The Smackdown

A successful, charismatic, well-spoken, African American man accompanies his white girlfriend to her parents’ home to meet her parents for the first time. What could possibly go wrong?

A lot, according to the competitors in today’s Smackdown, and in two very different ways. Our face-off pits this year’s huge sleeper hit, the creepy, suspense-satire Get Out, against its spiritual forefather from another cinematic era, the Oscar-winning, groundbreaking drama Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, which premiered half a century ago this year.

Will Get Out get out alive? Or will the Tracy-Hepburn-Poitier classic have it for dinner? We haven’t seen this kind of intergenerational battle royale since Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader locked light-sabers to see who got to sit at the head of the family table. So sit back and enjoy as we pit the edgiest hit, interracial film of today with one that held the title long ago in a galaxy seemingly far, far away.

The Challenger

Charming black photographer Chris (British-born Daniel Kaluuya) warily agrees to join his white gal-pal Rose (Allison Williams, on a break from Girls) to spend a weekend with her parents, Dean and Missy (the ever-invaluable Bradley Whitford and Catherine Keener) at their suburban estate, trusting Rose’s assurances that they’ll have no issue with his race, and ignoring the warnings of his conspiracy-spouting best friend Rod (an uproarious Lil Rel Howery).

Rose’s family turns out to be indeed quite welcoming, if a bit awkward around Chris, but telltale signs that something isn’t quite right about this gang keep popping up: The house’s black servants are all eerily mechanical and fake-sounding; Rose’s brother Jeremy (Caleb Landry Jones) gets oddly confrontational; and a hypnosis session with Missy takes him into bizarre, nightmarish realms.

To reveal more would risk major spoilage, but suffice it to say, the title supplies good advice for Chris.

The Defending Champion

Spunky young Joey Drayton (Katharine Houghton) is so head-over-heels in love with her new fiancé, handsome doctor/humanitarian/widower/all-around perfect guy John Prentice (Sidney Poitier), that she just can’t wait for him to meet her parents, Christina and Matt (legendary Hollywood couple Katharine Hepburn and, in his final film role, Spencer Tracy) at their San Francisco home. She’s not worried in the slightest about how her seemingly liberal folks will react to the new beau, but his nervousness about the meeting is indeed warranted.

The parents are indeed thrown off kilter at first, then quickly calmed by John’s obvious intelligence, decency and genuine love for their daughter. Still, they want an easy life for Joey and have concerns about how the rest of society will react to her relationship.

John assures Matt he won’t marry Joey without parental approval, but distracting Matt from this weighty decision is the impromptu inclusion of additional dinner guests, including John’s equally startled parents (Roy Glenn and Beah Richards) and the cheerfully tolerant and tipsy Monsignor Ryan (Cecil Kellaway). The critical and commercial success of the film would go on to permanently shatter Hollywood’s interracial romance taboo, change movie marketing strategies forever, and garner a swath of Oscar nominations (including wins for Hepburn and screenwriter William Rose).

The Scorecard

Surely itâ€s no accident on the part of Jordan Peele (best known as half of beloved sketch comedy team Key & Peele, and making his writing/directing debut) that Get Out has a setup that all but Xeroxes GWCTDâ€s, only to gradually reveal itself to be its exact opposite in every other sense. Where one is sedate, static, and quaintly stagey, the other is increasingly suspenseful, creepy, raucously funny and crammed with wild twists and reveals. One is upbeat and hopeful about racial progress in America, the other bemoans its current state and depicts a world of ugly retrogression. One is about white people whose seemingly tolerant views are put to the ultimate test; the other is about white people who have shed the prior generationâ€s intolerance in favor of racial envy and taken it to pathological new heights. One is a talky polemic and, by todayâ€s standards, pretty square (par for the course for director Stanley Kramer, king of the ’60s “message movies”); the other is kinetic and visually inventive, steadily ratcheting up the tension and building to an action-packed climax.

So yes, the Peele film is in many ways, a clever, ultra-hip updating and subversion of its stodgy predecessor, but as stiff as it may play today, Kramerâ€s is the truly groundbreaking work of art. America in 1967 simply hadnâ€t seen interracial couples on screen before, much less treated (eventually) with such acceptance and positivity. Miscegenation was still (as one character mentions) illegal in several states during its production (the Loving decision resolving the issue would precede its release by six months); a year later, Captain Kirk and Lt. Uhura would debut interracial smooching on the small screen. Dinner was a daring, courageous movie in its day, probably made possible only by the participation of legendary actors Hepburn and Tracy and the impeccable, flawless image of (the soon-to-be-legendary) Poitier.

