Category Archives: Skip It

“What would I do with mutant dinosaurs from an accounting perspective? Is that REALLY what we are asking?” Jurassic World Rebirth

12 July 2025

2 Comments

My God, Jurassic World Rebirth is an astonishingly stupid movie. The kind of movie that makes me angry I saw it. I don’t want to devote any more time to the damn thing by writing about it, to be honest, but I have … thoughts.

Here’s the thing. The overarching conceit – 32 years in – just doesn’t work anymore if it ever actually did past the first installment. As an audience, can we in good faith care about, worry over, or invest in the humans in peril if they are such nitwits that they willingly return to the former park setting, research lab, holding island, WHATEVER where chaos has already ensued countless times? Shouldn’t we in fact feel utter sorrow for the dinosaurs at this point? They asked for NONE of this, happily extinct until “life found a way” with greedy entrepreneurs who only worried about whether they “could not if they should” (and all the other pseudo-philosophical bromides that have peppered this film franchise).

Have these films become my generation’s version of those Irwin Allen disaster pics of yore where random celebs at various points of their careers survive an airport on fire in the middle of a hurricane which is also on fire? Paging Shelley Winters.

Rebirth director Gareth Edwards is one of our more interesting filmmakers, particularly with this kind of capitalistic science run amuck enterprise. Why didn’t he finally flip the script on its head and give us a film where without equivocation humans were the real enemies?! That would have been interesting. No one would have bought a ticket, but at least there would have been a raison d’etre.

What do we get? An L.L. Bean catalog costumed romp through Spielberg’s greatest hits:

  • Beautiful cinematography of sweeping jungle vistas
  • The epic swell of John Williams’ iconic theme (a LOT)
  • Random yuppie family members inexplicably in peril – people who should be nowhere near ANY of this but by dumb luck and poor life choices are
  • Chic product-placed SUVs
  • One whimsically likable and infinitely merchandisable pocket dino to contrast with those mean big ol’ SCARY ones just looking for a meal
  • Thumbnail tragic back stories ONLY for the characters who will clearly survive so we are manipulated into fretting over them
  • A handful of other people, each of whom will clearly get offed every seventeen and a half minutes because they’re painted as marginally unlikable
  • Absolutely zero grief from the survivors (UNLESS it’s a red herring death of a cast member who will reappear from the jungle ten minutes later)
  • Internal logic that is all over the map – e.g. don’t make a sound to inadvertently attract the dinos UNLESS we need you to scream and wail in the next scene with little existential consequence
  • Flippant jokes made amidst the carnage to show how chill the characters really are
  • Characters who periodically whoop and holler with glee at unearned “victory” or “in awe” moments – like they are attending a college football game
  • AND a terrifically talented and terrifically wasted cast who would have been better served playing Pickleball than showing up for this drivel

Scarlett Johansson plays a kind of remixed Lara Croft mercenary version of Chris Pratt’s and Laura Dern’s characters from earlier films. Mahershala Ali is the wise and world-weary boat captain with a secret heart of gold. Jonathan Bailey fares the best of the three as the Sam Neill/Jeff Goldblum arch-but-sexy-nerd “voice of reason” paleontologist. Bailey manages to wring some gold from the lines he’s given, landing a few zingers along the way – my favorite: “What would I do with mutant dinosaurs from an accounting perspective? Is that REALLY what we are asking?” Or maybe I just found that funny because it felt like an indictment of Universal Pictures still pumping these movies out.

Seriously, the film is sharp enough to cast three smart, winning, box office draws who can act but then has them wander around cavalierly for two and a half hours like they are at a blood-splattered country club. It felt like this was the direction they were given: “Yes, we know being surrounded by frantically carnivorous dinos should elicit some authentic reactions of abject fear, but we think it would be better if you portrayed your characters like they were in a Hallmark movie on their way to a county fair after grabbing a low-fat soy macchiato at Starbucks and some workout gear at lululemon. Can you make that work?”

There are simply no stakes in this film. I suppose I should tell you the hook for all the mayhem THIS time. In short, people in this Jurassic universe just don’t care about dinos anymore – they’ve moved on. Ho hum. And the remaining dinos can’t survive anywhere but a few equatorial islands. THAT could have been an interesting concept to explore in detail – how jaded and indifferent we have become as a society through the lens of dinosaurs becoming extinct, not literally but in popularity. We cavalierly cast aside such a miracle of science because it ceases to entertain; not to mention the planet’s atmosphere is so effed up these amazing creatures can’t survive here anyway. But, no, that’s just a passing thought in the first 10 minutes to set up an excursion to the equator to draw DNA from THREE – count ‘em THREE – very specific dinos (one by sea, one by land, one by air … naturally) in order for big pharma to develop a cure for heart disease. Yup, that’s why these nincompoops travel to hell on earth and get themselves killed (or mostly killed). For MacGuffins. Bailey’s character is stuck being the Jiminy Cricket conscience, periodically chastising with comments like “Science is for ALL of us, not SOME of us” and “WE don’t rule the earth … we just THINK we do.” Sigh.

