"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of Last Week: Rick and Morty, "Pickle Rick"

This is the ninth of 13 all-new blog posts that are being posted until this blog's final post in December 2017. Occasionally on Friday, I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. The "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week hasn't been a weekly feature for a long time, but sometimes, I'll catch a really good piece of animated TV shortly after its original airdate, and I'll feel like devoting some paragraphs to it despite my lateness to the party. Hence the rare "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of Last Week. This is the 134th edition of "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week! Stream "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," my one-hour mix of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, right now.



The Monday after it premiered, I streamed on the Adult Swim site "Pickle Rick"--Rick and Morty's most violent episode so far, as well as the show's most damning indictment of Rick and his treatment of his family, as he mutates himself into a pickle/human hybrid as an excuse to avoid going along with Beth, Summer and Morty to see a family therapist (special guest voice Susan Sarandon)--but I wasn't able to write about "Pickle Rick" until now. I was busy resuming work on my prose novel manuscript and trying to finish marathoning Fargo's third season on FXNow right before FX deleted the entire season from FXNow.

Movie Pilot did such an astute review of "Pickle Rick" (it's entitled "'Pickle Rick' Proved Beyond a Squanch of a Doubt That Rick Is the Real Villain of Rick and Morty") that I'm not going to discuss and briefly summarize (instead of pointlessly recap scene-for-scene) "Pickle Rick" in a fashion similar to the Movie Pilot piece, which is the same kind of non-recappy approach I've done with previous Rick and Morty episodes. I'm just going to raise a couple of points I haven't seen in other reviews of "Pickle Rick."

Danny Trejo is an underrated voice actor. I had no idea Trejo voiced Jaguar, the racially ambiguous assassin Pickle Rick battles and then conspires with to get himself back home, until the end credits. I thought it was Clancy Brown the whole time. That's how effective Trejo is as a voice actor. Trejo really whitened up his voice in "Pickle Rick." He did an even better job as Enrique, Hank's not-too-bright co-worker, in my favorite later-season King of the Hill episode, "Lady and Gentrification," because he convincingly voiced a meek and non-confrontational character who's the complete opposite of all the ass-kickers he played in movies like Desperado, the Machete flicks and even A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas, an atypical Trejo movie where Elias Koteas, not Trejo, is the one who's doing all the on-screen carnage. Speaking of King of the Hill, I'm not so excited over the rumors about Mike Judge reuniting with the King of the Hill crew to make new episodes. It's just wrong for King of the Hill to resume without the late Brittany Murphy. If King of the Hill is going to come back to TV now, it ought to kill off Luanne, Murphy's character, off-screen. And no, not even a terrific and versatile voice actor like Pamela Adlon, who juggled several roles on King of the Hill, including Bobby, would be a satisfactory enough replacement for Murphy as Luanne.

Trejo is always weirdly guest-starring in TV show episodes that make me emotional for some reason. "Lady and Gentrification" is a rare King of the Hill episode that angers me because of the things Enrique, his daughter Inez and their family are forced to experience due to the gentrification of Arlen (caused by Peggy, of course), even though a certain quotable grievance of Enrique's is played for laughs ("They put salmon in the fish tacos, Hank!"). The unexpected friendship between Hank and Inez, whom Hank has been asked by Enrique to give a speech for at her quinceañera even though Hank barely knows her, causes "Lady and Gentrification" to also be oddly affecting. Hank is understandably uncomfortable about being around Inez at first because the thought of a middle-aged man spending extra time talking to a teenage girl is never not creepy, but the friendship becomes kind of affecting when you realize Hank, after years of struggling to understand Bobby ("That boy ain't right") and not exactly getting along with the niece-in-law whom he and Peggy have to look after, has finally met a kid whom he could actually get along with. Trejo's guest shot on Monk had the same effect on me as Hank's quasi-parental bond with a surprisingly non-sullen Inez did in "Lady and Gentrification": his hardened lifer character's gradual sympathy for both his cellmate Monk, whom he doesn't get along with at first, and Monk's search for the murderer of his wife Trudy in "Mr. Monk Goes to Jail" is oddly affecting too, and I wished Monk brought back Trejo's character for another episode. In the Monk series finale about the revelation of Trudy's killer, Monk should have sent Trejo to kill Craig T. Nelson.

