"Heres…… Jokey?"
I ran across an article today that was just too ridiculous to ignore.
It was an interview by MovieWeb with some cast members of TDK andwhat I specifically snorted over was the comments from Gary Oldman:
“While none of us in attendance really wanted to dwell on the death of Heath Ledger, Oldman offered his thoughts on the actor’s portrayal of the Joker, calling it the scariest on-screen performance he’s ever seen.
He even went on to compare it to his own work as Sirius Black, saying, ‘Sirius Black might scare six year olds, but he doesn’t scare nine year olds. It’s hard to scare kids these days. Heath does. He scares everybody. This is one of the most frightening performances I have ever seen put on film.’ ”
Uhhh… excuse me? I mean, Gary Oldman is an excellent actor, but apparently he’s not such a great judge of the performances of others. “…scariest on-screen performance..ever”? Was he high on crack doing that interview? Or, like so many others, was he brown-nosing the broadly (yet distorted) accepted notion that Heath’s death somehow lifted this average performance somehow into the realm of excellence?
Here’s the link:
http://www.movieweb.com/news/18/29618.php
Filed under: Subpar Acting
It’s all part of “Super Mega Hyper Media Blitz – Part II “! Now, with more electrolytes!
Seriously, with WB planning on re-releasing the film – JUST because it wants to play off the ridiculous notion that Ledger (R.I.P.) might win an Oscar – we’re going to see yet more of this inane press popping up.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Oldman hadn’t said anything even CLOSELY akin to what was printed in that article. I’ve been horribly misquoted in newspaper interviews I’ve given, as well. I don’t know what gets into the head of some reporters, but they will pad your comments about the weather to make it sound like you believe in Martians.
But the change is starting to happen – more and more people are speaking up against this hype-fest. And being honest about what a lame film this was.
Keep up the good work. Next – a cure for cancer!
First- thanks for letting me know that everyone in the world isn’t a braindead tasteless zombie with a universal adaptor for the reception of mainstream tripe hype; and foremost “Fuck Heath Ledger! Only an utterly UNmasculine shameless non-entity would accept a depthless teeny-boper homosexual role without any artistic significance… He pretty much sold out his masculinity for some extra cash he definately didn’t NEED. NOW- The Dark Knight…
Ledger performed the Joker no differently than any other blockbuster over- the-top antagonist; NOTHING but a bunch of tongue
flapping, jumping around like a spaz, that silly weak charecter voice
he inconsistently used (kinda like Halle Barry’s extrodinarily weak
Storm) The Joker- the domestic-american-terrorist?! but then again
ridiculous ass voices were quite the norm in the Dark Knight- Christian Bale growling and screaming like a baffoon to make up for his lack of physicality-( or maybe I’m being too harsh; he was tough enough to fall off a sky scraper onto a car while holding someone- kinda like in ‘Batman Forever’ only cooler) Instead of Nolan spending a good chunk of that 180 million $ budget on getting Bale in condition and mentally prepared
for the role of a lifetime they spent it on one more 60 pound rubber
suit unequipped with any REAL tactical equipment or weaponary,
explosions, Bat-tank car crashes, fires and the usual other
miscealaneous demolition durby commercial elements. the whole movie makes cheap imaterial, irrelevant alagorical themes sludge and tarnish its way across the silver screen; yet again. There was absolutely NO
connection between Ledger/Joker and anyone else in the movie or any ideas (except of course when every charecter is dialoguing them to death) – JUST him spewing chaos-theories relentlessly, describing the plot to whomever he finds to listen at knife point. Ledger was no different in this
role than any other exaggerated mainstream movie villain- he yelled and growled at his victims and monologued tirelessly trying to
validate himself and his toonish electric shocked Cosmo Kramer manerisms, and of course the utterly childish PLOT : (Gary Oldman in
‘Air Force One’ & ‘The Professional” as just two examples of many
super villain xeroxes to pick from) Literally half
the movie was the 1989 batman film redone with more
silly explosions and property damage added, and the other half was
mostly scenes redone from 3 of the Batman animated movies all
strung together with alot of contrived dialogue and scenes
OVER-EXPLAINING who Christopher Nolan THINKS the charecters are; an effort which is a little baffling, since this movie (Nolan) is clearly willing/intent on going through any degree of self humiliation to achieve the god like capacity of the charecters as they float through events. :a guy like the Joker (who you would probably have to invent a new security class for) gets taken into custody at a police station, and is left with a guard in the room with him; that alone isn’t the ‘actuality-kicker’, but that The Joker PLANNED to have this unfathomable ‘In-Cell” guard there to use for escape.
