The following is a repost of my October 29, 2015 discussion of The Guest. After I published this post, Dan Stevens, the film's star, was cast as the title character on Fargo showrunner Noah Hawley's much-hypedLegion, an X-Men spinoff that will premiere next year on FX, while Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett, the duo behind The Guest, made a much-maligned Blair Witch Project sequel that was simply titled Blair Witch. The Guest is now streamable on Netflix.
"Mumblegore" filmmaker Adam Wingard has said the concept for his offbeat 2014 action thriller The Guest arose from watching a double feature of The Terminator and John Carpenter's original Halloween. So what would happen if you got your Terminator in my Halloween and you got your Halloween on my Terminator?
Marrying those two classic thrillers (and borrowing Carpenter's favorite typeface for the opening and closing titles, although Wingard would later regret choosing Albertus due to its sudden ubiquity) then led to the You're Next director and his regular collaborator, screenwriter Simon Barrett, taking additional inspiration from the 1987 cult classic The Stepfather for their story of a small-town waitress (Maika Monroe) who notices something's not quite right about her parents' houseguest, a well-mannered stranger (Dan Stevens) claiming to have served in Afghanistan with her dead soldier brother Caleb. Wingard and Barrett also took some inspiration from the various "seemingly nice stranger insinuates himself or herself into a benign household and gradually turns out to be a psycho" thrillers that followed in The Stepfather's wake, like 1992's The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, which turned into the box-office behemoth some Stepfather fans wish the 1987 film had gotten to be.
Usually on Throwback Thursday, I pull out from my desk cabinet--with my eyes closed--a movie ticket stub I didn't throw away, and then I discuss the movie on the stub and maybe a little bit of its score, which might be now streaming on AFOS. This week, instead of drawing some random stub, I'm going to completely break protocol and focus on a movie I didn't see in the theater. I caught this movie instead on Netflix, and it's an especially timely one because it takes place during Halloween.
"Mumblegore" filmmaker Adam Wingard has said the concept for his offbeat 2014 action thriller The Guest arose from watching a double feature of The Terminator and John Carpenter's original Halloween. So what would happen if you got your Terminator in my Halloween and you got your Halloween on my Terminator?
Marrying those two classic thrillers (and borrowing Carpenter's favorite typeface for the opening and closing titles, although Wingard would later regret choosing Albertus due to its sudden ubiquity) then led to the You're Next director and his regular collaborator, screenwriter Simon Barrett, taking additional inspiration from the 1987 cult classic The Stepfather for their story of a small-town waitress (Maika Monroe) who notices something's not quite right about her parents' houseguest, a well-mannered stranger (Dan Stevens) claiming to have served in Afghanistan with her dead soldier brother Caleb. Wingard and Barrett also took some inspiration from the various "seemingly nice stranger insinuates himself or herself into a benign household and gradually turns out to be a psycho" thrillers that followed in The Stepfather's wake, like 1992's The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, which turned into the box-office behemoth some Stepfather fans wish the 1987 film had gotten to be.
The duo ended up making a film that's more satisfying and engrossing than any of the gazillion Stepfather clones and Hand That Rocks the Cradle ripoffs that dominated movie houses--and the Lifetime schedule--in the '90s. Even though The Guest is a highly stylized action thriller (dig that pulsating synth score by musician Steve Moore and the well-chosen and hypnotic existing songs by Love and Rockets and Norwegian electro-pop singer Annie) and Stevens does that hyperrealistic action movie thing of nonchalantly unpinning a grenade in each hand at the same time as if he's in a John Woo joint, there's a nice tinge of believability to The Guest that's not found in those '90s killers-living-in-the-house thrillers.
