Sneak peek … our LMA Southeast Region fam asked me to send a video (since I can’t be there in person) offering my thoughts on “harmony” … the beautiful Legal Marketing Association #LMASE23 conference theme.
Here’s my response. Rainbow sequins and all. And, yes, there’s a song. Have you MET me?! This time Harry Nilsson’s “Swee’pea’s Lullaby” from the 1980 movie musical Popeye.
I’m a genx fanboy … what can I say? But the lyrics seemed fitting.✨
At the the LMA Midwest Conference, Pitchly’s Director of Partnerships, Vik Nair, led a panel called, “You Bought It, Now What?” all about the next steps marketers need to take after they select technology.
“With such a strong lineup of thought leaders on the panel, incredible takeaways were inevitable, and Vik wanted to make sure that anyone who couldn’t attend didn’t miss out.”
Panelists:
EXCERPT: “To ensure ongoing technology adoption, creative and consistent communication is key. The panelists recommended strategies such as success stories, statistics showcasing the software’s impact, interviews with super-users, and executive advocacy. These methods not only inform and educate staff but also inspire and motivate them to make the most of the technology.
“Roy E. Sexton emphasized the need for open and transparent communication to build trust and enthusiasm among the team.”
“A Quiet Thing” by Kander and Ebb, from a musical called “Flora the Red Menace” (Liza Minnelli’s Broadway debut), is a song that has been special to me for 25 years. My mom loved it, and I sang it in my very first one-man cabaret show at Wabash College. LOOOOONG ago. Think “Just Jack!” with fewer production values.
This was captured at our recent LMA Midwest Region Conference – #LMAMW23 – by co-chair Joanna Beckett. I’m so grateful to have this clip. I know it’s a bit unusual to offer opening remarks that include a show tune at a business meeting … but have you met me? This is a song that always resonates with me in moments of reflection. I’ve just got a few months left in my Legal Marketing Association – LMA International presidency, so I’m a bit in my feels … as the kids say.
As I noted right before I broke into song in broad daylight, I never had voice lessons. I didn’t sing in high school choir. But when I was in college, I suddenly found myself craving all the music my parents Don and Susie Sexton listened to when I was growing up: Barbra Streisand, Sammy Davis, Lena Horne, Doris Day. And I would go to the Walmart or Target in Crawfordsville, Indiana (we only had two stores … lol) and grab any CDs I could find. Columbia House helped too! I may still owe them for some of those discs, come to think of it. And I’d pop the shiny objects into my Discman that plugged into a tape deck in my swanky 1986 Buick Century and sing WAY out loud as I drove. Those artists “taught” me how to sing.
A few years later, I was cast as one of the leads in The Fantasticks. My mother, who DID have formal vocal training, told me years later that she was terrified over what was about to unfold. She said that once I opened my mouth and let out a warble, she knew I was going to be ok.
And I think I love singing for the very reason that it’s always been mine. No one forcing rules or expectations on me. Just doing it the way that feels natural to me. It refills my well and brings me joy. Not sure if it does the same for the audience, but that doesn’t stop me. Everyone needs something like that in their lives.
So thank you to LMA Midwest Region President Jennifer Gessner Shankleton for letting me share the stage with her this week and to co-chairs Lexie Blaner and Joanna for the EXCEPTIONAL work on this sold out event. It meant a lot to come full circle to the region where I started my LMA life for my last public appearance as the international president. As I joked from the stage, I think I’ve only made about 3.5 public appearances in this role as I mostly just want to stay in my basement!
Additional clips courtesy Sarah Ryan 💕
In this town we call home
Everyone hail to the pumpkin song
In this town, don’t we love it now?
Everybody’s waiting for the next surprise
—“This is Halloween,” from The Nightmare Before Christmas
October: a time of crispness in the air, crunchy red leaves underfoot, scrumptious cider and doughnuts, college homecoming football games, pumpkin spice everything — and Halloween.
