Yes, I’m an adult (sort of) who reads (and enjoys) comic books. I’ve always relished the escapist interludes comics frequently provide. But sometimes they are transcendant.
A few times in my life, be they in epic scale (Marv Wolfman’s and George Pérez’ Crisis On Infinite Earths, Brad Meltzer’s and Rags Morales’ Identity Crisis, Grant Morrison’s and Howard Porter’s JLA) or clear-eyed cultural critique (Alan Moore’s and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Reggie Hudlin’s and John Romita, Jr.’s Black Panther), the books left me speechless and deeply moved, notably in terms of how metaphorically revelatory these pieces can be about our sometimes joyous, often painful human condition.
Add The Other History of the DC Universe to that storied (pun intended) list. Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave screenwriter John Ridley pens a compelling, heartrending, corrosive yet loving treatment of the history of the DC Universe from the eyes of heroes of color left in the (literal) margins. Giuseppe Camuncoli and Andrea Cucchi provide gorgeous illustrations that are expansive, exhilarating, and somehow both retro AND forward-leaning.
In the first issue, Jefferson Pierce AKA Black Lightning takes us from 1972 through 1995, juxtaposing “real” world and “DC Comics’ world” events of that era with an incisive point-of-view that is eye-opening, transformative, damning, beautiful, and human. You might never look at Superman the same way again, yet you are even more appreciative of these characters and their ability to reflect our own ever-evolving societal perspectives on equality, fair play, and inclusion. Can’t wait to read the rest.
Want to join me in supporting a good cause? For my birthday this month (December 28 to be exact!), I’m raising money for Ronald McDonald House Charities Ann Arbor and your contribution will make an impact, whether you donate $5 or $500. Just click donate on this fundraising page: https://lnkd.in/eQ_NVZD
I’m a proud board member and have seen firsthand how every little bit helps. This little fundraiser is nearing the two thousand dollar mark because of wonderful support from kind and generous friends like you!
“Winter” (Tori Amos)
Thanks to our donors-to-date: Beth Kennedy, Greg Griffin, Terry Branoff, Paola Armeni, Chris Sheeren, Aaron Bebee, Rachel Shields Williams, Megan McKeon, Morgan Leigh Horvitz, Monica Phillips, Dianne Rychlewski, Kristen Bateman Leis, Becky Felix, Anna Ostrander, Eric Walkuski, Donna Ballantyne, Christine N. Harris, Jennifer Munsayac, Barry Solomon, Kate Meltzer, Laurin Hawkins, Connie Harris, Cynthia Voth, Tina Paraventi, Amy Oldiges, Tammy Gales Mangan, Kelly MacKinnon, Sally Feldman, Petrea Schumacher, Brook Weeks Redmond, and Sarah Gallagher. Love you ❤️
Thank you for your support.
#KeepingFamiliesClose
“Swee’Pea’s Lullaby” from Popeye
Legal Marketing Coffee Talk is back Monday with host Roy Sexton (ME!), Director of Marketing at Clark Hill, and guest Stephanie D. Preston, PhD and professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. Dr. Preston examines how the brain evolved to use emotions to influence decisions across species, particularly in interpersonal and investment contexts.
How does this apply to legal marketing!?
Well, Dr. Preston focuses her attention on our desires and how our neural processes that originally evolved to guide mammals toward resources that are necessary but scarce may mislead us in our current modern conditions of material abundance. In other words, she will help us understand how our brains work. She will also explain to us the interesting connection between marketing and psychology and how their connection has led to overconsumption in some areas.
Disney Pixar’s Incredibles 2, picking up 14 years (!) after the last film hit theatres, is about as subversive as a movie full of pixelated superheroes can be. This is the film our country needs right now. People will flock to this – Blue States on the coasts and Red States in the middle – and none will be the wiser that directing wunderkind Brad Bird has given us the ultimate Ray Bradburdy-esque allegory for our topsy turvy political times.
For instance, Holly Hunter’s Elastigirl – offered a Faustian contract by media-hack Winston Deavor (Bob Odenkirk) to publicly redeem superheroes who have been outlawed in the Incredibles’ flawlessly production-designed mid-century moment – queries, “To help my family I have to leave it. To fix the law, I have to break it.” Does that sound familiar … or what?! (I won’t even get into our present debate over the horror of separating immigrant families from their children at the border … oh, Elastigirl, how we need you right now.)
