like two excited mattresses making love in an echo chamber
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2008/07/21/080721crci_cinema_denby
The new Batman movie makes me really sad. I haven't seen it yet, and I'm not sure I want to. The Joker made me feel ill when I saw the 1990's Tim Burton film with the same villan. It makes me feel sick to my stomach that playing this role may have and probably did contribute to the stress that led to Heath Ledger taking too many medications at once.
(Many actors have told stories of dealing with getting too caught up in the emotions of acting and not being able to leave the job behind when they leave the set. David Thewlis has a story of going home after a day filming the nihilistic "Naked" and pulling up the linolium in his kitchen and scrawing poetry on the walls. After that he had to learn to distinguish the difference between his job and his life.)
As Ron Weasley says "He's not worth it."
I'm assuming that a lot of the attention the film is getting though is based on rave reviews of Ledger's performance as The Joker. Dave Denby at The New Yorker even compares him to Marlon Brando:
He’s part freaky clown, part Alice Cooper the morning after, and all actor. He’s mesmerizing in every scene. His voice is not sludgy and slow, as it was in “Brokeback Mountain.” It’s a little higher and faster, but with odd, devastating pauses and saturnine shades of mockery. At times, I was reminded of Marlon Brando at his most feline and insinuating.
The best paragraph of the review though, and a good giggle to end this post on is:
...there are many fights that employ the devastating martial-arts system known as the Keysi Fighting Method. Christian Bale, who plays Bruce Wayne (and Batman), spent months training under the masters of the ferocious and delicate K.F.M. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you a thing about it, because the combat is photographed close up, in semidarkness, and cut at the speed of a fifteen-second commercial. Instead of enjoying the formalized beauty of a fighting discipline, we see a lot of flailing movement and bodies hitting the floor like grain sacks. All this ruckus is accompanied by pounding thuds on the soundtrack, with two veteran Hollywood composers (Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard) providing additional bass-heavy stomps in every scene, even when nothing is going on. At times, the movie sounds like two excited mattresses making love in an echo chamber.
<3
Bonus material: http://www.newyorker.com/online/covers/slideshow_blittcovers?slide=1&run=true#showHeader
The controversial New Yorker cover about Obama, and some past satirical covers about politics.
The new Batman movie makes me really sad. I haven't seen it yet, and I'm not sure I want to. The Joker made me feel ill when I saw the 1990's Tim Burton film with the same villan. It makes me feel sick to my stomach that playing this role may have and probably did contribute to the stress that led to Heath Ledger taking too many medications at once.
(Many actors have told stories of dealing with getting too caught up in the emotions of acting and not being able to leave the job behind when they leave the set. David Thewlis has a story of going home after a day filming the nihilistic "Naked" and pulling up the linolium in his kitchen and scrawing poetry on the walls. After that he had to learn to distinguish the difference between his job and his life.)
As Ron Weasley says "He's not worth it."
I'm assuming that a lot of the attention the film is getting though is based on rave reviews of Ledger's performance as The Joker. Dave Denby at The New Yorker even compares him to Marlon Brando:
He’s part freaky clown, part Alice Cooper the morning after, and all actor. He’s mesmerizing in every scene. His voice is not sludgy and slow, as it was in “Brokeback Mountain.” It’s a little higher and faster, but with odd, devastating pauses and saturnine shades of mockery. At times, I was reminded of Marlon Brando at his most feline and insinuating.
The best paragraph of the review though, and a good giggle to end this post on is:
...there are many fights that employ the devastating martial-arts system known as the Keysi Fighting Method. Christian Bale, who plays Bruce Wayne (and Batman), spent months training under the masters of the ferocious and delicate K.F.M. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you a thing about it, because the combat is photographed close up, in semidarkness, and cut at the speed of a fifteen-second commercial. Instead of enjoying the formalized beauty of a fighting discipline, we see a lot of flailing movement and bodies hitting the floor like grain sacks. All this ruckus is accompanied by pounding thuds on the soundtrack, with two veteran Hollywood composers (Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard) providing additional bass-heavy stomps in every scene, even when nothing is going on. At times, the movie sounds like two excited mattresses making love in an echo chamber.
<3
Bonus material: http://www.newyorker.com/online/covers/slideshow_blittcovers?slide=1&run=true#showHeader
The controversial New Yorker cover about Obama, and some past satirical covers about politics.