I was that kid whose parents crafted bespoke costumes I had to explain to everyone my age. Imagine showing up at school dressed like Clark Kent (pic #1) Charlie Chaplin, Jacques Cousteau or Schneider (pic #2) from “One Day at a Time.” Yep, that was me. Everyone else had those awful plastic superhero masks that cut into your face, and I was dressed like obscure Hollywood actors and undersea explorers.
I suspect that is why this month holds so darn much nostalgia for me. And why this playlist might be the one I’ve been most excited to create. Enjoy these jamming “Happy Haunts” on Apple Music and Spotify!
October also means we are knee-deep in our incredible lineup of regional conferences. Two down (and SOLD OUT), four to go! Way to go, Southwest and Midwest Regions for knocking your events out of the park. The momentum is mighty for our remaining offerings.
Do NOT miss out on the fellowship, education, and fun ahead — click here to register for Northeast (October 19-20), Mid-Atlantic(October 26), Southeast (November 8-10), and West (November 13-14)!
As a sidenote, a few people have asked me if I am planning to attend XYZ regional conference. The answer? Nope. I did attend the LMA Midwest Region conference, but the truth is we have an incredible international board, beautifully geographically distributed. They all will be appearing — many even speaking — at their home region conferences. In my opinion, the celebratory focus needs to be on our incredible regions and all they do.
(Plus, I do have a day job, hubby and cute puppies who need me. 😉)
October 2-3 in the Windy City was grand. I joined my pal and LMA Midwest Region Prez Jennifer Shankleton on the mainstage to welcome everyone — no, no drag queens or disco showtunes THIS time! But there was a low-key musical surprise [CLICK TO VIEW “A Quiet Thing”] — right before phenom keynote Rich Bracken wowed us all.
This post from member Casey Harrison about the Southwest Conference (September 13-15) is a great reminder of why we do what we do. Give it a quick read, and I think you will smile. The Southwest Region kicked off our regional conference season in incredible style. SOLD OUT event, vibrant and so engaging. Whether you were there in person or saw the fantastic array of posts on social media, I think you will agree.
Let’s get ALL of these conferences sold out and end this year like the fireworks finale at Disneyland! Kudos to our regional presidents, regional boards, conference chairs and conference planning committees for their exceptional work and their dedication to the mission. You all inspire!
And thank you to HQ’s Ashley Stenger and her colleagues Ashley Nunzio and Eric Himsel for their hustle, heart and grace, burning the midnight oil behind the scenes to support it all so beautifully.
We work in demanding environments and this TED video resonated. For me, there were some a-ha moments of reflection regarding how I conduct myself as a leader at work and at LMA. I suspect you will feel similarly and hope you find this as helpful as I did. This video frames how we treat each other impacts the bottom line and how our well-being drives our behavior, all in one smart three-minute clip. And yes, there’s data to back it up.
A lot of heart, hard work and brilliance has gone into our regional events. We are so grateful to our volunteer leaders for everything they are doing. I’m excited to see the social media posts that will follow — truly a party that never ends!
Finally, I want to acknowledge the passing of industry legend Burkey Belser. In terms of design and positioning, he challenged the status quo and, quite frankly, rocked the legal world in the way we thought about advertising and imagery. You no doubt saw countless posts from leading lights who were influenced by him and whose careers he positively impacted. We must always honor those who came before us, as we are privileged to stand on the shoulders of giants.
I’ll share this link to one such post — the way Deborah McMurray framed her tribute spoke to me professionally and personally. She writes, “A visionary, pioneer, icon and iconoclast, he was a mentor to many legal marketers, including me. The positioning strategist that I am today is because I got to work with him, watching not what he did, but how he thought.” And that’s what true community is about.
(Don’t miss the P.S. below for the “suit” reference!)
Love you,
Roy
President, 2023 LMA International Board of Directors
Roy E. Sexton
Director of Marketing
Clark Hill
A few weeks back, I went a-wandering to grab lunch at this Indian food truck I’ve spied a few times — Paradise Street Eats & Biryani. I love Indian food and, given my recent bout of COVID and the rampant increase of cases, I’ll be eating outside for a while until it snows. And then I’ll be in my basement.
