SUICIDE SQUAD (2016) in SPOILERVISION

They blew it. The trailers promised something anarchic and exhilaratingly amoral, and for some that promised redemption for the "DC Extended Universe" after the "no fun" sturm und drang of Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. Instead, David Ayer delivered a tedious slog that is considerably shorter than Dawn of Justice yet seems interminable by comparison. Rumors of editorial interference have been swirling, but I doubt whether any alternate cut could improve much on what I saw. Suicide Squad is a failure on almost every level. The filmmakers wimp out on the promise of the trailers by trying too hard to make characters sympathetic and copping out whenever they have the chance to be hardcore, but they apparently hope you'll be distracted from the truth by the heavyhanded oldies soundtrack. After all the hype surrounding his off-camera pranks, Jared Leto shockingly gives us a boring Joker, neither especially funny or particularly scary -- merely a gangster with an odd fashion sense. Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn, who for marketing purposes is the reason this film even exists, never coheres into anything more than a collection of tics and quips, and the movie, telling her origin in truncated flashback form, skips over what should have been terrific scenes between smitten psychologist and psychopath seducer like a pebble on the surface of a lake that sinks well short of shore. Most of the other characters aren't even that well developed. Will Smith tries hard as Deadshot to project the correct badass attitude but is weighed down by a conscientious-dad subplot that no one really could have wanted. But I suppose it was inescapable in as generic a mismatched-buddies picture as Ayer has delivered, one where all our psychopaths and sociopaths apparently come to think of themselves as friends -- if not, gad help us, "family" -- and step up to do the right things in utterly predictable fashion.

Nor does it help things that Ayer came up with possibly the most incompatible menace for all his antiheroes' skill sets and made that menace absolutely uninteresting. Perhaps I should take that back. If anything, he made the menace less than uninteresting by tying it to another unwanted romantic subplot. An uninteresting menace leads to uninteresting fights, this time pitting the Squad plus anonymous army guys against a horde of literally faceless foes. These scenes expose Ayer's lack of the sort of epic visual imagination Zack Snyder possesses or the creative action choreography of Marvel Studios. Ayer prefers close-quarters combat, repetitive and roughly edited and thus ultimately tiresome. Warning that the villain's antics are putting the world in jeopardy seem like the filmmakers' desperate last appeal for our attention, if not an insult to our intelligence, since it now seems reasonable to ask why, should this be so, Wonder Woman, Batman and whomever they've gathered up so far don't show up to make short work of it. Ben Affleck shows up often enough as Batman to beg the question why we -- and, more importantly, Warner Bros. -- are bothering with these losers instead of getting on with a Justice League movie. It was Ayer's job not to let us ask that question and he blew it. Fortunately, I doubt whether word-of-mouth on Suicide Squad will do major damage to the overall DC movie franchise, since its irrelevance, rather than the hoped-for irreverence, should be self-evident to anyone who sees it. I doubt anyone will want to see Wonder Woman any less because Suicide Squad stinks, but let's not deny the truth for the next movie's sake. I notice I didn't really spoil a lot despite my Spoilervision promise. The fact is, I can't be bothered to describe what passes for a plot here in any detail. If I've spoiled anything, I suppose it might be some fans' hope that the critics were wrong again. Sure, some of those reviewers are biased against the whole superhero genre, but even a broken clock is right sometimes, and you shouldn't blame the clock for that.

Here we go again: DC fans embarrass themselves

I suppose we should be grateful that no one -- to my knowledge -- has yet threatened the life of a film reviewer for panning David Ayer's Suicide Squad in advance of its release on Friday, August 5. Four years ago people weren't so civilized, and the Rotten Tomatoes website, which aggregates film reviews and assigns films "Rotten" or "Fresh" scores, was driven to disable the comment threat for Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises after it became apparent that 1) the film didn't live up to Nolan's previous Batman film and 2)some fans wished death and/or rape on reviewers for killing their buzz. Now we do things in a more civil fashion. One Abdullah Coldwater has started a petition on the change.org site asking for Rotten Tomatoes to be shut down altogether because "It's Critics always give The DC Extended Universe movies unjust Bad Reviews ...and that Affects people's opinion even if it's a really great movies." Nearly 15,000 people have signed the petition. This looks like a Trumpian tantrum against a "rigged" system, even though DC Comics' corporate parent Time Warner remains a part owner of Rotten Tomatoes. I'm surprised that Coldwater didn't accuse RT of being partisans of Marvel Studios and its corporate parent, Disney.

