"Madness, as you know, is like gravity."

"Do I really look like a man with a plan, Harvey? I don’t have a plan. The mob has plans, the cops have plans. You know what I am, Harvey? I’m a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do if I caught one. I just do things. I’m a wrench in the gears. I hate plans. Yours, theirs, everyone’s."

The Joker, The Dark Knight

Having now seen The Dark Knight, I have to agree with the general opinion that Heath Ledger does a stellar turn as the Joker. However, it may be too stellar a turn - the Joker's dominance of the movie turns it into something other than a Batman story.

No one that I've spoken to after they've seen the movie makes any reference to the Batman at all. All the comments are about the Joker: as a character, as a performance, as an idea. When The Phantom Menace came out, disgruntled fans did guerilla cuts of the movie without the character of Jar Jar Binks, and I have to wonder how The Dark Knight would play out if someone went through and remove the Batman. What would you have left? It would be a kind of twisted morality play, the Joker versus Harvey Dent, Gotham's white knight, and an almost inevitable turning of that symbol to the sort of insanity and chaos that he has opposed. Normally the Batman acts as an equal counterweight to the Joker, order versus chaos, but in this case he seems overwhelmed by the Joker's glittering madness.

Logic says that credit for the creation of that madness should lie with Jonathon and Christopher Nolan, the screenwriters. After all, an actor is only as good as his material, and so much of the Joker's material is so very quotable. But in this case, the performance so completely suits the material - Heath Ledger gives the Joker a kind of febrile madness completely different from the original "Clown Prince of Crime" version of the character, to the point where Ledger is invisible behind - or within - the role. When we see Jack Nicholson as the Joker, part of the reaction to his performance is the recognition of Nicholson in an uncharacteristic place, whereas Heath Ledge vanishes completely within the smeared, corrupted clown makeup of his Joker.

The New York Post reported that Ledger spent six weeks in virtual isolation as he experimented with the character of the Joker. As part of the process, he is said to have kept a journal of the Joker's thoughts, a document whose appearance in some form or another is inevitable. No one will ever be able to say with any certainty if the performance had any connection with Ledger's death, although personally it seems too much like a convenient news hook rather than a believable tragedy.

And the rest of the cast? I'm sorry to say that I found Christian Bale's performance to be workmanlike, like he was only doing the job he was hired to do. I acknowledge the difficulty of acting behind a cape and cowl, but there are times when his Batman almost feels like a parody, with too much concentration on the gravelly tone of menace. The scenes that he shares with Michael Caine are probably his best, but unfortunately Caine probably has the second best lines in the movie after the Joker's.

Does Batman come in third for dialogue? Sorry, third place goes to Aaron Eckhart's Harvey Dent. As suggested above, you could easily turn the movie into a struggle between Dent and the Joker, and it's unfortunate that Eckhart and Ledger ended up in the same film. Eckhart could have easily supported an entire plot line with Dent versus Batman, but in this case he ends up as a bit of a sideshow. Oh, and I'm sorry to say that for me, Maggie Gyllenhaal comes across as a placeholder: "Stand here and read these lines - thanks." (I seem to be having a critical summer in terms of female love interests, Glyneth Paltrow also didn't work for me in Iron Man.)

I'm curious as to where they'll go from here. Someone must be kicking themselves about the decision to kill off Two-Face and keep the Joker alive, given how subsequent events have unfolded. It's oddly fitting, somehow - it's almost like some kind of slightly twisted joke...

- Sid

Tradition requires some kind of reference to "Braaaains".

Saturdays tend to be sort of a quiet day for me: usually I do the laundry first thing, catch up on e-mail, and maybe head downtown for a little shopping. Today, as I was walking around in the downtown core, I thought to myself, "Boy, there's a lot more zombies than usual lurching around down here." (And really, there aren't usually that many in the first place, in spite of what my friend Laurie would say about the general population.) Upon returning home, a little investigation on the internet revealed that today was the 2008 Vancouver Zombie Walk. "Oh, well then," I thought, "that explains everything."

The 2008 what?

The first Zombie Walk took place in Sacramento in 2001 as a promotional stunt for a B-movie film festival, and somehow the idea has gone internationally viral since then. For no good reason that I can imagine, Canada appears to score quite highly in terms of zombie walks, and somehow I can't quite bring myself to add that to my list of reasons for Canada being the best country in the world.* Nonetheless, should anyone wish to seek out an exciting part-time career with the walking dead, further information can be found at http://www.zombiewalk.com/ and http://www.crawlofthedead.com/

-Sid

*Although, to our credit, people were pretty calm about it. I think that in a lot of countries someone would have been tempted to add realism by shooting the participants in the head with a shotgun.

A small request.

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of - but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.

Robert A. Heinlein, The Notebooks of Lazarus Long

I would like to thank my small readership for the compliments and observations about my blog that they have passed on in person or over the phone. But I'd be very grateful if you'd leave a comment on the blog, as well - I just think that it looks more, I don't know, lived-in, if people leave a note now and then.

-Sid