The Gaming Den

Amazons Top Gear . . err . . The Grand Tour.
It is that grand. I enjoyed the first episode immensely!

Rented Suicide Squad....and while the movie overall had many problems, this little gag rocked me:

(spoilered to save image bandwidth, not because it reveals anything of the plot)

Damn, now I want to see Deadshot take out someone with a potato cannon.

Basically, if there's a sort of projectile involved, he is an expert in shooting it.

Also, Top Gear . . errr . . The Grand Tour Episode 2:
Just as good as Eipsode 1! If not better, depending on wether or not you are actually in it for the car stuff.
The Grand Tour Motto seems to be:"I want to look like an idiot doing something really really cool!"

Finally watched Suicide Squad. There were certainly elements in the movie that were good and there was obviously salvageable stuff in there. The problems, and there are many problems, mostly come down to just poor movie making. The movie is, as a whole, pretty much a mess. It misses story beats, gives exposition when it should show things, gives the same weak reveal like 3 times, fails to deliver on several foreshadowings, and all around looks like the shooting script wasn't fully polished or they ended up cobbling the movie together from parts. It's fashionable to blame the studio, but this feels like a failure on the part of the director or producers to me.

So to start off with, I regard the "suicide squad formula" as being fiarly easy and difficult to fuck up. Your plot is as follows:

• Task Force X idea suggested, shot down by other government agency dude.
• Bigger Bad does a thing that's pretty bad. Other government agency tries to stop it, but fails.
• Task Force X sent in.
• One of the members (expendable team member A) tries to use the confusion to escape, gets head blown up.
• Conflict with Bigger Bad escalates, Task Force X finds itself out of supply and no longer in danger of head explosions.
• One of the members (expendable team member B) joins the bigger bad.
• The rest of Task Force X rallies around a "you can't destroy the world, that's where I keep my stuff" pep talk, fights the Bigger Bad, saves the day.

You can embelish this with side stories for individual team members, or by having the unsympathetic government guy from Act 1 actually be in league with the Bigger Bad the whole time, or whatevers. Your actual team can be pretty much anybody subject to you finding the right actors, costumes, and special effects. The Bigger Bad isn't even important because the movie is about the anti-heroes and you're committed to doing an ensemble cast with multiple deaths and betrayals from the starting cast.

I feel that everywhere the Suicide Squad movie deviated from defaulting to the story writing itself through formula it was a weaker movie. Having the betrayal team member actually be the Bigger Bad and also betray the team before the team was sent in back in Act 1 meant that the important story beat of the betrayal segment was missed entirely and also that the Suicide Squad were in essence robbed of the opportunity to save the day at the end since they were just cleaning up their own mess. Maybe Harly's abortive attempt to run off with the Joker at the beginning of Act III was supposed to be the story beat of the sudden but inevitable betrayal, but that was so fucking weak that I'm not even sure. Slipknot's head explosion was severely undermined by the fact that we did introductions like 2 or three times for every team member except him, which made Act 1 drag way too long, but also made his status as Expendable Team Member A way too obvious.

Also suffers from the fact that Leto is at best the fourth best Joker. If you look at the Nicholson Joker, the Hamill Joker or the Ledger Joker, they are all very different. But one thing they all have in common is that they are the scariest person in the room at all times. I don't think Leto was ever the scariest person in any room he was in. And sometimes he was only in a room with one other person. I get that it was Harly's movie, but fucking hell.

But El Diablo was pretty much perfect. The actor, the two stage reveal of his backstory, the special effects, the power levels, it was all perfect. I would not change one bit about the El Diablo story arc. That part rocked me.

-Username17

What i do not get about suicide squad:
You have the brute, basically impossible to hurt monster croc.
You have el diablo, who can burn whatever he sees with fire.
You have the with with reality altering powers.
You have the psylocke wannabe psychic ninja?
And then you have . .
Deadshot. Who can shoot weapons.
And Harley who . . has a Baseball bat. And can do gymnastics.
And the Joker who can do . . appearantly fuck all?
It's the old BMX-Bandid and Angel Summoner Problem where about half of the team is, in the grand scheme of things, just not going to cut it.

The problem with Harley is that there isn't a lot of reason to have her on the team (her compliance:contribution ratio is terrible), but she's by far the most popular character. So they really needed to do something like the animated SS movie and have the mission involve her specific background and knowledge to get her contribution up. The animated SS had them breaking into Arkham and using her familiarity with the place, but you could have had her be June's therapist before she went mad and hoped to tap her for relevant insight that way or something.

Deadshot works because superhuman shooting actually is a pretty good contribution, and also he's a sane professional, which makes him one of the most reliable members of the team.

I've only gotten to see two episodes, but "Stranger Things" is just awesome. Especially the bit at the beginning with Demogorgon.

Deadshot also has one of the easiest prices. Make his daughter's life better in pretty much anyway, and you can get him to do just about anything. I think the only person with a cheaper price was Croc who just wanted cable in his sewer.

Yeah, the animated suicide squad movie (the one I actually saw) sounds much better than what your describing.

