In the storyline (which seems to have taken place within the estimated span of 2-4 weeks), The Joker seems to be able to get mass volumes of explosives seemingly wherever he wanted them.  Literally hundreds of metal barrels filled with a liquid explosive of some kind and who knows what else (enough to blow up large buildings) in:

2 buildings (seemed like warehouses)
2 large boats
A major metropolitan hospital

1. Where could he BUY such large amounts of explosives from, considering Homeland Security?
2. How does he get such mass volumes of explosives into the buildings without anyone noticing?  Especially the hospital?  Considering he would need large trucks, dollies, drivers, and various henchmen to move it all in, and even more people and time to hook the explosives up to detonate in sync?
3. How could he replenish his henchmen so easily and regularly considering that he killed so many of them?  How does he generate and maintain loyalty, and how does he reward that loyalty?
4. If he burned mountains of money and didn’t care about having very much, how did he pay his henchmen?  Did they just work for free?
5. How did he do all this and still be able to be multiple steps ahead of his opponents?

Responses have to be PLAUSIBLE, believable, and reality-based.

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?

How in the world can a big yellow school bus crash through a bank and nobody on the street seems to notice?  Further, after the bak robbery, the bus COINCIDENTALLY pulls out of the bank and into the middle of a line of other school buses in broad daylight, with cops right up the street and no one decides to pull the bus over?

Has wnyone ever seen a school bus line?  They follow each other closer than elephants, they barely give inches of space between them yet somehow The Joker had enough room to pull out of a gaping hole in a building into traffic in the middle of a bus line and everything continues as normal in traffic as if nobody could have possibly noticed.

This was the end of the opening scene of the movie.  It pretty much matches how the rest of the movie goes – “This is supposed to be real – oh wait, now we have something completely unrealistic happen. But, serious, it’s real, don’t suspend your disbelief just yet. Oh, but wait, actually do suspend your disbelief.  No, it’s realistic. OK, it isn’t.”

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

The time period of the hospital evacuation segment is implied as being enough time to evacuate an entire hospital.  The initial moments of The Joker’s threat hitting the airwaves, Gordon is heard shouting to various police crew to evacuate Gotham General Hospital as the priority (and it happens to be the one The Joker picked).  Regardless, it’s implied that the whole ruckus about the hospital happened in less than 30 minutes since the Reese guy was about to go on a TV show to expose who Batman is (seems to imply a show teaser at the beginning of a 30 or 60 minute “news” show hosted by Gary Wallace from Weird Science).  So, it’s IMPLIED as being enough time by the dialogue of the movie but in reality it would take HOURS, if not an entire day, to completely evacuate an entire hospital.  If it was the case that there was such an evacuation ahead of time, and it was evacuated before The Joker went to Dent’s room, why was Dent not evacuated?

Why would Dent be the sole patient left (contrary to Gordon wanting desperately to keep Dent safe throughout the story)?  The implication, then, is that the hospital is being evacuated at the same time The Joker shows up to Dent’s room.  The entire exchange between The Joker and Dent took place over 2-3 minutes and when The Joker walks out of the hospital it appears to be fully evacuated.

An entire major city hospital evacuated in 3 minutes.

The realness of this movie is astounding.  Not to mention how much the building actually looked like a hospital from the outside rather than an abandoned building in the middle of an industrial zone.

Well anyway, so he’s got all this nifty sci-fi 30-million cell phone bat sonar 3D thing hooked up to his headgear, and is able to “see” every everything up until just getting to the floor The Joker is on.  So, uh, what – he couldn’t see that there were dogs up there and be prepared?  I mean, maybe if he’d have taken that one tiny precaution since he was doing that pretty thoroughly floor-to-floor anyway, he’d have thought to stop by a Ralph’s on the way and picked up a couple juicy raw steaks for the puppies.  That’s usually the way every other protagonist in all other Hollywood movies distract guard dogs.

My friend also mentioned something else that was odd about that scene – The Joker had Batman pinned and he uses those projective “knives” (or whatever they were) to quickly get The Joker off him.  So you would think they would be gashing into The Joker’s face based on the angle, otherwise if they were just a distraction then it was a pretty lame use of that gadget.  This one I’m not so sure about (maybe he did have huge gashes or slices on his face or neck when hanging upside down?), but worth mentioning.  Still, with all of Batman’s fighting skills, he couldn’t get a single scrawny Joker off of him from that position?  Even a low rung UFC guy can do that with a simple leg grapple.  Maybe Bruce needs some tips from Randy Couture or Chuck Liddell?

Perhaps this equates to how the writers perceive people being disfigured as immediately and definitely correlating with them turning into homicidal maniacs.  Harvey Dent was the epitomy of do-gooder, until 1/2 his face burned off.  Insta-crazy!