I Can't Believe I've Never Heard It Till Now!: Arturo Márquez's "Danzón No. 2"

The "Danzón No. 2" sequence from Mozart in the Jungle

"I Can't Believe I've Never Seen It Till Now!" is a series of posts that appear sporadically here on the AFOS blog rather than weekly. In each post, I reveal that I never watched a certain popular movie--or that I never encountered a certain popular piece of music--until very recently, and that's largely because I'm Filipino, we're always late to the party and that's how we do.

When Mozart in the Jungle, the Amazon original series about the New York classical music world, took home Best Comedy Series and Best Actor in a Comedy for Gael García Bernal--as unorthodox conductor Rodrigo de Souza--at the Golden Globes earlier this year on January 10, Amazon celebrated its show's Golden Globe wins by allowing viewers who don't subscribe to Amazon Prime to stream for free every Mozart in the Jungle episode for only one day on January 17. I really wanted to see if Mozart in the Jungle got any better after its so-so pilot, which I watched for free on Amazon during Amazon pilot season a year before (I don't subscribe to Amazon Prime because it's too expensive for my blood), so I had to kiss the whole Sunday goodbye and try to stream Mozart in the Jungle's entire run before it turned back into a pumpkin at midnight.

Streaming two whole seasons in one Sunday is difficult to accomplish, especially when you're like me and you don't believe in binge-watching. I think it's a terrible way to savor scripted TV--I believe in taking my time when it comes to watching shows--and I also don't like to call it binge-watching because that word makes the act of TV-watching sound disgusting and Mr. Creosote-ish. Streaming two seasons in one Sunday is also difficult when you're the kind of viewer who can get fidgety after only two hours of marathoning a show and Sunday isn't the best day to be marathoning the entire lifespan of a show because after much procrastination, Sunday usually ends up being the day when you have to go replenish your fridge with groceries or else you're screwed for the next few days. Despite those obstacles, I was able to get as far as the third-to-last episode of the second season before Mozart in the Jungle turned back into a pumpkin.

As Rodrigo, the mercurial artistic soul whom aspiring oboist Hailey Rutledge (Lola Kirke) falls in love with and whom Mozart in the Jungle creators Roman Coppola, Jason Schwartzman (Coppola's cousin) and Alex Timbers loosely based on Venezuelan rock-star conductor Gustavo Dudamel, Bernal definitely deserved that Golden Globe. At times, Mozart in the Jungle threatens to turn into Entourage-y lifestyle porn, but it's neither as douchey as Entourage nor as unconvincing in its attempts to establish why its fictional central figure is an A-list star. I never could buy that the rather boring-ass Vincent Chase is a movie star--a CW star maybe, but not the 1997-ish DiCaprio type Entourage frequently hyped up Vinnie to be--whereas thanks to the amount of time Mozart in the Jungle spends on Rodrigo's creative process, as well as the vitality and warmth Bernal brings to Rodrigo, you understand why Rodrigo is such a highly regarded conductor and why every musician in the fictional New York Symphony would take a bullet for him.

New AFOS episode: "The Inmates Are Taking Over the Asylum"

This week, the United Artists 90th Anniversary Film Festival hits both the Castro Theatre in San Francisco and the Nuart Theatre in L.A., so the next episode of A Fistful of Soundtracks will feature my favorite selections from scores to films that were distributed by UA. "The studio without a studio" thrived during an era when rival studios couldn't keep up with their audiences--and the social changes of the period--and kept releasing dull and staid product. UA's smart and daring films during the Arthur Krim/Robert Benjamin regime and Krim and Benjamin's championing of filmmakers--they let them do their thing--are always worth celebrating. Oh yeah, and most of these flicks had terrific original music too.

"The Inmates Are Taking Over the Asylum" (WEB96) will begin streaming tomorrow (Thursday, May 1 at midnight, 4am, 10am, 3pm, 7pm and 11pm). I've included themes from some of UA's most popular releases (The Great Escape, 007), but I also wanted to fill most of the episode with music from cult classics (The Taking of Pelham One Two Three) or soundtrack albums that are out of print (The Long Goodbye).

Pelham, a thrilling caper movie with Walter Matthau at his sardonic best as a cynical transit cop who's the perfect disheveled hero for an even more disheveled New York, and The Long Goodbye, Robert Altman's clever reimagining of Philip Marlowe, are two '70s UA flicks I instantly fell in love with. I first caught Pelham on TCM a few years ago and discovered The Long Goodbye on DVD last year.

Pelham composer David Shire and Long Goodbye composer John Williams achieved so much with what little they had. Shire wrote each Pelham score cue under the 12-tone method of composition to evoke "organized chaos"--in other words, the funkiest film score not written by a black dude ever.

Williams' Long Goodbye score--one of the shortest he ever wrote--is equally off-kilter. It consists of nothing but different variations on the same melody. Wherever Elliott Gould's Marlowe goes, the Long Goodbye theme follows, whether it's as bar piano music or as a doorbell ring. I don't know exactly why Altman asked Williams to write the score like that. (Jaime J. Weinman says Williams' score is a spoof of the incessant pimping of movie title songs in the '60s and '70s--an issue that caused the previously stable working relationship between Alfred Hitchcock and the less pop-minded Bernard Herrmann to fall apart during the making of Torn Curtain. The Something Old, Nothing New blogger theorizes that Williams' score could also be an homage to Roy Webb's similarly structured score during Out of the Past.) But whatever the intentions were, the Long Goodbye score nicely reflects Marlowe's sense of displacement--he's a '40s guy in a '70s world.

Whereas UA was a '70s studio in a '50s Hollywood that struggled to keep up with the '60s.

Roman Coppola's CQ

WEB96 also covers UA's recent art-house phase, before Tom Cruise took over the company. One of my favorite films to emerge from UA's art-house years is Roman Coppola's CQ, a fun little film about filmmaking in the mold of Day for Night and Ed Wood. It contains a great loungey score by the French trio Mellow, which evoked the likes of Piero Umiliani, Piero Piccioni and Ennio Morricone during the cues for the movie-within-the-movie Codename: Dragonfly, a mash-up of Barbarella and Danger: Diabolik (the source of Angela Lindvall's sexy rolling-around-in-cash scene).

The '70s logo

A Half-Assed History of UA's Logos

I remember the first appearance of the '90s UA logo when I saw GoldenEye in 1995. The logo actually received cheers from GoldenEye's opening weekend audience--they were just so happy to see Bond again after a six-year absence.

The '90s logo

The sadly discontinued jingle was composed by Jeff Eden Fair and Starr Parodi.

The husband-and-wife duo recalled to SoundtrackNet that "We did that with a 90-piece orchestra at the Sony Scoring Stage... Our instructions were, 'We want something that represents the past, present, and future of United Artists.' So we started with classic orchestral instrumentation, moving to futuristic sounds and concepts at the end."

The '00s logo

Defamer's funny idea of what the UA watertower now looks like

Next AFOS episode: I'm taking a break after five consecutive eps. I don't know when I'll stream the next new ep.