Who got Engulfed more ?Ledger or Devito

[onDgrind]

P.S. I wasn't ragging DeVito's performance. It was great and IMO is hands d own the best interpretation of Penguin in comic, film or animation to date. Simply, brilliant. But I think Ledger and Pffeifer were further immersed into the depths of their characters and didn't feel the need to try and steal scenes like DeVito did.

Also another point for Pffiefer. yeah Ledger and DeVito stayed in character while in costume/make-up, Pffeifer put a damn live bird in her mouth and orgasmed while it fluttered in her mouth. If that ain't method acting, I don't know what is.

Just the ***** i was looking for , if that aint the greatest line in a Batman movie, i dont know what is And i didnt think Devito was trying to steal scenes, he was just enjoying his role and getting immersed in it, if you think he was, then Ledger was trying to steal scenes too

 

[onDgrind]

Yeah, there's no way the Penguin could have fashioned a vehicle to transport him around the sewers that didn't resemble a huge rubber duck. Sewer transport = giant rubber duck. It's that simple.

I guess you didnt realise that was sarcasim? hence the lol before the comment Why so serioussss?

 

[the_scream]

I didn't really like the Penguin. I thought he was pretty one-note.

 

[DaRkVeNgeanCe]

I didn't really like the Penguin. I thought he was pretty one-note.

then it must be pretty hard for you to understand a character with many levels to his psyche.

 

[obiwan]

both of them were amazing, they were both very grotesque and borderline horror movie characters. i will always love devito's penguin, he was so driuven by anger and rage, and he certainly did "play that stinkin city like a heart from hell". ledgers joker was similiar, only he didnt try to win ppl over to his side, but he tried to "change" ppl by making them bad like him, or trying to at least. for me devito's penguin was a more driven character, even when he was almost defeated, even at his death, he still continued. he even jumped batman! i always remember the power he had in his little speech "while there parents are dancing, they will be dreaming away in there safe cribs, there soft beds...and we will SNATCH them! carry them into the sewer, and toss them into a DEEP, DARK WATERY GRAVE!!" he was just so freakin nasty!! ledgers joker came close to this kind of thing.

 

[obiwan]

I didn't really like the Penguin. I thought he was pretty one-note.

one note? he had more of a background then ledgers joker, and he was just as if not more nasty. penguin was evil, yes, but he had a tragic background and you totally understand why he wants to kill the children and then gotham, his parents really screwed him up. hes a tormented character and we understand why. with ledgers joker, there is no origin, and he always changes his "scar" stories so we are meant to think hes just making up these stories, thats those are not really his origins. so i felt penguin was a more fleshed out character then ledgers joker, because he had a REASON for doing all the bad stuff. ledgers joker was just a evil SOB with no reason for it, really except he is a crazy psycho. in a way, ledgers joker is more one note comic booky villians then devito's penguin, who had more depth to him.

 

[Batman137]

"Devito? hes a fall guy. Ledgers the brains of the operation."

 

[Superwoman Prime]

both of them were amazing, they were both very grotesque and borderline horror movie characters.

I don't think there's anything "borderline" about it. BR Penguin and Ledger Joker were horror villains. Heck, Ledger makes Freddy Krueger look harmless by comparison.

 

[the_scream]

then it must be pretty hard for you to understand a character with many levels to his psyche.

 

[the_scream]

one note? he had more of a background then ledgers joker, and he was just as if not more nasty. penguin was evil, yes, but he had a tragic background and you totally understand why he wants to kill the children and then gotham, his parents really screwed him up. hes a tormented character and we understand why. with ledgers joker, there is no origin, and he always changes his "scar" stories so we are meant to think hes just making up these stories, thats those are not really his origins. so i felt penguin was a more fleshed out character then ledgers joker, because he had a REASON for doing all the bad stuff. ledgers joker was just a evil SOB with no reason for it, really except he is a crazy psycho. in a way, ledgers joker is more one note comic booky villians then devito's penguin, who had more depth to him.

That's not the same thing. I am talking about the performance being "one note". Background to a character is different.

DeVito spent the film screaming and acting disgusting. There was no dimension to the role at all. He had a tragic past, yes, but this didn't affect his performance in the slightest.

Ledger's performance was better but he also didn't have dimension either. Which is good because the Joker should be single-minded, a non-stop rollercoaster. An antagonist designed to test the other characters. They weren't attempting to give him a duality in TDK.