All of which accounts for the filmâ€s towering reputation and importance, but all that aside, when viewed today, is it actually, you know, any good?

Well… letâ€s concede that to most modern eyes, it will probably come off as a bit hokey and didactic. The characters are drawn with fairly broad brushes (e.g. the impossibly perky Joey, the cartoonishly saintly John, the wise and twinkly-eyed, tippling Monsignor, etc.). Roseâ€s Oscar-winning script, which beat out, among others, Bonnie & Clyde (cue eye-rolls), is largely on-the-nose and devoid of nuance, and even the occasional attempt at metaphor -– Matt reluctantly tastes a new flavor of sherbet and is surprised how much he likes it –- play rather heavy-handed. But the lovely, noble performances by the ensemble cast (Tracy, Kellaway, Richards and Hepburn all nabbed nominations, with the latter winning her third) make it sing, with Tracy (in his last, illness-plagued days) delivering a final monologue so moving and poignant, it brings all his fellow cast-members to genuine tears.

Get Out, a wildly fun, exciting, laugh-filled, terrifying and even thought-provoking thrill ride, has a decidedly different feel. Peeleâ€s film has been largely described as a horror-comedy, but the “horror” label doesnâ€t really fit; there are a handful of jump-scares sprinkled throughout, but the goings-on are really more sci-fi than horror, and in truth, the movie is too damn funny to really qualify as scary. Among other things, it’s a comedy of manners, a delightful, only barely exaggerated depiction of how awkward and unwittingly inappropriate white people can be around black people. This is never more apparent than among those, like the parents in both movies, who go overboard demonstrating their approval (such as when Dean assures Chris, immediately and unprompted, that he would have voted for Obama a third time). Peeleâ€s smart, witty dialogue and razor-sharp direction, a commanding leading performance from Kaluuya and delightful ones by Whitford, Keener, and especially Howery, and solid technical work all around combine to make Get Out the first must-see movie of 2017 and one of the more impressive writing-directing debuts in recent memory.

The Decision

Guess Whoâ€s Coming to Dinner’s message of tolerance was a significant step forward for progress and equality, on top of which the film showcases masterful acting by three screen legends at their best. Peeleâ€s film, in its off-kilter way, is equally compelling. Will people remember it as a classic 50 years from now? Maybe not, but today it’s far more gut-busting, armrest-gripping fun. Which is why we salute Dinner with one hand, while with the other, we enthusiastically give Get Out the Smackdown trophy.

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The Smackdown

Classic Smackdown alert! L.A. vs. New York! East Coast vs. West Coast! Cars vs. Subways! Dark romantic hit ’10s musical vs. Dark romantic flop ’70s musical! Studly De Niro vs. heartthrob Gosling! Winsome Stone vs. irrepressible Minnelli!

And how about that repetition within each city-centric title? Coincidence? We think not. It’s obvious the Smack gods were smiling on us for this one. Probably tapping their feet too.

Yes, folks, what we have here is no less than the most contentious battle since Black Spy first set his cunning sights on White Spy, and vice versa. So hold onto your hats and get your dancing shoes on. It’s showtime!

The Challenger

Damien Chazelle’s La La Land accurately envisions its title city as one crammed with ambitious young wannabe performers who have come to Hollywood from around the globe to chase their dreams of stage and screen stardom. One such dreamer is Mia (Emma Stone), a struggling actress working in the studio coffee shop and getting increasingly disillusioned by the brutal realities of the audition process. Her dismal life is finally brightened, after some unpromising meet-cutes, by an unlikely romance with Sebastian (Ryan Gosling), a surly-but-charming jazz pianist who dreams of opening his own club but is hampered by his stubborn rejection of all things musically commercial and popular.

Gradually, they drift apart as their goals take them in different directions. He joins a band led by his friend Keith (John Legend) that represents everything he hates and takes him on the road for long stretches but provides financial stability. She devotes herself, at his prodding, to an autobiographical one-woman show.

The story is fairly traditional, but the stylized visuals and occasional spots where characters spontaneously burst into song and dance (or in Gosling’s case, “song” and “dance”) bring to mind classic MGM musicals, beloved Jacques Demy flicks like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and everything in between, including —

The Defending Champion

The boisterous opening sequence of Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York (1977) finds the arrogant, relentlessly pushy Jimmy Doyle (Robert De Niro) at a swinging, dance-filled V-J Day party in the title city, desperately trying his stale pick-up lines on every woman in sight and finally facing a rejection from sassy USO singer Francine Evans (Liza Minelli) that he simply refuses to digest.

