1. Cleavon Little, "I Get a Kick Out of You," Blazing Saddles, La-La Land
2. Frankie Laine, "Signature/Main Title," Blazing Saddles, La-La Land
3. Dave Grusin Trio, "The Long Goodbye," Fitzwilly/The Long Goodbye, Varèse Sarabande
4. Roy Budd, "Jazz It Up (MC/M4),"The Marseille Contract, Castle Music
5. Donald Byrd, "Wilford's Gone" (from Cornbread, Earl & Me), Do You Pick Your Feet in Poughkeepsie?, Paul Nice
6. Joseph Koo, "The Killing Fight" (from The Big Boss), Do You Pick Your Feet in Poughkeepsie?, Paul Nice
7. Danny Elfman, "The Little Things," Wanted, Lakeshore* 8. Buffy, Spike, Sweet, Giles, Xander, Anya, Tara and Willow, "Walk Through the Fire," Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Once More, With Feeling, Rounder
9. Ennio Morricone, "Il Giardino Delle Delizie" (from The Garden of Delights), The Ennio Morricone Anthology: A Fistful of Film Music, Rhino
10. Isaac Hayes, "Source No. 3 (Caffe Reggio)" (from Shaft), Shaft Anthology: His Big Score and More!, Film Score Monthly
11. Quincy Jones, "Theme from The Anderson Tapes,"The Reel Quincy Jones, Hip-O
12. Quincy Jones, "Money Runner" (from $), The Reel Quincy Jones, Hip-O
13. Bear McCreary, "The Mask of Fargo" (from the Eureka episode "Noche de Sueños"), Eureka, La-La Land
14. Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard, "Aggressive Expansion," The Dark Knight, Warner Sunset/Warner Bros.
15. Thomas Newman, "Jazira Maroun (End Title)," Towelhead, Lakeshore
16. John Morris, "Noble Farewell/Finale," Blazing Saddles, La-La Land
* An interesting L.A. Times column from June about the recording of "The Little Things" can be found here. It mentions that Elfman recorded an alternate version of "The Little Things" with Russian lyrics for Wanted's Russian release.
A Fistful of Soundtracks: The Series returns to the channel schedule next Tuesday.
If you've never seen the Newman cult favorite Slap Shot, you're missing out on one of the 10 greatest sports flicks of all time. After reading about the death of Newman, whose performances I've always enjoyed watching because of what Alan Sepinwall calls Newman's "anti-vanity," I immediately popped into my DVD player the only Newman movie in my DVD collection, Slap Shot. (I wish I had a copy of Nobody's Fool in my collection, but Slap Shot sufficed.)
Every time someone posts a list of their favorite sports movies, they tend to pick the earnest ones (Rocky, Rudy, Field of Dreams, The Pride of the Yankees) as their favorites. You know, movies that make grown men cry? To borrow a classic Kay Howard line from Homicide: Life on the Street, "Oh, make me puke!" I prefer the more off-kilter and humorous sports flicks like Slap Shot, Diggstown, Breaking Away and Shaolin Soccer.
Nobody's Fool may be my favorite Newman movie, but Slap Shot contains my favorite Newman character, Reggie Dunlop, the aging hockey coach with a rather relaxed attitude towards on-the-rink behavior. Dunlop's insults are so delightfully foul-mouthed and politically incorrect that I'd hate to see what this movie is like when it airs on basic cable ("You know, your son looks like a fuddy-duddy to me. You better get married again 'cause he's gonna wind up with somebody's sock in his mouth before you can say Jack Robinson.").
I doubt TCM will include Slap Shot in its inevitable Newman marathon tribute. Even though TCM never censors its movies, I don't think they've ever aired a movie that's filled to the brim with F-bombs like Slap Shot.
Moviegoers in 1959 winced when they saw Jimmy Stewart discuss panties and sperm in the courtroom in Anatomy of a Murder. They probably had a coronary when they heard Newman curse up a storm in Slap Shot.
No wonder Newman considered Dunlop to be his favorite character and called Slap Shot the most fun movie shoot he ever did. I guess he didn't mind wearing what has to be some of the ugliest pants in movie history. (Plaid trousers? That pair of bell-bottom leather pants Newman tried to rock later in the film? Not even someone as cool as Newman in Slap Shot, Kurt Russell in Escape from New York or Eddie Murphy in his concert movies could persuade me to slip into a pair of leather pants. There are two things I'll never wear: leather pants and open-toed shoes. They're the least manly-looking pieces of fashion ever invented.)
