Heath Ledger’s Joker 'exacerbates stereotypes about mental health'

Hollywood shows schizophrenics and those with other mental illnesses only as either stupid or evil, according to a new report for the Time to Change Campaign, which is backed by the Mind and Rethink charities.
The latest Batman film, for which Ledger won a posthumous Oscar, is criticised for pandering to a false stereotype of schizophrenics, that they have split personalities.
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A survey of 1989 people, commissioned for the report, found that 49 per cent had seen people with a mental illness acting violently on screen.
In total, 44 per cent of those asked believe that people with mental illnesses are more prone to violence.
Sue Baker, Director for Time to Change, said: “This report highlights that movies are the main source of information that reinforces negative stereotypes of mental illness above and beyond any other form of media.
“We need to make it clear to directors and producers that they can still break box office records without wrecking lives.”

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Asylum

Natasha Richardson glides through the film version of Patrick McGrath's novel "Asylum" in various states of fear, desire and undress, a swan among Yorkshire frumps. As this placid tale of mad love unfolds, charting an affair between the wife of a mental hospital administrator and her brooding, Heathcliffy lover, Richardson—who is 5 foot 9, according to various unimpeachable Internet sources, but in "Asylum" looks to be about nine feet tall—towers over her repressed lessers, a lightning rod in summer whites. Set in 1959, the story begins as Stella Raphael (Richardson) arrives in her grim new surroundings alongside her tightly buttoned husband Max (Hugh Bonneville) and their solitary 10-year-old son, Charlie (Gus Lewis). The marriage iced over years ago. We hear of Stella's past indiscretions, which Max clearly hasn't forgotten or forgiven.Any hope of newfound peace is shattered by a charismatic aesthete in Stella's midst, sculptor Edgar Stark (Marton Csokas), pet patient of one of Max's associates. Playing Dr. Peter Cleave, a subtly devious character specializing in "sexual pathology and its assorted catastrophes," Sir Ian McKellen finesses the tiniest of pauses like someone who deserves a second knighthood just for his timing.

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Cobra Verde

Kinski's character, however, is far from the film's only serving of astonishing insanity: Herzog depicts the 19th century as an insensibly violent era, with both Africans and Europeans given equal time for maniac brutality. After da Silva wanders onto a town square where Brazilian colonials in comfy carriages entertain themselves by watching slaves get whipped in punishment, he's hired by a wealthy sugar plantation owner as an overseer. There, the sweet stuff is wrung from human misery: Slaves work alongside rumbling industrial machinery like cogs (almost literally: One man gets his arm caught in a cane-thrashing mill, and the factory owner calmly calls for someone to cut him loose). Sent to Africa after impregnating all three of the plantation owner's daughters, da Silva successfully parleys with the mad King of Dahomey to procure a boatload of human livestock in return for rifles. But later, da Silva leads a revolt against the king with the help of a massive army of topless warrior-women—like a spectacularly Freudian nightmare conjured after wanking to one too many National Geographic magazines.

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