Thanks to Jennifer Romano and Talk of the Town! Read here. Quote from yours truly: “As my blog rolls into another year of entertainment, rife with comic book adaptations, sequels, Oscar bait, arena shows, and theatrical productions big and small, sometimes I wonder if I am choking the life right from this hobby of mine. Can you imagine if every time you saw a film that your OCD tendencies forced you to rush home, throw some quippy hoo-ha on the internet, and wait eagerly for 3.5 comments to appear? Ah, well, it’s still too much fun to stop now—anticipate Volume THREE Roy’s Movie Migraine shortly.”
Excerpt: “Regarding BUT HAVE YOU READ THE BOOK jazz, my mother ALWAYS asked that question. Guess what? She very seldom had actually read the books herself; I preferred to write my book reports based on the more enjoyable movie versions!”
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Reel Roy Reviews 2
Reel Roy Reviews is now TWO books! You can purchase your copies by clicking here (print and digital)
I get asked this repeatedly when I see a movie based on a piece of literature (sometimes using that term very loosely), if I dare to have some issue with the film: its narrative structure, character choices, execution, blah, blah, blah. The questioner always seems to imply that my review is somehow thereby deficient, that I didn’t do my homework.
This scrutiny arose when I found the Twilight movies a tedious bore, when I thought Hunger Games was overrated nonsense, when I dubbed Mortal Instruments insipid idiocy, when I felt American Sniper was dangerous propaganda, and when I perceived Wild to be self-aggrandizing tell-all myth-making. I didn’t read any of these uber-popular tomes – I only saw the film treatments. And I’m not going to read the books. Stop asking me. Please.
(In my defense, I loved the films of Divergent and The Fault In Our Stars,without perusing the best-sellers on which they were based.)
Here’s the thing. I don’t want to have to read the book to understand and enjoy the movie. A good movie adaptation will anchor the narrative pulse points in a novel or biography and add visual flair to make the piece cinematic, comprehensible, and it’s own entity. Think Gone With the Wind, To Kill a Mockingbird, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, The Black Stallion, The Godfather, There Will Be Blood, No Country for Old Men, Foxcatcher. Hell, think Gone Girl.
If it’s that imperative to read the book and see the movie to get the complete entertainment value, well, I just won’t. To me, that’s lazy film-making, and that’s coming from someone too lazy to read the books. So there.
If Kurt Vonnegut and Janet Evanovich had a baby whose doting uncles were Raymond Carver, Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, and Mickey Spillane, that baby very well might be Tom Joyce. The Freak Foundation Operative’s Report relates the sordid and satirical tale of Batley, a small post-industrial town in Central Pennsylvania, a burg terrorized by a nasty group of thugs (“The Slain”) and populated with a carnival tent full of freaks and weirdos (and that’s just the City Council). The central mystery (and it’s a compelling one) is why this town has been targeted, who’s pulling the strings, and why.
I won’t spoil any of the surprises, but the book is a zippy page-turner with just the right balance of mirth and mayhem to engage the most jaded of readers (me).
Joyce employs a rotating cast of narrators, including a hard-boiled and hard-drinking gumshoe; a universally reviled local journalist (named, oddly enough, “Tom”); and assorted colorful characters, including, among others, a foul-mouthed little person who runs a road-side freak show, a confidence man who grows increasingly less confident in his choice of allies, and a huckster demonologist/psychologist with a heart of gold.
Joyce has a great pulpy literary voice, informed with a cheeky sensibility, a knowing cynicism about the uniquely American ability to wave the flag while we stab each other in the back, and a genuine flair for marrying creeping crud, visceral thrills, and rich Mayberry-quirk characterization. This book is naturally cinematic in its execution, cable-ready for HBO or AMC or (likely) FX to develop a raw, ribald anthology series from the frothy material.