Ledger/Joker in the 18 wheeler “I like this job, I like it” typical, common, fake bullshit one liners like that throughout the movie- Ledger doesn’t deserve shit! it’s shamelessly obvious that it’s because he’s dead; guess they figure might as well take all the jewelery you can find off the corpse. the WHOLE performance was a carbon copy of Michael Keaton as Beetlejuice- just a version that threatens with blades- but of course NEVER actually uses them; got to keep that pg rating so to cover mass toy sales. everyone is SIMPLY blinded by the SPECTACLE of this. A fucking OSCAR?!
OSCARS ARE FOR ACTING PERFORMANCES- NOT NOT NOT SPAZTIC DESPERATE FOR ATTENTION TONGUE SPAZZING RAMBLING VALIDATED, RESOLVED AND CLIMAXED THROUGH NOTHING BUT EXPLOSIONS, Joker “If I say that today a truck full of soldiers or a bus full of people are going to get blown up- nobody panicks; it’s all part of the plan- but when a few judges and public officials get killed then everyone just loses their minds” UH…WHAT?! public officials get killed all the time. it happens in major cities especially, several times a year. happens
all the time, and nobody freaks out about it. the people freaked out
in the Dark Knight because they knew they could be next- which they
thought ONLY because the public official killings were done by
‘explosions’ which IS uncommon. again like all lousy Hollywood-Formula
movies it’s all about explosions. The Dark Knight was not a crime film, it was NOT a film at all- it was just anothr dress up day at hollywood; JUST another really long promotional video spot for some corporate owned properties. THE DARK KNIGHT WAS A LAZY PLAGERIZED SCRIPT AND LEDGER WAS A LAZY, PATHETIC POOR EXCUSE FOR AN ACTOR- but America does love, excuse and even falsely turn to legend pre-maturely its mediocre BLONDES- Brittany Spears, Marilyn Monroe, Curt Cobain, Paris Hilton, Pamela Anderson
and now Ledger; especially when they die. Christopher
Nolan sickens me. Like most writers (which i use loosely in reference
to him) and directors he pussyed out when the pressure was on. he’s a
fat, lazy, intellectual mite, fat, slow witted, old, scarcely
objective literary oaf and he’s fat. hope he buys plenty of
cheeseburgers with all his wonderful money. money money money – hence we all get to enjoy one more herendous Matrix, Fast and the Furious, Underworld, X-Men, Spiderman etc etc Sequal ! I’m a comic fan (in case that’s not obvious here) but l don’t even really think about comics that much in reference to any movie. if the charecter/s and their
world are interpereted well then i’m satisfied…rarely. NOBODY went
to see the Dark Knight to watch/listen to Christopher Nolan prattle
and dribble on like an ass with his vague political satire, or
indecisive interjections about economy, industry and terrorism. he
babbles racial equality tangents endlessly through generic,
commercial, shamelessly artificial ethnic-minority spots,walk-ons, shots and of course
his braindead cameos with Morgan Freeman’s decrepid
instinctless, old ass! Morgan bummbles his way through scenes that
are neither of a pressing nature nor a dignified authoritve one- i.e
nothing like Lucius Fox. More so like Morgan just showing up and being
the mandatory black-guy-PR-Sentinal, so then the stupid BL#%KS will come to the movie as well, just like the stupid WH#%ES who would be the type to just as easily accept Will Farell as the Joker. Freeman (the standard morally infalible minority presence) speaks from Nolan’s mouth “the government shouldn’t tap phones without warrents.” Batman taps phones in a generic blockbuster crisis, but then tells ol ‘Morgan to discard the technology when it’s been put to use- the indicated moral : it’s okay in the time of a crisis but never again afterwards: How the fuck does that make any sense?! here’s a moral : when given the job to write a screenplay don’t ‘cut’ and ‘paste’ 1/5’s and 1/2’s of other people’s completed work, ASSHOLE!… also How could
commissioner Gordan have faked his own death through a rifle shot
assassination attempt by the Joker?! Was the Joker in on the death
faking?! how could the Joker have believed he shot Gordan (at such
close range at that) if he DIDN’T?! did Gordan have on a vest and
blood packs and prosthetics (in the story that is)?! utterly STUPID!
