Batman - The Dark Knight

Last two week, I went to the mall and watched 'The Dark Knight' with friends =) Quite nice especially the joker!! My rating for this movie is 9 out of 10.

Three years after "Batman Begins" reinvigorated the ailing Batman franchise to the tune of $352 million in worldwide box office earnings, Christian Bale is back in the Batsuit to battle forces of evil in Gotham City in director Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight," a highly anticipated sequel.

With our masked vigilante hero experiencing a crisis of conscience in a city thrown into chaos by an anarchist villain, the movie is packed with action, much of it shot in IMAX. Sadly, it's also the final completed performance by Heath Ledger, who died in January. Ledger plays the fearless and ferocious The Joker.

"He's the elemental bad guy, with no cause and no motivation, so he's a much more frightening villain," says screenwriter Jonathan Nolan, who wrote the script with his brother Christopher and David S. Goyer. Ledger created the ultimate nemesis in a role that may bring him a posthumous Oscar nomination.

Christopher Nolan reassembled his "Batman Begins" cast including Bale, Gary Oldman as Lt. Gordon, Michael Caine as Alfred and Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox, adding Ledger, Maggie Gyllenhaal as Rachel Dawes (taking over the role from Katie Holmes) and Aaron Eckhart as D.A. Harvey Dent, who eventually transforms into the vengeful Two-Face.

Production began in April 2007, with the bank robbery prologue shot in Chicago, where the bulk of the exterior and action sequences were filmed. There were also trips to Hong Kong and the U.K. for additional exterior and interior work.

"Moving back and forth between three different countries is an unusual way to make a film, but it's what we needed to do to get the size and scope of what we needed, to shoot as much as possible in real places, on real locations," says Nolan, who also endeavored to make the movie with as many practical effects as possible, using CG only when absolutely necessary.

Of course, shooting huge action sequences in busy cities and executing stunts like flipping a 40-foot truck, imploding a building and blowing up the beloved Batmobile took a lot of planning and effort, with the IMAX format adding an extra degree of difficulty.

Heath Ledger

Heath Ledger described the Joker as a "psychopathic, mass murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy".Nolan had wanted to work with Ledger on a number of projects in the past, but had been unable to do so.When Ledger saw Batman Begins, he realized a way to make the character work consistent with that film's tone, and Nolan agreed with his anarchic interpretation. To prepare for the role, Ledger lived alone in a hotel room for a month, formulating the character's posture, voice and psychology, and kept a diary, in which he recorded the Joker's thoughts and feelings to guide himself during his performance.^[10][14] While he initially found it difficult, Ledger was eventually able to generate a voice that did not sound like Jack Nicholson's take on the character in Tim Burton's 1989 Batman film.^[11][14] He was also given Batman: The Killing Joke and Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth to read, which he "really tried to read [...] and put it down".Ledger also cited inspirations such as A Clockwork Orange and Sid Vicious, which were "a very early starting point for Christian [Bale] and I. But we kind of flew far away from that pretty quickly and into another world altogether."There’s a bit of everything in him. There’s nothing that consistent," Ledger said, adding that "There are a few more surprises to him."Before Ledger was confirmed to play the Joker in July 2006,Paul Bettany,Lachy Hulme,Adrien Brody,Steve Carell, and Robin Williams publicly expressed interest in the role. On January 22, 2008, after he had completed filming The Dark Knight, Ledger suddenly died, leading to intense press attention and memorial tributes. "It was tremendously emotional, right when he passed, having to go back in and look at him every day," Nolan recalled. "But the truth is, I feel very lucky to have something productive to do, to have a performance that he was very, very proud of, and that he had entrusted to me to finish."All of Ledger's scenes appear as he completed them in the filming; in editing the film, Nolan added no "digital effects" to alter Ledger's actual performance posthumously. Nolan has dedicated the film in part to Ledger's memory, as well as to the memory of technician Conway Wickliffe, who was killed during a car accident while preparing one of the film's stunts.