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strawberrymilkandgin
Reviews
Suicide Squad (2016)
Great acting. Bad...editing?
I'll write about some of the things I haven't seen in the reviews yet so far.. I don't think it's possible at this point to spoil too much for anyone here because chances are, if you care enough about this movie to come to this review board then you've probably already seen the movie, and if you haven't seen it then you probably don't care enough to come to this review board :-) That being said;
1. This film won an Academy Award for best hair and makeup. It should have won an award for best trailer, because the trailer for this film has become famous in itself for being somehow better than the actual movie! I'll give you an example: when Mr. Boomerang Guy says "You know what they say about the crazy ones.." and then Harley glances over at him "Huh?" it works perfectly in the trailer, right? Unfortunately (spoiler alert) this scene falls completely flat on its face during the course of the actual film. That is just one of seemingly dozens of scenes that were ultimately (bizarrely) disappointing due to either bad writing, bad directing or bad editing. SO many bad lines of dialogue in this. I cannot fault the acting, because well, obviously it COULD have worked, just look at the trailer. Who knows, maybe someday it will attain postmortem status as one of those so-bad-it's-good cult classics, but I don't see how because in the end (spoiler alert) just a very run-of-the-mill superhero action flick which could have been spat out by one of those giant room-sized computers from the 50s.
2. Jared Leto's Joker is not the same as he comes off in the previews. Jared does the same thing here as he did when he played the villain in Panic Room where he imitated Brad Pitt's Tyler Durden. Here, he simply imitates Heath Ledger's Joker and winds up struggling as a cheapo, poor man's knock-off. God, I wanted to like that portrayal. I will get back to the Joker in a minute, because..
3. This film relies HEAVILY on Margot Robbie delivering slick one-liners like, all the time, interspersed with gratuitous shots of her stripper outfit only covering half her butt. Granted, without Harley Quinn's charm this entire movie would be catastrophically one- dimensional. However, they should have taken the same approach with her as they did with the Joker and used the character sparingly.
4. The Joker scenes that you actually DO get to see seem intentionally short and sweet to emulate Nolan's sparse use of Joker in The Dark Knight, but because of this directorial decision the Joker scenes instead end up feeling like a watered-down afterthought. This writer- director didn't develop the character enough! I give credit for trying something new-ish, but Leto doesn't even really get the chance to spread his wings and do much Joker stuff here so it fails at achieving the abstract vision that they were apparently going for. Like, why does he drive a hotrod? Why does he have capped teeth? And I hope you didn't want to see Batman himself, because he's only on the screen for about 12 seconds total! Again, probably not the actors' fault. Understandably they didn't want to make this into a Joker/Batman movie, whatever.
5. The obvious CGI wasn't TOO terrible, but then again, anytime you are aware you are looking at CGI while watching a movie it is a problem that the production team SHOULD feel compelled to contend with. Thankfully, the characters that do rely on CGI (Mr. Crocodile Guy, Mr. Fire Guy) are saved by their good acting.
If this movie is your type of thing you should probably just continue to love it and not read the reviews here because some of them are severely harsh. Overall, it's quite evident that this writer-director was trying to go for a more comic book feel for this film than the majority of recent Gotham-themed features, but now I feel I must quote Deadshot: "What are we, 12?"
I mean, how much extra money did they need to pay Will Smith to yell the line: "Lady, YOU ARE EVIL!!"
(spoiler)
Hot Boyz (2000)
Master P is the problem with the world.
Master P is a 6-year-old boy. He really has a serious psychological problem. Obviously he is trying to emulate certain film generes, like John Woo, Steven Segal or Ice T. Unfortunately, his fantasy realm of reverse-racism mutates itself into this extended music video. This is beyond stupidity. There is so much racism in this piece, at some points, it doesn't even make sense and it becomes comedic. White cops conspiring to implicate a group of blacks in a ring of corruption and blackmail. Half an hour into it, after his sophisticated girlfriend is killed by cops in prison, all white people are "evil" and it's up to "Kool" to set up his gangsta organization: "Hot Boyz Inc." Snoop D-O-Double-G is a main character, if that's any indication of what you're watching. UUUUNNNGGGGHHH!!!! It's like they made a movie for the sole purpose of spending time partying, smoking weed and hanging out with hoes. I don't know how they got Gary Busey to participate in this monstrosity of wasted celluloid. No amount of baseball caps turned backwards can save this piece of stuff from stinking crap so much.
Teenage Caveman (2002)
Wonderful. A treat
I'm surprised Larry Clark isn't one of the most sought-after directors in the industry. If you've seen 'Kids' you know that he captures a certain thing in actors that makes his movies unique. He really takes method acting to another level and tells the actors to just do whatever comes naturally. The characters in all his movies seem very free to do or say what they feel, like people you know in real life. Whether of not that fits into the "Hollywood" style of formulaic, script-seems-like-it-was-written-by-a-computer-program moviemaking, is dependent on the actors' performances. The end result is that his movies are very much like documentaries. His films can be compared to 'Crumb', 'Waiting for Guffman', or even films by Robert Altman, where the camera is an 'observer' from afar capturing the scene without being intrusive. Clark doesn't try to control every frame of the movie, unlike so many blockbuster Hollywood films (The Matrix, Fight Club, Gladiator etc.) Sure, this movie is just another low-budget sci-fi knockoff in its script and its story, but Larry Clark took that worthless made-for-cable script and breathed life into it by giving the actors a quality that no other movie of this type ever had. The only other director I know of who does this successfully is John Carpenter. I'm glad Larry has made this, a science fiction movie that defies the genre.