I believe in Heath Ledger, too.
Ever since it was announced that Heath Ledger was going be The Joker in the next installment of the Batman movie franchise reboot, people have been hemming and hawing all over the place, bitching that their personal choice wasn't picked. Everyone from Crispin Glover to "that dude from that fan movie" was supposedly "omg born to play the role."
Y'know what? I've enjoyed Ledger in the things I've seen him in. Now granted, it was only like two things, but I don't care. A Knight's Tale was goofy fun that didn't take itself seriously at all. Our plucky Ozzie actor named for a chocolate covered toffee bar did quite well, thank you very much. And in the edited-for-tv version of 10 Things I Hate About You that I saw, he did fairly well at the role he was supposed to be. I never saw Brokeback, but that won a bunch of awards or whatever, so it must have been at least somewhat decent, right?
Anyhoo, Christopher Nolan did a pretty good job on Batman Begins (although a bit overrated, probably just because he had to get trough two crapfests of Batman previously) and I think we can trust him to handle The Dark Knight at least as well. They say that superhero sequel movies are usually better than the original because they don't have to work on the origin side of things. Makes sense to me. And Nolan seems to be trying to do what Singer did with X-men and place a completely implausible character fit in a somewhat real world setting, trying to minimize the need for suspension of disbelief.
To that end, our new Joker doesn't have permanently bleached white skin and his smile is literally slashed into his face. Some people are already whining about that. (But hey, the fanboys got over Pete's webshooters being organic, so why not this?) And up until now, we've only really seen it in a faraway spy shot and a promo image from a viral marketing website.
But a few hi-res images have come out and it seems to me like they've got the spirit of the Joker pretty much down pat, even if the origin may not be 100% true to the comics.
Check it out:
He's got the trademark purple suit and a sufficiently crazy look in his eye. Heath naturally has a big grin-prone mouth to start with. Really, all I want from my Joker is to generally look like a demonic clown, be absolutely nuts, find violence funny, and have a wonderful laugh. I think they've probably covered at least 3 of those 4 so far. And the teaser trailer we got to see a few weeks back seems to indicate that Heath may have a good delightfully psychotic laugh down as well.
I'm hopeful.
