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Saturday's popcorn discussion - Heath and the Oscar hype

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Sean K

Sean K

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:popcorn:

Golly,

This has been coming, but I did not expect it to be such huge international news.

Heath has been lauded internationally for his Joker role, and I have yet to see the movie, but the criticism and applause are flowing wildly.

I’m interested to hear others opinions on the movie and if he deserves the acclaim, or whether it's just because he died tragically.

Such a loss for his family, and Australia.

kennas
 
kennas said:
:popcorn:

Golly,

This has been coming, but I did not expect it to be such huge international news.

Heath has been lauded internationally for his Joker role, and I have yet to see the movie, but the criticism and applause are flowing wildly.

I’m interested to hear others opinions on the movie and if he deserves the acclaim, or whether it's just because he died tragically.

Such a loss for his family, and Australia.

kennas
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Well I assume we all agree that the man was a genius, and a totally admirable person.

The movie is getting some good acclaim...

I look forward to going to see it - as you say kennas, his death adds a 'powerful' dimension to the emotion of the experience.

PS Sad one. I imagine his little girl (Matilda Rose, was born on October 28, 2005) will remember him by one of his happier movies. :2twocents

http://movies.nytimes.com/2008/07/18/movies/18knig.html?ref=arts
..the Joker.. a demonic creation and three-ring circus of one wholly inhabited by Heath Ledger. Mr. Ledger died in January at age 28 from an accidental overdose, after principal photography ended, and his death might have cast a paralyzing pall over the film if the performance were not so alive.

But his Joker is a creature of such ghastly life, and the performance is so visceral, creepy and insistently present that the characterization pulls you in almost at once. When the Joker enters one fray with a murderous flourish and that sawed-off smile, his morbid grin a mirror of the Black Dahlia’s ear-to-ear grimace, your nervous laughter will die in your throat.

A self-described agent of chaos, the Joker arrives in Gotham abruptly, as if he’d been hiding up someone’s sleeve. He quickly seizes control of the city’s crime syndicate and Batman’s attention with no rhyme and less reason. Mr. Ledger, his body tightly wound but limbs jangling, all but disappears under the character’s white mask and red leer. Licking and chewing his sloppy, smeared lips, his tongue darting in and out of his mouth like a jittery animal, he turns the Joker into a tease who taunts criminals (Eric Roberts’s bad guy, among them) and the police (Gary Oldman’s good cop), giggling while he-he-he (ha-ha-ha) tries to burn the world down. He isn’t fighting for anything or anyone. He isn’t a terrorist, just terrifying.

Mr. Nolan is playing with fire here, but partly because he’s a showman. Even before the Joker goes wild, the director lets loose with some comic horror that owes something to Michael Mann’s “Heat,” something to Cirque de Soleil, and quickly sets a tense, coiled mood that he sustains for two fast-moving hours of freakish mischief, vigilante justice, philosophical asides and the usual trinkets and toys, before a final half-hour pileup of gunfire and explosions. This big-bang finish — which includes a topsy-turvy image that poignantly suggests the world has been turned on its axis for good — is sloppy, at times visually incoherent, yet touching. Mr. Nolan, you learn, likes to linger in the dark, but he doesn’t want to live there.
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slightly off topic - but he was into chess apparently - including a planned movie as director :2twocents
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heath_Ledger

Ledger was an avid chess player, winning Western Australia's junior chess championship at the age of 10.[21][22] As an adult, he often played with other chess enthusiasts at Washington Square Park.[23][24]

Allan Scott's film adaptation of the chess-related 1983 novel The Queen's Gambit, by Walter Tevis, which at the time of his death he was planning both to perform in and to direct, would have been Ledger's first feature film as a director
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jersey10 said:
Why do you assume we all agree he was a genius? I don't. And I certainly don't put him in the category of "totally admirable person".
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my assumption was wrong

Hey if you're more admireable than he was, jersey.. in your eyes ... then so be it I guess :eek:
 
jersey10 said:
Why do you assume we all agree he was a genius? I don't. And I certainly don't put him in the category of "totally admirable person".
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My favourite movies of his were the minor ones. I think Candy was absolutely brilliant, and he was sensational.