Stahlseele wrote:What i do not get about suicide squad:
You have the brute, basically impossible to hurt monster croc.
You have el diablo, who can burn whatever he sees with fire.
You have the with with reality altering powers.
You have the psylocke wannabe psychic ninja?
And then you have . .
Deadshot. Who can shoot weapons.
And Harley who . . has a Baseball bat. And can do gymnastics.
And the Joker who can do . . appearantly fuck all?
It's the old BMX-Bandid and Angel Summoner Problem where about half of the team is, in the grand scheme of things, just not going to cut it.

Deadshoot contributes at least as much as any of the nameless US soldiers do, so bringing him to the mission is not a negative no matter the situation. He may not contribute much if superpowers are involved, but he's the elf gunbunny to Croc's troll facepuncher.
Joker is not even on the team, so no reason to discuss him.
Harley is a critical component.
The real useless elements were Katana, who did sweet fuck all and whose team contribution is that she has a katana, and Slipknot whose fucking introduction was "he can climb anything". Whoop de doo.

Being able to rapidly reach hard to reach places can be helpful if you need, like, a bomb planted somewhere, or you need to reach and abscond with a VIP, or something. It's a pretty conditional power but can be very useful when it comes up.

Harley's presence on the team really is ridiculous. She's probably the most likely to try and defect whenever she thinks she can get away with it or even if she just gets sick of it and decides to go out in a vengeful blaze of glory, and her list of superpowers is limited to "has baseball bat."

Chamomile wrote:Harley's presence on the team really is ridiculous. She's probably the most likely to try and defect whenever she thinks she can get away with it or even if she just gets sick of it and decides to go out in a vengeful blaze of glory, and her list of superpowers is limited to "has baseball bat."

I don't think you've been listening to me.

HARLEY QUINN IS A CRITICAL COMPONENT.

Longes wrote: The real useless elements were Katana, who did sweet fuck all and whose team contribution is that she has a katana, and Slipknot whose fucking introduction was "he can climb anything". Whoop de doo.

I remember that Katana's job was being the not-criminal member to keep a close eye on the others. An extra layer of security besides the collar bomb. Her relevant ability is fanatical loyalty to their superiors, not having a katana.

They really should have gone with the classic outfit. It would have looked better.

It looks like Harley shit herself and has red and blue poop.

But she's a rebel.

More importantly, she's a sexy rebel, so she has to look like a fetish mallpunk girl instead of a chick in a bodysuit.


On a power level level, she basically has the combination of plot contrivance and actual understanding of genre constraints to get away with being "a normal person" and successful in Cape world like Joker or Batman.

I think it would have been better if the show had started off in media res, with the team on a mission, rescuing an American officer who is being tried for war crimes in the Hague. Plan starts out smooth, but a couple things go wrong and they end up in a shootout with Belgian cops, who they don't hesitate to kill, setting up their bad guy/anti-hero credentials. One team member is severely injured, but they're able to get out and back to America.

Once they're back home, Waller greets the officer they just rescued, and immediately injects him with a hypodermic needle. He drops dead, Waller says that the coroner will rule it a heart attack, and explains that if he were convicted, America would have to respond, and it could cause World War III, and if he died in Belgium it would have been just as bad. But since he was rescued by mercenary supervillains hired by unknown parties and then died of natural causes on American soil, things can be smoothed over.

My wife and I recently re-discovered Avatar: The Last Airbender, and damn! I forgot how good that show is.

Yeah. It's a wonderful franchise, and I wish more stuff for it would get made.

Maybe they could make some video games, or even a movie. Those would probably turn out great.

Chamomile wrote:Maybe they could make some video games, or even a movie. Those would probably turn out great.

As long as they keep some pretentious hack like M. Night away...from...

...shit.

As long as they make it AN ANIMATED MOVIE this time around . .

I binged the entire season of The Expanse (amazon prime exclusive) last weekend. Looking forward to Season 2 starting Feb 1st.

They don't handle no/low gravity perfectly, but I was able to happily suspend disbelief enough to enjoy the ride. I'm looking forward to when I succeed at getting mrs erik to watch it with me so I can watch again. I'm still trying to get her to watch Stranger Things (she's seen 2 episodes and somehow isn't hooked), so I've an uphill battle.

I've been watching another Amazon show, The Night Manager. The premise is that Tom Hiddleston (Loki) meets attractive women and they immediately throw their panties at him. Okay, that's not the premise, but it's true enough. Art imitating life I guess. Dr House after faking his death became an English gentleman arms dealer as well. Mrs erik is watching this one with me, and we're at episode 5 out of 6.

Watched the movie Hell or High Water.

Possibly the tightest scripted film I've seen since Hot Fuzz. Sadly, nowhere near as funny since this one isn't a comedy.

It uses the fairly common Western tropes of Heroic Rangers vs Cunning Bank Robbers in a milieu of wide open vistas and ghost towns where an entire way of life is vanishing -- and transposes them beautifully into the setting of West Texas in 2016.