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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Benji B's "Movie Soundtrack Special" is from last year, but where else can you hear Jon Brion and RZA in the same hour (other than AFOS, of course)?

One of my favorite hour-long mixes last year made me take notice of BBC Radio 1's Benji B, who, in January 2013, spun tracks by the likes of Flying Lotus, Kanye West and Raphael Saadiq while a 16-piece string ensemble led by conductor Grant Windsor played along. FlyLo's "Do the Astral Plane" and Drake's "Headlines" sound incredible with a full string section. I still can't get enough of the Benji B string ensemble mix.

Plus there are some really lovely-looking female violinists in the ensemble.

Later in the year, Benji B put together a two-hour movie soundtrack special that I first stumbled into earlier this week. The show was part of Radio 1's July 2013 "Movie Week," which had Daniel Radcliffe dropping by the BBC for a live interview and film score music nut Edgar Wright doing a stint as a guest DJ. Benji B's mix combines classic original score cues like Jon Brion's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind themes with existing songs that were prominently featured in films, like Kanye and Rick Ross' "Devil in a New Dress," which turns up in Kanye's 2010 short film Runaway, and Ryuichi Sakamoto's 1995 instrumental "Bibo no Aozora," which was used in 2006's Babel.

I have a feeling that Jay Electronica heard Benji B play the Eternal Sunshine cues, which Jay sampled in 2007's Act I: Eternal Sunshine (The Pledge), back-to-back with "Bibo no Aozora," and that must be where he got the idea to drop verses over "Bibo no Aozora" for his recent single "Better in Tune with the Infinite." But whatever the actual reasons were for him picking "Bibo no Aozora," Jay has great taste in soundtrack albums.

I like how Benji B opens with John Barry's lesser-known secondary theme for 007 instead of the much more famous "James Bond Theme," which an uncredited Barry rearranged from material composed by Monty Norman. I also like the inclusion of both Barry's Goldfinger score cue "Golden Girl," which beatheads are familiar with from the Sneaker Pimps' "6 Underground," and Herbie Hancock's Blow-Up tune "Bring Down the Birds," which beatheads are also familiar with because Deee-Lite looped it in "Groove Is in the Heart."

Many of the rest of the cuts in Benji B's mix are tracks that can be currently heard on AFOS or were formerly in rotation on AFOS, like the instrumental "Polaroid Girl," from Massive Attack's original score to the 2005 Jet Li/Morgan Freeman/Bob Hoskins flick Unleashed (better known as Danny the Dog outside America). The inclusion of "Polaroid Girl," one of my favorite Massive Attack joints, makes me want to retrieve my copy of the Danny the Dog soundtrack, which I stupidly misplaced, and go put "Polaroid Girl" back into AFOS rotation.

R.I.P. Bob Hoskins.

The mix also contains the 1976 Rocky instrumental "Reflections," Bill Conti's ripoff of "Summer Madness," the Kool & the Gang tune that Rocky director John G. Avildsen clearly temp-tracked for Rocky's first scene in his apartment. Benji B erroneously ID'd "Reflections" as a Rocky III instrumental, one of a few mistakes he made while backannouncing. He also ID'd and listed the Blow-Up track as "The Naked Camera" instead of "Bring Down the Birds" and mistook For a Few Dollars More's pocket watch theme for a theme from A Fistful of Dollars, the installment that preceded For a Few Dollars More in the Man with No Name trilogy. Despite his errors, Benji B's movie soundtrack special is a worthwhile film music mix that's on a par with Paul Nice's classic Do You Pick Your Feet in Poughkeepsie? mixtape, and I wish I had heard it sooner.

