See The Movie...Or Read The Novel: "Suicide Squad"

Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice didn't have a tie-in novelization, but Suicide Squad does, written by Marv Wolfman, of Teen Titans and Crsis On Infinite Earths fame. I was impressed with his prose writing ability - I'm going to check out his novelization of Arkham Knight - and observed that it's probably (judging from the mixed reviews..or tomatoes, frankly) a smoother experience than the film, which I saw two months after reading the prose. In the past, I've tried reading other novels by comic book writers and found that only Dennis O'Neill, Devin Grayson and Alan Grant had a knack for it, whereas others felt very amateurish. If I didn't own the trade paperback of Crisis, I would've tracked down Wolfman's novelization of it, just to see how he wrote it up.

The book contains fewer Ben Affleck cameos. In it's place, the character of June Moon/The Enchantress and her storyarc in the film is elaborated on by Wolfman. In the film, June's relationship with Rick Flag, her initial transformation into the Enchantress and her enlistment to the Squad by Amanda Waller is just exposition, but it's dramatised in the book and takes up most of the first 1/3...having said that, the final battle between Enchantress and the Squad is really weak.

And I didn't enjoy reading the stuff with the EA's...the tar monsters (my description...or what I gathered that they looked like). All those descriptions of combat fighting felt like Resident Evil stuff. That was not interesting to read. I also disliked all the back-and-forth TV cop show-style bickering between Deadshot and Flag. Audiences liked Will Smith as Deadshot, so I'm assuming his performance added something missing from what reads like well-worn material. Captain Boomerang was fun to read, though the joke about why he owns the pink unicorn doll isn't in the book.

Neither the book or the film do anything with Katana, who's just along for the ride. Whatever additional scenes featuring Jared Leto that might exist on the cuttingfloor don't make it into the book, so it's hard to gauge whether even more material was shot after the book went to press...after all, the novel does have fewer Batffleck cameos...and no Flash cameo, either!

So..how do I sum this up? It has a lot of cool moments. The book does some heavy lifting with the characterization in parts, I didn't really like the plot, because it just becomes a video game along the middle, then has a really weak finale, while the casting choices impose a better movie exists along it's periphery...am I the only one who would prefer to see the newly branded DC Films ditch their labyrinthine plans for Justice League movies and just give us straight up a Batman vs. Joker & Harley Quin trilogy, instead?

Oh, and a trilogy Wonder Woman movies. Everyone loves Gal Godat. :)

See The Movie..Or Read The Book: "Ghostbusters"

Maybe I should've just seen the lady Ghostbusters movie..I wound up reading 3 books: the junior novelization, the standard novelization..and, perhaps better than either of those - a facsimile of Ghosts From Our Past, the guidebook serving as the catalyst for much of the film's plot.

The only disadvantage to opting out of seeing the film is that I can't say anything about the cast or choices regarding direction, production values and special effects. What I can observe is how earnest the story is. Erin and Abby's friendship is central to everything that happens...but it reminds me of the stuff with the baby in Ghostbusters 2 - actually, it's not as bad, but you can't have a proper screwball comedy romp when you try to add greater meaning to the shenanigans. Erin and Abby's dilemma belongs in a very different comedy, yet I'm aware that without it, this whole thing might resemble a remake of Pixels.

In the junior novel, Erin comes off particularly bipolar - she's looking for any chance to bail one moment, licking radioactive ghost traps the next. The junior novel, I'll bet, resembles the final cut of the film. Nancy Holder, who wrote the adult novel, goes to great lengths to flesh out Erin and Abby's backstory with lots of flashbacks to their salad days as teenagers and college students, eventually chronicling the disintegration of their friendship. That leaves little time for Holder to devote much to fleshing out the best characters: Kevin the receptionist and Jillian Holtzman. Midway into the final 3rd of the novel, she gives Holtzman and Patty Tolan a precious moment to talk about themselves, in a scene reminiscent of a moment between Dan Ackroyd and Ernie Hudson driving across the Brooklyn Bridge in the original film. For the sake of a sequel centering around Holtzman at least, I wish the film was successful enough for the studio to make one.

Other hints of the author taking creative license include an attempt to explain lame gags - the same Chinese food deliveryman, the dangerous radioactive device that gets handed like paperweight, Jennifer Lynch and the Mayor's obsession with keeping up appearances, Erin a popular target for getting slimed/puked on..

Oddly, Holder and Andrew Shaffer - the writer of the Ghosts From Our Past facsimile - invent contradictory accounts of the ghost Erin encountered as a child. Shaffer's account is more farcical and set around Halloween; Holder's account offers background on the old woman ghost and why she would want to haunt Erin. Shaffer and Holder also can't agree on how many hard copies of Ghosts From Our Past were self-published by Erin and Abby before Abby ultimately made it available on Kindle: Holder limits it to two copies, Shaffer implies far more, but never gives an exact number; just enough copies for other characters - debunker Martin Heiss in particular - to discover. These examples of discontinuity are not exclusive to these two; Ozzy Osbourne's cameo has a completely different line of dialogue in the junior novel and in Holder's novel! I prefer "I can't follow THAT!" (junior) to "SHARON!! I'm having another flashback!" (Holder novelization), but in this case, I'll bet the latter is in the final cut.

The guidebook is hilarious...though I wonder why they could make room for John Belushi and Chuthulu, but have no room for likely-to-have-been-seen-and-documented-before Ghostbusters rogues like Slimer, Viggo the Carpathian (whether you like him or not), Gozer the Gozerian, Vince Klortho and Zuul. Why not? This shit had rules? Nerds.

Hands down, the best passage in the guidebook was an Epitaph purportedly from Kevin, still completely at sea, trying to write abouta guidebook he opted out of reading...and trying to see if he can see the movie, instead...

...writing-wise, I think Kevin's my intellectual opposite/counterpart in the fictional world...

At the end of the day, I thought it was all okay...kind-of middle-of-the-road, story-wise. It's a story built on the outline of a plot I've seen before, so the interesting stuff was all the character moments..you could fashion a plot around this team never encountering any ghosts at all and still be entertaining...but that's not Ghostbusters...the appeal of this franchise is the blue collar approach to encountering the paranormal - like bug exterminators! It's a deceptively simple dynamic..but they got it half-right! It could've been much worse..