Boiler Room

Year 9, Day 328 - 11/24/17 - Movie #2,777

BEFORE: Day 4 of Affleck Week, just one more to go.  After playing millionaire Bruce Wayne, a multi-millionaire accountant/hitman and then a (presumably) rich crime-lord, for the last two films he plays rich stock-market guys.  Definitely a running theme going on here.

FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Wolf of Wall Street" (Movie #2,160)

THE PLOT: A college dropout, attempting to live up to his father's high standards, gets a job as a broker for a suburban investment firm, but the job might not be as legitimate as it once appeared to be.

AFTER: Even after all this time, I can't really say why one movie succeeds and another one like it fails.  To me this seems very similar to "The Wolf of Wall Street" in subject matter and tone, only it came first by about 13 years, and didn't seem to half of the critical acclaim, respect or any Oscar nominations.  When I could argue that in some ways this is the superior film, at least from a storytelling point of view.  The main character here feels bad about ripping people off in the stock market, while DiCaprio's character in that other film never showed any remorse, and that other film just devolved into three hours of watching stockbrokers snorting cocaine and having sex with hookers.

I guess in the end it all comes down to reputation, where "Wolf of Wall Street" relied heavily on the careers of both DiCaprio, McConaughey and director Scorsese, this one gives us instead Ribisi, Diesel and director Ben Younger.  So I guess at the end of the day, it's not the quality of the story being told, it's the names of the people telling the story.

Now, that being said, it doesn't mean that this film is problem-free, far from it in fact.  The first problem I noticed was the fact that some casting agent decided to put all of the most mumbly, hard-to-understand actors in the same film.  Vin Diesel practically built his reputation on the low mumble, and didn't really display any propensity for proper diction until he played Groot.  (I wouldn't know about the "Fast & Furious" films, that's a franchise I've managed to avoid.).  The only times that actors in this film are not mumbling are when they're insulting each other - but at least when they're shouting, you can understand what they're saying.

Ben Affleck appears here as the older, veteran stockbroker in the investment firm, and gives a speech to the newbies that wanted very badly to be a cross between Gordon Gekko's "Greed is good" speech from "Wall Street" and Alec Baldwin's "Coffee is for closers" speech from "Glengarry Glen Ross", but just couldn't reach that level of significance in the end.

The main character played by Ribisi can't catch a break, he's one of those people who always manages to be in the wrong place at the right time, and therefore fails upward (or is it "succeeds downward"?). After running an illegal casino near Queens College, he joins this brokerage as a trainee, only to find that the firm is taking too much of a percentage from every sale, and then learning that the claims he's making to the clients about their investments might not be true.  Ya think?  What tipped him off, besides the fact that the firm is an hour's drive from Wall Street, or the fact that all of their sales involved cold-calling random people?  Was tele-marketing still so new back in the year 2000 that people not only took calls from telemarketers but actually ended up buying what they were selling?  I guess it was a much simpler time back then, it's hard for me to remember.

Also starring Giovanni Ribisi (last seen in "Ted 2"), Vin Diesel (last heard in "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2"), Nia Long (last seen in "Keanu"), Nicky Katt (last seen in "Planet Terror"), Scott Caan (last seen in "Ready to Rumble"), Ron Rifkin (last seen in "The Big Fix"), Jamie Kennedy, Tom Everett Scott (last seen in "La La Land"), Taylor Nichols (last seen in "Godzilla"), Bill Sage (last seen in "I Shot Andy Warhol"), Donna Mitchell (last seen in "St. Vincent"), André Vippolis, Jon Abrahams (last seen in "The Faculty"), Will McCormack (last seen in "Prime"), Peter Maloney (last seen in "Breaking Away"), Jared Ryan, Lisa Gerstein, with cameos from Kirk Acevedo (last seen in "Dawn of the Planet of the Apes"), Siobhan Fallon Hogan (last seen in "The Paper"), Anson Mount (last seen in "The Forger"), Desmond Harrington (last seen in "We Were Soldiers").

RATING: 5 out of 10 hands of blackjack

Live By Night

Year 9, Day 326 - 11/22/17 - Movie #2,776

BEFORE: Day 3 of Ben Affleck week, with two films to go after this.

THE PLOT: A group of Boston-bred gangsters set up shop in Florida during the Prohibition era, facing off against the competition and the Ku Klux Klan.

