AFOS Blog Rewind: Doctor Who celebrated its 50th anniversary by upholding the humanism that makes it the most humanistic sci-fi franchise outside of Star Trek

Peter Capaldi, the current star of Doctor Who, returns as the Doctor this holiday season in "The Return of Doctor Mysterio."

The following is a repost of my November 26, 2013 discussion of "The Day of the Doctor." The latest of the BBC's annual Doctor Who Christmas specials premieres this Christmas Day.

So some British show celebrated the 50th anniversary of its premiere over the weekend. Inspector Spacetime didn't just prove that it hasn't shown any signs of aging even though it's a show that's so old Larry King discovered his first liver spot on the day it premiered. It also proved that even when the budget is at its lowest, the zippers on the Ocean Demon monster suits are at their most visible and the corridors that the Inspector and Constable Reggie are often seen running through are at their creakiest, it can still entertain, as long as there's plenty of charisma from whoever's portraying the Inspector and his associate and the storytelling is as impeccable as the Inspector's taste in bowler hats.

Throwback Thursday: A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas

Usually on Throwback Thursday, I randomly pull out from my desk cabinet--with my eyes closed--a movie ticket stub I saved. Then I discuss the movie on the stub and maybe a little bit of its score, which might be now streaming on AFOS. Today, instead of drawing some random ticket, I'm going to focus today's TBT piece on a Christmas movie whose stub I've kept. This is the final post of the AFOS blog's year-long TBT series. A TBT piece was the blog's first post of 2015, so this final TBT piece is the blog's final post of 2015. The blog will resume with all-new posts some time in 2016.

A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas is a triple Christmas miracle. It's a threequel that actually doesn't suck, a slapstick holiday comedy that doesn't suck and the hard-R Asian American Christmas comedy movie I--an Asian American who prefers his Christmas movies to be either irreverent (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, The Nightmare Before Christmas) or non-sentimental (The Ref)--always dreamed of.

Tired of comedies that don't reflect the diverse Jersey milieu they grew up in, writing partners Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg came up with Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle--starring John Cho as Harold (company man by day, pothead by night) and Kal Penn as Harold's more laid-back best friend Kumar--as an antidote. Hurwitz said, "Eventually we decided, wouldn't it be different if we wrote a movie where the Asian guys weren't the 'best friend,' and they were front and center." The hilarious and unabashedly crude Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle delivered a French fry grease-covered middle finger to Asian American stereotypes, placed Asian American men in non-stereotypical roles and gave them well-rounded and genuinely funny characters to play--11 years before Aziz Ansari and Alan Yang entertainingly did the same on Master of None and Fresh Off the Boat did the same with a Chinese American family very loosely (while some have viewed as way too loosely) based on restaurateur Eddie Huang's real-life fam.

I've also always wanted to see an Asian American version of Lemmon and Matthau anchoring a buddy movie. Thank fuck for the Harold & Kumar movies, in which Cho and Penn are our Lemmon and Matthau (I wish Cho and Penn would do 11 movies together like Lemmon and Matthau did, and in these buddy movies, they would get to leave behind Harold and Kumar and play other characters). Hurwitz, Schlossberg and director Danny Leiner broke new ground with the first Asian American pothead buddy comedy. In 3D Christmas (spelled with no hyphen between the 3 and D), Hurwitz, Schlossberg and director Todd Strauss-Schulson attempt to break some new ground with the first hard-R Asian American Christmas flick, and the result is both a more consistently funny Harold & Kumar sequel than Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (unlike Guantanamo Bay, it doesn't recycle gags from the first movie) and a much more visually inventive installment than the previous two.

The visual flair of 3D Christmas--despite an evidently low budget that has Detroit attempting to pass itself off as New York--is mainly due to the addition of Strauss-Schulson, a more visually adventurous director than Leiner and the duo of Hurwitz and Schlossberg, who shared directing duties on Guantanamo Bay (Strauss-Schulson's currently receiving good notices for his horror comedy The Final Girls), and the work of Laika, the great Portland stop-motion animation studio behind Coraline, ParaNorman and The Boxtrolls, during the 2011 threequel's Claymation drug trip sequence. Laika's sequence is a raunchy and gory parody of Rankin-Bass holiday specials that has Harold and Kumar seeing nothing but Rankin-Bass when their search for a Christmas tree for Harold's house gets disrupted by hallucinations caused by hallucinogen-spiked eggnog. In addition to a Claymation sequence, 3D Christmas treats the audience to a spoof of hyper-stylized heist-movie planning sequences, parodies of Sin City and Zack Snyder movies, a holiday musical number (and it too is raunchy, of course, with Kumar's '90s TV idol Neil Patrick Harris, once again playing a hyper-masculine, constantly-high-on-E version of himself, appearing to have orally satisfied a female dancer right in the middle of it) and sight gags about the ridiculousness of the film's 3-D gimmick.

The 3-D sight gags still manage to be funny even in 2-D. There's an especially crazy 3-D gag involving both a Christmas tree and Danny Trejo, who plays the tough and occasionally racist father-in-law Harold wants so badly to impress ever since he married Maria (Paula Garces), his love interest in the previous two movies. The Trejo/Christmas tree gag is classic Harold & Kumar.

Like the movie itself, the original score by William Ross isn't much of a game-changer, but it's a lot of fun. Ross, who frequently scored episodes of Tiny Toon Adventures, gets to revisit his Warner Bros. Animation scoring past for this Warner Bros. movie that's basically a live-action Warner cartoon, and the best parts of his 3D Christmas score are not the faithful covers of Christmas standards like "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" but Carl Stalling-style parodies of scores like James Horner's Mask of Zorro score ("Merry Christmas!"), any score where Lisa Gerrard's wailing ("Eggtion") and Don Davis' Matrix score ("Super Baby").

Ross' spoof of Davis' work on The Matrix is especially amusing because he was an orchestrator on The Matrix Reloaded. He wrote the Matrix-style motif for a scene where a toddler (triplets Ashley, Chloe and Hannah Coss) who's been accidentally high on weed and cocaine somehow develops superhuman strength and prepares to attack a famously vicious Ukrainian gangster (Elias Koteas). The brief motif is a great misdirect too: it tricks the audience into thinking the film is going to bust out yet another hacky parody of The Matrix's bullet-time scenes, but instead, the hacky bullet-time parody we're all expecting (fortunately) never happens.

