I finally got around to checking out the 2011 silat flick The Raid after recently hearing Yo, Is This Racist? podcast host Andrew Ti's enthusiastic recommendation of it, in which he said it's a great stabbing movie, and it features "the most hilarious stabbing I've ever seen in my entire life." For the American market, director Gareth Evans retitled his stabfest The Raid: Redemption to avoid a rights dispute here in America over the film's original title, but let's face it, man, nobody calls it by that cumbersome American title in regular conversations, and neither do I.
I like the propulsive original score Linkin Park member/Fort Minor founder Mike Shinoda and Oblivion co-composer Joseph Trapanese wrote together for Sony's American release of The Raid, particularly because of its stripped-down sound. As Shinoda said in one of the Raid Blu-ray's featurettes, he and Trapanese wanted to keep the score stripped-down to mirror the film's claustrophobic feel, so that meant ditching electric guitars and Asian or Indonesian flourishes that he and Trapanese felt would have sounded too distracting to the audience's ears, as well as their own.
Oh, and by the way, uh, Hollywood, the fight choreography in The Raid makes your attempts at martial arts flicks (fight scenes in Banshee, Fast Five and Furious6aside) look like '80s and '90s Christian pop music videos. In other words, milque-goddamn-toast.
I'm adding to "AFOS Prime" and "Beat Box" rotation the "We Have Company" and "Drug Lab" cues from the Raid score, which Sony's Madison Gate label made available only as a digital download. The Shinoda/Trapanese score has got me thinking about non-"Eye of the Tiger" existing songs I'd like to needle-drop as fight scene music if I ever get to direct a short film, feature film or TV series episode someday, although I don't think I'll ever be put in charge of an undertaking as massive as Furious 6.
1. Ghostface Killah featuring Raekwon and Cappadonna, "Daytona 500"
After The Boondocks brilliantly needle-dropped Raekwon's "Guillotine (Swordz)" when Huey imagined himself as a samurai, the world needs more fight scenes soundtracked with RZA-produced joints. Maybe "Daytona 500" is better suited for a car chase. If I directed a Fast & Furious sequel--though I just said it'd be so unlikely to happen--one of the car chases would have to be soundtracked with a bunch of Wu-Tang MCs spitting fire to a classic break like Bob James' "Nautilus."
2. Method Man, "Release Yo' Delf (Prodigy Remix)"
I hadn't noticed until recently that Prodigy sampled the horns from "El Colpo," a cue from Ennio Morricone's For a Few Dollars More score, during this remix. Prodigy's take on Meth's "Release Yo' Delf" was born to accompany any fight scene, whether it's a jewel thief laying the smackdown on a cop or an old lady beefing with another grocery shopper over the last loaf of bread.
3. Jeru the Damaja, "Ya Playin' Yaself"
Because Jeru did it before in his own music video, and it looked fantastic.
4. The Roots, "75 Bars (Black's Reconstruction)"
Black Thought's lyrical tour de force, in which he, as David Brothers once said, "stacks threat on crack on snap like the world's fastest game of Jenga," is a perfect cue for that great post-MMA black action flick that hasn't been made yet.
5. The Heavy, "That Kind of Man"
So many Heavy tracks work well as action genre music (Cinemax's Strike Back opens its episodes with "Short Change Hero"), and Madison Avenue must agree because ad agencies have played the shit out of "Short Change Hero," "How You Like Me Now" and "What Makes a Good Man?" (every other Dwayne Johnson flick that comes out always seems to have TV spots that feature Heavy songs). The angry groove of "That Kind of Man" is sort of like the retro-soul equivalent of Gerald Fried's exhilarating Star Trek fight theme (a piece that, by the way, was recently quoted by Michael Giacchino during the "San Fran Hustle" cue in his Star Trek Into Darkness score). If you removed all the vocals about relationship woes, "That Kind of Man" would have been a dope cue during the climactic knife fight in The Man from Nowhere.
Many TV critics who binge-watched all 15 new episodes of Arrested Development on Netflix last week complained that the show has lost its spark and its seven-year hiatus "was not good for its comedy." The new season's tacky-looking reliance on green-screen to accommodate the cast members' busy schedules and the forced attempts at political satire, which Arrested excelled at during the dark days of the Bush Administration (although I laughed at the new season's gags about "Halliburton Teen" and Halliburton's ice cream division), were among the haters' most frequent criticisms.
Lovers of smart TV--in other words, TV that doesn't involve singing contests, untalented trophy wives, creepy-looking child pageants or handfishing--who were disappointed with the new Arrested will probably be relieved to know that the return of The Venture Bros., another cult favorite that also experienced a prolonged break between seasons, isn't as shaky a viewing experience as some of those new Arrested episodes on Netflix. The seven-year hiatus has marred one particular aspect of Arrested, the interaction between Bluth family members, which was greatly reduced to cover up Mitchell Hurwitz's difficulties with getting all the original cast members in the same room, whereas the two-and-a-half-year hiatus between The Venture Bros.' fourth and fifth seasons, aside from a couple of specials to tide fans over, including last fall's Halloween special, has had no effect on "What Color Is Your Cleansuit?," The Venture Bros.' outstanding fifth-season premiere (which is actually the ninth episode in the season's production order).
The Venture Bros. is a rare example of a lengthy hiatus paying off hugely. Maybe it's simply because The Venture Bros. is animation, where you can easily work around certain obstacles the Arrested crew had to deal with and you're unable to be distracted by the stars' aging looks and attempts to freeze time on their faces because you can't see those faces. (But you can detect some signs of aging in the stars' voices, like when 2008's Batman: Gotham Knight got longtime Batman voice actor--and soon-to-be-two-time Venture Bros. guest star--Kevin Conroy to voice an anime incarnation of Bruce Wayne who looked as if he didn't shave yet, and the disconnect between middle-aged voice and youthful-looking character design was really off-putting.)
