The first pub­lic unveil­ing of any actual footage from The Dark Knight took place yes­ter­day evening at the Wiz­ard World con­ven­tion. The folks that brought us the news about the TDK event are back once again with all the juicy details. From Wiz­ard Uni­verse, a descrip­tion of the video:

The footage started with a sil­hou­ette of a dark fig­ure in front of one of Batman’s armored vehi­cles before quickly cut­ting to Bruce Wayne and Alfred deliv­er­ing the brief lines heard in the “Dark Knight” teaser trailer.

“Some peo­ple just want to watch the world burn,” advises Alfred before the cam­era jumps to Bat­man in action on the Bat­pod, the new iter­a­tion of his motorcycle.

The action built up as the Joker was seen in full for the first time with a mess of white face, smeared red lip­stick and sweaty, strag­gly green hair. Appar­ently, the clown prince of crime gets arrested at one point in the film, as the mon­tage pre­sented Jim Gor­don (com­plete in SWAT gear) at the Joker’s book­ing, say­ing, “no prints, no ID, cus­tom clothes, no tags.” The clown smiles with what appears to be blood over his face from the inside of an inter­ro­ga­tion room.

Check­ing back in with Bruce Wayne, the bil­lion­aire play­boy has a brief scene with Eckhart’s Har­vey Dent where he says “Rachel’s told me every­thing about you.”

“I truly hope not,” responds Wayne.

And points to note from the action mon­tage at the end:

• The new bat­suit ris­ing up from a trap door in the ground and held in a chain metal case.
• Rachel Dawes (played by Mag­gie Gyl­len­haal) close to an uniden­ti­fied man either kiss­ing him or being threat­ened by him as the cam­era rotates around them.
• The Joker and Bat­man bat­tling in close quar­ters (pos­si­bly a hos­pi­tal room). Bat­man throws Joker over a table and crash­ing into the ground while the clown smiles at him. It should be noted that the Joker was done up in his sig­na­ture pur­ple suit.
• Plenty of big, bold Bat­mo­bile action includ­ing a shot where the tank-like car dri­ves through a wall of flame. In fact, flames were pretty much every­where in the footage as it appears Joker does actu­ally make the world burn.
• There is also a shot of a some­what grim-faced Joker walk­ing across a city street mer­ci­lessly fir­ing a machine gun as well as a tele­vi­sion close-up of the Joker laugh­ing hysterically.
• Two major addi­tions to the spec­u­la­tion that Two Face will appear in the film came in the form of a sin­gle shot of a spin­ning 50 cent piece and the final image: after the action mon­tage has slowed down, the cam­era cuts to a bar­tender look­ing at Har­vey Dent, whose only onscreen pres­ence is his left shoul­der and a bit of a reddish-purple scarred neck. “Dent! I thought you were dead!” the man gasps, to which Har­vey replies, “Half.”

IGN also have some details about the “siz­zler” trailer whilst claim­ing that The Dark Knight film­ing is now 50% complete,

The Clown Prince of Crime was seen in a prison cell, dra­mat­i­cally speak­ing at the cam­era as if schem­ing some sort of dia­bol­i­cal plot. There were also sev­eral shots of Bat­man and The Joker fight­ing in what appeared to be an inter­ro­ga­tion room — in fact, the Dark Knight can be scene using “bad cop” inter­ro­ga­tion tech­niques, throw­ing The Joker across a table. There is a scene of The Joker danc­ing with Rachel Dawes (played by Mag­gie Gyl­len­haal), rem­i­nis­cent of the way Jack Nicholson’s Joker danced with Vicki Vale (played by Kim Basinger) in 1989’s Bat­man. Finally, there are a num­ber of shots show­ing a war-torn Gotham City — a machine gun-toting Joker fir­ing toward the camera.

While Eck­hart has already gone on the record with word that Har­vey Dent would be mak­ing the change into the dreaded Two-Face in this film, the footage served to con­firm this. A shot of Dent from behind has some­one com­ing up to the Dis­trict Attor­ney say­ing, “I thought you were dead?” Dent’s reply: “Half.” Mas­sive scar­ring can then be glimpse on the left side of his face. A dra­matic shot of a quar­ter spin­ning on a table also served to “wow” the audi­ence. In his non-scarred form, there is a shot of Dent first meet­ing Bruce Wayne. “Rachel’s told me a lot about you,” Dent says. To which Wayne replies, “I hope not.”