In the case of "Pickle Rick," the episode's final scene before the end credits was what made me emotional, but not emotional as in somewhat moved, like when I saw "Lady and Gentrification" or "Mr. Monk Goes to Jail." The final scene in Beth's car made me frustrated, as in "Goddammit, Morty, be more aggressive about this shit that's been eating you up inside."

Electric Boogaloo entertainingly looks back at Cannon Films, the Fyre Festival of indie movie studios

Mathilda May does her impression of me halfway through a Blu-ray of an '80s Cannon Films action movie in a scene from the big-budget 1985 Cannon flick Lifeforce.

This is the sixth of 12 or 13 all-new blog posts that are being posted on a monthly basis until this blog's final post in December 2017. It has taken me since January 2016 to finish writing this post about Cannon Films. I don't know why. Writer's block can really fuck you up sometimes. This is why I can't wait to leave this blog behind so that Accidental Star Trek Cosplay will become my only ongoing blog. After December, the only writer's block I'll have to worry about will be the block that keeps trying to prevent me from finishing my novel manuscript.

You've seen MacGruber, right? Now imagine if MacGruber wasn't a comedy. That's basically what an '80s Cannon Films action movie is like.

MacGruber is a Cannon movie played completely straight, except for a couple of big things: the profane update of MacGruber's old theme song (a tune from his days as an SNL character) and the intentionally offbeat dialogue that comes out of the mouths of Val Kilmer, Kristen Wiig and Will Forte, who weepingly delivers the least dignified and most sob-filled monologue in action movie history ("Just join my team. I'll suck your dick!"). Everyone else in MacGruber, whether the actor is Ryan Phillippe or the late Powers Boothe, is interestingly directed by Lonely Island troupe member Jorma Taccone to take the proceedings completely seriously, including even Maya Rudolph, aside from her silly sex noises while her dead character's ghost bangs MacGruber in a cemetary.



Phillippe and Boothe react to MacGruber's pantsless moment of desperation in the military office as if this were Michael Clayton or Spotlight instead of an Inspector Clouseau flick (or any other farce where everyone, including the straight man, gives a big and broad performance). Their underplayed seriousness actually increases the hilarity quotient of MacGruber's abnormal behavior.

Taccone's movie is a terrific parody of the schlocky Cannon house style, from the strange one-liners that sound like they were written by a 57-year-old Israeli movie producer ("Shut your butt!") to the ultraviolent heroes who, in real life, would be locked up in an insane asylum for their psychotic behavior (see MacGruber's "KFBR392" scene). If you took the dour and unintentionally funny 1986 Cannon movie Cobra, which I never watched until I rented it on YouTube a week ago, and you turned it into a comedy about how the behavior of matchstick-chewing supercop Marion Cobretti, the only person in the world who cuts pieces off his slices of pizza with a pair of scissors, actually looks to the world outside the narcissistic-at-the-time brain of Cobra star/screenwriter Sylvester Stallone, it would probably resemble MacGruber.

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The first Deadpool flick makes a Cobra reference I wasn't aware of until Outlaw Vern pointed it out (it's the scene when Ryan Reynolds quips about the matchstick between Gina Carano's lips and wonders aloud if she's a Stallone fan). Taccone and Deadpool screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick all clearly watched Cannon movies like Cobra when they were kids, just like how I was subjected to a few Cannon cheapies as an '80s kid.

One of those movies was 1987's Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold, which was one of Cannon's two attempts to update the then-100-year-old Quatermain novels in the wake of Indiana Jones, and I still remember how dreadful the production values in Lost City of Gold were (it should have been called Lost City of Plastic). Currently streamable on Netflix, Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films, an Australian-made 2014 documentary directed by Aussie filmmaker Mark Hartley, is the highly entertaining story of why during the '80s and early '90s, a name like Cannon meant it had to be not-so-good. It's hard to dislike any documentary that devotes five minutes to the lambada movie war of 1990.