Or maybe it's because Venture Bros. creators Chris McCulloch, a.k.a. Jackson Publick, and Doc Hammer are huge perfectionists who wanted--and were granted--more time from Adult Swim to work on the fifth season, even with Titmouse Inc. now lending a hand with the animation since the Halloween special. (By the way, the addition of Titmouse has resulted in a slight uptick in animation quality--peep the dazzling-looking moment in the Halloween special when Hank, who's voiced by Publick, and his friend Dermott, who's voiced by Hammer, are surrounded by zombies.) Judging from the results of "A Very Venture Halloween" and now the ambitious, hour-long "What Color Is Your Cleansuit?," Publick and Hammer deserved the extra production time (and the duo is more than up to the challenge of crafting consistently funny comedy for an hour-long running time, a format that doesn't often work out so well when other half-hour comedy shows like The Office take a stab at it).
"What Color Is Your Cleansuit?" picks up right where "Operation P.R.O.M." left off and opens during the morning after the home school prom Dr. Venture (James Urbaniak) threw for Dean (Michael Sinterniklaas) and Hank, but it also cleverly ties in to "A Very Venture Halloween," a pivotal story for Dean, who finally learned from Ben, J.K. Simmons' disheveled scientist character, that he and Hank are clones, a helluva thing for Dean to discover when he's still in the middle of trying to get over Triana Orpheus' rejection of him. It turns out that the entire Halloween special occurred between the first and second acts of "What Color Is Your Cleansuit?," so that means the season premiere takes place over the course of several months (the off-screen growth of the angstier, now-Goth-y Dean's hair length from spiky to quasi-emo between the first and second acts is a nice little way for Publick and Hammer to establish the passage of time without relying too much on clunky-ass exposition). The months-long time frame makes Dr. Venture's pathetic inability to notice the gradual mutations his color-coded-cleansuit-clad interns have exhibited even more amusingly pathetic. Their mutations were inadvertently caused by the mutagenic radiation from the ray shield project he's recruited them to finish for his brother Jonas Jr. (Urbaniak)--without pay and with Dr. Venture taking all the credit for their work, of course, because it's Dr. Venture we're talking about here.
"Operation P.R.O.M." was a particularly intriguing episode for this show about failure because it started to point towards redemption for several characters, especially the long-suffering Gary (Hammer), a.k.a. Henchman 21, who grew a backbone over the course of the fourth season, got over the death of his Ray Romano-voiced best friend 24, quit henching for the Monarch and joined SPHINX. But as we see in "What Color Is Your Cleansuit?," Gary still can't catch a break because people still call him 21, and former Venture family bodyguard Brock Samson (Patrick Warburton) prevents 21 from joining his SPHINX team on their exciting missions and saddles him with less exciting Venture Compound security detail (Brock's absence for most of the premiere and perhaps most of the rest of the season, due to what I assume is his investigation of the whereabouts of his once-thought-to-be-dead lover/nemesis Molotov Cocktease, is bound to disappoint Brock's biggest fans).
However, what starts out as mundane detail escalates into a situation where the fate of the world is being threatened by mutated college interns with "Sixth Finger"-style telekinetic powers, extra limbs and a vengeful streak, all led by Martin, who's voiced by perfectly cast guest star Aziz Ansari (as Wyatt Cenac's intern character Tommy amusingly notes, you get a bunch of mutated nerds together, and things get all Syfy Original Movie up in this piece). The path towards redemption that "Operation P.R.O.M." started continues when Gary ends up rising to the occasion, as do Billy Quizboy (Hammer) and Pete White (Publick), who are far better scientists than Dr. Venture, and together, Gary, Billy and Pete attempt to save the day.
Dean also gets a chance to triumph here (although temporarily), when he competes with Martin in a series of challenges to become the "Lee-Hun-Took" of Martin's tribe and win the hand of a mutated intern named Thalia (SNL's Kate McKinnon). The more sensitive half of the Venture brothers views Thalia as his rebound girl in a great dream sequence where he fantasizes about Thalia continually placing her hand on his crotch in a hilariously mechanical, TV-14-level (rather than TV-MA-level) manner that proves that even though Dean has burnt up the learning bed that educated him as an act of rebellion, he still has a lot to learn about the opposite sex.
In the previous four seasons, what distinguished The Venture Bros. from other nerd comedies like Chuck was its stubborn refusal to hand its loser characters huge victories, but I think at this point in the series run, it's earned the right to finally let the likes of Gary, Billy, Pete and Dean win a few battles. This is why I think the increasingly diminished presence of Brock, the killing machine who always saved the day in previous seasons, is great for the show. It gives most of the rest of the show's characters a chance to shine in Brock's old role as hero.
One character who hasn't needed such a moment of redemption because she's always so much smarter and more sensible than the man she both works for and is married to is the raspy-voiced Dr. Mrs. the Monarch (Hammer), née Dr. Girlfriend. In "What Color Is Your Cleansuit?," her suggestions to the Monarch on how to attack Dr. Venture and her overall cognizance of things, lack of knowledge of Game of Thrones aside (she's aware that Gary, who made out with her in the fourth season, quit the Fluttering Horde, while her husband is under the impression that Gary still works for him), all prove once again that this hottie is the real brains of the Monarch's criminal organization.
In addition to Gary's heroism and Billy's smarts, whether in the lab or during a crucial trivia contest with his lifelong rival Augustus St. Cloud (Publick), a nerd collectible-obsessed snob who drives around in the Anton Furst version of the Batmobile, of course, and thinks he excels at nerd trivia (I love the little detail in which Augustus, early on in the episode, misidentifies the first Highlander film as being from 1983 instead of 1986 and isn't corrected by anyone), Dr. Mrs. the Monarch's actions during "What Color Is Your Cleansuit?" reinforce a recurring theme of The Venture Bros.: the second-in-commands or underlings are far more deserving to be running things than the idiots who get to do so in this cruel world, whether they're the Monarch or Dr. Venture. "Don't take this as an insult, but working for you and the Monarch--it's like the same thing," notes Gary to Dr. Venture in one of the premiere's best bits of dialogue.
