The Suicide Squad Film Follies

this reminds me of when my old roomate was working on GI Joe 2 - the original was panned so their original idea was to immediately kill off channing tatum's character. then 21 jump street came out and the studio decided the world demanded more channing tatum, and they ended up reshooting like half the movie.

they're flogging the hell out of this thing on the late night talk shows and the clips are always as absurd as i imagine the whole film is.

I hope to god the initial test screenings didn't lead them to adding more Leto

Walter Chaw:

Suicide Squad fails at every single thing it attempts. It's porn for children. It'll make a ton of money, cause a lot of head-scratching and impotent conversations and mild outrage, and then Trump will be President and we'll deserve it.

AO Scott late to the party but came out swingin' with André Bazin references:

A series of tactical skirmishes with faceless minions — semi-zombies that can be slaughtered en masse, without a second thought — leads to a big final showdown. Spoiler alert: It’s essentially the final showdown from “Ghostbusters” and at least a half-dozen other recent blockbusters, with a few differences of what I guess we should call nuance. You can safely duck out of the theater and spend a good 20 minutes on the claw machine or Instagram, slipping back in to catch the final song and the sequel-teasing extra scene during the end credits.

i can't think of a more boring movie reviewer than a.o. scott. so tedious to read. aren't there any fiery young critics out there the NYT could hire? get rid of the old lumps. this is the everything he says in that review about what the movie looks like: "The colors are lurid and smeary."

Bazin indeed!

I tend to trust Dargis' taste

i just never read any good writing from those guys. very review/synopsis-oriented and kind of a snooze. it's definitely not good criticism.

A fairly overlapping set of circles in the Venn diagram of this, die-hard Trump supporters, men's rights advocates, and white men without a college degree.

A.O. Scott is the weirdest champion of, like, the well-done medium budget traditional Hollywood movie. Every review he writes, lately, is like reading a review of an adequate hamburger.

Pete Wells could probably write better movie reviews.

Heh, I was just reading on that Ask Greil Marcus page about how GM thinks AOS is such a great great critic - never read Scott's stuff, so was kinda intrigued (tho elsewhere on that site, GM produces a p tired old list - Thomson, Kael, Farber etc - when asked to name his fave film crits so...i dunno)

Out of interest, how does Scott bring Bazin in to a review of the Suicide Squad movie?

Again, don't really know Dargis crit - was put off her when Morbs quoted her saying that Spielberg belonged in the very top of the pantheon, which unreasonably enraged me. Whenever I look at that page of star ratings in Film Comment (I'm looking at em now), I don't agree w/ a lot of her rankings - 2 stars for Cemetery of Splendor, Embrace of the Serpent, The Lobster, 3 stars for Miles Ahead, no way

I don't agree with her on Cemetery or Embrace, that's for sure.

here's Scott's opening:

Scholars of classical Hollywood sometimes speak of “the genius of the system,” a phrase coined by the French critic André Bazin to refer to the ability of the old studio machinery to turn out works of inventive and beautiful popular art. But times change. “Suicide Squad,” the latest product of the DC-Warner Bros. partnership, is a good example of the idiocy of the system. This is not to say that it’s a completely terrible movie — it is certainly not worse than “X-Men: Apocalypse,” “Captain America: Civil War” or, heaven knows, “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” — but rather that its virtues and shortcomings are more systemic than specific. Written and directed by David Ayer (“Fury,” “End of Watch”), “Suicide Squad” is a so-so, off-peak superhero movie. It chases after the nihilistic swagger of “Deadpool” and the anarchic whimsy of “Guardians of the Galaxy” but trips over its own feet. The colors are lurid and smeary (when it’s not too dark to see what’s going on). The language pushes the far boundary of its PG-13 rating. The death toll is high, and the weapons are nasty. In spite of all the mayhem and attitude, the overall mood is cautious. For a film about a gang of outlaw brawlers, “Suicide Squad” is awfully careful to stay inside the lines.

"Suicide Squad is two hours of soul-sickening, sensory torment"

http://www.sfgate.com/movies/article/Suicide-Squad-is-two-hours-of-9067798.php

Tell us how you really feel.

xpost

In The Material Ghost, Gilberto Perez (a better film writer than Dargis or Scott, I'm willing to bet) writes in a footnote:

By "the genius of the system" Bazin did not exactly mean the Hollywood studio system... but something larger, the conjunction of a medium, its practioners, and its public, the social, cultural, historical juncture that allowed Hollywood's classical art to flourish.

something i've noticed just this week in the reviews of this film; phrasing to the effect of "you can cheerfully leave after the first 45 minutes and have not missed much" and "you can pop out to the candy counter and come back for the finale.." etc. i mean.. who on earth would actually do that?? i must have seen this kind of sentiment expressed 3 times across a handful of reviews. where's it coming from?? it seems like a whole new thing.

