Does Bad Boys hold up 20 years after its release?

What I said about Bad Boys as an "eye Teen Reviewer" for the San Jose Mercury News back in 1995 (April 14, a week after Bad Boys' April 7 opening, to be exact), word for word and with every single Merc style guide preference preserved, straight off a clipping I still have of my own article:

'Bad Boys' is fun — for a formula movie

EYE TEEN REVIEWER
Jim Aquino

THE cop-buddy comedy "Bad Boys" (not to be confused with the 1983 Sean Penn prison pic of the same name) is the latest flashy action movie from the Simpson-Bruckheimer assembly line, which has churned out such blockbuster hits as "Beverly Hills Cop" and "Top Gun."

Directed by Michael Bay, the genius behind the popular, Clio-winning "Aaron Burr?" milk commercial, "Bad Boys" sticks to the tried-and-true formula that made Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer big-name producers back in the '80s: gaudy visuals, extravagant action sequences, a big-time soundtrack and a script that's high on concept and low on subtlety.

After producing a low-profile film such as the dark, dialogue-driven comedy "The Ref," it appears that Simpson and Bruckheimer want to go back to making big, dumb movies again. "The Ref" worked because it fit star Denis Leary's edgy, verbose persona, and never tried to soften Leary's cynical humor. "Bad Boys" could have been as satisfying as "The Ref," if its script were as clever overall as the snappy, entertaining interplay between its two leads, sitcom stars Martin Lawrence and Will Smith.

Lawrence and Smith, playing mismatched Miami police detectives Marcus Burnett and Mike Lowery, rise above the formulaic cops-vs.-heroin thieves plot to deliver top-notch performances. "Bad Boys" runs too long at more than two hours, but it remains watchable because of these charismatic, energetic stars and their fast, funny and often improvised delivery.

"Bad Boys," originally written for Dana Carvey and Jon Lovitz, is strong on visuals, thanks to first-time director Bay, who must have watched a lot of Tony Scott movies. The Miami setting is wonderful to look at, and the set pieces are well-staged.

But "Bad Boys" suffers from uninteresting bad guys and a story line that offers few surprises, aside from the amusing subplot in which neurotic family man Burnett and smooth ladies' man Lowery switch identities. Tea Leoni, who was so memorable as the sexy bohemian girlfriend on the short-lived sitcom "Flying Blind," plays a key witness.

"Bad Boys" isn't original or groundbreaking, but it's fun and entertaining, thanks to Lawrence and Smith.

What I think about Bad Boys in 2015, on the day before the date of the 20th anniversary of its release:

Of all the movie reviews I wrote for the Mercury News while in high school and then college, the mixed review of Bad Boys--at that point in his filmography, the Fresh Prince had just won over critics because of his big-screen debut in the film version of Six Degrees of Separation, but he hadn't made Independence Day yet--is one of the only two or three reviews where I still stand by every word. For instance, Michael Bay was at his best as a director of commercials like that classic "Got milk?" ad (although putting the words "Michael Bay" and "genius" in the same sentence back then makes me cringe); The Ref remains a terrific antidote to Yuletide mawkishness; and I still can't remember the name of Burnett and Lowery's boring nemesis. Like Dana Gould did when he couldn't remember the name of the villain Ben Gazzara played in Road House, I'm just going to call their boring nemesis Drago.

All the other reviews I wrote back then can go in the shredder. That was the biggest problem with being a film critic for print media. If some part of your opinion about a film would change (and my opinions sometimes do), you couldn't go back and change what you said in print like you can now easily do on a blog or in digital media.