Dean, Gary and even reformed pedophile Sgt. Hatred (Publick), the Ventures' current bodyguard, have changed a lot over the course of the series run, while Dr. Venture, who's neck and neck with Malory Archer for the worst parent in cable animation ever, still has ways to go. After his scene with Dean while the teen torches the learning bed he confined him to for all of his life instead of letting him experience a normal child's education ("I haven't learned shit! I could tell you how many tastebuds are on the human tongue, but I've never even French-kissed a girl!... I'm sick of living my life in a box!," says Dean to his dad), I now feel like the real villain of the show has never been the Monarch or any of the Guild of Calamitous Intent members. It's self-absorbed Rusty, whose obsession with living up to the legacy of Jonas Sr., his not-so-great-as-the-history-books-say adventurer dad, always results in disaster or bringing down everyone around him. No wonder Brock isn't itching to come back to the Venture Compound any time soon. But what Brock perceives as a low point in his espionage career remains--even after an extended hiatus--wildly funny and entertaining as hell for the rest of us.
"The Whitest Block Ever," a new AFOS block that I added to the station schedule as a way to mark Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month (the block will remain on the schedule after May), is actually made up of five different one-hour playlists (and hopefully six, if Live365 hard drive space will allow it, and perhaps with an original track from Furious 6). All five playlists contain original themes and score cues from films done by Asian American directors and other filmmakers of color who have worked on films or TV series episodes I've dug or admired. "The Whitest Block Ever" airs every weekday at 10am-noon on AFOS.
Last week, I finished assembling the fifth playlist, a.k.a. "TheWhitestBlockEver05" (all the tracks in "TheWhitestBlockEver05" are streamed only during the "Whitest Block Ever" block and nowhere else on the station schedule, in order to reduce repetition). I enjoyed reading the replies Edgar Wright and "Whitest Block Ever" playlist fixture Robert Rodriguez gave to Empire magazine about their favorite score cues or soundtrack albums in the magazine's soundtrack tribute issue, so in a fashion similar to what Wright and Rodriguez did for Empire, here are descriptions of each of the 13 tracks in "TheWhitestBlockEver05."
1. Elmer Bernstein, "Prologue" (from Hoodlum)
Man, Bernstein could do it all: from slapstick vehicles for SNL alums like Trading Places and Ghostbusters to Harlem period pieces like the Bill Duke films A Rage in Harlem and Hoodlum. The ondes Martenot, an electronic instrument that Bernstein utilized most memorably in his Ghostbusters score and can easily be mistaken for a theremin, pops up in "Prologue" too and was used to great effect to represent an era of Harlem gone by.
2. Keisa Brown, "Five on the Black Hand Side" (from Five on the Black Hand Side)
I've seen only bits and pieces of this 1973 film, which has an enjoyable opening theme penned by legendary Capitol Records soul arranger H.B. Barnum and an equally enjoyable shot-on-a-shoestring trailer. The marketing for Five on the Black Hand Side brashly asserted that the film, an adaptation of a comedic stage play about the clash between Afrocentricism and black conservatives, was an alternative to the violent blaxploitation fare that was popular at the time of the film's release. "You've been Coffy-tized, Blacula-rized and Superfly-ed. You've been Mack-ed, Hammer-ed, Slaughter-ed and Shaft-ed. Now we wanna turn you on to some brand new jive," proclaims Fun Loving (Tchaka Almoravids) in the trailer. "You're gonna be glorified, unified and filled with pride when you see Five on the Black Hand Side."
3. Kid 'N Play, "Kid vs. Play (The Battle)" (from House Party)
I wish the Obama/Romney and Biden/Ryan debates were more like the freestyle battle scenes in 8 Mile and House Party.
4. Mader, "Rhumba (End Credits)" (from The Wedding Banquet)
Gentle-humored comedies about generational discord within families (or survival dramas about orphans who find unlikely surrogate families in the form of tigers) are where Taiwanese-born Ang Lee, this year's Best Director Oscar winner for Life of Pi, works best, not action material that calls for a nimbler touch from someone like Tsui Hark or Joss Whedon, like Lee's 2003 misfire Hulk. (As Stop Smiling said in its amusing evisceration of the two pre-Mark Ruffalo Hulk movies, "Lee shouldn’t do pop; his attempts to 'enliven' the material and make it more like a comic book with screen panels and visible page breaks was the cinematic equivalent of Karl Rove dancing.") Over a decade before he won his first Oscar for directing Brokeback Mountain, Lee tackled LGBT characters in The Wedding Banquet, a standout piece of Asian American indie cinema about Wai-Tung (Winston Chao), a Taiwanese American landlord who, with the prodding of his boyfriend Simon (Mitchell Lichtenstein), marries Wei-Wei (May Chin), a struggling Chinese artist, to enable her to get a green card and to satisfy his traditionalist parents from Taiwan. I feel like The Wedding Banquet has kind of been overlooked during this Brokeback/Life of Pi period of Lee's career, despite having been the most profitable film of 1993, even more so than Jurassic Park (it also went on to spawn a stage musical version in 2003). On paper, The Wedding Banquet reads like a shitty sitcom. But the film is far from being such a thing, thanks to Lee's thoughtful and low-key direction, which is aided by French-born composer Mader's equally low-key score, a mishmash of Chinese and Latin sounds that (spoilers!) mirrors how the future child of Wai-Tung, Simon and Wei-Wei will grow up to be a mishmash of various cultural influences.
5. Melba Moore, "Black Enough" (from Cotton Comes to Harlem)
I had no idea Galt MacDermot, one of the most frequently sampled composers in hip-hop, scored Cotton Comes to Harlem until recently. I've seen the Ossie Davis-directed adaptation of the Chester Himes novel of the same name two or three times, but that was before I became interested in finding out where beatmakers copped so many of their illest samples from (it's also kind of hard to notice MacDermot's musical trademarks during Cotton Comes to Harlem when all your 19-year-old self can think about is the film's T&A, like Judy Pace's T&A when she ducks out of being kept under watch by a dumb white cop by craftily tricking him into bed without sleeping with him). One of my favorite MacDermot samples takes place during 9th Wonder & Buckshot's "Shinin' Y'all," which loops "Sunlight Shining," a tune that happens to come from Cotton Comes to Harlem. I'd like to see some beathead make use of another Cotton Comes to Harlem joint, "Black Enough," the film's opening theme, which, like "Sunlight Shining," is filled with soothing strings and classic MacDermot beats.