As far as being a 'genius', I agree to some extent. I think actors are generally born with it, and they are overcompensated for their talent.

But, as I said, I have not seen the movie, and this is about his performance verses the hype of his death.

An Oscar to a dead person?

Has it happened?

I think the Academy may go that way from what I have read.
 
Hello,
There has been one posthumous Oscar winner, Peter Finch in Network News. Peter Finch was Australian. There have been 7 people nominated for an Oscar after they passed away.

Have not seen the movie in question so can’t make comment other than to say based on Heath Ledgers past performances he certainly had the talent equal to past recipients.
Some of his performances in comparatively low budget Aussie movies were great.

Regards
 
2020hindsight said:
my assumption was wrong

Hey if you're more admireable than he was, jersey.. in your eyes ... then so be it I guess :eek:
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Jersey wasn't claiming to be admirable as far as I can tell.
Just realistically pointing that not all of us agree with your assertion that everyone found Mr Ledger to be totally admirable.
 
Aren't we talking about his performance in Batman?

And whether it's Oscar material?

:confused:
 
Kennas, thinking more generally about the topic, isn't it the case that almost always when someone dies we find lots of good stuff to say about them?
e.g. have you ever heard/read an obituary where someone fails to point out all the endearing qualities of the dearly departed?
It just seems to be something we do, presumably out of some sense of respect for those who can't answer back, when someone dies.

Have you ever been to a funeral or read an obituary where the dead person is described as a total bastard whose death is a relief to everyone who knew him???

I'm just suggesting that something which has become a social convention is perhaps exaggerated when it applies to someone well known like Heath Ledger.

Remember the huge fuss when, after Steve Irwin's death, Germaine Greer in her usual forthright fashion, made some critical comments about him.
There was an outcry of massive proportions. She was just telling the truth as she saw it, but somehow it was unacceptable when the bloke was dead.
OK to say it when he's alive.
 
Yes, I agree Julia.

But, how did people talk about our old friend Adolf? eeeek!

Extreme example.

Actually, there was someone else who recently died and was canned here. Charlton Heston was it?

But, agree, we generally concentate on people's great qualities when they die, and forget their poor ones.

I obviously don't know Heath Ledger from a bar of soap, but I thought he was a very talented character actor who seemed to put a lot of effort into his roles.

The movie is coming out in Lima this week, so I get to watch him with a Spanish accent. :eek:
 
Depends on whether he was acting or his performance was just an extension of his inner 'demons' that contributed to his 'accidental' death? The Americans like to build these things into larger than life events - James Dean was not anything out of the ordinary yet today he's a 'legend'.
The're all just actors after all, the cult of personality? Who should we applaud - the people who feed the homeless etc or actors? Humans want heroes.
 
But only in a few cases do their fellow actors come across as so genuinely sad, almost to tears.

I mean this isn't your average accolade. :2twocents

More (many more) than 200 youtubes if you search for "Heath Ledger Tribute".
Here is the 18th page of such youtube tributes ...

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=heath+ledger+tribute&page=18

btw - a nice song this one ...

"He Was a Friend of Mine": a Heath Ledger Tribute
 
A couple of letters to the editor at a site called " salon.com " (?) - powerfully expressed (imo)

http://letters.salon.com/ent/movies/feature/2008/01/23/ledger/view/index.html

Wednesday, January 23, 2008 07:38 AM

When you are a celebrity, everyone knows you. Of course, they don't actually know you, but something you do creates a connection with your fans. Whether you are an actor, musician, or even a politician, your fans feel a deep relationship.

Heath connected with a lot of people over his short career. He never made an ass of himself on public. He lived in a regular neighborhood. He made some really good films. These are the things that made him even more accessable to his fans. These are the things that make his passing that much harder to deal with.

It's true that he was just an actor and there are a lot of more important things in this world. Think of this. Heath was one of those people that could make all those other things disappear for a short while in his films. For that, he will be missed.
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His portrayal of Ennis del Mar is one of the greatest in film history. He made me (a straight woman) feel the pain not just of the gay men who must keep their emotions hidden but that of ALL men, who are so constrained by the rigid rules of masculinity.