The believability emerges in the form of Anna Peterson, Monroe's character, figuring out way earlier than you'd expect--especially from a thriller like The Guest--that the stranger who identifies himself as David Collins is an imposter. Wingard said, "One of the things that we liked about being able to work in a movie that has some '80s and '90s genre nostalgia to it was, you're able to do the kind of thing where the kids get what's going on but the parents are totally clueless. That was a key factor to those films. That's just a fun dynamic to play with." The intelligence of Anna and her younger brother Luke (Brendan Meyer)--who's somewhat aware that there's something off about David, but he doesn't really care as much as Anna does because he's enjoying how David has taken to helping him fight off bullies at school--sheds light on how distracting it was that the family in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle was badly dumbed down in order for Rebecca De Mornay to get away with her reign of terror.
If you ever rewatch The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, the movie turns into 100 minutes of you muttering, "No family in real life is that dumb!" The family in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle was so clueless and so trusting of the evil nanny that the mentally challenged handyman played by Ernie Hudson ended up looking like a Mensa member compared to everyone in the family.
The tension of "When is someone in this family going to get the hint that this new guy fell out of crazytown?" is nicely done away with in The Guest so that greater--and more interesting--tension can be built from "Will Anna or David gain the upper hand?" and "Where did this psycho come from?" The Guest is at its most effective as a thriller when it conceals the mysterious David's backstory. In fact, Wingard's original cut of The Guest ran much longer because it delved so much into his backstory. Getting rid of all that backstory was a wise decision. The first and second acts of The Guest keep you guessing David's actual identity and why he has infiltrated on Halloween this family that's still grieving over Caleb. Is David a criminal trying to get his hands on a stash of money stored in the Petersons' house? Could he be a cyborg who escaped from the military to hide out among civilians? Or is he an alien who slaughtered all of Caleb's unit in Afghanistan and then took the form of one of Caleb's comrades as part of a plot to lull Earth into an invasion?
Stevens, who's playing against his Downton Abbey romantic lead persona, is great at embodying two sides of David and doing subtle things with his performance-within-a-performance to make the audience say, "What is the story with this guy?" There's the well-mannered and chivalrous side that wins over Anna and Luke's parents, Spencer (Leland Orser) and Laura (Sheila Kelley), and attracts women like Kristen (Tabatha Shaun), Anna's co-worker at the local diner. And then there's David's abnormal side, like when he stares too long and hard at Luke at the dinner table when he first meets Luke, as if he's an alien trying to figure out how to consume ice cream in a cone for the first time, or the way David unsettlingly stares into space when he's by himself. Stevens is reminiscent of a younger Jeff Fahey, and in an alternate-universe version of this story if it were made in 1989 or 1990 by Hemdale, the indie studio that produced the original Terminator, or Cannon Films, whose logo is amusingly channeled by the Snoot Films logo that kicks off The Guest, you could easily picture Fahey starring as David.
But the real find during The Guest is Monroe, the lead from last week's Throwback Thursday entry, director David Robert Mitchell's similarly striking horror flick It Follows. She looks like Gwen Stefani without all the weird and off-putting racial baggage. The Guest and It Follows are a fascinating pair of thrillers where Monroe stars as the kind of horror movie character author Carol J. Clover dubbed as "the Final Girl"--the last female standing in a horror flick with a massive body count--and is now the basis for director Todd Strauss-Schulson's meta slasher flick The Final Girls.
In It Follows, Mitchell subverts the Final Girl formula by making the girl who has the most sex in the movie the one who faces off against the killer at the end--instead of pitting a virginal heroine against the killer--and as that atypical Final Girl, Monroe makes for a solid lead who's more frazzled and vulnerable than action-thriller tough because of the incomprehensible nightmare her character is unable to overcome or make sense of for most of the movie. Meanwhile, in this thriller that preceded It Follows, Monroe plays a more traditional--and more strong-willed--Final Girl. But I actually prefer her performance in The Guest because she gets to show a little more range and cut loose for a couple of moments and be genuinely funny, like when Anna, before she takes David along with her to a Halloween party where she temporarily lets go of her suspicions about him, accidentally stumbles into a towel-clad David and becomes flustered by his chiseled bod, but in a believable way rather than an inane and cheesy rom-com kind of way.
