Heath Ledger Page 2

I almost missed this off-the-cuff joke -- it's spray-painted on the side of a semi as the Joker (Heath Ledger) descends on a police convoy hustling doomed district attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) beneath the streets of Gotham. But it beautifully captures the balancing act director Christopher Nolan attempts in The Dark Knight, an anticipated blockbuster that seems capable at any point of plunging headlong into hilarity or insanity, moral stability or absolute chaos.

Continue reading: The Dark Knight Review

At first, he's a young, train-hopping wanderer who has taken the name Woody (Marcus Carl Franklin), from his hero Woody Guthrie. He also plays a guitar with "This Machine Kills Fascism" painted on it. Later, the man appears as an aged Billy the Kid (Richard Gere) who can't understand why the locals are being bullied out of their land by a decrepit Pat Garrett (Bruce Greenwood). Fitfully, the sequences are shot in the dusty browns of Peckinpah and the hippie westerns of the late 1960s and 1970s. Both stories, along with the others, are consistently interrupted by a press conference with poet Arthur Rimbaud (Ben Whishaw), who speaks in a particularly American sarcasm while scrutinizing everyone who questions him, half-mumbling with cigarette in hand.

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Jimmy (Heath Ledger) works as a doorman at a strip club in the infamous Kings Cross area of Sydney. "The Cross" is the kind of place where trouble of the criminal kind is perfectly unavoidable, and Jimmy has trouble avoiding it. When asked by crime kingpin Pando (Bryan Brown) to deliver $10,000 to a unit in Bondi, Jimmy sees himself moving up in the world. When he loses the money on a disappointingly unromantic errand and it is stolen by a pair of Dickensian street kids, Jimmy knows he is a dead man. His only chance is to hook up with his dead brother's ex-gang and rob a bank to make the money back. As Pando's goons, including Acko (David Field) and Wally (Tom Long), hunt Jimmy down, the film races tensely to a climax that will decide his fate.

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Harry Faversham (Heath Ledger), a soldier with the British Army, is unwilling to travel into the Sudan with the rest of his regimen to protect British interests there. So, he resigns his commission. In response, Harry's fellow soldiers issue him three feathers symbolizing his cowardice for leaving. Looking for support, he turns to his father (a former military officer), who disowns him. As well, his fiancé Ethne (Kate Hudson), who provides a fourth feather and calls off their engagement. Unable to cope with the harsh reactions his decision prompts, Harry hastily departs for the Sudan to find a way to help his friends and redeem his honor.

Continue reading: The Four Feathers Review

2002's "Dogtownand Z-Boys" (now available in an excellentDVD) was an adrenaline-rush history of the Zephyr Skateboarding Team, adaredevil band of teenage surf bums who were the first to take wave-ridingmoves to the streets and empty swimming pools of drought-stricken SantaMonica in the early 1970s.

This handful of young turks (oneof whom became the director of that film andthe writer of this one) invented the board-gripping, back-scratching, wall-climbingstyle that launched the entire rebel culture of extreme sports -- but youwouldn't know it from "Lords of Dogtown," which concerns itselfmore with fabricated love triangles, unhappy home lives and rivalries thatformed when fame came calling.

While the performances of the young cast members -- keyZ-Boys are played by John Robinson from "Elephant,"Emile Hirsch from "TheGirl Next Door" and Victor Rasuk from "RaisingVictor Vargas" -- are multifaceted, they sometimes have the under-rehearsedfeel of a bawdier after-school special. Or maybe that's just the clumsyexpository dialogue: "Hey, I think we should start a skateboard team,man," says one shirtless, long-haired dude to another. "There'smoney in this!"

Continue reading: Lords Of Dogtown Review

By now you've heard about the concept of "A Knight's Tale" and had the time to become justifiably dubious. A 14th Century jousting adventure set to the tune of guitar rock stadium anthems? How could that possibly be anything short of laughable?

The answer is -- well, I don't know exactly. But when, five minutes into the movie, a crowd of peasants at a jousting tournament starts stomping feet in time and bellowing "We will/We will/Rock You!" (and soon thereafter do "the wave"), I defy you not to grin an aw-what-the-heck grin and go along for the ride.

The story itself isn't much more than a dressed-up, time-warped sports underdog yarn, in which the lowborn hero ("The Patriot's" jaunty Heath Ledger) poses as a knight (only those of noble birth are allowed to compete) and becomes the toast of the jousting world. But in the hands of writer-director Brian Helgeland (who helmed "Payback" and co-wrote "L.A. Confidential"), the movie's cliché-spawn chassis is merely a jumping-off point for a jocular, undeflatable, high energy theme-park ride of action, wisecracks and romance.

