Fuck the #WhiteOscars: A mash-up of Jill St. John's 1966 Oscar striptease and AlunaGeorge is far more satisfying in its two little minutes than the Oscars will ever be

Somebody who goes by "LOSANGELENA" has combined two of my favorite things: the atrocious, unintentionally funny and long-out-of-print 1966 showbiz melodrama The Oscar and the British R&B duo AlunaGeorge's 2014 joint "Supernatural." Actually, The Oscar isn't exactly one of my favorite things. I wouldn't say I like The Oscar. What I do like is chuckling over almost every inept element of this Harlan Ellison-scripted, MST3K-worthy movie, from Stephen Boyd's overacting and his weird Hayden Christensen-esque voice (while he shrilly plays the part of Frankie Fane, an ambitious Hollywood asshole who ends up becoming an Oscar contender) to the equally shrill Tony Bennett's visible nervousness in his first acting role.

It's no wonder that the singer of "I Left My Heart in San Francisco" and "Rags to Riches" never acted again, aside from his cameos during The Simpsons, Muppets Most Wanted and Alec Baldwin's endlessly quotable "Tony Bennett Show" sketch on SNL. The only stars in The Oscar who give what could be considered non-cringeworthy and not-so-clichéd performances are a non-comedic Milton Berle as an oddly principled talent agent and an equally non-comedic Jack Soo as an Asian houseboy who--and this is kind of remarkable because this is a movie from the not-exactly-racially-enlightened '60s--doesn't have an accent. It's funny how the two stand-up comics in the Oscar cast--two guys who weren't known for possessing dramatic chops when they were alive--give the least cringeworthy and most naturalistic performances in the whole movie.

(Photo source: Catfan's Feline Fatale Follies)

The best way to approach this kind of soapy "I don't give a shit who I bang or who I ruin to climb my way to the top" material is to do it as a comedy. That's why I love Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, which is so razor-sharp in its humor that it's made it difficult to take any musician biopic seriously anymore. Walk Hard takes musician biopic clichés like any scene where a white musician as a kid appropriates black musicians' sounds, basically says to the audience, "Hasn't this always looked ridiculous and stupid to you?," and then proceeds to make those clichés look even more ridiculous and stupid.

Instead, The Oscar plays it completely dead serious when it should be, oh, I don't know, more like Soapdish or the forgotten WB single-camera sitcom Grosse Pointe, which was basically Soapdish for the 90210/Dawson's Creek crowd--or better yet, more like John Waters. In fact, in an alternate universe far more entertaining than our own, The Oscar was probably directed by John Waters instead of being under the hacky, mid-'60s network TV-ish direction of D.O.A. co-writer Russell Rouse, with Divine in the role of a feminized Frankie Fane. And then in another alternate universe even more entertaining than that one, The Oscar was directed by Russ Meyer. Either of those guys would have transformed The Oscar into a comedic masterpiece.

This 1966 atrocity--which would have swept the Razzies had the Razzies existed in the '60s--is not on DVD. The only place where viewers can catch The Oscar is TCM, which shows a terrible-looking print. That's where I saw The Oscar and realized that as a dramatic actor, Tony Bennett is a decent watercolor painter. The movie features a striptease by future Bond girl Jill St. John that I assume was racy for its pre-Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?/Blow-Up time, and that's the scene from The Oscar that "LOSANGELENA" perfectly mashed up with singer Aluna Francis and producer George Reid's pulsating "Supernatural," along with footage from some late '60s Italian sexploitation flick I'm not familiar with.



I get more enjoyment out of the mash-up of The Oscar and AlunaGeorge than I ever would out of the tedious Oscar telecast--which I haven't watched in eons--and its annual array of frustrating snubs and overall out-of-touchness. Instead of dozing off during the 20,528th Chuck Workman montage of the night or fuming over "Selma is a well-crafted movie, but there’s no art to it" (I'd like to know what drugs that Academy member was on) and the absences of Selma star David Oyelowo and his director Ava DuVernay in the Oscar categories (plus the absences of a few other actors of color who delivered exceptional performances that went unrecognized), I'll be spending time with The Walking Dead, where an Asian American guy gets to be a hero who gets the girl for a change and actors of color like Steven Yeun and Danai Gurira receive far juicier material than the hackneyed kind the Academy would rather pay attention to when one or two actors of color actually do enter their often fucked-up radar.

