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

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

But in the context of the scene, it was awkward and a display of mediocre acting, questionable direction, or poor editing (if the editor had multiple takes to cut from, I doubt that was the best possible versions he could have picked).

Are we being warmed up for the appearance of Robin in the next installment of the series?  A return to nipples on the rubber suits?

The disturbing part about his role as The Joker was that it’s resulted in some kind of mania in the public’s eye that has so many people clamoring for him to get a posthumous Oscar. The problem is it wasn’t some kind of genius role, it wasn’t even anything really standout, it was just a decent execution of a somewhat extreme character. Most people who can’t act can have makeup put on their face and told to act like someone disturbed and it can be pulled off. One of the easiest kinds of characters to play is someone that’s crazy or psychotic.

Some actors have done superb jobs in such roles, such as Anthony Hopkins as Dr. Hannibal Lecter in “Silence of the Lambs”, Joe Pesci as Tommy DeVito in “Goodfellas”, or Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance in “The Shining”.

Heath Ledger has done nothing special in his role as The Joker and the only reason it’s even being suggested that his role as The Joker deserves an Oscar is because:

1. He’s dead
2. He lifted the movie up from being abysmal to at least mediocre
3. Most people are sheep
4. The movie is making a lot of money
5. A lot of critics forget that their role is to critique, not ass-kiss the box office

One other factor is that the role was “different” and anything “different” in Hollywood (if it’s meant ot be serious) is considered ground-breaking. For example: Viggo Mortensenhas a 5-minute nude brawl in a bath house in the movie “Easten Promises” and the next thing you know he’s being applauded. Seriously, I don’t want to be enjoying a fairly decent sober movie only to then have the equivalent of a Borat hotel scene (minus the censoring) shoved in my face. I guess in Hollywood when an actor allows his small shriveled prune-looking dangling bits to be exposed at length in a movie, it’s considered groundbreaking. “Different”? Yes. “Groundbreaking”? Um, no.

Although no shriveled bits to speak of in Heath’s role, the same concept applies.  The role is different but that doesn’t mean it’s groundbreaking or astounding.

Speaking of Borat – THAT is someone able to stay in character for a whole movie and with significantly more screen time. Should Sacha Baron Cohen have been nominated for an Oscar? If he died, would people be clamouring for that?

Yes, “The Dark Knight” is a piece of fiction.  It is a piece of fantasy, based on a comic book.  However, the clear premise of the rebooted Batman series, and the clear goals of Chris Nolan, the director, is to ground the fiction in reality.  Nolan goes to great effort to place the world of Batman into the real world, including: the locations, the characters, the story dynamics, and the plausibility of the elements of the story and plot.  That is the obvious goal. Especially in “The Dark Knight”, extending from the basis of “Batman Begins”, there is a persistent focus on keeping things realistic and not idealistic.  TDK is an attempt at taking something sourced from fantasy and placing it into reality, and also removing any semblance of idealism.

That’s all find and good – it’s an interesting goal and “Batman Begins” pulled it off quite well.  Watching BB, the audience can truly believe the various aspects of the story.  The main problem with TDK is that it fails miserably in that regard.  There are numerous scenes and situations that are completely not plausible at all, and the audience is expected to have a greater suspension of disbelief than what is implied throughout.  It steals from the audience the very thing that is meant to prop the value of the movie up in the first place.  The movie contradicts itself, it cheats itself, and the audience.  To compensate, what the audience is given is a lot of explosions and sadistic scenes, and the masses appear to have bought into it.

Yea yea I’ll have more writeups soon. Trust me this is worth watching.

Really, Alfred’s entire role in TDK was to keep telling Bruce to go out there and do whatever shit he needs to get the job done, even if it means not being such a good guy when doing it.  So not only are his morals somewhat shifted from BB, but he actually is now encouraging Bruce to dive head first into probable bodily harm and possible death.  And when he finally gives the “we burned the whole forrest” line in his final speech to Bruce, what was the point of it?  No symbolic action of the sort was taken by Batman at all that he wasn’t already doing or hadn’t already set in motion.  The symbolism of that ended up being meaningless.

So let’s get this straight – a man (clearly in his late 40s or early 50s) is dropped feet-first from a height of approximately 2 or 3 stories (maybe more), lands smack on his feet with a seriously disturbing cracking sound shown very distinctly, and barely 2 (or at most 3) days later in the story line he’s walking and standing almost completely normally with barely the need of a cane.

Maybe his legs have the same ability to withstand damage as Harvey’s eyeballs? Maybe Harvey should have traded his eyeballs for Maroni’s legs because he didn’t appear to survive what seemed to be a fall from the same height at the end of the movie.

Or maybe Maroni got strong bones by emulating Batman.  Hey Batman, got milk?

Most people sound different when they just go to the dentist and get a shot of novacaine.

It’s a miracle.

When Christian Bale roughed his voice a bit in his scenes as Batman in “Batman Begins”, it was authentically cool because he didn’t take it over the top.  He did it just rough enough so as to disguise his voice and add a menacing appeal.  When he did it in The Dark Night, however, it transitioned into the realm of the ludicrous.

I swear at some moments it was so try-hard that I saw spit coming out of his mouth.  If hiding his voice was so key, why not introduce a device into his costume, perhaps around his neck, which would help mask his voice?  The writers seemed perfectly OK to introduce the notion of 30 million cell phones all of a sudden becoming real-time 3D sonar devices, why not make the need for a rediculous raspy voice moot by introducing a device to handle it?