There's humor in The Guest, but Wingard and Barrett handle it with subtlety (rather than playing it broadly) and a couple of odd references nobody in Stevens' native country of England or outside America will understand. I'm amused by the weird way the film emphasizes how much of an ordinary American family the Petersons are by naming Caleb's siblings and parents after characters from General Hospital. Anna's name is clearly a nod to heroic secret agent Anna Devane, while Luke gets his name from Luke Spencer and the names of the Peterson parents come from Luke's longtime love Laura. Either Wingard or Barrett is a secret fan of all the drama over in Port Charles.
It's great that the suitably named Anna gets to be smarter than everyone else in the film, but I wish she were smarter in one particular area: being able to notice that Stevens' otherwise perfect Southern accent, like almost all other American accents attempted by British actors who portray Americans, gets all weird when he says the word "anything" and pronounces it as "ennathin." I've always wanted to write that one thriller where someone realizes he or she is being held captive in a fake, the Village from The Prisoner-esque version of America by a British person who's pretending to be American and is actually working for the enemy (or maybe evil aliens) because the way the captor pronounces "anything" gives away that something isn't right about their surroundings.
Then our protagonist shoots his or her captor in the head and says, "That's not how to pronounce 'anything,' bitch."
None of Steve Moore's original score cues from The Guest are currently in rotation on AFOS, but they ought to be.
Throwback Thursday is a forum for discussing past or present films we've paid to see, whether they contain score music that's currently in rotation on AFOS or don't, but it's a forum not just for myself. Hardeep Aujla--my homie from the U.K.-based international hip-hop site Word Is Bond, as well as an Asian action cinema devotee who introduced me to the batshit brilliance of The Man from Nowhere, while I hipped him to my favorite Johnnie To films--is someone whose writing we'll be seeing a lot of in this space later this year. He didn't see the 2014 thriller The Signal in the theater--where all previous Throwback Thursday subjects were watched, as shown by a movie ticket photo that usually opens each post--but he has a lot to say about this low-budget thriller he caught online. It features a nifty original score by both Nima Fakhrara, who scored the 2013 live-action version of Gatchaman, and, towards the end of the film, instrumental hip-hop artist Chris Alfaro, who records under the name Free the Robots. This is Hardeep's first Throwback Thursday piece. No British punctuation styles were harmed during the posting of this piece.
Spoilers for The Signal begin in 41... 5... 3... 2...
The Signal (2014) By Hardeep Aujla
Once upon a rainy Switzerland weekend, Lord Byron threw a party. Probably something like Puffy would do in our times: lots of famous people in attendance. Mary Shelley was there, had a nightmare after a night of horror-story-hot-potato and penned Frankenstein for the remainder of her stay. Nearly 200 years pass and we cite it as the first piece of science-fiction. Its philosophical discourse on man's folly of playing God by creating "artificial" life would inspire artists for generations and provide the genre with one of its most endearing pre-occupations. Technology advances and the stories keep up, or sometimes already had the lead. We get a broad spectrum of mechano-stuff from the "housewives' dream" Robby The Robot, to Sarah Connor's worst nightmare, the Terminator. Isaac Asimov lays down some fundamental, human-protecting laws, anticipating an emergent property which begins to rouse between the circuit boards and soldered wires. Johnny Five says he "is alive", Pris quotes Descartes, "I think, Sebastian... therefore I am", echoing an automaton that's been sitting in the town hall at Neuchatel since the 1700's writing that exact same phrase over and over again. Today, angst around AI research is manifested in cinema with a noticeable surge in recent years. Her (2013), Chappie (2015) and Ex Machina (2015) (which I've not seen but looks to be pretty similar to 2013's The Machine, right down to the fembot's name of Ava) all compute the dilemma of nuts and bolts and code gaining sentience. Then Automata (2014) straight passes forward the baton of life to them, because how else are we gonna survive the interstellar getaway with our squishy, frail and generally not-space-friendly bodies when we eventually wreck this rock?