Thomas Lennon's coked-up toddler daughter was the least favorite part of 3D Christmas for film critics who bizarrely cry foul over making humor out of kids inadvertently getting high. Like critic Stephanie Zacharek--a fan of White Castle and Guantanamo Bay who found 3D Christmas to be underwhelming but enjoyed its coked-up baby scenes--said back in 2011, the coked-up baby gags are a pretty daring move in a contemporary culture where kids are mini-potentates who must be protected from bad influences at all costs. Without the toddler's accidental encounters with drugs, 3D Christmas would have been deprived of one of my favorite scenes in the movie: Kumar's choice of "Wu-Tang Clan Ain't Nuthing ta Fuck Wit" as a lullaby to calm her down.

(Photo source: The Nihilistic Cinephile)

RZA, whose voice is all over "Wu-Tang Clan Ain't Nuthing ta Fuck Wit," even makes a cameo as a Christmas tree salesman who likes to fuck around with customers and role-play with his business partner (Da'Vone McDonald), who, at one point, desperately pleads with RZA's character to "play Angry Black Guy this time." Their scene is another great example of the Harold & Kumar movies' playful approach to racial stereotypes, which is basically "Yes, they're terrible, but you can't let them get you down, and the only way to cope with them and various other forms of racism is to laugh about them or mock them." It's not surprising why Harold and Kumar toke up a lot. Weed helps them get through the racism they have to put up with.

But in 3D Christmas, Harold has given up the herb because it lowers sperm count, and he's trying to have a baby with Maria (meanwhile, Kumar has distanced himself from an increasingly money-grubby Harold, dropped out of med school and replaced Harold with a bong--and sometimes Amir Blumenfeld--as his best friend). So in a deleted scene where an old Jewish lady at a Chinese restaurant mistakes the Korean American Harold for a Chinese waiter, Harold reacts not with a stoned laugh but in a way that's typical for those of us when we don't have a joint or a blunt to cope with racism: silent, world-weary resignation.

Hurwitz and Schlossberg frequently get criticized for the huge amounts of naked women and gay-panic jokes (fortunately, 3D Christmas has none of the gay-panic jokes that were all over White Castle and Guantanamo Bay) during their trilogy. But they've remarkably gotten two things right--and they've never gotten praise for it--in their three attempts to give Asian Americans the kinds of leading comedic roles they never previously got, which, if Hurwitz and Schlossberg hadn't been so careful or understanding, could have turned into self-serving, one-sided or clueless acts of white saviordom: 1) the way that race is an intrinsic part of the lives of people of color and affects everything we, as people of color, do; and 2) the many different ways we deal with racism, as opposed to just one way. A lot of us prefer to laugh about it, like Harold and Kumar do when they see the police artist sketches of themselves on TV at the end of White Castle. Meanwhile, the two Christmas tree salesmen in 3D Christmas prefer role-playing and running cons as their way of dealing with it. Or there are others who prefer to be more Zen about it, like the Gary Anthony Williams character in White Castle, who tells Harold that he realized long ago that there's no sense in getting riled up by racism, plus he has a really large penis, and that keeps him happy.

Those two things these two Jews managed to get right in these movies they've written as tributes to their Asian American friends (they named Harold after a real-life friend of theirs, Harold Lee) are perhaps the greatest gift the Harold & Kumar franchise has presented to us, even more so than crazy Neil Patrick Harris cameos, clever Claymation sequences, naked nun shower scenes or a waffle-making sentient robot named WaffleBot.

Nah, wait a minute. Nothing can top WaffleBot. Okay, they're the second greatest gift.

None of William Ross' score cues from A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas are currently in rotation on AFOS, but the triumphant-sounding "WaffleBot Rescue" ought to be. The AFOS blog resumes in 2016.

Attach the block: Netflix's Black Mirror: White Christmas imagines a cold future where people can be blocked in offline relationships like on Twitter

The following is a repost of a piece from December 17, 2014. It was published right after Black Mirror: White Christmas had its British premiere on December 16, 2014. White Christmas had its American premiere on DirecTV's Audience Network on December 25, 2014 and will finally be added to Netflix this Christmas day.

Goddammit, Black Mirror! Why do you have to be so amazing? Black Mirror isn't just the best anthology franchise currently on the air. It also contains some of the craftiest sci-fi storytelling on TV in 2014, as exemplified by Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker's feature-length Black Mirror: White Christmas, a delightfully twisted piece of non-traditional holiday entertainment that premiered in the U.K. on Channel 4 last night. White Christmas, which guest-starred Jon Hamm and a couple of Game of Thrones alums, Oona Chaplin and Natalia Tena, feels more like a feature film than a typical Black Mirror episode, which is why I'm writing the title in italics instead of in between quotation marks.

I've written about Black Mirror before, after it was added to Netflix in America, and as someone who stubbornly refuses to become a smartphone zombie like the male smartphone zombies in my family, I just love how much twisted and subversive fun the show has with exploring the dark side of technology. Want to live inside your phone? Well, you get your wish, but you have to part with a little thing called free will. Want to block your significant other from your marriage or any future interactions you have with him or her, just like how you can block some anonymous troll on Twitter? Well, here's the tech to block that bastard, but that person's going to be driven so crazy by being blocked that the bastard will come back later to murder your entire family.

I'm making it sound like Black Mirror is the kind of completely technophobic piece of shit Michael Crichton used to crank out. But the writing in the six previous Black Mirror episodes and White Christmas is more nuanced than that. Black Mirror's attitude isn't "Technology is evil." The show's attitude is more like "People are evil and fucked up, and when they have all this technological power in their hands, they don't know what to do with it." Not every gadget on the show is a detriment. There's one gizmo from the show I'd want to have, and that's the digital drawing board Hayley Atwell uses to create illustrations and graphic designs in "Be Right Back." But as for all the other gadgets, they seem appealing at first because of the immense power they give their users--like the "Entire History of You" device known as "the grain," which allows people to record everything from their workdays to their bedroom sessions with an implant in their skulls--but then they lose their appeal for me because of the horrible mistakes Brooker's characters make with these devices.

