Many, including us, have been wondering out loud how Warner Bros. plans on addressing the unique (and thankfully so) marketing problem currently facing The Dark Knight: Namely, what to do about a...... lire la suite
Many, including us, have been wondering out loud how Warner Bros. plans on addressing the unique (and thankfully so) marketing problem currently facing The Dark Knight: Namely, what to do about a...
Voici le premier de trois volets d'un dossier special, qui se poursuivra demain et dimanche. L'equipe de The Dark Knight a fait tres fort! Elle a mis presque une plethore de sites Web en ligne, comportant tous des informations sur le film. Voici les 10 premiers... Époustouflant!2 Vote(s)
Along with Hilary Duff and the rest of the world, I decided to go see Dark Knight because of all the hype. Shit bored the fuck out of me and the truth is that Heath Ledger was amazing in it, but since the rest of the movie was a waste of fucking time, he didn’t save the fuckin’ day. Maybe I didn’t like it becaue I generally hate movies and have no attention span for them, or maybe it was just fucking drawn out and uneventful and the main love interest who was supposed to be hot and who was played by Katie Holmes the first movie, was a fuckin ugly whore who I was happy to see die. I have an source close to Heath Ledger who recently told me that he’s not actually dead and that they just took the marketing of the move a little more aggressively than other movies have taken marketing, They figured if they staged his death, he’d get some time off and the buzz it would generate would lead to the shit we all witnessed/took part in this past weekend. Don’t be surprised if in the next month, dude surfaces again and tells us all it was a joke as part of his role as the joker. I mean people attributed his role to leading him to use sleeping pills because it was just that depraved and that ended up killing him, hyping up his character more than any character’s ever been hyped. Hearing people giggle in awe and excitement as soon as dude got on screen, just further proves that he carried the movie on his back and the only reason people were there was because of him and you’ll all regret it when you realize the real joke’s on you because after wasting 3 hours of my life, I feel compelled to start using and mixing perscription pills, but the good news is that the movie was so dull, I had no problem falling asleep during it, after it and even today when I think about it I find myself yawning and thinking how nice bed would feel. I am not just saying this because I am “that” guy, who just shits on everything that hits and that is successful to be the against the grain motherfucker, I sincerely think the shit sucked but not as much as these pics of Hilary Duff on her way to see the movie. The point of all this is to say that if I am wrong and he is actually dead, it had to be done by the studio because I don’t think a death since Princess Diana has made this much money and no life is worth as much as this movie made, I guess it’s just a small sacrifice and can only hope it becomes a regular strategy and used by other companies, mainly by MTV with the cast of The Hills, in a rigged bus accident that offs all these cunts in hopes of selling lots of DVDs. This entry was posted on Monday, July 21st, 2008 at 10:30 am and is filed under Dark Knight, Hilary Duff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
Welcome to the latest edition of Defamer Attractions, your regular Friday guide to another oversaturated summer weekend of new movies. While The Dark Knight sets up Batcamp for another week at number one, another brooding franchise goes up against Team Apatow in the also-ran camp. A British classic gets a fine art-house face-lift, meanwhile, and a windfall of new DVD's will keep the agoraphobes among us busy for a while. As always, our opinions are our own, but they're bulletproof, so read on for the only filmgoing advice that matters. WHAT'S NEW: The primary competition for The Dark Knight's second weekend will be... itself. You have to feel for Sony and Fox for dropping Step Brothers and X-Files: I Want to Believe opposite History's Greatest Film, but that's just the kind of extraordinary season it's been. Those films will perform decently enough, though — roughly $30 million for the Judd Apatow-produced Ferrell/Reilly comedy, $21 million for the sci-fi franchise adaptation — which is another bummer for Fox, which has only its overachieving The Happening to show for a long, lean summer at the box office. Also opening this weekend are the concert/protest film CSNY: Deja Vu; the oversexed '60s groupie chronicle Eight Miles High; Nanette Burstein's controversial pseudo-doc American Teen; the small-town gardener doc (seriously) A Man Called Pearl; and Minnie Driver's middling psychological drama Take. THE BIG LOSER: Not so much a "loser" as a handicapping interest of ours, Christian Bale's reported mum-thumping exploits — however blown out of proportion the actually are — could drop The Dark Knight a few percentage points more than it otherwise would have. But even if plunges by 50% (which it won't), it'll still nab $80 million, so again, save your pity for Fox. THE UNDERDOG: When news hit in 2006 that director Julian Jarrold (Kinky Boots, Becoming Jane) was taking on an adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's novel Brideshead Revisited, skeptics seemed less anxious about a perversion of the author's elegant, class-crash tragedy than how the film would stand up to the epochal 1981 miniseries adaptation. We don't have time or space to even touch that, but it hardly seems to matter: Jarrold's Brideshead bites deep into the love triangle between middle-class Charles Ryder and the Catholic-burdened Flyte siblings Julia and Sebastian, aided by a cast of young British talent led by Hayley Atwell, Ben Whishaw and the extraordinary Matthew Goode (The Lookout, Match Point). Emma Thompson drops in as well for a stirring matron act, but it's Jarrold's scope and Goode's tone harmonizing so dynamically here that you almost can't imagine this story ever required nine hours to tell. So is this your week to catch up on The Dark Knight? Or do you, as Fox so desperately hopes, want to believe? Can Step Brothers actually have more gags than those in its trailer? Go ahead — call your shots now before the August doldrums come to claim us all.
