A good interview/career analysis piece on Brokeback Mountain star Heath Ledger by Time‘s Belinda Luscombe (“Heath Turns It Around”). It reminded me of what I wrote hours after seeing Brokeback in Toronto, which was that between that and Ledger’s then-upcoming Casanova, he has saved his career. The 26 year-old Australian tells Luscombe that he pretty much decided to kill his movie-star persona after A Knight’s Tale, a film which made Ledger feel he was being sold and packaged as a slicked-up commodity. The result of Ledger’s Sean Penn-ish career stratgey since then was that, with the exception of Monster’s Ball, all the films he’s made have been critically slammed or strick out at the box-office, or both (Four Feathers, The Order, The Brothers Grimm, Lords of Dogtown). “Even if [Brokeback Mountain] pulls in crowds only in New York City, South Beach and San Francisco,” Luscombe writes, “it has redeemed Ledger from being a pawn — or even a knight — in the Hollywood chess game.”