What was Batman doing in that alley by the ambulance after the Gordan
shooting? he said himself that the psycho Dent was interrogating at
gun point was worthless as a witness; so my question again “WHAT the
hell was Batman doing in the alley at all?!” Was he spying on Dent?!
half that fucking movie made no fucking sense at all. soooo many plot
holes and inconsistencies. The only reason batman was there in the
alley was so Dent could be told by Batman that he was going to turn
himself in; so then Dent could confess himself as the batman before
him. Contrived! convoluted, polluted, ridiculous bullshit! If the
Joker wanted to break the asian drug-accountant- snitch out of county
did he really have to get himself arrested?! NOT that him planning for
Gordon to fake his OWN death AND spring literally out of no where with
a machine guess it doesn’t matter when it’s super imposed Christopher Nolan liberalism- practically the whole movie was Nolan trying to win a popularity contest- not as a film director, but as a film director who SAYS the stuff that a large group WANTS to hear. NOT a film director who observes and exhibits the angles of what many want. this is Nolan the whole script “Bush is BAD!” “A minority in power is GOOD” “massive american military vehicles of destruction are GOOD!” hence Bat-Tank!, “Terrorists are BAD!” “Women in power is GOOD!” “China is BAD!” “Batman toys are very very GOOD! in fact are the best thing there is” “Guns are GOOD (but only when Batman and american police use them) but they’re BAD when TERRORISTS use them and when Asia makes them, in fact they don’t even work when asia makes them” ALL fight sequences, fight choreography and stunts were fake illegite garbage! And you don’t have to be a fighter at my level to see that. Christian Bale was not in shape for the role, he was not trained IN ANY WAY PERIOD! there was not the slightest most remote similance of genuine hand to hand combat ability. you will find more legit fighting exhibited on Power Rangers and motherfucking BUFFY!!!
it was humiliating to watch. there was absolutely ZERO detective footwork
employed, that fingerprint nonsense was pathetic- made no sense. one
can’t even super impose a little fantasy push at the fingerprint on
the bullet scenario toward anything resembling conceivable- BECAUSE
WHEN YOU FIRE A FUCKING BULLET THE SHELL CASING COMES OFF OFF OFF OFF!- SO EVEN IF A CRIMINAL WERE STUPID ENOUGH TO LOAD CLIPS BARE HANDED THE BULLET WOULDN’T HAVE PRINTS ON IT! THE SHELL CASING WOULD! but the Bat NEVER picked up shells. not that it mattered since fingerprints being the first lead on a major case is BAD writing in the making. Batman is supposed to be the greatest mind and body in the fucking world! Nolan is a fagott and an embarrassement. About 3/5 of the Dark Knight wasn’t even original- they were just scenes redone from the 89′ batman film (still the only dignified 1 of them all) and the Batman Superman World’s Finest animated film. The Dark Knight achingly drags its feet to a pitiful 2 stars. NOTHING on Ledger’s part- rehashed, begging for attention and approval, typical bad
mainstream acting, Beetlejuice,beetlejuice,Beetlejuice! Someone get
Christian some lozenges, and tell him to do a few more push ups, and don’t BALE on them! LOL.
if you have to censor or shorten me- so be it, just nice to get that off my chest; on to more sites to bash that herendous fraudulent trash!
Welcome back.
The scariest thing ever on screen? No, sir Mr. Oldman. At best it was a fresh take from a brooding angle which doesn’t always suit the Joker and in this case left me liking the character but finding it hard to remember that it was “The Joker.” I also didn’t like that he was ripping off Hannibal Lector if the good doctor had a squeeky voice and could only go as far as PG-13 would let him.
Ultimately, the only reason I kept trying to see TDK was Heath’s Joker and that says something, but it is not a definitive performance. It’s been blown up by fan boys and because everyone else in the film were cardboard cutouts struggling through poor dialogue.
Seriously, Sirius Black was not scary but ridiculous – a tatoo studio in Askaban? WTF?