The first and third segments in White Christmas' triptych of interconnected horror stories about technology made me notice that there are never any healthy romantic relationships on Black Mirror. They all end badly. (At times, Black Mirror feels like the serious sci-fi version of many of Aziz Ansari's more recent stand-up routines, which have been based on extensive research he did about how much technology has changed relationships and romantic interactions.) Mankind's inability to contain its greed or keep its addiction to technology in moderation poisons everything, especially relationships. Even the original Twilight Zone, a huge influence on Brooker, was less cynical about relationships impacted by machines. When William Shatner and Patricia Breslin escaped the clutches of Satan's fortune-telling machine at the end of "Nick of Time," you knew their marriage was going to turn out okay. That's never the case with any relationship on Black Mirror.

The star of Mad Men, who portrays in White Christmas a futuristic dating coach who, of course, is unable to control the horrible outcome of one such ill-fated relationship, is the Kendrick Lamar of both American and British TV. He appears on everything. (Oh, look, he's on The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret! Now there he is on Parks and Rec, as the only employee of Leslie Knope's who's more incompetent than Jerry!) In White Christmas, I like how Brooker and director Carl Tibbetts got Hamm to tap into his comedic side, as seen in countless comedy podcasts, his 30 Rock guest shots and Bridesmaids, instead of doing nothing but brood a la Don Draper for the entire Christmas special (all the brooding during the special is left to Rafe Spall as a man who receives the aforementioned "block" from his girlfriend, who's played by Salem star Janet Montgomery). Hamm's so skilled at both anchoring Brooker's stories and injecting levity into them (his unreliable narration is the funniest part of the first White Christmas segment) that had Brooker wanted to go old-school instead and have a host introduce each story on Black Mirror, Hamm would have been the perfect Black Mirror host/narrator.

As a viewer of several comic book-inspired shows that are attempting to build shared universes of their own by dropping one reference to either the source material or a sister project after another (with his giddy habit of giving criminals colorful villain names that are the exact same names as their DC Comics print counterparts, Cisco from the CW's The Flash should be called "Mario Sue," as in "mare-ee-oh"), I'm getting kind of Easter-egged out. White Christmas is full of Easter eggs that reference previous Black Mirror episodes--at one point, Spall is seen flipping through TV shows that were featured in "Fifteen Million Merits" and "The Waldo Moment," as a sort of stocking stuffer from Brooker, in addition to this whole feature-length Christmas present he's written--but I don't mind those Easter eggs.

The possibility in White Christmas that all these Black Mirror stories take place in the same universe is interesting, and it reminds me of how the '90s version of The Outer Limits used to take its most well-received episodes and create sequels to them or intertwine those episodes' self-contained continuities with other episodes' continuities. In fact, Black Mirror is essentially an Outer Limits for the age of Google Glass and digital footprints, but better, stronger, faster. And--despite not containing any bug-eyed monsters or Cronenbergian creatures--scarier.

The first two seasons of Black Mirror--just three episodes each--can be streamed on Netflix, and they'll be joined on December 25 by the long-awaited addition of White Christmas to the streaming service. A 12-episode third season was commissioned by Netflix earlier this year and has not yet been given a premiere date.

I hate reunions, while I love how a little application called Adobe Premiere changed AFOS forever in 1999

(Photo source: A Burger a Day)

I don't like looking back at the past. I'd rather think about the present and the future, which is why a recent subject in this blog's Throwback Thursday series, The World's End--a cautionary film about the dangers of nostalgia and remaining in the past--resonates so much with me. Edgar Wright's film agrees a lot with me about staying focused on the future and never looking back. If I look at the blog archive at the bottom of my blog and the last few posts I wrote are all about subjects that took place before the '00s, I get really worried. "Uh-oh, I better not spend too much time in the past. Stay in the now," I think to myself. That's why I did for a couple of years a weekly series of posts about new TV (but focused on animation). Newer TV is always more fascinating to me than older TV. I don't even like film or TV blogs where the authors write only about old films or old TV, a.k.a. what Arthur Chu would call the pre-Selfie, pre-Fresh Off the Boat world. It's like those authors are basically saying, "Film and TV were better when it was all white folks." Uh, no, it wasn't, Teabagger.

This year, UC Santa Cruz--the university whose alums include Maya Rudolph, Cary Fukunaga and more recently, DJ Dahi--is celebrating its 50th anniversary. As part of the festivities, UCSC's campus radio station is inviting all former DJs, from Bullseye host Jesse Thorn to a classmate who occasionally keeps in touch with me, Yukiya Jerry Waki, to return to the station later this month and reminisce about their time there. I hate reunions and prefer to avoid them like the plague. So on some mornings in the past few weeks, I'll wake up thinking to myself, "Nah, I'll skip this Santa Cruz one." But then on other mornings, I'll wake up thinking, "Okay, maybe I'll drop by, probably tell someone a wacky story about that terrible time I did my radio show immediately after a sweaty, all-white drum circle performed live at the studio--so the studio smelled like the inside of an outhouse at a summer music festival for the rest of that afternoon--and after only a couple of hours of reminiscing, I bounce, and then it's straight to grabbing both a burger at Jack's and the next bus back north."

I'll always be grateful for what the station taught me about radio, broadcasting, chart reporting, interacting with the labels and so on--it was where AFOS began, as a two-hour show where I got the chance to interview on the phone Mark Hamill, '60s Star Trek composer Gerald Fried and my personal favorite interviewee on the phone during those UCSC years, a now-retired TV critic named Joyce Millman--but my time at the station also consisted of a few things I'm not proud of or that were just plain stupid. A reunion will just make me relive those cringeworthy moments I'd rather not revisit.