Fate bonds them together over the course of the night and into the next day, eventually leading to Jimmy’s audition for a local nightclub, where he reveals himself as a crazy talented saxophonist. What’s more, his chemistry with Francine on vocals is off the charts and lands them both the gig.

A turbulent romance and marriage ensue, and their stars continue rising, hers as a singer/actress, his as a composer/bandleader. But Jimmy’s volatile temper, infidelity, and all-around dickishness prevent them from finding much joy. Not even a fantastic, nearly non-stop soundtrack of jazz standards and two instant-classic Kander/Ebb songs manages to cheer them up for much of the film’s 163-minute (!) running time.

The Scorecard

But a side-by-side comparison makes the similarities impossible to overlook: Both begin with a lavish opening sequence that has the paths of the two leads cross and gets them off to an inauspicious start, leading to flirtatious banter and eventual romance. Granted, both films owe a rather staggering debt to such classic forerunners as A Star Is Born, but still.

In these two, the male half of the couple is an aspiring jazz musician/composer, and the female is a struggling performer. Both couples are threatened by their differing agendas and career priorities. Both female leads reach a career-boosting turning point with a big, dramatic (and show-stopping) number in a studio, and both male leads are hindered by being temperamental, stubborn, self-absorbed, and money-focused. And eventually (SPOILER ALERT), neither couple can withstand all the internal and external pressures, resulting in their breaking up and moving on with their lives (her raising a child, him going it alone), only to enjoy a brief, bittersweet reunion just before the credits roll.

While their plots and themes share more than a passing resemblance, how the two films approach their material couldnâ€t be more different. Chazelleâ€s style is one of imitation and nostalgia, more than happy to remind us of his various inspirations and play with them like a kid in a toy store, whereas Scorsese is more like a mad scientist, attempting to create some new, unholy hybrid of the classic movie musical and his own gritty, brooding, naturalistic (and frequently improvisational) sensibilities. The result, in Scorseseâ€s case, is a laudably ambitious experiment that contains some wonderful notes and passages but never quite comes together as a successful composition.

The fault lies mainly with De Niroâ€s character, an all but irredeemable creep who would have been right at home in Taxi Driver (a far better Scorsese-De Niro collaboration, that came immediately prior to this one), but here, we are simply at a loss as to any reason to like or care about him. We canâ€t imagine a sweetheart like Francine possibly falling for him that hard, and we have no rooting interest in their staying together or in his career taking off; if anything, we want him out of the picture so we can have her all to ourselves… and indeed, we pretty much get our wish toward the end, but itâ€s too little and WAY too late.

Meanwhile, on the opposite coast, Goslingâ€s Sebastian is no prince either, but heâ€s sweet, soulful and genuinely talented, enough to get us rooting for both his career ambitions to pan out and for him to wind up with Mia, whom Stone characteristically renders as irresistible. The two leads (both Oscar-nominated) have a wonderful rapport that makes for a delightful, witty and breezy first half. The script falters in the latter stages (though the critical accusations of racism and whitesplaining go overboard), when Sebastian starts making decisions that donâ€t seem motivated or clear, causing the subsequent events to feel contrived and hollow. But much of the movie hums along quite enjoyably thanks to its two charming leads, Chazelleâ€s fluid and confident direction, and the gorgeous technical achievements, pretty much all of which nabbed Oscar noms as well.

The one area where NY, NY comes out the clear winner, however, is a pretty major one for a musical: the music. As is par for the course for Scorsese, the soundtrack is overflowing with classic tunes, as performed by Minnelli and De Niro (yes, the ultimate Method Actor that he is, he actually learned to play), together and apart, and some outstanding back-up bands. And in the final half-hour, weâ€re treated to two of the great movie-musical performances of the entire genre: Minnelliâ€s rousing renditions of both the title tune (which, I donâ€t care how many millions of times youâ€ve heard it, still packs a wallop here), and the less-celebrated but equally powerful “But the World Goes Round.” The Justin Hurwitz songs in La La are serviceable and occasionally very good (the glitzy opening number and Stoneâ€s climactic solo are standouts) but not particularly memorable, and they simply canâ€t compare with Scorseseâ€s knack for assembling an indelible collection of songs, or the magnificent Minnelliâ€s delivery of them.

