'Suicide Squad'

"Worst Film Of 2016" - Rolling Stone

It may actually be that very thing - a terrible film with very few redeeming features.

Here's the obligatory spoiler alert, but would you really care about spoilers with this one?




I mean, that trailer's a little enticing. It could have been something cool.

What's Good About It

In descending order, Will Smith. Margot Robbie.

What's Bad About It

Concept. Execution. Everything in between.

That would include things like, oh, writing, directing, cinematography, editing, production design, sound design, sound mix, casting, wardrobe, acting, and well, all of it is a dog's breakfast. And by bad, I don't mean incompetence like being out of focus or boom mics popping into frame, but more like, an assortment of really poor aesthetic choices, one following the other, with bad pacing, out of control performances, and an utter lack of spatial consideration as to who is standing where as whatever the hell is going on is unfolding haphazardly.

A special note about the awfulness of this film's conception: Jared Leto's Joker is simply toweringly awful. He's hardly worthy of being Batman's big adversary, and maybe a little too young. Also, the fantasy sequence where Harley and Joker enjoy a suburban life of normalised nuclear family domesticity with a baby absolutely fails to understand these characters. As such, it was always going to crash and burn. That can't be Harley's secret desire. It's idiotic in the extreme.

Remember the person back in high school who had the dead set opposite tastes in everything that you were both interested in? You love rock, but they love disco? You love Tolkien, they love Donaldson? You love 'Blade Runner', they love 'Escape From New York'?
It's as if that person made a movie.

What's Interesting About It

I wrote about it with the 'Batman vs Superman' entry but the DCEU is utterly failing to deliver satisfying product. It looks worse because the 4 shows on the CW are pumping out competent product week after week, using some of the same characters as these. As a comparison, the Arrow featured an episode where it was mainly Deadshot and other members of the rogues gallery in that TV series who go on their Suicide Squad run, and while it has less spectacular effects and fight scenes thanks to the lower TV budget, it delivers a coherent story as well as ample characterisation so that the audience never misunderstands why they are doing what they are doing.

It's either the case that the CW shows are punching well above their weight, or the movie version of these characters is utterly failing to deliver the product as promised.

Now, Will Smith makes for a better Deadshot, and Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn is nutty as promised, but there's really not much of substance going on between those two to begin with and even less beyond it with the rest of this miserable film.

I So Wanted It To Be Good

Yeah I did. I really did. A good little picaresque is always great fun. Unfortunately this one was made by people with no sense of humour.

However I've been reflecting on my expectations a little bit and it's interesting that I did want it to be good, because I had zero expectations for 'Batman vs Superman' and 'Rogue One'. I've been asking myself how I could have gotten my hopes up so much. Maybe I sort of expected Warners to lift their game bait based on their recent comic book movie output.
I really didn't expect it to be this lousy.

'Seven Go Around The World'

The classic archetype of this story is called 'Seven Go Around The World'. An oddly assorted bunch assemble to go on an adventure. If the story telling is done right, they are introduced with a cameo and they get to show off their special talent, each of which pays off in a timely manner, somewhere in the plot. That's also the contract this story form takes, so if you don't fulfil it, like this film fails to do, then it looks like you don't know what the hell you're doing.

It's the kind of idea that works better in comic books to begin with, where time and budget aren't an issue, so you can afford the fanciful sidetracks and flashbacks. Because this film cannot and will not afford all the proper affordances, they only sendup covering Deadshot and Harley, and it's not like Harley has a special talent that comes into play at the climax.

The story has too much exposition about who these characters are, with scant thought as to why they are who they are and what truly motivates them. It's amazing that a major studio can turn out a film with so little thought given to character.

Limits Of Comic Book Content (cont.)

Argh. My eternal issue with comic movies is going o be their inability to dig deep. 'The Watchmen' was a great series to read, but when it ended up on the screen, it was a lot less moving and a lot less interesting. 'Iron Man' would start off by tackling the Military Industrial Complex and somehow find a cheap villain with which to distract us. The eternal frustration is that the concepts go nowhere while the CGI explosions an destruction get bigger, wilder, and ever more impossible. What makes it worse is that it comes at us dressed in other genres like science fiction or political fiction, but really, most of the time there is no deeper thought about real problems from which they leap off with their stories.

And that's okay for a laugh if it's 'Guardians of the Galaxy', but with something like 'X-Men: First Class', it ends up being the dopiest telling of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

So what does this film go and do? This film... aims low and manages to shoot beneath it. Maybe one day somebody is going to champion this film and force us to watch it again in order understand its intricacies better but somehow I doubt it. It really is a big, dumb, corporate, bit of entertainment.

Please Don't Spin Off Anything

There's a bit of talk about spinning off Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn into a solo movies and maybe even WillSmith's Deadshot into its own movie. I'ms are they've got the success of 'Deadpool' in mind but they really shouldn't go there. The Warners people haven't exactly been hitting home runs with these comic book movies. If they can't make 'Batman vs Superman' work, and they can't pull together an interesting rendition of 'Suicide Squad', what makes them think they're ready to deliver something like 'Deadpool'?