The novel is composed of a series of journal entries, letters, documents, and reports (via the various narrators delineated above) offering the cumulative effect that we, as readers, are suddenly privy to a hotbed of small-town intrigue as the mystery unfolds through hearsay, redirects, and anecdotes (see Carrie, The Color Purple, or even The Sound and the Fury for other examples of this technique). This, coupled with Joyce’s pragmatic, glib, and witty writing style, makes for an adventurous reading experience – Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew for adults.
Here’s looking forward to big screen (or small screen) adaptation, wherein I can finally ask others, “Did you read the book?”
Wild is an interesting film, and, on the whole, I liked it quite a bit. It’s great to see Reese Witherspoon digging in and acting again. I had begun to find latter-day Witherspoon (post-Walk the Line) a bit self-satisfied and, well, smug, and this based-on-a-true-story-as-turned-into-a-New-York-Times-bestseller role allows her to strip off the starry veneer and (mostly) give us some of the nuanced acting that her early career promised.
Where the film falters (at least for cynical me) is in what I would like to dub the Julie & Julia conundrum: a biographical film based on a regular ol’ person’s memoir, a tome that hangs on an oh-my-God-will-you-believe-THIS gimmick that makes great fodder for teary Oprah interviews or saucy segments on The View. In the case of, say, Julie & Julia, Amy Adams’ failed writer seems to declare, “Aw, what the heck! I’m just going to cook a different, fabulous Julia Child recipe every day and blog about it. I have no intention of becoming famous for it and leveraging it as a marketing hook to jump-start a literary career doused in flop sweat. Nope. Not me. I’m authentic.”
In the case of Wild, our protagonist Cheryl Strayed (interesting last name, given the subject matter) implodes after the sudden death of her beloved mother, throwing her marriage and her family and her English major lit aspirations (she’s a feminist because she references Erica Jong? that made me wince) in a garbage can, pouring kerosene on it, and lighting the whole kit and kaboodle on fire as she discovers the joys of sex addiction, heroin addiction, and just plain addiction. What saves her sullen, sputtering butt? Well, she just happens to see a guidebook to walk the Pacific Crest Trail (mind you, this is while sauntering into a drugstore for a pregnancy test ’cause she thinks she’s with child but not sure whose) and then determines that heading on a thousand mile vision quest will heal her soul. Oh, and if you didn’t know how rotten she was at this point, you later learn that she and her brother shoot her mother’s prized horse after mama’s death because they didn’t have the resources to care for it?!?! Um, how about offering it for adoption/rescue? Just a thought.
That preceding paragraph came across sh*ttier than I intended, but I’m leaving it there for all to ponder at will. It’s not this film’s problem, but our reality television/prurient tall tale tell-all culture has me wondering sometimes as to the veracity of stories like this one and the relative ease with which they translate from journal to blog to novel to Academy Award-glittering event film.
Regardless, Jean Marc-Vallee leaves behind any of his TV movie tendencies (see any of Jennifer Garner’s scenes in Dallas Buyers Club) and transforms the source material into cinematic poetry. The film is akin to a “memory play” where the central characters/audience float surreally in and out of present and past, and Vallee has a genius command of music and sound and imagery to evoke the kind of sense memory that snaps one back to happy and not-so-happy moments in time. Vallee and his game cast, which also includes a heart-breakingly luminous Laura Dern as Strayed’s/Witherspoon’s mother, allow for some marvelous bits of situational humor to shine through all the pathos – that is a real gift and essential for a movie like this, which could easily become a dark, cliched slog.
In the end, though, the movie lives or dies on Witherspoon’s epically back-packed shoulders, and her performance is a triumph. As she showed us so many years ago with her brilliant channeling of the What Makes Sammy Run? farce that is American politics (be it national, local, or … student council) in Election, Witherspoon with her jutting jaw, limpid eyes, and tortured/tortuous inner life excels when playing the unlikable. Pick Flick! Her Cheryl Strayed is raw-boned and relatable, someone whose misery has toxified her soul, not to mention anyone else’s within a five-mile radius of her.