AFTER: For some reason, Hollywood just loves to romanticize the time of Prohibition, and maybe it's an easy thing to do because revisionist history tells us how "wrong" it was to criminalize alcohol, because all that did was create more criminals, instead of changing people's behavior.  But yet we're unable as a country to carry those lessons forward, which would lead to de-criminalizing marijuana, or apply them instead to something meaningful, like gun control.  But the movies will keep showing us bootleggers and gun-runners from the 1930's as if they're heroes, or at least anti-heroes.

Logically it just doesn't work, so for good measure here they use Southerners as foil characters, as if our Irish anti-hero from Boston is doing terrible things, but in a "good" or at least "better" way, because at least he's not racist like the Southern gangsters are.  Really?  I mean, I get that the Klan is/was wrong, which most right-minded people seem to agree on (with some key exceptions this year) but can we really say that one gangster/killer/bootlegger is "better" than the other because he's in a relationship with a woman of color?  He's doing just as many illegal things as everyone around him, but because he's got love in his heart for a Cuban/African-American woman, well, by all means, lets' root for him.  Carry on with your illegal activities, and be sure to kill all the Southern racists while you're at it.

He also fights a different form of racism, as a man of Irish descent who feels the need to succeed in the Italian mafia, and initially this comes from ambition combined with carrying on an affair with an Italian mobster's girlfriend, but those motivations only carry the character so far, at some point if he talks like a gangster, dresses like a gangster and acts like a gangster, he's a gangster, right?  So any desire to see him succeed, even if he's the central character, feels a bit misguided.

The rest just sort of feels like coincidence and complications, because he befriends the local sheriff in Florida (who's helpful in mediating things between him and the Klan, up to a point anyway) but the sheriff's daughter heads out to Hollywood to become famous, and things don't go her way.  It's an incredible coincidence that our man would be aware of the troubles that she encountered there, and an even greater coincidence that she would overcome them and become a popular advocate against both drinking and gambling, the two things that our hero intends to profit from.  Karma's a bitch, it may give but then it also takes away, I guess.  Or what comes around, goes around.

This was based on a long novel written by Dennis Lehane, and considering that the film's initial running time of three hours eventually got cut down to just over two, and that several prominent actors who filmed scenes for it had their parts removed entirely, it seems that there may have been problems with the story, that needed to be solved by trimming and more trimming, until only the most basic skeleton of a story remained, and that has to affect certain reasons for things happening, or some shades of characters somewhere.

Also starring Zoe Saldana (last seen in "For the Love of Spock"), Sienna Miller (last seen in "Factory Girl"), Chris Cooper (last heard in "Cars 3"), Elle Fanning (last seen in "Trumbo"), Remo Girone, Brendan Gleeson (last seen in "In the Heart of the Sea"), Robert Glenister, Matthew Maher, Chris Messina (last seen in "Rounders"), Max Casella (last seen in "Jackie"), Miguel, Christian Clemenson (last seen in "Heartburn"), J.D. Evermore (last seen in "Trumbo"), Clark Gregg (last seen in "Labor Day"), Anthony Michael Hall (last seen in "Foxcatcher"), Chris Sullivan (last seen in "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2"), Benjamin Ciaramello, Derek Mears (last seen in "The Haunted Mansion"), Gianfranco Terrin.

RATING: 4 out of 10 barrels of rum

The Accountant

Year 9, Day 325 - 11/21/17 - Movie #2,775

BEFORE: Ben Affleck carries over from "Justice League", and so does the actor who played Commissioner Gordon, sharing screen time again with the current Batman, although this film was released a year earlier, so I guess yesterday's film was the real reunion.  Once again I have to point out that I planned this chain months ago, long before any Hollywood harassment/abuse scandals surfaced, so it's too late for me to change things around and start boycotting films because of who starred in or produced them, not if I want to finish the year the way I planned, and link to "Star Wars: The Last Jedi" on the day it premieres.

But, if you're keeping track, in addition to any allegations against Affleck, this film was produced by Ratpac, Brett Ratner's production company, though he is not credited as a producer on this one.  And just for good measure, news broke yesterday of ANOTHER actor in this film being accused of sexual harassment, so really, I can't win here.  Until Hollywood finishes cleaning house and decides who gets to keep making movies and who doesn't, I'm just going to stick with my plan - because all this boycotting and firing is starting to approach something akin to "guilty until proven innocent", and that's not only the way the legal system is supposed to work, it opens the door to possible false accusations causing someone to lose their jobs.  Let me be clear, 99% of men in Hollywood are probably perverts, and 99% of these accusations being made are probably true, but I'm also worried about the 1% of accusations that might be false, and innocent people possibly having their careers ruined.