Aside from a clunky and racist bit of attempted comedy where Shaun Toub--a.k.a. Dr. Yinsen from the first Iron Man flick--shows up as a stereotypical Middle Eastern convenience store clerk (an ominous sign of comedic things to come in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen) who racially profiles Lawrence and Smith because of the visible guns in their holsters, Bad Boys remains one of Michael Bay's few tolerable movies. That's mainly due to the dialogue between Martin and Will ("Don't be alarmed, we're Negroes"), the most enduring part of the first Bad Boys, which cost only $17 million to make. I prefer smaller-scale Michael Bay over larger-scale, giant-robot-testicles-flashing Michael Bay, which is why I never bothered to watch 2003's much bigger-budgeted and longer-in-running-time Bad Boys II, even though Simon Pegg and Nick Frost were seen worshiping Bad Boys II in Hot Fuzz, an Edgar Wright film that trounces Bad Boys in all sorts of ways, simply because it's an Edgar Wright film (I hear 2013's Pain & Gain is supposed to be a return to Bay's smaller-budgeted roots, but I haven't seen that one yet either).

The Bad Boys original score by Mark Mancina still holds up too and hasn't aged poorly at all. During "AFOS Prime" and "Beat Box" on AFOS, you can hear a previously unreleased version of the film's dancehall-influenced main title theme, Mancina's "Prologue - The Car Jacking," taken from La-La Land Records' out-of-print Bad Boys score album and featured below. (The Bad Boys song album's not too shabby either. I remember practicing to get my driver's license to the sounds of Diana King's dancehall-style "Shy Guy.")



If you still find Bad Boys--or Drago--to be too generic for your tastes, perhaps reading Shield creator Shawn Ryan's mostly sardonic live-tweets of Bay's Bad Boys DVD commentary while he watched Bad Boys for the first time ever in 2012 will make the film go down easier. "Michael goes silent on commentary for a few minutes," tweeted Ryan, who actually likes the movie, during a lull in Bay's pontifi-bating. "Perhaps he took a break to write nasty email to Megan Fox."

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes has a lot to live up to, like a grand tradition of the most depressing endings in movie franchise history

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, which opens tomorrow night, currently has a 97% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes (over on Metacritic, it's received a 90% approval rating). The new prequel's Tomatoes rating is even higher than the 89% Tomatoes rating that currently belongs to the original Planet of the Apes, a classic, Rod Serling-penned film that comedian and Planet of the Apes stan Dana Gould once amusingly summarized as "Moses dressed like Tarzan being chased by King Kong dressed like Fonzie."

Director Rupert Wyatt's 2011 slice of San Francisco disaster porn, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, was--James Franco sleepwalking through the whole film aside--a surprisingly enjoyable reboot of the most unlikely post-apocalyptic, racism allegory-filled sci-fi franchise to become popular with kids. Dawn, which has Andy Serkis reprising his motion-capture role as ape revolutionary Caesar with Cloverfield director Matt Reeves at the helm, is bound to conclude with a heartwarming feel-good ending, just like Rise and the seven films that preceded Rise did. Let's look back at these eight previous feel-good endings (including the restored conclusion in the director's cut of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, the best of the '70s Apes sequels), shall we?

(Spoiler warning for anyone who's seen neither of the Apes films.)

Pain don't hurt, whereas parts of Road House are pretty excruciating

All this week, everyone has been chiming in with their Patrick Swayze memories, from their love of Dirty Dancing and Ghost to the night they laughed their asses off during the classic SNL episode when Swayze spoofed both his sex-symbol image and his appeal to gay viewers and then played generous straight man to Chris Farley in the then-newcomer's breakout sketch, the Chippendales audition. Because I'm a guy who has zero tolerance for chick flicks, I'll always remember Swayze not for Dirty Dancing and Ghost, but for his creepy Donnie Darko supporting turn as a child-molesting motivational speaker and action films like Road House, where the mulleted star's dance background and willingness to do many of his own stunts played a huge part in making the fight sequences the best element of that Joel Silver camp classic.

Since 1989, Road House has been a source of great comedy, from Dana Gould's bit about Dalton's Zen bouncer thing-as-U.S. foreign policy to Michael J. Nelson's MST3K "(Let's Have) A Patrick Swayze Christmas" musical number and RiffTrax audio commentary (a more enjoyable commentrak than the Road House DVD's Kevin Smith/Scott Mosier one, which is a funny commentrak when Smith isn't tediously reading off pages and pages of Internet jokes about Dalton's superpowers because he ran out of things to say).