There's a pathetic partisanship among fans of the two major comic-book publishers and their cinematic spin-offs that has only grown worse once Marvel finally learned to make proper movies and beat Batman-focused DC in the race to create a "cinematic universe" in which heroes and villains are shared among filmmakers. Since Nolan's Batman series ended Warner Bros. has been in catch-up mode, which is proving a no-win situation. They are accused of either aping Marvel/Disney or of trying so hard not to be Marvel that their films stray out of many people's comfort zone -- and all the while the more moronic Marvel fans really are rooting for the DC films to fail. Man of Steel and Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice have been savaged by both mundane reviewers and many DC Comics fans, the latter resenting deviations both aesthetic and ethical from what they're used to in print. In response, the DC movie franchise has spawned a fanatical, backs-to-the-wall rooting section that is just a little paranoid, accusing practically anyone who criticizes DC of a pro-Marvel bias. As a DC Comics fan who wants to see the DC "Extended" universe flourish and has liked the Zack Snyder Superman movies more than most people, I find this paranoia absurd and embarrassing. As a longtime fan of both "cult" and "art" (and "genre") movies, I'm used to being outside the mainstream in my tastes. By now, with reviewers talking hopefully of "superhero fatigue," all comic book fans should have reconciled themselves to a certain biased skepticism among reviewers that is entirely within their rights. If DC fans are demoralized because reviewers are bashing Suicide Squad before they get to see it this weekend, and if that seems unfair because some people like Marvel movies better, that's just too bad. I liked the Suicide Squad trailers and I want to like the movie. Whether I like it will be decided by the movie, not the reviewers, and whether the reviews cost the movie at the box office really doesn't bother me. Again, I'm used to liking films that have been total bombs at the box office, without even one good weekend to boast of, and I've liked no film less for being unpopular. It's always a shame if that sort of failure means filmmakers don't get a chance to do similar work, but  neither film fans nor comics fans should take it personally. Even if the DC Extended Universe dies young, you can bet that Warner Bros. or someone else will try it again before too long. Maybe this generation of DC movies is destined for cult status, at whatever cost to Warner Bros. now. If so, my advice to the people rallying to Suicide Squad's defense sight unseen is that cult movie fandom is not for crybabies. So grow up already.

Pre-Code Parade: BROADMINDED (1931)

You can see the first hints of the road-trip comedy in Mervyn LeRoy's film, which offers Joe E. Brown as a dubious chaperone to a wastrel friend on a cross-country trip to California. But most of the action takes place at the end of the trip, and overall Warner Bros. hasn't yet figured out how to best exploit Brown's slapstick athleticism; here he's pretty much a guy with a big mouth, a figure whose clowning borders on the pathological. He's the guy who shows up at the young people's "baby party" and takes the act to extremes, arriving in a pram and really, really getting into the role more than anyone else. The story is conventional stuff, having both Brown and his sidekick (William "Buster" Collier) fall for California girls but having their romances complicated by the arrival of an old flame from the east, for Collier, and the reappearance, for Brown, of an enemy made on the road. This enemy gives Broadminded its main interest today, for he is Bela Lugosi, six months after the release of Dracula.

For Lugosi this movie represents a road ultimately not taken. It's an attempt by Warners to try him out as an all-purpose ethnic, in the role of a tourist from the country of "South America." That role requires Lugosi to be very different from Dracula. He must be loud, he must talk relatively fast, and when Brown really annoys him, as when the comic sprays ink on Bela's dessert, the offended man gives chase at a vigorous, elbow-churning pace. It's not really a great performance, but it belies any notion that Lugosi's Dracula represents the limits of his English or his acting style. He's not exactly convincing as a Latin American, especially by today's standards, but if you pay attention you can hear how he's modulating his accent slightly to fit the part. But if Broadminded gives us a rare glimpse of a non-typecast Lugosi, LeRoy clearly appreciates Bela's essential gifts. The most Lugosian moment in the film comes when Brown's party are dining in a restaurant booth and Brown recounts his dealings with his Latin antagonist, not realizing that the man himself has just been seated in the next booth. Lugosi hears Brown's boasting and, recognizing the hated voice, gets up and peers over the partition behind him at Brown. Naturally, this is the last place Brown expected to see Lugosi, and his reaction to seeing Bela's face is an easy gag. But then LeRoy holds a shot of Lugosi peering over the partition, now with only half his face showing, most importantly those eyes. If more directors found ways to exploit Lugosi's most obvious gifts without relegating him to what was quickly becoming a ghetto for horror films, we might think of Broadminded as a different kind of milestone in a very different career.

