Varèse Sarabande's "LP to CD" series is a bonkers idea only hoarders would sign up for

The AFOS blog has a schedule each week: just two (or sometimes three) new posts, and one of the posts is a Throwback Thursday post where I draw from a desk cabinet a movie ticket I saved and discuss at length the movie on the ticket (occasionally, if I draw a ticket for a movie I won't find to be stimulating to write about--like, say, Transformers: The Torture of Hearing Shia LaBeouf Scream "No!" 50,000 Times--I'll change it to a different movie). I chose a two-per-week schedule so that this blog has something new every week and it doesn't wind up looking like tumbleweed drifting across a vacant lot, which is what has happened to so many blogs I used to enjoy reading before their authors simply lost interest and abandoned them without even saying a proper "I'm Swayze."

Finding a topic to write about other than the Throwback Thursday movie-of-the-week has sometimes been difficult. In the last couple of weeks, I've wanted to write about how I wish the late, great movie trailer announcer Percy Rodrigues were alive to read promo copy for Penny Dreadful or trailer copy for 2011's Attack the Block because they look so much like things Rodrigues--whose favorite trailer campaign of mine has got to be the one he recorded for 1995's Tales from the Hood--would have been hired to read copy for when he was alive.



But the problem I've been having with that topic is that it's difficult to write about in a structure that's not a listicle. Earlier this year, I vowed to never write a listicle again because 1) listicles at their worst are such lazy and vapid writing; 2) every time I see an article hed that consists of a numeral followed by a plural noun followed by "That You Didn't Know Were This," I feel like punching a millennial hed writer in the face; and 3) if your film music blog or pop culture site has posted tons of listicles where the hed starts with a numeral, and it continues to post such lists, your blog or site sucks.

So while I was experiencing starts and stops with the topic of trailer campaigns Rodrigues would have been perfect for, I saw "Varèse Sarabande Launches LP to CD Series" in my e-mail. Then I said, "Interesting. I've found my non-TBT topic for next week." And good thing it's the kind of topic that can't be shaped into a fucking listicle.

"Varèse Sarabande has delved deep into our vinyl soundtrack vaults to locate fan favorites and hard-to-find gems that have never been released on CD to date!," announced the inkblot-logoed soundtrack label on its site last week. "The LP to CD subscription series will feature one CD soundtrack per month culled from Varèse Sarabande's archives and available only to subscribers."

The label plans to debut 12 long-out-of-print score albums in CD form instead of in mp3 download form. Subscribers who pre-order for "LP to CD" membership ($10 per month, plus shipping) before June 14 will receive from Varèse (pronounced "vuh-rez") a CD carrying case in the shape of a vintage vinyl carrying case. After June 14, people can join the subscription series on a month-to-month basis. The first out-of-print score in the "LP to CD" series is Charles Bernstein's score to the '80s horror comedy April Fool's Day.



Eh, I've never seen April Fool's Day (even though I kind of remember the tongue-in-cheek April Fool's Day TV spots from when I was a kid, and judging from those TV spots, it looks like the type of horror comedy I'd be into renting these days), so the score doesn't interest me. But bringing 12 score albums from Varèse's pre-CD past back into print is both a nice thing for Varèse to do--it's reminiscent of the MOD (manufactured-on-demand) business model Warner Archive has created to give film geeks access to previously unreleased or out-of-print catalog titles from the Warner Bros. and Turner libraries--and a subscription series I'd get on board with if I had more money.

Actually, I thought it was a subscription series I'd get on board with--until I found out the other 11 score albums in the series haven't been announced by Varèse yet. So anyone who subscribes before June 14 won't have any idea what they'll be filling their red carrying cases with after the April Fool's Day score and maybe whatever score is scheduled to follow that one, which I think is crazy. To be put into that kind of guessing game is the kind of thing I wouldn't sign up for. A guessing game might be great for a pie-of-the-month club, but it wouldn't be so great for a score-album-of-the-month club. To give other score album collectors an approximate idea of what else Varèse might reissue for the "LP to CD" series, someone on the Film Score Monthly message board posted a list of Varèse titles that never made the jump to CD. There are more than 12.

Yeah, that's not exactly an enticing list. Meanwhile, the world's only two or three fans of Blame It on Rio or From the Hip just creamed their pants.

I've always liked Varèse, and I put selections from tons of Varèse albums into rotation on AFOS all the time. My favorite release of theirs has to be the six-CD 2010 release of both Alex North's 1960 Spartacus score and the various cover versions of North's Spartacus love theme, a tune that became a jazz standard and one of the late Nujabes' favorite things to sample. The handsomely packaged, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink Spartacus box set is a release that, on paper, sounds like the old "We've put 50 songs on 50 CDs!" joke from the "Greatest Hits" game on Whose Line Is It Anyway?, but it's no joke, and that box set is the impressive pinnacle of Varèse's work in both giving beloved film and TV scores proper releases and honoring the art of film and TV scoring.

