• As a joke, one bat suit was made with nipples, as in Batman & Robin (1997). It was presented to Christian Bale as the real bat suit, but he knew instantly it was a joke, having seen a few design pictures during preproduction. He did pose for some publicity photos in the “nipple” suit.
• Robin Williams, Lachy Hulme, Paul Bettany, and Adrien Brody all expressed interest for the role of the Joker before Heath Ledger was cast. When asked, “Why Heath Ledger as the Joker?” Christopher Nolan said, “Because he’s fearless.”
• To prepare for his role as the Joker, Heath Ledger lived alone in a hotel room for a month, formulating the character’s psychology, posture and voice (the last one he found most difficult to do). He started a diary, in which he wrote the Joker’s thoughts and feelings to guide himself during his performance. He was also given Alan Moore’s comic “Batman: The Killing Joke” and “Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth” to read. Ledger also took inspiration from A Clockwork Orange (1971)’s Alex and Sid Vicious.
• Director Christopher Nolan and co-writers Jonathan Nolan and David S. Goyer decided not to explore the origins of the Joker in order to portray the character as “absolute.”
• While in the nurse uniform, The Joker’s name badge says Matilda. This is the name of Heath Ledger’s daughter.
• It’s Sir Michael Caine’s opinion that Heath Ledger beat the odds and topped Jack Nicholson’s Joker from Batman (1989): “Jack was like a clown figure, benign but wicked, maybe a killer old uncle. He could be funny and make you laugh. Heath’s gone in a completely different direction to Jack, he’s like a really scary psychopath. He’s a lovely guy and his Joker is going to be a hell of a revelation in this picture.” Caine bases this belief on a scene where the Joker pays a visit to Bruce Wayne’s penthouse. He’d never met Ledger before, so when Ledger arrived and performed he gave Caine such a fright he forgot his lines.
• Bruce Wayne develops and wears a new Batsuit in the film. This Batsuit was an improvement on the outfit from Batman Begins (2005), and made Christian Bale more comfortable and agile in his performance. It was constructed from 200 unique pieces of rubber, fibreglass, metallic mesh, and nylon (producing an impression of sophisticated technology), with elastic banding added for tightening the costume to fit Bale. The gauntlets had their razors made retractable and able to be fired. The suit’s cowl was based on a motorcycle helmet and separated from the neck piece, allowing Bale to move his head left/right/up/down, and comes equipped with white eye lenses for when Batman turns on Bat-sonar.
• The Joker make-up was composed of three pieces of stamped silicone, which took less than an hour to apply to Heath Ledger on each day of shooting. Ledger described it as “new technology which is much quicker to apply than regular prosthetics;” he felt he was not wearing any make-up at all.
• Costume designer Lindy Hemming based the Joker’s look around his personality, in which “he doesn’t care about himself at all.” Hemming was inspired by countercultural pop culture artists like Pete Doherty, Iggy Pop, and Sid Vicious. She avoided his design being vagrant, but made it scruffier and grungier, therefore making his movements slightly twitchier and edgier.
• An explosion was filmed at the Battersea Power Station in London. The fireball created calls from panic-stricken local residents, who assumed a terrorist attack was on the out-of-use Station.
• The Batman Comic Books “The Long Halloween”, “The Killing Joke”, “The Man Who Laughs” and the first two comics to feature the Joker character served as an influence on the film’s storyline.
• The “Batman” theme is heard only twice in the film, as Composers Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard decided that a heroic theme that a viewer could hum would ignore the complexity and darkness of the character. Hearing the tune only twice would create what Zimmer calls “a musical foreshadowing.”
• Heath Ledger improvised when he started clapping inside his jail cell in a mocking and sardonic capacity as Gordon is promoted. The clapping was not scripted but Christopher Nolan immediately encouraged the crew to continue filming and the sequence was included in the film.

Source: www.imdb.com

Last night I finally got my chance to see the new Batman movie: The Dark Knight.

Of course, after seeing the movie a lot of questions have been raised about the fate of certain characters, how well or accurately they were portrayed, and what will happen in the next film (assuming there will be one) after the terrible loss of Heath Ledger.

In my next blog post I aim to answer a lot of these questions and provide theories as to “what happens next”. Obviously, as I am not part of the team responsible for making the Batman movies, I can only hope to give you the best possible information/guesses based on the information I have access to.

So, If you have any questions regarding the film and characters, please post a comment below and I will do my best to try and answer them all in the next post

“What gave you the impression we have lives??
I think most people here pretend to have one by not posting in the weekends.”

Quote of the Month used to quite a popular feature on the Noddegamra site. A small box used to display on the homepage with a random quote from one of our forum members. Maybe it’s something I should re-introduce? For now though, I hope you enjoyed a quote that clearly defines us as the geeks we are

As you may have noticed it has been a little quiet around here lately. The forum has been absolutely buzzing, but unfortunately I have not had enough time to focus on the main blog. It’s a shame really as there was a great build up of content and regular visitors, then suddenly silence on the Noddegamra front.

So what have I been up to? Well, to be honest, I have been playing a lot of World of Warcraft (some of you may remember me posting about the new guild I created - which is currently very successful). I have also been spending a lot more time with my friends and recently joined a gym. There has been quite a lot going on in the last couple of months, but I wont bore you with the details now.

So what now? What is to become of Noddegamra? Well I hope to try and get back into the swing of things. Whilst I seem to have less time to focus on the blog, all I really need to do is try and find a way of fitting it into my routine. This seems to be a common problem with bloggers, but I’ll try and fix it

It might take a little while to get the updates back up to speed, but bare with me and come back soon to see what random things I wish to share with you

I love seeing what people can achieve using Lego. Whilst this may have been done before though, I haven’t seen it executed this well. Check out these cool remakes of famous photo’s using Lego by Balakov.

View Image Gallery: Classics in Lego

58-year-old Tatsuko Horikawa was discovered in a flat storage space only just big enough for a person to squeeze into lying down. She had sneaked a mattress and several plastic bottles into the closet and appears to have been living there, undetected, for months.

It is unclear how she managed to enter the home without being noticed. Police suspect she may have been “closet-hopping”, moving from house to house perhaps for years.

This berry is a miracle berry. Its active ingredient, known as “miraculin” is a protein that binds to the taste buds of its ingestor and acts as a sweetness inducer when it comes into contact with acids. Limes become candied, vinegar resembles apple juice and goats cheese tastes just like cheesecake.

Franz Aliquo has been holding so-called “flavour tripping” events for some time now, inviting guests to chew on one of these mysterious berries before trying, amongst other things, tabasco sauce, (tastes just like doughnut glaze), lemon sorbet and Guinness, (chocolate shake), and oysters, (chewing gum).

The Western world has known about this miraculous African berry since the 18th century but, after being turned down as a sugar substitute in the 1970s and owing to its extreme rarity, it has developed only a small cult following.

Each berry goes for about $2.50 each and, although our American friends can order a freezer pack of 30 for $90 from www.miraclefruitman.com, I wonder if they’re available in this country? It would sure be an interesting experiment…

Source: New York Times