Pop Culture Happy Hour: "The Suicide Squad" and What's Making Us Happy

Margot Robbie, Daniela Melchior, Idris Elba, a shark-man voiced by Sylvester Stallone, and David Dastmalchian are most of the lineup of The Suicide Squad. (Warner Bros/DC Comics)

Wednesday was my birthday, and it was not the first time I’d spent part of my birthday talking about a James Gunn comic book movie on Pop Culture Happy Hour. In 2014, I reported to the now-long-since-demolished-and-replaced NPR headquarters to talk about the just-released Guardians of the Galaxy before heading off to dinner at Oyamel. This year, I skipped the studio — we all skipped the studio — but still joined a panel chaired by my A Degree Absolute! co-host Glen Weldon and allies Daisy Rosario and Ronald Young, Jr. to dissect (it’s a grisly movie) The Suicide Squad.

Glen and I two-handed its kinda-sorta precursor, the definite article-free Suicide Squad, in 2016. I also wrote a review of that film for NPR. God, what a rotten year that was.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: "Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood"

Brad and Leo, movie stars (Sony)

Our Pop Culture Happy Hour dissection of Quentin Tarantino's ninth picture gave me the opportunity to be on a panel with Monica Castillo, a fellow Eugene O'Neill National Critics Institute fellow and someone with whom I'd not previously had the pleasure of speaking, though we have friends and colleagues in common. A fun episode. After some deliberation, we elected to avoid any in-depth discussion of the ending of the film.

The Next-to-Last Picture Show: "Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood," reviewed.

Brad Pitt is a stuntman-turned-gopher to a fading TV star in Quentin Tarantino’s ninth film. (Sony)

The Bruin—the Westwood cinema where Margot Robbie (as Sharon Tate) goes to see herself in the Dean Martin-starring spy spoof The Wrecking Crew midway through Quentin Tarantino's new Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood—is where I saw Ocean's 11 (the Soderbergh-Clooney-Pitt one, not the the Dean Martin one) in 2001 and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines in 2003. I must've seen at least a few other movies there, but those are the two I remember.

I like QT's new picture a whole lot. My NPR review awaits you.

Self-Inflicted Wound: Suicide Squad, reviewed.

"I loved you in that movie Focus." Will Smith and Margot Robbie. (Clay Enos/Warner Bros.)

I was genuinely curious about Suicide Squad, because I admire many of writer-director David Ayer's films, and because I like the sturdy bad-guys-on-a-dangerous-mission premise in general. (I finally saw William Friedkin's 1977 thriller Sorcerer a few months ago, and I loved it.) But Suicide Squad is at least as awful as Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, and probably would've been lousy even if a panicked studio hadn't commissioned an edit from a company that specializes in trailers. Anyway, I performed an autopsy for NPR.

While can't endorse the movie, I strongly endorse my friend Neda Ulaby's All Things Considered piece about Kim Yale, who co-wrote many issues of the late-80s Suicide Squad comic with her husband, John Ostrander. He gets shouted out in the movie in the form of a sign for the "John F. Ostrander Federal Building," but Yale does not. I'm glad Neda stepped in to correct the record.

When the Legend Becomes Fact: Tarzan, reviewed.

Samuel L. Jackson as real-life Renaissance man George Washington Williams, with Alexander Skarsgård as fictional he-man Tarzan. (Jonathan Olley)

For NPR, I wrestled with the 201st (give or take) iteration of The Legend of Tarzan, a movie wherein in the Uncanny Valley is often represented by a valley.