Before its license to thrill was revoked by Netflix again, Never Say Never Again was full of music so awful it would make Netflix viewers say "never again" to hearing it

(Photo source: New York Times)

Have you ever heard score music that's so terrible during a certain movie that its trailer music sounds like Beethoven by comparison? Michel Legrand, whose jazzy and very French score for the original Thomas Crown Affair is one of the highlights of that very '60s caper flick, clearly had an off day when he wrote the score to 1983's Never Say Never Again, the unofficial 007 movie that was the weird result of a legal dispute that allowed Thunderball to get remade with Sean Connery in the role of Bond again. (The messy circumstances that led to the production of the non-canonical Never Say Never Again--the last 007 movie to pit Bond against SPECTRE before next winter's canonical 007 movie Spectre--are like if the Indiana Jones franchise got embroiled in some sort of legal beef between Disney and George Lucas that would be too convoluted to imagine in detail here, and as part of the settlement, Harrison Ford got to star as Indy one last time in a rival Indy movie for another studio while Disney worked on its rumored reboot with Chris Pratt as Indy.)

The much-maligned GoldenEye score by French composer and frequent Luc Besson collaborator Eric Serra--the only cue I really dig during Serra's score is the very first one, the 17-second gunbarrel music--isn't the worst score written for a Bond movie. Nope, the "worst Bond score" honors would have to go to Legrand's tin-eared score. I realized his weirdly chintzy-sounding and sometimes yacht rock-ish score is the worst after I rewatched Never Say Never Again on Netflix only a few hours before the streaming service lost the streaming rights to the movie once again and had to yank it from its library over the weekend. It's the first time I've watched Never Say Never Again in its entirety since the very first time I saw it--on VHS as a kid. I barely paid attention to Never Say Never Again that day because I was too busy playing with the Christmas present my parents gave to me right before they rented a VHS of Never Say Never Again, and that toy happened to be this:

(Photo source: ActionFigurePics)

(Photo source: Vintage Action Figures)

When you're a kid whose attentions are divided between play-acting battle strategy conversations inside a huge castle playset between He-Man and Mekaneck about how they're going to metaphorically skullfuck the forces of Skeletor and Trap Jaw and watching a VHS of an overlong and clunkily paced but lavish spy flick, it's a little difficult to pay attention to the spy flick. But the one thing I do remember from that Christmastime viewing of the VHS rental of Never Say Never Again is Connery getting stabbed right after the easy-listening sounds of former Sergio Mendes and Brasil '66 vocalist Lani Hall's Never Say Never Again theme song.

Thanks to cable network airings of Never Say Never Again that failed to lure me into rewatching it in its entirety and YouTube clips of the opening titles, I'm constantly reminded of how poorly Hall's ballad--which was composed by Legrand and produced by both Hall's husband Herb Alpert and Mendes himself--fits with the opening action sequence. It's not the worst tune, but "Never Say Never Again" is yacht rock-era Sergio Mendes and Herb Alpert, not "Mas Que Nada"-era Sergio Mendes and Herb Alpert.

Together with Hall and the rest of Brasil '66, "Mas Que Nada"-era Mendes and Alpert were responsible for one of the coolest covers of a Bond song, their remake of "The Look of Love," another tune from an unofficial Bond movie, the 1967 version of Casino Royale. The lackadaisical feel of this later Bond song from Hall, Mendes and Alpert robs Never Say Never Again's opening action sequence of any tension or suspense. Yacht rock and spy movies are a terrible combination. It's why I don't like the Rita Coolidge version of "All Time High" the late John Barry produced for Octopussy--a rare musical misstep by Barry--and I instead prefer the more dangerous-sounding (especially at 3:06) Pulp cover of "All Time High" David Arnold produced for 1997's Shaken and Stirred: The David Arnold James Bond Project, the cover album that landed Arnold the gig as Tomorrow Never Dies score composer.

The rest of Legrand's Never Say Never Again score is far worse than the opening theme and lacks the oomph, tunefulness, grandeur and sexuality of the best of Barry's work for the official Bond movies. Oomph, tunefulness, grandeur and sexuality are four reasons why, like recent "Uptown Funk" mastermind Mark Ronson once said in 2011, Barry's work has been sampled so much by hip-hop artists ("It's mean stuff. It's not pretty or sanitised. It sounds tough," wrote Ronson). Legrand's score is a good example of why French musicians shouldn't be scoring Bond movies. Unless they're Daft Punk. That's because I like those two helmeted motherfuckers and I like how the idea of Daft Punk scoring a Bond flick would make way-too-conservative Bond fanboys--the same fanboys who are way too intense about their hatred of French electronica artist Mirwais for producing Madonna's much-maligned Die Another Day theme--squirm.

The Never Say Never Again trailer music has more oomph than the actual music in the movie. Sure, the unknown composer who wrote the trailer music was clearly imitating Bill Conti's score from an official Bond movie, 1981's For Your Eyes Only, without using the Barry/Monty Norman Bond theme that Conti had the freedom to include and neither Never Say Never Again producer Jack Schwartzman (the late husband of Talia Shire, as well as the father of Jason Schwartzman) nor Warner Bros. had the rights to use for their rival Bond movie.

But the anonymous Conti wannabe's trailer music gives off sparks in ways that Legrand's score fails to do. Combined with both the way the trailer house pieced together footage of the movie and the baritone of Peter Cullen (a.k.a. Optimus Prime), the voice of so many trailers and TV spots for '80s Bond flicks, the trailer music makes Never Say Never Again appear to be a more exciting action movie than it actually is.

The best things about Never Say Never Again are the performances of Connery--who's more awake during Never Say Never Again than he was when he sleepwalked through You Only Live Twice because he was sick and tired of the Bond franchise at the time of You Only Live Twice's filming--and Barbara Carrera, who steals the movie as Fatima Blush (like Luciana Paluzzi did during Thunderball when she played the same villainous character, Fiona Volpe, in that version of the story, 18 years before). Carrera was even nominated for a Golden Globe for her performance as Fatima. Throughout my rewatch of the movie on Netflix, all I could think, especially when Carrera wasn't on screen, was "All that money that's up there on screen, and they couldn't get Raiders of the Lost Ark cinematographer Douglas Slocombe to light the locations with more panache, and they couldn't get Connery a more convincing toupee."