Yet, Witherspoon never comes off maudlin, self-pitying, scenery-chewing. Her emotional collapse is chiefly internal (save some awkward heroin-den flashbacks that likely should have been left on the cutting room floor), and her trek along the rugged trail is believable and … kind of inept in its execution. Strayed makes lots of mistakes – think Cast Away in the woods which makes it all the more heroic in the end.
And, as for that horse situation (’cause you totally know THAT is what bothered me endlessly)? Strayed/Witherspoon is haunted by it (think Equus without all the weird Freudian freaky BS), and, as she journeys through California, animal life is a constant. A beautiful fox that very well may be the avatar of her late mother (the CGI was a bit clunky on that otherwise neat concept), an alpaca that she comes across in the wood (yeah, you read that correctly, but it leads to one of the film’s sweetest moments when she finds the grandma/grandson pair who care for the creature), little tree frogs that visit her in the night, and a whimsical encounter with a caterpillar. I’m sure I’m reading what I want to here, but Strayed’s/Witherspoon’s last words in the film are: “My life – like all lives – is mysterious, irrevocable, and sacred.” Damn right.
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Reel Roy Reviews 2
Reel Roy Reviews is now TWO books! You can purchase your copies by clicking here (print and digital)
I am very lucky to have parents who continue to support and celebrate everything I do, even though I am too old to be doing all these silly things. My dad always makes a point to brag about me at his weekly Rotary meetings in Columbia City, Indiana, the small town in which I grew up and where my parents still reside. Below is a snapshot of the front page of the latest Rotary newsletter – you can see a mention of me and the latest book in the lower right corner. Thanks, Susie and Don – love you!
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Reel Roy Reviews 2
Reel Roy Reviews is now TWO books! You can purchase your copies by clicking here (print and digital)
Gosh, I did not like American Sniper, Clint Eastwood’s latest entry in his ongoing cinematic efforts to celebrate war heroes of every stripe.
And if you’re the kind of reader who’s going to tell me I’m not a good “patriot” because I don’t like this movie, just move along … right now. Or, better yet, check out classic film The Mortal Storm, about a culture run aground by totalitarianism as certain citizens dare to challenge the propaganda being shoved down their collective throats (that society in question would be Nazi Germany, BTW).
If the intent of this Oscar-nominated film American Sniper is to reveal the horrors post-9/11 warfare has had upon its participants, there have been much better, much more nuanced, much more sensitive cinematic efforts in that regard: Jarhead, Zero Dark Thirty, Stop/Loss. If the intent of this film is to rally the Lee Greenwood-loving “Proud to be an American” contingent, then count me out.
With that said, Bradley Cooper in the title role does yeoman’s work, communicating a world of hurt and confusion and well-intentioned if misused patriotism. With just his eyes, Cooper gives us a Chris Kyle (one of the most successful snipers in US military history) haunted by his actions and what appears to be a sneaking suspicion that his particular talents have been misapplied in a world gone mad. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the film Eastwood is intent on making.
At times (chiefly during the interminable scenes set in Iraq), I felt I was watching a WWII-era propaganda film blurred into one of those single-shooter video games where jackbooted soldiers blow away any flesh-and-blood creature identified in big, bold font as ENEMY. Has Eastwood finally regressed to his cowboy roots, with a simplistic white hat/black hat approach to world affairs, totally disregarding our messy connectivity – technologically, economically, socially? Sure feels like it.
Sienna Miller as Kyle’s long-suffering wife Taya does her best Kate Beckinsale impression, running the gamut from slightly worried to really worried to slightly worried again. She has a thankless role, and does her best, like Cooper, to offer layers that the script doesn’t provide. Miller is a crackerjack actor, and her scenes with Cooper offer a glimpse into the film’s potential. Her exasperation with his dedication to duty and country versus her hopes for his potential as husband and father are rich territory to explore; sadly, the film spends more time in Iraq than at home, with Miller relegated to bringing whatever flavor she can to one-sided cell phone calls.
