Word: joker
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Where Batman appears dark and impenetrable, his nemesis the Joker (Jack Nicholson) is just the opposite. Nicholson wears a bright orange and purple suit that stands out from the Gotham cityscape. Dressed like that, the Joker is not about to disappear into the fog. And Nicholson's face, wrenched into a permanent parody of a grin (the result of being dropped, by Batman, into a vat of toxic chemicals), is a perfect complement to Keaton's expressionless mask...
...armature. He is amusingly awkward wrestling with the threat that Vicki's inquisitive love represents. He knows the world is not quite worth saving, and yet, "It's just something I have to do," he says, "because nobody else can." Same with Nicholson. Who else could play the Joker? He has a patent on satanic majesty. His performance is high, soaring, gamy. He is as good, and as evil, as the film allows him to be. Which, finally, is not enough...
...comics and in the popular mid-'60s TV series. And the younger generation, still devouring Batman comics in a new, hipper format. And, next week, moviegoers attending the opening of Batman, with Michael Keaton as Bruce Wayne (alias the Caped Crusader) and Jack Nicholson as his nemesis the Joker. In a season when the other big-budget films are sequels, Batman should seem familiar yet fresh. At least Warner Bros., with $35 million riding on the film, hopes...
...years," says Sam Hamm, one of the three writers who worked on the film, "just to get to the first shot of the guy in the costume that we've all come to see." His solution: Bruce Wayne is already Batman, but Jack Napier is not yet the Joker...
...Hamm's scenario, Batman interrupts a Napier heist and allows the crook to fall into a vat of toxic waste. Jack emerges as the Joker and leads a crime wave, concocting a formula to be injected into cosmetics that twists the victim's face into the Joker's awful leer. Soon Gotham is a city of the grinning dead, and only Batman can revive it, with the help of Vicki Vale (Kim Basinger), frontline photojournalist and all-time fabulous babe...