Not to mention all of the people who were working on "House of Cards", "Transparent", and that animated show from Louis CK's company - those people are also victims, losing their jobs right before the holidays because a production company has suddenly decided that a movie or TV show is suddenly not marketable because of one actor getting bad press.  Does that seem fair?

THE PLOT: As a math savant uncooks the books for a new client, the Treasury Department closes in on his activities, and the body count starts to rise. 

AFTER: It seems like MAYBE someone had good intentions here, trying to create a character in the vein of John Wick or The Equalizer, but who overcame things like autism and childhood trauma to be a (high-)functioning member of society.  Someone who might do "bad" things, but for "good" reasons.  Like, for example, Marvel's Punisher character, who turned the loss of his family into a one-man war on crime, becoming a ruthless killer, but only of bad people - sinning to rid the world of other sinners. 

But I'm just not sure this film goes about things in the right way, and instead could end up giving a lot of terrible ideas to people.  Autism and other learning disorders are already a hot-button social and political topic, and this film is just going to add fuel to the fire.  Remember back when "Rain Man" came out, and people questioned scenes like taking Dustin Hoffman's character out of the home, bringing him to a casino and teaching him to count cards?  Yeah, it's like that, only ten times worse. 

Let me go on the record here and state that I don't fully understand autism.  (Does anyone?)  I know there's been a lot MORE of it than there used to be, or maybe there's just more reporting being done, better record-keeping could make it seem like a disorder is on the rise.  I don't know anything about  what causes it, how to cure it, or what happens to those kids when they become adults.  Do some of them become functioning members of society, while others just don't?  I need to research this, because it's not really something that I've heard people discuss openly. 

So I'm presented with a character that USED to be autistic, or had some similar kind of disorder like OCD or ADHD, or is some kind of savant, and we see flashbacks to him as a child, while being diagnosed he puts together a jigsaw puzzle at record speed - only he's not looking at the picture, he's doing it while looking at the BLANK sides, which I don't think is possible, even for a savant. And then when he's missing one piece, he starts to freak out.  Thankfully my own OCD was never that bad, I had a few jigsaws as a kid that were missing pieces but I learned to live with that.  Back in my day, we just called the weird kids "weird", and I say this as one of those kids.  (I was the brainy fat kid, so I took my lumps in grade school and learned to deal with it until junior high, when things got better.)

Over the course of the film, through flashbacks we learn that this character (called Christian Wolff, but apparently this is an alias and we never learn his real name in the film...) grew up with a military father, and his mother split since she couldn't deal with her son's disability, and that his little brother ended up being his protector, and all that seems to track.  But his father chose to handle his son's autism by training him as an expert in hand-to-hand combat, and apparently in the use of firearms as well.  This is some kind of screenwriter's fantasy, I guess, and was necessary to create the character he wanted to profile, but from a medical standpoint, this is probably the worse tactic to take to deal with autism since Jenny McCarthy started telling people to not get their kids vaccinated.  It's irresponsible at best - do we really want more people with learning disorders and unpredictable personalities to have working knowledge of firearms? 

We also learn that this guy is now an incredible forensic accountant, because his disorder allows him to have the equivalent of superhuman focus - so give him 15 years of a company's books, and he'll figure out who's embezzling money, and how, and he'll stay up all night and obsess over it until he cracks the case.  OK, maybe there are skills that he developed or acquired that could help him here, and maybe there are aspects of his disorder that can help him at certain jobs, but this is just a bit beyond believable.

What muddies the waters even further here is that he seems to work for all manner of clients, from getting a farming couple the maximum tax deduction, to cooking the books for the mob - so where's his moral center if he's taking on both legal and illegal clients?  How am I supposed to root for him now?  Plus, what are the chances against someone possessing this exact set of skills, someone who can both figure out who's blackmailing you AND can beat them in a shooting match?  Extremely unlikely. 

Seeing things from the point of view of the Treasury agent isn't much better - this aspect of the film plays out like a procedural, and therefore seems like it would answer some questions about who this guy is and why he does what he does, but even as the lesser agent manages to crack the code and find out some things about how he operates, her superior then reveals more information that basically contradicts everything we've seen before.  It seems the Treasury Dept. used him as a mole once, sent him undercover to prison to get some important information from an inmate.  Yet, NITPICK POINT: they didn't find out his real name or anything else about him, before using him?  This makes zero sense.  Someone didn't do their detective work on him when they had the chance, and now it's too late?

