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CINEMA
BATMAN- THE DARK KNIGHT
I’ve always been a great Batman fan, since the first tv series when I was a youngster and watched tv after homeworks.
At that time those series looked so cool, not yet with visual special effects, but it seemed to be in contact with the only one super hero with no super powers in the cartoon universe.
Yes, because Bruce Wayne has no superpowers unless his skills and some pyrotechnic device.
As I said, I’ve always been a Batman fan, and of course I hated the evil fellows who challenged him, but not this time.
This time I couldn’t resist, and not because I’ve turned evil, but just because everyone who has seen the movie Batman-The dark knight came out with the same thought.
It is too much of a Joker to hate him.
Because he is crazy, as a good Joker should be, but he’s smart too, and intelligent, and a goth punk psycho with funny legs coming out from the nurse dress he wears just to stay in touch with Two-faces when he’s in hospital.
Apart from the Jack Nicholson’s performance , the other Jokers in the movies history have been just funny, or just psycho ones, but not all of these at the same time, just as the great Heath Ledger have been able to put on the screen.
And tis funny to see thousands of reviews of the movie talking about the evil fellow and not even mentioning the name of the actor under Batman’s dress.
The poor Christian Bale, with his husky voice and his always angry face, who tried his best with his unexpressive face to put some seriousness onto a character with no expression and no way to be serious even when his promised girlfriend blows up due to a Joker’s trick.
The only two good performances, after of course the great Ledger one , are the usual Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine, someone who can give density to the acting with the right drama but with the right funny side of every cartoon translated into a movie; there can’t be too much thrill, that is not the real world.
A special mention to Gary Oldman; dismissing the dress of the Prisoner of Azkhaban and of course the most beloved Dracula ones, he seems a bit older than he is, perhaps it’s the moustaches of lieutenant Gordon that helps, or maybe it’s just time passing by…he’s great as always, but he’s been greater, and his fans could agree with me.
Directed by Christopher Nolan as the previous one Batman Begins, the story of the movie is shortly said: Batman raises his head again towards crime in the city where he lives, Gotham City, with the help of a new friend, Harvey Dent, the new district attorney which is in love with the former Bruce Wayne’s girlfriend Rachel Dawes. But soon they will be challenged by a new great-minded criminal who calls himself The Joker.
Of course, as always, the good wins and the evil ones are arrested, even if this time the good people are not the real winners of the show.
There is nothing to do, this time the real dominator in the movie is the evil fellow, a performance acclaimed even by the same characters of the movie themselves: Gary Oldman states that the Joker is worse than Hannibal Lecter just to note someone.
Unfortunately Heath Ledger is not here anymore, he can’t read or just listen to the claiming of his performance, and it’s a pity, because the world has lost one of the most important and skilled young actors of the moment when he died.
We can smell the perfume of an Oscar, but what would it represent? Nothing, just the loss of a great actor.
The lights fade onto the story and the lights in the cinema enlighten reality, we are not anymore at Gotham City and we are not running after some criminal with the Bat mobile, we are going home, waiting for another Batman movie, because of course this does not end, leaving traces for the waiting of another movie; Bruce Wayne said he wants to rebuild Wayne manor brick by brick, there would need time, that’s why we are not in the Bat cave but just into a sterile basement.
Batman will be back then, but who could dare to be the next evil fellow? It would be inevitable to compare the next one with the previous one.
The best ever.
Thanks Heath, for a moment I forgot you are not anymore with us, and your laugh will resound in every next Batman movie as a threat towards the evil ones, you’ve been the evilest one, but still able to make everyone love you and miss you when the lights fade and Batman it’s the only image we can see on the screen.
This time the dark knight is a loser.
Nailedtoacross-Monica
THE JOKER -PUT ON AN HAPPY FACE!
His coming in “The Dark Knight” had been foretold at the end of “Batman Begins”, when Commissioner Gordon shows to Batman/Bruce Wayne the ‘business card’ of a gangster who’s plunging the city into a deep mayhem: a play card with the image of the jolly joker.
