This is the 10th of 13 or 14 all-new blog posts that are being posted until this blog's final post in December 2017.
Game of Thrones, the most popular TV show in the world right now, is a show I've been ride-or-die for since the eerie White Walker attack that opened its 2011 pilot episode. It's a rare small-screen soap opera in which the action filmmaking on display during certain set pieces--marshaled by directors like Miguel Sapochnik and Breaking Bad veteran Michelle MacLaren, a.k.a. the original director of Wonder Woman before she quit over creative differences with Warner Bros.--is intriguingly on a par with the work of master craftsmen in the action genre like the "Johns": the late John Frankenheimer, John Woo and Johnnie To, Woo's much more grounded (as in there are no fucking doves in his movies) but similarly skilled Hong Kong compatriot.
The one-and-a-half-year-old podcast Song Exploder has a tantalizing premise for a show about the craft of music. Each episode, produced and edited by musician Hrishikesh (pronounced "rih-shee-kaysh") Hirway, who records under the name The One AM Radio, takes a new or recent piece of music from any genre, whether instrumental or with vocals, and explains each of the components that form the composition. As a sometime hip-hop blogger, the Song Exploder installments about tracks by Open Mike Eagle, Ghostface Killah and RJD2 (whom people outside hip-hop only know as "the Mad Men theme guy," but he's more than just "A Beautiful Mine," old white fogeys) definitely captured my interest, but my favorite Song Exploder episodes would have to be any installment that delves into the making of a film or TV score cue, and they're all worth a listen.
Bouchard said, "This had to be a story of hardship as it pertains to running a restaurant, but it's supposed to be an optimistic show and a nice slice of life with a lot of happiness in it. The ukulele was perfect, so I knew that I wanted to start with that." In more recent seasons, Bob's Burgers has occasionally flirted with slicing out the opening titles--and sadly, the local business name puns during those titles as well--and cutting straight to the first scene of the story, but fortunately, the theme survives in the form of the presence of Bouchard's uke during those episodes.
Other score music-related installments of Song Exploder have delved into Jeff Beal's House of Cardstheme; Brian Reitzell's eerie and complicated sound design for his music on Hannibal, as part of a crossover with Roman Mars' architecture-and-design podcast 99% Invisible; the brief score cue Brian Tyler wrote for the Avengers: Age of Ultron title card; and Jeremy Zuckerman's creation of the very last cue in the final episode of The Legend of Korra ("On a kids' show, showing a lesbian relationship... I kind of wanted the music to reflect that this is a historic moment"), during what has to be Song Exploder's most oddly affecting installment. Zuckerman's masterful Korra cues are a good example of what animator Timothy Reckart once told me about score cues that excel by not overdoing sentimentality: they don't dictate the emotions and instead suggest the depth of those emotions.
For its premiere episode as a new addition to the podcasting network Radiotopia about two weeks ago, Song Exploder chose as a suitably grand first subject the global phenomenon that's spawned everything from billions of YouTube musician covers of its main title theme to really annoying and asinine fan reaction supercuts of narcissistic viewers recording themselves and hamming it up for the camera while they watch beloved characters perish: Game of Thrones. The Ramin Djawadi episode doesn't go into the pressure Djawadi must have been under when he had to replace Stephen Warbeck as the Game of Thrones composer about a few weeks before the premiere of the very first episode. That's a forgotten part of the history of the hit show's music I'd like to hear more about.
But the episode does have Djawadi breaking down each element of his Game of Thrones main title theme (which can be heard during "AFOS Prime" and "Hall H" on AFOS), from the cello to the female choir. The ability to finally get to hear about the origins of this piece of music I've heard trillions of times in many different forms--including the vocal version South Park came up with--is one of the many aural highlights of Song Exploder.