Plus, how can the Treasury agent know so much about him, without knowing his name?  He knows so many details about the guy's family that with a minimal amount of research he should be able to close that gap - is he just lazy?  This is a complete dodge, it's meant to be a twist since we at first believe he's trying to catch the guy and knows nothing about him, to change things up in the second half also makes no sense.  Twists are twists, but if they don't work then they shouldn't be there in the first place.

There's another big NITPICK POINT that I'm redacting here, another one of those unbelievable, near-impossible coincidences.  But I figured out where this was headed about an hour before the twist, and once again, I learned too much from reading the cast list before watching the film, so I really should stop doing that.

Also starring Anna Kendrick (last seen in "Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates"), J.K. Simmons (also carrying over from "Justice League"), Jon Bernthal (last seen in "Sicario"), Jeffrey Tambor (last heard in "A Merry Friggin' Christmas"), Cynthia Addai-Robinson, John Lithgow (last seen in "Orange County"), Jean Smart (last seen in "The Brady Bunch Movie"), Andy Umberger (last seen in "Bounce"), Alison Wright, Jason Davis (last seen in "Concussion"), Robert C. Treveiler, Mary Kraft, Seth Lee, Jake Presley, Izzy Fenech, Ron Prather (last seen in "42"), Susan Williams, Gary Basaraba (last seen in "The Smurfs 2").

RATING: 4 out of 10 cantaloupes

Justice League

Year 9, Day 324 - 11/20/17 - Movie #2,774

BEFORE: I face a dilemma today, because of the Hollywood sexual harassment scandals - I happened to know Brett Ratner, one of the men standing accused in the news - or, rather, I knew him back at NYU in the late 80's.  He was there solely to get his diploma, and to do as little work as possible in order to make that happen, because he apparently had a job waiting for him in Hollywood, and just needed the piece of paper to make that happen.  So sophomore year I was on his crew and he was supposed to be on mine, but he never showed up to carry my equipment when it was my turn to direct, not even once.  And when I crewed for him, he seemed to spend every spare minute between shots trying to pick up girls by offering them gum, that was his move.  So I've known for 30 years that the guy's a sleaze ball with a one-track mind, and wouldn't lift a finger to help anyone else, and finally the rest of the world is catching up with me.

I've spent those 30 years avoiding as many of his films as possible, making exceptions only for "X-Men: The Last Stand", which happens to be the worst film in that franchise.  I slipped up and watched "Tower Heist" and "Red Dragon" too, but hey, I'm only human.  Ratner also got very sneaky and got into producing, so that his name got attached to big-budget films like "The Revenant", "Black Mass" and "Rules Don't Apply" - but since the scandal has broken it appears that most companies have severed ties with him, and encouraged others to do the same.  If karma is an actual thing, then he should spend whatever fortune he has amassed over his career to either settle or satisfy the lawsuits against him, and then live out the rest of his days penniless and, preferably, homeless.

(Bitter? Moi? Why should I be bitter against the person who taught me that the vast majority of people in this industry are selfish and unreliable, because I learned that if I wanted to make a movie, I could only count on myself, so for that semester I became writer, director, cameraman and star of my student films, in the vein of Renaissance men like Orson Welles.  OK, so I hold grudges.  My motto is "forget, but don't forgive".  Or should that be the other way around?)

But I've been planning for months to see "Justice League", it's an integral part of my chain, and also the DC Universe that I've been keeping track of.  Am I supposed to boycott this film, and not see how these superheroes come together to form their universe's greatest team?  My solution is to use the Fandango gift certificate I received as a birthday gift from my co-workers, so at least it's not MY money contributing to the box office of a Ratner-produced film.  And hopefully by the time another DC superhero film rolls around, Warner Bros. will have cleaned up their yard a little better, so the rodents don't get back in.

Robin Wright carries over from "Blade Runner 2049", and as it turns out, I didn't need to hold that film back from the Ryan Gosling chain - there's an actress that could have carried over from "Paranoia" to this one, I didn't dive very deep into the credits to find better connections, because once I found a way to connect between all the films I wanted to see for the rest of 2017, I didn't see the need to try to improve it.  It could have been a great quadrilogy, with four films set in Los Angeles with Ryan Gosling in them.  Oh, well, what's done is done - and now I get to watch five films in which Ben Affleck plays a rich person.  First up, Affleck as Bruce Wayne.