But despite my liking of Varèse, I've never been a Varèse soundtrack release completist like the completists who would subscribe to the "LP to CD" series. Who out there makes it their life's mission to collect every single release put out by a record label--rather than a musician or band they might love--even if an album made by the label contains a score from a movie or TV show they're not familiar with and even if a score released by that label was written by a composer they never liked? That's like if a hip-hop head bought every single release from Def Jam just because it's from Def Jam, including everything from the failed Roc La Familia imprint and even Kingdom Come, which Jay Z considers his worst album. It's just so bizarre. I call it bizarre, while A&E has a different word for it. Maybe you've heard of that word. The word is Hoarders.

Paul Chihara

Only one out-of-print Varèse score on the above list interests me. It's Paul Chihara's score to 1981's Prince of the City, one of my favorite Sidney Lumet films and a film that inspired Dick Wolf to create for Prince of the City star Jerry Orbach a wiseass Law & Order detective character slightly modeled after Orbach's corrupt and racist NYPD narc character (hey, Law & Order afternoon marathon-obsessed moms and stand-up comics who don't work during the day, remember when Briscoe was introduced as the formerly crooked, estranged-from-his-grown-up-daughters and twice-divorced antithesis of Paul Sorvino's fatherly and happily married Sgt. Cerreta?). Prince of the City is also a film that must have influenced Shawn Ryan in his TV work. The Shield, The Chicago Code and even the non-police-related Last Resort owe a lot to Prince of the City, which the late Lumet signed up for after Brian De Palma left the film (man, take me to the parallel universe where De Palma made Prince of the City!) because Lumet wanted to tackle a portrayal of the police that was more complex and morally ambiguous than his own 1973 smash hit Serpico. Prince of the City is the kind of audacious and grown-up cinematic fare that, like I said in my discussion of Horrible Bosses, major Hollywood studios used to be good at crafting in the days before the stink of PG-13, and it's the kind of fare that's found only as original shows on cable TV or streaming services these days.

The melancholy Prince of the City score--which was recorded in Paris with Jules and Jim and Contempt composer Georges Delerue as conductor instead of Chihara, due to an American musicians' strike at the time--is an important score to me and a noteworthy achievement because it's a solid score written by one of the few Asian American composers in the still-not-so-diverse world of film and TV music. Chihara, who collaborated frequently with Lumet and Farewell to Manzanar director John Korty, may not be as active in that world anymore (his last significant screen scoring credit was additional music for the John Turturro-directed 2005 musical Romance & Cigarettes), but the Japanese American composer remains active in the classical music world.







Outside the context of the film, the Prince of the City score isn't exactly a rollicking good time like, say, "I Don't Know" by Slum Village or "A Roller Skating Jam Named 'Saturdays'" by De La Soul, but it nicely reflects the isolation and angst of Treat Williams' character Daniel Ciello, a corrupt-cop-turned-whistleblower-taking-down-other-corrupt-cops. "Conceptually, Danny Ciello was to be treated always as one instrument: saxophone. Over the body of the picture, his sound was to become more and more isolated, until finally three notes of the original theme, played on sax, was all that remained of the music," wrote Lumet in his 1995 book Making Movies.

Chihara's score is an effective score from a film that's still underappreciated, and if Varèse's "LP to CD" series does rescue the Prince of the City score from the out-of-print doldrums, then we're getting somewhere. For now though, the series' "hey there, completists, for $10 a month, you won't know what you're getting!" concept just gives me bad--not to mention Hoarders-y, crazy cat lady-ish--vibes.

The Ref, whose score album will be looped on AFOS on Christmas, is the best holiday flick Netflix doesn't carry right now

What the shit, Netflix?

Even on DVD, director Ted Demme's 1994 Christmastime comedy The Ref--which, even though it was made for only $11 million, flopped at the box office but became a cult favorite afterward--still can't catch a break. While attempting two weeks ago to add The Ref to my Netflix queue so that I could rewatch it in time for the holidays, I received the following message from Netflix: "Available 1/1/2015."

Excuse me? January? After the time of the year when The Ref takes place? This isn't the first time the words "The Ref" and "lousy timing" were in the same sentence. One of the reasons why it flopped was because Touchstone Pictures dumped it in theaters in March instead of releasing it during the holiday season. The studio executive who made that scheduling decision probably also believes that Fox should go back to unveiling The Simpsons' annual "Treehouse of Horror" episode after Halloween or that presents should be opened after Christmas.

The Ref, whose out-of-print score music by David A. Stewart will be looped on AFOS all Christmas Day long (this Thursday), doesn't deserve this kind of treatment. Demme's 20-year-old movie is one of the best anti-Christmas movies ever made, although "anti-Christmas" wouldn't be a completely accurate description of the movie's attitude towards Christmas because not even its ending is totally immune to the holiday spirit. The Ref's attitude is more like "anti-Christmastime sentimentality" and "anti-fake and callous people during Christmas."

The movie's title refers to Denis Leary, who stars as Gus, a hapless burglar who's forced to play both referee and marriage counselor to the two constantly bickering hostages he's taken while hiding in the Connecticut suburbs from cops on Christmas Eve. Those hostile hostages (outside America, The Ref is called Hostile Hostages, which makes it sound like a Woody Woodpecker cartoon) are the yuppie couple of Lloyd Chasseur (Kevin Spacey), an unhappy antique store manager, and his adulterous and equally unhappy wife Caroline (Judy Davis).