Filed under: NewsThe marketing peeps over at Brandweek are reporting that this Summer's sure to be a hit blockbuster movie, The Dark Knight, will see a massive marketing campaign with companies signing on to do cross-promotional tie-ins including our own Xbox 360. Sometime this Summer, Microsoft will be holding a giveaway where they'll be handing out The Dark Knight themed Xbox 360s in both Batman and Joker flavors. Just think how twisted-crazy a Joker themed 360 would be. Details regarding the promotion are slim, but come July we'll be informed and on a Dark Knight 360 mission. We guess our limited edition Mass Effect Xbox 360 will have to tide us over for now.
Wired recently published an excellent article on the Dark Knight (Batman Begins 2). It's a must-read for anyone who's a fan of Batman, the film's director, Christopher Nolan, or just doing things the old fashioned way. Between interesting tidbits like Christian Bale himself standing on the edge of the Sears Tower, arguments with the Chinese government to allow stunt helicopters over Hong Kong, and the film's huge 8K Imax cameras outright cracking their mounts, you really get a glimpse of the trouble the filmmakers went through to nail a gritty visual effect while using CGI only sparsely. But one thing I wanted to highlight was a particularly interesting segment from Wally Pfister, the film's director of photography. He explains the relevance of using huge Imax film stock in the days of 1080p televisions and digital compression. It's more of a visceral thing. You can see something way off on the horizon. You can see a little glint of light, a reflection in Batman's eye. You can't see it in a conventional theater. And you definitely can't see it on a plasma screen at home. Only a handful of the Dark Knight's scenes were shot with Imax film and cameras, but I'm looking forward to them all the same. Now read it all over at Wired. Or I swear I'll blockquote the whole thing. [Wired]
It's essentially just a marketing tool for the Dark Knight movie, but hot damn if we don't like this. Just run the app, take a picture of yourself, then add Joker elements to your face. Works on iPhone (use the camera) or iPod touch (use a saved picture). The only downside is that there's no way to delete picture elements once you've let go of your fingers, so be careful or you'll have to start over. [iTunes - Thanks Marco!]
After more than four months of hype, it's getting to feel like there's increasingly less to discover about The Dark Knight except whether or not it's good. Variety pretty much took care of that on Sunday, overriding David Letterman's early, spoilerrific review with a bit more textural rave. That was preceded in the LA Times by more Heath Ledger superlatives and requisite bleakness reinforcement from director Chris Nolan. But Anne Thompson has an even better showing at her blog, featuring expansive Nolan quotes from a recent screening/discussion and, far more impressively, a look at Michael Bay's little-known original stab at the Dark Knight screenplay: EXT. A HIGHWAY — DAY ... Howdy, Batman. Got time for a little... prank? JOKER unleashes an all-out barrage of missiles, like the biggest fucking missiles you will ever see. BATMAN shoots his own back, and they all collide into each other in the middle of the highway releasing a violent explosion, and then, an explosion within that explosion, this time in slow motion, with tanks flying out of it. Both BATMAN and JOKER eject from their vehicles, shooting themselves into helcopters. they they unleash even bigger missiles, which whizz past both of the helicopters, destroying the highway on the ground below. The action's not over yet, though, because in the distance there are still five more highways and, on top of them, a bridge. And you know what? While we can't vouch for how Ledger's penultimate performance might have fared in the Bay biosphere (regardless of this joke script's authenticity), at this point we can't deny we'd mind living in the parallel universe where this script would not only be written, but this movie would be made.