OK, now for dilemma #2, Ben Affleck has been accused of (and admitted to) other bad behavior, beyond being closely associated with Harvey Weinstein.  Two years ago it was revealed that he was having a relationship with his kids' nanny, and this eventually led to the break-up of his marriage.  This was what passed for a scandal two years ago, before Cosby, before Louis CK, before (insert three more names here, based on this week's top stories).  Again, we learn that people, in general, are untrustworthy and unreliable over long spans of time.  I'm spending this whole week watching movies with Affleck, who's probably thanking his lucky stars that the current wave of scandals has made his behavior seem better by comparison.  Though he may or may not have done anything illegal, adultery still counts as a very shitty thing to do, depending on one's own morals of course, so your mileage may vary.

But where do we even begin to draw the lines on regulating the moral behavior of others?  We think we know where to start, but where do we stop?  Will this become a Hollywood "witch hunt" for pervy behavior, similar to the anti-Communist McCarthy hearings of the 1950's, and if so, will there be anyone left in Hollywood afterwards to make movies?  Stay tuned.  

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice" (Movie #2,295), "Wonder Woman" (Movie #2,652)

THE PLOT: Fueled by his restored faith in humanity and inspired by Superman's selfless act, Bruce Wayne enlists the help of his newfound ally, Diana Prince, to face an even greater enemy. 

AFTER: This is finally the film that galvanizes the DC universe, where all of its most powerful heroes come together to compare their origin stories, and work together to defeat the evil power.  Which in this case is the dreaded Spoiler, the villain who ruins movie plots by posting them online.  Just kidding, but I do try to create a spoiler-free zone here, and since I'm viewing the "Justice League" film just three days after its release, I'm going to try to be very careful, because I know that not everyone rushes out to see a big film like this during its opening weekend.

I went on Monday night, and there were only about 15 people in the large IMAX theater I went to, but yet somehow I still ended up sitting in front of the only two people in the screening who insisted upon having a conversation during the film.  Sure, but if I turn around and ask them to stop talking, then I'm the bad guy. But they did eventually quiet down, so I was able to fully enjoy the second half of this film.  (Sure, I could have moved my seat, but it's the principle of the matter.)

I'm mostly a Marvel Comics man, but about 10% of my monthly reading list comes from DC - the 3 Batman books, the 2 Superman books, and the Justice League trades. (It's kind of like how I mostly drink Mountain Dew, which is a Pepsi product, but if a restaurant only has cola, I'll drink Coke over Pepsi.)  I've been reading DC since the Big Reboot back in 1985, and through the two (or is it 3) re-boots that have occurred since then.  I got on board with the JLA when the comic was revamped in 1997 -  it had existed for decades, but I guess had begun to suffer from having too many characters and spin-offs, so the 1997 version brought the book back to basics, with a focus on Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Flash, Green Lantern and Martian Manhunter.  In 2006 the "Infinite Crisis" mini-series marked a return to multiple dimensions and parallel Earths, so what followed was a 5-year run called "Justice League of America", with the trinity of Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, and a rotating cast of minor heroes like Vixen, Black Lightning and Hawkgirl.  This run culminated with the "Flashpoint" storyline, where Flash traveled through time, changed history and years of DC's continuity (or so it seemed...)

The 2011 DC reboot was another attempt to go "back to basics", with a new Justice League line-up of Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Green Lantern (Hal Jordan), Flash (Barry Allen) and Cyborg.  Hmm, with the exception of Green Lantern, that's VERY close to the line-up of this movie.  This reboot was called "The New 52" because there were 52 initial series in the publication line-up, and many of those books ended up being published for 52 issues before the next re-boot, which took place in 2016 and was called "Rebirth".  (I won't bore you with the argument over whether this was a reboot or not, because in some ways it was a return to the pre-Flashpoint continuity, but in other cases it wasn't, it's all very technical and overly nerdy, and very little of this argument relates to the movie.)

My point is, DC seems to have now settled on who constitutes the "core" of the movie Justice League, and it's this line-up very similar to the 2011 "New 52" reboot.  (Which wasn't really a reboot, it was just some villain who somehow stole 10 years out of history and made every hero think they had a new origin story.  Again, very complicated and super-nerdy.)  But in the movie continuity, the Justice League forms in a world without its Superman, where Batman and Wonder Woman have to unite and recruit the other team members: Aquaman, Flash and Cyborg.  (Thanks to his solo movie failing, DC requests that you ignore the absence of Green Lantern.)