The mid-'80s were not exactly the greatest period for Bond movies, whether official or unofficial, although Octopussy has its moments, dumb Tarzan yell gag and questionable attitudes towards Indians aside. I don't know if the most underwhelming aspects of Never Say Never Again were because of cocaine or because of the Taliafilm production company's cluelessness about how to craft a Bond movie a la the Broccoli family, which runs the Bond movie franchise like a tight ship. But when you hire folks like Legrand, Slocombe, Empire Strikes Back director Irvin Kershner and stuntpeople from Raiders of the Lost Ark and they're not putting in their best work (one minute, Kim Basinger's escaping from a castle on horseback, clad in just a slip, and then the next minute, her stunt double's leaping off the castle fully dressed, or maybe those aren't long sleeves and that's the stunt double's actual skin, which is far lighter than Basinger's), the blame for those underwhelming aspects has to be put on the badly distracted leadership of Schwartzman, who was reportedly too busy dealing with constant legal battles with the Broccoli family and Eon Productions to be present for the day-to-day shooting. His absence "left the actual supervision of production in the hands of barely-qualified subordinates," wrote You Only Blog Twice blogger Bryant Burnette.

(Photo source: Lewis Wayne Gallery)

(Photo source: You Only Blog Twice)

Legrand's tepid-sounding Never Say Never Again score cues have been frequently excised from the movie by Bond fanboys in fan edits of Never Say Never Again they've posted on YouTube or outside YouTube. I think they should try inserting into their Never Say Never Again re-edits the theme songs from Bond video games like the Quantum of Solace video game and Blood Stone, which are more enjoyable tunes than most of the opening themes from the '80s and '90s Bond movies themselves.

The Legrand cues are, of course, not part of "AFOS Incognito," the new espionage genre music block at midnight on AFOS. Only the best original music from spy movies or shows is streamed during "AFOS Incognito," like Barry's On Her Majesty's Secret Service cues "This Never Happened to the Other Feller" and "Main Theme." Barry, show 'em how it's done.

The Ref, whose score album will be looped on AFOS on Christmas, is the best holiday flick Netflix doesn't carry right now

What the shit, Netflix?

Even on DVD, director Ted Demme's 1994 Christmastime comedy The Ref--which, even though it was made for only $11 million, flopped at the box office but became a cult favorite afterward--still can't catch a break. While attempting two weeks ago to add The Ref to my Netflix queue so that I could rewatch it in time for the holidays, I received the following message from Netflix: "Available 1/1/2015."

Excuse me? January? After the time of the year when The Ref takes place? This isn't the first time the words "The Ref" and "lousy timing" were in the same sentence. One of the reasons why it flopped was because Touchstone Pictures dumped it in theaters in March instead of releasing it during the holiday season. The studio executive who made that scheduling decision probably also believes that Fox should go back to unveiling The Simpsons' annual "Treehouse of Horror" episode after Halloween or that presents should be opened after Christmas.

The Ref, whose out-of-print score music by David A. Stewart will be looped on AFOS all Christmas Day long (this Thursday), doesn't deserve this kind of treatment. Demme's 20-year-old movie is one of the best anti-Christmas movies ever made, although "anti-Christmas" wouldn't be a completely accurate description of the movie's attitude towards Christmas because not even its ending is totally immune to the holiday spirit. The Ref's attitude is more like "anti-Christmastime sentimentality" and "anti-fake and callous people during Christmas."

The movie's title refers to Denis Leary, who stars as Gus, a hapless burglar who's forced to play both referee and marriage counselor to the two constantly bickering hostages he's taken while hiding in the Connecticut suburbs from cops on Christmas Eve. Those hostile hostages (outside America, The Ref is called Hostile Hostages, which makes it sound like a Woody Woodpecker cartoon) are the yuppie couple of Lloyd Chasseur (Kevin Spacey), an unhappy antique store manager, and his adulterous and equally unhappy wife Caroline (Judy Davis).

As the night wears on, Gus finds himself becoming Lloyd and Caroline's hostage, and the Chasseurs' arguments about their failing marriage, the class conflict between Gus and the suburbanites and the battle of wills over who has the upper hand in the hostage situation aren't the only battles of wills during the film. There's also the game of cops and robbers between the largely incompetent local police force and Gus; the mental duel between the Chasseurs' juvenile delinquent son Jesse (Robert J. Steinmiller Jr.), who's home from military school, and Siskel (J.K. Simmons), the military instructor he's blackmailing; and the battle of wills between Lloyd's visiting mother, the heartless Rose Chasseur (Glynis Johns), and practically everyone else, including her own son. The character of Rose brings to mind the late Sir Peter Ustinov's frequent description of his famously curmudgeonly Spartacus co-star Charles Laughton: "Somebody who was hanging around waiting to be offended."

Countless Christmas movies have posited that Christmas can be the most stressful of holidays, whether it's Home Alone or It's a Wonderful Life, but Demme's movie is one of the few that emphasizes and captures quite well something many adult viewers can relate to: the discomfort and nasty invective experienced by family members who hate each other and are forced to be in the same room together on Christmas. Screenwriter Richard LaGravenese, who co-wrote The Ref with his sister-in-law Marie Weiss, drew these scenes of discord from their own experiences at holiday family dinners ("Both Marie and I are Italian Catholics who married into Jewish families, so we do have those big holiday dinners. Families always have these unspoken dramas," said LaGravenese in 1994). They wanted to explore what would happen if the unspoken tensions during those occasions stopped remaining silent and everyone started being honest. Humor mined from uncomfortable and boozy holiday family gatherings is why SNL's fake Dysfunctional Family Christmas record album commercial ("Leave me alone, please go away/I'm doing fine, just get away") remains one of the show's most beloved sketches from the early '90s, and it's also why The Ref built up a cult following after its release.