And the joker is the Christopher Nolan’s new movie main character; forget the charming Joker played by Jack Nicholson in the Tim Burton’s ‘Batman’: Batman’s perfect nemesis in this movie is an anarchic, bleak and psychopathic clown who dresses his crimes with chilling jokes. Many actors like Paul Bettany (“The Da Vinci Code”, Robin Williams (“Dead Poets Society”), Johnny Depp (“Sweeney Todd – The Demon Barber of Fleet Street”) and Adrien Brody (“The Pianist”) tried to get the role, but the aussie actor Heath Ledger (named to the Oscars for his performance in “Brokeback Mountain”) won over all.
“Heath and I spoke about our personal concept of the character and it was the same” explains the director “Joker had to transmit the threat of anarchy and to find amusement in creating chaos and terror on large scale. Heath understood by instinct how to render this character different compared to how he had been performed before”.
Joker is the model of super-criminal in the world of comics. He is enigmatic, psychopathic, deeply diabolic but at the same time charming, ironic, magnetic: “he is the direct answer to Batman, who inoculated this kind of extreme behaviour into the ones that are showing themselves in Gotham City” says Nolan. “We knew that we needed an extraordinary actor to perform him and Heath was the man under every aspect. From every little physical particular to the use of his voice, his is an unforgettable performance”.
His work is, indeed, one of those representations that will remain in history (so much that Michael Caine, co-starring as ‘Alfred’ purposed him for a posthumous Oscar): in those moments Ledger IS the Joker, on the screen we don’t see an actor playing, but the clown brought to life.
In the comics, Joker is a young failed comedian, with a wife to maintain and a desperate need of money, so he is engaged by Red Hood to act in his first criminal action; in Tim Burton’s movie he is instead at once a famous gangster of Gotham City Mafia, also known as Jack Napier. In “The Dark Knight” we don’t have any information about Joker’s past: he is a chaos agent, he has nothing personal against Batman (at the contrary in the comics stories he hates Batman because he caused is awful face by pushing him down in a river full of acid from where he returned with his cheeks deformed and his hair green). The innovation in Nolan’s movie is the fact of making the Joker real, less fictional if compared to his former versions: his make up is not useful to hide his deformation due to acid, but to create a new face, a mask that represents for Gotham City the purest terror and chaos. His green hair become dirty, his hysteric sneer, his smeared lipstick are elements that knock the Joker off his pedestal (as the dandy performed by Jack Nicholson in the former “Batman”), but at the same time he crosses self assured the streets of the city, standing in a sort of royalty with his violet jacket that seems to be a funny imitation of Batman’s cloak.
So the grotesque demon who comes out from this figure is the absolute criminal whose behaviour is defined by a totally free violence with the only aim and pleasure of spreading evil and anarchy; nothing can stop him: even when he is captured by police and is beaten hard he keeps snearing, and his laugh is able to rise in the “heroes” too their dark side, giving to the audience a deep anxiety. So Ledger brings to life a character who sees the world as a big stage where people are nothing else than puppets in his hands.
“We all have some evil inside, the potential of having bad, frightening thoughts. I worked a lot on details. I thought for example to eat raw meat, its taste, the effect it has on your stare. The Joker is absolutely lacking of empathy. And for this fact too he is very interesting: the potential of his evilness has no limits” so Heath Ledger commented the character in an interview, during the work in progress and this is the true essence of the anarchist clown.
At the end of the credits, when on the screen the dedication to the Australian actor so early passed away appears, emotion invades the audience, aware to have seen his almost perfect next-to-last performance. Death brought him away too soon, but he will be part of us for ever.
BlackMamba "The Bride" (translated by Legolas_di_Mirkwood)
Planned and developed by Mrs Lindstrom with the help of Nailedtoacross, Legolas di Mirkwood,
Shikaia590 and Maia.Editor in chief: Mrs Lindstrom, Graphic Project: Dan[616]
