I emailed the link to this thread to the radio reviewer I mentioned and this was his response.

CHRIS,

           that was a reasonably apt summary of what I said, I think. The problem with reviewing something like that (well, a movie or anything) on the fly, rather than from a script or bullet-points, is that you risk focussing on certain aspects too much and others not enough or at all.

But I didn't want to leave it another week until I'd had time to script a review, since it had already been a little while since the movie's release, and it was still a hot topic NOW, so I'll have to wear it.

The concentration on "Would the Joker have acted like this?" is probably a little to one side of the issue for me, is what I guess I'm saying. I thought it was more of a 'movie-construction' issue.

That particular conundrum of the Joker ("He's a nutbar , but he still gets stuff done", to really dumb it down to nutshell-form) is part of the character, and has been (depending on treatment over the years - it was noticeably less 'hardcore' in the period from the 50s to the 60s, and really was never as viciously characterised in the early days as it was in the Englehart/Rogers revisionist run in "Detective Comics" in the 1970s, which led to the Alan Moore "Killing Joke" and Frank Miller "Dark Knight Returns" treatments of the '80s) since Bob Kane came up with him in the late 30s. That's all jake with me. It's a matter of treatment.

My question re the movie was about how THE MOVIE dealt with that, and I think that the anarchist/nihilist Joker they present, who is wilful and acts on whim, is difficult to reconcile with a guy organised enough to ramrod the entirety of organised crime in the city into becoming effective lackeys, or an irrelevance, and also completely bamboozle and terrorise the police force, and all in record time as well. An analogy seemed to be made to terrorism, but terrorists as we know them have defined (if sketchy to us) goals, and their acts are, in some way, presumably intended to help them advance towards those goals. If the Joker's goal is to transmit his nihilism to the populace of Gotham City - which is what the guts of the movie is really about, and the part that works best, i.e. the issue of the Joker's psyche - then what does he give a fig about organised crime, or convoluted heist attempts? He doesn't, is the simple answer. The movie tries to play it both ways. I'd suggest the idea of the Joker as an intricate political manipulator (if to demented ends) is not an uninteresting one, but it doesn't have much to do with the Joker that's in the bulk of the movie, and certainly the part that counts. It's a contradiction, and a weakening of focus, in this case. It's also not really anything that's to do with any portrayal of the character in the past. Good idea for a future movie or comics series, quite possibly - just not for this one.

I guess my point was that they didn't have the focus or the discipline to keep the action of the movie within the fairly bold parameters of the psychological profile they'd established for the Joker. In the normal run of heroic action/everything explodes movies, this wouldn't matter much and you'd just go along with it, and take any and all implausibilities as part of the territory. In this case, to me the loss of focus weakens the movie as a whole, since by the time the Joker is really established as a character, and his relationship with the Batman character registers, (not until about half-way through as I mentioned) you realise that that's really what the vital core of the movie is, and the rest is set decoration, give or take, and you wonder why there had to be so much of the latter, since it just dilutes the most effective elements of the film.

Just to clarify a couple of other things. The soundtrack wasn't "too loud" in my opinion. It was too busy, and poorly mixed, at least in the version I heard in that particular cinema. There was dialogue that was meant to be heard that was inaudible. There was a music score, with electronic elements similar to sound effects, then a loud FX track, and also dialogue, plus all the usual multi-track folderol. In portions of it, there was simply too much going on, and they also mixed the dialogue track too low in comparison with the rest of the cacophony.

This is a good analogy for the rest of the movie - far too much shoe-horned in, far too much going on, and a loss of focus on the stuff that really was key to the dramatic dynamic that not only made the movie work, but was really the whole movie. (Or should have been.)

The guy on the posting board thing you sent me the link for who commented that they shouldn't have introduced, developed and then killed off the other supervillain Two Face, within this movie was dead right. That was the next picture if they played it right.

It's this modern day approach (probably dating back to the Indiana Jones movies, at least, but set in stone more since then) of throwing everything at the fan, and then finding a little more everything and throwing that too, and then throwing the fan at the movie goer, heedless of anything resembling effective dramatic structure, that just doesn't cut it for me. A more ironclad and obvious example is the third Spider-Man picture. How many supervillains and soap-opera sub-plots do you need in the one superhero movie? There can't be any real momentum or dramatic build in a situation like that. There's no need to shovel 100 comics worth of plot into a film when 10 will cover it.

They put too much in "Dark Knight" - much of it irrelevant to the core that really got the viewer in and drove the movie - had too many climaxes, and it went on far too long.

Just a couple of other clarifications. I didn't want to seem churlish about Heath Ledger's performance or Heath Ledger. He did a great job. My point wasn't EXACTLY that five or six other guys could have done as good a job. It's a fine distinction, but what I was trying to say (and I think I did say this, although I haven't listened back to a recording yet) is that it was such a gift of a role as written that five or six well-chosen other actors, ones with a gift for the quirky, could have had a fair crack at it and done equally well. In other words, because of the nature of the role, as written, unless it was a case of total miscasting, whoever was chosen for the role had a fair crack at doing something memorable with it. I don't, and didn't, mean to take anything away from Heath Ledger, who recognised the golden opportunity and aced it.