I don't like looking back at the past. I'd rather think about the present and the future, which is why a recent subject in this blog's Throwback Thursday series, The World's End--a cautionary film about the dangers of nostalgia and remaining in the past--resonates so much with me. Edgar Wright's film agrees a lot with me about staying focused on the future and never looking back. If I look at the blog archive at the bottom of my blog and the last few posts I wrote are all about subjects that took place before the '00s, I get really worried. "Uh-oh, I better not spend too much time in the past. Stay in the now," I think to myself. That's why I did for a couple of years a weekly series of posts about new TV (but focused on animation). Newer TV is always more fascinating to me than older TV. I don't even like film or TV blogs where the authors write only about old films or old TV, a.k.a. what Arthur Chu would call the pre-Selfie, pre-Fresh Off the Boat world. It's like those authors are basically saying, "Film and TV were better when it was all white folks." Uh, no, it wasn't, Teabagger.
This year, UC Santa Cruz--the university whose alums include Maya Rudolph, Cary Fukunaga and more recently, DJ Dahi--is celebrating its 50th anniversary. As part of the festivities, UCSC's campus radio station is inviting all former DJs, from Bullseye host Jesse Thorn to a classmate who occasionally keeps in touch with me, Yukiya Jerry Waki, to return to the station later this month and reminisce about their time there. I hate reunions and prefer to avoid them like the plague. So on some mornings in the past few weeks, I'll wake up thinking to myself, "Nah, I'll skip this Santa Cruz one." But then on other mornings, I'll wake up thinking, "Okay, maybe I'll drop by, probably tell someone a wacky story about that terrible time I did my radio show immediately after a sweaty, all-white drum circle performed live at the studio--so the studio smelled like the inside of an outhouse at a summer music festival for the rest of that afternoon--and after only a couple of hours of reminiscing, I bounce, and then it's straight to grabbing both a burger at Jack's and the next bus back north."
I'll always be grateful for what the station taught me about radio, broadcasting, chart reporting, interacting with the labels and so on--it was where AFOS began, as a two-hour show where I got the chance to interview on the phone Mark Hamill, '60s Star Trek composer Gerald Fried and my personal favorite interviewee on the phone during those UCSC years, a now-retired TV critic named Joyce Millman--but my time at the station also consisted of a few things I'm not proud of or that were just plain stupid. A reunion will just make me relive those cringeworthy moments I'd rather not revisit.
"Doo-hude... Tina... I can totally hear my heart beating. It's like a Pharrell beat with guest verses being dropped by T.I."
Every Wednesday in "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," I dine on five of the week's most noteworthy animated shows. The episodes are reviewed in the order of when they first aired.
In "Rodent," the latest Apollo Gauntlet installment, Prince Belenus and Dr. Benign (both voiced by series creator Myles Langlois) blame an evil robot's abduction of the Princess (Hollie Dzama) on Apollo (also Langlois) and his pummeling of her royal guards, who would have protected her from the robot had Apollo not knocked them all out. Apollo replies that leaving the guards alone wouldn't have mattered anyway because "that robot would have come in here like Terminator in the police station."
That's not the only Terminator reference in "Rodent." Unless Langlois created a blooper without realizing it, the barefoot Benign is seen at the start of the episode running through a corridor making the kind of footstep noises that would emanate from someone wearing hard-soled shoes, not someone who's barefoot--an exact re-creation of the off-putting footstep sound FX the Terminator 2 foley artists created for a barefoot Sarah Connor after she broke out of her cell. I don't know if Langlois intended it to be a reference to one of the silliest foley artist bloopers ever seen in an expensive and beloved summer blockbuster, but I'd like to think he did.
Earlier in Apollo Gauntlet's second season on the Rug Burn Channel, I said, "I might go from mildly liking this weird cartoon to straight-up admiring it if its new season never bothers to leave that throne room." Since then, the characters have stepped outside the throne room, but we've reached the season's seventh episode by now, and the show is still confined to the Dundrum castle (Apollo, Benign and Belenus will have to eventually leave the castle to rescue the Princess). The fact that the show has remained this long in one single setting proves how low its budget is, but budget limitations don't matter much when Apollo's dialogue, the awkward pauses and the intentionally wretched rotoscoping are so frequently funny.