Anywho…I walked back to the office on a different path and passed a store, Hot Sam’s Detroit.
This suit was on a clearance rack out front. It spoke to me. Love the color. Love a bargain. Love… being impulsive. I grabbed it and walked inside. I was in AWE of this place. Every bit of clothing was pure joy. I’ll likely go back, a lot.
I walked up to one of the dapper gentlemen running the store, and said, “How much is this?” Happy with the price, I said, “I’ll take it.” As I waited to check out, we made some small talk. And here’s where my exuberance failed me.
I said, “This is such a cute store!” “Cute store,” he replied with a tone that suggested that wasn’t a desirable adjective.
“Oh, I’m my mother’s son. That’s a high compliment for us!” Now feeling like I stepped in it, I added (unhelpfully), “How long have you been here?”
He replied drily, “Since 1921.”
Now I’m feeling the flop sweat on my brow and kicked into overexplaining mode. “Well, I was just trying the Indian food truck.” He added, “It’s really good.” I replied, “So I don’t normally come down this way. And I’m from Indiana originally. But I’ve lived here for 25 years. I do live in Ann Arbor though. But I come to Detroit a couple days a week.”
At this point, he was getting pretty amused at this nut buying the suit in his store. He handed me his card. It read: “Tony Stovall, CEO/Co-Owner, Hot Sam’s Detroit.”
He added with grace and good humor, “Check us out on social media. And learn about who we are and what we do.”
I said, “I sure will!” and took my Indian food and beautiful new suit, exclaiming, “I’ll be back.”
And then I did what he asked and realized how sometimes we know absolutely nothing. Sometimes we should pause and listen and learn to appreciate the history and good work around us. Similarly, I’ll leave you to it to learn more. But DO take a moment and check out their website: https://hotsamsdetroit.com/.
Elegance personified. Community engagement. Leadership. Authenticity.
Ain’t nothing “cute” about that. That’s pure fire. And I’m proud to be a transplanted Detroiter — even if I do say well-meaning stupid things sometimes!
File under: well-meaning things we say/do that land with a thud!
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[Image Source: Wikipedia]
Fun.
I’m not averse to revenge fantasy as a narrative arc. We all get to channel the murky, marginalized, pre-pubescent rage of our middle school years watching some big-screen hooligan seeking sweet justice. Yet, how many movies like this do we really need?
(Having just completed a brief, shining stint on jury duty this morning, I’m even more averse to cinematic celebrations of vigilantism at the present.)
The Hateful Eight is quintessential Quentin Tarantino – which means it is as artistic and provocative as it is juvenile and misanthropic. Tarantino, in his novelistic and verbose style, turns cowboy romanticism on its head, telling the sordid tale of eight (seems more like nine or ten, but whatever) fugitives (literal and/or emotional) who converge on a general store (the comically named “Minnie’s Haberdashery”) amidst a teeth-rattling blizzard. The MacGuffin animating the plot is actually a person not a thing – though the way murderer Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh as the MacGuffin in question) is disturbingly manhandled through the film makes that distinction debatable. Domergue is a bloody Raggedy Ann doll, banjo-eyed and tragicomic, two-parts Charlie Chaplin’s “Little Tramp” and one-part Sissy Spacek’s “Carrie.” She’s one of the best things in a film that otherwise can’t seem to make up its mind whether it’s a testosterone fever dream or an epic indictment of male ego. Leigh’s droll turn coupled with Ennio Morricone’s throbbingly beautiful horror show score save the film for me.
