A sample of a very funny,very irreverent, spoiler-laden recap of the final chapter in the Harry Potter series. You can find the whole thing here: Harry potter and the Deathly Hallows so you don't have to read it
Page 571: “Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Lost Diadem.” And Neville Longbottom finally shows up, with the crap thoroughly and comprehensively kicked out of him. Seems with Harry gone, he’s decided that someone has to be the guy who stands up to the forces of evil and injustice, and is getting the shit whaled out of him for doing it. Neville Longbottom is fucking hardcore.
Page 577: Neville also figured out how to use the Room of Requirement as a headquarters for his secret army and how to keep the bad guys from finding it and how to use it as an entrance and exit to Hogwarts that they don’t know about. Why isn’t this guy the hero of the books again?
Page 582: Again, Hermione as the voice of reason, pointing out that if twenty-plus young wizards offer to fight on your side, it’s kind of retarded to tell them you don’t want their help.
08 August 2008
02 August 2008
The 3 Jokers
Coletta Factor: The Dark Knight
The first actor I saw play the Joker onscreen was Cesar Romero, a 1960's "Latin Heartthrob" in the vein of Andy Garcia or Antonio Banderas. This was on the campy, live-action comic book TV show starring Adam West as the Caped Crusader. Romero's Joker was a criminal and a psychopath. but in a really corny way. Like all the other villains on the show, he had a theme, and all his henchmen dressed in nearly identical uniforms that were a bit clownish. Whenever he set an elaborate trap for Batman and Robin or came up with an excruciating way of killing them, (which he would always explain in detail before doing it, thereby giving Batman time to come up with a plan to escape,) it was always based on a practical joke or a carnival ride or something fun like that. He was memorable but not a very convincing or scary villain.
Next up is Jack Nicholson, the Joker to Michael Keaton's Batman in Tim Burton's 1989 relaunch of the franchise. The film overall was dark and moody, as a lot of Burton's films are, indeed, as many fans of Batman expected. Gone was the BAM! and KAPOW! of the 60s, in its place a brooding, troubled Batman and a truly dangerous Joker. Jack Napier was a gangster who was doublecrossed and left for dead by his boss, but he didn't die. He ended up in a vat of this horrible stuff that gave him the perma-grin, discolored his skin, and turned him into a right nutter. He was obsessed with art and beauty, or more precisely, destroying same. He did murder people, lots of them, and Nicholson did a great job making us believe that the Joker was just out to lunch, but the film itself, while considerably more thoughtful than the old TV show, didn't really present much in the way of psychological drama or moral ambiguity.
Which brings us to Heath Ledger, in the role that drove him into the depression that killed him. Ledger's Joker at first appears to be an eccentric crime boss. We see him stealing from the mob in the first scene, and later conspiring with the heads of Gotham's criminal underground to kill Batman. As the movie goes on, however, Lucius Fox (played excellently by Morgan Freeman,) tells Bruce Wayne that some men "just want to watch the world burn," and we soon see that the Joker is one of these. He plays an elaborate "practical joke" on Gotham's knight-in-shining-armor District Attorney, for the sole purpose of turning Gotham's best hope for a safe and peaceful city into a disfigured, bitter, and unhinged shell of a man, a man who turns a gun on a child by the end of the film. Another one of his "jokes" consists of putting 2 bombs on 2 boats, each full of people fleeing Gotham during his reign of terror. He puts on each boat the detonator for the other boat's bomb. If one boat blows up the other, they will live, but if neither boat explodes by midnight, he'll blow them both. This sort of complexity is far beyond what we usually see in a comic book movie villain. The Joker doesn't want to hurt innocent people, he wants to turn them into killers, bring everyone down to his level and feed off the misery. Ledger hits it spot on, too, with the help of really creepy, perpetually smudged makeup. His nasal, high-pitched voice and his maniacal laugh paint the perfect picture of a truly deranged mind. He doesn't have a name, and I can't imagine what he would have been like as a child, or what kind of trauma you would have to endure to get that frakked up. He's just the Joker, a little like Stephen King's Walkin' Dude, sowing the seeds for the destruction of men as he walks the path.
The first actor I saw play the Joker onscreen was Cesar Romero, a 1960's "Latin Heartthrob" in the vein of Andy Garcia or Antonio Banderas. This was on the campy, live-action comic book TV show starring Adam West as the Caped Crusader. Romero's Joker was a criminal and a psychopath. but in a really corny way. Like all the other villains on the show, he had a theme, and all his henchmen dressed in nearly identical uniforms that were a bit clownish. Whenever he set an elaborate trap for Batman and Robin or came up with an excruciating way of killing them, (which he would always explain in detail before doing it, thereby giving Batman time to come up with a plan to escape,) it was always based on a practical joke or a carnival ride or something fun like that. He was memorable but not a very convincing or scary villain.
Next up is Jack Nicholson, the Joker to Michael Keaton's Batman in Tim Burton's 1989 relaunch of the franchise. The film overall was dark and moody, as a lot of Burton's films are, indeed, as many fans of Batman expected. Gone was the BAM! and KAPOW! of the 60s, in its place a brooding, troubled Batman and a truly dangerous Joker. Jack Napier was a gangster who was doublecrossed and left for dead by his boss, but he didn't die. He ended up in a vat of this horrible stuff that gave him the perma-grin, discolored his skin, and turned him into a right nutter. He was obsessed with art and beauty, or more precisely, destroying same. He did murder people, lots of them, and Nicholson did a great job making us believe that the Joker was just out to lunch, but the film itself, while considerably more thoughtful than the old TV show, didn't really present much in the way of psychological drama or moral ambiguity.
Which brings us to Heath Ledger, in the role that drove him into the depression that killed him. Ledger's Joker at first appears to be an eccentric crime boss. We see him stealing from the mob in the first scene, and later conspiring with the heads of Gotham's criminal underground to kill Batman. As the movie goes on, however, Lucius Fox (played excellently by Morgan Freeman,) tells Bruce Wayne that some men "just want to watch the world burn," and we soon see that the Joker is one of these. He plays an elaborate "practical joke" on Gotham's knight-in-shining-armor District Attorney, for the sole purpose of turning Gotham's best hope for a safe and peaceful city into a disfigured, bitter, and unhinged shell of a man, a man who turns a gun on a child by the end of the film. Another one of his "jokes" consists of putting 2 bombs on 2 boats, each full of people fleeing Gotham during his reign of terror. He puts on each boat the detonator for the other boat's bomb. If one boat blows up the other, they will live, but if neither boat explodes by midnight, he'll blow them both. This sort of complexity is far beyond what we usually see in a comic book movie villain. The Joker doesn't want to hurt innocent people, he wants to turn them into killers, bring everyone down to his level and feed off the misery. Ledger hits it spot on, too, with the help of really creepy, perpetually smudged makeup. His nasal, high-pitched voice and his maniacal laugh paint the perfect picture of a truly deranged mind. He doesn't have a name, and I can't imagine what he would have been like as a child, or what kind of trauma you would have to endure to get that frakked up. He's just the Joker, a little like Stephen King's Walkin' Dude, sowing the seeds for the destruction of men as he walks the path.
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