full of surprises you don't see coming. And just try to get it out of your dreams.
The power of love is a curious thing
Make a one man weep, make another man sing
Change a hawk to a little white dove
More than a feeling thats the power of love
Tougher than diamonds, rich like cream
Stronger and harder than a bad girls dream
Make a bad one good make a wrong one right
Power of love that keeps you home at night
You dont need money, dont take fame
Don’t need no credit card to ride this train
Its strong and its sudden and its cruel sometimes
But it might just save your life
Thats the power of love
Thats the power of love
First time you feel it, it might make you sad
Next time you feel it it might make you mad
But youll be glad baby when youve found
Thats the power makes the world go round
And it dont take money, dont take fame
Dont need no credit card to ride this train
Its strong and its sudden it can be cruel sometimes
But it might just save your life
They say that all in love is fair
Yeah, but you dont care
But you know what to do
When it gets hold of you
And with a little help from above
You feel the power of love
You feel the power of love
Can you feel it ? ....Hmmm
It dont take money and it dont take fame
Dont need no credit card to ride this train
Tougher than diamonds and stronger than steel
You wont feel nothin till you feel
You feel the power, that’s the power of love
Thats the power, thats the power of love
You feel the power of love
You feel the power of love
Feel the power of love
I can get fancy explosions and such in any crappy movie these days. What thrills me about this refreshed Batman series is the psychology behind the characters. Adding this amplifies the effect of their actions. I really looking forward to Ledgers performance. Sad that it was his last.
Agreed 100%.
The first review, from MovieBlog.com reads, and I quote,
One of the things I was preparing myself for was how over hyped the performance of Heath Ledger was going to be. Since he passed away, I knew he’d be getting rave reviews out the ying yang no matter what and I’d be frowned upon if I said any different. But holy mother suck puss face… HEATH LEDGER DESERVES AN OSCAR NOMINATION FOR HIS PERFORMANCE AS THE JOKER… no… I’m not even kidding in the least. I was totally, 100% blown away like nothing I’ve ever seen in a comic based movie before. He is at all times completely believable, at all time relentlessly disturbing, at all times nightmarishly frightening and at all times THE JOKER. This is a slightly different vision of The Joker than we’ve ever seen before… but it hits the mark so purely that even Batman himself is made to feel like a secondary character. It really was the performance of a lifetime for Ledger in all its poetic tragedy. I can not stress this enough… Ledger really was that good in this flick, and if he gets an Oscar nomination (which he really should), it won’t be out of sympathy or sentimentality… it will be because it was a performance worth of the honor. Absolute best performance in a comic book movie I’ve ever seen. Yes, he was THAT good.
Nolan kicks in the narrative overdrive from the first minute and doesn't relent after that. A spectacular bank job with a gruesome aftermath introduces Heath Ledger's Joker, aka "The Scariest Supervillain Of All Time™". Ledger's performance is so incredibly strong that by all means come July 24th, it should become the pure definition of the term 'sociopath' in your friendly neighbourhood dictionary. Ledger, who sadly passed away in the beginning of this year, leaves a legacy unlike anything that has ever been seen in a comic book film adaptation as Batman's nemesis.
Ledger's merciless depiction of The Joker makes him a truly dangerous opponent for our protagonist and creates truly terrifying scenes. While it may not come as a great surprise that the Caped Crusader survives this installment, that's not saying he's going to be too happy about that.
And David Germain writes:
LOS ANGELES - The buzz over Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker in "The Dark Knight" for the last several months was justified. With his final full film role, Ledger delivers what may be remembered as the finest performance of his career.
A press screening of the "Batman Begins" sequel Thursday night had the audience cackling along with Ledger's Joker, a depraved creature utterly without conscience whom the late actor played with gleeful anarchy. At times sounding like a cross between tough guy James Cagney in a gangster flick and Philip Seymour Hoffman's fastidious Truman Capote, Ledger elevates Batman's No. 1 nemesis to a place even Jack Nicholson did not take him in 1989's "Batman." Nicholson's Joker was campy and clever. Ledger's Joker is an all-out terror, definitely funny but with a lunatic moral mission to drag all of Gotham, the city Batman thanklessly protects, down to his own dim assessment of humanity. Spewing alternate personal histories for how he got the horrible scars on his face, the Joker hides behind distorted clown makeup that looks like a chalk drawing left out in the rain.