Nielsen releases an infographic that lists how much of your life you've wasted watching Sheriff Rick brood in a spotty Southern accent

Nielsen is an evil company. Because broadcast networks still rely on Nielsen's horribly outdated ratings diary system for deciding which shows to cancel instead of measuring a show's popularity on streaming video services (which are where viewers like me prefer to access shows these days), a lot of shows I like that were more popular with viewers at streaming video services than with Nielsen families have been cancelled.

I'm still not over ABC's cancellation of the hilarious but low-rated Happy Endings (which starred Damon Wayans Jr., who might end up edging out Elisha Cuthbert as the most well-known name from that show if his upcoming--and promising-looking--hard-R comedy Let's Be Cops becomes a hit). I resent Nielsen so much for its role in the cancellation of so many great shows that when I attended V3con in L.A. last year and was handed a goodie bag containing a free T-shirt from one of V3con's 2013 sponsors, which happened to be Nielsen, I felt like tossing the Nielsen tee into the garbage. It's currently lying in a pile of clothes I've set aside for Goodwill.

Orphan Black

Occasionally, Nielsen does something that's actually beneficial to the public, like posting an infographic that displays how much time viewers would spend watching the entire runs of shows like The Walking Dead, 24 and "¡Escandalo!" (Sherlock takes up the least amount of time, of course, because it produces only three 90-minute episodes per season or series). It's an interesting chart--although I wish it would include Orphan Black, the most recent show I Netflixed from start to finish--and it's quite useful for someone like me who hasn't watched a single episode of House of Cards and wants to know how much time it would take to stream both seasons of House of Cards on Netflix.

But I still dislike Nielsen. For example, in the infographic, they use the term "binge-watch" to try to be hip. I hate that term. Along with terms like "shippers," "squee," "bromance," "amazeballs," "the feels" and "reverse racism," "binge-watching" should be taken out back and shot and then buried in a ditch. "Binge-watching" makes watching TV sound like an eating disorder. I prefer the term "marathoning" because it sounds more proactive, and it makes you feel like you've accomplished something special, like sitting through three days and two hours of Ted Mosby's obnoxiousness without strangling somebody.

Who are these nutcases who like to "binge-watch" things? Ingesting an entire season in one sitting is crazy. Even after two episodes, I start to get antsy. Three is my limit for a marathon, whether those three episodes are from a half-hour comedy or an hour-long drama. To get caught up on Orphan Black in time for its season premiere, I marathoned its first season on a disc-by-disc basis over the course of one week, and I found the three-or-four-eps-per-disc marathoning pattern to be perfect and not-so-exhausting.

Next, I'd like Nielsen to post an infographic on marathoning really old ABC sitcoms like Family Matters and Mr. Belvedere, an atrocious show that comedian Ken Reid reveals himself to be an expert on--I never knew about the Belvedere writing staff's bizarre fixation on rape--during Hari Kondabolu's entertaining guest shot on Reid's podcast TV Guidance Counselor. Would sitting through Belvedere's overly preachy Very Special Episodes about date rape or AIDS be a two-day ordeal or a three-day ordeal? (And who knew that one of the most progressive stand-ups of color around is also a Perfect Strangers/Family Matters nerd? There are side characters from Family Matters whom Kondabolu brings up that I never knew existed. I didn't realize that there are layers to the Urkelverse that rival the layers of the Tommy Westphall Universe.)

I'd also like to see an infographic that looks at when viewers start to lose their patience while marathoning the one-hour Republican Party commercial for the torture of suspected criminals that was 24. I've been wondering if more viewers start yawning when the cougar shows up or when the show runs out of people for Jack to torture and decides that "Hey, let's have him torture his own younger brother! That should be amazeballs!"

Original score cues from Arrested Development, Game of Thrones, 30 Rock, Battlestar Galactica and The Wire, which are among the shows listed in the Nielsen infographic, can be heard during "AFOS Prime" on AFOS. Two of those cues are "Balls in the Air," an original David Schwartz/Gabriel Mann song from Arrested Development, and "The Fall," Blake Leyh's end title theme from The Wire.

My last few reviews for Word Is Bond

I joined the Word Is Bond crew in March, and since then, I've been enjoying writing about artists I'm familiar with (Bambu, Adrian Younge) and artists I'm not so familiar with (The Doppelgangaz). Here are links to--and passages from--my first five album reviews for WIB.

The Doppelgangaz, Hark (March 12, 2013)
"I don't think I've ever heard bursitis mentioned in a hip-hop track, let alone any kind of track, outside of Al Bundy and his elderly musician friends singing a 'We Are the World' parody about how 'We are the ones who wear bifocals and have bursitis.' That's an example of how unique and original The Doppelgangaz are as storytellers."