The cult following is also due to the invective being really nasty (even more so than in other non-traditional Christmas movies that aren't Bad Santa) and delivered beautifully by everyone in the cast, including Leary, Davis and Spacey, who, in 1994, was already a respected actor whom theater or TV critics would frequently write hosannas and sonnets for, but he wasn't yet a movie star. Although the late Demme said in a 1994 New York Times News Service interview that he didn't cast huge stars because he wanted "an everyman, underground, edgier feel to the characters," The Ref was built and marketed as a star vehicle for Leary, whose rants in a series of Demme-directed MTV interstitials had just brought him notoriety and whose film work at the time consisted of showy supporting roles in action flicks like Demolition Man and Judgment Night. But because The Ref didn't become the breakout success that would have taken the Worcester, Massachusetts-bred stand-up's film career to another level, instead it's better remembered as the place where Simmons--now a likely Oscar contender for his role in Whiplash--had his first feature film role. (His bit part as Jesse's stripper-loving military instructor was named after Gene Siskel by LaGravenese as a form of revenge after Siskel trashed his screenplay for The Fisher King.)

The Ref is also the place where I first took notice of Christine Baranski, who's excellent as the film's second most hateable woman, Lloyd's bossy sister-in-law, and is one of many theater-bred actors in the cast who make The Ref gel so well, as if it were a snappy stage farce with twice more F-bombs than Avenue Q. There are so many pointless stage versions of movies, whether it's Legally Blonde: The Musical or Shrek: The Musical. Because of LaGravenese and Weiss' hilarious script and the incisive dialogue, The Ref is far more deserving of the stage treatment than those movies. It's the kind of movie that, with the right stage director and the sharpest actors, would kill as a stage play (but not as a musical because that musical would be awful). Imagine the reactions Lloyd would receive from the theater audience when he finally tells off Rose ("You know what I'm gonna get you next Christmas? A big wooden cross. So every time you feel unappreciated for all your sacrifices, you can climb on up and nail yourself to it."). People would be howling just like the studio audience did when the late Greg Giraldo verbally handed Leary his ass on Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn.

The enjoyment viewers of The Ref get from scenes like Lloyd's verbal comeback to his evil mother is why Netflix's inability to carry the movie at the most appropriate time of the year--which also denies people who aren't familiar with the movie and are in the mood for a largely non-mushy holiday comedy the chance to discover it--is so maddening. The Ref is oddly comforting for people who find the holiday season to be far from comforting.

David A. Stewart's score from The Ref will be looped in the "Yell Log," all Christmas Day long (Thursday, December 25) on AFOS.

Attach the block: Black Mirror: White Christmas imagines a cold future where people can be blocked in offline relationships like on Twitter

Goddammit, Black Mirror! Why do you have to be so amazing? Black Mirror isn't just the best anthology franchise currently on the air. It also contains some of the craftiest sci-fi storytelling on TV in 2014, as exemplified by Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker's feature-length Black Mirror: White Christmas, a delightfully twisted piece of non-traditional holiday entertainment that premiered in the U.K. on Channel 4 last night. White Christmas, which guest-starred Jon Hamm and a couple of Game of Thrones alums, Oona Chaplin and Natalia Tena, feels more like a feature film than a typical Black Mirror episode, which is why I'm writing the title in italics instead of in between quotation marks.

I've written about Black Mirror before, after it was added to Netflix in America, and as someone who stubbornly refuses to become a smartphone zombie like the male smartphone zombies in my family, I just love how much twisted and subversive fun the show has with exploring the dark side of technology. Want to live inside your phone? Well, you get your wish, but you have to part with a little thing called free will. Want to block your significant other from your marriage or any future interactions you have with him or her, just like how you can block some anonymous troll on Twitter? Well, here's the tech to block that bastard, but that person's going to be driven so crazy by being blocked that the bastard will come back later to murder your entire family.

I'm making it sound like Black Mirror is the kind of completely technophobic piece of shit Michael Crichton used to crank out. But the writing in the six previous Black Mirror episodes and White Christmas is more nuanced than that. Black Mirror's attitude isn't "Technology is evil." The show's attitude is more like "People are evil and fucked up, and when they have all this technological power in their hands, they don't know what to do with it." Not every gadget on the show is a detriment. There's one gizmo from the show I'd want to have, and that's the digital drawing board Hayley Atwell uses to create illustrations and graphic designs in "Be Right Back." But as for all the other gadgets, they seem appealing at first because of the immense power they give their users--like the "Entire History of You" device known as "the grain," which allows people to record everything from their workdays to their bedroom sessions with an implant in their skulls--but then they lose their appeal for me because of the horrible mistakes Brooker's characters make with these devices.

The first and third segments in White Christmas' triptych of interconnected horror stories about technology made me notice that there are never any healthy romantic relationships on Black Mirror. They all end badly. (At times, Black Mirror feels like the serious sci-fi version of many of Aziz Ansari's more recent stand-up routines, which have been based on extensive research he did about how much technology has changed relationships and romantic interactions.) Mankind's inability to contain its greed or keep its addiction to technology in moderation poisons everything, especially relationships. Even the original Twilight Zone, a huge influence on Brooker, was less cynical about relationships impacted by machines. When William Shatner and Patricia Breslin escaped the clutches of Satan's fortune-telling machine at the end of "Nick of Time," you knew their marriage was going to turn out okay. That's never the case with any relationship on Black Mirror.

The star of Mad Men, who portrays in White Christmas a futuristic dating coach who, of course, is unable to control the horrible outcome of one such ill-fated relationship, is the Kendrick Lamar of both American and British TV. He appears on everything. (Oh, look, he's on The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret! Now there he is on Parks and Rec, as the only employee of Leslie Knope's who's more incompetent than Jerry!) In White Christmas, I like how Brooker and director Carl Tibbetts got Hamm to tap into his comedic side, as seen in countless comedy podcasts, his 30 Rock guest shots and Bridesmaids, instead of doing nothing but brood a la Don Draper for the entire Christmas special (all the brooding during the special is left to Rafe Spall as a man who receives the aforementioned "block" from his girlfriend, who's played by Salem star Janet Montgomery). Hamm's so skilled at both anchoring Brooker's stories and injecting levity into them (his unreliable narration is the funniest part of the first White Christmas segment) that had Brooker wanted to go old-school instead and have a host introduce each story on Black Mirror, Hamm would have been the perfect Black Mirror host/narrator.