As the night wears on, Gus finds himself becoming Lloyd and Caroline's hostage, and the Chasseurs' arguments about their failing marriage, the class conflict between Gus and the suburbanites and the battle of wills over who has the upper hand in the hostage situation aren't the only battles of wills during the film. There's also the game of cops and robbers between the largely incompetent local police force and Gus; the mental duel between the Chasseurs' juvenile delinquent son Jesse (Robert J. Steinmiller Jr.), who's home from military school, and Siskel (J.K. Simmons), the military instructor he's blackmailing; and the battle of wills between Lloyd's visiting mother, the heartless Rose Chasseur (Glynis Johns), and practically everyone else, including her own son. The character of Rose brings to mind the late Sir Peter Ustinov's frequent description of his famously curmudgeonly Spartacus co-star Charles Laughton: "Somebody who was hanging around waiting to be offended."

Countless Christmas movies have posited that Christmas can be the most stressful of holidays, whether it's Home Alone or It's a Wonderful Life, but Demme's movie is one of the few that emphasizes and captures quite well something many adult viewers can relate to: the discomfort and nasty invective experienced by family members who hate each other and are forced to be in the same room together on Christmas. Screenwriter Richard LaGravenese, who co-wrote The Ref with his sister-in-law Marie Weiss, drew these scenes of discord from their own experiences at holiday family dinners ("Both Marie and I are Italian Catholics who married into Jewish families, so we do have those big holiday dinners. Families always have these unspoken dramas," said LaGravenese in 1994). They wanted to explore what would happen if the unspoken tensions during those occasions stopped remaining silent and everyone started being honest. Humor mined from uncomfortable and boozy holiday family gatherings is why SNL's fake Dysfunctional Family Christmas record album commercial ("Leave me alone, please go away/I'm doing fine, just get away") remains one of the show's most beloved sketches from the early '90s, and it's also why The Ref built up a cult following after its release.

The cult following is also due to the invective being really nasty (even more so than in other non-traditional Christmas movies that aren't Bad Santa) and delivered beautifully by everyone in the cast, including Leary, Davis and Spacey, who, in 1994, was already a respected actor whom theater or TV critics would frequently write hosannas and sonnets for, but he wasn't yet a movie star. Although the late Demme said in a 1994 New York Times News Service interview that he didn't cast huge stars because he wanted "an everyman, underground, edgier feel to the characters," The Ref was built and marketed as a star vehicle for Leary, whose rants in a series of Demme-directed MTV interstitials had just brought him notoriety and whose film work at the time consisted of showy supporting roles in action flicks like Demolition Man and Judgment Night. But because The Ref didn't become the breakout success that would have taken the Worcester, Massachusetts-bred stand-up's film career to another level, instead it's better remembered as the place where Simmons--now a likely Oscar contender for his role in Whiplash--had his first feature film role. (His bit part as Jesse's stripper-loving military instructor was named after Gene Siskel by LaGravenese as a form of revenge after Siskel trashed his screenplay for The Fisher King.)

The Ref is also the place where I first took notice of Christine Baranski, who's excellent as the film's second most hateable woman, Lloyd's bossy sister-in-law, and is one of many theater-bred actors in the cast who make The Ref gel so well, as if it were a snappy stage farce with twice more F-bombs than Avenue Q. There are so many pointless stage versions of movies, whether it's Legally Blonde: The Musical or Shrek: The Musical. Because of LaGravenese and Weiss' hilarious script and the incisive dialogue, The Ref is far more deserving of the stage treatment than those movies. It's the kind of movie that, with the right stage director and the sharpest actors, would kill as a stage play (but not as a musical because that musical would be awful). Imagine the reactions Lloyd would receive from the theater audience when he finally tells off Rose ("You know what I'm gonna get you next Christmas? A big wooden cross. So every time you feel unappreciated for all your sacrifices, you can climb on up and nail yourself to it."). People would be howling just like the studio audience did when the late Greg Giraldo verbally handed Leary his ass on Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn.

The enjoyment viewers of The Ref get from scenes like Lloyd's verbal comeback to his evil mother is why Netflix's inability to carry the movie at the most appropriate time of the year--which also denies people who aren't familiar with the movie and are in the mood for a largely non-mushy holiday comedy the chance to discover it--is so maddening. The Ref is oddly comforting for people who find the holiday season to be far from comforting.

David A. Stewart's score from The Ref will be looped in the "Yell Log," all Christmas Day long (Thursday, December 25) on AFOS.

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.

"'Cause it tastes good": Midnight Run turns 25

On July 20, 1988, Universal released Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin's Midnight Run. It didn't make much of a splash at the box office--although it was popular enough to spawn a series of Midnight Run TV-movies with Happy Gilmore villain Christopher McDonald in the De Niro role--and in the 25 years since its release, the De Niro/Grodin cross-country road movie has received far less ink than either summer 1988's sleeper success story, the original and unsurpassed Die Hard, the subject of so many "Die Hard is 25!" listicles in the last few weeks, or summer '88's other cinematic success story, the still-amazing-looking blockbuster Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

Yet I find myself rewatching Midnight Run more often than Die Hard or Roger Rabbit. Why is that?