Hey, Amblin Entertainment and Universal Pictures, the next time – and that is a fiscal inevitability – you start cranking up your marketing machinery to gestate another one of these Jurassic babies, just take a moment and remember what Jeff Goldblum cautioned alllllll the way back in 1993 (and I repeat for those in the back): “You were so preoccupied with whether or not you could, you didn’t stop to think if you should.”

Counterpoint: “A movie is a movie until they go to odd extremes?” My mom takes on Oscar-winner Parasite

17 February 2020

4 Comments

By Susie Duncan Sexton (my ma)

Viewed PARASITE…what do I think? I dunno? At all. But Academy Award winner? WTF? Beyond me how that happened. Gonna take me three days to forget it?

I think I kinda hated it to pieces? I’d like to feel happy now and then? Or at least englightened and hopeful? This was uneven and tricksterish and grim and odd… I see a point to it all, but I already am just bright enough to have known the point without sitting still for three hours reading dialogue stream underneath humans attempting to act out some message or other? Naughty me?

The tried and true theme of class collisions and the very worst of humanity and its general cluelessness and victimization and nuttiness and self-centeredness. Who needs to wallow in it? Bad enough on a daily level. It exists everywhere even in living rooms across the globe if people are lucky enough to have living rooms? JOKER got the message across much more provocatively and, hopefully, meaningfully and artistically? How in the world this incarnation of misery bounced onto the scene and into consciousness and got multiple film awards is totally puzzling.

ReelRoy…occasionally he and I disagree, and that is rare but choice! (Spencer Tracy word there!)

Some of the stuff I have loved over a half century does not always hold up I admit…but hey, slop is slop…manipulation I resent from young film makers, and I felt manipulated? And I would have if this thing debuted years ago…and it could have…sorta? How about THE GREAT GATSBY which I do NOT adore…but it serves the purpose fine?

Hallelujah… I do not feel so nuts now that I think I hated this thing? I am usually not this critical. A movie is a movie until they go to odd extremes?

P.S. James Corden said the week after the Oscars he was enjoying listening to all the people who pretended to watch it. I thought that was cute. I forgot to share that. I damn near gave up on it early on…and later on as well? Ha!

“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” Beautiful Boy (film)

11 November 2018

8 Comments

[Image Source: Wikipedia]

Felix Van Groeningen’s film adaptation of David Sheff’s memoir Beautiful Boy is, alas, one of those movies that doesn’t do anything terribly well. Neither poignant and tear-jerking nor haunting and horrifying, neither evocative and transporting nor gritty and (forgive me) sobering, Beautiful Boy attempts to be a harrowing account of a father (Steve Carrell, all professorially hirsute and mincingly whiny) watching his beloved first born (Timothee Chalamet, all Gen X shaggy and sullenly whiny) circle the drain of crystal meth addiction.

I wanted to care. I wanted to be invested. I hear that the book is quite compelling. Perhaps I should have spent my time reading it instead.

This is the kind of film that makes me understand why the Fox & Friends tin-foil-hat brigade hates us liberals. The family in the film is all northern California boho charm, too cool to parent exactly right, having only momentary flirtations with actual discipline. Why read your kid the riot act when you can smoke a doobie all-hipster style with him at his high school graduation? This is the kind of film where stepmom is a groovy painter (Maura Tierney, all furrowed brow pout and earnestly whiny); dad’s manopausal new toe-headed toddlers never get haircuts and have cutesy names like Jasper and Daisy; the family pads around super-casz in their sprawling Frank Lloyd Wright-esque redwood-and-glass ranch; and they tool around town in a vintage Volvo station wagon (“boxy but good!”) with two bounding retriever mutts in tow. Lord, these people annoyed me. “Hey, we’re having a crisis that would cripple any normal family … so let’s all go surfing.”

[Image Source: Wikipedia]

The film only manages to grind to some kind of life in its final 20 minutes as Carrell’s David Sheff finally writes off a son who is beyond redemption and Chalamet’s “beautiful boy” Nic Sheff truly hits rock bottom as a result. This is where the film’s bloodless dispassion does pay off. We, as an audience, have grown as numb and as immune as David to Nic’s manipulations, so when we see Nic at his most disgustingly debased, we realize that Nic’s only way out is to come face-to-face alone with his demons (and they are legion). End scene.

