Tarnish wrote:I wonder how many of those votes have only seen Ledger/are 13 years old.
I was just thinking that the other day.
Steve wrote:Yes, because anyone who disagrees with you must be 13.
As much as I hate to use this phrase, "Ooh, a strawman!"
The point Tarnish was making is this. How can a person who has never seen Cesar Romero's Joker, or Jack Nicholson's Joker, say that Heath Ledger is the best? There's no basis for comparison.
It'd be like if I said, "Metal Gear for the NES is the best Metal Gear game ever made, all the other ones suck" and you asked, "Have you played any of the other Metal Gear games?" "Well, no...but it doesn't matter, they suck."
Robin wrote:He plays a stark raving mad character VERY well.
And here, my friends, is where we come to the problem with this.
Heath Ledger DOES play a stark raving mad character very well. However, in my opinion, he does not play the JOKER well. And when the Joker is the character you are supposed to be portraying, it matters little how well you can act if you aren't portraying the character properly.
Let's look at Danny DeVito in the movie Batman Returns. He acted extremely well. He was good at playing a short, scraggly, psychotic reject. However, this is not what the character of the Penguin is like at all. The Penguin is a distinguished gentlemen who dresses sharply and is polite and cunning.
Danny DeVito acted amazingly. However, his acting has nothing to do with how true to the character it is. Imagine if you will a fantastically animated sequence in Fruits Basket where Tohru punched the ground and make the earth split in half. That'd be AWESOME! But it would be out of character and therefore NOT a good portrayal of her. It doesn't matter how cool it is, it isn't true to the original.
I'd wager a good portion, not all, but a good portion of the people voting here have never seen the original Batman TV series, nor even Tim Burton's masterful film Batman. They may never have even seen the wonderfully done Batman: The Animated Series cartoon.
I will have to say that yes, Mark Hamill IS the best Joker, though I voted for Nicholson. It's not fair, since he only did a voice, but WHAT a voice. It was so definitive for the Joker that when I read my copy of The Killing Joke, Hamill's voice and distinctive laugh are what I heard in my mind for the Joker's speech. I've also noticed that the people in this thread that actually read comics also voted for Mark Hamill...coincidence? I doubt it, as the people who have read the source material are most intimately familiar with the character and know how he should best be portrayed...and they have said, Ledger is not the best portrayal.
Still, it's very difficult to compare the Jokers at all. Cesar Romero was light-hearted and silly, and of course, his version of the Joker would look ridiculously out of place in The Dark Knight. It would be awful. But by the same token, Ledger's Joker would look just as out of place in the original Batman TV show. It's hard to compare the two when they are written so very differently, for different time periods and different audiences.
The interesting thing is that Nicholson's Joker would fit in EITHER situation, both Dark Knight and the 60's show. Does this make him the best Joker? Well, not exactly (though I think he's the best of the three live-action choices), but to me it means he was the best WRITTEN Joker.
To those who still say Ledger's Joker is the definitive interpretation, I have only this to say. In Batman, if you took off Jack Nicholson's makeup, and just left him named Jack Napier, but left everything else exactly the same, people would watch the movie and say, "This guy acts just like the Joker. Why didn't they just use the Joker?"
Now, let's say there was no Joker card at the end of Batman Begins. There were no rumors of Joker being used. No one ever heard anything about Joker being in Dark Knight. Heath Ledger didn't wear makeup or the purple suit, but everything else was exactly the same. How many people would say "This guy acts just like the Joker"?
Maybe, possibly, a handful. But that's the difference. Everyone would have recognized Nicholson for the Joker even without the makeup, but hardly anyone would have recognized Ledger for the Joker without it.
That isn't Ledger's fault, and I'm not saying he's a bad actor. He's an EXCELLENT actor, and I think he did the best job he could have done in that movie. I think almost nobody else could have acted as well as he did in Dark Night. The problem lies on the writers and the producer and director for making a Joker that was not true to the comics, not Ledger.
So when I say Ledger was far from the best Joker, not even close, I am not slamming Ledger's acting ability. I am praising it, as it deserves to be praised. Rather, I am slamming the writers and makers of Dark Knight for straying so far from the source material, same as everyone else seems to do for most other comic book movies.
*gets off soapbox*