Sure, Die Hard contains far more impressive action sequences, and the humor in that classic Bruce Willis action flick was handled so perfectly (as was the humor in Roger Rabbit). But I'll always be drawn more to Midnight Run's De Niro/Grodin banter (Grodin: "Why would you eat that?" De Niro: "Why? 'Cause it tastes good.") and its lengthy bits of improv, something that director Martin Brest (who, at this point in his strange career, was a long way from the fiascoes of Meet Joe Black and Gigli) carried over from his earlier hit Beverly Hills Cop, presumably from seeing how energized his 1984 film became from the ad-libs of Eddie Murphy and Bronson Pinchot. Years before improv became an integral part of Judd Apatow-produced hit comedies like Bridesmaids, De Niro, as crafty bounty hunter Jack Walsh, and Grodin, as Jonathan "The Duke" Mardukas, a dorky bail jumper and white-collar criminal who turns out to be a lot craftier--and braver--than the burnt-out Jack, ad-libbed several of their scenes together and most of the brilliantly underplayed "Litmus Configuration" sequence.



Of course, Midnight Run didn't invent the wheel--before Brest made Beverly Hills Cop and Midnight Run, Robert Altman films were always full of improvised dialogue--but the dialogue and expressions that resulted from playing things by ear while the cameras rolled are consistently funny during Midnight Run (the chemistry between De Niro and Grodin helps a lot too). Each time I rewatch an ad-libbed De Niro/Grodin moment, I always notice something new and amusing, whether it's Jack nervously bumping into Mardukas while the Duke poses as an FBI agent during his "Litmus Configuration" scam to get money for groceries or a simple expression from a non-actor who's part of their scene (during the "chorizo and eggs" scene, peep the nervous look on the diner waitress who's clearly a non-actor).



In his think piece about Die Hard's 25th anniversary (by the way, that summer also gave us Big, Coming to America, A Fish Called Wanda and Bull Durham), RogerEbert.com editor-in-chief Matt Zoller Seitz noted that John McTiernan's film surrounded Willis with a bunch of terrific supporting players ("McTiernan and his credited screenwriters Steven E. DeSouza and Jeb Stuart stuff every nook and cranny with beguiling little character touches," wrote Seitz, who mentioned the classic bit of comedic business where a candy bar gets stolen by ubiquitous '80s stuntman Al Leong--soon to be experiencing a bit of a career resurgence, by the way, as a cast member in National Film Society's upcoming Awesome Asian Bad Guys web series). Midnight Run's supporting players are equally terrific, and most of these character actors are familiar faces from various crime movies and shows.

As Alonzo Mosely, the dyspeptic FBI agent whose badge and identity get stolen by Jack, Yaphet Kotto deserved some sort of award for "Outstanding Achievement in Comedic Acting During a Role with Minimal Dialogue." It's an entertaining performance, but Kotto's dourness was apparently real. He reportedly didn't enjoy shooting Midnight Run, due to both a fever he caught and weariness from Brest's insistence on multiple takes. As the much more chatty Jimmy Serrano, the ruthless Vegas mobster the Duke embezzled millions from to give to a good cause, after realizing he was managing the accounts for a mobster (I guess the words "waste management" weren't enough of a hint for the Duke), Dennis Farina is endlessly quotable, whether he's berating his always-rational attorney (Philip Baker Hall) or the incompetent underlings (mob genre fixtures Richard Foronjy and Robert Miranda) he's sent to rub out his former accountant ("Is this moron #1? Put moron #2 on the phone."). Because Farina worked as a cop in Chicago before he became an actor, I wouldn't be surprised if some of the criminals he encountered in Chicago formed the basis for his performance as Serrano.

Also twisting the word "fuck" through many sorts of imaginative, George Gallo-scripted iterations (the inactive site Listology counted 132 F-bombs during Midnight Run, just one F-bomb above De Niro's later film Jackie Brown) are Joe Pantoliano as the slimy L.A. bail bondsman who assigns Jack to deliver the Duke and John Ashton as Dorfler, a rival bounty hunter with a walnut for a brain. I hate the term "movie magic," but that's exactly what ensues when these character actors are thrown together on-screen or when De Niro and Grodin are either winging it--the improvised dialogue makes Jack and the Duke's growing friendship feel more natural than most other buddy flick pairings I've been subjected to--or helping to elevate Midnight Run from being a disposable buddy flick during their more dramatic moments. Midnight Run pulls off the shifts in tone from comedic to dramatic more seamlessly than most big-screen comedies that attempt to do so. Community creator and on-and-off-and-on-again showrunner Dan Harmon has cited the comedic timing in Midnight Run as an influence on his show. Harmon also seems to have been influenced by the film's skillful juggling of humor and seriousness. Many of Community's strongest episodes juggle the two as effectively as Midnight Run does.



Jack and the Duke are such well-drawn and likable characters I could spend more than 126 minutes watching them interact, and yet, I still don't want to see them in a sequel at all. A sequel reuniting De Niro with the semi-retired Grodin, a project that Brett Ratner threatened to direct last year, remains a colossally terrible idea. Remember The Odd Couple II, which Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau made together 30 years after the first Odd Couple feature film? Yeah, I'm not looking forward to a repeat of whatever the hell The Odd Couple II was.