Cannon was, of course, embroiled in that vicious war over who could first rush into release a movie about a dirty dancing craze from Brazil that was barely sweeping the nation. Nobody won the war between Warner Bros./Cannon's Lambada and Columbia Pictures/21st Century Film Corporation's The Forbidden Dance. The only winners were quippy film critics who got a kick out of tearing apart terrible movies. For five silly minutes, Electric Boogaloo recounts how obsessed Menahem Golan (pronounced "muh-nawk-um go-lawn"), the aforementioned 50-something Israeli movie producer, was with trying to get The Forbidden Dance completed in time for its spring 1990 release date, while Yoram Globus, one of the producers of Lambada, and his collaborators toiled over their rival project. Golan and Globus were not just former business partners who ran Cannon (into the ground). They also happened to be cousins.

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.

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Bob's Burgers, "World Wharf II: The Wharfening (or How Bob Saves/Destroys the Town, Part II)," and The Boondocks, "Freedom Ride or Die" (tie)

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.

So special guest star Kevin Kline's ad-libbed attempt at beatboxing while voicing Mr. Fischoeder, the eccentric owner of both the Wonder Wharf and the Belchers' apartment building, didn't quite make the final cut of "World Wharf II: The Wharfening" like I had expected. But plenty of hilarious bits of business made it into the conclusion of Bob's Burgers' two-part fourth-season finale. My favorite running joke in "World Wharf II" has characters being able to find time, even when Bob's life is in danger, to make the usual potshots at either Bob's age ("It's not your time, Dad! I want to put you in a nursing home next year!") or his hirsute, sad-looking body ("Your butt... Up here, you're okay, but down here, it gets bad.").

Throughout "World Wharf II," which marks the first time the show has ever placed Bob in such peril (the camping episode doesn't count), I was reminded of how often Diff'rent Strokes and its mid-to-late-'70s misery-porn precursor Good Times would subject their characters to cliffhanger situations that were as perilous as Bob and Mr. Fischoeder getting kidnapped and tied to the pier together by Mr. Fischoeder's greedy brother, but were much more depressing. Kidnapping was a favorite dramatic device of the Diff'rent Strokes writing staff (Arnold and Kimberly were kidnapped by a rapist who attempted to sexually assault Kimberly, and Sam was later abducted by an insane dad who wanted Sam to replace his dead son), while on a very special, chroma-key-heavy two-parter of Good Times, a deaf kid almost fell into an elevator shaft because he couldn't hear the Evanses' warnings about the shaft and was too busy trying to entertain them with an impression of the crappy chroma-key flying FX from The Bugaloos.

Bob's Burgers is so much better than those older shows and their misguided and wildly inappropriate (especially when they're accompanied by studio audience laughter) attempts to raise the stakes and be taken seriously by the press (I'd like to know what sort of drugs were involved in the decision to place Kimberly in danger of being raped as if she were Edith Bunker, during a family sitcom that's meant for little kids). If there's anything that's serious about last week's "Wharf Horse" and "World Wharf II," it's the issue of gentrification (Felix's scheme to get his brother to sell the wharf is a comedic take on a not-so-funny real-life matter), but Bob's Burgers never feels the need to preach about the evilness of gentrification or go down a completely somber path regarding the issue. It's sort of the same approach King of the Hill brought to gentrification in my favorite late-period King of the Hill episode, "Lady and Gentrification" (an episode that gets extra points for giving guest star Danny Trejo the following line to say: "They put salmon in the fish tacos, Hank! Look at it! It's salmon! They're ruining everything!").

