[Spoilers!] Dark Knight

[Burter]

You sound like you're trying to convince yourself more then us.

[Violet]

Roffle. I woulda figured the hospital being blown to smithereens would have guaranteed a nice, cozy death, but you never know.

He could come back.

[Pink Underoo]

Gay movie was gay. Joker was better than I thought in some aspects, worse in others, and he was the best part of it all. I'd rather watch Jack's version of Joker, tbh, and I think people are gushing over Ledger mostly because he's dead.

[Bojack]

Ok...

Ok.

Are you sure you were even inside, and not in the alley, laying in garbage, having some sad hallucination brought on by cheap psychedelics?

[Pink Underoo]

No, I definitely saw the movie.

Sure felt like garbage and cheap flashy nonsense, though.

[Raditzu]

Shocking.

[Waffuru]

Well, you're the first person I've seen so far who didn't like it.

[Pink Underoo]

Heath's Joker couldn't hold a candle to Nicholson's. Here, I made a list about it:

- Heath got the "aw, daddy touched me too much/not enough" bore-a-thon background. Lame.
- Jack's Joker was an actual gangster. Not those dopey inner-city thugs of today, I mean Scarface-style gangster that lived in a swanky apartment and had the appearance of a very successful high-roller that's banging his boss' squeeze while he murders people for a living. That's hard fucking core right there.

-Heath's justification for his wacky behavior is that he was cut in the face at a tender age. ZzZzZzZz. There's such a large and empty gap between his childhood monologue and who he is when the story actually begins that it seriously hurts his character. There's no development, there's no real story here. If I wanted to fill in blanks I'd do a mad-lib.
-Jack's character is simply scary. Of course he's somewhat psychotic because he murders people for a living, it's just that he knows how to keep a lid on it. But then his boss tries to off him. And is he angry about it? No. He's actually happy that it happened. It set him free, like Kefka in FFVI. Now that's how a villain should be.

-The catchphrase "why so serious?" was decent for the childhood sob story monologue, but it wasn't compelling since you didn't get to actually see it in a flashback. When he actually cuts the guy up after saying it there's a sudden camera switch, no gore or anything. Super weak. Also, if they had used some of that CGI that the Harvey "Two-Face" Dent character had, and gave Joker permanent jagged slits up both sides of his face so you could see all of his teeth when he smiled (and maybe some of his skull, and it would bleed a little at the edges, too) he would have been a more visually interesting character. As it is, he's just some plot-protected disheveled jerk in sloppy makeup with a lame catchphrase.
-The line "ever dance with a devil...?" is much more sinister. And the 1989 movie had the awesome dynamic that, instead of Joker being traumatized by some sadistic asswipe, he was the sadistic asswipe that traumatized Bruce with this phrase that originally compelled him to become the dark knight. Not because the phrase itself is anything special, it's just that whenever Jack says it he happily kills somebody, or at least tries to even before he becomes The Joker, until the very end when Bruce is dressed like a demon and says it to him before kicking his ass in a bell tower by the pale light of the moon. That's solid storytelling.

-Most important of all, Heath's Joker didn't want to kill Batman. What the crap is that? What kind of villain doesn't want to kill his nemesis?? I'll tell you: a shitty villain, that's what kind.
-The 1989 Joker tried to kill Bruce on many different occasions. Sometimes he stopped by choice, sometimes he wasn't fast enough or got outsmarted, sometimes he just didn't try hard enough. But, at least he wasn't caught up in some retarded "I can't kill you, you can't kill me" psychobabble: he's a murderer, he'll murder people with a comically sinister plan or at a whim, be it a city full of greedy idiots or his right-hand man.

I expected this movie to be disappointing, and to that end it did not disappoint. Bale is an idiot and is ruining the character of Bruce Wayne. Is his head really shaped like a pear and his hair is hiding it, or is that just the mask? Anyway, I just wanted to see Heath's last performance. Sad that he got such a half-ass character. I will make a note to avoid the forthcoming movies in this series.

[Reijin]

I'm not at all surprised by Dab's opinion of it, to be honest. There will be critics.

[Waffuru]

You need to read a few more Batman comics dude. Joker never wants to kill Batman, all he wants is to corrupt him, to bring down Gotham's savior and make him into a killer by forcing him to kill the Joker.

Hating everything works for Yahtzee but it makes you look like a asshole.

[Pink Underoo]

Why can't I prefer the way Nicholson's Joker was? Is there some rule about this somewhere?