And what sort of implausible circumstance would bring Jack and the Duke back together? The way things ended between them at LAX--Jack and the Duke part ways, then Jack turns around to say one more thing to the Duke, but the Duke's already vanished--was perfect.

And now, something interesting someone else wrote about a work that's represented in my "Ask for Babs" mix: Midnight Run

Why did I put together a 67-minute DJ mix about Universal, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary (the official anniversary date is April 30)? Because Universal was the studio that Spike Lee turned to when Paramount wanted him to change the ending of Do the Right Thing, and Universal simply said, "Don't change it." And when Martin Brest wanted to make Midnight Run with difficult-to-work-with, not-exactly-a-box-office-draw-anymore Charles Grodin as The Duke because he saw in Grodin a certain something he couldn't see in other stars if they played The Duke, Paramount kept insisting to Brest that he hire Cher (WTF?) or Robin Williams instead. But not Universal. They said yes to the casting of Grodin.

Do the Right Thing and Midnight Run are two of my favorite movies, and I know my "Ask for Babs" mix makes it look like I'm fawning over a corporation, but Universal is a major reason why those movies are two of my favorites. They didn't interfere with what Lee and Brest wanted to accomplish with their respective works.

And why am I doing so many posts about the Universal movies that are referenced in my "Ask for Babs" mix? I want some more people to listen to the mix. It's not attracting as many people as say, HitFix TV critic Alan Sepinwall's blog posts do.

Sepinwall, whom I once had the honor of running into at a very small line at Comic-Con while waiting to get a graphic novel purchase signed (I had forgotten what Sepinwall looked like, so I didn't realize it was him until he introduced himself to the novel's author), does many of the best recaps of Mad Men and Community, and long before Mad Men, his weekly analysis of The Wire was the best. There's a Sepinwallism I've picked up from reading so many of his recaps. It's this.(*) It sometimes irritates me if he does it more than once in a recap, and I hate that I picked it up from him for a while. It's a habit I recently got rid of.

(*) Putting asterisked footnotes between paragraphs instead of placing them where they belong: at the very bottom of the article. I've started putting all footnotes at the bottom again.

This Sepinwallism can make his posts have a bizarre and choppy flow(**) to them. The placement of footnotes between grafs makes it feel like Pop-Up Video, the show that turned viewers into experts on important sociopolitical concerns like the making of Lionel Richie's 1983 "Hello" video, is invading my reading.

(**) Like Das EFX's "diggity-diggity" flow, which every other rapper started biting in 1992 before finding it to be passé in 1993.

Sepinwall is an excellent writer, but if a post of his is interrupted by five of these asides--hello!(***)--instead of just one or two, it can be a little frustrating. However, I've learned to live with it. To borrow a memorable line from a drama Sepinwall used to cover, I've learned to let Sepinwall be Sepinwall.

(***) The not-so-blind actress who played Laura, Lionel Richie's blind object of desire, was always mistaken for being blind by people on the street.

I especially like how Sepinwall is a Midnight Run fan. He's blogged at length about the 1988 movie twice.

An AFOS listener once whined on my Facebook wall about having to hear so many selections from Danny Elfman's Midnight Run score get shuffled by AFOS in one day. The reason why there are so many selections from Midnight Run in rotation is because I adore Midnight Run and its score, moron #1. The dismissal by some people of Midnight Run as just another lousy buddy movie (it isn't, moron #2, moron #3 and moron #4), as well as the fact that film and TV score album labels like La-La Land or Intrada haven't reissued the film's out-of-print score, which, for a couple of years, was ubiquitous in movie trailers, are examples of how underappreciated the film has been since its release (even though home video made it popular enough to spawn a series of '90s TV-movies starring Christopher McDonald as Jack Walsh).

When I discovered this delightfully foul-mouthed, mostly improvised road movie and its score in 1989, a few months after the movie had to compete with the likes of Die Hard and Who Framed Roger Rabbit in theaters and ended up getting lost in the summer shuffle, I felt like the only kid in the world who loved Midnight Run (I even read the novelization, which must have been adapted from a really early version of George Gallo's script because the book depicted Jack as a total racist, a trait that was eliminated from the movie). It's fantastic to see I wasn't alone in 1989:

Here's the thing: if "Midnight Run" was just an action comedy about an odd couple joined at the wrist while dodging bullets across the country, it would still be a fun, memorable movie. But what's always elevated it above that, to me, are a pair of scenes, with the first and most important being Jack's visit to his ex-wife Gail's house in Chicago. It starts out funny, with The Duke telling Gail's young son that he's a white collar criminal, then turns ugly as Jack and Gail relive the same old arguments for the 5000th time, then goes heartbreaking when the daughter Jack hasn't seen in nine years appears in the door and, like flipping a switch, stops the argument in an instant…

In that moment, you feel the weight of every single thing Jack has lost and how far he's fallen, and then once you connect Serrano to Jack, it becomes a redemption story. You don't want Jack to bring The Duke to jail and set him up to be killed, but you do want Jack to get a win, badly.