The rest of the cast includes Samuel L. Jackson becoming even more of a Cheshire Cat-caricature of himself as a Civil War veteran and bounty hunter who magically always seems to be 17 steps ahead of any other character; Kurt Russell as an Old West Remington Painting Cossack who speaks with John Wayne’s wiggly weird voice; Tim Roth in the Christoph Waltz role as an oily, glib, bespoke-dressed hangman; Bruce Dern and Michael Madsen basically playing Bruce Dern and Michael Madsen in Reconstruction Era clothing; Demian Bechir giving us yet another in a shamefully long line of stereotypically duplicitous Latinos; and Walton Goggins as a gummy, big-toothed take on the sweaty, nervous, hair-trigger, hammy loon that always pops up in a movie like this. Oh, Channing Tatum, burying any sparkle he has under a mound of Dippity Do, slides in at the three-quarters mark in one of those chronological misdirects that Tarantino employs … to the point of cliché. How many hateful people is that now? 62?
Did I hate The Hateful Eight? No. Yet, I’m struggling to discern why mid-career Tarantino flicks like Kill Bill or Inglourious Basterds – equally violent and similarly reckless in their disregard for our common humanity as Hateful Eight is – resonate with me so much more profoundly. Recent efforts like Eight and Django Unchained leave me a bit cold (and a lot worried). Some of it could be my age, and some of it could be that the real world is ever more perilously resembling the fictitious community of Red Apple cigarette smoking fiends that Tarantino gleefully depicts.
However, I also hypothesize that Bill and Basterds both reveal an empathy for the underdog and have a kind of constrained feminism/humanism at their core. Django and Eight – as beautifully as they are filmed (Eight especially with its sumptuous Panavision vistas and claustrophobic production design) – have a caustic ugliness in their DNA that belies the apparent intent behind Tarantino’s cartoonishly extreme brutality. He always seems to be suggesting to certain members of his audience, “Oh, you like guns? Oh, you hate [insert race/gender/faith/ethnicity here]? Oh, you like throwing around sexual grotesqueries for comic effect to create discomfort? … Well, here’s what that really looks like. Still interested in carrying that behavior into daily life?” Yet, with The Hateful Eight, I am not sure where pornography ends and social critique begins.
That said, The Hateful Eight entertained me. I could not take my eyes away for a second … which is saying something, especially in its grinding last 45 minutes. The Revenant, on the other hand, is a high-minded bore that had me checking my watch every twenty minutes. (In its defense, I did see it after spending three hours in Tarantino-ville.)
![[Image Source: Wikipedia]](https://i0.wp.com/reelroyreviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/the_revenant_2015_film_poster.jpg?resize=202%2C300&ssl=1)
[Image Source: Wikipedia]
Yet, unlike Tarantino’s drama, there are no obvious black hats. One can even argue that Tom Hardy’s antagonist John Fitzgerald – who (spoiler alert) actually buries DiCaprio’s character alive shortly before slaughtering DiCaprio’s son – is no more evil than any other European-American in the film, motivated as they all are by the seemingly limitless money they hope to reap at the expense of the land and its inhabitants. These fools simply do not know any better, so why is it such a leap of logic that Hardy’s character goes from killing animals and Native Americans at a whim to extending those same courtesies to his fellow fur-traders? And that may in fact be the film’s thesis … or I may be projecting, as the film is so frustratingly artistic (read: obtuse) that I wasn’t always sure what I was even watching. Ah, an Ansel Adams winter sky here. A glistening tree branch there. A floating shaman. A pyramid of bleached skulls. WTF?
For those of you out there who loved this film – be you survivalist or nature-lover – please don’t hate me for rooting for the bear, but I found myself slapping my knee in delight as Leo was tossed around like a chew toy by a mother bear protecting her cubs. Of course (another spoiler alert, essential for my animal-loving buddies out there) the CGI bear is killed, which squelched my buzz for the rest of the picture.
It is this mauling and Leo’s subsequent “Hey, I ain’t dead yet!” burial that sets up the vision quest/hero’s journey as DiCaprio crawls through the muck, grunting out all manner of guttural protestations, to stake his revenge on the man who done him wrong (Hardy). If chapped lips, broken appendages, greasy hair, and frost-bitten noses are your thing, then this is the film for you. I found it an interminable slog, with a concept that might have made a fabulous short-film but felt woefully padded at nearly two hours and forty minutes.