It's interesting that Newman's final role was in another sports movie (and an animated one too!), Cars. I'm glad he went out as a talking Hudson Hornet instead of a planet-eating lardass.
In high school, I wanted to be a comics illustrator like Jim Lee or Norm Breyfogle, but I gave up pursuing it because I sucked at it. I just didn't have the patience or aptitude for it.
Sixteen years later, I get bit by the webcomic writing bug, and here I am, attempting to draw my first webcomic (in addition to writing it). The getting-back-into-drawing part was the biggest challenge of this comic.
You know what's also a challenge? Trying to explain to my devout Catholic dad that Renfrew cockblocked Daryl and Joe (off-panel) in chapter 5, without using the word "cockblocked."
"AFOS A-Go-Go" airs every Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday in September on the Fistful of Soundtracks channel.
* Shaw was an orchestrator on one of my favorite films, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Earlier this month, one of Shaw's first feature scoring assignments,Asian Stories, hit DVD shelves. The 2006 indie film is a romantic comedy starring James Kyson Lee (Ando from Heroes) and Kathy Uyen (Spirits).
Everyone and their mother has a crappy webcomic, and now I've created one too. Rather than ask a more talented artist to pencil and ink the webcomic, I decided to do everything myself so that I could post the webcomic right away and because I wanted to have complete creative control. Drawing the strips wasn't easy. Since I'm an amateur artist, it took longer for me to finish them than it would take for a professional because I can draw faces--and that's about it. I'm terrible at drawing bodies.
This six-part black-and-white webcomic is a dialogue writing exercise that I did to prepare myself for The Palace, a project I'm trying to get started on. I'm not sure yet if The Palace will be a graphic novel, an ordinary novel without any illustrations or a series of webcomics, but one thing's for sure: The Palace's central character and his best friend will be Filipino American (gotta represent!).
In this webcomic featuring characters I created for The Palace, the staff of an old-fashioned movie palace in Luminesa, California reacts to the latest in a never-ending series of setbacks: the popularity of the rival multiplex's biggest attraction, The Dark Knight.
The Monty Python and the Holy Grail trailer did the deconstruct-other-trailers thing better back in 1974, but the HG2G trailer's spoof of "a deep voice that sounds like a seven-foot-tall man who has been smoking cigarettes since childhood" is awesome. The announcer who parodied LaFontaine's delivery was not LaFontaine himself, as some bloggers have said. AshtonSmith, best known for narrating the trailers and TV spots for the Bourne series, was the deep-voiced announcer. (Smith had some amusing things to say about his colleague both before and after his death, like "When you die, the voice you hear in heaven is not Don's. It's God trying to sound like Don" and "I guess God is going to lose that gig when Don gets up there because Don is just that good.")
Little Children
The "wealthy and pretty white people with problems" genre doesn't appeal to me. Not even the sight of a naked Kate Winslet--why can't more American actresses be as unafraid of nudity as Winslet and her fellow countrywomen are?--can get me to add Little Children to my Netflix queue. But this creepy trailer for the film that revitalized Jackie Earle Haley's career is beautifully put together by the folks at Mark Woollen Associates.
I Am Going to Get You SuckerI'm Gonna Git You Sucka
It's interesting that United Artists' marketing department back in 1988 had a ball promoting this little movie, while they didn't seem to be all that enthused about UA's 007 cash cow. The tepid marketing campaign for Licence to Kill* literally killed that movie's chances at the American box office.
* Often referred to as "Bond trapped in a Miami Vice episode," Licence to Kill was an okay and ahead-of-its-time attempt at a grimmer take on 007 that isn't as awful as the haters made it out to be. But what keeps me from putting LTK up on a par with the underappreciated Timothy Dalton's other Bond installment, The Living Daylights, Casino Royale, On Her Majesty's Secret Service and From Russia with Love is that composer Michael Kamen and cinematographer Alec Mills were clearly having an off day--LTK is one of the fugliest-looking Bond films ever shot. (A slashed budget might have had something to do with the downgraded cinematography and not-so-lavish-looking locations.) Because Eon Productions opted for a darker tone with LTK, this would have been the perfect opportunity for Eon to rethink the Bond series' look and production style, which were frozen in the campy Roger Moore '70s, and the unsurprisingly unballsy Eon didn't take it. LTK needed an awesome cinematographer like Dante Spinotti to step the series' game up visuals-wise. Because LTK was shot too much like a Moore-era romp, I keep expecting to hear Dalton make a Tarzan yell in the middle of a shootout.