Road House is the white Dolemite. Like the Rudy Ray Moore camp classic, the Swayze vehicle is a bad movie, but extremely fun to watch and endlessly quotable.

Over at big WOWO, Byron Wong calls the modern-day western one of the best American martial arts flicks ever made. He raises a good point about how "Swayze didn't have to otherize us. Unlike Chuck, Steve, Jean-Claude, and just about every other White martial artist out there, he didn't have to hire a crew of Asians, blacks, or Latinos to beat up."

I agree with Byron that Road House's martial arts sequences are terrific--the complete opposite of Dolemite's fight sequences--and the movie surpasses anything Van Damme and Seagal have done (with directors who aren't Peter Hyams and Andrew Davis, that is). But outside of the convincing fight sequences and Swayze's charismatic star turn as the world's only NYU philosophy major-turned-internationally famous bouncer, Road House is pretty incompetent for a glossy '80s big-studio movie. Keith David (They Live, There's Something About Mary), one of my favorite actors-turned-announcers, shows up halfway through Road House, and then the movie leaves him stranded with nothing to do. Road House is loaded with almost everything I don't like about '80s big-studio filmmaking--the only '80s Hollywood touch that's missing is the John Hughes-style racism. The movie outdoes the first season of NewsRadio in the crappy clothes department. Swayze wears a weird-looking wraparound gi thing as a shirt, which, combined with the mullet, makes him look like Luke Skywalker's soap opera actor cousin from below the Mason-Dixon Line on Tatooine.

Road House is like a bad '60s Elvis flick, but with a pubes-flashing Sam Elliott as second fiddle instead of Bill Bixby--and Jeff Healey doing all the singing instead of the Big E. Healey has a painfully awkward "musician appears as himself and gives us his endorsement that the hero's a cool guy" scene, which was a staple of '80s movies, although that kind of cameo existed long before the '80s (Duke Ellington's scene with Jimmy Stewart in 1959's Anatomy of a Murder is the earliest example of a "musician cameoing as himself and helping to up the star's street cred" moment I can think of). The Healey tracks, which include a pretty good cover of Bob Dylan's "When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky," overshadow a Michael Kamen score that sounds exactly like all the other drab scores Kamen wrote for the Silver action factory. There are attempts at wit that fall flat and make little sense, like the vague and homoerotic-sounding "I thought you'd be bigger" running gag, which seems to be a jab at Dalton's height--or not. I assume this botched attempt at a Silver catchphrase refers to how his height is below average for someone who's a cooler. So why didn't the script have the characters say "I thought you'd be taller" instead of "I thought you'd be bigger"? Oh, '80s Hollywood.

I never saw Point Break, Swayze's other signature action film, until shortly after his death was all over the news. I happened to have a long-unwatched Netflix copy of the 1991 bankrobbing surfer flick lying around my apartment, so as I watched the film for the first time, I was surprised by how well-made it was. The foot chase sequence, which concludes with the angsty emptying-of-the-gun moment that Hot Fuzz memorably mocked, is the best foot chase I've seen since the one in Raising Arizona. (During the DVD, I also constantly cringed over how Point Break's superbly shot surfing and skydiving sequences would have looked if the film were made in this current age of CGI instead of pre-CGI 1990.) Point Break is a better Swayze actioner than Road House, thanks to the skilled direction of underrated Hurt Locker helmer Kathryn Bigelow, but if I want a campy and unintentionally funny good time, I'll turn to Road House. Gay guys have their Valley of the Dolls, The Apple and Showgirls, while us straight guys have Dolemite, Color of Night, Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky, Death Bed: The Bed That Eats and Road House.