Chris Kyle killed 161 men, women, and children in the Middle East in his career, all in an effort to spread liberty across the globe. However you may feel about the war effort, making a compelling movie about a soldier who sits on rooftops all day long picking off insurgents is a tough sell. I’m not downplaying his contributions, but I would like to see a film that helps us better understand the why and the what of his activities in Iraq, especially since his life took such a tragic turn when he finally came home for good, shot at a rifle range as he was trying to rehabilitate a fellow veteran. Was that devastating price worth the wartime outcomes? Perhaps, but I’m not sure I got that from American Sniper.
I’m unclear as to the intended audience for this film, but I suspect it isn’t yours truly. I felt profoundly uncomfortable during the lengthy 2 1/2 hour running time, as if every jingoistic button I do not possess was being pushed and prodded: the inflated sense of American superiority; the fetishization of firearms; the paranoid survivalism (better conveyed I might add in the superior Prisoners); the notion that life (be it animal or human) must be sacrificed for our ongoing prosperity. I don’t buy into any of that, and I never shall.
I don’t mean to be glib, but I feel that at some level this film may be recklessly misinterpreted by a red-blooded, fist-pumping audience looking for simplistic villains that just don’t exist in the modern world. If you want to watch people being heroic and making the world safe for their fellow man, I suggest you check out Selma. Or Paddington.
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Reel Roy Reviews 2
Reel Roy Reviews is now TWO books! You can purchase your copies by clicking here (print and digital)
Selma is a beautiful film beautifully made and could not arrive at a more appropriate time in our nation’s history. Selma depicts a world in which we as a nation invest time and energy fighting foreign wars while neglecting our own people at home. Sound familiar? This core message in the film resonates today as it did then, and it is delivered flawlessly.
I won’t go into the recent Oscar controversy surrounding the film, but I do concur with those who feel the film’s lead actors and director not being nominated is a gross oversight. Like so many modern films depicting historic situations, Selma suffers from some genre clichés: collapsing too many complex issues into a glib exchange or two, projecting the passage of time chiefly through changes in wardrobe and hairstyle, giving us historical figures who sometime seem as if they walked out of a book of paper dolls.
However, and this is key, Selma is written and directed with a sharp eye toward how far we think we’ve come yet how little we’ve actually achieved when it comes to human rights in America. We are a country that celebrates freedom and equality but thrives economically on an ingrained caste system, which is based on race and ethnicity and gender and age, all superficial qualities ultimately irrelevant to one’s true value. The film wisely focuses on an episode in Martin Luther King‘s storied career (the march on Selma) as a means of understanding the man and his role in history, rather than doing the tired lifetime-crammed-into-three-hours biopic approach of yore.
Director Ava DuVernay stacks the deck with a cast that is both credible and compelling. David Oyelowo so inhabits the soul and voice and mannerisms of Martin Luther King, you forget at times that you’re watching an actor (let alone a Brit) portray one of our greatest historical figures. Carmen Ejogo (another Brit!) offers a Coretta Scott King who is flinty and self-possessed, gracious and justifiably exhausted in the face of harrowing trials both domestic and public.
Tom Wilkinson (Brit number three!) as a blustering, well-intentioned, frustrated and frustrating LBJ and Tim Roth (Brit number four!) as misguided/misanthropic political animal George Wallace round out a terrific cast. All are dynamite. With great nuance, Oprah Winfrey, one of the film’s producers (and not a Brit), plays a pivotal (if small) role in Annie Lee Cooper , whose efforts to gain the right to vote are the essential issue at play in King’s historic march from Selma to Montgomery.
Unlike Lee Daniels’ The Butler, which presented another take on the civil rights movement of the 1960s, Selma does not fall prey to its own high-minded aspirations. The filmmakers are not afraid to show King warts and all (his philandering is addressed in a quietly powerful confrontation between Coretta and her husband) or even to imply that King is as much a political opportunist as those white leaders both alongside and in opposition to his efforts. DuVernay lets her lens show King in a number of lights: noble, maddeningly self-serving, obtuse, kind. I found that approach refreshing, educational, and enlightening, particularly as I continue to scratch my head at the decision-making of our world’s current leaders.
