The Suicide Squad - minor spoilers only

Friday night we watched The Suicide Squad. "It doesn't suck, does it?" Hawk asked a friend. She was wary about it being a reboot of the 2016 Suicide Squad which... I think the only people who liked it were diehard fanboys/fangirls of the character Harley Quinn.

"It's actually really good," our friend assured us. Still wary we watched it on a free trial of HBO Max instead of shelling out $20++ to see it in a theater. It was... 2 hours 12 minutes long. Yeah, it wasn't that great. It wasn't bad enough that I want my time back, but if I'd paid much more than $0 for the tickets I'd want something back.



The Suicide Squad is an action comedy patterned on 1970s war movies such as The Dirty Dozen. (Yes, cinemaphiles, The Dirty Dozen is from 1967. The director of this movie has repeatedly cited "1970s war movies" and "The Dirty Dozen" in the same sentence in interviews about his inspiration. That may tell you something about the quality of the art here.) Instead of garden variety criminals sent on a dangerous mission, it's comic book villains sent on a dangerous mission. D-List comic book villains.

"This is like Mystery Men," I quipped as the team of misfits was pulled together. "Except without the charisma of The Shoveler."

"I think that's the one played by the guy who did Pee-wee Herman," I snickered about one character. "No, wait, I think that's him," I corrected moments later. For the record, none of them are played by Paul Reubens.

By the time the full team assembled, with brief backstories given for each member, I'd already stopped caring about the characters. "I've already ranked my list on which ones I want to see die first," I announced.

It turned out that was ironic because in practically the next scene, ( Minor Spoilers )

.

That's the point, of course. The characters are not meant to be sympathetic. Like in The Dirty Dozen you may root for them to win because they're fighting for your side, but at the same time you know they're scum. Except here most of them are so unsympathetic, so ridiculously fourth-rate, sad sack villains, that you're rooting for most of them to die.

And that's kind of the point, too. Actor John Cena describes his portrayal of the character Peacemaker as, "Captain America, if he were a total douchebag." 

It's hard to imagine a story full of unlikeable characters keeping itself together for over 2 hours. The Suicide Squad does... barely. It does that by stringing together action scenes with plenty of violence and gore. And a high body count. Yeah, one reason you might keep watching is to see the character(s) you hate get whacked.

Overall I give this movie a D+. It does a bit better than the minimum passing grade, but not by much.

You know what's scary, though? At a D+ this might still be the best DC Comics movie adaptation. Why is it that dozens of movies have been made in the Marvel Comics universe and the worst of them is still okay, but with DC it's such a struggle to do better than crap a turd onto the screen?

Hiking in Soberanes Canyon

Saturday this weekend we traveled down to California's Central Coast to hike at Garrapata State Park. I wrote about the trip overall in a blog yesterday. Here I follow up with pictures and notes from our hike out & back in Soberanes Canyon.

As I noted in that other blog entry, hiking out & back in Soberanes Canyon was not our first choice. We thought we'd hike up & back Rocky Ridge via the oceanfront trail. Alas that trail is closed from fire damage— still, after a fire that occurred 5 years ago! The fire delivered a one-two punch to many mountainsides as it first burned off all their vegetation then left them susceptible to flash flooding. It's really the floods that occurred a few months after the fires that damaged hiking trails.



Well, the thing about walking in beauty is that beauty can be found all around. Rocky Ridge trail closed? Let's hike Soberanes Canyon instead. It's not the same form of beauty; it's beauty in its own way. In this case, today, with wildflowers all around.

Curiously this lush, full canyon was also once savaged by floods. Well, once within living memory anyway. When we first hiked this trail in the late 1990s there had been flash floods during days of heavy rain a few months earlier. The floor of this canyon with a 50-wide swath of destruction. Plants and bushes were wiped away, small trees were wiped away, even the trail was wiped away. We rock-hopped up the stream bed for a mile.



Today there's virtually no trace of that flood from 23 or so years ago. The plants and flowers have all grown back. Even the shape of the land seems to have recovered. Thus I am sure the land that burned will recover. ...In fact if it burned down here, it clearly already has!

The canyon narrows as you follow it up into the mountains. The trail darts from wildflower covered hillsides into riparian zones like this as it crosses the stream in a few places.



This little stream that today you can hop across... yes, this stream cut that 50-foot-wide swath of destruction years ago.

"So what are you hiking to?" a person might ask.

The thing is, right now there's no to. Other than to the end of the trail. In past years we'd hiked the Soberanes Canyon trail until it joins with the back end of the Rocky Ridge trail, then up the steep backside of Rocky Ridge, over the top which in the spring is carpeted with a riot of wildflowers, and down the stunning but toe-jamming oceanfront side of Rocky Ridge.

"So what do you see when you get there?"

Literally, we see a "trail closed" sign. But that's not the point. The point is we're not getting there, we are there. We're there the whole time. In beauty we walk.



On the way back from... halfway though our walk in beauty... I paused to shoot closeups of some of the wildflowers.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the photographic challenges of shooting flowers with this blurred background effect when we visited Spokane's flower garden. The challenges were the same here. The challenges are satisfying to face, though, because I have the knowledge, skill, and tools to surmount them.



Sometimes beauty is gazing miles out to see, sometimes it's thousands of feet overhead to a mountain, sometimes it's inches from my nose inside the petals of a wildflower. With beauty all around me I walk.

The adventure continues! Keep reading: Walking the Bluffs at Garrapata