Stray observations:
* "'Apollo Gauntlet'? Uh, yeah, sure, let's call him that," says a continually puzzled Benign to the Princess. In "The Interrogation of Dr. Benign by the Hero Apollo Gauntlet," Benign addressed Apollo as Paul. Apollo's full actual name is Paul Cassidy, according to YouTube's series synopsis.
* Where did Paul and Benign teleport from? I'm putting my money on an insane asylum where Paul was an inmate--which explains the conversations with his right gauntlet and all the slightly creepy hallucinations he's been experiencing--and Benign was either a scientist who was fiddling around with some sort of teleportation gizmo that happened to be lying around a lab in the mental facility or a therapist who was accidentally zapped along with Paul into the distant planet by the device while in the middle of a therapy session with him. (There's also the possibility that these adventures on this other planet are one whole illusion in Paul's mind.) The show also has yet to explain where Paul's magic gauntlets come from.
* "Oh no, Billy, Witchiepoo captured Pufnstuf!" H.R. Pufnstuf was way before my time, so I never watched it, but my comedy nerd-dom has exposed me to lots of jokes or sketches about the cheesiness of Pufnstuf that were written by comedians who grew up watching it. Weed references during late '60s/early '70s Krofft shows were really subtle back then. I bet H.R.'s next-door neighbor was named Phil E. Blunt.
***
On The Cleveland Show, Cleveland and his drinking buddies find a living out of being seat fillers at strangers' funerals. Donna objects to Cleveland's new side job because of how creepy it is for him to pretend to have known these strangers who died, so Cleveland wises up and quits. But his temporary stint as a funeral seat filler in "Grave Danger" has resulted in some gorgeous-looking vistas of Cleveland and his friends chillaxing at the cemetary, and the craft and care that's been put into the shots of the cemetary remind me that while this recently cancelled cartoon may not be the funniest on Fox's "Animation Domination" lineup, it can really look like a million bucks from time to time. I'm not so fond of the use of Blue Oyster Cult's "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" during the funeral montage though. Like all those covers of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," the depressed white person's "Macarena," that shit was charming the first 998 times I heard it on series TV.
Meanwhile, Rallo spends a weekend at his biological dad Robert's apartment in East Stoolbend, and he encounters a pack of street kids who are tougher than even Rallo himself. He's so intimidated by them that he agrees to "jack show-and-tell" at his kindergarten class for them, especially after they blackmail him with photos of him appearing to bully a fat kid at the basketball court (of course, Rallo was actually telling the kid to fall on his ass so that he'd appear to be tougher in front of the street kids). Rallo's story is nothing special, aside from a funny running joke involving eBay (see below). But the denouement--in which Rallo scolds the other kindergarteners for their cruel and classist words towards the East Stoolbend kids who tried to steal their show-and-tell items, and then after the East Stoolbenders leave the classroom, he calls the police on their asses--is a terrific subversion of the badly aging "More You Know" endings that were a fixture of so many of the black sitcoms that influenced The Cleveland Show.
Stray observations:
* There's a good score music gag when Rallo cowers from hearing helicopter blades whirring, gunshots, a violin playing slashing chords, wolf howls, spooky moans and the cackling of a witch. To keep from getting scared, he switches on the TV and hears an anchorman (Kevin Michael Richardson) report that "according to police, the crazy wolf-ghost-witch violinist is believed to be armed and flying a helicopter, hunting for little boys who look like you."
* "Thanks again, Padre, for forgiving me for pushing the fat kid and for keeping your hands to yourself."
* "That's a nice suit, Rallo." "Thanks. I got it on eBay. Peter Dinklage wore it to the Golden Globes."
* Donna to Cleveland: "Is that a new suit?" "Mm-hmm. Got it on eBay. Tilda Swinton wore it to the Golden Globes."
* T-Pain voices one of the kindergarteners on the show? That's bananas. Then again, I shouldn't be surprised because of this cartoon's history of strange and random casting choices--like enlisting David Lynch to voice a bartender.