The first Incredibles surprised us all, billed as it was as a four-color throwback to superhero shenanigans of movie matinee yore. Yet, in reality, it was a brilliantly executed existential treatise on surviving in a world of ageist disposability and politically charged hypocrisy. In both films, Bird uses the titular Spandex’d family (homage as they are to Marvel’s own Fantastic Four) to explore thorny issues of identity politics, socioeconomic disparity, and xenophobia. (For those of you rolling your eyes, watch the first film again and tell me I’m wrong. In fact, I would argue that, taken together, The Incredibles are a far better “spiritual adaptation” of Alan Moore’s and Dave Gibbons’ seminal Watchmen than Zack Snyder’s slavishly literal 2009 film treatment of said graphic novel.)
[Image Source: Wikipedia]
Bird has woven into both films an infectious love of 60s caper-television fare a la Mission: Impossible,The Man from UNCLE, and Jonny Quest, aided and abetted by his pitch-perfect musical soundtrack partner Michael Giacchino, whose shameless worship of Lalo Schifrin, John Barry, and Herbie Hancock is as obvious as the “i” on Mr. Incredible’s Buick-sized chest.
Of all Pixar’s storied output, The Incredibles films go the greatest distance, creating a self-contained universe of exceptional design and unimpeachable character and holding an outsized mirror to the heartbreaking flaws in our present reality.
Incredibles 2 is one of those rare sequels that meets if not exceeds its predecessor. This may be the Godfather 2 of Pixar flicks.
[Image Source: Wikipedia]
The first film debuted before Marvel Studios’ ascent to cinematic glory, not to mention Marvel’s subsequent acquisition by Disney, and this sequel appears after the first major chapter of Marvel’s meteoric rise comes to a close with Avengers: Infinity War. Not sure what to make of that, but The Incredibles‘ wry, relatable commentary is arguably far more sophisticated than that of any other superhero flicks we have seen … or likely ever will. (I’m pretty sure this is the only superhero movie, let alone animated film, I’ve ever seen that has used the word “conflate” in a line of dialogue.)
We meet our heroes, one day following the events of the first film, as they continue to bump along in life – Olympian gods suffering through the mundanities of middle American subsistence. The super-family’s well-intentioned intervention of a bank heist goes awry, and they find themselves in the slammer and without the aid of their super-handler Rick Dicker, who has decided a life of retirement is preferable to one of damage control for a family of super-powered freaks. He observes ruefully, “You want out of the hole? You should put down the shovel.”
[Image Source: Wikipedia]
In Dicker’s absence, PR maven Winston Deavor steps forward with a scheme to celebrate Elastigirl and thereby rehabilitate the negative image “supers” have suffered in The Incredibles-universe for years. Mr. Incredible (with heart-breaking comic voice work by Craig T. Nelson) is left at home with a super-powered infant Jack-Jack (whose anarchic impulses yield increasingly zany and haunting consequences) as well as two angsty tweens: the invisible Violet and the speedster Dash. Oh, and Deavor’s sister Evelyn (a delightfully sardonic Catherine Keener) may or may not be on the side of the angels. TBD.
The movie touches on just about every zeitgeist issue hitting today’s headlines: women who have lived far too long in the shadows of men; the dilemma of finally finding one’s “moment” when the obligations of daily life make it impossible to actually enjoy it; a fear-mongering government whose reach far exceeds its grasp; and the unerring need of the media and elected officials to scapegoat the marginalized for all of society’s failings. Not incidentally, Incredibles 2 is a funny-as-hell, fizzy-a$$ bottle-rocket of entertainment.
Yes, fan-favorites Frozone (Samuel L. Jackson, all wisenheimer perfection) and Edna Mode (director Brad Bird doing double-duty as the voice of the fussy Edith Head-inspired “capes and cowls” designer) make their triumphant returns. Mode particularly enjoys a delightful sequence where her take-no-prisoners approach to fashion ends up yielding exceptional parenting tips to Mr. Incredible: “Done properly, parenting is a heroic act.”
[Image Source: Wikipedia]
The film’s antagonist declares in the movie’s final act that “superheroes make us weak,” asserting that our reliance on escapist fare prevents us from living our most authentic lives.
It’s a twisty and cynical bit of meta-commentary, embedded as it is in a film produced by a media empire (Disney’s) raking in billions from our foolhardy fantasies that Captain America will somehow save our hides from the real-life fascists ruining our country. Fair enough.
But all hail Pixar for yet again offering us – under the deceptive and intoxicating guise of family friendly entertainment – a healthy dose of philosophical medicine just when we desperately need it … a big gulp of fortifying spinach to counteract the real-life Krytonite sapping our spirits on a daily basis. (Yes, I just mixed my Popeye and Superman metaphors. Go sue me, Lex Luthor.)