And not only does that scene give much greater heft to Jack's character, but to the relationship between the two men. From that moment on, while they still fight and curse and claw and argue, it's different. The Duke saw a part of Jack Walsh that very few people have ever seen, and he was quiet and respectful in that moment (and never once brings her up again, even though it would be so easy to push Jack's buttons that way), and Jack respects and appreciates him in turn for that…

And here's the other big dramatic moment, as Serrano finally comes face to face with the man who embezzled millions from him and gave it to charity. To this point, it's not like the stakes of the movie have been low - Jack and The Duke have been shot at and beaten up many, many times over - but the violence was all on some level cartoonish (again, see Jack and the helicopter) and Serrano was mostly used as comic relief, showing up for 30 seconds at a time to threaten to hurt someone in an amusing way. But when he gets into the back of that car with The Duke, there's nothing funny happening. This is stone-cold, sincere menace (the added promise to kill The Duke's wife is a nice touch), it is a man who will do anything to hurt the characters we've grown to like, and it makes the tension of the airport scene that follows so much more palpable than if Serrano was always played for comedy…

And this post is now at least one week later and a thousand words longer than I had planned. (And that's without even going into other parts of the movie, like Danny Elfman's marvelous blues-y score, which I will listen to if the writer's block is really hitting me hard.) There's really no point to writing 3000+ words about a two-week-old screening of a 23-year-old movie. But it's the movie I love watching most in all the world. And every now and then it's nice to be able to articulate the many reasons why.

Ask for Babs (Universal 100th Anniversary Mix) by Dj Afos on Mixcloud

March Madness March of the Day: "Main Title" from The Great Escape by Elmer Bernstein

I'll just let the late Elmer Bernstein have the floor.

"The score for The Great Escape was not about action at all. It was in that theme that everybody knows now; it was about indomitability, about not being put down, about spirit. That was the essential thing about the score, as exemplified by the character that Steve McQueen played."

--Bernstein, from the liner notes of Varèse Sarabande's The Great Escape: The Deluxe Edition score album

The biggest Shaft of all in the illest retro CD packaging of all

Honey, someone shrunk the Shaft LP.

Because I changed the title of A Fistful of Soundtracks' default block from "Assorted Fistful" to "AFOS Prime" last week, I've had to painstakingly search through the "AFOS Prime" mp3 library for every single track that contains an "Assorted Fistful" sweeper and delete each of them from "AFOS Prime." Then I've had to go back into my CD collection, re-rip many of the tracks I deleted from "AFOS Prime," replace the parts of the tracks that were previously occupied by "Assorted Fistful" sweepers with new intros (most of them are just movie or TV trailer audio clips) and re-upload those tracks to "AFOS Prime."

And I'm having a blast! Seriously, no, I'm not.

So far, the only thing about the above tasks that's been nice is revisiting Hip-O Select/Geffen's now-out-of-print Shaft in Africa soundtrack CD because I dig its retro packaging (Hip-O Select/Geffen packaged their 2004 reissue of the Willie Dynamite soundtrack in the same fashion as well). I had to pull out the Shaft in Africa CD from the cabinets where I store my soundtrack CDs because the tracks that I ripped a few years ago from that disc, including Johnny Pate's "Shaft in Africa (Addis)," which was most memorably sampled by Just Blaze in Jay-Z's "Show Me What You Got," contain now-outdated sweepers.

In 2005, the 1973 LP for the threequel that MGM declared "The biggest Shaft of all in the hottest place of all" made its debut on CD as part of the limited-edition Hip-O Select series of Universal Music Group-owned album reissues that are available only through Hip-O's site. The CD packaging was simple and not-so-flashy but inspired. Instead of sticking the CD in a jewel case, Hip-O recreated the LP packaging--they didn't mess with the Shaft in Africa cover's original typefaces or its ABC Records emblems or its washed-out-looking color scheme and they even brought back the inner sleeve--and shrunk the cardboard sleeve and inner sleeve to CD size. It looks like something I unearthed during a crate-digging session at the used LP section of a CD store, except it somehow wound up in a washer and dryer that were being used incorrectly like in some bad sitcom or an old cartoon, and it shrunk along with all the other clothes.

The "CD-Sized Album Replica" packaging appears to be eco-friendly too. Why don't more labels package their reissues on CD like this?

Vinyl is awesome, but I hate how much space vinyl takes up (my music collection currently consists of only CDs, mp3s or AACs). I'm like an anti-hoarder. I try to make my carbon footprint as small as possible, so I rejoiced when albums became downloadable. I love how music, movie and TV show formats have gotten smaller and smaller so that the content on those formats can be carried around in your pockets now.

I've been thinking lately about venturing into club or lounge DJing. Ever since I got myself my first MacBook last month, I've been adding onto its iTunes so many mixes, including Paul Nice's Do You Pick Your Feet in Poughkeepsie? mixtape and DJ sets from props, SFNY and Sweater Funk. Listening to those mixes nonstop on my MacBook Pro has made me want to someday become a DJ like Nice, props, his SFNY cohorts and the Sweater Funk members. If I end up doing that kind of DJing, I'm so going to enjoy carrying around all those damn records.

Occupy anti-Halloween conservatism with A Fistful of Soundtracks' "Buckets of Score"

Do you have a conservative neighbor or two who are part of the anti-Halloween camp and are trying to recruit people to their cause? On October 31, show those opponents of Halloween how much you feel about their hatred of fun by paying them a visit and then taking out your phone and blasting A Fistful of Soundtracks' "Buckets of Score" block in their faces.