I’m not sure what this genre of film should be called: “Pretty hippies with moolah have troubles too?” I blame Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach and Lisa Cholodenko and their self-indulgent directorial ilk. I attended a “magnet school” growing up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and the campus was rife with kids from clans like that in this film; I’m guessing these directors are likely my age and came from similar upbringings as those classmates of mine. I’m probably just a cranky old fart at this point, but if I was even drinking too much Coca Cola as a teen, you’re damn well certain my parents wouldn’t just look casually over their shoulders as I passed through the front door to God-knows-where and say, “Have a good time!” I’m being judgmental, but then why else do we watch movies like this, if it isn’t to walk away empathizing “glad that’s not my life”?

[Image Source: Wikipedia]

I should probably say more about about the movie. It’s a bore. A crashing bore. I wasn’t sure if the film wanted to be a navel-gazing After School Special cautionary tale on the dangers of drugs or was simply in love with its own masturbatory misanthropy. It’s two hours of my life I’ll never get back.

If I want to watch a film that crawls under my skin and nails the familial destabilization substance abuse can cause, give me Long Day’s Journey Into Night, The Days of Wine and Roses (at least that one has a lush theme song), The Lost Weekend, Less Than Zero, Trainspotting, The Fighter or, hell, 28 Days.

“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” Indeed.

________________

[Image Source: Wikipedia]

Reel Roy Reviews is now TWO books! You can purchase your copies by clicking here (print and digital). In addition to online ordering at Amazon or from the publisher Open Books, the first book is currently is being carried by Bookbound, Common Language Bookstore, and Crazy Wisdom Bookstore and Tea Room in Ann Arbor, Michigan and by Green Brain Comics in Dearborn, Michigan. My mom Susie Duncan Sexton’s Secrets of an Old Typewriter series is also available on Amazon and at Bookbound and Common Language.

“Smells like Marlboros and farts.” Planet Ant Theatre premieres Who Run the World

18 March 2018

4 Comments

Originally published by EncoreMichigan

We live in fraught, absurdist political times. Kurt Vonnegut couldn’t even have anticipated how off-the-charts bonkers our reality show polarization has become. So, there is a timely, refreshing, and essential concept at the heart of Planet Ant’s latest original work Who Run the World – taking its title from the pop-feminist anthem  “Run the World (Girls)” by that ubiquitous purveyor of hard lemonade Beyoncé.

The show – written from what appears to be a series of free-wheeling improv exercises by director Lauren Bickers and her unrestrained cast Dyan Bailey, Suzan Jacokes, Esther Nevarez, Scott Sanford, Caitlyn Shea, and Sarah Wilder – is an interesting conceit. What will be the logical (and comically tragic) progression of our society by 2040 if we continue down this Red State/Blue State, feminist/antifeminist, extreme left/alt-right striated path?

Cast of Who Run the World (Photo by Scott Myers)

In the evening’s most effective and crispest moments, a series of video montages (created by Bailey, who used a similar technique in The Ringwald’s concurrently running production Merrily We Roll Along) bring the audience up-to-speed on world events from 2018 to 2040. America is rocked by a series of increasingly extreme political swings – President Oprah Winfrey succeeds President Donald Trump; she is, in turn, defeated by President Donald Trump, Jr.; he is ousted by President Ellen DeGeneres who is overtaken by Prezident Kid Rock (who didn’t even know he was running). A full out gender war erupts, centered around a network of Target stores, and eventually the women prove victorious driving unenlightened men into a series of, yes, “man caves.”

The gynocentric society, on the surface, seems practically perfect in every way: work/life balance, a presidential cabinet made up of bureaucrats dedicated to peace and culture and comfort, and omnipresent “dance breaks” set to the strains of Black Box’s “Everybody, Everybody.”

I admit my other favorite aspect of the show was the pre-show music/scene interludes, which all seemed to be emanating from my own personal iTunes collection. Any time I hear Madonna’s “Human Nature” during a performance (which has been … never … up-until-now), I’m a happy boy. “I’m not your b*tch. Don’t hang your sh*t on me.”

It’s unfortunate, then, that the actual show doesn’t quite live up to the promise of its surreal high concept. The performers–playing both the aforementioned cabinet members as well as a series of mulleted, flannel-wearing male denizens of the underground–should be commended for the ferocity and BIG energy with which they attack the material, but many scenes seem unrehearsed, perhaps even improvised on the spot, which clashes with the slick and professional nature of the video narrative. Further, the production seems to exist at three decibel levels: loud, louder, and loudest. For such an intimate space, this flattens the proceedings, giving the show an extended “skit-like” quality. When the cast is all present onstage, there is such a cacophony of voices and movement, it is at times difficult to discern exactly what is transpiring.

Dyan Bailey, Scott Sanford (Photo by Scott Myers)

There are many funny lines but they are lost as the actors’ articulation isn’t always up to snuff. Or clever quips are delivered with the blunt force of an anvil striking the audience on its collective head, losing the wry, satirical touch that would make them really zing. For example, one particular “man cave” is described as smelling like “Marlboros and farts.” The line made me chuckle, not from its actual delivery, but from its potential.

