Bizarre…

In Japan, fake Catholic ceremonies make up 60% of all weddings.

Sometimes I think 90% of what Japan does is just making fun of us.

Total Request #3: All-Time Movie Villains

I’m super late in doing this Total Request. My apologies!

Br. Bob writes:

How ’bout:

Heath Ledger’s Joker: how does he rank among all-time movie villains? Personally, I gotta put him in at least the top ten, though I don’t exactly know who else would be on that list.

So in that spirit, let’s go ahead and do the Top Ten Movie Villains. This will inevitably be a biased list. I haven’t seen every movie ever, I’m partial to Star Trek and science fiction, and these villains will all come from movies I actually like. (yeah, there’s some good villains elsewhere, but I’m not touching Robocop). So keep that in mind. I know these lists can be contentious, so feel free to post your own contributions.

#10 – The Borg Queen, Alice Krige, Star Trek: First Contact

Strange, sexual, creepy, she was the great unexpected villain of Star Trek. The Borg were supposed to be a collective mind, and here was their queen, The One Who Is Many, seemingly in control. What was her relationship to the Collective? What was her role? Was she the first Borg? Perhaps she was simply a high-function unit, more than a drone but less than an individual. Some have speculated that she was nothing more than a mouthpiece, like Locutus (who’s name apparently means “Speaker”), but she seems profoundly different than the stiff, monotone Picard Borg. Her slow seduction of Data absolutely made First Contact.

#9 – Lady Eboshi, Minnie Driver, Princess Mononoke

I like villains who aren’t clear-cut evil. Nobody wakes up and says “I’m going to be as horrible as I can be to everyone I meet!” When they work for a goal, generally it’s something that they at least perceive as a good. Lady Eboshi simply wants to make sure Iron Town can’t be threatened, to secure a livelihood for her people. She employs lepers in the manufacture of her weapons and treats them with genuine respect and affection. And she wars with the Wolf Tribe because the wolves keep killing the settlers. But she’s profoundly out of the balance, and her actions place her in conflict with the environment around her. In the end, she beheads the Forest Spirit, who becomes a lumbering, oily god of death who ends up destroying Iron Town. What makes her so remarkable is that, in the end, she learns from her mistakes, and resolves not to turn Iron Town into what it was before.

#8 – Seahaven, The Truman Show

Yes, the town. It’s hard to argue Christof as the villain; in the end, he let Truman go. Christof was arrogant and controlling, but he still had some affection for Truman. The town, on the other hand, was the giant lie, the prison Truman was trying to escape. It was the wool pulled over his eyes. This idyllic planned community was downright sinister.

#7 – Count Orlock, Max Shreck, Nosferatu

Orlock warrants a place for the simple effectiveness of his visuals. We’ve seen vampires of this sort only rarely, and never as effectively. Inhuman and terrifying, he appeared more often as a shadow than an actual figure, which only further distorted his strange otherness, elongating his nose and fingers. Sure, it was a German expressionist silent film, but few can match his shivering creepiness.

Visually probably the most unsettling thing in the world.

#6 – Khan Noonien Singh, Ricardo Montalban, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

Montalban’s portrayal of Khan is so well-done, most people never realize that at no point in the movie does he ever actually come into contact with Captain Kirk. They never meet face to face. Everything is viewscreens and communicators, Khan distantly promising to destroy everything Kirk loves. “I’ve done more than kill you, Admiral. I’ve hurt you. And I intend to keep hurting you.” Formerly a megalomaniacal Hiter figure, Khan is now motivated, not by any desire for conquest, but simple revenge on Kirk for the death of his wife and child during the exile Kirk imposed. He’s vicious, and he’s angry, and worse, his anger is wholly justified.

#5 – Warden Samuel Norton, Bob Gunton, The Shawshank Redemption

I spent the entire movie trying to get a handle on this guy. When he’s introduced, he’s tough and a little hypocritical, but we have little sense of his brutal streak. He treats Andy Dufresne with some minimum of respect, which is remarkable for his job, and accords him great influence. Norton’s devotion to the Bible doesn’t seem to stretch as far as actually influencing him ethically, though, and he forces Dufresne to engage in embezzling, denies him a chance at a retrial and orchestrates the murder of the one person who could have had Dufresne freed. It doesn’t seem like a transformation, though, as much as his true character showing through. Positively chilling.

#4 – Bill, David Carradine, Kill Bill

You don’t break the heart of a murdering bastard. A kung-fu master, a skilled assassin, and even he has a soft spot in his heart. Of course, when he found out his greatest love and best agent had vanished, and turned up in Nowhere, Texas marrying a record store clerk, he was a little angry. Hell, he’d thought she was dead, and as he says, making some who loves you think your dead is a cruel thing to do.

Bill just reacted the way you could expect him to act: murdering her fiance, the pastor, the pastor’s wife, and everyone else in the building. He even tried to kill Beatrix, but she just wouldn’t die.

#3 – Tyler Durden, Brad Pitt, Fight Club

Sure, he was just a hallucination, but a hallucination with a clear and coherant plan for the destruction of civilization and a messiah complex complete with a church and system of sacraments. Durden is the Anti-Christ, pure and simple, actively God’s enemy — “our fathers were our models for God. If our fathers left us, what does that say about God?” — and the enemy of basic humanity. To Durden, anyone in his way was merely an obstacle, something to be done away with as quickly and brutally as possible, not above castration as a method of punishment. He is the ultimate utilitarian and the enemy of human dignity. The only reason he’s not ranked at number one is because of who the next two are.

#2 – Darth Vader, David Prowse and James Earl Jones, Star Wars

The tragic villain, corrupted by his desire to protect his family, manipulated by his mentor, and even before then, impetuous and angry, Darth Vader is one of the most stirringly complex and well-developed figures in, well, modern storytelling. He’s his own villain, his own enemy, the victim of despair and lies. The strength of his figure is that he isn’t beyond redemption, that there was still good in him after all. I mean, his descent was motivated by love, the love of his wife, the love of his country, the love of his children, so of course only love could bring him back. For Vader, the recognition that the Emperor held not one whit of compassion for him as he shocked Luke pushed him to realize where his true loyalties lay.

• #1 – The Joker, Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight

That’s right, I put him at number one, and if you don’t know why, go see the movie. He is the most insanely brutal, disgustingly evil character ever to slobber his way across the screen. A self-described agent of chaos, he has no motive but to murder for its own sake, and to destroy because he enjoys destruction.  He becomes a terrorist Bin Laden would admire, thrusting Gotham into a terror no American city has ever seen. He holds the entire city hostage in the grip of an almost supernatural fear. He bombs hospitals, boats, poisons his opponents. There is no hiding from him, and Batman is not certain he can be the man he needs to be in order to stop him.

Batman can’t stop him.

His violence draws the worst out of everyone, and his mission was to turn the best of Gotham, the crusading D.A. Harvey Dent, and turn him into just as much the monster, to show that there is no good in anyone, and nobody is above him. Ledger’s performance was stunning, and the role is rumored to have killed him. We’ll never see a villain like that ever again.

Number one, with a bullet, The Joker.