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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.
Nina Kaur (thanks to fellow Farmington PlayerAmy Lauter for connecting us!) asked me to contribute a guest blog entry to her fun and interesting blog Thirty Something Years in Ninaland. Here’s what she wrote about me – “Every Monday I will have a guest blogger. Today I am featuring a wonderful Movie Reviewer named Roy Sexton. He is witty, charming and great critic! Enjoy reading about his journey!” Wow! Thanks, Nina! Click here for the original post on her blog.
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By yours truly …
Movies have always been an important part of my life.
I like to read books (more accurately comic books these days, as I seem to now have the attention span of a tsetse fly), and I adore music. Television is fine, and I’ve spent many hours traipsing the boards of theatres across the Midwest. But movies transport me.
I love the fact that a film is an encapsulated medium. Whether 90 minutes or three hours, a movie tells one story – beginning, middle, and end – introducing you to new friends and enemies and locales in an efficiently designed delivery mechanism. With a good film, you get the experience of reading a novel (whether or not the film is in fact based on any work of literature) in a highly compressed fashion.
Nina Kaur
Your brain leaves your body for a bit, you take a mini-vacation to places you might not otherwise ever see, and you return to your regularly scheduled life a bit changed, perhaps enlightened, and hopefully re-energized.
I stop reading email, answering calls, or monitoring social media…and just blessedly check out…for a bit.
My parents cultivated appreciation for the arts by filling our home with movies and music and books and love. I’ve groused in the past about wanting, as a child, to play with my Star Wars action figures in the solitude of my toy-lined room and being forced instead to sit in our den with my parents and watch some creaky B&W classic movie on Fort Wayne’s Channel 55. And I am so grateful now for that.
My appreciation for classic cinema resulted from these years basking in the glow of our old RCA color TV. And when we could finally afford a VCR and could now watch any movie of our choosing, I was already hooked on the story-telling of vintage movies with their requisite arch wit, dramatic stakes, whimsical joys, and belief that anything was possible.
However, not everything was high art in our house. The advent of HBO in the early 80s and its repetitive showings of whatever junk Hollywood had most recently cranked out shaped my tastes for better or worse as well. I’m a sucker for the movie train wreck – the more star-studded, over-budget, under-written, and garish the better. Some of my most beloved films are among the most notoriously awful of all time: Xanadu, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Wiz, Popeye, Flash Gordon. The Black Hole, Raggedy Ann and Andy’s Musical Adventure, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Return to Oz, Battle Beyond the Stars, Krull, The Neverending Story, and so on.
If it was a flop and it was shown ad nauseum one mid-afternoon following another on HBO in the 1980s, then I fell in love with it. Like self-imposed water torture on my nascent aesthetic.
As time went by and I stomped through my high school and college know-it-all years (some might argue I’m still stuck in them), I learned from both my parents and some wonderful teachers the tools of critique and criticism. What is the intent of the piece? What is the context for its creation? How effective is its structure, composition, impact? Where did it go awry or where did it cross over into something classic?
It’s all highly subjective and a bit arrogant, I suppose, but I can’t help it. I’m entertained by the act of analysis.
In more recent years, Facebook gave me an outlet to connect with my inner-Ebert. I started posting status statements summarizing in glib, condensed fashion my take on whatever flick we had just enjoyed … or endured. My kind-hearted and patient partner John has suffered through a lot of movies over the years, many he enjoyed … and even more he did not.
At wonderful Jim and Lyn’s beautiful wedding
We still bicker about his departure from Moulin Rouge after twenty minutes with nary an explanation. I found him after the movie in the lobby reading a newspaper – I don’t know what is more telling: that he was too kind to want to ruin the movie for me by alerting me how much he hated it, or the fact that I stayed to the end without checking on his safety and security!
My friends and colleagues enjoyed these little “squibs” I posted on social media. I suppose I was aspiring to capture the grace and insight of Leonard Maltin’s “micro reviews” that I consumed voraciously as a child every January when we bought his latest edition. (The paper on those early volumes was always of some strange newspaper-esque stock prone to smudging and was pulpily aromatic. I will never forget that musty, fabulous smell.)
John always asks plaintively, “Didn’t they know this movie was bad when they were making it?!”
Perhaps I keep trying to solve that riddle, with the false confidence that my $10 movie ticket entitles me to a shot at armchair quarterbacking. Perhaps the failed actor in me is still trying to reclaim some artistic glory. Or perhaps I’m just a wise-ass with too many opinions and without the good sense to keep them respectfully to myself.