That is not to say that everyone involved doesn’t have their moments. Dyan Bailey has great fun channeling Kathleen Turner- meets-Donald Trump-meets-Ernst-Blofeld as societal matriarch Kameela Toriana (Department of Appearance and Diplomacy). There isn’t a piece of Jennifer Maiseloff’s underdeveloped scenery she won’t chew (her use of an exercise ball as her throne was particularly effective and amusing), and Bailey’s sheer force-of-hurricane-gale-will keeps the show moving apace.

Caitlyn Shea offers the closest thing to character progression in her shrinking violet-turned-Norma Rae Tracee McAllister (Director of Unpacking), who brings some nuance to the cartoon-like proceedings and revels in her character’s whiplash-inducing turns of personality.

The remaining cast members have some zippy moments, particularly when each goes to the “man cave” of Scott Sanford’s Addison Houser to explore their respective vices. There is an interesting narrative sequence to explore in these scenes if Planet Ant continues to develop the piece. These “vice visits” form a kind of Faustian compact – not dissimilar to Jack Nicholson’s increasingly menacing trips to commiserate with the spectral barkeep in The Shining – wherein the characters discover their true selves and the balance they’ve lost amidst political extremes. If the Who Run the World team works on refining those scenes, that sequence could provide much-needed narrative spark and character development to the play.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJVVGzEbJC0

I may not be the right audience for what Planet Ant does. The full-house on opening night roared with laughter and approval, particularly as the show escalated further into Saturday Night Live territory or when actors riffed off-script due to a missed light cue or misplaced prop.

As an aside, when I bring my friend Lauren to a show, there seems to be an ironic bit of foreshadowing in our pre-show dinner conversation. I held forth at Green Space Café about how I just didn’t get “improv” and often found the humor therein a bit of a “stretch” for my linear sensibilities. As we watched Who Run the World, which I hadn’t realized was improv-based until I read the program immediately prior (shame on me), it reminded me that, at least for this viewer, I prefer a tightly rehearsed show with clear and nuanced character delineation, levels, and timing. I offer this to say that if you are a fan of improv, you might really dig Who Run the World … and I’m just a crabby fuddy duddy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fN5HV79_8B8

That said, I suspect there is a really sharp 45-minute piece buried somewhere in Who Run the World’s two-hour run time. With some Draconian editing, the show could be just the tonic our troubled times need. I, for one, crave a new Crucible, Children’s Hour, or, hell, Book of Mormon for this MAGA vs. #MeToo cultural dumpster fire in which we are currently living. Who Run the World ain’t it yet … but with some work, it might be.

_______________________

Lauren Crocker, Roy Sexton – opening night of Who Run the World

Reel Roy Reviews is now TWO books! You can purchase your copies by clicking here (print and digital).

In addition to online ordering at Amazon or from the publisher Open Books, the first book is currently is being carried by Bookbound, Common Language Bookstore, and Crazy Wisdom Bookstore and Tea Room in Ann Arbor, Michigan and by Green Brain Comics in Dearborn, Michigan.

My mom Susie Duncan Sexton’s Secrets of an Old Typewriter series is also available on Amazon and at Bookbound and Common Language.

‪Honored to be one of #AMAfeed’s featured #authorsAMA. My #askmeanything starts Thursday 3/15 at 9 am! #geeksunite

8 March 2018

4 Comments

Well, that’s nifty! Honored to be one of AMAfeed’s featured #authorsAMA. My #askmeanything starts Thursday 3/15 at 9 am! #geeksunite – here.

I love movies, musicals, superheroes, cartoons, action figures, & miscellaneous geekery. I love talking about them even more. Ask me anything!

I’ve been posting my movie musings at www.reelroyreviews.com for five years now … much to the chagrin of true arbiters of taste. And at one point a publisher (Open Books) decided to turn my online shenanigans into a couple of books. I tend to go see whatever film has been most obnoxiously hyped, marketed, and oversold in any given week. Art films? Bah! Won’t find too many of those discussed by yours truly. And every once in awhile, I may review a TV show, theatrical production, record album, concert, or book (yeah, probably not too many of those either). So ask me anything … I act, sing, write, laugh, cry, collect, and obsess in my downtime … and I market lawyers to pay the bills.

_______________________

Reel Roy Reviews is now TWO books! You can purchase your copies by clicking here (print and digital). In addition to online ordering at Amazon or from the publisher Open Books, the first book is currently is being carried by Bookbound, Common Language Bookstore, and Crazy Wisdom Bookstore and Tea Room in Ann Arbor, Michigan and by Green Brain Comics in Dearborn, Michigan. My mom Susie Duncan Sexton’s Secrets of an Old Typewriter series is also available on Amazon and at Bookbound and Common Language.

