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Yeah, Heath Ledger (like Jack Nicholson and Mark Hamill) met my main criteria for Joker: be funny. I laughed when I got the joke in TDK when we was going to have the Honor guard kill the Major. Or makes a pencil disappear. The Joker makes jokes. Sick twisted jokes.

Leto's Joker wasn't funny. He was trying too hard to be edgy. And the fact that he actually had some affection for Harliquin in Suicide Squad completely felt that they did not understand his character.

Bane's a tough character. He was created as a gimmick, but written above the quality of the story he was created for. He also HAD a gimmick and that was an easy thing to latch onto so most early adaptations made it his THING and he lost what made him more than a henchmen (even being reduced to a Henchmen in the abysmal B&R). In many ways, the DKR Bane is the closest to what makes him compelling in the comics an adaptation has come; he's just in a film that's... super confused as to what it wants to be. It cares about comic references in a way that prior films were generally pretty happy to ignore and has a bunch of little ideas without really having a big one. It's just trying to do way too much and everything suffers for it somewhere along the line.

Its easy enough to do a compelling bane. Just stop making him someone elses lacky. Bane is intelligent enough to run his own scheme and manipulate everyone else in the process. So let him.

Bane's portrayal outside of the comics have always been disappointing. He is so much more than a brute.

 Ouze wrote:

Josh Brolin – Milk as Dan White
Robert Downey Jr. – Tropic Thunder as Kirk Lazarus
Philip Seymour Hoffman – Doubt as Father Brendan Flynn
Michael Shannon – Revolutionary Road as John Givings Jr.

These are all great actors. I'm not going to dispute that. However, was each one of them an academy award winning performance in those roles? I would argue no. Only Phillip Seymour Hoffman even came close, having seen those performances. He doesn't have to have given the best acting performance of all time, he needs to have given the best acting performance in that year as compared to those other nominees, and I think he did that. I think the Joker was a tour de force, honestly.

Doubt is one of my favorite dramatic movies, and I am in LOVE with Streep. Hoffman acted his butt off in that movie, but I think Ledger edged him out. He's the only joker that I can honestly say seems like he is a crazy man trying to act sane, rather than a sane man trying to act insane.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Upon further consideration I have to say there is ONE thing that hinders any comparison between HL and JN. The Dark knight was supposed to be "realistic". The Tim Burton Batman still has a lot of cartoony camp to it.

Both are good for what they are. I just see them as slightly different genres, and thus a bit of an apples to oranges comparison.

 cuda1179 wrote:

 Ouze wrote:

Josh Brolin – Milk as Dan White
Robert Downey Jr. – Tropic Thunder as Kirk Lazarus
Philip Seymour Hoffman – Doubt as Father Brendan Flynn
Michael Shannon – Revolutionary Road as John Givings Jr.

These are all great actors. I'm not going to dispute that. However, was each one of them an academy award winning performance in those roles? I would argue no. Only Phillip Seymour Hoffman even came close, having seen those performances. He doesn't have to have given the best acting performance of all time, he needs to have given the best acting performance in that year as compared to those other nominees, and I think he did that. I think the Joker was a tour de force, honestly.

Doubt is one of my favorite dramatic movies, and I am in LOVE with Streep. Hoffman acted his butt off in that movie, but I think Ledger edged him out. He's the only joker that I can honestly say seems like he is a crazy man trying to act sane, rather than a sane man trying to act insane.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Upon further consideration I have to say there is ONE thing that hinders any comparison between HL and JN. The Dark knight was supposed to be "realistic". The Tim Burton Batman still has a lot of cartoony camp to it.

Both are good for what they are. I just see them as slightly different genres, and thus a bit of an apples to oranges comparison.

The idea that Nolans Batmans films are in any way realistic is hilarious - both his and Burtons films are very different from the 60's tv series but neither of them are realistic.

I think he just meant it wasn’t as campy. JN was crazy fun Joker, HL was crazy evil Joker. Neither was goofy Romero Joker. And I’m glad somebody pointed out the JD Joker from Red Hood!! His performance was awesome. Never mind, he gets second spot after Hamill. Now THAT was a psycho Joker. The laugh, the humor, the violence...it had everything.

Nolan's movies were largely built on the idea that it was grounded in a realistic world, at least until the third one.

 timetowaste85 wrote:
I think he just meant it wasn’t as campy. JN was crazy fun Joker, HL was crazy evil Joker. Neither was goofy Romero Joker. And I’m glad somebody pointed out the JD Joker from Red Hood!! His performance was awesome. Never mind, he gets second spot after Hamill. Now THAT was a psycho Joker. The laugh, the humor, the violence...it had everything.