From 5pm to 11pm on Halloween, AFOS will be streaming for the second Halloween in a row original music written for the horror, thriller and paranormal genres. The playlist--which is full of Goblin tracks, cues from Elmer Bernstein's out-of-print score to Ghostbusters and original music from either non-glittery vampire flicks (The Omega Man, From Dusk Till Dawn) or supernatural genre shows (Buffy, Angel)--will be joined this year by selections from Alan Howarth and Larry Hopkins' new re-recording of the mostly synthesized cues Ennio Morricone and John Carpenter separately composed for the 1982 version of The Thing.

Howarth, who collaborated with the filmmaker/composer on the scores to such classic Carpenter flicks as Escape from New York, Big Trouble in Little China and They Live, recreated with Hopkins the tracks from the long-out-of-print Thing soundtrack album (with some help from the Digital Orchestra Toolbox) and re-sequenced them so that they're in the chronological order of the 1982 film. The re-recording is being released by the record label wing of BuySoundtrax (a site I once had such a lousy mail-order experience with--and I'm relieved to see I'm not alone--that every time I receive an e-mail from BuySoundtrax, I angrily delete it without reading it).

(Photo source: Alex Pardee)

Also added to "Buckets of Score" this year are selections from Steven Price and Basement Jaxx's terrific, if-Carpenter-were-a-dubstepper score to the recent inner city-vs.-outer space thriller Attack the Block, a film that's now on Blu-ray (I disagree with the opinion that Attack the Block loses much of its entertainment value on the small screen and is a less interesting film if you don't watch it with an amped-up crowd in the theater--I saw Attack the Block in an empty theater and still enjoyed it).

"If you like your beats on the monstrous side, you've come to the right place," wrote Attack the Block writer/director Joe Cornish in the Attack the Block soundtrack liner notes. "We wanted the Attack the Block score to do the things that film scores used to do. To be as exciting and escapist as a John Williams adventure, and as gritty and percussive as the great John Carpenter's electronic scores."

Price and the Jaxx duo's score lives up to Cornish's intentions. As the hoodies in Attack the Block would say, believe it, bruv.

Back with another one of those Hot Rockin' beats

Featured during this month's A Fistful of Soundtracks mini-playlists is Quincy Jones' laid-back main title theme from the 1972 Donald E. Westlake adaptation The Hot Rock, a cue that's both supercool (like Jones' sampled-by-the-Pharcyde cover version of the Lovin' Spoonful's "Summer in the City") and an effective foreshadowing of how hapless Robert Redford's Dortmunder and his crew will be for much of the rest of the movie.

Long before his charttopping success as a producer for performers like Michael Jackson and James Ingram, the trumpeter/bandleader was a trailblazer as one of Hollywood's first African American film and TV composers (the original In the Heat of the Night, Ironside). I have an affinity for older caper movies like The Hot Rock and the funkdafied scores Jones wrote for several of those flicks. Every time a '60s or '70s Jones score is released on CD, like most recently, the score from another Westlake adaptation, 1968's The Split, it's an event at the Aquino castle. I wish more Jones scores got the same lavish treatment the Split score received from the Film Score Monthly label.


The Dixieland-style end title theme is the only cut from the Hot Rock soundtrack that's ever found its way to CD. Rhino added it to the "Gone Hollywood" portion of 2001's Q: The Musical Biography of Quincy Jones box set. Unfortunately, the rest of the soundtrack, which was released by the Atlantic-distributed Prophesy label, remains out of print and can only be found on various mp3 blogs. The Hot Rock score's absence on disc is odd because it was one of Jones' favorite film music projects. He was so pleased with the results of his score that he wanted all the major jazz musicians who collaborated with him to receive on-screen credit. The long list of musicians at the Hot Rock scoring sessions who received credit included saxman Gerry Mulligan, trumpeter Clark Terry and drummer Grady Tate, whose militaristic-sounding solo at the beginning of the main title theme was sampled in Eminem's "Like Toy Soldiers" in 2004 (six years before "Like Toy Soldiers," Jurassic 5 sampled "Hot Rock Theme," a loungy and more upbeat version of the movie's main theme that the Don Elliott Voices recorded specially for the Prophesy album, in "Improvise").

Jones' Hot Rock theme makes me want to go steal a diamond.

The long Khan: AFOS September 2009 segment playlists

Starting today at 8am, these September '09 playlists (intro'd by yours truly, of course) will air all through the month on the Fistful of Soundtracks channel. Until September 29, they'll be repeated every Tuesday and Thursday at 4am, 10am, 3pm, 7pm and 11pm and every Saturday and Sunday at 7am, 9am, 1pm, 3pm and 5pm.