Garden State's teaser
The frequently asked-about song during this teaser (another good one from the Mark Woollen trailer house) is "Let Go" by Frou Frou.
Jaws
Paul Mooney would probably be amused that Universal's marketing department got a black man, African Canadian actor Percy Rodrigues*, to help scare millions of white people out of going swimming.
* Rodrigues is another legendary voiceover artist who died recently. Outside of his voice work for the Jaws franchise, his most memorable voiceover was from the Alien³ trailer ("The bitch is back").
Blacula
The Blacula trailer was a highlight of the voiceover career of A Soldier's Story star Adolph Caesar, who also narrated trailers and ads for the originalDawn of the Dead, Superfly, Trouble Man and countless other B-movies. Cartoon voice actor Corey Burton was clearly channeling Caesar during the trailers for Machete, Planet Terror, Death Proof and Hell Ride.
The Birds
Sixties sitcom writer James B. Allardice wrote the sardonic copy for most of the trailers that Hitchcock appeared in ("How proud the birds must have been to have their feathers plucked out"), as well as Hitchcock's advertising-bashing segments during Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
The Sept. 1 death of announcer Don LaFontaine has led bloggers to post lists of their all-time favorite LaFontaine voiceovers or their favorite trailers, whether with or without Mr. "In a world"'s baritone. Now I'd like to chime in with my favorite previews (and a few of them feature the pipes of the legendary LaFontaine).
A few years ago, I started attaching clips of trailers and radio or TV spots to tracks that I put into rotation on A Fistful of Soundtracks' "Assorted Fistful" playlist because I didn't want to go through the trouble of recording an intro for every single track. Plus I've found that trailers and spots--particularly the always enjoyable radio spots for old blaxploitation flicks--work quite well as intros to the tracks. Since then, I've had to watch and listen to hundreds of trailers on my PC and I've developed a knack for identifying which trailer announcer's voice is which (now I'm able to tell apart LaFontaine's voice from the similar-sounding HalDouglas').
I also started to notice a few things about trailers, like how they've changed over the decades and why some viewers find them to be an annoying form of advertising. I often read or hear complaints that trailers give away too much of the movie these days. True, but trailers have always been this way. In fact, they were much worse during the '50s and '60s.
Instead of the typical two-minute length for trailers today, older trailers lasted as long as four or five minutes (!). They were at their best when the studio would try something different like getting Hitchcock himself to pimp his own film (if it were a trailer of Hitchcock just reading the phone book for five minutes, even that would be witty too). At their worst, older previews were quite dull and overly talky and hardly as inventive as the stylish and sometimes wordless trailers that presently come out of trailer production houses like Mark Woollen Associates and Ignition Creative.
I'm glad that trailers have become less wordy and less reliant on narration or "One man..."-style copy. Some of my favorite trailers play less like extended ads and more like short films (the Comedian trailer is the best example of this), and some of them have proven that a trailer can be more powerful and effective without narration or dialogue, as you can see from several of the examples below.
1. Monty Python and the Holy Grail
This is my favoritest trailer of all time because of funny gags like the unseen producer's interruption of the trailer to sack the announcer (a foreshadowing of Holy Grail's opening titles, in which the title designer is sacked in a similar fashion and replaced by other designers who end up getting sacked as well). I remember first seeing the Holy Grail trailer at the beginning of a screening of the director's cut of Blade Runner at the UC Theater in 1992, and I loved how the trailer morphed into an ad for a Chinese restaurant.
2. Comedian
Whenever someone jokes about the tweedy-voiced announcer during a tweedy trailer for some lousy middlebrow Oscar bait movie, Hal Douglas' voice is what they're joking about. Douglas, whose voice I remember from the Lethal Weapon series trailers*, is like LaFontaine's equally authoritative but more sensitive and touchy-feely older brother, which is why he was also often hired by the WB and the current WB wannabe ABC Family to lend his gravitas and comforting pipes to promos for shows like Gilmore Girls and Beautiful People. Despite his tendency towards drippy previews and promos, Douglas shares with LaFontaine an admirable willingness to poke fun at himself, like during this clever anti-trailer for the Jerry Seinfeld documentary Comedian, which doesn't even feature any footage from the doc or Seinfeld himself.