The Decision

So how to score it? New York, New York remains an intriguing and occasionally brilliant curiosity, but its extreme length and rather hateful protagonist make it a bit of a slog. On the one hand, if you believe you can’t have a great musical without great music, you’ll agree that it takes the “Soundtrack Smackdown” undercard by an easy TKO. On the other, start spreading the news, because for the main bout, I go with the sympathetic characters, laughs, likability and rooting interest of the winner La La Land, a phrase I suspect weâ€ll be hearing repeatedly this coming Sunday.

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Arrival is a big, fat Smackdown target, given the boxes it checks from other classics. Aliens arrive in massive ships all over the world like they do in Independence Day. It has a brainy female scientist who is desperately needed so that clueless authorities can understand how aliens talk, as in Contact. Itâ€s got Interstellarâ€s shifting reality and its spacey interpretation of the parent/child relationship. It also comes complete with a mother grieving a lost child, as in Gravity. It even has the U.S. government setting up in remote places to talk to these giant alien hovercraft like they did in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

That would be check, check, check, check and check. Which is another way of saying that Arrival clearly has arrived with ambition to stand among some very powerful, important films even if there is a bit of Frankenstein-type borrowing stitched into its fabric.

Try this for a logline: A brilliant woman interested in communication is chosen to lead a global response to extraterrestrial contact and is changed forever by the experience.

Yes, thatâ€s the high concept behind Arrival, coming soon to a theater near you. But itâ€s also the idea behind Contact. Thatâ€s why they go into the ring together for this one.

The Challenger

Since weâ€ve already laid out what Arrival is, hereâ€s what it isnâ€t. Itâ€s not a big alien invasion blockbuster, despite what its YouTube trailers might lead you to believe. You actually are going to have to think about this one in order to penetrate its world fully.

The film began as a short story, “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, got turned into a screenplay by Eric Heisserer, and ended up on the big screen under the direction of Denis Villeneuve. Together theyâ€ve turned out something that explores some fascinating ideas, with a look that is beautiful and at times challenging. Oh, and itâ€s got a Rod Serling twist.

Amy Adams plays college linguistics professor Dr. Louise Banks, and when me meet her she is sad and just going through the motions. Through flashbacks, we see that Louise had a daughter who died of cancer. The girl’s father is a scientist, we learn, but heâ€s not around these days.

When extraterrestrials show up, we just know that A) Amy is going to be needed, and B) her emotional tragedy over her child will have to be a part of this film.

Amy gets drafted by the military to travel to one of 12 alien ships, this one hovering over Montana. Her job is to work with Forest Whitakerâ€s Colonel Weber and a physicist played by Jeremy Renner. We know that Amy and Jeremyâ€s characters are super-smart because she acts with very little make-up and he wears glasses.

These people try to get the aliens to fess up on some basic questions. What is their purpose here on Earth? Where are they from? And if Donald Trump wanted to build a wall to keep them out, who would pay for it?

The Defending Champion

Contact, the film directed by Robert Zemeckis, is a far more faithful adaption of Contact, the novel written by Carl Sagan, than most book-to-movie adaptations can claim. Sometimes thatâ€s a good thing, sometimes not, but in this case, it means the story is set on tested and solid ground.

This is a sprawling canvas set before us, and the filmâ€s reputation has grown over the years.

In both the book and the film, radio astronomer Dr. Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster in the film) hits the cosmic jackpot when the giant radio telescopes that are part of S.E.T.I. (Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence) actually turn up a non-random signal from across the universe. Someone is talking to us or, more accurately, talking back. You see, theyâ€ve picked up the very first television transmission the Earth ever leaked outward, amped it up and sent it back to us.

Itâ€s an excellent surprise and — without spoiling it — letâ€s just say that the first TV signal that went out from Earth is, well, unexpected. It kicks the film into territory where no movie has really gone before.

The characters, however, often feel stock. The hero must be impeded by standard blocking devices, in this case, White House advisers played by James Woods and Angela Bassett, and Tom Skerritt, whose character steals credit for all Ellie’s work. There is also the non-standard religious leader played by a young and folksy Matthew McConaughey with the hots for the blonde scientist.

The whole movie hinges on the twist that the signal buried in that TV re-transmission is, basically, the blueprint for building a gigantic spacecraft… for one person! Well, if there was ever a situation designed to stretch our humanity to the breaking point, it would be trying to determine whoâ€s going to be that lucky (or, in failure, unlucky) astronaut. Where will they go? Will they ever return? Will they die? Is it some kind of trick? If it is a one-way trip, would it be possible to send Donald Trump?