"Eelmatic":
1. James Horner, "The Eels of Ceti Alpha V/Kirk in Space Shuttle," Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Retrograde/Film Score Monthly
2. James Horner, "Captain Terrell's Death," Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Retrograde/Film Score Monthly

"Promises, Promises":
3. Tom Jones, "Promise Her Anything" (from Promise Her Anything), Their Greatest Hits: Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperdinck, Rebound
4. Klaus Badelt, "The Promise," The Promise, Superb

"Chase Those Crazy Beatheads Out of Town":
5. Barry De Vorzon, "Baseball Furies Chase," The Warriors, Spectrum
6. J.J. Johnson, "Willie Chase," Willie Dynamite, Hip-O Select/Geffen

"Harkness, Everybody, Harkness":
7. Ben Foster, "Here Comes Torchwood," Torchwood: Children of Earth, Silva Screen
8. Ben Foster, "Judgement Day," Torchwood: Children of Earth, Silva Screen

"Tarantino Raided My Soundtrack Cabinets":
9. Ennio Morricone, "Algiers November 1, 1954" (from Battle of Algiers), The Ennio Morricone Anthology: A Fistful of Film Music, Rhino
10. Giorgio Moroder & David Bowie, "Cat People (Putting Out Fire)," Cat People, MCA
11. Lalo Schifrin, "Tiger Tank," Kelly's Heroes, Film Score Monthly

"The Hottie and the Ostinati":
12. The Paramount Studio Orchestra, "Prelude and Rooftop," Vertigo, Varèse Sarabande
13. The Paramount Studio Orchestra, "The Streets," Vertigo, Varèse Sarabande

"Schnapps for Breakfast":
14. Bernard Herrmann, "Thank God for the Rain," Taxi Driver, Arista
15. Bernard Herrmann, "Getting Into Shape/Listen You Screwheads/Gun Play/Dear Father & Mother/The Card/Soap Opera," Taxi Driver, Arista

"R.I.P. Erich Kunzel":
16. Cincinnati Pops Orchestra, "Overture" (from The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad), The Great Fantasy Adventure Album, Telarc

"I Guess This Means That Alias/Alias Crossover's a Possibility Now":
17. Michael Giacchino, "On the Train," Alias: Season Two, Varèse Sarabande
18. Eric Rogers, "Spider-Woman," Sci-Fi's Greatest Hits Vol. 4: Defenders of Justice, TVT

"English as Language Second":
19. Ennio Morricone with Maurizio Graf, "Il Ritorno Di Ringo" (from The Return of Ringo), The Ennio Morricone Anthology: A Fistful of Film Music, Rhino
20. Guido & Maurizio De Angelis featuring Susi & Guy, "Driving All Around" (from Il Cittadino Si Rebella), Beretta 70: Roaring Themes from Thrilling Italian Policefilms 1971-80, Crippled Dick Hot Wax!
21. Seatbelts featuring Masayoshi Furukawa, "You Make Me Cool" (from the "Mushroom Samba" episode), Cowboy Bebop: No Disc, Victor
22. Seatbelts featuring Mai Yamane, "Want It All Back" (from the "Asteroid Blues," "Stray Dog Strut" and "Speak Like a Child" episodes), Cowboy Bebop: No Disc, Victor

"Westlake Ho":
23. Johnny Mandel, "Trackdown" (from Point Blank), Point Blank/The Outfit, Film Score Monthly
24. Quincy Jones, "Kifka Car Caper," The Split, Film Score Monthly
25. Quincy Jones, "Main Title," The Hot Rock, Prophecy
26. Jerry Fielding, "Office Scuffle/Kenilworth Heist/Casino Heist" (from The Outfit), Point Blank/The Outfit, Film Score Monthly

"Say Si, Not Oui":
27. La-33, "La Pantera Mambo," La-33, Walboomers
28. The Wondermints, "The Party," Shots in the Dark, Donna

"Alley OOP":
29. Elliot Goldenthal, "Obligatory Car Chase," Demolition Man: The Original Orchestral Score, Varèse Sarabande
30. Hans Zimmer, "Show Me Your Firetruck" (from Backdraft), Passions & Achievements, Milan
31. Royal Scottish National Orchestra, "End Credits" (from First Knight), Hollywood '95, Varèse Sarabande

"There Are Never Possibilities":
32. James Horner, "Epilogue (original version)/End Title," Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Retrograde/Film Score Monthly

Even-numbered Indiana Jones movie curse?

I'm a fan of the first and third Indy movies, but I don't like the second one for obvious reasons, so what does that mean for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which is already getting mixed reviews? I probably won't like Crystal Skull, even though Harrison Ford is reunited with his Raiders of the Lost Ark co-star Karen Allen, my favorite Indy leading lady, and Steven Spielberg promised to keep those dreaded CGI FX to a minimum.

Or I might like it. I don't know. In the meantime, from the out-of-print and currently pricey Raiders and Temple of Doom soundtracks, here are the subdued and eerie Raiders main title music, the rousing "Airplane Fight" and "The Mine Car Chase," which accompanies one of the 1984 prequel's few enjoyable sequences.

John Williams, "Main Title: South America, 1936"
From the expanded Raiders of the Lost Ark soundtrack (4:10, DCC Compact Classics, 1995, mp3)

John Williams, "Airplane Fight"
From the expanded Raiders of the Lost Ark soundtrack (4:36, DCC Compact Classics, 1995, mp3)

John Williams, "The Mine Car Chase"
From the Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom soundtrack (3:38, Polydor, 1984, mp3)