The problem here is, we've seen this film before, in 2012, and it was called "The Avengers". Which is probably very ironic because the Justice League's been around longer in the comic books, and if anything the Avengers comic was an attempt to rip off the Justice League.  Only Marvel got there first during the current wave of superhero movies, and did this "team up the heroes to defeat the alien invasion thing" first, so now it looks like DC is copying Marvel, at least on the screen.  So if the box office for "Justice League" ends up being under-whelming, I wonder how much of that can be attributed to the fact that the audience might have plot deja vu, and that perhaps no new ground was broken here.

If I take this comparison to the extreme, consider this: Iron Man is the equivalent of Batman - both are orphaned millionaire playboys with unlimited resources, tons of gadgets and obsessive/addictive personalities.  And just as "Iron Man" kicked off the Marvel Cinematic Universe, so did the three "Dark Knight" films kick off the DCU (I realize this is a debatable point, but work with me here...)  Now, if Batman = Iron Man, then probably Superman = Thor (both are aliens, with unlimited strength, energy-based powers and both wear red capes) and that leaves Wonder Woman = Captain America, which is not a great analogy, except that the World War I-based origin story for Wonder Woman reminded me of the World War II-set "Captain America: The First Avenger".

If you scratch a little deeper, you can find equivalencies for just about every member of the JLA on the Avengers squad - like Flash = Quicksilver, Aquaman = Namor the Sub-Mariner (with a fair amount of Black Panther mixed in), and if you extend to the comic books then obviously Green Arrow = Hawkeye, Black Canary = Black Widow, Red Tornado = Vision, Zatanna = Scarlet Witch, The Atom = Ant-Man, and so on ad infinitum. Sure, there are differences, and there are no doubt many characters in each universe that have no counterparts on the other side of the comic-book store aisle, like Hulk.  DC has no Hulk-type character, but then Marvel has no Lex Luthor, for example.  (Obadiah Stane was an obvious Luthor rip-off, but he didn't last...)

Now, is "Justice League" a complete rip-off of the first "Avengers" movie?  No, of course not, but the main thrust is the same.  But if you change "Chitauri" to "parademons", "Loki" to "Steppenwolf", and "Tesseract" to "Mother Box", I'm afraid you'll find you're already halfway there.  We may have reached the point where all of these superhero films are essentially drawing from the same pool for plots.  That being said, I did find that the events in "Justice League" did feel like a perfectly natural logical progression from the events depicted in "Superman v Batman: Dawn of Justice".  We saw those scenes where Batman reviewed the files on those other heroes Luthor was tracking, plus the flash-forward/dream sequence where we saw Batman battling the parademons.  So we all knew this was coming, and now it's here. 

What I might have some problems with, however, are the characterizations of Aquaman and Flash in this film.  In the comics Barry Allen was an accomplished hero, and then he died and was replaced by Wally West, who (having had been Kid Flash for a few years) was full of insecurities, and also had to eat a lot to keep up his runner's metabolism.  In this film Barry Allen is a teenager, so it's like they're trying to combine the two comic-book Flashes into the same character.  This character is Barry in name only, he's got the "eating disorder" of Wally West, plus all of his nebbishy (Jewish?) insecurities, so he's somehow Woody Allen in a red track-suit.  I don't watch the "Flash" TV show, so maybe this is the way the character goes on TV now, but his personality doesn't resemble any Flash I know from the comics.  Here he's like that awkward kid in school that nobody wants to sit with at lunch, and doesn't get invited to any parties.  Are we geeks supposed to see ourselves here?

On the other end of the spectrum, the Aquaman from the old "Super-Friends" cartoons was too much of a straight arrow, with his neat blond hair and his green speedo, so the character was definitely in need of a personality injection if audiences were going to take him seriously.  Plus he could talk to fish, and how often is that going to be useful in a fight, I mean, really?  But I'm not sure that the direction they picked, which is part mountain man, part hipster, and part Maui from "Moana" was the way to go.  I mean, the guy is the prince of Atlantis, should he really be saying things like "Hey, I dig it!" and "My man!" - that all seems way out of character.  I mean, I get that a screenwriter might have to go to extremes to give these five do-gooders distinct personalities, but too far in any one direction, and it starts to become unbelievable.