* Everyone says Pablo Francisco does a great LaFontaine impression, but he sounds more like Douglas in Lethal Weapon mode.
3. Batman's January 1989 teaser
This isn't the trailer that opened with the Batwing attacking the Joker. I'm talking about the first trailer, which hasn't been posted on YouTube and wasn't even included as an extra on the two-disc Batman DVD. The teaser opened with the Batmobile powering up its turbine engines. After that first glimpse of the new Batmobile, you were hooked and you knew this Batman wasn't going to be like any other incarnation you'd seen before on screen. Unlike the trailer that's on YouTube and the DVD, the teaser didn't contain any of Danny Elfman's score from the movie (the lack of music, narration and screen text, except for a card that posted "Coming This Summer" in silver and black block letters, added to the style and mystique of the teaser). This trailer--not the second one with the Batwing--was the one that got people talking back in January '89 because it attracted Batman fans who paid to get into the feature presentation just to see the teaser and then left the theater after the teaser ended.
4. The Shining's teaser
If it didn't have the Shining star and director credits scrolling through the screen, this would have been the creepiest PSA about Aunt Flo ever made.
5. Heat
When I was a college freshman, Heat's stunning trailers and ads got me sold on the historic teaming of Pacino, De Niro and Michael Mann. But having to buy that Pacino could kick Henry Rollins' ass--not so much.
6. Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid
Steve Martin's delivery of "He'll laugh in the face of danger! He'll dace in the fange of laughter!" kills me every time.
7. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
Last Crusade's 1988 teaser, a montage of behind-the-scenes footage, features the infamous shot of Harrison Ford pretending to staple his fedora to his head*. The 1989 trailer features my favorite LaFontaine voiceover ("For some adventures, one Jones is not enough!").
* Many Indy fans have gotten suckered into the urban legend that Ford really did staple the hat to his head. C'mon, man. If you had been exposed to that teaser a million times like I was back in '88 and '89, then you would have realized that had Ford actually stapled it to his noggin, he would have screamed as if he just drank the blood of Kali.
8. Cliffhanger
This preview was the most talked-about trailer of 1993* because of its use of Dies Irae and lack of narration, which were unique and revolutionary back in the nine-tray, but those devices are pretty much the norm nowadays.
* A great trailer makes you want to go see the flick immediately. Even though it's an awesome trailer, the Cliffhanger preview failed to accomplish that for me. I still haven't seen Cliffhanger after all these years (the negative reviews drove me away).
9. Escape from L.A.
"No freedom of religion"? Whoa, who snuck that into the "Welcome to the Theatre" announcement? Sarah Palin?
10. The Simpsons Movie's "In 2-D" teaser
Fox may be evil (micromanaging to death their comics and sci-fi projects, particularly Wolverine and Dollhouse, their lawsuit against Warners over Watchmen, Fixed Noise...), but they put together a clever and enjoyable promotional campaign for The Simpsons Movie. LaFontaine's last great trailer campaign was for that film, which spoofed CGI animal flicks in its teaser. (LaFontaine's last great voiceover--he recorded so many each year that perhaps there are a bunch of LaFontaine voiceovers that haven't even been aired yet--was for a current Sprint Instinct cell phone commercial that spoofs chick flick trailers.)
Click here for Part 2 of this post because trying to create an expandable post summary in Blogspot is so damn confusing and ineffective.
* "They're our next door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska" is this year's "Our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., uh, should help South Africa, it should help the Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future, for us."
** To borrow a Letterman joke, Palin comes across like the mayor of a small town that's banned dancing, so I wouldn't be surprised.
Or as the young'uns like to say, it drops on Monday here at afistfulofsoundtracks.blogspot.com.
I'll be posting a six-part black-and-white webcomic that I first drew on the backs of those CineMedia soundtrack press release sheets that are slipped into my soundtrack packages from CineMedia because I didn't have a drawing pad with me when I started working on the comic. Finally those press releases are being put to use.
R.I.P., Bill Melendez. Happiness is watching his body of work, from the Termite Terrace era (wow, I didn't know he was involved with one of my all-time favorite Looney Tunes shorts, Bob Clampett's "The Great Piggy Bank Robbery") to Charlie Brown.