“I can only see the world as it should be.” Murder On The Orient Express (2017) AND Daddy’s Home 2

26 November 2017

8 Comments

Hollywood gets a lot of flak, much of it deserved, but the crime perpetrated by Tinseltown that may bother me the most is when a talented cast is completely squandered in servitude to a lame script and lousy direction.

The Thanksgiving movie offerings this year all have left something to be desired, but we were misfortunate enough to see two of the worst offenders back to back last night. Murder on the Orient Express and Daddy’s Home 2. Yes, you read that sentence correctly. We paid money to see these two movies in sequence. Maybe the problem is with us.

The first is an unnecessary remake of a far superior Sydney Lumet film, based on the original Hercule Poirot mystery by Agatha Christie. It is yet another self-serious, self-satisfied confectionery indulgence from director/star Kenneth Branagh, who fancies himself the poor man’s Laurence Olivier, when he, in reality, may be the poor man’s Benny Hill.

The second is an unnecessary sequel to an unnecessary broad farce, holding a far too indulgent and yuppified mirror to the mixed up sociopolitical and familial dynamics in modern middle-class America. It stars Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell as an ex-husband/father and new husband/stepfather, respectively, whose own fathers John Lithgow and Mel Gibson, also respectively, crash Christmas and demonstrate that they are as boneheaded and as consumed with unflattering male ego as their sires.

NOTE: the movie isn’t smart enough to actually do anything with that premise, and it’s too frightened of its Trump-triggered audience demographic to actually skewer these idiotic men.

Both films favor set decoration and bleak whimsy over script and character development. Orient Express pursues arch tedium over anything resembling flesh and blood characterization, fetishizing starched linens and glistening martini glasses and anthropomorphizing its titular train to the point one wonders if Branagh is simply trying to capture the imaginations of too many young adults weened on the also creepy and tedious Polar Express.

Daddy’s Home conversely, is the kind of film that seems to hold National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation as a kind of high art that could only be improved if the “Nancy Meyers’ school of filmmaking” (middle-class characters living amidst-Better Homes and Gardens residential-porn they couldn’t actually afford in real life) had installed a Sub Zero fridge in Randy Quaid’s “the-sh*tter’s-full” Winnebago. Daddy’s Home is the kind of movie where a character cuts down a cell phone tower, thinking it is a Christmas tree, and gets charged $20,000, and everyone just laughs and shrugs and says, “Now, who is going to pay for that?” This inane, unrelatable incident occurs after the cast has engaged in an interminable sequence where they decorate – top-to-bottom, inside-and-out – a vacation home they are RENTING for the holidays. Who does that? In real life, this family would be trying to figure out how to pay the credit card bills they ran up to buy presents nobody actually wants and would end up in both divorce and bankruptcy courts when slapped with a $20,000 bill for destruction of public property. Or maybe they would be in jail. Fa la la la.

Orient Express is the kind of film where all of the characters have less depth than those found in a Clue board game, but lounge around all casual-cool-dramatic in beautifully appointed train cars (which seem much larger than humanly possible) as if they are posing for a Vanity Fair cover. It is the kind of film where people spout portentous philosophy (“I can only see the world as it should be.” – Poirot) and glower at each other across petits fours. Whodunnit? Who cares?

When one film (Orient Express) offers the best Johnny Depp performance in years (not saying much … and, by the way, spoiler alert, he is the titular murder) and the other (Daddy’s Home) makes John Cena as its final act complication seem practically Oscar-worthy, something ain’t right in the mix.

NOTE: Kenneth, a mustache that covers half your face and renders your speech incomprehensible is not character development. You are no Wes Anderson. And I don’t like Wes Anderson.

NOTE: Mel, swaggering around like an aging muscle man whose tummy has become a beach ball and who believes FOXNews offers great lessons in parenting and social graces is not character development. That is just you. And we don’t like you.

To the rest of the luminaries who collected a paycheck to appear in these movies – John Lithgow, Linda Cardellini, Judi Dench, Penelope Cruz, Willem DaFoe, Daisy Ridley, Leslie Odom, Jr., Michelle Pfeiffer, Josh Gad, I’m looking at you – you all know better. Next time an easy payday comes along, please just say no.

Finally, I want to correct the statement with which I began this piece. The worst crime Hollywood commits is hypocrisy. Women are not disposable commodities. Violence is not comedy. Respect for each other, for our individuality, for our unique spirit is essential.

Daddy’s Home 2 is by far the bigger offender because jokes about kissing/spanking little girls or about men “just being men” in Las Vegas or about fathers hitting on the mothers of their sons’ classmates are not funny. They are gross.