So finally the next Batman film, The Dark Knight, lurches into theaters this Friday. Anticipation is intense, as Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan's reboot of the franchise, was such a dark success. Of course, though, the real reason to see the film is Heath Ledger as uber villain The Joker. The buddingly talented actor died all too young in a SoHo apartment this past winter, leaving this as his last complete performance. So yeah, that's all we really care about when surveying the early reviews (we already know that Christian Bale will be gruff and brooding, Morgan Freeman sage and weary, Maggie Gyllenhaal unsurprisingly better than Katie Holmes, the film as a whole loud and jangly). So what do the critics say? Mostly, that he's fantastic. The increasingly-irrelevant Peter Travers, of Rolling Stone, calls the performance "mad-crazy-brilliant." The Davids Edelstein and Denby worry that Ledger stepped perhaps too far into the abyss to access the character. Basically, we're excited. Read a digest of the reviews after the jump. · "Ledger's performance is a beauty. His Joker has a slow cadence of speech, as if weighing words for maximum mischief and contempt. He moves languidly as if to savor his dark deeds, his head and body jerking at times from an overload of brain impulses." [THR] · "It's a stupendously creepy performance, wild but never over the top. He cuts a figure so dangerous that you wonder if Batman is up to the task—or if our hero himself will have to become as ruthless as his foe. When you're fighting an enemy who plays by no rules, do you have to abandon your own moral code to vanquish him?" [Newsweek] · "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.'" [Rolling Stone] · "How is Heath Ledger? My heart went out to him. He's working so very hard to fill the void, to be doing something every second. It's rave and rage and purge acting. This Joker is a straight-out psychopath—a Stephen King clown-demon with smudged greasepaint and yellow teeth and hair that appears to have never been washed. As written, the Joker is like a souped-up Andy Robinson in Dirty Harry (only this Harry won't blow him away with a .44 Magnum), and Ledger revs it higher and higher. He bugs his eyes and licks compulsively at the gashes that extend his mouth. He tries on different voices. First he sounds like Cagney in White Heat, then slides into a prissy singsong like Al Franken's Stuart Smalley, then throws in some fruity Brando flourishes and a dash of Hannibal Lecter. He's lethal—fast with sharp objects—but apart from a gruesome bit with a pencil not terribly prankish. I couldn't take my eyes off him, but in truth, I found the performance painful to watch. Scarier than what the Joker does to anyone onscreen is what Ledger must have been doing to himself—trying to find the center of a character without a dream of one." [NYMag] · "[Bale's is] a dogged but uninteresting performance, upstaged by the great Ledger, who shambles and slides into a room, bending his knees and twisting his neck and suddenly surging into someone's face like a deep-sea creature coming up for air. Ledger has a fright wig of ragged hair; thick, running gobs of white makeup; scarlet lips; and dark-shadowed eyes. 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. When Ledger wields a knife, he is thoroughly terrifying (do not, despite the PG-13 rating, bring the children), and, as you're watching him, you can't help wondering—in a response that admittedly lies outside film criticism—how badly he messed himself up in order to play the role this way. His performance is a heroic, unsettling final act: this young actor looked into the abyss." [New Yorker]
After surviving months of Dark Knight hype, viral outreach and tastefully overblown praise for late co-star Heath Ledger, Defamer finally got its chance at a screening Tuesday to see what all the Bat-fuss was about. And as editor Seth Abramovitch and senior editor S.T. VanAirsdale discovered in their second installment of Defamer Instant Reviews, not everybody is ready to validate its Second Coming status quite yet. Is it good? Absolutely. Is it the best film of the summer? That's where things get complicated — on AIM, of course, because this watershed cultural moment deserves no less. STV: That said, I just thought it was pretty good. SA: I thought it was excellent! STV: Yeah, yeah, fine. It's fitfully brilliant, but so heavy-handed. Did I miss something? SA: But that said, I don't think a single scene passed by that I didnt feel worked. And it was a long movie. STV: What about the story? I was lost. STV: But the Joker shows up wanting a piece of Teflon goombah Eric Roberts, the Russians, the blacks, and a Hong Kong money-laundering syndicate. STV: Even if Gotham City is totally corrupt, it's the most equal-opportunity corruption in history, which I guess should be commended. SA: Speaking of the Joker, what did you think of Heath? SA: I was prepared for him to be annoying, but I actually really enjoyed him. SA: I mean, its The Joker! This isn't a portrait in subtlety. You want hyena cackles! SA: Yeah — their not committing to his backstory was a strong choice, but I'm not sure it really helped them. SA: But I think they were trying to say, "What does it matter where he came from?" Like, what does it matter where any psychopath comes from? He's chaos. But then you have no psychological in, so he's less interesting. STV: He's a great director, though, right? I mean, this film looks, feels, sounds amazing. STV: But he's so much better at subterranean truck chases and high-altitude kidnappings. I want overturned big rigs! STV: And the Bat-Blobile. What was that? The Batmobile was a hulking blob of scrap on wheels. STV: He's basically a cockney Jiminy Cricket serving breakfast. How about Morgan Freeman? SA: If God and Q had a kid. STV: I think he's the best thing about it. STV: He's a guy pulled 15 different ways, very flawed, vulnerable, and at his best when things are out of his control. He gets to work when shit hits the fan, while everyone else just sort of... talks. SA: What did you think of Batman's voice? STV: I didn't quite get it. SA: He'll definitely get a nomination. SA: I sort of think the movie itself deserves a Best Picture nomination. It's just so ambitious and epic and so expensive-looking. STV: This movie is going to make a fortune, right? I'm calling $140 million for the weekend plus $2 billion in damage caused by rioting fans worldwide. STV: And I am a believer in IMAX. SA: OMG — that hospital. Yeah, I really loved this movie. SA: Iron Man was fun; this was a nice compliment.