6. Michael Jackson, "On the Line" (from Get on the Bus)
It's been a few years since I watched Spike Lee's Million Man March-themed Get on the Bus, so I forgot that Michael Jackson sung the film's opening title theme, which contains lyrics about overcoming self-hatred that bring to mind the Five on the Black Hand Side theme (and the Jackson theme was produced by Babyface too!). "On the Line" is, along with "Butterflies" and maybe the Teddy Riley-produced "Remember the Time," one of the few tunes from Jackson's post-Bad, extremely treacly "won't someone think of the children?" era that I actually like. The fact that "On the Line" is--like Everybody Loves Raymond used to say at the start of each episode--not really about the kids also helps.
This Sunday, Netflix will finally unveil--all at once--15 new episodes of Arrested Development, the hilarious cult favorite that aired from 2003 to 2006 on Fox. These new episodes will be available exclusively at the streaming video service. Ever since I posted in 2010 my attempt to make Arrested Development-style frozen bananas, I've seen some Arrested Development fans on Pinterest and Twitter link to my post. If you're having an Arrested Development season four viewing party, try the following frozen banana recipe I'm reposting, and if the results are as disastrous as Gob's racist ventriloquist act, then try again just like I did (it took me a couple of tries to get the frozen bananas right).
I learned a lot from watching Arrested Development, like the importance of always leaving a note, the existence of a dessert known as a frozen banana (which, in the show's universe, was created by a Korean banana stand owner and known as "Cold Banana in Delicious Brown Taste" before the Bluths stole the idea from him) and George Bluth Sr.'s adage that "there's always money in the banana stand." I had never heard of a frozen banana before Bluth's Original Frozen Banana Stand (a.k.a. "the Big Yellow Joint," the subject of Arrested Development composer David Schwartz's amusing fake '70s stoner anthem "Big Yellow Joint"). I thought a frozen banana was Asian American slang for a McCain-supporting Asian guy who lives under the Uncle Ruckus-style delusion that he's as white as Edward from Twilight while suffering from hypothermia.
I didn't realize a frozen banana is a banana covered in chocolate until when I became curious about fictional foods that were integral to episodes of sitcoms like 30 Rock, The Boondocks and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (which gave us "milksteak" and "the grilled Charlie"), and I stumbled upon online recipes for the not-so-fictional dessert.
Yeah, it kind of looks like a chocolate-covered dick, and when peanuts are added to the coating, it starts to resemble poop on a stick, but it's also a delicious snack that's alright for any season. It's essentially a banana Popsicle in a chocolate coating.
In 2009, a couple of Arrested Development fans in Austin opened their own Bluth-style banana stand called Bananarchy and offered toppings like cinnamon and coconut. They even named an item after Will Arnett's breakout character. "The Gob" is two bananas double-dipped in chocolate and covered in peanuts.
Arrested Development narrator/co-executive producer Ron Howard and Terry Crews, a guest star during AD's new season, both help Netflix promote the show's return at an actual Bluth's banana stand opened by Netflix in Manhattan.
Meanwhile, I attempted a few times to make for myself a frozen banana because I always wanted to re-create a snack that came from a show I admire (and occasionally revisit on DVD). I failed the first time with the chocolate coating, which is the trickiest component to master while making this otherwise simple snack. The coating shouldn't be Oreo cookie-esque, which was how my coating turned out the first time I made the dessert. It should be as smooth as Tobias Fünke's shiny blue pate:
Ingredients
1 ripe and peeled banana
1 cup (6 oz.) of Nestle Toll House Milk Chocolate Morsels
1 tbsp. vegetable shortening
1 Popsicle stick
(Photo source: JJA)
1. Unpeel a banana. Cut an inch off one end of the banana. Push a Popsicle stick into that end of the banana.
2. Put the banana in a Ziploc bag and freeze it overnight.
3. The next day, place the chocolate morsels and the vegetable shortening together in an uncovered microwave-safe bowl. The shortening will thin out the chocolate and make it easier to work with. Heat the bowl on medium-high (70%) power for one minute. If there are still some morsel shapes in the melted chocolate, heat it again for a few more seconds. Stir.
4. Unroll a sheet of wax paper and pour the melted chocolate onto the sheet. Take the banana out of the freezer. If there are ice crystals on the banana, scrape them off. Roll the banana around in the chocolate until it's completely coated in it.
(Photo source: JJA)
(Photo source: JJA)
5. Seal the chocolate-covered banana in an airtight container and place it in the freezer. Keep the banana inside the freezer overnight or longer or until you're secure enough in your sexuality to stick a chocolate penis in your mouth.
Every Wednesday in "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," I dine on five of the week's most noteworthy animated shows. The episodes are reviewed in the order of when they first aired. "5-Piece" has been posted for 54 consecutive weeks--a.k.a. one year and two weeks--since May 11, 2012. I need a goddamn break. "5-Piece" returns on June 5 with a discussion of the first new episode of The Venture Bros. in 47 years.
Goofy-looking rotoscoping of Michael Jackson footage and a polite, purple-skinned baby who speaks in full sentences with a Julia Child-like falsetto are the highlights of "Just Me and You Now, Bud," another enjoyably surreal installment of Apollo Gauntlet. When animator Myles Langlois first streamed Apollo Gauntlet on his own, a few years before the Rug Burn Channel picked up the show to stream it exclusively, someone wrote, "If they were ever to make this into a live-action film, I'm going to suggest Will Forte take the lead." Apollo has the bullheadedness--and pornstache--of a typical Forte character, combined with a "What Up with That?"-style habit of interrupting people, especially his enemies, with rapping and dancing.