Early in The Hateful Eight, Tim Roth’s character observes, “Justice delivered without dispassion is always in danger of not being justice.” Both film’s wrestle with this idea to varying degrees of success, ultimately losing the delicacy of this concept in self-indulgent largesse. The problem with Eight is that there may have been too much hot-blooded passion in Tarantino’s execution, drowning his critique of our white-washed conception of the Old West in a tsunami of Karo Syrup. And The Revenant remains too icily remote, enamored of its own gunmetal haze at the expense of visceral investment.
Somebody wake me when Oscar season is 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.
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[Image Source: Wikipedia]
Maybe my expectations are just suitably lowered by the anti-hype. Maybe the public has an unfair axe to grind with these particular “flop” films. Maybe I always root for the over-marketed, over-budgeted underdog kicked around the Hollywood playground. Maybe all of the above.
(In defense of my admittedly dodgy tastes, I am united – in at least one instance – with all moviegoers, all film critics, and anyone with a pulse in loathing Ryan Reynolds’ godawful Green Lantern.)
This brings me to The Lone Ranger, akin to John Carter, Disney’s latest attempt to create a blockbuster tent pole franchise from a radio serial property. Hollywood execs, just an observation, but this particular strategy never works – and, while I adored The Shadow, The Phantom and the marginally financially successful Dick Tracy and Flash Gordon, the cash and Oscars weren’t exactly flying at those pictures either.
But let me say this: I liked The Lone Ranger. I mean, I liked The Lone Ranger A LOT! I thought the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, made by the same troika of Gore Verbinski/Jerry Bruckheimer/Johnny Depp, were over-baked, shrill, and much-too-self-indulgent (especially everything after the first entry). I did not have the same issues with The Lone Ranger.
Yes, they could have trimmed about 20 minutes (what summer movie couldn’t this year?), but I thought that pairing Armie Hammer (this poor guy, like his cinematic “older brother” Jon Hamm, can’t seem to catch any real starring success on the silver screen) and a beautifully understated yet madcap Johnny Depp, as the Lone Ranger and Tonto respectively, was perfection.
The film slyly turns the dutiful Native American sidekick trope on its square, fuddy-duddy head, positioning Depp’s Tonto (who has been working this deadpan schtick since the insipid Benny & Joon) as a wry, world-weary, rubber-jointed Buster Keaton/Charlie Chaplin anti-hero.
The animal-lover in me winced at a few odd choices, like cannibal rabbits that make a very brief appearance salivating at the campsite fire of Tonto and the Ranger. Or the requisite horses falling over and over. (I really hate that about Westerns.) However, I do know that these choices all were to support some theme that the filmmakers were exploring about nature being out of balance. (Nearly every character appears to give voice to some derivation of this idea at least once.)
In fact, the film sets as its backdrop the industrialization of America (as represented by the marvelously understated villainy of Tom Wilkinson and the not-so-understated but equally fun hijinks of William Fichtner and Barry Pepper), literally driving train tracks through the untouched beauty of Native America homelands in the West.
The twists and turns in the plot are as predictable as those in a Wile E. Coyote/Road Runner short, but the journey is a big, dumb summer delight. For once, in my view anyway, Depp’s zany-hat-wearing, fey eccentricities are actually in service to the narrative (unlike another hit film I hated, Disney’s Alice in Wonderland). Some critics have unfairly labeled his performance boring and dull; I would counter that, for the first time in a long time, he is stealthy and nuanced, deriving humor organically from situation (and only a pratfall or two).
I liked that the film layered in messages about respecting our history, our environment, our culture, and our world. In a movie called The Lone Ranger, released over a Fourth of July weekend with tie-in toys available at Subway, those themes ain’t gonna be too deeply explored … so just give these blockbuster kids a break, willya?