Also, one of my objections which I didn't mention was to the Joker make-up. It looked too much like a kid playing with mummy's make-up and I didn't find it repellent or frightening at all. It just looked like a guy in a lousy make-up job, not someone who'd had their face carved up. (I liked Heath Ledger's gimmick of constantly pushing and probing with his tongue against the scars supposedly inside his mouth. That was creepy/interesting/irritating on a subliminal level, and it was good that they didn't mention it in dialogue and dilute it. But with the make-up and prosthetic technology available today, why leave it all up to the actor?) The original Bob Kane conception of the Joker came from a silent movie called "The Man Who Laughs". The main character of that, portrayed by Conrad Veidt, still has a somewhat shocking and disconcerting look to this day. It must have been possible to hark back to that example, and develop a face-piece/make-up for Ledger that resembled and expanded on Veidt's, without subjecting him to the torture that Veidt went through with wires distorting his mouth, etc. I thought the Ledger make-up was unimaginative and flat as a tack. It didn't even have "evil clown" scare value for me, and the Joker's visage is meant to go beyond that. Kane's version was a leering, horrible variant on the classic theatrical mask of the past. That's the kind of effect to go for.

Oddly enough, there's enough that works in it that I still thought it was a decent picture. By now you know which parts I thought worked. I have no doubt that in a few years' time all but the most subjective will have revised their opinions of this movie, and we won't be hearing about it as any sort of "great" picture. The reality is that "Iron Man" did what it did rather better, as a whole, than this did, mainly because they mostly stuck to what worked, both in their conception, and in terms of adapting a much less promising comic-book original. The great Dark Knight/Batman/Joker movie is still yet to be made. Simply adapting "Killing Joke" or "The Dark Knight Returns" as faithfully as possible (with the right director/actors/creative personnel/budget etc etc, of course) would achieve that.

What they're doing with this series is a somewhat freestyle and occasionally wayward variant on Frank Miller's "Batman: Year One" mini-series, from which they've abstracted many many key elements, and then grubbed their way through other comics sources, thrown that in, plus some additional "Hollywood magic" and bonus explosions. Neither movie has been bad, but both could have significantly improved with more focus.

They just have to leave out all the salad in future and concentrate on the burger at hand.  


                                                         CHEERS,

                                                                      LLL

Rumor mills are buzzing that Johnny Depp will play the Riddler in the next movie.


Phil

Well, I finally saw The Dark Knight last night and I thought it was good. I'd heard some of the talk about it being pro-Bush, not just from Sheepwalker but from other sources too. So through out the movie I was trying to workout what was Bush about Batman and what was Bin Laden about the Joker and I also wondered if Harvey Dent was supposed to be Barack Obama. But the references were there; the line about how the Romans would suspend democracy, the buy American (not Chinese) and even Mayor Rudy Giuliani made an appearance. In fact there were quite a few occasions through out the film when I noticed references to current world events. But why did Batman have to run? That seemed more Bin Laden than Bush to me.

Here’s an article by a local right-wing journo who draws comparisons between Batman and Bush:  
  
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,24099007-25717,00.html  

Anywho, after reading that review from the radio reviewer, (see my previous posts), I was expecting to see a convoluted, over the top shoot em up and while there was heaps of action, I thought the story line and twists were first rate. There were numerous memorable scenes and the climax was a beauty. I was totally blown away when that semi-trailer flipped on to its roof and the scene with the prisoner and the bomb detonator was good too.  

As everyone has said, Heath did a great job as the Joker and I hung on his every word.  I actually found myself wanting him to win even though I knew he wouldn't, not because I’m pro-evil but because the Joker was a much more interesting character than Batman and I found his motivation for being the way he was a lot stronger than Batman’s (perhaps they should've reminded us about how Batman's parents died.) However, I was bit confused about the Joker's explanations for his scars. First he said his father did it to him and then he said he got them by chewing on razor blades. Was he lying, delusional or talking about two separate incidents?

But overall it was a very good movie and is definitely worth seeing on the big screen.    

The scars I think is referenced to one of the comic book source (I forgot which one at the moment) but it's discussed in the posts before. But the change of story refers to his delusional state. I had problems understanding that as well until I read the posts here and researched the comic book sources.

Gabe

I loved this movie, I think it hit every single bar that it needed to.

I'm not writing a review, I'm replying to others so I what I say is;

The voice is overdone but is back to the basics of the comics

Heath played the Joker amazingly well but as others have said it can be recast

Personally I thought up until the Joker got arrested it was an average film. After that it was exceptional. There was so many emotions going on in the final two thirds, it just kind of made the first act pointless....at least in my eyes. Obviously not pointless, but ya know

the dark knight OWNS all. so freaking awesome.

Heath Ledger as the joker=best onscreen preformance of all time