The Scorecard

Where they diverge in tone, the two films converge on their depiction about the nature of the alien contact by giving us aliens that are not monsters. In fact, they each seem to want to give humankind something that will change us, or at least welcome us to the greater universe.

I just saw Arrival at the Telluride Film Festival where it played multiple times to audiences that had high anticipation for it, and for Amy Adams†in-person festival tribute. Most people seemed impressed with the film, but there was an audible minority walking out of the theater who just didnâ€t take to it.

While Arrival wants to reach for 2001: A Space Odyssey in tone, Contact wants to drive its message home, even if it pushes the film into preachiness. This cuts in favor of Arrival. When it comes to sci-fi, we generally prefer to have our minds blown than our souls hammered.

Letâ€s consider Louise versus Ellie, our two brainy scientist/intellectual women who just exude gravitas, since they are characters inhabited by two wonderful actresses in their prime. It was Jodie Foster back in 1997 for Contact and now, nearly twenty years later, itâ€s Amy Adams in Arrival.

Foster’s Ellie has Daddy issues. Adams, as Louise, has kid issues. Both get dealt with, but Contact has more clarity about what is really going on. Arrival is more challenging, yes, but it’s also more likely to leave some people scratching their heads.

Youâ€ll get a chance in each film to see the female protagonist go head-to-head with the alien intelligence. This also cuts for Arrival, given the beautifully creepy moment of first contact with the aliens, called Heptapods. They are big, seven-fingered beings, lurking in mist and writing in some inky squid-like script. In Contact, they communicate with ones and zeroes.

Both films deal with the issue of Disclosure, forcing me to disclose that Iâ€ve written a book on the topic. Capital “D” Disclosure is when the whole world basically wakes up at the same time to the fact that we are not alone and there is another intelligence out there in the universe that is knocking on our door.

Arrival gets across these concepts through interstitial news bits about looting, stock market plunges, military exercises, etc. Contact did less of that, preferring to discuss these issues in debates between their characters.

Both films have twists at the end that put into question the nature of reality in the universe, of space and time, and the nature of our relationship to other intelligent life-forms. They are challenging pieces of sci-fi, but neither is perfect. What they both have, however, is a scope that runs from global to personal and makes you think about your own life in the context of this overwhelming news that the universe is a very big place that we are a very small part of.

The Decision

Contact, drilling deep on the ideas of Sagan and Zemekis, turns out in the end to be a metaphor for faith. Arrival, spawned by the ideas of Chiang, Heisserer and Villeneuve, also draws from Sagan, Zemeckis, Spielberg, Emmerich, Nolan and many others, recombines their DNA into something that feels both new and familiar simultaneously, and turns out to be a metaphor for living life in the present.

Iâ€m a sci-fi geek from forever and I liked both of them. Arrival, for all its polish and sizzle, does lack the singular originality of Contact. Still, because of its ambition and its more artful blend of the universal with the highly personal, Arrival is the better film.

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Forget Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Old news.  In fact, forget Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice v Captain America: Civil War.  Soon to be old news. Those films are just the surrogates fighting when the real war is something much larger.  Weâ€re talking about universes in collision.  This is really the one for the ages, “Marvel v DC.”

It was really the comic books that introduced the world to the concept of the mulitiverse, that wacky idea cooked up by physics experts that we not only live in an infinite universe but our universe is but one in an infinite multiverse.  This, of course, is worth its weight in gold at the academic level, spawning all manner of thesis papers, butâ€s been worth its weight in platinum to the world of superheroes as they fight each other in an endless variation of alliances and grudge matches.

This means that readers and viewers can accept that the Earth we live on is one reality, and there is another reality where Kennedy lived, or the Nazis won the war and on and on. But it also encouraged fans to believe that there was one world where Clark Kent grew up in Kansas and moved to Metropolis before becoming Superman and another where he put on the costume while he was a teenager, and so on. Earth One and Two and Three… to Infinity and Beyond!

In films, we have watched as, first, the Marvel Universe took shape in an intricately plotted unveiling of superheroes, building up to The Avengers.  Only recently has the DC Universe begun a similar advance.  After preferring films in stand-alone realities where Superman lived in one world and Batman another, the owners of DC at Warner Brothers have begun their own march that will culminate in the Justice League.

Along the way, however, we have seen that there is an almost existential pull to put more superheroes into the same movie.  While The Avengers and Justice League are the current destinations of that trend, both Dawn of Justice and Civil War speak to another reality — the idea that single character films arenâ€t always enough any more for fans who love to see cross-overs between characters in comics and want them on screen.