For Apollo's big "If I put my golden boot in your ass" dance number, "Just Me and You Now, Bud" recycles Apollo's dance moves from "Belenus Blade"--just as how Filmation used to always recycle footage to cut costs--but this time, the episode cops a few classic Michael Jackson moves, including the late Jackson's still-dope-ass anti-gravity lean from the "Smooth Criminal" segment of Moonwalker. That's not all that "Just Me and You Now, Bud" cops. The character design for the purple baby who agrees to help the Princess free herself from her cell appears to be lifted from the Dancing Baby. The voice Langlois chose for what's clearly a man in a baby's body is unsurprisingly strange--and amusing. The man-baby sounds more like the French Chef than Baby Herman. I keep expecting him to start giving the Princess tips about how to prepare a soufflé.
***
"The Unnatural," the Bob's Burgers third-season finale, caps off one of the most consistently funny seasons of any show--animated or live-action--in typically strong and endlessly quotable fashion. Gene dabbles in a sport he has no understanding of, while Tina gets addicted to espresso and can't bear to give it up. These two storylines are kind of standard-issue for a sitcom, but when Bob's Burgers gets its inventive, "Electric Boogie"-covering hands on them, these storylines soar.
Tina's storyline hits the same comedic beats as other "kid gets hooked on a drink she's too young for" storylines (I'm having flashbacks to Maggie Simpson going buckwild after tasting coffee ice cream). But then Bob's Burgers diverges from the other shows by intertwining her storyline quite smoothly with Gene's A-story (Tina has to go through caffeine withdrawal after Linda pawns the restaurant's new espresso machine to pay for Gene's overpriced baseball camp) and then tossing in a funny Trainspotting shout-out when Tina copes with withdrawal. (According to the comments section below the Movieclips excerpt of Renton's withdrawal hallucinations from Trainspotting, My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magicreferenced the same Trainspotting nightmare scene as well. Sure, that's cool, and yeah, that Trainspotting gag is proof that Friendship Is Magic ain't your mommy's My Little Pony, but that's still not going to make me want to watch more of that cartoon. Sorry, Bronies, I'm still not feeling it.)
I'm glad to hear Rob Huebel return as a guest voice actor, even though it's as the "Dr. Yap" scam artist formerly known as "the Prince of Persuasia," the seduction guru Yap sought advice from, instead of his other Bob's Burgers role, as the Family Fracas producer who kept trying to make out with his show's male host a few weeks ago. Now known as the "Deuce of Diamonds," Huebel's con man character has been scamming wanna-be Little Leaguers and their parents out of their cash by running a half-assed baseball camp full of no actual baseballs and lots of amusingly ill-informed advice about the game ("A famous baseball player whose name I can't remember right now had Lou Gehrig's Disease and he didn't let it slow him down"). When Mr. Manoogian (Jason Mantzoukas, reprising his thick foreign accent from his role on Enlightened), the manager of the motel where the Deuce currently lives, threatens to throw him out on the street for not paying him back $1100, the Deuce tricks the kids into thinking he's taking them on a road trip and makes them act as his hired muscle at the motel ("We're just gonna take some swings... at your soda machine").
I enjoy seeing Bob's pragmatic approach to parenting (he doesn't think Gene is cut out for baseball and would rather have him quit, and he can see through the Deuce's scam) bump up against Linda's optimism (she believes Gene has lots of potential in the sport, and she keeps thinking the Deuce is a legit coach), especially when it leads to a hilarious scene where Bob and Linda argue like an umpire and a manager over Gene's hit in the climactic game, a great example of the overlapping dialogue that distinguishes Bob's Burgers from the rest of the Fox "Animation Domination" lineup. "Ah, you're such a dick, Bob," grumbles Linda to her husband, whose unwillingness to root for Gene and the fact that the kid's baseball skills don't really improve overnight both make "The Unnatural" a cut above the overdone "bumbling kid athlete succeeds at the right moment in the game" story.
Other memorable quotes:
* "I love baseball: the pizza parties, the spiky shoes, the parade at the end of the season where we ride on a float." And later: "I'm gonna have a killer fastball and a magnificent perm!" Yup, Gene bats for the other team. He just doesn't know it yet.
* Teddy, refusing Bob's offer of a cup of espresso: "I don't like those tiny cups! They make it look like I have giant hands!"
* Louise, overhearing Bob's opinion that Gene's thought-to-be-permanent abandonment of baseball has a quiet dignity: "Quiet dignity? Have you met us?!"
* An overcaffeinated Tina rattles off Burger of the Day ideas: "Woulda Coulda Gouda. You Gouda Be Kidding Me. As Gouda as It Gets. Gouda Gouda Gumdrops. A Few Gouda Men. Gouda Gouda Two Shoes, comes with shoes. Gouda Day, Sir..."
* The Deuce to the kids: "Okay, any questions so far? About anything at all? Girls, boys, life, money, inkjet printer repair?"
* Andy, recognizing the Deuce's motel: "Hey, this is where our dad goes for his naps."
* The Deuce, encouraging the kids to damage Mr. Manoogian's soda machine: "Babe Ruth used to beat the crap out of a root beer machine. Now look at him."
* "Soda, you made me fat, but you also made me strong!"
* Ollie, defending the Deuce: "He's gifted; he said so." Andy: "He's gonna do a TED Talk."
* Gene, regarding the Deuce: "He gave us his magic and then he disappeared. Just like Toad the Wet Sprocket."
"Beat Box" consists of selections from old scores with funk, synth or jazz sounds that have been sampled by beatmakers, plus cuts from more recentscores with funk, synth or hip-hop sounds. Beatmakers, get ideas for future samples during "Beat Box."
"The Whitest Block Ever" is a block of original themes or score cues from films made by filmmakers of color who have directed projects I like (and the occasional dog or two), including Justin Lin, Jessica Yu, Spike Lee and Robert Rodriguez.
"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" consists of original score cues from animated shows and movies, whether cel-animated or in CG. I'm not really into metal, but I like what Vernon Reid and Rodrigo y Gabriela have done with the genre, and I'm also cool with the metal score music Stephen Barton wrote for Titmouse's short-lived, too-badass-for-Disney Motorcity. I wish Barton released his cues from that show. They'd be perfect for "Brokedown."