Hollywood, if you want us to buy the rhetoric that you are rejecting the worst offenders in your midst, make better movies. More responsible movies. Movies that don’t joke out of both sides of their mouths where animal rights or gun control or human equality are concerned. Stop trying to cater to every demographic. That lack of moral compass is the antithesis of what these holidays are truly about.

Rant over.

Reel Roy Reviews is now TWO books! You can purchase your copies by clicking here (print and digital).

In addition to online ordering at Amazon or from the publisher Open Books, the first book is currently is being carried by Bookbound, Common Language Bookstore, and Crazy Wisdom Bookstore and Tea Room in Ann Arbor, Michigan and by Green Brain Comics in Dearborn, Michigan.

My mom Susie Duncan Sexton’s Secrets of an Old Typewriter series is also available on Amazon and at Bookbound and Common Language.

“My lack of success is self-imposed.” Roman J. Israel, Esq.

24 November 2017

12 Comments

When you are driving home after a movie (albeit loaded up on carbs and sodium from this insane food we Americans insist on eating at Thanksgiving) and you as a family are discussing how you would rewrite the script, chances are the film fails to fulfill its own potential. Such is the case with Denzel Washington’s latest Roman J. Israel, Esq. (If that title alone doesn’t warn you that you are in for an overreaching quirkfest, nothing will.)

Directed by Dan Gilroy, who helmed the far superior Nightcrawler with Jake Gyllenhaal, the movie tries to be too many things.

Is it a film – taking a cue from Melville’s classic short story Bartleby the Scrivener (kudos to my mom for reminding me of that piece) – wherein one person’s singular and single-minded belief system magically transforms all who come in contact with said person? This could be a genre unto itself – think: Erin Brockovich, The Pursuit of Happyness, Forrest Gump, Being There, Rain Main, To Wong Foo. Sometimes the tale ends tragically, often not, but just about every time, someone in the film walks away with an Oscar.

Or is Roman J. Israel, Esq. an allegorical cautionary tale of the dire consequences of material temptation – a Hitchcockian cat-and-mouse, sweaty-palmed, walls-closing-in thriller depicting a poor schlub caught with his hand in the cookie jar, thinking he’d finally “made it big”?

Or is the flick just another soap opera set in the paradoxical world of the American legal system, where nobility and opportunism make strange bedfellows?

Any ONE of those films would have been fine, particularly given the great character work Washington delivers as a sensitive yet obtuse attorney with a database-like brain, a penchant for keeping all written records on index cards, a fixation on jazz music, and a lion’s heart for civil rights and human equality. Washington’s Israel has been the back-office partner for a two-man law firm in Los Angeles, and, when the face of the practice is felled by a heart attack, Israel finds himself unemployed.

As in Nightcrawler, director Gilroy’s Los Angeles is a concrete jungle of oppression and temptation (photographed perhaps a bit too exquisitely). Israel offers his services first to an ACLU-like organization helmed by Carmen Ejogo’s Maya, but finds that the volunteer organization has neither the money nor the appreciation for what his generation has brought to the movement.

Israel ends up in a Faustian contract with Colin Farrell’s George Pierce who runs a criminal defense firm, a man more interested in the pricing model depicted in his slick brochures than in the rights of his hardscrabble clientele.

Israel’s sweet self-righteousness quickly is subsumed by the earthly pleasures of a regular paycheck, and when he finds himself using privileged information to gain a bounteous reward for the capture of an alleged murderer, his world spirals downward.

Yet, everyone who meets Israel transforms into a better human for some inexplicable reason, including Farrell’s character whose 180 degree turn gives the audience whiplash. As Israel’s world devolves, the other characters get religion (metaphorically speaking), but the film presents little compelling evidence as to why.

Oh, and all of this happens over just a three week period. Whew.

I wanted to love this move and to be moved by its message that “purity can’t survive in this world.” In fact, the movie is filled with bon mots like that: “my lack of success is self-imposed,” “hope don’t get the job done,” “each one of us is greater than the worst thing we’ve ever done,” “gang sign? like that flag pin on your lapel?” That may be its biggest problem. It’s a movie of bon mots, adding up ultimately to not very much more than a big budget Hallmark Hall of Fame that fancies itself an expose of the seamy gonna-get-mine underbelly of modern Los Angeles. That’s a shame.

Whereas Nightcrawler was a gut punch to the Horatio Alger myth that underpins Americans’ preoccupation with sparkling capitalism, Roman J. Israel, Esq. fails to deliver a similar blow to the endemic racism and deal-making that undermines our faith in the criminal justice system. That movie has yet to be made. Let’s try less quirk next time.

Reel Roy Reviews is now TWO books! You can purchase your copies by clicking here (print and digital).

In addition to online ordering at Amazon or from the publisher Open Books, the first book is currently is being carried by Bookbound, Common Language Bookstore, and Crazy Wisdom Bookstore and Tea Room in Ann Arbor, Michigan and by Green Brain Comics in Dearborn, Michigan.

