So last night I saw "The Dark Knight" the newest Batman movie. First off, I think that it was a great movie and that almost every person should see it. Secondly, I am further convinced that I correct in two of my beliefs: that this was Heath Ledger's finest performance, and that he should not be looked down upon for cracking under the pressure of this character.

I promise, this is the last time I am going to beat this dead horse. It's just that this topic is one of psychology, fear, and a bit of mysticism. I can't let all three of those things slip away from me so easily. Besides, I like beating dead horses. They don't kick as hard as live ones.

Anyway, I think this was Mr. Ledger's finest hour, I commend him for a great job, and I say that anyone who viewed him at all as an actor and not just an attractive guy should see this movie, out of respect.

Secondly, I think now, after seeing this movie, that I might very well have suffered under the strains of playing this character, had I any acting talent warranting my performance as such. When the Joker appeared on that screen, I did not see a shred of the actor playing him; the Joker had complete control at that moment. Perhaps it was merely superb acting, but I don't think so. This was too...creepy. My friend, who was sitting next to me during the show, kept saying how she was trying to see the Heath Ledger in the character and was having a hard time doing it. All the while I kept thinking, "That's because he's not Heath Ledger anymore. He's the Joker now."

I am blowing this way out of proportion? Probably; but I like to blow things out of proportion, it makes things so much more fun. On a side note, I think I can accurately guess as to what led to Mr. Ledger's death, the actions that made him afraid of himself, as it were.

And I think I was correct in one other fact, as well: the Joker really is the epitome of bad guys. Watch the movie; he explains why.

So, right now the accepted cause of Heath Ledger's death was an overdose on prescription pills and other such things. And it is becoming more widely known that this incredible increase in the use of these drugs was due to his part as playing the Joker in the newest Batman movie.

My question is, how much of a BA does a character have to be to kill someone without having to be real?

I've heard that this was the cause of the late Mr. Ledger's untimely passing quite a while back, almost immediately after the incident. A friend of mine used him as the subject of one of her research papers that we had to do this past year in English, so I had the "pleasure" of hearing nearly his entire life story. Luckily it wasn't too long of a story.

Okay, that was mean, a bit below the belt even. So sue me. It's not that I didn't like the guy, in fact I thought he had a lot of talent as an actor, and think that it is a shame that be broke down so early, but I didn't cry about his death, and I really don't care.

So anyway, when I first heard about Mr. Ledger going a little bonkers after only playing the Joker in a movie, I had my doubts about him. I mean, the Joker isn't Hitler he's not Satan, and many actors have playing both of these characters and survived quite nicely.

Then I heard that Jack Nicholson gave Heath a call. Apparently Jack wanted to warn the young actor and convince him not to play the part. He said that it was a part that got inside of your head and was hard to walk away from. I think we can all agree that Mr. Nicholson has been around the block for a very long time, and he has played some pretty mean characters in his time.

After learning about his phone call I started thinking: maybe the Joker IS like Hitler and Satan. We as Americans have been trained and taught to despise the latter two, to fear them, loathe them, and distrust anything similar to them. I think that the Joker is much the same. I even go so far as to bet that Heath Ledger read a few comic books in his day. I think that the Joker retains his power in our world because he is the manifesation of everything that we ever fear or mistrusted or thought was wrong when we were children. As we grew up we tried to forget about those "childish misgivings", but some things can't be forgotten so easily. So I understand that Heath Ledger may have been overcome by the task of representing a character that is absolutely insane. I think I would have caved as well.

Do you know what I really don't like? People who constantly try to find hidden meanings and messages in everything. I don't if each person does this on occasion, or just as a lark to purposely create a super-complicated and completely rediculous idea for enjoyment. Those occasions are fine by me. When people do this constantly, though, is when I get annoyed.

Overanalysing books and other works of literature is bad enough. Some people just don't believe that a story is exactly as it appears on the surface. They always think there's a subtext, a hidden meaning to the words. Usually this can be related to war, or something similar. I believe that the stories can indeed be just stories. Let's look at an example:

Lord of the Flies VS The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

Lord of the Flies was obviously filled with references to the world political structure during the time of the its creation. Almost everything that happens in that book can be correlated to real-world happenings. That is a good example of when analyzation is a good thing. The second book is an example of the opposite. C.S. Lewis was a very religious person, and he wrote quite a few stories about that subject (Screwtape Letters comes to mind), but I don't believe that came across in the Narnia series. I would chalk those books up in the category of stories just for the sake of having stories. Yes, they may be based on ideas and symbols, but not everything in them is neccesarily a symbol or idea.