(Thanks for the heads up Eric)

Seems like Warner Bros. have sneaked in at the last moment with a top secret Bat­man related, ticket only, event at Wiz­ard World in Chicago. Here’s the blurb from Wiz­ard Uni­verse:

As a last-minute addi­tion to the convention’s pro­gram­ming slate, DC Comics announced today that its part­ners at Warner Bros. Pic­tures will be hold­ing a panel for the Christo­pher Nolan-helmed “The Dark Knight” at 6 p.m. [11th August] in the Dave Cock­rum Room at Wiz­ard World Chicago. In accor­dance with the shroud of secrecy already sur­round­ing the “Bat­man Begins” sequel, the ticket-only event will be kept under the tight­est secu­rity, with a ban on all cam­eras, phones, record­ing devices and any other elec­tron­ics. To gain entrance to the panel, fans will have to line up at 10 a.m. Sat­ur­day at the DC Comics booth on the con­ven­tion show floor for one of the passes to the 1,200-seat room.

And while DC and Warn­ers have made no state­ments as to what the panel’s pro­gram­ming will con­sist of, the cam­era ban alone hints that footage from the film, which fea­tures Chris­t­ian Bale repris­ing his role as the tit­u­lar hero as well as Heath Ledger as the Joker, Michael Caine as Alfred and Mag­gie Gyl­len­haal step­ping into the part of Rachel Dawes, will be revealed for the first time any­where. And con­sid­er­ing the fact that “The Dark Knight” is film­ing in the Windy City, an appear­ance by cast or crew mem­bers is pos­si­ble.

Stay tuned! 

Not much to see lately, and I apol­o­gise if the site has appeared slow — we seem to be hav­ing some issues that I am work­ing hard to resolve.

In the mean time, here’s Heath Ledger once more,

First up, we have some words from Paul Bir­chard (via indieWire). Non-too reveal­ing, they give us another fas­ci­nat­ing insight into Heath Ledger’s por­trayal of this famous character:

As regards to how Heath Ledger *seemed* as the Joker, he seemed like he WAS the Joker, and didn’t need to let any­one know it — rather con­tained, but ready to explode at any moment in an unex­pected fash­ion. Men­ac­ing, but more because he seemed like he was prob­a­bly crazy, and maybe vio­lent, rather than that he was TRYING to scare you. (and by the way, all he did dur­ing the scenes I was in was sit in his hold­ing cell, react­ing and listening…so, he’s a very fine actor if I imbibed all this from just watch­ing him sit there…) He didn’t talk a lot between takes, but he also wasn’t “Don’t approach me!” in his man­ner — a real pro, in other words.

In short, he seemed just like the Joker SHOULD seem.

Before more Joker — I am going to slip in this lit­tle link, be an Extra on The Dark Knight. And here is an RFK cast­ing call. (links via our friends at Bat­MovieNews)

Spoil­ers after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

Film Rota­tion are report­ing a sus­pected time that we may see our much antic­i­pated Bat­man trailer, precisely,

The first of THREE full length the­atri­cal trail­ers for Christo­pher Nolan’s The Dark Knight will debut in front of the much-anticipated Will Smith apoc­a­lyp­tic action-horror, I Am Leg­end, in late November/early Decem­ber this year.

Cat­e­gorised as a rumor.

Mary Jane has sent in this tid­bit of news for us,

Begin­ning Sat­ur­day, August 11 and con­tin­u­ing through Sat­ur­day, August 18, prepa­ra­tions for and film­ing of a fea­ture film cur­rently dis­guised as “Rory’s First Kiss” is sched­uled at 330 North Wabash. The film­ing takes place in the lobby, thir­teenth and third floors as well as the exte­rior south plaza. The actual film­ing dates are: Sun­day, August 12 in the lobby (south­west side), Wednes­day and Thurs­day, August 15 and 16 on the 13th floor, and Fri­day and Sat­ur­day, August 17 and 18 on the 3rd floor and exterior.

Next up, after the break, check out the image of the Joker Semi that Eric sent us and some Har­vey Dent spoil­ers… Read the rest of this entry »

Warn­ing — Beware of Spoilers.

Thanks to Nites­tar Productions.

And some more footage from this weeks film­ing, from the early morn­ing of August 4th:

We’ve heard some infor­ma­tion about an animé filler between Bat­man Begins and The Dark Knight, now a leaked doc­u­ment (is it true? No way to val­i­date the info yet) has informed us that this will take the shape of six short films, much like the Ani­ma­trix, each with a dif­fer­ent screen­writer (Josh Olson — His­tory of Vio­lence, David Goyer — Bat­man Begins, Brian Azzarello — famous comic book writer). They will intro­duce a num­ber of pop­u­lar char­ac­ters from the DC comics whilst con­tin­u­ing plot arcs from Bat­man Begins. Expected to be PG-13 rated and geared towards core fans, this col­lec­tion shall bere­leased 2–4 weeks prior to the movie.

To take a gan­der at this doc­u­ment, which has its valid­ity put into doubt by the mis­spelling of Olson as Olsen — (or just a typo that escaped), check out the page here.

Also, here’s a fun Gotham flag as seen on Fight­ing the Sub­urbs (guy stand­ing in the pic­ture ruth­lessly cropped out!):