He absolutely broke my heart in that movie--helped me to understand my husband, my sons, my brother, my dad just a little bit better. All the "gay cowboy" jokes are pathetic--and by all accounts Heath Ledger hated them too as well he should have. He played one of the greatest tragic film roles of all time and I hope that he is remembered, by those of us who didn't know him at least, for that.
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3 to 1 odds on a posthumous Academy Award to Ledger

broke all box office records etc .....

"All signs have it going down as Heath Ledger's film"

http://www.abc.net.au/bestof/#s2310739 click on "watch 4MB"

ABC critic's forum this afternoon suggesting that it will be a movie (in particular Ledger's part) that wll be studied by acting schools for a long time to come . :eek:
 
http://www.rollingstone.com/reviews/movie/16155928/review/21477208/the_dark_knight

I can only speak superlatives of Ledger, who is mad-crazy-blazing brilliant as the Joker. Miles from Jack Nicholson's broadly funny take on the role in Tim Burton's 1989 Batman, Ledger takes the role to the shadows, where even what's comic is hardly a relief. No plastic mask for Ledger; his face is caked with moldy makeup that highlights the red scar of a grin, the grungy hair and the yellowing teeth of a hound fresh out of hell. To the clown prince of crime, a knife is preferable to a gun, the better to "savor the moment."

The deft script, by Nolan and his brother Jonathan, taking note of Bob Kane's original Batman and Frank Miller's bleak rethink, refuses to explain the Joker with pop psychology. Forget Freudian hints about a dad who carved a smile into his son's face with a razor. As the Joker says, "What doesn't kill you makes you stranger."
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The Joker represents the last completed role for Ledger, who died in January at 28 before finishing work on Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. It's typical of Ledger's total commitment to films as diverse as Brokeback Mountain and I'm Not There that he does nothing out of vanity or the need to be liked.

If there's a movement to get him the first posthumous Oscar since Peter Finch won for 1976's Network, sign me up. Ledger's Joker has no gray areas ”” he's all rampaging id. Watch him crash a party and circle Rachel, a woman torn between Bale's Bruce (she knows he's Batman) and Eckhart's DA, another lover she has to share with his civic duty.

"Hello, beautiful," says the Joker, sniffing Rachel like a feral beast. He's right when he compares himself to a dog chasing a car: The chase is all. The Joker's sadism is limitless, and the masochistic delight he takes in being punched and bloodied to a pulp would shame the Marquis de Sade. "I choose chaos," says the Joker, and those words sum up what's at stake in The Dark Knight.
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Not fair giving away the mysteries of The Dark Knight. It's enough to marvel at the way Nolan ”” a world-class filmmaker, be it Memento, Insomnia or The Prestige ”” brings pop escapism whisper-close to enduring art. It's enough to watch Bale chillingly render Batman as a lost warrior, evoking Al Pacino in The Godfather II in his delusion and desolation.

It's enough to see Ledger conjure up the anarchy of the Sex Pistols and A Clockwork Orange as he creates a Joker for the ages.

Go ahead, bitch about the movie being too long, at two and a half hours, for short attention spans (it is), too somber for the Hulk crowd (it is), too smart for its own good (it isn't). The haunting and visionary Dark Knight soars on the wings of untamed imagination. It's full of surprises you don't see coming. And just try to get it out of your dreams.
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Found this in an "eye4" review of the Dark Knight...

It's more reminiscent of a "Heat" - Michael Mann's extremely popular cops-and-robbers flick starring Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino - than a "Superman" or and "Incredible Hulk". While those films are good, this is very good - it goes the extra mile...

For a superhero film to give you the biggest lump in the throat ever ... you know it's in a league of its own.

In short. the Dark Knight is the best Batman film ever made, the best superhero movie ever made, and the best movie of the year to date. It's a five-star masterpiece that'll leave you spinning.
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The poor bugger should get an Oscar. All the fame made him a drug addict who doctor shopped for some release. At least his talent would be recognised.

gg
 
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