HE WON'T ROCK ANYONE NOW

http://www.merryweatherjones.com/content/he_won't_rock_anyone_now Thu, 24 Jan 2008 05:32:44 GMT HE WON'T ROCK ANYONE NOW What an asshole. That's right, you heard me. When I read the news today, the first thing I registered upon confirming the reports was anger--anger that he'd been so careless with his life. He was a good actor. And I'm not just talking about his performance in Ang Lee's Oscar nominated Brokeback Mountain, which earned him a best actor nod, or Monsters Ball, where he starred alongside Billy Bob Thornton and Halle Berry. His role in A Knight's Tale is the cinematic moment crystalized in my mind when I think about Heath Ledger. That cheesy, quirky, post-modern, medieval melodrama, about a low-born serf, who impersonates a knight and romances a nobleman's daughter, with the help of a motley crue: played by silver-tongued Paul Bettany (Chaucer), the ever-clever Mark Addy and Alan Tudyk (his faithful sidekicks), and the terribly underrated Shannyn Sossamon (as the nobleman's daughter). The film is probably most notable for it's use of classic rock like Queen's "We Will Rock You," Thin Lizzy's "The Boys Are Back in Town," and David Bowie's "Golden Years" as the backdrop for a story set in the 14th-century. It's a dumb movie, but it's also one of those films where you can tell the cast are getting along, and you can imagine that it was fun to be on set, and the feeling of conviviality and solidarity among the actors makes it hard to be critical of the corny dialogue and cliche plot. As he grew as an actor, my appreciation for his skill increased, but it will always be A Knight's Tale which established in my mind the weight of his talent; I knew then that he was an actor to watch. He will be best known for portraying unstable characters with brooding intensity, but I think his greatest strength was in being able to find levity in a scene and highlight it. In A Knight's Tale, he tackled a very silly film and made it his own; maybe not as extravagantly as Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Carribean, but something like it. That's what I'll remember about Heath. "I only do this because I'm having fun. The day I stop having fun, I'll just walk away. I wasn't going to have fun doing a teen movie again.... I don't want to do this for the rest of my life....I don't want to spend the rest of my youth doing this in this industry. There's so much I want to discover." Vanity Fair (August 2000) Good night, gay cowboy acting man Heath Ledger, A Knight's Tale, Brokeback Mountain http://www.merryweatherjones.com/content/he_won't_rock_anyone_now http://www.merryweatherjones.com/viewcomments.php?articleid=158