My pals told me, “Set up a blog. Capture these Facebook reviews for future reference. They’re great; they’re fun! Blah blah blah.” I have to admit that eventually my ego got the better of me, and, one late night, I explored the wonders that WordPress holds (albeit not that many) and set up ReelRoyReviews as a diary of sorts, detailing my adventures in the cinema.
Here’s the funny thing. Nobody read them. Nobody. At least for quite a while.
Well, that’s not entirely true. My mom was an avid reader and supporter and was always the first to offer an encouraging comment: “My son writes the best reviews and everyone should love them.” So there!
But you know what? Something interesting happened along the way. I stopped caring and just started writing for myself. And I started having fun. And people started reading.
Life is way too short (and exasperating) to get too intense about entertainment, so I try to take a light and conversational approach with my reviews. And I try to respect that (for the most part) these are show business professionals putting (ideally) their best feet forward and that they are human beings with hearts and souls and feelings. I hope I never seem cruel. I don’t mean to be. These writings are off-the-cuff and journal-style and come from as positive a place as I can muster.
Approach everything and everyone honestly and with positive intent and offer candid feedback with an open heart and as much kindness as possible.
Please check out my latest reviews here … Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Transformers: Age of Extinction, Edge of Tomorrow, 22 Jump Street, The Fault in our Stars, and Tammy and more …
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Reel Roy Reviews is now a book! Thanks to BroadwayWorld for this coverage – click here to view. In addition to online ordering at Amazon or from the publisher Open Books, the book 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.
The countdown continues! 15 days left until the official release of ReelRoyReviews, a book of film, music, and theatre reviews, by Roy Sexton! The book is now (for however long THAT will last 😉 !) on Amazon’s list of top-selling “Guides and Reviews”!!
Here’s a snippet from Roy’s review of Silver Linings Playbook: “Make no mistake, Russell is offering pointed commentary on how we deal with mental illness in this country. Yes, people may need ‘help,’ but not pharmaceutical, not pigeonholing. There is a wonderful scene where both characters speak knowingly about the horrors of the various drugs they have had to endure but in a totally cavalier way, like kids comparing comic books or baseball cards they may have collected.”
Just 18 days until release date of ReelRoyReviews, a book of film, music, and theatre reviews, by Roy Sexton!
“…the second installment, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (seriously? these are the best titles you can come up with, Jackson? I guess Attack of the Clones was taken), is a rip-snortin’, jolly good time.”
Last year I just wasn’t that nuts about the first installment of Peter Jackson’s planned fim trilogy adapting J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. You can revisit my ire here.
And I stand by these words, “If I feel the original [Lord of the Rings] trilogy – where one film = one book – seems a bit padded, you can imagine my distaste for having The Hobbit broken into a wallet-gouging three films.”
HOWEVER, the second installment – The Desolation of Smaug (seriously? these are the best titles you can come up with, Jackson? I guess Attack of the Clones was taken) – is a rip-snortin’, jolly good time.
All the ponderous and self-satisfied back story and set up has been dispensed with in the first film, so the cast and crew is free to let the Errol Flynn-esque, Saturday morning serial freak flags fly. The film is a good thirty minutes too long and suffers yet again from a terribly unsatisfying non-ending ending.
Yet, all of the players are clearly having a ball and that carries over to the audience experience. Benedict Cumberbatch (is he everywhere this year?!?) steals the show – without ever showing his face – as the voice and motion-captured physicality of the titular villain, the dragon Smaug. The very theatre rumbles with his presence, and you can’t (and dare not) look away for a moment.
The rest of the cast acquits themselves nicely amongst the manic proceedings which involve some nonsense about reclaiming a mountain and finding some shiny jewel thing. Martin Freeman comes into his own as our central protagonist Bilbo Baggins, capitalizing on comic sympathies garnered during the first outing.
Ian McKellen is fine but a bit underused in a confusing subplot that involves Orcs, a cheesy looking castle, and the film series’ Big Bad (Sauron). I greatly enjoy Richard Armitage as the brooding Thorin – just when I as an audience member feel totally exasperated by the shenanigans onscreen, he seems to be as well and grounds everything with a sneer and a sidelong glance. Heck, I even like Orlando Bloom this go-round, which is saying something as watching him is typically akin to watching paint dry for me.
New to the series, Lee Pace, Ryan Gage, and Stephen Fry are welcome additions, with Fry bringing an almost Dickensian whimsy to his role as a sleazy mayor of a floating fishing village that makes Popeye‘s Sweethaven look like Metropolis. Luke Evans also adds a fine level of swashbuckling gravitas to the key character of Bard who helps our intrepid band reach the final leg of their interminable journey.
