We’re now a mere five days away from The Dark Knight. I was planning on putting together a big review of all the viral marketing stuff, and include all the links to the different websites, but the Joker was kind enough to do that for us. Not only that, but he also took the time to vandalize all the other sites as part of his last game before the movie.

In preparation of the big wrap up, I got a phone call from, well basically, from the movie today. I’d given them my phone number previously for a viral thing that ended up with Commissioner Gordon entrapping me. Basically, the call today was a collage of the audio from earlier viral fun like the guy the Joker was holding hostage, the Harvey Dent hostage negotiation, Gotham News talk shows and the aforementioned Commissioner Gordon call. This viral campaign has been really well done on all fronts and people are certainly well hyped for the movie. You can get a lot of the specific audio and video from the campaign on this site.

Lots of glowing reviews. Kevin Smith called it the best comic book movie ever made. Certainly looks that way to me. Obviously I’m biased, but there’s just so much great potential, and every little bit of the movie I’ve seen (and I have seen a decent bit, at least 13 minutes worth of little clips between released scenes like the Two-Face tease and the various TV trailers) has been stellar. I’ve had to swear off the internet scavenging though.

There’s just too much access these days, you know? It must be frustrating for Chris Nolan, et al, to look on the nerd websites and see camera phone pictures from press screenings. They seem to have put a decent amount of care into controlling what information is available and what isn’t. Through following the movie online, watching spy shots of the filming in Chicago for the better part of the year, I’ve got some of the basic points down. I know a lot of the big beats. But I have no idea about how a lot of them fit together. And I know there are things I’m missing as well. I’ve got a lot of random puzzle pieces and only a few of them seem to fit together. Sure, there’s been a fair number of leaked photos, but there wasn’t anything too spoilerish out there before they started screenings.

Apparently there are two very spoilerish pictures out there, purportedly, one of each Joker and Two-Face (possibly the fates of each character at the end of the movie?). Took me about 5 minutes to find them. But I thought about it, and decided not to open the page. I’ve seen enough. In the meantime, I did download the score, and today picked up the animated DVD, Batman: Gotham Knight. It’s 6 stories in 6 different styles that all sort of link together. It’s really well done, though. It’s anime-styled and really comes across better than the last DC animated project, Darwin Cooke’s Justice League: The New Frontier. Not that TNF was bad, but it seemed a little underwhelming. There is a preview on Gotham Knight of a new Wonder Woman animated movie, which looks decent. Keri Russel is playing the titular heroine, with Alfred Molina as the villain. I like both those casting choices. I couldn’t buy Keri Russel as Wonder Woman in live-action, but I think she has a good voice for it. As for Molina, he gets to play Ares, the God of War. Wasn’t that Kratos?

Anyway, the other big thing people are talking about is obviously, Heath Ledger’s performance, which is being bandied about for an Oscar nomination. Honestly, I hope he gets nominated, but doesn’t win it. It may be a cliche that it’s “an honour just to be nominated,” but it is probably true. When people are running down an actor’s accomplishments, they mention the nominations as well as the awards. But my concern is that I expect if he did win it, regardless of whether or not he deserves it, a lot of cynical types will bitch that he just got it because he’s dead.But we still haven’t seen the film. Maybe this time next week, we’ll all be talking about how it would be insane not to give him a posthumous Oscar. We’ll find out soon.

Oh, also, I should mention that I just watched the newest Venture Brothers episode, “What goes down, must come up” and this one was as funny as the previous seasons. All you need to know is that Dr. Venture got lost in the sewers beneath the compound, and the guy from Prodigy was running around down there.

“He just keeps saying he’s the Firestarter. I’m trapped in a sewer with a confessed arsonist Brock!”

Well don’t I feel like a jackass.

After mouthing off about people not writing anything, I forget to post anything until 3 in the morning. Well, better late than never, I suppose. Again, this probably won’t be any sort of a article with real intrinsic value, but rather a collection of random thoughts and links to keep you entertained.

I’ve been on a big Hannibal Lector kick lately. It started when I saw Red Dragon for the first time a little while back. Then last week, I rented Hannibal and watched that. Good stuff. I heart Julianne Moore. I had been hoping she would get cast in The Dark Knight as Lieutenant Essen (co-worker that Commissioner Gordon has an affair with, then eventually becomes his wife years after his divorce from his current wife). She would have been perfect for that role.

Actually, that touches off on a good idea. I did a list of the best versions of Batman before. Here’s a short list of the best, most definitive (in my less than humble opinion) Batman stories for various characters. To get the best sense of them.