Ever since Swayze went Swayze, I've been looking all over the file folders in my computer for Dana Gould's Road House bit. I finally found it. During an August 28, 2004 performance at the Largo in L.A., the stand-up and former Simpsons staff writer amusingly observes how America is "the world's bouncer." I like how Gould couldn't remember the Ben Gazzara character's name, so he gave him the name of the main villain from Rocky IV.

Gerald's game: Star Trek composer Gerald Fried opened hailing frequencies with A Fistful of Soundtracks back in 1999

In his stand-up act, Dana Gould hilariously envisioned the composer of the Spock bass guitar theme from the original Star Trek as a tortured drug addict cursing loudly at four in the morning like a junkie version of Don Music from Sesame Street while trying to come up with the perfect theme for Spock. The calm and genial Gerald Fried--the now-retired TV and film composer who penned both Spock's theme and Kirk's frequently spoofed fight theme for Star Trek's 1967 "Amok Time" episode--isn't exactly Don Music on smack.

As I await both J.J. Abrams' new Star Trek feature film and its Michael Giacchino score--which I've refused to hear excerpts from until I see the film itself--I thought it would be the perfect time to transcribe half of a phoner I recorded with Fried (pronounced "freed") for the terrestrial radio incarnation of A Fistful of Soundtracks in 1999. (Almost all the pre-2000 broadcasts of A Fistful of Soundtracks were pre-recorded on audiocassette, and I don't have the equipment to transfer audiocassette content to computer--the audio quality would suck anyway--so I'd rather just post text of the interview below.)

During our conversation, Fried promoted the 1999 Silva Screen Records release Dr. Strangelove: Music from the Films of Stanley Kubrick, which contained re-recordings of themes Fried composed for the first few films of his childhood friend Kubrick. But what I was most interested in was Fried's TV work, which he loved doing despite the rushed schedules and older TV's tendency to recycle score music to cut costs ("As a composer, it's disturbing to hear music I wrote for one scene appear somewhere else," said Fried in a 1991 Starlog magazine interview). I particularly enjoyed talking with Fried about his scores for the Roots miniseries, which I first caught when the Family Channel (now ABC Family) reran it while I was in high school, and the original Star Trek, which I grew up watching and is now being relaunched by Abrams on the big screen.

(Photo source: TrekCore)

Jimmy J. Aquino: Now Jerry Goldsmith wrote the theme to The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Lalo Schifrin wrote the theme to Mission: Impossible. Alexander Courage wrote the theme to Star Trek. When you worked on those shows, were you ordered by the producers to compose in their styles or were you allowed artistic freedom?

Gerald Fried: We had to refer to the theme, which was okay with me. I think both those themes... The Sandy Courage thing, you know, that female voice--that was kind of stupid to me. Jerry's theme and Lalo's theme from Mission: Impossible are just fine. I had no problem using them.

As far as style goes, the first year, Jerry Goldsmith, I think, scored most of the Man from U.N.C.L.E.s, and it was a kind of symphonic style. Then they brought me in the second year, and Lalo also did a few of them, and we were the ones who changed it into a kind of Latino jazz... you know, the... [Hums his faster-paced arrangement of Goldsmith's U.N.C.L.E. main title theme.] That was my kind of contribution. They wanted style change from Jerry's style, and then it stuck pretty much like that for the next two or three years, however long the series ran.

JJA: Yeah, when it changed to color, they got campier and less serious.

GF: Yeah, which was part of the joy of doing it.

JJA: Now I want to talk about what I remember you the most for, your work for Star Trek. You did a total of five episodes: "Shore Leave," "Amok Time" I remember most fondly, as well as "Catspaw," "Friday's Child" and "The Paradise Syndrome." Was Star Trek taken seriously in the industry when it initially aired on NBC like it was by the sci-fi community or did everybody you know in the industry dismiss it as, you know, shallow, Flash Gordon-type hokum?

GF: Somewhere in between. They had no idea that it would become part of Americana. But neither did they see it as a piece of junk. You got some pretty classy writers--Harlan Ellison and some of the big sci-fi writers--so I think it was respected, and Gene Roddenberry was kind of an impressive guy. But certainly, they had no idea that it was going to take hold as it did.