As I have said before - IMO JN's Joker was much darker and more evil than HL's - he might have loved to overact but we was far more dangerous and sadistic than HL's.

 gorgon wrote:
I find it hard to compare them on all fronts just because they're different Jokers.

Nicholson's Joker was good as a '50s/'60s styled Joker...the kind of Joker who'd rob banks and have wacky gadgets and helicopters that looked like his goofy head. Like I said in the other thread, clearly Jack had fun with the role, but I wouldn't call it one of his best performances.

IMO that's the boring Joker with weird gadgets etc. I dont' find that sort of thing all that interesting. So Ledger not having weird gadgets all the time was just plus for me.

I like the acid flower. I like a joy buzzer that kills. But those are more or less concealed weapons. Joker Helicopter style gadgets or collapsible giant revolver is just goofy.

 Lance845 wrote:
I like the acid flower. I like a joy buzzer that kills. But those are more or less concealed weapons. Joker Helicopter style gadgets or collapsible giant revolver is just goofy.

The acid flower was nasty Jack vehicles were just painted bright colours and he on several occassion bemoaned that Batman had the "best toys" Otherwise it was just carnival balloons and "that" gun.

Batman is always the gadget guy in the films - even more so in Nolan's films with the bat car that split into the bat bike etc.

Nolan was very much the inheritior of the darker, more "realistic" (even though its a comic book film and simply so can't be that realistic) that Burton pioneered for Batman. I remember seeing at the cinema for the first time and it was a massive change from the general perception. Nolan did expand on this a bit but all the main work had already been done (and better IMO)

The Joker got really silly at certain points in times. Here's a Jokermobile.



I'm pretty sure there was a helicopter with a big Joker face on the front too. Anyway, the less of that stuff the better. And I think making the Joker an anti-gadget guy (Nolan's Joker mostly just uses bullets and gasoline by his own admission) creates another layer of contrast with Batman.

I have a soft spot for Jack in the role.

That was the first movie I ever owned on VHS and I watched it so many times I can probably still quote it word for word when it comes on.

"Where does he get those Wonderful Toys."

Teaser trailer is here.

Now THAT looks dark.

Very weird take on the character to me, but it looks alright so far.

Impressive - and yeah very dark

The DC universe appears to be more hands off or something. Shazam coming out (I hears its "BIG if Tom Hanks woke up a s uperhero") and this.

I really like this actor but am a bit nervous about the film.

I'm not sure humanizing a major villain is really needed.

 Vulcan wrote:
I'm not sure humanizing a major villain is really needed.

Humanise him and then when he does such inhuman things the impact is all that more stronger, think of the man he was and what the world made him, I am really looking forward to this take on the joker

Who knows...maybe at the end of the film, he'll state that sometimes he remembers it all differently. *shrug*

This is the new DCEU...each film will have lots of room to be what its director wants it to be, without worrying much about a shared universe. It's not like anyone other than Marvel has shown they can consistently pull it off anyway. (FWIW, Shazam does lots of nods to DC characters and such, it's just that it has its own tone.)

This one does seem very obviously inspired by Scorsese films, even including Bobby DeNiro in the cast.

Finally, the origin story no one wanted.

Finally watched the Trailer.

Seems to Joker by way of Taxi Driver. Just an ordinary bloke driven over the edge.

I am intrigued.

I'm not that interested in DC but a colleague just made me watch the trailer and it looks an interesting take. Not sure it's my sort of film though, I've never completely moved on from Romero.

But are the DC movies supposed to be as tightly intertwined as the MCU, or even at all? Wasn't there a younger Joker in that ensemble film?

This is potentially great but also a double edged sword. the joker needs to be evil. Pure evil. Not "justified, fed up with society anti-hero". He needs a hard punch from life to kickstart him? Sure, go for it. But after that, he must be evil.

 Riquende wrote:
I'm not that interested in DC but a colleague just made me watch the trailer and it looks an interesting take. Not sure it's my sort of film though, I've never completely moved on from Romero.

But are the DC movies supposed to be as tightly intertwined as the MCU, or even at all? Wasn't there a younger Joker in that ensemble film?

MCU has a single canon. Film makers are given things to slot into their individual movies (set up x, mention y, introduce z type stuff), but can otherwise do what the fancy.

DCCU? Not so much a canon, as a blunderbuss. This Joker film is nowt to do with the rest of their oeuvre.

This seems like the perfect place to share this.

 Ouze wrote:
Finally, the origin story no one wanted.

The Joker has had an origin story in comics for decades. More than one story, in fact. Batman '89 was a Joker origin story also.

I've heard this gripe about this film before, but it doesn't make any sense to me unless your entire experience with the character is limited to the Nolan films.