I happened to see this one in Jackson’s much-vaunted “high frame rate 3D” which, once you get past the nauseatingly hyper-crisp visual clarity, completely immerses you in Tolkien’s Middle Earth. It’s like watching a soap opera/video game hybrid … on the sound stage where it’s being filmed with the actors spitting and sweating in your face in real time. Lovely, eh? Not sure I completely recommend it, but it’s worth experiencing … once.
In sum, the film is fun escapist fare with a shot of adrenaline that reminds us why movies can be such a joy. I have no idea what I saw, and I won’t remember 80% of the plot tomorrow … and I don’t much care.
OK, I have to fess up. I went into Silver Linings Playbook with axes to grind: Sullen, dull Jennifer Lawrence can’t be that good. The movie couldn’t be nearly as strong as the awards-season fawning implies. Bradley Cooper must be just doing his same smarmy/winsome crap. Jessica Chastain was robbed at the SAG Awards (and no doubt soon-to-be shanghaied at the Oscars too).
Wrong.
This is a sweet, deeply affecting film. My quibbles? I’m not totally on board the David O. Russell train. As a director, I feel like he aspires to be Paul Thomas Anderson grungy/dirty/epic (see: Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood) while riffing on a Robert Altman we’re-so-groovy-with-our-overlapping-improvised-dialogue vibe (see: Nashville, The Player, or my guilty pleasure Popeye). BUT he does consistently wring great performances from his players and has a lovely eye for skewering populist middle American conventions (see: The Fighter).
I wasn’t nuts about Robert DeNiro or Jacki Weaver as Cooper’s haunted, crackpot parents. They had moments of authenticity, but mostly they seemed like they were well-heeled Yuppies slumming and winking at their hardscrabble Italian/Phildelphian roles. Their early scenes were the worst culprits of goofy look-at-us-make-up-the-dialogue-as-we-go-along bits.
(A sidebar plea: American directors, please, I implore you, just stop this improv junk, along with the twitchy, handheld camera stuff. The only people who can do this are the British…and maybe Australians…and only with Mike Leigh in charge – see: Secrets & Lies).
HOWEVER, what did I like…no, love…about this film? Lawrence and Cooper, especially when he was onscreen with Lawrence. Oh, and I adored always reliable Julia Stiles as Lawrence’s materialistic/tightly-wound sister. She nails the young Gen Y cloying mommy thing with that constant need to remodel/remake/reproduce. Love her!
The plot of the film just sounds ridiculous when you read about it: young man loses it when he catches his wife cheating on him; he is released under the care of his parents, though he still struggles with bipolar disorder; he meets cute with a young widow similarly afflicted; they enter a dance competition and simultaneously bet all his father’s money on a football game with a triumphant, fist-pumping Hollywood outcome for all. End scene.
Only…it’s not exactly like that. What you don’t get from that synopsis is that Lawrence and Cooper zig when they might have zagged. They are broken toys hurt deeply by a world that only knows how to hurt. They are surrounded by friends and family who are just as afflicted (though not conveniently “diagnosed” for their “problems”). Cooper has a line at the end of the film about the world having a million ways to break our hearts.
The film addresses mental illness/health deftly and humanely. We may label people “ill” out of our own fear or a desire to avoid any inconvenience they may cause us…when all of us are struggling with our own demons every day. Perhaps we do it out of resentment: “I can keep my genie in its bottle, so why can’t you?” Who knows. But it is hypocritical and unfair.
Cooper and Lawrence are quiet forces of nature. Blunt instruments with hurricanes of sadness roiling right beneath the surface. Anyone who knows me may not be surprised at this analogy, but they reminded me of abused, neglected strays one brings home to rehabilitate: gun shy, scared, sad, perhaps aggressive but with much stifled love to give.
Make no mistake, Russell is offering pointed commentary on how we deal with mental illness in this country. Yes, people may need “help,” but not pharmaceutical, not pigeonholing. There is a wonderful scene where both characters speak knowingly about the horrors of the various drugs they have had to endure but in a totally cavalier way, like kids comparing comic books or baseball cards they may have collected.
The most powerful statement the film makes is that what truly heals a broken heart/mind are kindness, attention, passion, and understanding. Much humor is derived from the fact that these two characters are brutally, unflaggingly, purely honest. Like children. And what a wonderful way to be.
![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/File:The_Hobbit_-_The_Desolation_of_Smaug_theatrical_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/File:Silver_Linings_Playbook_Poster.jpg)
Reel Roy Reviews 