1. Peter Thomas Sound Orchestra, "Space Patrol," Futuremuzik, Scamp 2. Stanley Clarke, "Passenger 57 Main Title," At the Movies, Epic Soundtrax 3. Bear McCreary, "Precipice" (from the Battlestar Galactica episode "Precipice"), Battlestar Galactica: Season 3, La-La Land 4. Hans Zimmer, "Why So Serious?," The Dark Knight, Warner Sunset/Warner Bros. 5. The John Gregory Orchestra, "The Sweeney," Six Million Dollar TV Themes, Spectrum 6. Tyler Bates, "Block 41," Doomsday, Lakeshore 7. Mark Mancina, "Jojo, What You Know?," Original Score from the Motion Picture Bad Boys, La-La Land 8. Mark Mancina, "Dead Guy," Original Score from the Motion Picture Bad Boys, La-La Land 9. Johnny Pate, "El Jardia," Shaft in Africa, Hip-O Select/Geffen 10. Roy Budd, "Fear Is the Key (Main Theme)," Rebirth of the Budd, Sequel 11. Peter Thomas Sound Orchestra, "The Hump" (from Edgar Wallace: The Hunchback of Soho), Futuremuzik, Scamp 12. Royal Scottish National Orchestra, "Judge Dredd Trailer," Hollywood '95, Varèse Sarabande 13. Franz Waxman, "The Ride to Dubno," Taras Bulba, Rykodisc 14. Isaac Hayes, "Main Title (Truck Turner)," MGM Soul Cinema Vol. 2, Beyond/MGM Music 15. Huey Lewis & the News, "Pineapple Express," Pineapple Express, Lakeshore
I haven't updated the station information on jim.aquino.com in weeks, and judging from the FTP problems I've suddenly been having with jim.aquino.com's provider, the famously quick-to-help Netidentity, it looks like I won't be able to update jim.aquino.com any time soon. So check back with this blog instead of jim.aquino.com for the latest news and info about A Fistful of Soundtracks or updated playlists.
Speaking of which, here now is some late-breaking news: I'm removing the hour-long A Fistful of Soundtracks: The Series from the station schedule this month. No AFOS: The Series eps for the next few weeks. I know I've been streaming the same five or six eps since springtime, but they're the only eps I'm satisfied with at the moment. I'll bring the series back to the sched when I find the time or willingness to produce another hour-long ep.
In AFOS: The Series' place will be something I'm calling "AFOS A-Go-Go."
Dictionary.com defines "a-go-go" as "In a fast and lively manner." Merriam-Webster defines it as "being up-to-date." Instead of hearing eps I recorded months or years ago, you'll be hearing segments from me that are timelier and more up-to-date--and took far less time to record and edit--during the "AFOS A-Go-Go" block. (For instance, while I was recording segments for this first week of "AFOS A-Go-Go," I found out about the death of Don LaFontaine--R.I.P.--and was able to sneak in towards the end both a brief word about this legend in the voiceover community and a montage that I hastily edited together of clips from LaFontaine's trailers and promos.)
I'll be eschewing the heavily scripted, each-epi-has-a-single-theme format I've been doing since 1999 on terrestrial radio (and since 2002 on Internet radio). I felt like trying something new. The each-ep-has-a-theme format has been too constricting. It takes a lot of time and work to pick out a theme, hunt for 14 or 15 tracks that share that theme and then come up with interesting things to say about each track.
Under this new and temporary format (which I'm thinking of switching to whenever I'm between eps like now), I'll be able to play tracks that I wasn't able to include on any of the themed eps because they didn't fit the themes. These "A-Go-Go" playlists won't have a theme, other than "favorite tracks of the week." Listeners will get to hear music that I've never streamed before on my station, plus more stuff from newer releases. I'm trying to reduce repetition, which I've noticed has been a flaw of the Internet radio stations I regularly listen to, as well as my own station.
"AFOS A-Go-Go" airs Tuesdays and Thursdays at midnight, 4am, 10am, 3pm, 7pm and 11pm, and Saturdays and Sundays at 7am, 9am, 11am, 1pm, 3pm and 5pm.
8. Buffy, Spike, Sweet, Giles, Xander, Anya, Tara and Willow, "Walk Through the Fire," Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Once More, With Feeling, Rounder