Mic.com aptly compared each Song Exploder episode to watching somebody take apart a car and put it back together. Hirway's podcast is also the aural equivalent of a chef visiting the table and describing the ingredients of his meal before unveiling it and letting the diners savor it. It's a terrifically edited and very cut-to-the-chase podcast, which explains the 10-to-15-minute length of most episodes. After 15 minutes, any music discussion by anybody--I don't care if you're Sheila E. explaining hi-hat techniques in a Victoria's Secret catalog outfit or in Ava Gardner's femme fatale gown from The Killers--can start to wear thin.
Hirway is clearly aware of the virtues of brevity, hence the thankfully short length of each episode. He speaks only during the podcast's opening, the intro to the score cue or song in its entirety and the podcast's outro. The rest of the time, he gets out of the way, and the musicians behind the track do all the talking. This approach is a nice change of pace from the often tedious navel-gazing of too many podcast hosts, even during some of the comedy podcasts I like. Song Exploder is far from omphaloskeptic. Look it up, fool!
If you prefer your podcasts to be insightful about the creation of art but very succinct--or if you're a film or TV score music fan who's curious about the scoring process but doesn't have time to sit through lengthy discussions of the process, which can be tedious or incomprehensible if you're not versed in music theory--Song Exploder is your jam. Too bad Song Exploder didn't exist when I was a kid. I really wanted to know what was going on inside the head of the genius who wrote "By Mennen!"
Paul Nice, the beathead behind one of my favorite mixtapes, 2005's Do You Pick Your Feet in Poughkeepsie?, dropped an enjoyable (but not exactly danceable) Shaw Brothers tribute mix full of Shaw Brothers movie soundbites and Shaw library music cues last week. His tribute to everyone's favorite movie studio with a logo that clearly was filmed against someone's office door window has got me thinking that unless Marvel Studios tops the Raid-inspired fight choreography on Daredevil with even more impressive choreography on its planned Iron Fist martial arts project for Netflix or in the Daughters of the Dragon adaptation I've been wishing for, I doubt anyone's going to assemble a similar tribute mix about Marvel Cinematic Universe filmmaking 40 years from now, in the same way that the Poughkeepsie DJ sampled The Daredevils and Masked Avengers about 40 years after their release.
Throwback Thursday guest blogger Hardeep Aujla and Marvel Studios' harshest critics might be onto something about the MCU movies not holding up as action filmmaking 15 years from now. But if they ever YouTube how Universal Television shot Captain America in the '70s, they'd probably be like, "Wow, that was wack. It makes the studio that brought you Sharknado look like Spielberg. Okay, Joe Johnston and the Russo brothers for the win."
In the '80s, Marvel Comics published a Larry Hama G.I. Joe story about Snake Eyes and Scarlett that contained no dialogue and is still remembered as a groundbreaking piece of comic book storytelling. If Marvel Studios wants to be remembered for more than just snappy banter or one-liners and the transformation of Andy Dwyer into an action star and be thought of as an innovative action movie studio like Shaw Brothers, they're going to have to do something ballsier than even single-take fight scenes in a hallway or in front of a blind Chinese guy singing in Mandarin. I think they should make a silent action movie like that classic G.I. Joe issue and goddamn commit to it like Hama did.
Mad Max: Fury Road is nearly a silent action movie. The guy from Skins is chattier than either Tom Hardy or Charlize Theron. The enthralling 15-minute White Walker/wight attack on the Free Folk and the Night's Watch two Sundays ago on Game of Thrones--in which David Benioff and D.B. Weiss basically knocked on The Walking Dead's door that night and said to Scott M. Gimple, "Try and top this"--isn't exactly chatty either. I'm surprised no one outside of the TV industry has attempted to do a silent action flick like Buster Keaton's The General, which George Miller cited as an influence on his latest Mad Max installment. Think of all the Akiva "My Best Work Was on the Underrated Fringe" Goldsman-penned blockbusters that would have been improved--or all the post-1996two of theone of the all the three-fourths of one of the post-1996 Michael Bay blockbusters that would have been improved--if they'd been completely scrubbed of dialogue.