JJA: I remember reading reviews from the '60s when it premiered, and Variety and TV Guide dismissed it as being shallow and just another space opera.

GF: Heh! Okay. I hope Gene Roddenberry is enjoying that statistic wherever he is.

JJA: He got the last laugh.

GF: Yes, he sure did.

JJA: Now for "Shore Leave," you wrote two unforgettable themes: the love theme for when Kirk is reunited with Ruth, his first love, and the Irish tune for Finnegan, Kirk's bully from his academy days. Tell me about writing those themes.

GF: Well, the love theme--the flute solo--was just kind of a movie-type pop thing, which I thought was appropriate and immediately accessible. The other one--I figured, well, how do you do it? It was an opportunity to write something special, kind of like an epic Irish fistfight. Remember the movie The Quiet Man? Something like that. To keep it Irish and keep it large and keep it insouciant like the Finnegan character was. So it seemed like a jig would be a good idea, and I was nervous about it because whenever you take a gamble, you're always in danger of having some conservative person throw it out. Well, [Bob] Justman and Roddenberry did not throw it out. But you do get nervous when you take chances like that, which I always do because I think any good composer... Jerry Goldsmith is the greatest chance-taker, probably of all time, and Elmer Bernstein... Yeah, I love them for that, for letting me do something with some kind of left-field imagination.

JJA: Now in "Amok Time," you created a theme for Spock for bass guitar. Let's talk about that. Why a bass guitar for Spock?

GF: Spock had a lot of trouble with emotion. If he did have any, he hardly knew how to get it out. Now if you try to play a lyrical line on a big thumpy bass guitar, you're gonna have trouble sounding lyrical, so I thought it would be a match to write a lyrical theme but put it on the bass guitar. It somehow parallels Spock's trouble and confusion with emotion.

JJA: Who played the bass guitar?

GF: Barney Kessel.

JJA: What were some of his previous credits? Did he work with you before?

GF: Yeah, he was a studio guitarist by the time I came to him, but before that, he was one of the half-dozen greatest jazz guitarists in history. You'll find him on records like with Art Tatum and Earl "Father" Hines. He's right up on the top. In fact, he, Herb Ellis, Joe Pass, Kenny Burrell, Eddie Lang and Charlie Christian--I just named to you the half-dozen great guitar players of all time.

JJA: Before you wrote the scores for the Star Trek episodes, were you handed the script or did you watch the episode first? The dailies?

GF: Yeah, there were no videocassettes in those days, so you get a chance to see... no, not the dailies. They called it then a workprint, and that was usually like about 10 or 12 days before airtime, so it was very scary. You just go home and work practically 22 hours a day for an intensive five or six days. You see it once. At first, Bob Justman--and maybe even Roddenberry for the first one--sit there with you and then we talk about where the music should go. The last few, they were so busy and so tired and so worried about the next show that I just thought by myself with the music editor in the room and just chose where the music goes and what I should do by myself.

JJA: Now your music for the Kirk/Spock fight scene in "Amok Time" has been called the greatest fight music ever written for television. It's even been quoted in parodies of Star Trek.

GF: Oh yeah. [Laughs.]

JJA: For instance, the characters on Mystery Science Theater 3000 would hum the fight music whenever they saw a B-movie fight scene.

GF: [Laughs.] That's funny. I know. I get royalties from The Simpsons and The Cable Guy. I know it was used there.

JJA: Do fans at the Star Trek cons come up to you and hum the fight music?

GF: Yeah, I actually attended two or three of those Star Trek conventions. There was a program. I made a suite of all my main themes from Star Trek into sort of a concerto for oboe, which I played myself. I'm still an oboe player. Yeah, some people would come up and talk mostly about those specifically.

JJA: I know that in television, like you said before, composers don't have much time to work with. Do you feel your music is better when it's written in such a limited amount of time or do you feel the opposite?

