Long Dark Knight of the soul

"As you’re watching him, you can’t help wondering how badly he messed himself up in order to play the role this way. His performance is a heroic, unsettling final act: this young actor looked into the abyss... Scarier than what the Joker does to anyone onscreen is what Ledger must have been doing to himself — trying to find the center of a character without a dream of one"
— the two Davids (Denby and Edelstein), on Heath Ledger's performance as The Joker in The Dark Knight

I fear we've got a lot more of this stuff coming our way. Let's be clear: Ledger did not die for his art. He died of acute intoxication from the effects of oxycodone, hydrocodone, diazepam, temazepam, alprazolam and doxylamine. None of them lethal on their own but dangerous when combined. In other words, an overdose of the most heartbreakingly mundane kind: on prescription painkillers, by accident. Please spare us the critical rhapsodies about his "scary", "heroic", "unsettling" tap dances on the edge of the abyss.

Hancock: wish this movie well

For those who haven't heard, Hancock is about a drunken-bum superhero played by Will Smith who wakes up on park benches hungover, flies drunk, smacks into buildings, topples telegraph poles, shunts trains, wrecks cars; when he lands he crashlands, the sidewalk buckling beneath his feet, like a kid on a carpet. "You want people to be pleased you've arrived," advises a wonderfully emollient Mark Bateman as a PR man who take it upon himself to rehabilitate the grizzled bum.

As Hancock is hauled before a podium to apologise to a large angry public, then sent to prison to serve time for the damage he has caused, the story takes on shades of OJ and Mike Tyson and Coby Bryant — all the black superstars who have taken the plunge from public disgrace to rehabilitation. He even seems at times to stand in for the Bush administration, villified by the press for his blunderbuss ways — "You are not above the constitution" harangues Nancy Grace, while a small French kid calls him an "asshole." Hancock picks him and sends the little squirt hurtling into the sky. In its portrayal of a rogue super-hero, learning how to wield his powers and win back an abused and distrustful public, Hancock could well turn out to mark the beginning of Obama's America, in the same way Rambo marked Reagan's.

In almost any other year this movie would probably have bombed. Early word had that it was a train-wreck, Will Smith's first big stumble, and reviews suggested a lumpen Last Action Hero for the new millennium. It's too slight for that. It has a skimpy, skit-like feel, shot in hand-held documentary style, with a skipping bluesy soundtrack. What it is is bonkers. There's a sliver of genuine craziness to this movie, particularly in its second half, after a plot twist involving Bateman's beautiful blonde wife (Charlize Theron) sends it hurtling off, at speed, into the thickets of taboo — to do with white women, black sexuality and the like — that American movies rarely go near, let alone plant a big grey-blue vinyl super-boot.

But the craziness is not the craziness of folly. Its the kind of hot mid-summer craziness that hits a nerve. I saw it last night with a large July 4th audience who sat there astonished, delighted and flabberghasted in rapid succession: there was a fair bit of head scratching as we left the theatre. Independence Day it ain't. But it is bold and original and I haven't a clue how well it will do. How often can you say that about a movie these days?

Pixar vs Disney

I'm not going to add to the chorus of praise for WALL-E, except to way that with it Pixar have finally bested that incredible winning streak Disney had back in the forties when they came out with Snow White, Bambi, Peter Pan, and Pinocchio in the space of just over 10 years. In some ways Pixar's run has been even better, comprising Toy Story, Monster's Inc, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatoiulle and now WALL-E — with Cars as the Fantasia-misfire.

The sound of silence

The sound-man on the new Pixar movie, WALL-E — about a robot janitor left behind on a junkyard earth — is Ben Burtt, who did the sound on Star Wars. If the imaginative triumph of Star Wars was to usher us into a wholly foreign universe that felt instantly familiar, even nostalgic, then Burtt deserves a large portion of the credit. He was still a graduate student at USC at the time, tinkering around with the old Simplex projectors one day, when he noticed "a wonderful humming sound. It would slowly change in pitch, and it would beat against another motor, there were two motors, and they would harmonize with each other."

It was very close to a sound he'd been hearing in his head ever since Lucas first gave him the script. While recording it, he accidentally walked his microphone around the back of a TV set, picking up a strange buzzing sound. He ran the two tones together through a speaker, then got a second microphone and whipped it by fast, to get a Doppler effect and presto: he had the sound of a lightsabre, slicing through the air.

WALL-E the robot is, for the most past, silent. “We all thought about Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton,” Burtt tells the NYT, “this energetic, sympathetic character who doesn’t say a whole lot." There are echoes of E.T.’s "throat-singing" to the minimal sounds he makes, and when Wall-E moves, the sound comes from a hand-cranked, World War II Army generator that Mr. Burtt saw in a John Wayne movie, then found on eBay. I'm not normally envious of other people's jobs but concocting sounds for imaginary future technology strikes me as an endlessly satisfying line of work.