Batman:
-Year One
-The Dark Knight Returns (obviously)
-JLA: Tower of Babel (awesome story where Batman takes out the entire Justice League. Well, technically, it’s Ra’s Al Ghul, but he’s using Batman’s contingency plans for if any of the League ever went rogue.)
-Arkham Asylum, A Serious House on Serious Earth
-City of Crime
-Anything written by Jeph Loeb
-Anything drawn by Norm Breyfogle

Actually, Arkham Asylum also makes the list for a number of characters. It made the frigging Mad Hatter a cool character for god’s sake. That’s an accomplishment. It’s very psychological and dark. Here’s  a sample.

Joker:
-The Killing Joke
-Joker’s Five-Way Revenge
-The Joker Fish
-The Man Who Laughs
-Emperor Joker

Two-Face:
-Faces (by Matt Wagner of Grendel fame)
-Face to Face (recently in Detective Comics)
-don’t know the name of it, but a storyline about Two-Face falling in love with Det. Montoya, and then eventually outing her as a lesbian, getting her thrown off the police force in the process.
-The Long Halloween (basically a Two-Face origin with a year’s worth of context, set in the same timeframe as Year One.)

Riddler:
-Run, Riddler, Run
-Hush (for the first time, Riddler becomes a badass. Good for him)

Catwoman:
-another one I don’t know the name of, but Black Mask tortures and kills her sister and brother-in-law, or something like that. Really intense story.
-Catwoman sees really good character development over the course of Year One, Long Halloween, Dark Victory and Hush

Robin:
-Joker’s Wild
-Identity Crisis
-Under the Hood
-A great recent story that had Robin hostage in an SUV driven by the Joker around Gotham at Christmas time as he ran over pedestrians, shot drive-thru workers in the face and generally caused havok.

That’s all I can think of off the top of my head. I’m sure purists would name a ton of other stories, but it’s late, and I don’t have anywhere near the energy.

Excite Truck is one of my new favorite games. Simply phenomenal. Great adrenaline rush. As a general rule, I hate straight driving games. Colin McCrae and shit like that bores me to tears. I need a gimmick to keep my attention, like Mario Kart (quirky characters, tracks and weapons) or Burnout (smashy smashy!). Excite Truck definetly has enough gimmicks to it, like terrain morphs, insane jumps, and crazy boosts, but the real fun is just in the intensity of the race. The feeling of hitting a POW boost, shredding through a narrow path through trees, sliding back on to the track and slamming the guy in first off the track just can’t be beat. All you Wii users check it out.

Speaking of the Wii, I decided to splurge a bit and dropped some coin on more points for the virtual console. Today, I downloaded Super Castlevania IV, Contra III, Donkey Kong Jr., Super Mario 64 and the demo for the next Metroid Game. Castlevania is just as awesome as I remember it, but Contra suffers from poor controller layout on the Gamecube controller. I’ll probably need to buy the “classic controller” to get the full nostalgic value out of that one.

Do you remember this? If that’s not classic mirth-making, I don’t know what is. I had no idea they played Jimmy Kimmel. As little as I generally enjoy his show, it raises my respect for him that he would spend $40,000 on plane tickets to bring Happatai to the states. Good stuff. Many of you might only remember the flash animation that was made to the song, Irrational Exuberance, or something like that. I’m seriously considering a pained, singer-songwriter cover of this tune. I’ll let you know if that comes to pass.

Finally, perhaps due to my bringing extra attention to it, all those links to Venture Brothers episodes I told you about last week were taken down. So the Venture Brothers quiz I promised will wait for another time. I did, however, find this clip, which immediately made me think of my good buddy Malcolm. Malcolm dug the Depeche Mode, and I would argue with him that they were the gayest band in the world. The joke was that I had actually not heard anything of their’s other than Personal Jesus, and I didn’t know anything about the band, but goddamn did I have a good time getting him riled up.

Malcolm is in Japan now, but I recently brought this site to his attention, and I certainly hope he reads this, checks out the link, and has a good chuckle about the old days. Cheers Malcolm old buddy. This one’s for you.

Hey folks,
I’m tired, and getting over being sick, and I’ve only got the Wii to write this with. So this will be short.

You know what’s awkward (besides writing this on the Wii)? Going from Zelda on gamecube to Zelda on Wii. I put over 70 hours into the gamecube one. But the Wii version is reversed horizontally, for the ease of righties (Link usually holds his sword in his left hand).
That’s all well and good, but all my instincts are backward.
I can understand why they did it, but for the life of me, I don’t know why they didn’t just flip the Link sprite.
Well, whatever, I’m going to bed.
Go to youtube and search for a user named zero266 and watch as many Venture Brother episodes as you can in a sitting. There’ll be a quiz later.
Say goodnight, Gracie.