Dear Warners, please don't go starting now.

View From The Couch - 05/Jul/2016

It Doesn't Get Better For Malcolm

Pleiades rang me yesterday morning to let me know that just about everybody was writing off Malcolm Turnbull. Columnists as far and wide across the AFR, The ABC, The Australian and The Guardian as well as Fairfax were essentially rolling up their sleeves and sharpening their pens to writ Malcolm Turnbull's political obituary.

Pleiades was particularly interested in discussing Barrie Cassidy's prognosis that the Coalition won't get the seats to form government, and Ian Verrender's piece where he couched the problem in a historic context where the political elite have worn out their welcome with the wider electorate. The most damning might be Mark Kenny:

The scale of the failure is colossal. Turnbull's key promise in the final weeks was the assurance of that most valuable thing: stability. Indeed, this emerged as his key edge, his point of market differentiation over the unstable Labor-Greens-independents nexus. 

Two points on this. First, stability is not a policy per se and can no more be promised than happiness. It is rather, the by-product of sound policy, effectively designed and successfully delivered. "Stability" in a democracy, is ultimately the people's to give and in this case, the people have expressly withdrawn it. 

Second, Turnbull in his anger, ignored the electoral message on Saturday night and thus missed the opportunity it gave him to communicate internally. Voters opted for the centre. They voted in more-or-less equal numbers for his style of economic management, but Labor's higher taxes, and more spending on health and education. Ditto for the NBN and climate change. 

Bill Shorten became the first mainstream leader in a generation to actually propose higher taxes and higher spending. Some voters perhaps many, said yes.

It seemed a bit strange that a lot of that noise was also going from the far right of the Liberal Party who are still under the misapprehension that Tony Abbott might have fared better had he been the PM contesting it. Oh, and Peter Reith had stuff to say that made about as much sense as a dog turd omelette. Of course when even Amanda Vanstone points out how out of touch such a view might be, then maybe they have to consider that they might be bad at this politics thing. I guess the corollary there is that if you make Amanda Vanstone look like the voice of reason, you're probably lacking in much reason.

By late in the day even Bill Shorten was calling for Malcolm Turnbull to resign - although it's hard to decipher on what basis he thinks that Malcolm would take on board his expert advice. I guess Bill Shorten knows very well what a terminal leadership looks like given his track record. If Malcolm were his leader, Bill would've removed him by now.  Maybe Mr. Turnbull should accept it as free expert advice.

Of course, there's this non-endorsement from Steve Kilbey of The Church.

Batman Vs Superman

I finally caught with this turd nugget on Fetch TV. I know Warner Brothers are in a hurry to ramp up the DC cinematic universe but this was a dog's breakfast with a side order cat food and birdseed. No, really, I can't poke fun at this film enough. It is as misguided as it is incomprehensible; it is lame as it is dumb and teetered towards the unwatchable and outright laughable in many spots.

The benchmark for the genre is the first 'The Avengers' where the marvel heroes gather and do battle with the aliens threat. This one is a three way tango between Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman, where you can't fully comprehend the motivations for any of the characters. They don't come together - they fail to even gel convincingly. The patina of the film is so dark and grimy, you lose sight of the fact that you're supposed be watching Superman.

Actually, having watched Season 1 of 'Supergirl' (and what a triumph that was) it was distressing to see a film that utterly failed to make Superman 'super'. Or Wonder Woman wonderful for that matter. Gal Gadot is a great bit of casting. It's a shame they gave her so little to do. Ben Affleck as Batman was okay. He wasn't the worst thing in the film as once feared. But Jeremy Irons totally phoned in his Alfred performance. It was just boring. Again, 'Gotham' is doing great things with Alfred, and this film utterly failed to match that intrigue and interest between these characters.

It's hard to believe this is the film that follows up 'Man of Steel'. It's hard to believe Christopher Nolan was even involved. It's hard to believe they're going to launch Ezra Miller as The Flash on the back of his cameo in this film. It's pretty clear that at this point Grant Gustin has him beat. It's no contest, it's not even close; and that tells you the Miller/Flash movie is going to flop - it may as well be stillborn now. There's no point in doing that film. Even the standalone Wonder Woman movie is going to be deeply problematic judging form this movie.
They're doing this all wrong. Unbelievable.

Just A Side Note On Brexit

I want to share a couple of videos worth watching. The first is the inimitable 'Jonathan Pie'.



He's wonderful, this comedian. This is a great character. I guess if he was working in America they'd offer him a show. heck maybe there's a show in that - Jonathan Pie is sent to cover DC.
Anyway, he makes a fair point about branding the people who voted to leave as all racists and xenophobes.

A more apt description might have been "lied-to". Try this video for size:



Basically, the people who voted for Brexit believing they had very good reasons might have been fed false information to come to their conclusions. Of course it doesn't stop Boris Johnson from continuing to spout forth these lies. Such is life in the world of sane men led into terrible waters by madmen and megalomaniacs.