Bambu, The Lean Sessions (March 19, 2013)
"The new EP may be far from a last hurrah for a skilled emcee who'd rather devote more time to family and community activism, but if Bambu wants to completely quit the game, The Lean Sessions proves that he has a future as an astute TV critic ('Man, they keep killing black people on Walking Dead, so I switched/Breaking Bad been my shit, that 40-ounce got me blitzed')."

Adrian Younge

Ghostface Killah and Adrian Younge, Twelve Reasons to Die (April 14, 2013)
"Younge has taken elements of Morricone's sound--the fuzz guitar riffs that are highlights of Morricone's Danger: Diabolik and Once Upon a Time in the West scores, the chimes and the wordless melodies--as well as some touches from other film composers (like the sitar towards the end of 'The Sure Shot,' which is reminiscent of Manfred Hübler and Siegfried Schwab, or the piano licks that are all over the RZA's projects, like his Ghost Dog score), and he's brought his own stamp to them. Younge has provided Ghostface with the imaginary soundtrack for the superhero movie he must have always wanted to star in."

Trebles and Blues, From My Father (April 30, 2013)
"This kind of dramatic, trying-to-overcome-barriers material can turn kitschy or sappy. Think unintentional laugh riots like 'Accidental Racist' or any of the family photo slideshow videotapes that a lot of my Filipino parents' friends would subject their party guests to back in the '80s and were often soundtracked with ballads by Whitney Houston and Surface or, ugh, any non-Sid Vicious version of 'My Way' (let's face it, yo: Vicious recorded the only take on 'My Way' that's worth a damn). But fortunately, From My Father, an instrumental work as effective and beautifully crafted as The Blue Note, is neither of those things."

Eric Lau, One of Many (June 24, 2013)
"The best way I'd describe U.K. neo-soul producer Eric Lau's sound would be 'It brings to mind the minimalist production wizardry of Dilla, but without any recognizable samples and perhaps with a taste for crumpets instead of donuts.'"

5-Piece Cartoon Dinner (04/10/2013): Archer, Scooby-Doo!, Out There, Apollo Gauntlet and Do's & Don'ts

Some people just want to watch the gazebo burn. (Photo source: Archer Wiki)

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.

Jon Hamm's last animation guest shot had him voicing a talking toilet on Bob's Burgers, and in Archer's two-part "Sea Tunt" season finale, Hamm voices a character who's almost as bizarre as that toilet: Captain Murphy, one of many batshit crazy characters who populated Sealab 2021, Archer executive producers Adam Reed and Matt Thompson's Adult Swim show from the '00s. Here, Captain Murphy (the namesake of electronica/hip-hop producer Flying Lotus' masked alter ego as a rapper) is reimagined as an eco-terrorist who's plotting to attack Miami, New York City and the nation's capital with missiles tipped with nerve gas.

But the Mad Men star doesn't really get to do much in "Sea Tunt: Part I." The episode is more of a showcase for guest stars Eugene Mirman and Kristen Schaal, who get to interact with their Bob's Burgers co-star H. Jon Benjamin, and the entire regular cast (except for Lucky Yates as Krieger, who stays behind at ISIS Headquarters), and any episode that traps the entire cast in enclosed farcical situations that escalate into gory (or in other episodes, nudity-filled) chaos is always entertaining.

Instead of voicing their Bob's Burgers characters like John Roberts got to do in "Fugue and Riffs," Mirman voices Cecil Tunt, Cheryl/Carol's oceanographer/philanthropist brother, while Schaal plays Tiffy, Cecil's easily perturbed helicopter pilot and girlfriend. Malory turns to Cecil for one of his deep-sea vehicles, which will allow her and the agents to recover a hydrogen bomb inside a B-52 bomber that went down in the Bermuda Triangle in order to get a reward from the U.S. government. Of course, nothing goes as planned: the bomb turns out to be a hoax concocted by Cecil to get ISIS to stop Murphy, the lead scientist at Cecil's undersea research lab, from going through with his plan. The hoax is also a scheme for Cecil to obtain on record as many stories about his sister's insane behavior as he can from her co-workers so that he can get conservatorship over her to steal her inheritance and use it to fund his numerous philanthropies.

(Photo source: Archer Wiki)

"Sea Tunt: Part II" is bound to be a more impressive and chaotic half than "Part I," but this episode isn't too shabby, thanks to killer jokes about score music and Cheryl/Carol's sanity. When everyone reacts in shock to Cecil's bit of info about Murphy's nerve gas supply, lifelong pyromaniac Cheryl/Carol is the only one who's thrilled about the madness that's about to ensue. Her giddiness matches our own.