Then I read about how MGS4 has created a "controversy" over any hidden messages that may be present within it. Apparently some people spend a good portion of their time trying to pick apart the brain of Mr. Kojima to figure out exactly what it was he was trying to say. I suppose that's fine, because everybody needs a hobby and this series is a bit rife with material to talk about. But then the New York Times ran a story about it.

I should confess: all of this is based around a single comment made by an individual. This comment really doesn't have much to do with the rest of this rant except where it was located. This person (I really can't remember the name) had the gall to ask whether the deep and convoluted story of the MGS series was every necessary.

Wow.

This perturbs me greatly. That's like saying a book just might not need a story. But this peson had that example too, saying that without the story there wouldn't be a book. I say that without the story there wouldn't be a MGS series. Perhaps this is just the remaining prejudice against games showing through. Yes, games have become much more mainstream (sometimes too much so) and are generally much more accepted. But not by everyone. There are still some who deny their value. I say that video games are just another medium of self-expression, of entertainment. I say that video games come is a variety of genres to meet the needs and desires of everyone; sometimes you want a nice story, and challenging mystery, or just to make something go boom. And I say that sometimes stories are just stories.

It's funny how things become associated inside a person's brain. Like recently I have been replaying Tales of Symphonia on my Gamecube. At the same time I've just gotten my hands on a copy of Def Leppard's 15 year greatest hits CD. By combining the two together I have created a connection inside my brain that I hadn't seen coming. Now whenever I hear Def Leppard on the radio, I can immediately think of Tales of Symphonia. Do they go together? Not really, although Def's high vocals and music style seem to go well with some of the characters.

This happened to me before when I was playing Grand Theft Auto II. I ate a lot of licorice and drank a lot of orange juice while playing that game. Now all three of those things are linked together in my brain. The problem is that orange molotov cocktails with twizzler straws don't taste very good.

Then there's what I think about when I eat pizza. Everytime I eat pizza I can't help but think of Mick Jagger and the Stones. See, back in '65, when I was traveling around with the Stones, we ended up in New York City one night. Now, I should probably explain what I mean by 'traveling with the Stones'. You see, I had met the guys and known for a while, but hadn't until recently done anything with them. This was the first real time that I was spending a considerable amount of time with them. Things were as crazy as they would become later, but they had a number of hits under their belts and had made for themselves.

But anyway, we were in New York, right? We were sitting in our hotel room when all of a sudden Mick decides he wants a pizza. 'I've come all this way to New York, so why shouldn't I have some of their pizza?' he siad to me. Something you should know about Mick: he's always been the type of guy that wants to get his way, even before he hit the big time. So at that moment, when he had enough money to buy a pizzaria, even though I didn't think it was a good idea to be buying a pizza at midnight, I didn't try to stop him.

But you can see the problems with trying to buy a pizza so late. Mick, he gets on the TV and starts looking for commercials advertising for pizza. He just kept flipping through the channels. He must have seen a commercial for everything on that set: some Billy Mays predecessor was seeling bleach, a preacher was calling on our souls to join his church, a couple movies were on, and a cowboy was selling cigarettes (which I remember as being weird because I always saw cowboys and liking chew more, but whatever).

Now, eventually Mick got really frustrated with the TV, so tells me to get on my coat; we were going to find a place to get pizza. Thinking I would be in deep trouble if I lost the biggest upcoming star in rock & roll, I followed. Mick hailed a taxi, and we drove around the for the next 2 hours just looking for a place that would sell us some New York style pizza. All the while Mick was getting more and more angry and more and more frustrated. Finally we came across a sign that had the magical words: "24 hour pizza delivery". Mick pretty much screams at the driver to pull over. We get out of the car and head to the door just as a girl comes out and starts locking up. Mick asked, in a few choicer words, what was going on, that this was supposed to be open all day. The girl said that the owner had come down on some hard times and had sold the place just that day to new management. She said that if he really wanted pizza from there he would have to come back in a week or so. Seeing this as a sign from above Mick gives up and we went back to the hotel.

About a week later, after a rather righteous party, Mick brought me a new song he had been working on. He called it, (I Can't Get No) New York Pizza'. Despite my reservations with the title, I looked the words over, more or less just to humor him. Turns out he had a real winner, or at least I thought so. So I told, you gotta think of a better title, something catchy. Like what? he asked me. So I thought about it, and said, 'Why don't you say satisfaction instead of New York pizza? Then it's still true, but it has the innuendo in there so it'll catch more people's attention. He agreed. Keith Richards, who had been black out drunk during all of this, suddenly sat up and grabbed his guitar. He hashed out a few notes that eventually became the basic melody of the song. Luckily I was there with my recorder, or else he wouldn't have a remembered a single part of it.