In the film, King, in his climactic speech in Montgomery, uses the phrase “a vicious lie as placation,” impugning the very nature of a system that pushes one class down to the benefit of another. This insidious concept continues to corrupt our ability to peacefully coexist, both among ourselves as Americans and with all other denizens of the world; viewing Selma could be part of the antidote: instructive, heart rending, and essential
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Reel Roy Reviews 2
Reel Roy Reviews is now TWO books! You can purchase your copies by clicking here (print and digital)
Like some Oscar-bait cross between Million Dollar Armand Sunset Boulevard with a pinch of Psycho and Jane Eyre thrown in, Foxcatcher details the sordid tale of Olympic gold-medal wrestlers Dave and Mark Schultz and their dubiously motivated benefactor John E. du Pont. The film is a slow moving, frosty enterprise that deftly skewers the out-of-touch misanthropy of one-percenters, the sweaty desperation of competitive athletics, and the strange sycophantic creatures known as athletic boosters.
Steve Carell, richly deserving his recently minted Oscar nomination, portrays the scion of the American chemical dynasty as a heartbreakingly creepy, incestuously inbred superpatriot whose preoccupation with Americana and misplaced mommy issues leads him to adopt a cadre of wrestlers to live and train on his sprawling estate. Vanessa Redgrave – in all of her three minutes of screen time – exonerates any lingering Freudian implications about du Pont’s mother, Jean, a world class horse trainer. With just a flicker of those legendary eyes and a pursing of the lips, Redgrave telegraphs, with a quietly, comically poignant thunderstorm intensity, her profound disappointment and confusion over the oddball son she raised.
You see, John du Pont runs around in a Revolutionary War three-quarter length jacket (when he’s not rocking a cheesy wrestling coach track suit), buys tanks to tool around his property, goes skeet shooting with the local police, insists that people call him “Eagle” or “Golden Eagle,” snorts cocaine, and decorates his home in a faux colonial style that would have been tacky during the ’76 Bicentennial. In other words, he would be a great addition to the Bush family. Sorry.
He aims to overshadow his mother’s equestrian accomplishments by helping Mark Schultz (and thereby ‘Murica) bring home the gold at the ’88 Seoul Olympics. Du Pont is a pathetically amateurish wrestler himself, with a very kinky preoccupation with singlets and wrestling mats. And an even kinkier preoccupation with the younger Schultz brother, as portrayed by Channing Tatum.
Tatum hasn’t gotten the accolades garnered by Carell as du Pont or by Mark Ruffalo as Mark’s older brother David. That’s a shame. Tatum turns in a brilliant variation of his standard lunkhead routine, swiping a bit from James Dean’s Cal Trask (East of Eden) playbook as the wounded, ever-ignored baby brother. It is this broken spirit that connects Mark with du Pont in a toxic brew of clammy co-dependence. As du Pont continues to derail the younger Schultz with his sociopathic manipulation, the thick-headed heartbreak of Tatum’s emotionally stunted Mark Schultz is palpable. His breakdown in a hotel room at the Olympic trials is epically harrowing (if not a touch overbaked).
Ruffalo, as always, is scruffy perfection as Tatum’s brother. He captures the pathetic swagger of an athlete whose accomplishments were forgotten before they even really began. Olympic gold for these brothers is more of a dead end than an open door. Ruffalo is warm and lovely and appropriately stilted in all of his interactions with family, not quite as stunted as his brother Mark … but awfully close. When he finally meets his tragic end, it is both shocking and expected but no less horrifying.
Director Bennett Miller, like Carell and Ruffalo, also has been nominated for an Oscar, though his recognition is arguably the least deserving. Bennett is brave enough to let the quiet moments speak for themselves, capitalizing on the expressiveness of his crackerjack cast to great effect. The movie’s strongest moments are in its silences; the most telling exchanges from a wordless look of disdain from one character to another.