DVR Diary: THE SILENT STRANGER (1968-75)

If spaghetti westerns owed their global popularity to Sergio Leone imitating Akira Kurosawa, it probably was inevitable that the archetypal circle would close with a spaghetti cowboy visiting the land of samurai. This was accomplished by Tony Anthony, an American who started more obscurely than Clint Eastwood and scored a hit with A Stranger in Town, a film he co-produced with M-G-M money. "The Stranger" became Anthony's spaghetti persona, with the exception of his title character in Blindman, where he was upstaged by Ringo Starr. The Silent Stranger was the third Stranger movie made, but despite the character's apparent popularity it sat shelved for seven years, not appearing until near the tail end of the spaghetti era, and after other east-meets-westerns (Red Sun, The Fighting Fists of Shanghai Joe, etc.) had come and gone. Silent Stranger remained a novelty as a west-meets-eastern, and it's really more interesting as a samurai movie than as a transplanted spaghetti.

Why the film is called The Silent Stranger is beyond me, since Anthony offers a sporadic voice-over commentary on the action. The story opens in the Klondike, where The Stranger rescues a Japanese man from some ruthless northwestern types. The rescue comes just a little too late, since the Japanese man dies, but he's rescued enough to give Stranger a scroll, with instructions to deliver it to Osaka in return for $20,000. Crossing the Pacific, Stranger becomes the typical Ugly American visitor, expecting to be understood when he speaks pidgin English and drops names. Gradually a Red Harvest type situation emerges as two factions of samurai fight for control of a territory and Stranger, possessing the scroll everyone covets, ends up in the middle. Since this is a spaghetti samurai film, a machine gun factors in the conflict. The scenes showing the oppression of the common people are the best in the picture, particularly a sequence in which tax collectors compel peasants to come out of their houses one family at a time to pay up and rough up those who won't or can't pay, with one man nervously waiting for his turn while Stranger holds him captive. These moments of frantic cruelty feel authentically Japanese, at least in a generic sense, making me wonder whether there was an uncredited native second-unit man during the location shoot. Another highlight is a fight highlighting clashing national styles, as an unarmed Stranger tries to bludgeon a samurai with a hunk of bamboo, only to have the swordsman gradually whittle his weapon down to a nub. At its best, Silent Stranger benefits from an engaging grotesquerie that encompasses the smugly oafish Anthony himself and extends to a villain's dwarf sidekick. At its worst, it takes for granted what it should not, that Tony Anthony is a funny guy, or that anything can be made funny by playing a flute. Inevitably the film is an ego trip for Anthony, and that trips it up, since by a certain point The Stranger is the least interesting thing about the film. It's still an interesting and often entertaining picture, but I recommend it in spite of its star.

Serial Pulp: THE SPIDER'S WEB (1938), Chapter Five: Shoot to Kill

Nearly all our heroes were in peril at the end of the previous chapter. The Spider himself was trapped in a room with a gas bomb and killing steam, while Nita, Jackson and Ram Singh were shackled inside the archetypal flooding room. The first cliffhanger is hurdled easily as The Spider simply forces his way out a window. Meanwhile, The Octopus taunts the others via intercom, while Ram Singh vows to carve his name in the villain's heart. The Spider goes back into the trap house and takes out the goons operating the radio and speakers. He somehow figures out that his friends are in danger and pries open the airtight door to the flood room, clobbering two foes with the rush of water while he discreetly hops on top of a chair. After he frees his friends, Ram Singh notices that the two gangsters are coming to. Something violent is cut from the picture here, at least in the version I saw, for we now see The Spider and Ram Singh approaching the camera, and then we see the gangsters' bodies twitch and go limp.

The Octopus is royally pissed at his men's latest failure to kill Richard Wentworth and his friends. ??, as the actor playing The Octopus is known for now, knows how to work his full-face mask to make it express his rage. He puts his long-term plans to dominate American utilities on hold for the moment to make destroying The Spider priority number one.

Learning through his underworld sources (i.e. Blinky McQuade's) that everyone's out to get The Spider, Wentworth switches up. His plan is to make a public spectacle of himself at a charity magic show in order to draw out The Octopus's men, if not The Octopus himself. He seems awfully confident that the bad guys will attempt some surgical strike on himself instead of bombing the bus station (i.e. the set from the chapter-one cliffhanger) where the charity show will take place. The Octopus takes the bait but complicates things a little by issuing a threat to Wentworth in The Spider's name.