Yeah, I helped Mick out a bunch of times while I was with him. Like this one time when we were in New Orleans. We had just finished a show, and Mick wanted to go out, so we went to celebrate at a bar. When the bar closed Mick wanted to keep going, but me, being the good little boy I was, I went home so I could get up for church in the morning. So Mick went out by himself. The next morning I got a call from Mick saying he needed a ride. I said sure since I was worried about the guy, and I went to pick him up. When I found him he looked absolutely terrible. I wanted to ask him what he had been up to, but we had an unspoken rule not to ask if the person didn't want to tell, and I knew that Mick didn't want to talk about it, so I let it go.

About a month later, Mick came back to me for advice on another song. This song's title was bad too, but in a different way than Satisfaction. Let's just say that it dealt with the abilities of a certain female companion available in New Orleans. Still, the rest of the song was good, I tried to help. Eventually we settled on Brown Sugar so that the context of the song wouldn't be lost.

You know, I never minded helping out Mick and the boys. My only problem was that I was never compensated or credited for my efforts. To this day the Stones deny that I was ever with them. Maybe they forgot, maybe not. Well, I haven't always been denied credit; sometimes I just gave it up. Like that one time with Michael Jackson.

Everybody knows that Thriller was one of the most expensive music videos ever. Few people know why. The real reason is because they used real zombies, imported from Haiti, to do all of the scenes. I was one of the lead advisors on the project, so I pleaded with Michael not to use them for a couple reasons a) the zombies were hard to train to dance b) zombies eat people, and paying all of the families restitution would be expensive, and c) zombies don't like to be put back in the ground once they're out. But Michael insisted; he said he wanted realism. So I quit the project with only a month left to go. I was one month away from having my name on the credits. Oh well.

So anyway, it's very strange how things get connected in the brain.

This is a post that contains a bunch of stuff that doesn't really deserve a post by themselves, but together they manage to round one out quite nicely.

Back to the premature hype thing I post a few days back, I have been thinking about some things. Every now and then I start to think of how I would do things if I were involved in the video game industry, if I was a programmer or a developer, etc. Well, I came up with the idea that, while my game was still under developement, I would release lots of information. However, that information would be a sort of red herring. All of it would be centered around a character that would be made to seem like the hero of the story, but he isn't. About 30 minutes into the game I would kill him deader than a stone and either a) have the sidekick become the next protagonist, b) having the killer of the hero be the main subject, or c) a combination of the first two. So if you see any games like this in the future, someone probably ripped me off some kind of bad.

Moving on. I played the World of Warcraft free 10 day trial during these past few days. It was a fantastic game, and a complete winner, but I still want to play FFXI more. I just can't get it out of my system. And what's worse, WoW played perfectly fine on my computer and connection, so FFXI should play just fine also.

Changing gears a bit, I just managed to finish God of War II on titan difficulty. This was my second attempt at doing so. The first time I tried I got majorly stuck at the descent down to Clotho, and I finally quit. This time I did get stuck for a while, but all of a sudden I beat it. I'm not even really sure how it happened. So yeah. The next time I play God of War II I can do it was Athena. The bad part is that it's still Kratos's voice that comes out of her mouth. Weird.

I've noticed that, in the past few years, the hype surrounding upcoming games has become more and more intense. This probably started with E3, the huge opportunity it was to attract an audience. This isn't true for just the high-profile games, either. Sometimes little, do-nothing games are hyped like no tomorrow.

I understand the premise of stirring up a frenzy: if everyone is excited about a game then there is a better chance of making money. But sometimes go way too far. My example is the recent games of Final Fantasy, specifically FFXIII. We knew about that game before FFXII came out. To me this going way overboard. What is the point of telling everyone about a game that is three years away from release? And, unless the company immediately goes tight-lipped, way too much info will be given away in the waiting period. At least, that's what I think. Nowadays you can learn everything about every character and every aspect a gaming experience without buying it or looking at a guide. I find that it takes away from the experience. Finally, having everyone know about a game may put additional pressure on the developer to release a flawed game.

Of course, I could be completely wrong about all of this. In that case, ignore me because I'm just blowing smoke out my rear.