My mom Susie Duncan Sexton’s Secrets of an Old Typewriter series is also available on Amazon and at Bookbound and Common Language.

“Thank God you’re pretty.” Baywatch (2017 film)

28 May 2017

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The first third of the film adaptation of TV’s Baywatch seems designed chiefly to show off how impressive Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s calves are. Admittedly, they do look like two bowling balls suspended in mid-air between his ankles and his knees. THIS remarkable feat of anatomy, however, does not a great movie make.

Directed by Seth Gordon (um … Identity Thief), the film aspires to the same pop culture meta lunacy of 21 Jump Street, Charlie’s Angels, or The Brady Bunch Movie. Unfortunately, the proceedings are saddled with a pedestrian script that is more paint-by-numbers Beverly Hills Cop III than off-the-charts self-referential foolishness. And that’s a shame, as Gordon has assembled a cast that could sell hyperbole to President Trump.

Johnson and Zac Efron are an ADORABLE comedic couple, and they deserve MUCH better material (see: Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling in The Nice Guys). Their repartee (not to mention gleaming teeth and pneumatic abs) powers through the pedestrian material (drug cartel, half-baked political shenanigans, police corruption) to keep the audience entertained well beyond all reason. These two (playing overly ambitious California lifeguards who think their jobs involve after hours police work – cute idea) deserved such a better script, for their personal training regimen alone, not to mention the wit and wisdom both bring to just about any project.

The supporting cast is a hoot too: Priyanka Chopra, preening and prancing as the underdeveloped “big bad;” Kelly Rohrbach more self-aware than required as the Pamela Anderson-comic relief; Alexandra Daddario (whose eyes could pierce concrete blocks) as Efron’s infinitely wiser love interest; Ilfenesh Hadera as The Rock’s endlessly patient lieutenant; and Jon Bass as the exuberant schlub who has somehow been asked to join their hard-bodied lifeguarding team.

Damn, but I wish they had all had a thoughtfully designed script. Hell, any script. I was entertained for 90 minutes, but I’ve completely forgotten already what plot if any existed. I remember Zac Efron’s highlighted hair and his Malibu Ken physique. I will never forget Dwayne Johnson’s megawatt smile shining beneath the tumultuous waves as he rescued one woebegone Cali beach swimmer after another. But the plot? That has already escaped my brain, even as I type.

Will you have a good time watching this cinematic Baywatch? Of course, you will. It’s the same mindless idiocy of the 1990s syndicated TV hit (David Hasselhoff even puts in yet ANOTHER unnecessary summer ’17 film appearance) with a heaping, helping of post-millennial wink-and-nod camp. I just wish the filmmakers had taken … oh, I don’t know … ten extra minutes? … to devise plot and dialogue that gave Johnson and Efron something to do with all the charisma (and biceps) that they have in spades. Would anybody like to stage Sam Shepard’s True West with two charmingly steroidal hunks? If so, I think I have your duo.

As one cast member (I can’t recall who now for the life of me) notes to Efron’s dim bulb former-Olympian character (a la Ryan Lochte), “Thank God you’re pretty.” Indeed.

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Reel Roy Reviews is now TWO books! You can purchase your copies by clicking here (print and digital). In addition to online ordering at Amazon or from the publisher Open Books, the first book is currently is being carried by Bookbound, Common Language Bookstore, and Crazy Wisdom Bookstore and Tea Room in Ann Arbor, Michigan and by Green Brain Comics in Dearborn, Michigan. My mom Susie Duncan Sexton’s Secrets of an Old Typewriter series is also available on Amazon and at Bookbound and Common Language.

“What if this man is your Hasselhoff?” Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2

7 May 2017

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[Image Source: Wikipedia]

Marvel movies always suffer a bit from sequelitis. The first entry in any given super-franchise of theirs always has a fizzy independent spirit and a distinct point of view that resonates, even amidst the blockbuster marketing hype and merchandising mania. Invariably, the second entry arrives a bit bloated, a bit self-satisfied, over-playing the light froth that worked the first time around, under-playing the humanity that connected, and over-stuffing the proceedings with far too many “special guest stars” and comic geek catnip “Easter Eggs.”

Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2, directed again by James Gunn, tries to have its cake and eat it too, embracing these follow-up pitfalls in one cheeky meta nod after another (even the title itself) while never really skewering them enough to keep the flick from feeling focus-grouped within an inch of its life.

All your favorites return: Chris Pratt has Han Solo-esque fly boy Peter Quill/Star-Lord, Zoe Saldana as sardonic a**-kicker Gamora, Dave Bautista as cuddly nihilist Drax, Bradley Cooper voicing Ed-Asner-in-raccoon form Rocket, and Vin Diesel voicing the now adorable (and very marketable) tree creature Baby Groot. We even get flinty Michael Rooker back as Quill’s loved/hated proxy daddy Yondu and perpetually sullen Karen Gillan as Gamora’s thundercloud sister Nebula.