But all this talk of DeVito giving all this dimension to the role...I don't think so. A grotesque monster with one thing on his mind. Well acted but one-note.

 

[Dr Strange]

I dont know how you can really compare the two characters, Ledgers Joker was phenominal and there is very little room for improvemnt. Danny Devito's Penguin is a bad interpretation of the character, i didnt mind how he looked but the whole Deformed raised by Penguins, bleeding black blood thing was awful, he is not some Mutant sewer creature he is suppose to be a mobster-type criminal, he fancies himself a "gentleman of crime", an intelligent and aristocratic personality. I do not think Devito captured this in his performance.

 

[onDgrind]

I dont know how you can really compare the two characters, Ledgers Joker was phenominal and there is very little room for improvemnt. Danny Devito's Penguin is a bad interpretation of the character, i didnt mind how he looked but the whole Deformed raised by Penguins, bleeding black blood thing was awful, he is not some Mutant sewer creature he is suppose to be a mobster-type criminal, he fancies himself a "gentleman of crime", an intelligent and aristocratic personality. I do not think Devito captured this in his performance.

Devito cant capture that simply because this Penguin wasnt the Penguin you described, i for one loved Devitos Penguin, i dont see whats wrong in modifying characters aslong as you give a depth and good interpretation of your modification. Joker didnt have scars on his face in the comics, however it worked in the movie, same way Spidey worked with organic webbing.

 

[Bat-Mite]

Heath's joker was not drammatic enough to make it in nolan's batman. He was very focussed on his goal and lacked a childlike fun side to him which would what would be required to parallel burton's dark driven serious batman.

I could never see nolan's interpretation saying 'you wouldn't hit a man with glasses would ya?' while donning a pair of lenless spectacles...Just wasn't theatrical enough.

Heath's Joker not childlike? Wow.

Spoiler

Okay.. let's see. "I don't wanna kill yooou! *giggles like a little girl* What would I do without yoou?!" The way he nonchalantly says "Yeah" to Gambol's rhetorical question on if he can steal from the mob and get away with it. The way he gently takes Harvey's hand in the hospital and says, just like a child would, "Sooo... when I say... ah, c'mere. When I say you and your girlfriend was nothing personal, you know that I'm telling the truth." And of course, the way he looks all pouty when the clock strikes midnight and neither one of the ferries have blown up. Now, that last part there doesn't have anything to do with fun, of course, but the expression on his face was really childish. Oh, and I almost forgot. When Batman has apprehended him and he's hanging there and says "like gravity!" and starts wiggling his arms around. What you're looking for is GAGS, and Heath's Joker didn't have as much of those as Jack did, but he still had plenty of childlike fun to him.

Anyway, despite the fact that I think Heath put his heart and soul into the Joker, I actually think Devito was more engulfed in the role. They say he never broke character on the set and scared a lot of the crew members by the way he was acting. That, and it takes a lot of commitment to chomp down on a real raw fish like he did. Eeeewww.

 

[Dr Strange]

Devito cant capture that simply because this Penguin wasnt the Penguin you described, i for one loved Devitos Penguin, i dont see whats wrong in modifying characters aslong as you give a depth and good interpretation of your modification. Joker didnt have scars on his face in the comics, however it worked in the movie, same way Spidey worked with organic webbing.

I see where your coming from and i agree that in Burtons Batman Film the way they made the Penguin was fine, its just i wished that it was a bit more realistic but i am talking about the Burton batman films which are brilliant but not realistic in anyway.

 

[onDgrind]

I see where your coming from and i agree that in Burtons Batman Film the way they made the Penguin was fine, its just i wished that it was a bit more realistic but i am talking about the Burton batman films which are brilliant but not realistic in anyway.

If you wanna talk about realism , then you could say every single one of the 6 Batman movies had their flaws when it came to realism. Even TDK, is not totally realistic, Batman is a fictional character, so if you wanna enjoy the movies, walk iinto the cinema with this in mind and you will enjoy and appreciate the movies more

 

[Bat-Mite]

If you wanna talk about realism , then you could say every single one of the 6 Batman movies had their flaws when it came to realism. Even TDK, is not totally realistic, Batman is a fictional character, so if you wanna enjoy the movies, walk iinto the cinema with this in mind and you will enjoy and appreciate the movies more

I would actually say that there was very little that was realistic about TDK (it's even less realistic than Begins, IMO), but I wouldn't have it any other way.