The Octopus's idea is that the bogus threat will draw the actual Spider to the scene, where he can then eliminate both his enemies at once. He still doesn't realize how easy that would be, but I'm not sure of the soundness of his plan.  Why wouldn't The Spider, presuming he was someone other than Wentworth -- as The Octopus must presume so far -- simply stay away on the assumption that the charity show will now be heavily guarded? For the plan to work, this theoretical Spider must assume that someone, presumably an enemy of his, actually will go after Wentworth. Of course, this criticism is moot because The Spider can't help but be there is Wentworth is. The funny part is that no one -- the press, the police and, of course, Wentworth, takes the fake threat seriously. Sending threats to the newspapers isn't The Spider's M.O., and as Wentworth asks, what would The Spider have against him. Wentworth's a crime fighter in his own right, after all, while The Spider, in Wentworth's words, is "a perfectly nice sort of fellow ... who goes around punishing people the law doesn't have time to catch up with." Wentworth's chat with Commissioner Kirk allows the latter to air anew his suspicions about Wentworth being The Spider, since Ram Singh had left his turban, lost when the bad guys clobbered him in the previous chapter, in the trap house which the cops found littered with corpses marked with The Spider's brand. Ram Singh, after all, is the only man in the entire city who wears a turban, isn't he?

 Does this make Nita Van Sloan a costumed crimefighter in her own right?

In any event, it's on with the show despite the dubious threat. Wentworth arranges to have the more suspicious spectators herded to one section of the makeshift theater, but The Octopus's chief goon (Marc Lawrence) recognizes the set-up and orders a cohort to head over to where a spotlight has been set up. The gangster sneaks up there and kayoes the lighting man, all unbeknownst to the security detail. They're the same people who let Lawrence into the bus station with a loaded gun, despite the publicized (albeit mocked) threat to Wentworth's life. Nita takes the stage in costume to introduce Wentworth, who immediately draws fire from Lawrence. Wentworth seems unhurt, almost as if the bullets hit a force-field. Why didn't they just blow the place up? That's what a real Norvell Page villain would do. Now The Spider appears, faster than the quickest change would make possible, to open fire on the gangsters. But now the wisdom of Lawrence's tactics becomes apparent, because The Spider has maneuvered himself into the perfect position for that goon up above to drop that spotlight on him. Thus ends a relatively uneventful chapter dominated by The Spider and Octopus trying to outwit each other. You still get the sense that The Octopus is somewhat more dangerous than the typical serial villain, but he clearly wasn't at his best this time. Let's wish him better luck next time, since The Spider's Web isn't even halfway done yet.

Pre-Code Parade: UNTAMED (1929)

Joan Crawford's first talking feature, directed by Jack Conway, doesn't live up to its title, and it definitely doesn't live up to its cable-guide synopsis, which led me to expect Crawford as something closer to a female Tarzan. She's no jungle girl, alas, but from the perspective of Hollywood South America may as well have been Darkest Africa, and that's where we find "Bingo," the daughter of a down-on-his-luck oil prospector raised among the common people, whom she entertains with the untamed sounds of Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown's The Chant of the Jungle. Jungle music it isn't, just as The Pagan Love Song wasn't very pagan. I suppose Bingo (nee Alice) is untamed insofar as she's been raised on the streets and has a certain rough manner. When some slob tries to grope her during a dance she yells out, "Somebody give me a knife!" The same slob later kills her dad, just as his old pal Murchison (Ernest Torrence) was going to tell him that one of his mines has finally paid off, making him (but now Bingo) a millionaire.

You can see where this is going, and the idea of the looming, lunkish Torrence, who made his name as a psycho hillbilly in Tol'able David and was rendered still more exotic by sound's exposure of his Scots burr -- acting as Bingo's Henry Higgins to make her fit for society has some potential. Unfortunately, Untamed doesn't go there. Instead, her social education is presented as a fait accompli so the picture can take up a new subject. On the boat back to America Bingo had met cute with Andy McAllister (Robert Montgomery), who unfortunately already has a date for the voyage. That doesn't stop Bingo, who after bopping her rival on the nose on the ship hooks up with Andy again in New York, where practically the last untamed thing Bingo does is goad Andy and a rival suitor into a boxing match in the middle of a swanky party at her mansion. From this point, Untamed really becomes Andy's story, driven by a male-pride melodrama. The young man has been bred for society but has no immediate prospects. This means that, should he marry Bingo, he won't be able to give her the lifestyle to which she has but recently become accustomed. For Bingo this isn't a problem, as she doesn't see why they couldn't live off her money, as managed by Murchison. This is where male pride comes in; it would be shameful for Andy to live off his wife, especially when Murchison suspects him of being a gigolo -- even though the straitlaced old man can't bring himself to utter the word. Recognizing that psychology at work in Andy, Murchison tries to manipulate him out of Bingo's life by appearing to consent to a wedding while offering Andy a "wedding gift" of $30,000. He sweet-talks Andy, assuring him that it won't be like living off Bingo's money because this will be his by virtue of the gift, but he depends on Andy pridefully rejecting the offer and walking out on Bingo once and for all. What he doesn't depend on is Andy grabbing the check with a threat to flaunt it (and a former girlfriend) at the party where Bingo plans to announce their engagement and call it a bribe to make him quit her. What Andy doesn't expect is that Bingo will respond to this scene by shooting him. Fortunately the bullet only grazes his collarbone; it's the kind of wound that makes shooter and victim realize how much they still love each other. But if that wasn't a fatal blow to the audience, now Murchison decides that if Andy wants to work and earn the means to support Bingo, there's a mine-engineering job available, for which Andy just happens to have the college qualifications. That's one head-slapping way to close a movie, since you can only ask why Murchison didn't offer Andy that job in the first place.