Stray observations:
* Malory: "We are going to beat the Russians!" Archer: "Give it up, folks! Mike Eruzione!" I knew watching that DVD rental of Miracle would pay off someday.

* Archer, after being introduced to Cecil: "Yeah, Rien Poortvliet just called. He wants you to pose for him. [Awkward silence.] Oh, c'mon, beloved illustrator of Gnomes? Jesus, read a coffee table book!"

* Pam references an '80s Stephen J. Cannell show that, for a change, is neither The A-Team nor The Greatest American Hero: "I assume you've got an epi-pen on this big Riptide-lookin' bastard?" I wouldn't be surprised if Archer or one of the other ISIS employees was a Renegade viewer back in the '90s.

(Photo source: Archer Wiki)

* Homer Simpson's eating noises used to make me instantly chuckle, but now I think Pam's eating noises while wolfing down vegan crab legs, courtesy of Amber Nash stuffing her face with cheese puffs, are funnier. Or maybe it's because they're paired up with the sight of Pam's face swelling up from soy allergies.

* Cheryl/Carol keeps hearing suspenseful score cues: "Just ignore it. It's non-diegetic." And later on: "Goddammit, shut up, John Williams!"

March Madness March of the Day: "Attack" from Patton by Jerry Goldsmith

Aw, jeez. It's tough to pick for the "March Madness March of the Day" series just one march from Jerry Goldsmith's brilliant and rather subdued score from director Franklin J. Schaffner's 1970 biopic Patton (fun but disturbing fact: it was Richard Nixon's favorite movie and it might have influenced his wartime decisions, like the bombing of Cambodia).

There are four marches in Patton that stand out: the "Entr'acte" version of the General Patton march, the "Attack" version of that march, the German forces' march, which is distinguished by its bizarre time signature, and "An Eloquent Man," which merges both the Patton and German marches. I don't want to give two or more posts to Patton because there are so many other films with exemplary marches that I want to cover for the rest of the "March Madness March of the Day" series, so you win, "Attack."

Back when AMC stood for American Movie Classics(*) and its original programming--before the days of the esteemed Mad Men and Breaking Bad and the not-as-esteemed but spectacular-in-the-ratings Walking Dead--just consisted of a dramedy about old-timey radio called Remember WENN, AMC was old people's MTV. One of the few things I liked to rewatch on geriatric MTV when I was in college was the uncut and letterboxed Patton. You would think '90s AMC, with its serene graphics and older hosts like Bob Dorian and unexpected recent jailbird Nick Clooney, would find George C. Scott's language in Patton to be too salty to air, but fortunately, the channel kept its hands off the audio-off button during its airings of Patton. It could have pasted bleeps over Scott's saltiest words like most basic cable channels do today, but '90s AMC was too classy to bleep.

It was also too classy to interrupt its movies with commercials, so I could watch prolonged and uninterrupted chunks of Patton and be able to notice that for a film with such a famous musical component (the trumpet triplet, which represents Patton's obsession with reincarnation and was given a fading echo effect by Goldsmith with the help of a tape-looping device called an echoplex), Patton contains very little score music. There's only about a half-hour of it during Patton's nearly three-hour running time. The most effective film scores are ones that aren't so intrusive, and the Patton score is an example of that. It does its thing--like during the montage that traces Patton's winning streak on the German battlefield--and then gets out of the way.

The cue during that winning streak sequence is "Attack," which unleashes the pompous Patton march at its most pompous, as Patton heads for German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's forces in Berlin and amps up the troops with "I'm gonna personally shoot that paper-hanging son of a bitch!," a line I was especially glad to see AMC keep because of Scott's wonderful delivery during that moment.

Patton producer Frank McCarthy and Goldsmith later attempted to capture lightning in a bottle again with another World War II general biopic, 1977's not-as-well-received MacArthur, which starred Gregory Peck and was directed by original Taking of Pelham One Two Three helmer Joseph Sargent. In the early '80s, Goldsmith arranged "The Generals Suite," which combined his MacArthur march with his Patton march and became a staple of his concerts. So why is the Patton march more interesting than the less subtle MacArthur one and why is it such a highlight of Goldsmith's oeuvre? Goldsmith Conducts Goldsmith album liner notes writer Derek Elley broke it down best when he said the Patton march is "a melody which, like [General Patton], has ambitions to glory but remains trapped in its own dreams."



(*) I think it now stands for Advertisers, Meth and Culo.