Benji B BBC Radio 1 (Movie Soundtrack Special) (18.07.13) by Benji B on Mixcloud

Blade Runner

Correct tracklist
1. John Williams, Alfred Newman's 20th Century Fox studio logo music
2. John Barry, "007 Takes the Lektor" (from From Russia with Love)
3. David Shire, "End Title" (from The Taking of Pelham One Two Three)
4. Alain Goraguer, "Maquillage de Tiwa" (from La Planète Sauvage)
5. Bernard Herrmann, "Diary of a Taxi Driver" (from Taxi Driver)
6. Lalo Schifrin, "Scorpio's View" (from Dirty Harry)
7. John Barry, "Golden Girl" (from Goldfinger)
8. Roy Budd, "The Diamond Fortress" (from Diamonds)
9. Nino Nardini, "Tropicola" (needle-dropped in Black Dynamite)
10. Geinoh Yamashirogumi, "Kaneda" (from Akira)
11. Vangelis, "End Titles" (from Blade Runner)
12. Giorgio Moroder, "Chase" (from Midnight Express)
13. HAL 9000 soundbites from 2001: A Space Odyssey
14. Chromatics, "Tick of the Clock" (needle-dropped in Drive)
15. Angelo Badalamenti, "Laura Palmer's Theme (Instrumental)" (from Twin Peaks)
16. Massive Attack, "Polaroid Girl" (from Danny the Dog)
17. Forest Whitaker, "Samurai Quote 5" (from Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai)
18. Cliff Martinez, "Don't Blow It" (from Solaris)
19. Barry Forgie, "Mindbender" (from the album Mindbender)
20. Bill Conti, "Reflections" (from Rocky)
21. Roy Ayers, "Coffy Is the Color" (from Coffy)
22. Herbie Hancock, "Bring Down the Birds" (from Blow-Up)
23. Grand Wizard Theodore, "Military Cut" (from Wild Style; opening soundbite only)
24. Curtis Mayfield, "Little Child Running Wild" (from Superfly)
25. Jon Brion, "Phone Call" (from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind)
26. Jon Brion, "Collecting Things" (from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind)
27. Ryuichi Sakamoto, Jaques Morelenbaum & Yuichiro Gotoh, "Bibo no Aozora" (needle-dropped in Babel)
28. Ry Cooder, "Paris, Texas" (from Paris, Texas)
29. Ennio Morricone, "Carillon" (from For a Few Dollars More)
30. The Complexions, "I Only Have Eyes for You" (from A Bronx Tale)/The Flamingos, "I Only Have Eyes for You" (needle-dropped in A Bronx Tale)
31. Kanye West feat. Rick Ross, "Devil in a New Dress" (needle-dropped in Runaway)
32. D'Angelo, "She's Always in My Hair" (needle-dropped in Scream 2)
33. RZA, "Samurai Showdown" (from Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai)
34. Crooklyn Dodgers '95, "Return of the Crooklyn Dodgers" (from Clockers)
35. Dr. Dre, "Keep Their Heads Ringin'" (from Friday)
36. The Fearless Four, "Rockin' It" (needle-dropped in Style Wars)
37. Fab 5 Freddy, "Down by Law" (from Wild Style)
38. Public Enemy, "Fight the Power" (from Do the Right Thing)
39. Method Man & Redman, "Da Rockwilder" (needle-dropped in How High)

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

BBC's Luther may be as close as we can get to that TV version of Gotham Central some of us GC readers always wanted to see

The BBC One cops-vs.-serial killers procedural Luther, which concludes its second season on BBC America tonight, isn't a perfect show, but it's more enjoyable than most procedurals, due to an imposing and lively but never hammy turn by former Wire star Idris Elba (an actual lead of color who still has his show!) and a distinctive, not-so-generic look.

(Photo source: Luther Caps)

The '60s Batman had the Dutch angles and Homicide: Life on the Street had the jump cuts and washed-out color scheme (something Homicide phased out in its later and less interesting seasons). Luther likes to take its actors and place them at the bottom left and right corners of the screen so that they're surrounded by lots of negative space. If I recall correctly, a Luther crew member said the crew favored this framing effect because it makes it appear as if comic book-style thought bubbles are about to surface above the actors' heads.

(Photo source: Luther Caps)

The framing effect, which was more prominent in Luther's first season (did some Beeb higher-up put NBC exec-vs.-Homicide-style pressure on the Luther crew to do less of it?), also enhances the show's sense of dread and unease. It dwarfs the actors and manages to make the tall Elba look as small as the runty white psychos he's been chasing this season (at times, Luther feels like a serious version of Chris Rock's post-Columbine stand-up routine about crazy white kids who scare the shit out of him, like the goofily named Trenchcoat Mafia).

Luther evokes dread and unease more effectively than most shows. The mute, hammer-wielding LARP-er who terrorized working folk in the penultimate episode of Luther's second season is scarier and more menacing than anything during Luther's American ratings competition, FX's trying-way-too-hard-to-be-scary American Horror Story. The LARP-er's muteness and the episode's preference for filming his killings from a distance or having them take place off-screen--we're subjected only to gruesome hammer-to-skull sound effects--both make his acts of violence more disturbing. And though it's resorted to the tired and annoying device of children in peril that's been used by torture-porn procedurals like Criminal Minds, Luther rarely feels as sadistic as that show (below an A.V. Club piece about Criminal Minds and its short-lived spinoff Suspect Behavior, a commenter astutely noted that "Middle America eat [sic] this crap up with a spoon. It genuinely baffles me that middle aged and conservative Americans have made this show such a mainstream hit.").

That quality of being unnerving without getting sadistic or graphic recalls Gotham Central, the much-missed DC Comics crime title that writers Ed Brubaker and Greg Rucka told from the point of view of Gotham City homicide detectives who resent Batman (Gotham Central was a bleak book, but it wasn't as sadistic as most of DC's puerile attempts at edginess, perhaps because Brubaker and Rucka write like grown-ups instead of horny and torture-porn-obsessed adolescents). From "the operatic theatricality" that crime novelist and Luther creator Neil Cross once said he's brought to DCI John Luther's adversaries to that aforementioned framing effect that creates the illusion of thought bubbles, the larger-than-life Luther is basically a comic book--or as John's teenage charge Jenny Jones (Aimee-Ffion Edwards) would prefer, graphic novel--but it's a very good one, which Gotham Central was.