Continue reading: A Knight's Tale Review

Plied with fiction and short on depth, the new biopic of legendary Australian outlaw Ned Kelly plays like "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" without the excitement, charm and humor.

Bearded and brooding but otherwise uncharismatic, Heath Ledger stars as the folk-hero bushranger (Aussie for "cowboy"), who according to this film was an upstanding citizen of the Outback frontier until contemptible, crooked, downright sinister lawmen drove him to a life of crime by picking on his family.

They jailed his ma, molested his teenage sister, and falsely accused him and his brothers of horse rustling. They "started a war" against us, Kelly says in voice-over. "So I killed their coppers. I robbed their banks."

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There's just no excuse for making a Shakespeare knock-off with "Savedby the Bell" quality dialogue. When a movie modernizes The Bard, evenif it's set it in a high school, the chief obligation is to dialogue aboveall else.

"10 Things I Hate About You" -- a "Clueless"-spawnremake of "The Taming of the Shrew" -- while an above averageentry in the recent pool of teen-targeted pics, is sorely lacking in thisarena.

Penned by two office temps-cum-screenwriters and directedby a feature film rookie (Gil Junger) as well, "10 Things" isa bright idea (I'm always an advocate of fiddling with Shakespeare), butit is an interpretation without poetry or rhythm, occasionally cashingin on multi-syllabic, Scrabble-winning words in a misguided attempt tomake its characters look rebelliously intellectual.

Continue reading: 10 Things I Hate About You Review

The Catholic church has been a source of inspiration for a whole slew of scary movies -- everything from goosepimpling tales of possession like "The Exorcist" to fact-based stories of institutionalized horror like the current art-house hit "The Magdalene Sisters."

But mostly these scary movies have not been all that frightening. In fact, mostly they've been forgettably cheap-fright thrillers that make up their own mythology, then dress it up in cassocks and clerical collars for mock-credibility, much like "The Order."

This dark supernatural thriller about a brooding young man of the cloth (lumpy-featured heartthrob Heath Ledger) in the midst of a major crisis of faith (there's this girl, see...) is loosely based on an archaic con offered to ex-communicated sinners on their deathbeds in Medieval times: Someone calling himself a "sin eater" would perform a ceremony in which, for a price, he would assume all the dying person's transgressions and guilt so he or she would be free to enter Heaven.

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All sweeping desert vistas and melodramatic 19th Century British imperial clichés (updated with politically correct tisk-tisking, of course), Shekhar Kapur's "The Four Feathers" is a hollow-hearted epic for the sake of an epic.

The tedious seventh film adaptation of A.E.W. Manson's turn-of-the-Century flag-waving war novel about the heroic redemption of craven English army officer, the film stars Heath Ledger ("A Knight's Tale," "Monster's Ball") as Harry Feversham, a highly respected young soldier who resigns his commission -- for reasons related to panic, not principle -- just as his regiment is being shipped off for the first time to battle Sudanese rebels.

"I never wanted to join the army," he whines. "I did it for my father. I thought I'd serve out my commission a year or two."

Continue reading: The Four Feathers Review

For a relentlessly unoriginal, pandering and predictable, two-and-a-half hour Revolutionary War epic that white-washes slavery, chooses exaggerated slow-motion action over any interest in historical accuracy and is helmed by a director who has demonstrated little talent for anything but overblown textbook filmmaking, "The Patriot" isn't a bad movie.

It's a mimeographed knock-off of "Braveheart" in buckskin vests and powdered wigs, but that doesn't seem to bother Mel Gibson, who won an Oscar for directing that film and stars in this one as another tread-upon colonial who takes up arms against England for his nation's freedom.

A hero of the French and Indian War who has since pledged to raise his children as a pacifist plantation farmer in South Carolina, Benjamin Martin (Gibson) is an amalgam of real revolutionary war figures, fantasized by screenwriter Robert Rodat ("Saving Private Ryan") as a politically correct hero who is a wonderful widower father, who communes with the natives (he's versed in the deadly use of a Tomahawk hatchet), who employs his plantation workers instead of enslaving them, and who takes up arms again only after a stuffy, sadistic redcoat Colonel named Tavington (Jason Issacs) kills one of his sons in cold blood when he finds Martin's home filled with rebel soldiers receiving first aid after a battle.

Continue reading: The Patriot Review