Also another clue that should have tipped you off that “50 reasons why TDK sucks” is a joke site- the first paragraph- “This popcorn flick may have broken box office records, but let’s face it. It’s a snooze. Campy, kitsch and predictable, The Dark Knight leaves us wondering: has the magic, recently brought to the franchise by Batman & Robin, already dried up”?

what exactly do you have against australians? have you ever been to australia before?

and to Bwarg69—

even tdksucks, though i disagree with him on many counts, will probably agree that it isn’t cool to be as disrespectful as you are being. there is no reason to be saying things like that, to anyone. i dont care if you didnt like his acting. unless you had a personal gripe with him, which i have to doubt, then you have no reason to attack him thus.
am i right tdksucks?

ps— tdksucks, that survey thing you put up was a tad bit bias dont you think? you probably could have found one that would have just said i think he deserves one or i dont think he deserves one. i know you have strong opinions, but try to be a little more open to the TDK lovers out there

In the beginning (Detective Comics) the Joker was just a man with a scarred face who wore makeup as a disguise during his criminal activities. He was a ROBBER first and foremost. He used his gags (laughing gas, the poison he made that drew the face into a rictus as the people died, etc) to scare people to give him the money as a sort of ransom without actually killing the person or having to go through the trouble of hacking into a vault.

Usually even if they did get the money to him, he would kill the target anyway. Same with his henchmen, either serve me or die. Usually they ended up dying anyway. It was a way for him to cover his tracks.

This is what I saw as the foundation of the character the director and the actor created, and I loved it. It is a facet of the character you do not see often portrayed on screen. Usually we see the whole “chemical vat” origin story, which really wasn’t hardcore canon until the 80s with the Killing Joke.

However, the crazy/murderous Joker did appear just a few decades shy of that after the Comic Book Code fell (thank the LAWD!) and it was also around that same time that all the “mobsters” went to the wayside as the Rogue Gallery took over. Although it may have happened during that time, but I was so sick of what the censors turned Batman into I gave up on reading the series created in that era, but I digress!

This movie seems to be that time of transition. Joker was the first regular villain the Batman saga had (which is why I was royally pissed Scarecrow showed up first in this series of movies and why I giggled like a school girl at the end of it).

Not only was I impressed with Heath’s voice, as pointed out previously, I was impressed by his body language. The man’s six foot something, but the crookedness of Joker’s mind comes out in his bent crouch. The skip over the curb as he comes out of the hospital brings out the clown. The dying, sarcastic laugh as he approaches the mobsters bringing out his feeling of superiority (a whole different class of criminal). The way he grabbed and touched people when he crashed the party at Wayne’s penthouse and telling the cop how he could see who people truly were in their last moments of life – coward versus brave – expressed his joy of the power to intimidate and manipulate people. The way he mouthed “Seven?!” is just one example where he threw in the comedian. The overly dramatic gestures are reminiscent of a magician, trying to distract people from the real thing bubbling beneath.

In the comic Joker was always drama queen, and this definitely showed up here. Over the top explosions, the detonators wrapped up like a present, more than enough gasoline barrels to kill Dent and Rachel, the pencil trick, the video of the Batman imposter, pushing one of his goons out of the way just so HE can unmask Batman after the chase, etc. All over the top, all more than necessary to get the job done.

An attention-grabbing in-your-face crazy drama queen. The wannabe stand-up comic. The soul of the Joker. Some might not have seen it, but it was there.

All of this lovliness, however, is not Oscar worthy. The character was played beautifully, and from a comic-book geek’s perspective I enjoyed it immensely, but Mr. Ledger was an actor.

That. Was. His. Job.

I am grateful he laid out such a strong foundation for the character. With this on film I think it will not be hard to find another actor and have them copy the voice/intonation/body language. An Oscar worthy performace is something NO ONE can replicate.

Now I will shut up because this post is lengthy as is. I just hope some of you will be able to read enough of it to rebut. I love people who can put up a good rebuttal.

Ah, sarcasm, my old friend. (although to be fair, I didnt like aschiede’s post either, but he probably wont be back intime for calling him out to be worth it, where as you might)

Oh, Jenny said there’ve been no noble prize winners (or artists or authors from Australia) Azure called her out for being stupid, but just to prove the point:

Lawrence Bragg & William Bragg, physicists received the Nobel Prize in 1915 for their work in x-ray crystallography.
Howard Florey received the prize in 1945 along with Alexander Fleming and Ernest Chain (both British) for their work on the medicinal properties of penicillin. It was Florey who later turned penicillin into the practical drug which was to save millions of lives.
Macfarlane Burnett received the prize in 1960 for his work on immunology.
John Eccles received the prize in 1963 along with Andrew Huxley and Alan Hodgkin (both British) for their work on nerve cells.
Bernard Katz – received the prize in 1970 for Physiology and Medicine.
Patrick White received the prize in 1973 for literature (although he left aus, and kinda hates it).
John Cornforth received the prize in 1975 for chemistry.
John Harsanyi (Hungarian & Australian) who received the prize in 1994 for his mathematical contributions to economics.
Peter Doherty and Rolf M. Zinkernagel (Swiss & Australian) who received the prize in 1996 for their work in immunology.
Barry Marshall and Robin Warren received the prize in 2005 for their discovery in 1982 of the Helicobacter pylori bacterium which causes stomach ulcers and gastritis.

Other famous australian literary authors: Colleen McCullough, Peter Carey, Nevil Shute, Bob Ellis,
Thomas Keneally, Les Murray

Artists: Norman Lindsay, Brett Whiteley, Arthur Streaton, Emily Kame Kngwarreye…

Pretty much a similar % to any other western country our population size Id say.

I love how you think that taking courses in film makes you more qualified than other people to critique any piece of crap that comes out of hollywood.

It just really sounds like a cop out ass pull saying “I took these courses, therefore I make more sense than you”. Like the common comic book fan who says he’s more qualified to be a fan of aqua man because he has a collection of comics from the first issues of volume 1. Do us all a favor and dig your skull out of that crusty crater you call an asshole, and come back with an argument that works.

im not going to jump on the oscar bandwagon just yet (while till the oscars and plenty more movies to come) but the accusation that ledgers performance was in someway pedestrian and could have been easily done is unfair. joe pesci and jack nicholson, who you mention as having played superb villians in goodfellas and the shining respectively, are no doubt superb in those roles. but so is ledger as the joker. the mannerisms, the twitches, the voice. maybe wackjobs are easier to act, but few actors fully flesh out the role like ledger did. Ledger took what could have been a pedestrian psycho role and gives us… a character. ledger fills the role the same way pesci and nicholson filled theirs. i’m not gonna make any decisions on the oscar issue, but he certainly doesn’t deserve to have his swansong slandered as though someone else could have done it. Because they couldn’t have. end of story.