Now, back to the alien invasion.  What we have here is the parademons from Apokolips (even though that name is never uttered) and they're being commanded by a villain I've never heard of, who I assume is a minor villain from the "New Gods" storyline that Jack Kirby spear-headed back in the day.  Now, you don't HAVE to be familiar with Apokolips, the New Gods and the Fourth World to enjoy this movie, but it couldn't hurt.  (Yeah, it turns out the villain here is from the comics, but I hadn't heard his name, except for the fact that it's also a novel by Herman Hesse, and the name of the band that recorded "Born to Be Wild".)  So, this leads to my first NITPICK POINT, namely where the hell is Darkseid?  When you get all of the big DC heroes together, the challenge they face should be world-threatening, and if you're really going to swing for the fences, they should be fighting Darkseid, the "big boss" of Apokolips.  But maybe they're saving him for the next film, the way that Marvel's been building up to Thanos and "Avengers: Infinity War".

Now, my other NITPICK POINT concerns Suicide Squad.  We know from that 2016 film that Bruce Wayne was aware of who Suicide Squad was as a team, and what they were capable of.  When he learned that an invasion of parademons was imminent, why wouldn't he turn to the team that was already formed, instead of putting together the new Justice League and racing against time to get these disparate heroes to form bonds, relate to each other's powers and start to work together?  For that matter, why couldn't he do both, put the J.L. together and also throw Suicide Squad into the mix?  When the fate of the entire world is at stake, why wouldn't he use EVERY resource he had to try to fix the problem?

OK, one could say that being aware of the Suicide Squad and what they could do, maybe they're just not on the same power level as Wonder Woman, Flash, Aquaman et al.  But then TELL us that, it would only take two lines of dialogue, with Alfred saying, "Master Bruce, what about that team of criminals that's already been formed, and has trained together?"  And Batman would say, "I considered that, Alfred, great suggestion, but they're just not powerful enough for this situation."  And now I'm doing all this work, writing dialogue that fixes a professional screenwriter's plotholes...

On the other hand, "Justice League" resolved my greatest NITPICK POINT from "Wonder Woman", namely, where was she for the last 100 years, following her battles during World War I?  This film managed to answer that question, with just a few simple lines of dialogue.  So why couldn't this have been addressed in her own film?  It turns out that she was always there, sticking to the shadows, fighting injustice on her own terms, but avoiding the spotlight for personal reasons, while remaining very unsure about whether the world was ready for a female superhero.  It's the god damn patriarchy system, it even affects the heroes now.

Which is really a shame, because even Batman admits during this film that he's not cut out to be the leader of the Justice League, because he's not really a "people person", as we should all be able to discern from the fact that he dresses up like a BAT and spends his nights beating up criminals.  He may have the tools, but not the talent. The person with the most power and the best managerial skill, the one who really should be leading the team, is Wonder Woman.  But even in the JLA comic books, I don't think she's even held that position, but I could be wrong.  Maybe this is what's wrong with the world, that more women should be running things - they certainly can't muck things up worse than the men have done, so I'm all for them driving the proverbial the bus for a while.  Now is the time, if ever there was one, when the world needs more Wonder Women.  And a few genuinely super men.  

Also starring Ben Affleck (last seen in Suicide Squad"), Gal Gadot (last seen in "Keeping Up with the Joneses"), Jason Momoa (last seen in "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice"), Ray Fisher (ditto) Ezra Miller (last seen in "Suicide Squad"), Henry Cavill (last seen in "Tristan + Isolde"), Jeremy Irons (last seen in "Race"), Diane Lane (last seen in "Trumbo"), Connie Nielsen (last seen in "Wonder Woman"), J.K. Simmons (last seen in "La La Land"), Joe Morton (also last seen in "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice"), Amy Adams (last seen in "Arrival"), Amber Heard (last seen in "Paranoia"), Billy Crudup (last seen in "Spotlight"), Kiersey Clemons (last seen in "Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising"), Julian Lewis Jones, Eleanor Matsuura (last seen in "Wonder Woman"), Michael McElhatton (last heard in "Norm of the North"), the voice of Ciaran Hinds (last seen in "Calendar Girls"), and cameos from Jesse Eisenberg (last seen in "Café Society"), David Thewlis (last seen in "The Zero Theorem", Holt McCallany (last seen in "Vantage Point"), Joe Manganiello.

RATING: 8 out of 10 Viking warriors