In the closing paragraph of his Suicide Squad review, Andrew O’Heir wrote that “it’s not one mediocre anti-superhero movie that bothers me [but] the immense cultural starvation, and the deep-seated willingness to believe that giant entertainment conglomerates hold the only possible remedy.”

Yesterday Variety‘s Guy Lodge tweeted the following:

The final paragraph of my own half-assed review of Suicide Squad (posted on 8.3), I wrote the following: “I saw the faces of the all-media invitees as I left the theatre. They were numb, drained, sucked dry and asking themselves the same question — ‘What have we done to ourselves as a culture? Why are we submitting to the vision of those malignant Warner Bros. executives, to the overall D.C. Comics grim-itude, to the rancid emptiness of the corporate greed virus? Why are we watching these films? What has happened to our moviegoing souls?'”

Are you detecting a commonality, a despairing view of things shared not just by myself, Lodge and O’Hehir but possibly many others?