I'm only going to see this coz T-Mobile gave out free tickets to it as part of T-Mobile Tuesday. at least this one is free.

the part about getting in the guys who made the trailer to help out with the re-cut is blowing my mind.

"you can pop out to the candy counter and come back for the finale.."

maybe filmmakers are realizing their movies are so terrible they have started incorporating viral marketing by promoting film counter candy/popcorn vendors into bad reviews

http://comicbook.com/2016/08/03/petition-to-shut-down-rotten-tomatoes-over-bad-suicide-squad-rev/

lots of people I know think RT actually are scoring the movies themselves and don't know how data aggregation works (tho RT's binary scoring system is a bit misleading to begin with, though they do post an 'average score' as well).

all the aggregation is dumb as hell, you have to weight using special sauce due to the fact rating systems are different. you either end up with "net positive/negative" which can mean everyone thought it was ok as a film but not that interesting (so it gets a really high percent) or an attempt to average out numerical ratings which is another shitshow

90% on rotten tomatoes, iirc, means that people thought it was ok, not that it rates a 9/10

so if something fails as a film but is interesting, depending on the reviewer set, you end up with abyssmal scores but it could appeal to you

I guess that might be this film for some people, but it doesn't mean the site is wrong, per se.

yeah, RT I find useful only cos I know how to read it and still actually read the attached reviews rather than just going "OMG IT GOT AN 83%!".

Metacritic tends to be 'more accurate' iirc.

no they are all bad

yeah Metacritic is great. also there's a cool 'disparity' feature on there too, where you can see films with the highest ratings by the site users that have been slated by the critics. there's not enough of that kind of thing on these sites IMO.

i've never seen this movie but the sjw types hate it

*votes 10/10*

Fanboys more deserving of pissing off than sjws.

i'm glad this 20 year promotional cycle is coming to a close

rotten tomatoes is awful, but outraged fanboys are worse

i like RT. i have seen a lot of movies that were low rated on RT and they were almost all horrible movies. it's useful to average the ratings from industry experts.

the only people who think this movie is going to be so good there must be a CONSPIRACY AGAINST IT are people with no sense of perspective.

BvS was lousy. but not even in a bad movie kind of way. just dull and unpleasant and loud and confusing.

has anyone seen the Ultimate Cut? does it explain anything?

I have only seen the Ultimate Cut. It was dull, unpleasant, loud, confusing, and very long. There was a solid one hour stretch where there were no superheroics of any kind.

I've seen only Ultimate Cut too. It wasn't confusing or anything, but I think it's notable that it takes over two hours to set the titular conflict between Batman and Supes, and even then, A) they still can't do it without using the kidnapping of a loved one as justification, and B) it still makes both heroes look like idiots. But this is a movie where Batman shoots and kills a whole bunch of people without any care, and where Superman acts like a mopey teenager (and kills two villains too, despite the outrage the previous movie's ending caused), so they might've just as well been any random characters, they have little to do with the Supes and Bats as they've been established for the last 70+ years.

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/08/whats-the-matter-with-the-dc-comics-movie-franchise/494333
The Atlantic: Still Taking on the Tough Issues in 2016

Shutdown Rotten Tomatoes
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Abdullah Coldwater Alexandria, Egypt

We need this site to be shut down because It's Critics always give The DC Extended Universe movies unjust Bad Reviews, Like
1- Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice 2016
2- Suicide Squad 2016

and that Affects people's opinion even if it's a really great movies

It Afflecks people's opinion

hmmm
SUPERMAN RETURNS (2006) - 76%
BATMAN BEGINS (2005) - 84%
THE DARK KNIGHT (2008) - 94%
THE DARK KNIGHT RISES (2012) - 87%

What? No Catwoman?

the fanboy campaigns really kill me. like, if you love DC so much why not direct your anger at WB for making shit movies?

mysteriously the Catwoman rating is just a little picture of DJP giving a thumbs-up

this looks like shit. I'm so tired of seeing Margot Robbie smirk. I don't 'get' harley quinn. I hate this movie.

Im goin cos T Mobile gave freebie tix to all its members Tuesday lol.

are you going to post that every 25 hours until you see it?

sic is sad

Believe it or not sometimes people forget they posted something already, you dickcheese

But if my brain fog is amusing to ya knock yrself out

sic burnt

I am sure 45% of the movie is Robbie making a sexual innuendo

i wish it were just a movie of juggalo jared leto mailing people shocking things

i've seen worse comic book movies

was entertaining enough, even though far from perfect and you could see all the rough edges were scenes were bizarrely re-edited in even though we'd already seen them and pop songs blatantly inserted to make the movie more "fun"

leto/robbie were fine, will smith was fine as slightly angrier will smith. too many characters, but the ones we actually got time for backstory on were solid enough. first act with all the flashbacks was the best part for me, when it became dirty dozen + mud creatures it got too predictable