Even when Linda panics after realizing Bob's been kidnapped or when Teddy starts weeping over Bob's disappearance, the writers keep things light, hence the characters' comments about Bob's weird body. It helps that those writers are the sister duo of Lizzie and Wendy Molyneux, my favorite writing pair on Bob's Burgers (they were behind series highlights like "Art Crawl" and last year's "Boyz 4 Now," as well as a bunch of jokes in episodes they didn't receive on-screen credit for, like Gene's line about Linda's apron in "Lindapendent Woman"). I feel like the Molyneuxs remembered what those lurid Very Special Episodes of Diff'rent Strokes were like and thought, "Those shows were awful. Let's not be like those shows during this two-parter."

The Molyneuxs' skills with funny rat-a-tat-tat dialogue make "World Wharf II" such an enjoyable mock-dramatic experience (while "Wharf Horse" is credited to Nora Smith, who wrote "Mother Daughter Laser Razor"). "World Wharf II" is also noteworthy for being the first time the Belchers say "I love you" to each other. Of course, when Bob's Burgers finally gets them to say "I love you" after Bob's rescued, the Molyneuxs and the other writers undercut the potentially sappy moment with offbeat touches like abrasive Louise's slightly standoffish version of "I love you" ("I love you all. But that's just between us.") and the Belchers saying "I love you" so repeatedly that Mr. Fischoeder groans in disgust, a noise that Kevin Kline must have also made while skimming through the script of Life as a House. They're great examples of how Bob's Burgers gets the characters to express their affection for each other without becoming too goopy. There's only one thing that's corny about Bob's Burgers, and it's all those genuinely funny puns.

Other memorable quotes:
* Tina: "I have a great new nail polish I've been dying to try. It's called Clear." Gene: "Sure, if you want to look like a prostitute."

* "Quit squirming around, Bob. Do you have worms? 'Cause I do, and you're making them crazy."

* Fanny (Jordan Peele): "Hey, what are you looking at? My boobs are up here."

* I like how John Roberts, as Linda, can be heard breaking character and chuckling when Tina's able to identify Mr. Fischoeder's butt in the picture Bob sent to Linda: "How do you know what Mr. Fischoeder's butt looks like?" "I have photographic butt memory."

* Linda attempts to decipher Bob's garbled cry for help in his text: "Could it be... 'I tried blow'? We were gonna do that together. Just once."

* "You have to pull yourself together! You have two children and a Louise to take care of!"

* Teddy suspects a waiter (Paul F. Tompkins) of kidnapping Bob and proceeds to channel Mel Gibson in Ransom: "Let me at him! Give me back my son!"

* "And now I'll never know who wins Game of Thrones/Oh, things are bad!"

* "No, no, we need your dad. You kids are a two-adult, two-bottle-of-wine-a-night job."

* Fanny: "Shut up! I can't think!" Mr. Fischoeder: "What else is new?"

* "You saved us, Linda. Thank God we live in a time where women can learn to swim."

***

An equally irreverent approach to a serious issue also distinguishes The Boondocks' latest episode, "Freedom Ride or Die," which flashes back to 1961, when a young Robert Freeman became part of the Freedom Riders movement--against his will, of course (this time, young Robert's voiced by a digitally sped-up John Witherspoon, instead of now-absent ex-showrunner Aaron McGruder, who previously voiced young Robert during a non-canonical flashback to Rosa Parks overshadowing Robert's attempt to make civil rights history in 1955 Montgomery in "The Return of the King"). While trying to hide out after getting caught starting a different kind of movement inside a whites-only bathroom in a segregated bus station ("It was a dump for freedom. A stinky load for the dignity of the black man."), Robert accidentally hops onto a Freedom Rider bus headed for Birmingham and immediately wants to get off because of all the violence down there. Rev. Sturdy Harris (special guest star Dennis Haysbert), the leader of the protesters, believes that Robert, who's uninterested in getting himself killed and finds Sturdy's non-violent form of activism to be completely insane, is born to be a Freedom Rider and continually prevents him from jumping off the bus.