At least they got rid of that horrible Bat-tank. Seriously, Batman is an urban ninja. It's bad enough that he's decked out in full body armor (that's something that was originally introduced in the 1989 movie, it's almost been TWENTY YEARS, please let it go), he didn't need to ride around in that monstrosity. I bet they totaled it on-screen because of the complaints.

The bike was nice, but it felt as if it was artificially imposed onto the story with that time bomb thing. I miss the old Batmobile, the one that was essentially a jet engine on wheels. That thing was pimp.

edit: also, yahtzee is an asshole. if you're trying to suggest otherwise then you're wrong.

[Waffuru]

There's nothing wrong with preferring the other Joker, but faulting the movie for sticking true to the comics is kinda missing the point.

edit: Btw, the armored suit was introduced in a 1964 Batman issue.

[Pink Underoo]

They stuck with the campy BS like letting him live even though the original intent of the comic was to kill him off (he's irredeemably evil, you know, and when you defeat him once you defeat him a thousand times) and the conflicts he had with Batman in the movie were totally phoned in.

[Violet]

The bike was nice, but it felt as if it was artificially imposed onto the story with that time bomb thing. I miss the old Batmobile, the one that was essentially a jet engine on wheels. That thing was pimp.

Batmobile ftw.


I'd have to say that I agree with you on the points you've made, though. I like Heath's portrayal, but I grew up with one Joker, and that was Jack's, and that will always be the absolute best to me.

[Reijin]

Headsup: For anyone that hasn't gotten the memo yet, NO, this movie is not in any way a remastered version of the original Batman movie ala Special Edition style. Its an entirely different movie, different universe even.

You know... in case someone is dissappointed that it didn't have sleek cruisers, flashy costumes, a remote controlled batarang, bad references to the Adam West show, and absolutely no connection of any sort to the movie before it.

I don't want someone to dare stumble into this movie under those terms. You might feel out of place wearing your parachute pants and Reebok Pumps.

[Talys]

Just one thing I'd like to point out to Mr. Underoo is that the Joker's back story that he tells toward the beginning probably isn't what actually happened to him to make him crazy since he changes the story later on. You are entitled to your opinion, still. I personally prefer Heath's Joker because of how manipulative he is and his psychological attacks.

[Waffuru]

Joker's origin has never been fully explained even in the comics.

[Reijin]

The comics constantly "kept coming up" with pasts when they tried, always clashing. Its why they now have it so that Joker basically himself is confused about his own past, at this point he doesn't even know nor care what happened, he just wants to fuck shit up.

[Yamu]

If you didn't catch it he tells a completely different story to Rachel about how he got his scars. He talks about his wife and chewing on a razor blade. Neither of them are true, he is a liar and a psychopath trying to freak people out with his horrible past, that is in fact not true. If you did not like the Joker because of his backstory you missed the point because there is not one, he tells two different versions and starts to tell a second one to Batman at the end but is stopped.

Nolan wrote the Joker to be a force of nature not a character. His story is not what is important, Batman's is. He comes out of nowhere and doesn't leave either, he is just there.

[Pink Underoo]

You're right, Joker did give a few different background stories. I think I was dozing off around the second one, though. (the movie dragged on for way too long)

I have a number of issues with the character, though. Characters should be characters; I'm just old school that way. When you have a character, particularly a major villain, whose existence in the world is an end unto itself, who nobody is allowed to kill throughout the bulk of the movie, that makes no fatal mistakes, that has an unexplainable power to set up ludicrous situations at the drop of a hat, and in the end fails miserably (as he must), yet he simply does not die (not externally or internally) it comes off as contrived. I guess that's fine for a serial like comic books or TV shows, but this is neither. At least when you have superhero movies like The Hulk the characters are actually developed with absurd dynamics, so it's still a character story, and even then the villain got what he wanted which turned into the key of his demise. And I'm not saying that all villains should die simply because they're villains, I just think that the resolution here was weak and I want some reassurance that they're not going to bring him back: a character that's limited to "wanton destruction" is only good for one show.

Another thing that's bugging me is that time when Joker figured out that Batman was hot for Barbara, which implies forethought when setting up the dual time bomb scenario, while his actual dialog was the subtext of the scene (about how people are only as good as society allows, etc). This is why I said his conflict with Batman was phoned in: they're glazing over the sequences that should have been shown to build tension while the character is saying the things that don't need to be said because the action should convey it. It was bad enough that it happened once, but then at the end when Joker starts ranting subtext again it really sucked the energy out of the finale. I'm pretty sure Jon Stewart made a point about this during one of the times he was complaining about President Bush's speeches. It's just lazy writing.