There's no guaranteeing that Untamed would have been any good if it had continued along the lines of its first half-hour, but the way it did continue guaranteed that critics would declare it brain-dead. A Pittsburgh reviewer called it "the most amazing burlesque ever to come from the sometimes deluded wanderings of a scenario writer," and I don't think I can top that.

I KNEW HER WELL (Io la conoscevo bene, 1965)

Fifty years after starring in Antonio Pietrangeli's film, Stefania Sandrelli offered what may be the best critique of it. Her character, the aspiring actress Adriana, jumps to her death from her upper-floor apartment at the end of the picture, no longer being able to cope with the humiliations of her existence. If it seems like an overdetermined moment to you, Sandrelli seems to agree. She doesn't think Adriana had to die, or necessarily would have killed herself, but "she had to die for the film to end." But if Io la conoscevo bene closes on a false note, there aren't many others in Pietrangeli's scathing satire. In many ways -- its episodic structure, its social surrealism -- it seems like a critique of Federico Fellini, its point being that la vita isn't so dolce for those less privileged than Marcello Mastroianni's characters. To the extent that Adriana's career is apparently ruined on a whim by a spiteful filmmaker, it takes a shot at the possibly misogynist vanities of 8 1/2 as well.

Adriana is a striver, first seen as a clumsy stylist -- literally first seen sunning herself on a garbage-strewn beach, actually -- who longs to be on screen. She has an agent who lands her dubious assignments that at least pay some bills, from shoe model for a TV commercial to traveling funiture ad on the roof of a car to fashion model during the intermission of a boxing card staged at an opera house, with some vast classical tapestry as a backdrop. For her these are important stepping stones, but others find her ambitions absurd. Why did she dress up so elaborately for the shoe commercial, for instance, when she'll only be seen from the ankles down?

Our heroine is just another rat in a hopeless race, it seems, and both she and the film itself are sympathetic to people in a similar plight like the good-natured boxer Lunk (a clean-shaven Mario Adorf), who gets battered on a regular basis because it's the only way he can earn money. His path and Adriana's cross all too briefly, but despite her apparent affinity for simpler, sweeter people like the local auto mechanic (Franco Nero), her ambition draws her into the orbit of less lovable losers. Gigi Baggini (Ugo Tognazzi) is a has-been and hanger-on with a big star who makes him perform a grueling tap dance at a party Adriana attends. Later, the star uses Gigi as a go-between with Adriana. When Adriana tells Gigi to have his master ask her out himself, in his own desperation not to take the blame, Gigi reports that Adriana simply rejected the idea of a date. That doesn't help Gigi, who's last seen desperately clinging to the great man's car, begging for a break, but his lie leads to Adriana's ruin. She was at the party in part to film an interview with the star that will be included in a newsreel to promote her career. Out of spite, the star edits the interview into an atrocity out of Merton of the Movies, portraying Adriana as an idiot and a slut with the bad taste to wear a plaster on the heel of her foot. Adriana doesn't see it coming, having gathered with her fellow usherettes at the local movie house to watch her big moment, only to be laughed out of the building. From there, for all intents and purposes, her fate is sealed.

I still can't help feeling that the film has her give up too easily -- she seems capable of greater perseverance --  but I suppose satire has its prerogatives, and the film has been fine enough up to this point for me to hold the ending against it too much. It isn't called I Know Her Well, after all, so we should have seen this coming. Whether it's past or present tense, the moral seems to be that no one knew her well, or ever will, though some may think they did. Whether Adriana really knew herself, or was simply playing a role at the fatal moment, is a question the film invites you to answer for yourselves.