Oh yeah, there's director J.C. Chandor, whose 2013 film All Is Lost, with Robert Redford alone on a boat, almost contains no dialogue--Chandor said he wanted to see what Redford would be like as an actor if his voice was taken away--but All Is Lost is a survival drama, not an action flick. Whether part of the action genre or not, a huge part of what makes Fury Road, the "Hardhome" massacre sequence and All Is Lost riveting is their minimal dialogue and the performers' reliance on their physicality to carry the story. Before Fury Road, Game of Thrones and All Is Lost, a few writers and directors--all working for TV--were aware of how riveting depriving their actors of their voices could look, especially in a dialogue-heavy medium like TV, so they experimented with near-silence.
Some of Breaking Bad's most memorable cold opens were done as mini-silent action movies. Genndy Tartakovsky, who drew storyboards for Iron Man 2, did a silent action movie a few times on Samurai Jack and Star Wars: Clone Wars (the minimized dialogue is why I always preferred Tartakovsky's cel-animated Star Wars prequel tie-in over George Lucas' actual prequels, which, at their worst, turned into C-SPAN in space). The director of Avengers: Age of Ultron himself did it once for almost an entire hour on Buffy, and it remains one of the show's most popular episodes. I'd make a silent action movie if I had the money and the connections. So what's stopping the studios from experimenting with wordless action sequences for two hours?
Sure, The Artist was one of the lowest-grossing Best Picture Oscar winners, but a modern-day silent movie isn't exactly box-office poison. People (who are open-minded enough to put aside the notion that a silent movie is too old-timey) will go see such a movie if they're fans of whoever's going to be doing all the non-talking. Mel Brooks' star-studded Silent Movie was a hit in 1976, and I bet that if IMAX theaters show for just one week the "Hardhome" massacre sequence--and only that sequence--droves of Game of Thrones fans will roll into those theaters that week like that creepy "Hardhome" zombie avalanche.
With their one-act or one-episode experiments, Vince Gilligan (and his Breaking Bad army of imaginative directors like Michelle MacLaren), Tartakovsky and Joss Whedon proved once again that far braver creative souls have been emerging from TV. So maybe a silent movie would be too bizarre for the playing-it-safe (and now Joss-less) film division of Marvel Studios. Someone said Jackie Chan, who worships Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Charlie Chaplin, should be the one to tackle a silent movie, but I doubt Chan would get that experimental these days: he's in the "Steve Martin shifting back and forth between Father of the Bride and more serious movie roles" phase of his career, not the "Steve Martin doing weird shit like recording banjo albums" phase. But you know who I think would be up for a silent actioner because he has proven that just because you're a 70-year-old filmmaker, that doesn't mean you have to phone it in? George Miller.
The Aussie director considered making Fury Road silent. A silent version of Fury Road is even being planned as an extra for its Blu-ray release. Also, it looks like Mad Max is getting less chatty with each installment. I wouldn't be surprised if by the time Hardy does his last movie as Max--and Hardy's inevitably going to make more of them--he'll say only one line in the whole movie: "Oy."
(This post first appeared in a completely fucked-up form on Blogcritics. The following version doesn't contain any of the inane edits that were made to it by a really sloppy editor. One of those inane edits actually reworded a fact about a production company so that what it now said about that company was factually incorrect. It's so goddamn frustrating, man.)
The HBO medieval drama's most shocking twist brings to mind a similar moment from a classic '70s animated series
It's been a long time since an HBO drama series has made me think to myself at the end of each episode, "God, I'm dying to see what happens next week." The last HBO drama to elicit a reaction like that from me was David Simon's Iraq war show Generation Kill. But that was actually a miniseries, not a drama with a not-so-limited run like The Sopranos, so the last non-Generation Kill HBO drama where I was really invested in every character was The Wire three years ago--until Game of Thrones came along.
(WARNING: Anyone who has never watched either of the two shows that are mentioned in this post's title can leave now. Spoilers right after the parenthesis.)