 

[Dr Strange]

All i was getting at was that Batman Returns is more of a fantasy film, when you look at TDK to BR which ones more realistic? But no Batman film is realistic because knowone would ever dress up like a big Bat and fight crime.

 

[onDgrind]

People throw the realism word around too much, seriously how many movies out there are realistic?

 

[Dr Strange]

People throw the realism word around too much, seriously how many movies out there are realistic?

I agree, Very good point, i say we just leave it there.

 

[DACrowe]

That's not the same thing. I am talking about the performance being "one note". Background to a character is different.

DeVito spent the film screaming and acting disgusting. There was no dimension to the role at all. He had a tragic past, yes, but this didn't affect his performance in the slightest.

Ledger's performance was better but he also didn't have dimension either. Which is good because the Joker should be single-minded, a non-stop rollercoaster. An antagonist designed to test the other characters. They weren't attempting to give him a duality in TDK.

But all this talk of DeVito giving all this dimension to the role...I don't think so. A grotesque monster with one thing on his mind. Well acted but one-note.

DeVito's Penguin was not single-minded in purpose. He was spat on by society and cast out for being different (something Batman can psychologically relate to) and his crime that made him messed up in the head was not what happened to his parents but what his parents did to him.

He comes back for revenge, yes, but he also wants respect. I think he truly hated his parents for what they did to him, but he honestly seemed longing and sad for them when he visited their grave. He was conflicted and put away his plans for punishing Gotham's elite when the proposition came up to "reclaim his birth right." He was finally accepted in society.

He was torn between being a monster of hellish imagery and a child throwing a temper tantrum. He looks at children and sees what he never had. He grew up as a freak show performer (Burton did a very interesting drawing of this) and humiliated. He is throwing temper tantrums and when he thinks society will finally accept him (even if he used them) he is cast out again the same way he was as a baby. He is torn between a man trying to find his humanity and being the monsterous animal-man that the world projected on him and continues to do so because he was born different.

He was given the "tragic monster" death at the end for that reason. The penguins that found him leave him to rest in his on watery grave, dying a monster who never could cope with humanity.

He was actually more developed than any of the Nolan villains save for Two-Face. Albeit, Joker isn't meant to be developed. I'd argue the same for Catwoman who I think has a richer character arc and story than any Bat-villain in a movie to date, except maybe again Eckhart's Two-Face. Ledger's Joker may be top, but he was more of an idea and a concept than a character. Penguin and Catwoman were fully fleshed out, complex human characters.

 

[DACrowe]

I dont know how you can really compare the two characters, Ledgers Joker was phenominal and there is very little room for improvemnt. Danny Devito's Penguin is a bad interpretation of the character, i didnt mind how he looked but the whole Deformed raised by Penguins, bleeding black blood thing was awful, he is not some Mutant sewer creature he is suppose to be a mobster-type criminal, he fancies himself a "gentleman of crime", an intelligent and aristocratic personality. I do not think Devito captured this in his performance.

Bad interpretation? I'll take that as a compliment, because the Penguin in the comics was always lame and the only reason he is still famous and well known is because of burgess Meredith on the old TV show. A petty criminal who dabbles in organized crime with a fetish for birds is not an interesting character. Especially if he is supposed to be compared to the "Gotham freaks" like Joker, Two-Face, Catwoman, Bane, Scarecrow, Riddler and Mr. Freeze.

I bring that up because I think Burton did for Penguin what TAS did for Mr. Freeze. They took a second-tier boring character and turned him into something more. In Mr. Freeze's case they gave him a storyline of pathos and Greek tragedy and Burton did that in his own way for Penguin. He turned him into a freakish villain worthy to be held along the ranks he is in the mainstream and made him a truly disgusting but complex villain.

If you are against distancing from the source material how can you like Ra's Al Ghul in Batman Begins? He is a normal man who trained Bruce Wayne to destroy Gotham as a mentor figure before he was Batman, has no daughter that Batman falls in love with (a major aspect of the character in the comics) and in fact dies a mortal man's death at the end.