The Joker masterminds a series of escalating abductions, assassination attempts, murders and bombings, all aimed at calling out Batman (Christian Bale) and proving to the tormented vigilante hero that they are two sides of the same coin. "You complete me," the Joker tells Batman, dementedly borrowing Tom Cruise's sappy romantic line from "Jerry Maguire."
Long before Ledger's death in January from an accidental prescription drug overdose, his collaborators on "The Dark Knight" had been describing his performance as a new high in the art of villainy for a comic-book adaptation.
Director Christopher Nolan, reuniting with "Batman Begins" star Bale, told The Associated Press earlier this year that Ledger came through with precisely what he had envisioned for this take on the Joker, "a young, anarchic presence, somebody who is genuinely threatening to the establishment." "It was though they'd taken the Joker and all the colors, everything of it, and just kind of put him through a Turkish prison for a decade or so," Bale told the AP. "It's like he's gone through that personal hell to come out being this, if you can even call him mad, at the end here."
A best-actor Academy Award nominee for "Brokeback Mountain," Ledger has earned fresh Oscar buzz for "The Dark Knight," which could land him in the supporting-actor race. Running just over two and a half hours, "The Dark Knight" is a true crime epic. Throughout, the Joker's bag of tricks is bottomless, twisted to the point of horror-flick sick.
"Some men aren't looking for anything logical," Michael Caine's butler Alfred tells Bruce, who's trying to decipher the Joker's motives. "Some men just want to watch the world burn."
Come July 18, when "The Dark Knight" lands in theaters, the world will be watching Ledger burn up the screen.
Plus, from the clips and trailers we've seen of the Heath-Joker:
(Also see post 24).
Like I said, I haven't heard from any of you on the matter in quite some time and I'm just wondering if you all still feel the same way you did, with all the info we have now.
Bale is great in The Prestige, love that movie and Scarlett Johanssen is in it too, you can see here texting Obama if you watch closely. I’m going to watch Rescue Dawn on blu-ray right now, very impressed with Christian Bale as an actor, let’s hope he’s not a liberal.
Agreed. But don’t you wonder if there’s not a bit of a Dark Knight in most of us Freepers?
TIME-LIES-WARNER-TURNER-CNN publishes DC Comics, owner of Batman.
QUESTION AUTHORITY THAT TELLS YOU TO SEE THE SAME CORPORATE CRAP
Perhaps you should pick up one of the comics instead.
Either some of Neal Adamns 1960s Dark Knight tales with Denny O’Neil or Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns.
Skip the Year Zero, Catwoman is a whore nonsense. It didn’t work for Halle Berry either and the art is NOT as good as in DNR.
And skip Miller’s second Dark Knight series decades later.
But for all the disdain that people have over comics, they sure anticipate half assed presentations of comic book movies.
Let me ask you this, riddler. Riddle me this...
If you wouldn’t turn to Rolling Stoned Magazine for political or music advice these days, why the hell would you go to them for a movie review even if they weren’t tied to the parent company of the product?
And Michael Keaton sucked in Batman back in the 1980s too. Yep. Said it.
He was a klutzy millionaire playboy who inherited his wealth but never knew how to accept it. Shluffed it off. Had no action chin. He was the same smart ass that he was in the comedies that preceded Batman.
And he didn't get to keep the role.
What other Gotham/Manhattan event could compare? Sick.
The tv show didn't make Batman campy. Andy Warhol and POP ART made Batman campy.
Peter Travers has generally been a pretty good gauge for me. But I have yet to see anything negative about The Dark Knight. There are tons of interviews pouring in on AICN and they are uniformly positive. Where do you go for movie reviews?
Ummm...because movies are for entertainment, and politics are about the future of the country, and the two have nothing to do with each other?
(And also because the movie looks friggin' bad a**?)
That poster reminds me of this and always will.
Then I feel sorry for you.
Something tells me that if I go and see this movie then I won’t get a good night’s sleep for the next six months.
Would you post a list of products, publications, actors and such that are banned so we can all live up to your ideal conservative way of life. Also include fast food chains. I want to make sure I’m never entertained, fed, or informed by a liberal ever again.
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