The Joker in TDK is not scary at all – scary is only the fact we get a pathetic villain shoved into our faces whose only merit is that he is always at the right place at the right time and knows in advance were to install car bombs, poison, huge truck loads of barrels – that nobody will notice – can locate persons if the plot requires is and of course not if it would hinder the plot. Instead of getting shown some “scary” stuff he does with knives he talks about it briefly to then go on how he is against planing and all for chaos blabla, yeah we get : he can twart all plans because he has the script (what an awesome supper power for a villain, I wonder why Marvel has not come up with it)
I like the signature Heath has given the character, what I do not like is everything else about the Joker.
and bloody hell, as predicted, heath’s mediocre performance is nominated for an oscar. oh well we all know that the oscars is a sham anyway.
Gary Oldman said: “This is one of the most frightening performances I have ever seen put on film.”
You understood it as: “This is one of the most frightening performances ever put on film.” There’s a difference.
You folks need to learn how to read.
Yeah, Garry Oldman is a pretty `careful with his words’ kind of fella, and if you look through his filmography, he hasnt been in many if any `scary movies’. There’s a huge difference in what he said and what you’re complaining about.
I’m on board with ‘the D(ic)K left me pissed-off!’, but I think taking seriously Oldmans words to this cynical degree is just stupid. why not praise a (dead) friends/co-actor’s work? he did a wonderful job, he was the only heart and soul of this pretentious hypocritic POS that put the Batman myth to shame (but at the same time, like most of you here, I’m going mad with all of it’s suck-ses – wtf is with all this high numbers???) and I haven’t seen a movie in theathers since. the joker was scary as shit – or at least he could have been… ”brilliantly” the writers-nolan with david ass. goyer didn’t want to give Joker any motivation or clear history, so i belive since Ledger was the only one that was given the right to actually ACT in the movie he needed to come up with something himeself. and he did good. if I was on Oldmans place I would have said the same thing.
Dude, Joker has no clear motivation or jistory in the comics. If you think he does, you’ve been reading them wrong.
Yes, I understand. But this is the super-realistic movie in wich they explored Bruce Wayne’s history of becoming a ninja and now I have to belive that Joker is a demon who came out of thin air?
Not really. They set the guy up at the end of BB so thats a few months of building his empire right there. And he could have been an escaped Arkham inmate. and there are a few options for how he got his scars.
But they explore Bruce Wayne’s history because he’s the hero of the story. As an audience, if we’re going to cheer for this character we want to know what motivates him to dress up as a bat. the ninja training part of the movie was as much about his morals as it was his training.
But the Joker has no real motivation. He just does things, to paraphrase from the movie. And that doesn’t require a clear history. Because the joker is more of a force of nature than a human being. Whereas the batman/bruce character is very much a human character. He gets hurt, he struggles with his burden, he occasionaly stumbles. So in order to empathise with him, we need to know where he’s coming from.
As a comic-book fan first and formost, I appreciated nolan’s efforts to stay true to the spirit of the source material, while making some necessariy storytelling concessions due to the change of medium. A couple of his changes (opera instead of zorro in begins) I didnt think were necessary (but then again the zorro thing was a relatively recent addition to the bat-mythos anyway, and, as an alternatively relality to the DCU Mainstay it doesn’t bother me that events in the nolan-verse batman’s life unfolded a little differently) but none of them out-right changed the tone of the stories from comics to film, unlike burton (who amde a burton film) and shumachers (who seemed to want to remake the old tv series) “efforts”. (both were valid choices and filmakers, but I, didnt like them, again as im primarily a comic-book reader, rather than a film buff).
HA! Heath Ledger wins Academy Award for his portrayal of the Joker in The Dark Knight. Eat that dickwads, shows you punks just how great his Joker really is.
The Dead Douche Fag wins…noooooooooo
Ah, Mike, another TDK hater who can’t tell the difference between fiction and reality (not to mention rude and crass). Which group has the lower IQ again tdksucks?
Really Mike? Fag? Besides being homophobic, that statement doesn’t make sense because Heath wasn’t gay. He played a gay cowboy in a movie, but that was in a MOVIE. Not real. Entirely fictional. And even so, what’s so bad about him winning. I don’t see what the big deal is, he was an ahmzing actor who won an award for playing a part extremely well. Simple as that, why do you care so much?
No lower than people who feel compulsed to have the last word I guess. Cough Cough.
Oh, the irony of that comment Mike. the irony.
So not liking an actors’ interpretation of a character means his acting isn’t good ? LMAO. Some of you people have obviously never studied acting. As the great Brando once said the best performances are the ones where the actor compeltely becomes his character. Whether or not you liked how Ledger played the part the fact is he never at any time played himself(which is what Jack Nicholson did in the original). Throughout he was The Joker in voice, body language, laughter. Consider the fact that it was the same guy who played a mumbling cowboy in Brokeback. In terms of pure acting his performance was excellent… he became the character compeltely.