Then on Thursday in the same slot at 9 (as well as earlier that day at noon), "AFOS Vault" will stream old one-hour shows from the AFOS vault that were never streamed before in stereo.
Studio Paradiso in San Francisco
The only episodes of AFOS: The Series I actually like and can bear listening to snippets of are the ones I recorded in a professional studio. I'm not so big on the rest of them. But back when I had a steady income, which was three centuries ago, I was able to afford to record a few of those shows in an actual studio, and I'm honored to have done so in the same San Francisco studio where Kid Koala and the band Dengue Fever cut some records. Thosethreeepisodes that don't make me cringe--along with the 007-centric "Dance Into the Fire," the final episode, which I occasionally get asked by listeners to stream again--will be streamed in the "AFOS Vault" slot.
Every Wednesday in "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," I dine on five of the week's most noteworthy animated shows. The episodes are reviewed in the order of when they first aired.
YouTube comments sections are often moronic forums where almost everyone either simply repeats dialogue from the video above without much regard for correct spelling or hurls racial slurs at each other or at some black or Asian person in the video. Only occasionally will some of these sections take a pause from the trolling or Chappelle's Showfrat-boy-viewer-style parroting of catchphrases to raise a good point, like when several posters in the section below "Hey Guys, It's Me," the latest Apollo Gauntlet installment, noted that it feels like the show skipped an episode that would have explained how Apollo tracked down the fortress of Corporal Vile, the villain who most likely sent a robot to capture the Princess.
Despite the disjointed feel of "Hey Guys, It's Me," series creator/voice actor Myles Langlois gets in a couple of amusing moments here, like Apollo's comparison of the henchmen's movements to "tai chi for dummies" and Dr. Benign's awkward retraction of his understandable perception that Prince Belenus, who sees Apollo as his competition for the Princess' hand in marriage, and the Princess are brother and sister. If the Prince is indeed related to her and is totally Jaime Lannistering for her affections, then ewwww.
***
Bob's Burgers is usually the highlight of the Fox "Animation Domination" lineup, but this week, it's been bested by American Dad's special 150th episode. I initially found "Carpe Museum," which centers on Bob's first time to chaperone the kids' museum field trip, to be underwhelming (especially in comparison to "Boyz 4 Now"), despite the way that Linda's protest chants sound exactly like the Tom Tom Club's "Wordy Rappinghood" ("Boys are from Mars, girls are from Venus!/I've got a yum-yum, you've got a penis!") or the enjoyable interaction between Bob, Louise (who accidentally slips out that she wants to inherit the restaurant from Bob) and asthmatic Rudolph Steiblitz (Brian Huskey), a.k.a. Regular-Sized Rudy. On second viewing, I like "Carpe Museum" a little more and better appreciated how the episode, during its subplot of Tina's attempts to get everyone else to notice that her field trip partner Henry (Jim Gaffigan) is dorkier than her, nails the arrogance of nerdy school kids who think the graphic novel or fanfic they're going to write will change the world ("Maybe you just don't understand it?... There's 17 installments, and you really need to read them in order, which you haven't, so I doubt it.").
I also better appreciated how well "Carpe Museum" uses most of the secondary characters, from Teddy, whose clinginess to the restaurant never gets old, to inseparable twin brothers Andy (Laura Silverman) and Ollie (Sarah Silverman), who, at one point, both turn to a weirded-out Bob for help when they need to blow their noses (on Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist, H. Jon Benjamin was continually pining for an uninterested Laura Silverman, while on Bob's Burgers, he'd rather not be near her and reluctantly has to help her blow her nose). Ollie blows his nose on Bob's vest, which is a moment I'm all too familiar with because I've seen little kids blow their noses on other people's clothes, and when I was a kid, I was frequently attacked by a much younger kid who liked to leave his snot on other people's shirts. That kid grew up to become Owen Kline in the school locker scene in The Squid and the Whale.
Other memorable quotes:
* Bob: "So how did you survive eight years of being stuck with Mr. Frond?" Linda, TV's most entertaining functioning alcoholic who's not an Archer: "Wine Thermos."
* Louise to Pocket-Sized Rudy: "Jeez, Rudy, quit sneaking up on people. Wear a bell."
* Louise: "Hey, Mr. Frond! Why did the chicken cross the road?... So he would be in a different school district where there's a different guidance counselor!" Bob: "Louise... don't say that... here."
* The flirtatious, Margaret Dumont-voiced museum director (Brooke Dillman): "Your skin should be its own exhibit." The equally captivated Mr. Frond (David Herman): "Well, your hair should be sent to an Asian wig factory."
The following piece was written three years ago as an exclusive article for an aborted print compilation of both a webcomic I drew and several of the posts I've written for this blog, and all the posts that were going to be collected in the book were about lesser-known films I dig. I was going to put the book together by myself and self-publish it, but I ultimately decided not to publish it because I'm not exactly well-known, so no one would want to buy it. I even drew an illustration that would have accompanied the piece, which is a lengthy discussion of a favorite movie of mine, a pivotal work in the history of Asian American cinema that dropped in April 1982 in New York and then three months later in San Francisco.
I was too young to be interested in movies when Chan Is Missing hit the art-house circuit. The only movie I gave a shit about in 1982 was The Great Muppet Caper on HBO. Ten or 11 years later, my tastes in film had matured to the point where I was ready to tackle a black-and-white art-house oddity like Chan Is Missing. I first caught it on KQED, the perfect San Francisco station to watch--with no interruptions, although with lots of audio dropouts that removed the F-bombs--what I consider one of the best San Francisco films, much like how two of my other favorite films,Do the Right Thingand the recentlyProopified 1974Taking of Pelham One Two Three, are great New York films, and how another favorite film of mine,Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, is a great L.A. film.
I've updated the piece about this 1982 classic a bit, and I'm unveiling it for the first time now because it's Asian Heritage Islander American Pacific Month or whatever it's being called this year.