Oh, but if that’s not enough – Kurt Russell, being his most blow-dried Kurt Russell smarm/charm self, shows up as Quill’s “birth” father “Ego, the Living Planet.” (Yup, your read that correctly.) And Sly Stallone keeps popping up as some kind of somnambulant Jiminy Cricket to failed space pirate Yondu.

There are a race of video game playing golden hued Oscar Statue clones – the Sovereign – led by a Cate Blanchett-aping Elizabeth Debicki as their queen Ayesha. Chris Sullivan from This is Us appears as a crabby mutineer with the regrettable name  Taserface. Sean Gunn from Gilmore Girls nips at the edges as Yondu’s turncoat major domo Kraglin. And Pom Klementieff is the most welcome new addition as Ego’s aide-de-camp Mantis, an naive empath whose heart is as big as her anxiety and ignorance.

[Image Source: Wikipedia]

The film, like any space opera, is choppy and episodic, hopping from one interchangeable  MC Escher-over-designed planet to another, one ear-rattling nausea-inducing firefight to the next, as our band of scruffy misfits bicker and squabble on their way to discovering the “important life lesson” that we anticipated from beat one.

Guardians, Vol. 2 opens with a CGI-de-aged Russell wooing Star-Lord’s mother in 1980, all feather-coiffed and hot rod convertible Mustang’ed swagger. The strains of the admittedly addictive “Brandy, You’re a Fine Girl,” seeping through every corner of the theatre’s immersive Dolby Surround Sound.  The first film left us with the question: who is Star-Lord’s father?

Alas, the sequel already answered said question in the ubiquitous television ads that have been airing since January’s Super Bowl. And as for the actual narrative impulse of Guardans, Vol. 2? It aims to compel us amidst the flat-one-liners and scatalogical digs that family doesn’t make us but rather we make the family we want. However, hitting us over the head with a homily just gives the audience a headache, not enlightenment.

At one point, Gamora (Saldana) reminds Quill (Pratt) of a story he had shared with her previously: that, as a boy, he told the other children at school that his real father was David Hasselhoff, the “great” actor of TV who drove a talking car and possessed the “voice of an angel.” She then queries, “What if this man [Kurt Russell – ‘Ego’] is your Hasselhoff?” It is a genuinely sweet/sad/funny moment, the kind the original film had naturally in spades – lovable in its absurd earnestness. Unfortunately, with Vol. 2 the set-up is far too labored, making the poignant punchline an afterthought – even including Hasselhoff himself in a couple of unnecessary cameos after this exchange AND adding a weird Hasselhoff disco-ditty to the film’s available-at-Target-now soundtrack. Talk about gilding the lily.

I believe Gunn had the best of intentions, taking mythological/Freudian father/son God complex fixations and running them through a madcap Friz Freleng blender, in the hopes of crafting a hero’s quest that was as irreverent as it was moving. It just didn’t work for me. And that makes me sad.

Early in the film, Drax (Bautista) cautions Quill on the ways of love that there are “those who dance and those who do not.” I enjoyed the film just fine, but it felt far too much like work and I felt far too exhausted when  I exited the theatre 2.5 hours (and five?!? bonus mid-credits scenes) later. There are movies that dance – Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 1 – and there are those that don’t – Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2. Next time, let’s hope the gang is a bit lighter on their feet.

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[Image Source: Wikipedia]

Reel Roy Reviews is now TWO books! You can purchase your copies by clicking here (print and digital). In addition to online ordering at Amazon or from the publisher Open Books, the first book is currently is being carried by Bookbound, Common Language Bookstore, and Crazy Wisdom Bookstore and Tea Room in Ann Arbor, Michigan and by Green Brain Comics in Dearborn, Michigan. My mom Susie Duncan Sexton’s Secrets of an Old Typewriter series is also available on Amazon and at Bookbound and Common Language.

Holiday warning: “Deck the Halls”

24 December 2016

8 Comments


Doing my bit of Christmas community service …

Oh, Matthew Broderick, Danny DeVito, Kristin Chenoweth, Kristin Davis, Fred Armisen, WHAT were you thinking with crass, dull, underwritten, underacted, underdeveloped holiday dreck “Deck the Halls” (2006)?

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And what were we thinking watching it – with commercials? Interminable. At least, the cast collected a paycheck while mangling their careers. All we accomplished viewing this tone-deaf train wreck was losing brain cells.

TBS/ABC Family, take this holiday horror off the 24-hour marathon posthaste. If you care about humanity. At all.


Thanks to Will Britton for this image (above) – a wonderful Christmas surprise!