No Boondocks episode involving historical figures from the civil rights movement could ever top the quality of the Rev. Al Sharpton-angering "Return of the King," especially when McGruder's no longer involved. "Freedom Ride or Die" doesn't even try to revisit the highs of "The Return of the King" or outdo them. But thanks to the solid satirical writing of Boondocks veteran Rodney Barnes, as well as the fact that it's not burdened with the fourth season's inane "Granddad in debt" arc, "Freedom Ride or Die" is easily the funniest episode of this underwhelming McGruder-less season (however, there was no need for present-day Uncle Ruckus to explain the Speed reference; that just killed all the funny out of the bomb-on-the-bus gag).

"Freedom Ride or Die" even contains the reliable laugh-getter of Robert taking out his belt (the same belt he'll later use to frequently punish Riley with), a sign that this Boondocks episode's a solid one. The sight of Robert attacking racist rioters with his belt makes me wonder why neither Wesley Snipes nor Michael Jai White have ever made a martial arts flick set during the civil rights movement. Who gives a shit what Sharpton would say? A '60s black activist martial arts flick would be brilliant.

Other memorable quotes:
* "Take that, you cracker-ass cracker! That's why I shit in your bathroom and used up all your special white people quilted toilet paper!"

* "I noticed she was reading Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, a book I had meant to read many times."

* Young Robert to Sturdy: "You want to know how to end Jim Crow? Get out of the fuckin' South!"

Danny Trejo's so tough Freddy has nightmares about him

The talk of the Internets is AICN's Cinco de Mayo posting of the trailer for Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse spinoff Machete--a movie that originated as a fake trailer, much like Black Dynamite and Spaceballs, which swam out of the spaceballsack that was "Jews in Space" from History of the World: Part I.

I loved the original fake trailer, and so did the audience during one of the cleverest DVD audio tracks I've heard, the Planet Terror DVD's "Audience Reaction Track." With a cast that includes three Losties, Machete looks like a Lost flash-sideways on acid. The all-star 20th Century Fox revenge flick drops on Labor Day Weekend. Let the "Danny Trejo's so tough..." meme begin.

The new Machete trailer opens with "This is Machete with a special Cinco de Mayo message... to Arizona!" I wish Machete added, "And to the putos at my distributor's 'news' channel!"

Show me your taglines: My favorite movie poster slogans

In a world where movie taglines are corny or tepid, sometimes there are taglines that are genuinely witty and clever.

Fox just launched an eye-catching "Snakes on a cane" teaser promotion for House--it's as cryptic as ABC's "What did you see?" springtime promos for John Cho's FlashForward--and the IMDb Hit List recently linked to a blog post about the greatest bits of poster or trailer copy. Both items got me thinking about which taglines are good ones (and aren't just reiterations of lines from the movie, like the Dark Knight teaser campaign's "Why so serious?" or the original Dawn of the Dead's "When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth").

Michael Aushenker, who e-interviewed me for his Cartoon Flophouse blog, used to be a tagline writer. He came up with Eve's Bayou's tagline: "The secrets that hold us together can also tear us apart."

In no particular order, here are my favorites.

This Is Spinal Tap: "Spinal Tap... does for sex, drugs and rock n' roll what Sound of Music did for hills."

Southern Comfort: "It's the land of hospitality... unless you don't belong there."

Back to the Future: "He was never in time for his classes... He wasn't in time for his dinner... Then one day... he wasn't in his time at all."

Shaun of the Dead: "This September aim for the head."

Planet Terror teaser campaign: "You might feel a little prick."

The War of the Roses: "Once in a lifetime comes a motion picture that makes you feel like falling in love all over again. This is not that movie."

Wet Hot American Summer: "It was the last day of summer. It was the first day of the third week in August."

Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay teaser campaign: "What would NPH do?"

Alien vs. Predator: "Whoever wins... we lose." A great tagline doesn't always lure me to the movie, especially one with Paul W.S. Anderson's name on it. That's why I still haven't seen AVP.

The Thing (1982): "Man is the warmest place to hide."

Here's a bonus favorite tagline, from the fake Machete trailer that precedes Planet Terror: "But they soon realized they just fucked with the wrong Mexican!"