Thank you, Chan Is Missing, for recognizing that there are actually Filipinos in San Francisco and for depicting Filipino characters who aren't maids, houseboys or sex slaves. Even though those characters--a philosophical Manilatown senior center manager named Presco (Presco Tabios) and the title figure's elderly friend Frankie (Frankie Alarcon)--don't get a lot of screen time in Chan Is Missing, the sequence they appear in is one of the film's most enjoyable sequences, and it's not just because I'm Filipino, and hey, it's an American film representing us flatteringly!
In director Wayne Wang's 1982 breakthrough film, which he shot in black and white on a $22,000 budget, Chinatown cabbie Jo (Wood Moy) and his nephew Steve (Marc Hayashi) are scouring the streets of San Francisco to track down their business partner Chan Hung, who mysteriously disappeared and took with him $4,000 that Jo and Steve need in order to start their own cab company. At one point, Chan's trail leads the amateur sleuths to a Manilatown senior center where Chan is a frequent visitor because he's a fan of the mariachi musicians who entertain the center's manong (elderly Filipino) regulars.
Wang takes a minute to drink in the laid-back atmosphere of the senior center where Chan, a recent immigrant who hasn't had the easiest time assimilating into American culture, felt accepted despite his different nationality. During the interlude, elderly couples are seen dancing to a recording of "Sabor a Mi" by Los Lobos (back when they were known as Los Lobos del Este de L.A.), and we see why Chan felt so at ease at the senior center.
The manongs' enthusiasm for dance and Latin music is infectious, and it's not an unnatural-looking enthusiasm like in that insipid early '90s Pepsi ad where elderly actors pretended to get their dance on to Young MC's "Bust a Move" while awkwardly using phrases they just learned on the set after the director played them a tape of a first-season episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air between takes. The fact that the Manilatown old-timers weren't actors--they were regulars at the actual Manilatown Senior Center, captured by Wang's camera--might have something to do with their natural-looking enthusiasm.
That documentary realism--Wang did location shooting in areas of San Francisco like Manilatown that Hollywood rarely ventures into--is a reason why I'm more taken with Wang's indie snapshot of Chinatown and Manilatown than with a product of the studio era with a similarly all-Asian American cast like the quaint, mostly confined-to-the-studio-backlot 1961 screen version of Flower Drum Song, which Chan Is Missing references in a charming closing montage that's accompanied by the original 1958 recording of "Grant Avenue."
While promoting his 2008 indie films A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and The Princess of Nebraska (Wang still makes indies when he's not directing Lifetime channel-friendly studio fare I'm not exactly dying to see), Wang told an interviewer from AsianWeek that he made Chan Is Missing as a response to previous examples of Asian American cinema. "Documentaries and fictional Asian American films were very seriously sort of talking about how we were discriminated against, and how difficult our history was, blah blah blah blah blah, in a way [that] was almost too serious. And almost like perhaps complaining about our experiences. Or trying to be too rah-rah about how positive we have to be," Wang said. "So Chan Is Missing was kinda looking at the complexity of Chinatown in a different way."
Chan Is Missing's impact on Asian American filmmakers or writers, whether they're Chinese or Filipino, is so immense that Wang's film is still being discussed and prodded and poked, primarily in Asian American film classes at universities, while those '70s films Wang was referring to are largely forgotten. It's also a film that--except for a couple of dated-sounding Chinese pop songs on the soundtrack, the occasional sight of poofy hair and the pronunciation of "FOB" (short for "Fresh Off the Boat") as "ef-oh-bee" instead of the presently more common "fob"--looks timeless. (Charles Burnett's similarly shot 1977 indie Killer of Sheep has that timeless quality too.) Sure, the Flower Drum Song movie has its charms (among them are Nancy Kwan's legs), but if I check out a clip from that movie, I know right away I'm watching something from 1961. Chan Is Missing is the Homicide: Life on the Street to Flower Drum Song's NYPD Blue: the scruffier and more improvisational and down-to-earth work that feels more alive and relevant than the better-known, mostly backlot-based and sometimes forced and self-conscious latter work.
"Doo-hude... Tina... I can totally hear my heart beating. It's like a Pharrell beat with guest verses being dropped by T.I."
Every Wednesday in "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," I dine on five of the week's most noteworthy animated shows. The episodes are reviewed in the order of when they first aired.
In "Rodent," the latest Apollo Gauntlet installment, Prince Belenus and Dr. Benign (both voiced by series creator Myles Langlois) blame an evil robot's abduction of the Princess (Hollie Dzama) on Apollo (also Langlois) and his pummeling of her royal guards, who would have protected her from the robot had Apollo not knocked them all out. Apollo replies that leaving the guards alone wouldn't have mattered anyway because "that robot would have come in here like Terminator in the police station."
That's not the only Terminator reference in "Rodent." Unless Langlois created a blooper without realizing it, the barefoot Benign is seen at the start of the episode running through a corridor making the kind of footstep noises that would emanate from someone wearing hard-soled shoes, not someone who's barefoot--an exact re-creation of the off-putting footstep sound FX the Terminator 2 foley artists created for a barefoot Sarah Connor after she broke out of her cell. I don't know if Langlois intended it to be a reference to one of the silliest foley artist bloopers ever seen in an expensive and beloved summer blockbuster, but I'd like to think he did.
Earlier in Apollo Gauntlet's second season on the Rug Burn Channel, I said, "I might go from mildly liking this weird cartoon to straight-up admiring it if its new season never bothers to leave that throne room." Since then, the characters have stepped outside the throne room, but we've reached the season's seventh episode by now, and the show is still confined to the Dundrum castle (Apollo, Benign and Belenus will have to eventually leave the castle to rescue the Princess). The fact that the show has remained this long in one single setting proves how low its budget is, but budget limitations don't matter much when Apollo's dialogue, the awkward pauses and the intentionally wretched rotoscoping are so frequently funny.
Stray observations:
* "'Apollo Gauntlet'? Uh, yeah, sure, let's call him that," says a continually puzzled Benign to the Princess. In "The Interrogation of Dr. Benign by the Hero Apollo Gauntlet," Benign addressed Apollo as Paul. Apollo's full actual name is Paul Cassidy, according to YouTube's series synopsis.