This is why I love this blog. All of Ledger’s little fanboys start circlejerking each other and pretend he was scary, when he sucked hard.
And all you haters are tonguing each others balls and bitching about how his performance sucked because YOU didn’t like it.
I thought tdk was hard to watch (I was falling asleep at the IMAX) but I thought Heath Ledger did an amazing job. Was it revolutionary or ground breaking? No. Worthy of an Oscar? Yeah.
For this movie, they really should have come up with an all new villain… Oh, wait, they did. But they tried to pass it off as the Joker.
First off, his appearance literally screams to me of lowest common denominator. It’s as if the designers thought “How can we make this, the most unique and deadly of Batman’s enemies, so common and mundane that he’d pack the most asses into our theatre seats? I KNOW!!! Clowns are scary, right? Let’s go as far as we can in all the cliche’d ways imaginable to really emphasize how evil this guy is. Let’s make this guy the common folk epitome of evil clowns!”
Can someone please explain to me exactly what is so pants-shittingly scary about this guy??? Is it the pathetic heavy-metal death clown thing he’s got going? Is it the weird likes-to-play-with-knives-so-he’s-also-probably-a-self-cutter thing? Is it the supposed omnipotency (which, strangely, makes one wonder whether he’s got a copy of the script)? Is it his lip-smacking drooling problem, which I had initially heard described as making him seem more like a dangerous mad-dog, but instead conjured up images of a crusty, old, cigar-chomping George Burns routine?
Please. One look at him and I thought I was looking at an angry, sullen teenager who had spent all morning crying in the corner, bitching about how unfair life was, and was then preparing to go and shoot up his school in a vain attempt to get even. His body language in his first appearance in this movie cannot be denied: he’s friggin’ SULKING.
Once they’d finished butchering his appearance, they then sought to remove anything that might resemble trademark “Joker” behavior from the character. No more with the merry laughter while killing innocents with truly unique yet truly horribly ghastly gag methods that could only have come from him. No longer do his victims die laughing. Now they supposedly die with soiled pants, quaking in fear. I’m sorry, but I thought we did “fear” already. WITH THE SCARECROW!!!!! IN THE LAST FRIGGING MOVIE!!!!!! Or is this the Scarecrow revisited?
Seemingly in lieu of any wit or witticisms or other merryment while causing rampant chaos, they give him the most annoying speech mannerisms, as if to say “Hey, look, he’s funny. Just not “Ha Ha” funny”. In addition to the aforementioned question concerning his appearance, will someone PLEASE explain to me what in the hell is so scary about someone who says “uh-Let’s-AH put a Suh-MY-ULL on that FAYCE-AH!!!” Did they slap a clown suit on Bizzarro? Does Jerry Lewis know his routine is being ripped off?
Then there’s his pseudo-intellectual psychobabble mumbo-jumbo that gets very old very fast. The Joker really only did that sort of thing once, and that was in the Killing Joke. The whole point of that part of the story was how the Joker was ultimately proven wrong by Gordon remaining sane. Funny how that graphic novel is cited as being a major inspiration for the character in this film, yet bears very little resemblance.
So what are we left with? A psycho nut job in clown makeup. That blows up hospitals. And cuts people. Did I miss anything?
???
I’m sorry, but that’s not the Joker. As I’ve commented before and elsewhere, the single most depressing thing for me as a Joker fan is that this bullshit is most likely what’s going to end up being hailed as an inspiration (perish the thought of definition) towards which future renditions of the Joker character should aspire.
Hey,
I personally thought that Heath’s portrayal of The Joker was really good. In fact the only reason I even enjoy the film is because of his performance as The Joker. It certainly isn’t the wooden performances of Aaron Eckhart or Bale. The only good dialogue in the film I believe comes during The Jokers scenes. I wasn’t aware of Heath’s death until after I saw the film, and to be honest I couldn’t care less about his death so it didn’t alter my opinion of his acting. (Other than the fact it was a stupid waste of talent) So I would agree with you any point concerning the appalling dialogue, absurd plot devices and typical rubbish you expect from superhero films. However, I can’t agree with you on your point about Heath because I thought his acting was excellent. Feel free to disagree with me because it’s your choice.