So we get Batman taking on Superman and Captain America taking on Iron Man. When these beloved characters get a chance to slug it out against each other, we can appreciate that it means a bit more in the stakes and surprise departments.  After all, when Batman takes on the Joker and Iron Man takes on Mandarin, itâ€s a pretty good bet that the heroes will win the battle so they can fight on against other villains in other movies to come.

The contenders here both bring some real heat to the battle for supremacy in the multiverse.  Vote for your favorite universe in the poll to your right.

In the DC Universe, the energy has always come from the big two of Superman and Batman, but has included the less-than-stellar Swamp Thing, Catwoman, Steel, Constantine, and The Green Lantern, but holds promise of righting the ship soon with Suicide Squad, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Aquaman, Shazam, Cyborg and, not too long from now, Justice League. New versions of Superman and Batman, independent of the group films, must be in the offing but arenâ€t being publicly discussed just yet.

Where does this all lead?  I think the comics provide the answer, in the same way they have given such guidance to the Marvel Universe and DC Universe so far.

For the next few years, weâ€ll see more crossovers between characters in the individual universes, like we just saw in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Captain America: Civil War.  Weâ€ll see a run of films that continue The Avengers brand for Marvel and the Justice League brand for DC.  

Both Warner Bros. and Disney will exploit the hell out of their existing characters in a growing web of action and re-action.  And while that sounds super-exciting now, even that is going to feel been there/done that some day.

Sometime in the next ten years and maybe sooner, weâ€ll see a crossover film that pits Batman against Captain America, Superman against Thor, and/or Aquaman against Sub-Mariner.  While I wouldnâ€t bet my house on that, Iâ€d bet yours.

Then, when that hero against hero from the competing universes has become the norm, itâ€ll be time to step the game up once again.

Personally, I canâ€t wait to see the Warner Brothers/Disney film of “Justice League v The Avengers.”  The only thing I canâ€t figure out now is who is going to get top billing.  Still, with all the universes out there in the multiverse, Iâ€m sure theyâ€ll be able to figure something out.

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Here at the Smack, weâ€d have to say that heâ€s the most iconic comic book villain of all time. The Joker just turned 75, by the way, having first appeared in Batman #1 back on April 25, 1940.

So happy birthday, you green-haired, crazy-eyed, psychopathic criminal, you!

As a straight-up birthday present to fans, Suicide Squad director David Ayer just tweeted out a clear look at the Joker as heâ€s going to be portrayed by Jared Leto. Impossible as this may sound, Letoâ€s Joker is as surprising today as Heath Ledgerâ€s was when we first saw him.

I mean hereâ€s Oscar-winning Leto (Dallas Buyers Club), now appearing as what one Internet pundit calls “a shady, skeezy guy in the corner of a rave, selling ecstasy to kids.” Frankly, we think itâ€s a good look. The cosplay types at the next Comic Con are going to have a field day with the tats, thatâ€s for sure. And the grill. Definitely the grill.

One thing we can count on is that the fans are always going to go into shock when a new version of a beloved character comes out, and that means comedy. One video making a lot of noise at the moment uses an About Schmidt clip to show how Jack Nicholson, who made a pretty fair Joker himself for director Tim Burton, takes the news.

Although the Joker had a pretty active life in comics, it wasnâ€t until the 1960s Batman television series that he got turned into a celluloid character played by Cesar Romero. He wasnâ€t scary at all, but he had a distinctive cackle that fans used to love.

Then came Nicholson in Burtonâ€s 1989 Batman, a villain disfigured when he fell into a vat of chemicals during a fight with Michael Keatonâ€s title character. Also possessed with a unique sense of style, Nicholsonâ€s performance got him listed 45th on a list of the American Film Instituteâ€s 50 greatest film villains of all time.

Heath Ledger, though, turned the Joker into an honest-to-God terrifying dude in director Christopher Nolanâ€s The Dark Knight. The performance was highly acclaimed, and Ledger said he viewed the character as a “psychopathic, mass murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy.” He was brilliant.

Sadly, Ledgerâ€s untimely death prevented him from returning in the role. This has opened the door for Leto to play him in 2016â€s Suicide Squad (and maybe to flash a cameo in Batman v. Superman, which also comes out next year). Obviously, the filmmakers and studio have decided not to try to compete with Ledger and have gone in a completely different direction.

Hereâ€s our question. Which direction do you like the best?

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