As a viewer of several comic book-inspired shows that are attempting to build shared universes of their own by dropping one reference to either the source material or a sister project after another (with his giddy habit of giving criminals colorful villain names that are the exact same names as their DC Comics print counterparts, Cisco from the CW's The Flash should be called "Mario Sue," as in "mare-ee-oh"), I'm getting kind of Easter-egged out. White Christmas is full of Easter eggs that reference previous Black Mirror episodes--at one point, Spall is seen flipping through TV shows that were featured in "Fifteen Million Merits" and "The Waldo Moment," as a sort of stocking stuffer from Brooker, in addition to this whole feature-length Christmas present he's written--but I don't mind those Easter eggs.

The possibility in White Christmas that all these Black Mirror stories take place in the same universe is interesting, and it reminds me of how the '90s version of The Outer Limits used to take its most well-received episodes and create sequels to them or intertwine those episodes' self-contained continuities with other episodes' continuities. In fact, Black Mirror is essentially an Outer Limits for the age of Google Glass and digital footprints, but better, stronger, faster. And--despite not containing any bug-eyed monsters or Cronenbergian creatures--scarier.

Both seasons of Black Mirror--just three episodes each--can be streamed on Netflix. There haven't been any announcements yet regarding Netflix making White Christmas available to American viewers. Parts of White Christmas are reminiscent of the sci-fi-tinged Batman: The Animated Series episodes "His Silicon Soul," in which a neglected robot clone of Batman believes he's the real Batman, and "Perchance to Dream," in which Bruce Wayne wakes up to discover his parents were never murdered. Excerpts from the late Shirley Walker's superb score from "Perchance to Dream" can be heard during "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" and "Hall H" on AFOS.

The "Yell Log" on AFOS will loop The Ref's out-of-print score album all day long on Christmas Day

On Christmas, Lloyd and Caroline Chasseur do not get to yell, but AFOS gets to do so. AFOS will stream the Ref score album by David A. Stewart of both Eurythmics and Lily Was Here theme fame all day long on Thursday, December 25. It's just like how TBS loops A Christmas Story all day long on Christmas or how TV stations still do that dumb thing where they loop footage of a yule log burning in a fireplace while playing shitty holiday music (I'd like to write and direct a short film all about the one poor sap who had to work at the local UHF station on Christmas--back when UHF stations were a thing--because he had to press the buttons that kept the "Yule Log" video running). I don't understand it. Why do TV stations still air "Yule Log" loops? Is it to simulate a fireplace for people who don't have fireplaces? Just light a rat on fire in a trash can and make that the "Yule Log." That's better than a fake fireplace that keeps playing Paul McCartney's "Wonderful Christmastime."

The "Yell Log" is my holiday gift to the one or two individuals out there who actually log on to AFOS on December 25. Director Ted Demme's acerbic 1994 comedy--starring Kevin Spacey and Judy Davis as the bickering Chasseurs and Denis Leary as a burglar who takes the yuppie couple hostage on Christmas Eve and ends up regretting it ("Great. I hijacked my fucking parents.")--is one of my favorite Christmas movies. In fact, on some days, The Ref, which was lamely retitled Hostile Hostages outside America, is my favorite Christmas movie, and on other days, it's Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.

A dark Christmas comedy isn't complete without a drunk Santa, and he's played in The Ref by Bill Raymond, a.k.a. "The Greek" from The Wire. He's one of many stage play veterans in The Ref's cast, along with Spacey, Davis, Christine Baranski and B.D. Wong (in the role of a therapist before he played similar roles on both Law & Order: SVU and the short-lived Awake). I actually got to see Raymond live on stage as the mischievous title character in an American Conservatory Theater production of Molière's Scapin in San Francisco as part of a high school field trip, about a year before I saw him get wasted as a quintessential drunk Santa. It's remarkable how Raymond could convincingly transform from a loud and slapsticky character like Scapin or the drunk Santa to a laconic and completely still individual like the Gus Fring-type crime boss he portrayed on The Wire.

Slapped with the additional title Songs of Suburbia (perhaps to de-emphasize the film's Yuletide setting while it was playing in theaters during springtime instead of Christmastime), the Ref score album has long been out of print. The record label that released it, Imago Records, folded only a few months after the score album's release, and no labels since then have expressed interest in reissuing it, which is a bit of a shame because I'm a sucker for the Massive Attack/Nellee Hooper/Portishead/'90s British downtempo sound that Stewart aimed for in his Ref score. He even got Shara Nelson, one of Massive Attack's various vocalists, to perform the film's end title theme, "Welcome to the Suburbs." In its warmest moments, especially during "Welcome to the Suburbs," the Ref score brings to mind the lushness of 1985's enjoyable "There Must Be an Angel (Playing with My Heart)" from Stewart's Eurythmics days, a song that could have easily doubled as a holiday tune had it been released as a single in December instead of June, kind of like how The Ref could have made a little more money had Touchstone Pictures released it in December instead of March.

Stewart's opening title theme nicely sets the mood of The Ref and hints at how dark a Christmas comedy The Ref is, via the combination of a holiday choir and a very '90s trip-hop groove that represents the crime caper side of the film. So that opening title theme, along with "Welcome to the Suburbs" and a couple of score cues that contain dialogue from the film--it was the '90s, when soundtrack album producers wanted their albums to be like the soundbite-heavy Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction soundtracks--will all be there during the "Yell Log," for any Ref fan or any "Yell Log" listener whose past holiday seasons have rarely been merry and bright to enjoy as many times as they want.

I'm doing a bit of resequencing with the Ref album tracks. I'm omitting from the "Yell Log" the song "Broken Circles," which was performed by Ké Grivois--it's the only track on the album that wasn't produced by Stewart--and I'm moving "Welcome to the Suburbs" to the position of the final track to emulate its placement at the end of the film. At one point, I was even thinking of changing the name of the day-long loop from "Yell Log" to "Ref-tivus." Nah, maybe I'll do that next year. I'm not sure if the "Yell Log" should become a holiday tradition, but I do know that somewhere, there's another Ref fan just like me who prefers their Christmas entertainment to be unsentimental and funny as hell Connecticut.