Every Wednesday in "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," I dine on five of the week's most noteworthy animated shows. The episodes are reviewed in the order of when they first aired.
The first minute of "Legs" is a thing of comedic-editing beauty and an atypical way for Archer to kick off a cold open. It centers not on Archer or a bunch of the major players in the same room but on secondary character Ray and his frustrating morning routine ever since Archer's crash-landing of the escape craft at the end of last season left the gay agent paralyzed (for real this time, after he pretended to be paralyzed for much of the third season).
The sight of Ray struggling with his medical bills and the difficulties that come with being actually paralyzed--like having to relieve himself in a plastic bag--is slightly reminiscent of a much more somber montage during Ed (the Tom Cavanagh lawyer show, not the Matt LeBlanc baseball monkey shitpile), in which handicapped cast member Daryl "Chill" Mitchell, whose character on Ed was wheelchair-bound Eli, wordlessly demonstrated how much longer it takes for a disabled person to get out of bed and change clothes. But because this isn't Ed, where the characters were far less irritable, cynical and TV-MA-mouthed, Ray is grumbling aloud to himself while getting ready for work and cursing Archer, "the other shitbag in my life." Ray is like the long-suffering Frank Grimes to Archer's oblivious Homer Simpson, and this episode's subtlest and cruelest joke (but not as cruel as the countless ways Meg's been humiliated on Family Guy) is that even in an episode where Ray gets to drive much of the story's events, he ends up sidelined for most of it, due to undergoing surgery to receive robotic legs from Krieger.
Despite being a bottle episode, "Legs" is a shining moment for the show's editors. Besides that cold open about Ray's crappy morning, they also demonstrate their editing skills through that "cutting away from one conversation to another so that it sounds like the character in the next scene is replying from faraway" device Archer deploys, but rarely to the extent that the show does in this episode. (The funniest of these gags cuts away from Cyril asking Lana if Terminator cyborgs are asexual to Krieger in mid-conversation with Pam while operating on Ray: "Not when I'm done with him.") It's fitting that "Legs" makes use of this choppy comedic device so often because Ray is being rebuilt in a similar (and much gorier) way.
Word of Ray's surgery causes Archer's fear of robots to resurface, which distracts him from heading to Rome with Lana and Cyril for an ISIS mission. Convinced that the robot apocalypse is near, Archer defies uptight ISIS armory supervisor Rodney and collects an array of weapons from the armory. He tries to thwart the surgical operation by himself, while Krieger races against time to finish Ray's new legs before Archer can burst in and ruin Ray's legs again.
Archer is that rare spy show where the hero occasionally becomes the villain, not because of mind control or brainwashing by some adversary but because he's simply an immature prick. When Archer fires a rocket launcher inside the armory and becomes a danger to the office building, Lana takes up the task of stopping Archer and gets to outwit him while he crawls through ducts like a typical, post-Die Hard '90s action hero. She has a repairman overheat the building's furnace, which causes Archer to doze off. Lana vs. Archer is always an amusing rivalry, whether she's verbally sparring with him in other episodes or pitted against him strategically like in "Legs" (most of her verbal sparring here is with Cyril rather than Archer). But both Archer and Lana wind up looking stupid at the end of "Legs" because Archer is also that rare spy show where the female spy who's supposedly more competent than the lead character sometimes screws up when she gets her chance to step up. Two days after she stops Archer from wreaking further havoc in the building, Lana realizes she forgot to turn off the furnace and let him out of the ducts.
Overheated furnace/ginormous heating bill screw-up aside, Lana and Krieger have helped Ray to receive something the ill-fated Frank Grimes never got: a happy ending. Ray regains the use of his legs--that is until the next time Archer causes him to end up paralyzed again. Because this is Archer, chaos reigns. On this show, happy endings don't last like chaos does--and are not as entertaining.
Stray observations:
* Ray: "I piss and shit in a plastic bag!" Krieger: "Me too!"
