One has to wonder while watching the movie “Suicide Squad”, whether or not special effects and action scenes are cheaper or easier to shoot when it’s dark, foggy or murky. Just about 100% of all the action scenes in this movie are at night or dusk or in foggy or rainy conditions. On top of this, the entire film is constantly dark regardless of whether the scenes are internal or external. The story is very dark too, about a group of murderers and insane people that include one sorcerer witch and one guy who looks like a lizard who are locked up for life and are now needed to save the world for reasons that are never clearly defined and seem to change as the movie continues. Another thing about this crazy movie are that the first one-third is devoted to defining and explaining who these criminal people are, but not nearly enough of the remaining story is about explaining the insane and stupid story which in many places makes no sense and in most other parts is completely crazy.

Margo Robbie has a career in movies right now that is exploding and Will Smith are the stars of this film and each of them have by far the most lines and scenes. Robbie plays a former psychiatrist who falls in love with the Joker, played by Jared Leto and as a result, goes completely insane and somehow gains extraordinary martial arts skills along the way. Will Smith plays and assassin who has amazing accuracy in shooting any kind of a gun. The actress Viola Davis seems to be completely misplaced in this mostly bad movie. I was surprised that she, along with Will Smith, chose to be in this film, given that it is so obviously poorly written and mostly bad. After all the characters are defined the story goes into introducing some kind of an alien force that is created by the sorcerer​ in a scene that barely makes any sense. From here the entire story goes completely south and involves this group of criminals chasing down and fighting these aliens who seem to be comprised of rocks and stones.

Unfortunately, this movie is not very good and I cannot recommend it.

It is a rare thing when a movie comes out at the exact same time or a little before a real life event that compares very closely to the subject matter of the film. One of the most famous times this has ever happened was in 1979 when the movie “The China Syndrome” came out just a week before the Nuclear Power Plant in Three Mile Island almost melted down. The new movie “Nerve” is not as closely related to the recent Pokemon Go craze as The China Syndrome was to an almost nuclear meltdown but fundamentally​ it is about an irresponsible​ smartphone game where people can dare people to do very dangerous acts which can easily result in someone being killed. What is so irresponsible of the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) is that a game like Pokemon could be released when it relies entirely on GPS tracking and Pokemon creatures​ that can appear in real life locations distracting people on bikes, on foot and even driving cars. There have already been a number of incidents that have resulted in accidents due to the popularity of this new Pokemon game.

The movie Nerve is about an even more irresponsible​ software program that might someday actually happen​. Viewers on the internet challenge other players on the internet into doing some kind of a dangerous dare and if the challenge​ is successful, money is paid to the person who completed the challenge. If they fail the challenge then they are out of the game. Ultimately all the players are ranked and the person who finishes first is paid​ some unknown large amount of money. As the​ movie goes on the challenges get more and more dangerous even involving two women trying to walk across two buildings using only a ladder. These challenges lead to a confused and rather badly written resolution to the entire story which I thought made more Hollywood sense than common sense and because of this reason and the pretty average film behind this entire idea I cannot recommend this movie. The actors Emma Roberts and Dave Franco do an OK acting job in this movie, but unfortunately the script is not good enough to rescue this film.

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I would assume that most big fans of Woody Allen long for the days when his movies were exceptionally funny as well as well told stories. Good examples of this would be Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Hanna and her Sisters. These examples of great Allen movies seem to be very far in the past now, perhaps due to his age or his extremely difficult personal life which seems to always come up after a few years, most recently at the Canne’s Film Festival. I for one am amazed at Woody Allen’s ability now at age 81 to write and direct a movie at a rate that is at least once a year especially when you add the stress of what people have been saying about his personal life since 1992. For over 30 years Woody Allen has been the captain of his own ship and has been able to write direct and produce his own movies his own way with his own company, with the new production company for this movie Amazon Studios. This ability to do everything his way for so long is probably unprecedented​ in the history of movies and because of this several all time movie classics have been created.

This new movie Cafe Society, is really two completely different movies that are not connected at all. One is a love triangle involving the main character played by Jessie Eisenberg and the other is about the Mafia-like criminal acts​ of his brother who during the movie kills about 4 people and places them into the same cement sidewalk. ​I thought it was very unusual​ that Allen would have two disconnected main and sub-plots in one movie, which is something that I have rarely if ever seen in any film that I can remember and this idea really does not work very well in this story.

The other actors in the love triangle include Steve Carrel who plays an important Hollywood producer and Kristen Stewart who plays his secretary. At first, the relationship between Carrell and Stewart is going to result in his leaving his wife to marry her and then he changes his mind and after that breakup Stewart’s character gets involved with Eisenberg only to have Carell change his mind again, leaving​ Eisenberg the odd man out who then returns to New York city.

One of the best and telling parts of this movie is when Carell and Stewart, now married, return to the nightclub Eisenberg is running in New York City with an attitude of total callousness, not caring for a moment how Eisenberg might react when he sees them together. This seemed like real life to me as I have often been amazed at the callousness and indifference some people can have concerning the feelings of others. After the breakup with Stewart, Eisenberg’s character met and married another woman, played by Blake Lively and they quickly had a child together. It seemed a little far-fetched that Eisenberg’s character would be able to get involved with two very attractive women at this level, considering his very average looks, so this part of the movie seemed to be a bit far-fetched. As this story and love triangle progressed​ there would be more scenes that involved Eisenberg’s Mafia brother and more murders, even involving​ a rude next door neighbor that felt very out of the place and had nothing to do with the main plot of this movie. For most movies sub-plots always have some kind of a related connection to the main plot but not in this film which I found to be highly unusual.

Cafe Society is not a bad movie but not really a good one either. I would have rather seen this same film with much more humor involved, maybe even including Allen himself as one of the characters and in this movie and he was the main narrator​ at certain points of the story. There are not too​ many laughs during this movie and the story seemed to be nothing special so for these reasons I cannot recommend Cafe Society.