* Where did Paul and Benign teleport from? I'm putting my money on an insane asylum where Paul was an inmate--which explains the conversations with his right gauntlet and all the slightly creepy hallucinations he's been experiencing--and Benign was either a scientist who was fiddling around with some sort of teleportation gizmo that happened to be lying around a lab in the mental facility or a therapist who was accidentally zapped along with Paul into the distant planet by the device while in the middle of a therapy session with him. (There's also the possibility that these adventures on this other planet are one whole illusion in Paul's mind.) The show also has yet to explain where Paul's magic gauntlets come from.
* "Oh no, Billy, Witchiepoo captured Pufnstuf!" H.R. Pufnstuf was way before my time, so I never watched it, but my comedy nerd-dom has exposed me to lots of jokes or sketches about the cheesiness of Pufnstuf that were written by comedians who grew up watching it. Weed references during late '60s/early '70s Krofft shows were really subtle back then. I bet H.R.'s next-door neighbor was named Phil E. Blunt.
***
On The Cleveland Show, Cleveland and his drinking buddies find a living out of being seat fillers at strangers' funerals. Donna objects to Cleveland's new side job because of how creepy it is for him to pretend to have known these strangers who died, so Cleveland wises up and quits. But his temporary stint as a funeral seat filler in "Grave Danger" has resulted in some gorgeous-looking vistas of Cleveland and his friends chillaxing at the cemetary, and the craft and care that's been put into the shots of the cemetary remind me that while this recently cancelled cartoon may not be the funniest on Fox's "Animation Domination" lineup, it can really look like a million bucks from time to time. I'm not so fond of the use of Blue Oyster Cult's "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" during the funeral montage though. Like all those covers of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," the depressed white person's "Macarena," that shit was charming the first 998 times I heard it on series TV.
Meanwhile, Rallo spends a weekend at his biological dad Robert's apartment in East Stoolbend, and he encounters a pack of street kids who are tougher than even Rallo himself. He's so intimidated by them that he agrees to "jack show-and-tell" at his kindergarten class for them, especially after they blackmail him with photos of him appearing to bully a fat kid at the basketball court (of course, Rallo was actually telling the kid to fall on his ass so that he'd appear to be tougher in front of the street kids). Rallo's story is nothing special, aside from a funny running joke involving eBay (see below). But the denouement--in which Rallo scolds the other kindergarteners for their cruel and classist words towards the East Stoolbend kids who tried to steal their show-and-tell items, and then after the East Stoolbenders leave the classroom, he calls the police on their asses--is a terrific subversion of the badly aging "More You Know" endings that were a fixture of so many of the black sitcoms that influenced The Cleveland Show.
Stray observations:
* There's a good score music gag when Rallo cowers from hearing helicopter blades whirring, gunshots, a violin playing slashing chords, wolf howls, spooky moans and the cackling of a witch. To keep from getting scared, he switches on the TV and hears an anchorman (Kevin Michael Richardson) report that "according to police, the crazy wolf-ghost-witch violinist is believed to be armed and flying a helicopter, hunting for little boys who look like you."
* "Thanks again, Padre, for forgiving me for pushing the fat kid and for keeping your hands to yourself."
* "That's a nice suit, Rallo." "Thanks. I got it on eBay. Peter Dinklage wore it to the Golden Globes."
* Donna to Cleveland: "Is that a new suit?" "Mm-hmm. Got it on eBay. Tilda Swinton wore it to the Golden Globes."
* T-Pain voices one of the kindergarteners on the show? That's bananas. Then again, I shouldn't be surprised because of this cartoon's history of strange and random casting choices--like enlisting David Lynch to voice a bartender.
The start of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month is the perfect time to introduce AFOS' new late morning block, which will consist of original themes and score cues from films done by Asian American directors and other filmmakers of color (like Spike Lee, pictured above with frequent musical collaborator Terence Blanchard during a Miracle at St. Anna scoring session) who have worked on films or TV series episodes I've admired or enjoyed. I'm calling this block "The Whitest Block Ever."
Justin Lin, a co-founder of the much-buzzed-about YOMYOMF Network and director of the upcoming Fast & Furious 6 (which was scored by Lucas Vidal instead of Brian Tyler, who's pictured above with Lin), will be represented on the "Whitest Block Ever" playlist by Tyler's scores from Finishing the Game and Fast Five and Akiko Carver and DJ Ropstyle's original music from Better Luck Tomorrow, particularly "Eat with Your Eyes."
And if you tune in to "The Whitest Block Ever" and wonder why hip-hop producer CHOPS' "Chinese School" is on the playlist, "Chinese School," the opening title theme for the 2007 sports comedy Ping Pong Playa, is on there to represent the work of Jessica Yu, who directed Ping Pong Playa and is best remembered for her 1997 Oscar acceptance speech, in which she joked about her Oscar outfit costing more than the documentary she won for. The decision to censor characters' F-bombs with basketball dribble sound FX in Ping Pong Playa sort of ruined that film for me. (Remember the original Bad News Bears? Now imagine that flick with some of the shit-talking covered up by baseball bat crack sound FX--that's how dumb the decision to self-censor the dialogue in Ping Pong Playa was.) But I enjoyed both CHOPS' original tunes during Ping Pong Playa and a lot of Yu's other works, like the West Wing episodes she directed, the 1992 short film Sour Death Balls and the 2012 short doc Meet Mr. Toilet.
The current generation of Asian American YouTube content producers will also be represented during "The Whitest Block Ever" by some of George Shaw's score from the 2010 Wong Fu Productions/Ryan Higa collabo Agents of Secret Stuff. "The Whitest Block Ever," which celebrates the efforts of both these YouTube stars and the filmmakers of color who must have inspired them (and in the case of Lin, are now partnering up with them as part of YOMYOMF), airs at 10am-noon on AFOS every weekday, starting Monday.
Here's one more little taste of "The Whitest Block Ever": the Robert Rodriguez/Tito & Tarantula theme from both Grindhouse's fake Machete trailer and Rodriguez's first Machete movie (Machete returns to entertainingly piss off much of the far right again in Machete Kills on September 13).
