The problem with The Problem with Apu is that not enough people are going to see Hari Kondabolu's terrific documentary

This is the last all-new blog post before this blog's absolute final post in December 2017.

Fuck all these (predominantly white) superheroes fighting motion-capture-enhanced (and often boring) supervillains on the big screen. The movies I'm way more eager to see are documentaries about ordinary Asian Americans fighting stereotypes. It's a fight I've been a part of in some capacity. Nearly everything I do (even something as insignificant as writing a barely-being-read-by-anybody post for this insignificant and soon-to-go-completely-inactive blog) is some sort of clapback against Asian stereotypes, which have been a pain in my ass since junior high. Filmmaker Salima Koroma's Bad Rap, a doc about Asian American rappers, was the movie I wanted to see the most last year, and now The Problem with Apu, a 49-minute doc directed by Michael Melamedoff and hosted and produced by comedian and Politically Re-Active podcast co-host Hari Kondabolu, is the 2017 film that, despite its skimpy length and non-theatrical status, I've been anticipating the most, much more so than Wonder Woman, Thor: Ragnarok and even Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

The Problem with Apu chronicles the Indian American comedian's love/hate relationship with a little-known Tracey Ullman Show spinoff called The Simpsons. Kondabolu's a Simpsons fan who loves everything about the animated franchise that was brought to life by Matt Groening, James L. Brooks and the late Sam Simon, except for one character. That would be Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, the Indian convenience store owner who, since the show's premiere in 1990 (not counting a 1989 Christmas special that was actually the eighth episode in the first season's production order, "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire"), has been voiced by a white guy, longtime Simpsons voice actor Hank Azaria. The character is, as Kondabolu describes him in the doc, "servile, devious and goofy." Apu's shtick on the show is, as Kondabolu memorably said in an extremely funny 2012 Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell segment about his delight over the rise of Indian American representation on TV, basically "a white guy doing an impression of a white guy making fun of my father!"

The most interesting tidbit about Kondabolu's Totally Biased rant about Apu, which went viral and ended up being shown in high school and college classrooms, is that Kondabolu was initially reluctant to write and perform the segment because he was so tired of complaining about Apu. I like how Bell--the now-defunct FX late night show's titular host and Kondabolu's boss in the Totally Biased writers' room--had to talk Kondabolu into doing it, as if Kondabolu were Logan being dragged out of his dead-end limo driver job to unsheathe his adamantium claws one last time and protect some runaway mutant kid.

No Soup for us: The disappointment over E! never archiving The Soup for the show's fans

This is the third of 12 or 13 blog posts that are being posted on a monthly basis until this blog's final post in December 2017.

The longest I laughed over one of Joel McHale's quips on E!'s now-defunct pop culture clip show The Soup ("a sort of national archives of idiocy" was how TV Insider astutely described the show, a few months before its cancellation in 2015) was the moment when The Soup played a Today Show clip of Richard Simmons--this was way before he went "missing"--being Richard Simmons while sitting on a couch with a miniskirted Lisa Rinna. The former Days of Our Lives star, who looks a lot different from her pre-Botox days in Salem, covered her crotch when Simmons lifted up her legs because she thought the viewers at home were getting a glimpse of her Salem's Lot (actually, the viewers at home couldn't see shit).

Neither the accidental quasi-upskirt clip nor McHale's scripted response to the clip were what made me laugh for two or three minutes. The muttered aside that the Soup host clearly ad-libbed right after his scripted response was what caused my sides to hurt from laughing for two minutes: "Her lips are full of collagen."

The Soup studio audience laughed over the ad-lib for longer than half a minute as well. On a broadcast network, Standards and Practices would lamely bleep out "lips" and ruin McHale's joke, but because this was basic cable, E! let the randy ad-lib go. It was a rare wise decision by a cable channel known for a million dumb programming decisions that were made fun of by McHale and his fellow joke writers on the regular during The Soup's 11-year run.

I wish I could revisit that improvised Soup moment and a bunch of other lines that were ad-libbed by McHale (in addition to wishing I could revisit the memes that originated from The Soup, like Spaghetti Cat and "Stay out of it, Nick Lachey!"), just like how I can easily stream an entire episode of The Daily Show from any point of history during the Dubya Administration or how I can easily stream the classic 2007 Colbert Report interview segment where Jane Fonda took Stephen Colbert by surprise (by sitting on his lap and kissing him to persuade his fake Republican alter ego, also named Stephen Colbert, to remove her name from his "On Notice" board). (Also, a search for almost every discriminatory thing that has come out of Steve King's mouth isn't so difficult, thanks to the Colbert archive.)

Unfortunately, I can't revisit as much Soup content as I'd like to because E!'s online staff never bothered to put up an archive of full Soup episodes like how Comedy Central built exhaustive online archives of full Daily Show episodes and lengthy Colbert Report clips. And that lack of a Soup archive--meanwhile, all 12 interminable seasons of Keeping Up with the Kardashians are up on Hulu--is an even dumber move on E!'s part than building an unwatchable reality show around a tanning salon.