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Bob's Burgers, "Father of the Bob"

Every Friday in "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week," I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

One of my old day jobs was writing for a weekly newspaper, and I was assigned to write really hard-hitting stuff: a series of short profiles of restaurateurs in one of San Jose's gazillion Camazotz-esque suburbs. One week, I chose a matzo ball soup place to be the paper's local eatery of the week, and the discussion of the opening of that old restaurant reopened a rift between the two brothers who ran the joint. Yeah, I really enjoyed being the cause of two family members beefing over who played a bigger role in the family business.

The conflict between Bob and his estranged restaurateur dad Big Bob in "Father of the Bob," this year's Bob's Burgers Christmas episode, brings back memories of that matzo ball soup feud I somehow reignited. Except this conflict is way more entertaining and headed towards some sort of resolution. Big Bob sort of appeared on Bob's Burgers before, but he was kept off-screen in a flashback and voiced by H. Jon Benjamin; in his first full appearance, Big Bob--now voiced quite convincingly by a young guy who's had plenty of experience portraying old, cantankerous men, Bill Hader--is alive and well and still running Big Bob's Diner, a far more popular local eatery than Bob's Burgers. The diner, which had previously appeared in pictures on the Belchers' apartment walls, is also the place where the younger Bob honed his skills as a craftsman of gourmet burgers with puntastic names--before a grill-side argument with his dad led Bob Jr. to go into business for himself.

This half-hour Christmas present from episode co-writers Steven Davis and Kelvin Yu comes wrapped in the form of both a nifty mini-origin story for Bob Jr.'s restaurant and a father/son reconciliation story that carries some echoes of the reunion between Krusty the Clown and Jackie Mason's Rabbi Krustofsky, who, like Big Bob, was embarrassed by his son's comedic approach to things (in Big Bob's case, his son's interest in inventing what he dismisses as "gimmick burgers" was what he objected to most strongly). But as much as I adore the classic-era Simpsons episode "Like Father, Like Clown," I always found its closing "O Mein Papa" sing-along between Krusty and his dad to be a bit schmaltzy for my tastes. Bob's Burgers is much more restrained when it comes to heartfelt moments, which is more effective to me than teary renditions of sappy German oldies, and that perhaps is due to the input of co-executive producer Jim Dauterive, who seems to have emulated that restrained approach to heartfelt moments from his previous show King of the Hill.

When "Father of the Bob" finally does arrive at that reconciliation between Bob and his dad, it brilliantly places it in one of the least likely settings for a serious heart-to-heart about raising kids, remorse for having been an inflexible parent and coping with an absent wife: a crowded country/western line dance. I just love how Bob awkwardly tries to keep up with the rest of the dancers while the much less awkward Big Bob--who's learned to line-dance in his off-hours--finally opens up to him and makes the very first reference on the show to Bob's mom (it's not specified if she's dead or alive). It's one of many ways that Bob's Burgers gets playful with the obligatory emotional scene towards the end of most family sitcoms: by burying the emotion under music (or a scene location) that's all tonally wrong, like in the line-dancing scene, or by having the Belchers say "I love you" to each other so many times in the same sentence that it pisses off a bystander.

The Baby You Can Chive My Car Burger (Photo source: The Bob's Burger Experiment)

But before that truce at the line dance, the two Bobs reignite their longtime disagreements over cuisine and customers' preferences. I also love the episode's implication that every restaurant in the show's unnamed town has a Teddy--a meek guinea pig for the chef's culinary experiments--and at Big Bob's Diner, that would be Henry (Carl Reiner), who isn't a relative of Teddy's, but the character's nose design is similar to his. (It's like how several of the Acme Looniversity students on Tiny Toon Adventures had similar facial and behaviorial attributes to teachers like Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, but they weren't relatives or offspring of the faculty.) At his latest reluctant Christmastime visit to Big Bob's Diner, Bob tries to prove wrong his dad's opinions about gimmicky burgers and culinary experimentation by getting Henry to enjoy his Baby You Can Chive My Car Burger, one of many "jokey burger specials" that Big Bob expressed his disdain for during the grill-side argument that drove away--no pun intended--20-something Bob from his diner. Meanwhile, Big Bob tries to lure Henry away from Bob's burger with a simple tuna melt.

The competitive nature of the A-story (mirrored in the B-story of the kids competing to create the best present for Bob out of stuff in their grandpa's basement) is, to me, the most Christmassy part of "Father of the Bob," even more so than father and son putting aside their differences just in time for the holiday. Because Christmas isn't really "chestnuts roasting on an open fire," like Madison Avenue would rather have you believe. Often, it's more like "chumps trampling each other in a Walmart." Or two brothers embroiled in an old matzo ball soup feud.

Memorable quotes:

* Teddy: "Hey, father issues--we all got 'em. I've got mother issues too. I've even got cousin issues. Beautiful blond cousin issues."
Tina, channeling Annie and Shirley: "Aw..."
Bob: "Ew."
Teddy: "What?"

* Bob discovers that his dad kept in his basement a copy of the first review of Bob's Burgers: "Unique burgers. Good prices. Service leaves something to be desired. But worth the trip." That sounds a lot like many of the reviews the show first received when it premiered on Fox.

* Pete (Nick Offerman), Big Bob's best friend, to Bob: "Your dad's in my bar. We're gonna go see him."
Tina: "Yeah, Dad. When a mysterious cowboy/Santa says, 'Come with me,' you climb on that horse and ride."

* Bob: "I thought this was a disco."
Pete: "That's Wednesdays. Thursdays, we watch Scandal."

* Bob, regarding the line-dancing thing: "You guys are really good at this."
Big Bob: "I'm here every Friday night. And Thursdays. I love Scandal."

* The following is from an ad-libbed scene between Bob, Big Bob and Linda that wasn't included in "Father of the Bob" for obvious reasons:
Bob: "You used to drink so much Baileys."
Big Bob: "I would smell it from across the room. There was a very nice restaurant, or, uh, like more like a dessert place across the street, and it would waft across the street, and it would come in, and the next thing I know, I'd be strangling your mother, every fucking scent in the whole place..."
Bob: "You were the only drunk who exclusively drank Baileys."