GF: I had only one opportunity to find out because 100 percent has been on a rushed schedule. The exception is the documentary Birds Do It, Bees Do It. I had lots of time for that. That was my one and only Oscar nomination, so maybe there is a correlation. Except for that, I have no way of knowing!

JJA: Now themes from your Star Trek scores would be recycled in many episodes. Were you flattered by this or did you find that practice inappropriate?

GF: Well, if I were to give a speech on the aesthetics of film composing, I'm sure I would rant and rave about "music must be composed specifically for this and that." But when you get your music, for one thing, played on network television, you've got a helluva lot of money, and that kind of tempers your thinking... It doesn't temper your thinking. It tempers your mouth, so I didn't do any public complaining. Sometimes, I thought it was ludicrous what they did, and sometimes, I think, "Well yeah, alright, it sort of works." But generally, I'd like to go down in the books as saying it's a bad policy. It makes a product out of movie and TV stuff. I still like to consider it a great art form, so with that high road in mind, I come down against it.

JJA: So how do you feel when people come up to you and say, "Oh, I like that love theme from 'This Side of Paradise,'" but it was the love theme from "Shore Leave"?

GF: Yeah. [Laughs.] I smile. What are you gonna do? Read them a lecture on cinematic aesthetics?

JJA: Anybody who has worked on the original Star Trek, whether they're an actor, a writer or a composer, is always stopped on the street and remembered for their contribution even if it was only a guest stint. Why do you think Star Trek has been so popular?

GF: I think the intent and quality of the writing and the concept of it, to try and comment on earthly problems in terms of outer space... The dynamics of jealousy, rage, envy, power, lust and all those things were commented on intelligently and fairly. I think they reflected--as all good writing does--on the conditions of all the people down here on Earth, and I think that came through.

JJA: Any advice for anybody who took one listen to your music from Star Trek and said, "I wanna do that too"?

GF: [Laughs.] Yeah, it's possible. There will always be music for movies and television. It's hard to get into because a lot of people want to do it, but if there's a major motivation, and the person is willing to do the work and the research and become an all-around person in music... The days of having specialists are over. Producers need to hire a composer who they know has enough range, so that they can handle whatever problem might come up. Yeah, my advice is go for it.

Nerd Prom Humor Week on Morning Becomes Dyspeptic

Damn, it's a helluva week to be a nerd. The Dark Knight finally arrives in theaters (and opens to acclaim and packed houses), Joss Whedon's clever and surprisingly bittersweet Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog premieres on the Web (and gets flooded with so many visitors that it crashes), and nerds who were lucky to get themselves a membership and a San Diego hotel room are trekking to the wretched hive of scum and questionable hygiene known as the Comic-Con.

I'm skipping this year's Nerd Prom (for reasons that are partly monetary and don't have anything to do with that dumb term "staycation"), but I'm marking the occasion by streaming five somewhat Comic-Con-related episodes of Morning Becomes Dyspeptic this week. Each MBD episode during Nerd Prom Week features at least one clip of nerd-friendly comedy, from either a comic who's an unapologetic nerd (Patton Oswalt, Brian Posehn) or a comic who wouldn't be caught dead at Comic-Con (Norm MacDonald, Bobcat Goldthwait).

Here's the schedule for MBD this week:

Mon., Jul. 21: Episode MBDA13 (Dana Gould, "In Praise of Vincent Price")
Tue., Jul. 22: Episode MBDA08 (Norm MacDonald, "The Fantastic Four")
Wed., Jul. 23: Episode MBDA01 (Brian Posehn, "The Unholy Trilogy")
Thu., Jul. 24: Episode MBDA49 (Bobcat Goldthwait, "Star Wars Fans Are Uber Nerds")
Fri., Jul. 25: Episode MBDA50 (Patton Oswalt, "At Midnight I Will Kill George Lucas with a Shovel")

MBD airs every weekday at 1am and 8am on the Fistful of Soundtracks channel.