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.

"Rock Box" Track of the Day: Classic & 86, "Ridin'"

Song: "Ridin'" by Classic & 86
Released: 2004
Why's it part of the "Rock Box" playlist?: It's featured in the Jersey-set Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle and may be the best song to bump in your ride while driving through Jersey since "Woke Up This Morning."
Which moment in White Castle does it appear?: Both the opening and closing credits.

White Castle fans who enjoyed "Ridin'" might have wondered, "Who the hell are Classic & 86? Did they skip the planet?" I didn't know who they were either. At first, I thought that after releasing "Ridin'," Classic ended up as a UPS driver like Thugnificent on The Boondocks, while 86 is toiling away in the same kind of office from hell where Harold would spend his workdays being a walking doormat. I did some digging around the Web and landed on an Urban Dictionary entry that actually listed some useful information about them instead of feeding me info that Classic & 86 is a new expression for getting a tug and chug.

After following a paper trail that started from Urban Dictionary, I found out that the two rappers, who have separate careers and teamed up on "Ridin'," each have recorded more than just that one song and are still making music. Classic is Chris Classic, a protege of the late Jam Master Jay who's frequently contributed hip-pop tracks to prime-time soaps like Gossip Girl and a bunch of movies I want nothing to do with (Harold & Kumar star Kal Penn's 2007 masterpiece Epic Movie, Disaster Movie, the Alvin and the Chipmunks movies and most recently, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps), while 86 is Miss Eighty 6, who also received some airplay on Gossip Girl. Before "Ridin'," Miss Eighty 6 recorded under her real name Sarai. A commenter under Sarai's 2003 "Ladies" video on YouTube wrote: "bring Sarai back - will trade for Ke$ha."

"Ridin'" is good, solid hip-pop with lyrics that are actually more than four words long--it's not the same kind of hip-pop Eminem astutely criticizes and ridicules in his just-leaked track "Syllables" when he says "nowadays these kids jus'/Don't give a shit about lyrics/All they wanna hear is a beat and that's it." The 2004 tune also showed up in the Usher rom-com In the Mix, The Air I Breathe and the Melrose Place revival, but it will forever be identified with a cult flick that's one of my favorite comedies of the '00s.

More Obamicon fun

Here are more Obamicons I've created. The first two refer to something I watch on every Martin Luther King Day ever since it first aired in 2006: The Boondocks' awesome "Return of the King" episode, in which Dr. King (voiced by Kevin Michael Richardson, a.k.a. Rockefeller Butts) awakes from what was actually a coma and is dismayed by what he's returned to ("Black Entertainment Television is the worst thing I've ever seen in my life!").

Bonus new AFOS episode: "Bottomless Party"

And there you have one of the reasons for the R rating that's been stamped on Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay--the bottomless party sequence.

I'd hate to be at the bottomless party where they serve bean dip.

Austin Powers series composer George S. Clinton--his slinky, atmospheric Wild Things score doesn't receive enough praise--wrote the Guantanamo Bay score, and an excerpt from Clinton's new score will be included on the next AFOS episode, "Bottomless Party" (WEB95), which will begin streaming tomorrow (Thursday, April 24 at midnight, 4am, 10am, 3pm, 7pm and 11pm).


Not much of the original music from the Harold & Kumar flicks has been made available to us fans of the H&K series--there wasn't enough in the first movie to fill an entire CD--so the rest of WEB95 contains selections from several of my favorite original scores that were written for comedies (The Hot Rock, Stripes, Ratatouille).

Also on the WEB95 playlist: some classic Henry Mancini joints, plus an amusing fake '80s movie anthem co-penned by former Shudder to Think member Craig Wedren, who regularly collaborates with alumni from The State (Wet Hot American Summer, Reno 911!) and is a film/TV composer to watch.


Some clickworthy articles about Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, the first H&K movie:
"Bathroom humor and stoner jokes aside, this teen-pleasing, stereotype-challenging road movie has a lot to say about race in America today." [Salon]
"The film's vision of what it really means to be a second-generation immigrant is downright sardonic." [Flak]
John Cho: "I imagine the second one, set as it would be in Amsterdam would be even funner... I can see the tag line now--'more funner than the first one.'" [DVD Talk]
"White Castle and Church's Chicken, Manhattan, New York" [Dancing Blue Seal] (actually, this blog post doesn't have much to do with Harold & Kumar--it just contains some great food porn pics of those luscious White Castle Slyders)

Next AFOS episode: The title of WEB96 will be "The Inmates Are Taking Over the Asylum," and it will feature selections from scores to movies released by United Artists, which is celebrating its 90th anniversary with a 90-disc DVD box set and UA retrospectives at both the Film Forum in New York and the Nuart in L.A. This ep will contain my favorite themes from UA movies (From Russia with Love, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three), as well as selections from some out-of-print soundtracks to UA cult favorites (The Landlord, I'm Gonna Git You Sucka).