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To continue the Dark Knight theme, I think that Heath Ledger passing away so young would have been like Jack Nicholson dying after making One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which is such a breathtaking demonstration of acting ability. By this point in Nicholson’s career he’d already received several major award nominations, as had Ledger, and each of these two movies (looked liked it) pushed each actor to their respective limits. Nicholson then went on to win several major awards, including the Oscar for Best Actor for his role in ‘Cuckoo’s Nest. Of course my comparison is not without its irony - Nicholson went on to play the Joker in Tim Burton’s original Batman movie in 1989. Food for though.

In case you haven’t seen it already, I present some reasons to see The Dark Knight aka Batman 2:

• (at the time of writing) The Dark Knight is the highest rated movie on IMDB with a score of 9.5 average out of over 90,000 votes, beating The Godfather.
• It was Heath Ledger’s last movie and he was a great actor who’s work we should respect and watch.
• The reports I read way back when indicated he got so completely into his character that he had terrible problems pulling himself out of it afterwards.
• Christopher Nolan directed and co-wrote it, and he did the last Batman Begins movie, The Prestige, Insomnia and Momento.
• It has Christian Bale as Batman, who I’ve thought has been an awesome actor ever since making Empire of the Sun back in 1987 as a child. He also was in Equilibrium (yes, I liked it), The Machinist, The Prestige, and others.
• It’s not only a good comic-book flick but also a fantastic detective story. Yes, there’s a real story in it.
• There’s an IMAX version with several scenes filmed specially to take advantage of the larger screen.
• Because I said so? :)

In an interest to keep my mind off other matters.. An interesting rant against the XFiles 2 movie that opens this week. My take:

• If you haven’t seen The Dark Knight, go see it.
• If you have seen The Dark Knight, go see it again.
• If you’ve already seen it twice, got see Hellboy 2.
• The show itself was so over-done by the end it was like the Griswald family christmas turkey.
• Did I mention going to see The Dark Knight? Good. Do it.

Viacom has successfully convinced the US courts to make Youtube/Google give them a copy of all user access logs. In honor of this victory I recommend that everyone spend as much time loading the most awesome video ever over and over to truly show one of the world’s largest media companies how much we love them.

If you get a chance I thoroughly recommend the movie Requiem for a Dream, which you can watch online for free. It’s an Oscar-nominated story of four people who become too heavily involved with and ultimately pay dearly for their growing addictions. All four main parts are played extraordinarily well, you are easily sucked into their stories, and it becomes more upsetting to see them loose control over their lives and loose sight of their dreams through their addictions, wishing that they’d see that making this one decision they’d start to recover.. At two hours long there are several disturbing parts, especially towards the climax , but it is worth sticking through to the end.

Don’t bother going to see Manoj Shyamalan’s latest movie, The Happening, instead sit comfortably at home/work and read through The New Republic’s descriptions of the movie’s “highlights”. I must say, I’ve never heard of such a dumb movie, well, not since the last time someone offered to make a movie with Larry the Cable Guy.

With the recent mass defection from the HD-DVD camp to Sony’s BluRay it has been only a matter of time before the other shoe dropped - hardware support. After the defections Toshiba started flogging their players for half what they were before Xmas, even with a bunch of movies thrown in for free, which was a very obvious sign of desperation. Sure enough, today Toshiba announced a halt of development of new HD-DVD hardware, and the other manufacturers can’t be far behind. So, so long HD-DVD, it’s been good.

One hidden boon of the announcement - HD-DVD players and discs should become very cheap as people start to off-load their gear to migrate to BluRay, and yes, I’m thinking of you, Serenity.

It appears that HD-DVD will win the high-def media format war, if history is anything to go by.

History lesson: In the 1980’s Sony’s Betamax tape standard lost out to JVC’s competing and technically inferior VHS tape standard primarily due to the adult entertainment industry’s backing of the latter’s lower production and media & equipment costs.

While Las Vegas’s played host to 2007’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), down the street was the adult entertainment industry’s annual convention where many studios announced support for the more affordable of the two new high-definition media standards: Microsoft’s HD-DVD. While Sony’s Blu-Ray is admittedly a superior technology, as Betamax was versus VHS, it is the media costs, production costs, playback-equipment costs and popularity of the players (in part due to Microsoft’s XBox360’s popularity, which has a HD-DVD player available for it, versus Sony’s Playstation 3 with its Blu-Ray player) that has sold them.