* According to Cheryl/Carol's dialogue with Archer about cyborgs, the show takes place in a universe where the Voight-Kampff machine from Blade Runner is now apparently a household item (extra points to Archer for not having Cheryl/Carol awkwardly point out it's from Blade Runner for the folks in the audience who never saw the film). The Voight-Kampff test ought to be used on reality TV stars like Kim Kardashian to confirm that they're all really machines because when most of these attention whore-bots cry on-camera, they don't look like normal people crying--they look like Cameron the Terminator when she creepily imitated human grief during Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
* Someone finally came up with the brilliant idea of giving Krieger and the equally crazy Pam a bunch of scenes together. Krieger's form of crazy is rarely in sync with Pam's form of crazy, except for when Pam, the world's worst nurse, asks Krieger if she was supposed to scrub up before surgery. His answer is "Eh, I didn't."
1. American Gigolo: Giorgio Moroder, "Hello Mr. W.A.M. (Finale)," American Gigolo, Polydor
2. Battlestar Galactica: Bear McCreary, "Mandala in the Clouds" (from "Maelstrom"), Battlestar Galactica: Season 3, La-La Land
3. Confessions of a Police Captain: Riz Ortolani, "Il ricordo di Serena" (from Confessione di un commissario di polizia al procuratore della Repubblica), Easy Tempo Vol. 1: A Cinematic Easy Listening Experience, Right Tempo
4. Damage: Zbigniew Preisner, "The Last Time" (from Damage), Varèse Sarabande: A 25th Anniversary Celebration Volume Two, Varèse Sarabande 5. ER: James Newton Howard, "Theme from ER," ER, Atlantic
6. Finishing the Game: Brian Tyler, "Ready or Not," Finishing the Game, Brian Tyler
7. Game of Death: John Barry, "The Big Motorcycle Fight" (from Game of Death), Game of Death/Night Games, Silva Screen
8. The Hunchback of Soho: Peter Thomas Sound Orchestra, "The Hump" (from The Hunchback of Soho), Futuremuzik, Scamp
9. Infamy: DJ Z-Trip and Garron Chang, "Infamy Movie Theme" (from Infamy), djztrip.com
10. Justice League: The New Frontier: Kevin Manthei, "Plan to Action," Justice League: The New Frontier, La-La Land
11. The Knack...And How to Get It: John Barry, "Here Comes Nancy Now!," The Knack...And How to Get It, Rykodisc
12. Lupin the 3rd: You & the Explosion Band, "Theme from Lupin III '78," Lupin the 3rd, Pioneer
13. The Man Who Knew Too Little: Christopher Young, "The Man Who Knew Too Little," Varèse Sarabande: A 25th Anniversary Celebration Volume Two, Varèse Sarabande