However, the film’s pacing is ponderous, and, occasionally, Bennett allows the flick to devolve into TV movie clichés: Mark Schultz now has highlights in his hair … so he must be having an illicit relationship with du Pont; Mark Schultz is surrounded by beer bottles, so he must be letting training slide; Du Pont is snorting cocaine during a helicopter ride, so he must be a reckless ne’er do well; David Schultz can’t remember simple things like picking up his kids from school, so let’s have him write notes on his own hand like “pick up kids” which must show what a regular Joe he is. Ain’t that cute?
Regardless, the film is very much worth seeing, for the implications it offers regarding the super rich in this country … of their inability to understand the hopes and dreams of the rest of us, of their inability to see that we aren’t here as chattel for their amusement. To me, that was the most powerful message of all in the film, like Les Miserables in a wrestling ring.
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Reel Roy Reviews 2
Reel Roy Reviews is now TWO books! You can purchase your copies by clicking here (print and digital)
Thanks to Deb Lowrance of Columbia City’s Peabody Public Library for finding this article and sending it to me. I love the movie reference and the photo of little me with author and raconteur George Plimpton, but I adore what they say about my mom Susie Duncan Sexton even more!
And the letter I received from Mr. Plimpton back in the day (after the meeting detailed in the above article) …
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Reel Roy Reviews 2
Reel Roy Reviews is now TWO books! You can purchase your copies by clicking here (print and digital)
My publisher www.open-bks.com has been nagging me to start a video component to my blog … So here is my pathetic attempt. Click here to view. Enjoy! Also, my mom’s website as mentioned in the clip is www.susieduncansexton.com – go buy our books here and here! Pretty please?
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Reel Roy Reviews 2
Reel Roy Reviews is now TWO books! You can purchase your copies by clicking here (print and digital)
![Description: Film poster; Source: Wikipedia [linked]; Portion used: Film poster only; Low resolution? Sufficient resolution for illustration, but considerably lower resolution than original. Other information: Intellectual property by film studio. Non-free media use rationales: Non-free media use rationale - Article/review; Purpose of use: Used for purposes of critical commentary and illustration in an educational article about the film. The poster is used as the primary means of visual identification of this article topic. Replaceable? Protected by copyright, therefore a free use alternative won't exist.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_%28film%29#mediaviewer/File:Wild2014Poster.jpg)
![Description: Film poster; Source: Wikipedia [linked]; Portion used: Film poster only; Low resolution? Sufficient resolution for illustration, but considerably lower resolution than original. Other information: Intellectual property by film studio. Non-free media use rationales: Non-free media use rationale - Article/review; Purpose of use: Used for purposes of critical commentary and illustration in an educational article about the film. The poster is used as the primary means of visual identification of this article topic. Replaceable? Protected by copyright, therefore a free use alternative won't exist.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Sniper_%28film%29#mediaviewer/File:American_Sniper_poster.jpg)
![Description: Film poster; Source: Wikipedia [linked]; Portion used: Film poster only; Low resolution? Sufficient resolution for illustration, but considerably lower resolution than original. Other information: Intellectual property by film studio. Non-free media use rationales: Non-free media use rationale - Article/review; Purpose of use: Used for purposes of critical commentary and illustration in an educational article about the film. The poster is used as the primary means of visual identification of this article topic. Replaceable? Protected by copyright, therefore a free use alternative won't exist.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selma_%28film%29#mediaviewer/File:Selma_poster.jpg)
![Description: Film poster; Source: Wikipedia [linked]; Portion used: Film poster only; Low resolution? Sufficient resolution for illustration, but considerably lower resolution than original. Other information: Intellectual property by film studio. Non-free media use rationales: Non-free media use rationale - Article/review; Purpose of use: Used for purposes of critical commentary and illustration in an educational article about the film. The poster is used as the primary means of visual identification of this article topic. Replaceable? Protected by copyright, therefore a free use alternative won't exist.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxcatcher#mediaviewer/File:Foxcatcher_First_Teaser_Poster.jpg)