If it is just aesthetically that they gave Penguin black goo and that sort of thing, show me the comic where it is revealed Joker wears poorly caked on make-up as opposed to being perma-white.

Sometimes changes are for the best of the director's vision and I'll take Burton's tragic and vilely haunting Penguin man-child as opposed to a short guy in a tux who attacks Batman with pet birds.

 

[DACrowe]

P.S.

Sorry for the multiple posts, but one more thing.

Fans take the realism argument too far. Nolan likes to ground his movies in reality so you can accept the fantastical elements, but that does not mean they have to be realistic. He sets in a very modern and real looking city (****, it might as well have been called Chicago when the elevated train, Sears Tower and Wrigley Field are all in plain sight in TDK) and goes ofr naturalism as opposed to Burton's take on gothic fantasy. But he does that so you can accept the more absurd aspects. For example a billionairae dressing up like a bat and successfully fighting crime, a group of ninjas whose order predates actual ninjas who are behind every major civilization collapse and plan to use a vapor sucking device (that would suck the air out of humans and kill them if it existed) to release a posion that causes people to hallucinate their worst fears and kill each other. Not to mention an insane clown who somehow can sneak into hospitals, ferries and city hall and plant poison or tons of explosives without anyone ever noticing, or a guy who gets half his face burned off to the bone and doesn't die or get serevly sick from infection when he refuses surgery.

And oh yeah, a guy dressed up like a bat who flies around the city and never gets caught or followed by news choppers when his giant tank-car drives home to Wayne manor. They're not realistic. They use realism to let the audience accept the unrealistic.

 

[MrQuinn]

Heath would definately fit into Burtons Dark interpretation , dont see why he wouldnt. And if we took out the Penguins , Burtons Penguin should fit into Nolans universe too, i dont see whats wrong with having a guy born different at birth.

haha this is like exactly what I said in another thread.

It's true though, I think both characters fit well into each others universes.

 

[obiwan]

i think trying to put too much realism in comic book movies is stupid, because....its a comic book movie.

 

[the_scream]

DeVito's Penguin was not single-minded in purpose. He was spat on by society and cast out for being different (something Batman can psychologically relate to) and his crime that made him messed up in the head was not what happened to his parents but what his parents did to him.

He comes back for revenge, yes, but he also wants respect. I think he truly hated his parents for what they did to him, but he honestly seemed longing and sad for them when he visited their grave. He was conflicted and put away his plans for punishing Gotham's elite when the proposition came up to "reclaim his birth right." He was finally accepted in society.

He was torn between being a monster of hellish imagery and a child throwing a temper tantrum. He looks at children and sees what he never had. He grew up as a freak show performer (Burton did a very interesting drawing of this) and humiliated. He is throwing temper tantrums and when he thinks society will finally accept him (even if he used them) he is cast out again the same way he was as a baby. He is torn between a man trying to find his humanity and being the monsterous animal-man that the world projected on him and continues to do so because he was born different.

He was given the "tragic monster" death at the end for that reason. The penguins that found him leave him to rest in his on watery grave, dying a monster who never could cope with humanity.

I completely disagree. Burton did not portray the Penguin this way at all. From one of the opening scenes in the film, the baby Penguin yanks a cat from his crib and bashes it. Clearly, Burton was saying he was born a monster both physically and psychologically. He was born that way before any trauma from his parents tossed him aside.

Sure, being left in the sewer would p*** anyone off. But there is no tragic moment where he is truly upset or conflicted. When he visits the grave, he is putting on a show for all the people of Gotham. Again, single minded with one purpose.

Even when he has been accepted by Gotham, he is silently plotting to kidnap all the children at night, toiling away gathering their names. Doesn't sound like someone who isn't single minded?

Now, Ledger's Joker is also single-minded. He's a monster like Penguin. The difference is the performance is not one note like DeVitos. The opening scene shows a silent Joker, nodding, and sitting on the side watching the bank robbers. In the mob boss scene, he's menacing yet playful. In the scene with the fake Batman, he plays the Joker as a complete monster (LOOK AT ME!!). He has moments where he silently taunts and other moments where he charges into action. There are playful moments of insanity and continual changes in his voice from high pitched to low and menacing. Then there is the slow build ups when he threatens his victims with his knife. All in all, the performance is something very special.

DeVito is good but he essentially acts like a crazed, angry monster throughout the film. The performance is one note.