14. Northern Exposure: David Schwartz, "Alaskan Nights," Northern Exposure, MCA
15. Ocean's Thirteen: David Holmes, "Snake Eyes," Ocean's Thirteen, Warner Sunset/Warner Bros.
16. The Prisoner: Ron Grainer, "Main Titles," The Prisoner [File #1], Silva Screen
17. Quantum of Solace: Four Tet, "Crawl, End Crawl," Crawl, End Crawl (from the Motion Picture Quantum of Solace), Columbia/MGM
18. Raiders of the Lost Ark: John Williams, "Airplane Fight," Raiders of the Lost Ark, DCC Compact Classics
19. Shaft in Africa: Johnny Pate, "Shaft in Africa (Addis)," Shaft in Africa, Hip-O Select/Geffen
20. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles: Bear McCreary, "Highway Battle" (from "Queen's Gambit"), Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, La-La Land
21. The Untouchables: Ennio Morricone, "The Strength of the Righteous (Main Title)," The Untouchables, A&M
22. V for Vendetta: Dario Marianelli, "Remember Remember," V for Vendetta, Astralwerks
23. WALL·E: Thomas Newman, "Define Dancing," WALL·E, Walt Disney
24. XXX: Randy Edelman, "Prague Arrival" (from XXX), Varèse Sarabande: A 25th Anniversary Celebration, Varèse Sarabande
25. You Only Live Twice: John Barry, "Fight at Kobe Dock - Helga," You Only Live Twice, EMI/Capitol
26. Zodiac: David Shire, "Graysmith's Theme," Zodiac, Varèse Sarabande
27. John Williams, "Superfeats" (from Superman: The Movie), Superman: The Music, Film Score Monthly
28. John Carpenter and Alan Howarth, "The Siege of Justiceville," They Live: 20th Anniversary Edition, AHI
29. Maurice Jarre, "Building the Barn" (from Witness), Paramount Pictures' 90th Anniversary Memorable Scores, Sony Classical
30. The City of Prague Philharmonic, "Fanfare/'I ain't Captain Walker'" (from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome), The Essential Maurice Jarre Film Music Collection, Silva Screen
31. Shirley Manson, "Samson and Delilah," Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, La-La Land
The two-hour "A-to-Z April" block repeats Tuesdays and Thursdays at 4am, 10am, 3pm, 7pm and 11pm, and Saturdays and Sundays at 7am, 9am, 1pm, 3pm and 5pm all through April on the Fistful of Soundtracks channel.
Before he played Carlton, Alfonso Ribeiro was best known for his slick dance moves on Broadway and in commercials with Michael Jackson back when he was black, so it's funny that Ribeiro's most famous dance move today is a much less slick-looking move in which he had to pretend to be a less skilled dancer. The Carlton Dance is a parody of what has to be the whitest-looking dance ever. Every rhythmically challenged white person in the '80s did it, from Bruce Springsteen and Courteney Cox in the "Dancing in the Dark" video to the clubgoers at the Tech Noir in the original Terminator.
Whenever Ribeiro would bust out the Carlton Dance, everyone in the studio audience would lose their minds. Twelve years after the last time Carlton shook his ass back and forth to Tom Jones' "It's Not Unusual" on NBC, that dorky dance still makes crowds lose their minds, judging from yesterday's reactions from the Raider Nation, the TV sports reporters and the blogosphere.
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* When Higgins scored another TD, he bust out what SacBee blogger Jason Jones (not the soon-to-be-ex-Daily Show correspondent) called "one of Big Daddy Kane's patented dance moves." After the game, JLH identified this second dance as the "Hooka Hooka." He also did the Humpty Dance for a TV sports reporter in the locker room. The guy's got quite an arsenal of end-zone dances. A hater said on a message board that JLH's "idiotic dances need to be penalized." Looks like Reverend Shaw wants to expand his anti-dancing crusade from Bomont to the NFL.
- The release of Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay inspires a list of "10 Sequels That Are Better Than the Original." [GreenCine] Speaking of superior sequels, a few of them are among the "18 Pretty Great Summer Blockbusters Not Directed By Steven Spielberg." [A.V. Club] Both the GreenCine and A.V. Club articles praise Terminator 2. Really? I still think the original Terminator is superior. It doesn't have Edward Furlong's grating performance (it's 1991, and the kid's still quoting lyrics from Tone Loc's "Wild Thing"?) and the hackneyed "a robot learns to understand human emotions" subplot, which is handled better on The Sarah Connor Chronicles, thanks mostly to an actor who's more nuanced than Schwarzenegger (Summer Glau).
- Sean T. Collins' "11 Most Awful Songs from Geek Movie Soundtracks" include Seal's "Kiss from a Rose" from Batman Forever, Margot Kidder's "Can You Read My Mind?" from Superman: The Movie and Puff Daddy's mangling of "Kashmir" for the 1998 Godzilla album (Puffy must have had a photo of Jimmy Page with a sheep, which could only explain Page's guest appearance). Where's R. Kelly's sappy "Gotham City" from Batman & Robin? That song made Bill Finger do a Batspin in his grave. [Topless Robot]
- I just discovered this. A brilliant mash-up of the Hillary Clinton campaign and one of my favorite movies, Alexander Payne's Election:
