Occasionally on Friday, I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. It's the "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week. Stream "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," my one-hour mix of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, right now!
When The Venture Bros. pulled the in medias res trick--an overused storytelling device Rick and Morty, another equally great animated comedy from Team Venture's home network of Adult Swim, made fun of a few months ago--only 25 seconds into "A Party for Tarzan," I was worried. "No! Not you too, Astrobase Go," I thought to myself.
Fortunately, the episode's deployment of in medias res turned out to be a parody of Martin Scorsese's in medias res moments from the opening title sequences of GoodFellas and Casino (as well as Raging Bull). I almost forgot that Scorsese actually did this, decades before Morty Smith would lose his mind on the Purge planet, when an aspiring screenwriter on that planet pissed Morty off by starting his story at the point where it got interesting instead of where its timeframe actually began.
Set during a night when Gary, who doesn't enjoy the homicidal part of henching, reluctantly executes an arch in the Pine Barrens as dirty work and Dr. Mrs. the Monarch experiences some similar hesitation while Wide Wale gives her the chance to pull the trigger on the man she thinks is the supervillain-killing Blue Morpho, "A Party for Tarzan" ranks up there with Community's "Contemporary American Poultry" episode and Mr. Show's hilarious "Pallies" sketch as an entertaining Scorsese parody. "Pallies" was actually more of a parody of the Bill the Butcher-esque treatment commercial TV has subjected all of Scorsese's R-rated movies to than a parody of the director's signature filmmaking techniques, but it's still a great little sketch about the violence of GoodFellas.
"A Party for Tarzan," the penultimate episode of The Venture Bros.' sixth season, even has in common with "Pallies" the brief presence of Paul F. Tompkins. The Mr. Show alum reprises his role from earlier this season as the original Morpho, whose 1973 master plan of disguising himself as the then-closeted Billie Jean King and nakedly seducing Dr. Z (Jackson Publick) into relinquishing a priceless statuette known as the Jade Dragon (while somehow tucking in his dick like Buffalo Bill)--which is detailed in a flashback-within-a-flashback--is definitely something you would never have seen on The Green Hornet.
If you're going to give Patrick Warburton and Mike Sinterniklaas an entire episode off from voicing Brock and Dean, respectively, you better damn well make the episode worthwhile. The Scorsesean flashback gimmick Doc Hammer went with for the episode he scripted--perhaps to compensate for the lack of Warburton and Sinterniklaas--could have turned out to be annoying, like it would have probably been in the hands of some lesser writer whose go-to Scorsese references are limited to Raging Bull and GoodFellas. But luckily, the gimmick works. When Hammer's making fun of Scorsese's overreliance on "Gimme Shelter" instead of recreating Joe Pesci's most profane lines from GoodFellas and Casino, that's how you know "A Party for Tarzan" is a solid Scorsese spoof. The Stones and blues music soundalikes Venture Bros. composer J.G. Thirlwell came up with in place of too-pricey-to-clear Scorsese movie soundtrack cuts like "Gimme Shelter" or "Mannish Boy" are funnier than using the actual songs themselves.
Between the references to Scorsese's 1987 video for Michael Jackson's "Bad" during "It Happening One Night" and the homages to Scorsese's documentary narration-inspired style throughout "A Party for Tarzan," Publick and Hammer must have revisited much of Scorsese's work while looking for inspiration for the New York-based sixth season and planning the whole season out. Doing that must have given Publick and Hammer a renewed appreciation for the legendary New York director whose name is interestingly one of the most frequently misspelled, even by filmmakers who claim to be fans of his work.
Spy wasn't just the last entry in the AFOS blog's ongoing and year-long Throwback Thursday series before I took a three-week-long break from blogging for most of July. The Paul Feig flick is also the final movie I'll be watching inside a theater. I'm disappointed that I'll have to wait to see Ant-Man, Trainwreck, Mission: Impossible--Rogue Nation, Spectre, Ryan Coogler's Creed and possibly The Force Awakens until they hit Blu-ray. After being subjected to yet another theater audience member switching on his or her glowing smartphone screen light in the theater--this happened in the middle of a screening of Spy--I've simply had it. I said to myself, "That's it. I'm not watching another movie in a theater until Alamo Drafthouse actually opens that San Francisco Drafthouse theater they've been talking about opening since the Bush (Sr.) Administration."
It's not like I'm an absolute fascist about it. Unlike that psycho in Florida who shot and killed someone in a theater for texting during a bunch of movie trailers, I'm not distracted by moviegoers who check their texts during the trailers. They're commercials. I don't care. Neither am I distracted by those who use their phones as flashlights to help them see their way out while the closing credits are rolling and I'm waiting for some lame and pointless post-credits scene to arrive.
But when some moron in one of the front rows (and I can see them from afar because ever since college, I always sit in the farthest back row, due to my hatred of having my seat get kicked from behind me by strangers when I was younger) is flicking on his or her phone light during the feature presentation, in the middle of an action sequence, that's when I really get distracted and angry. I never want to be that guy who either tells people to turn off their phones or shushes a noisy talker, which is why I've never done either of those things. But I've always felt like doing so. Rude people in theaters can't be reasoned with, so why bother?
I also never want to be that guy who complains to the theater staff to get them to reprimand some unruly moron, simply because multiplex employees don't do shit. But when that smartphone zombie in one of the front rows flicked on his screen in the middle of one of Melissa McCarthy's Spy action sequences, that was the last straw for me. My tolerance for this nonsense has ended. He switched it on only once during Spy, which actually isn't as awful as the imbecile who brought his tablet to Kingsman: The Secret Service and kept switching it on during the feature presentation (that tablet zombie at the Kingsman screening is reason number 4,081 for why I despise the Silicon Valley tech world, a world I regret having worked for during the '00s). But despite the Spy screening being less aggravating than the Kingsman screening, my tolerance for smartphone or tablet zombies inside theaters is kaput. Why the fuck does this always happen during spy movies?
During the last 1/2 hr of MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: GHOST PROTOCOL, the woman next to me was constantly texting. Still trying to fathom this. 1/2
I'll say it and I'll say it again: movie theaters don't need timid or indifferent ushers to handle texters. That squeaky-voiced teen from The Simpsons wouldn't have the ability or the guts to handle them anyway. Movie theaters need bouncers, and not just a regular bouncer: a Samoan bouncer. Samoan bouncers rule.
I'm not as violent as a bouncer. But smartphone zombies who check their texts in the movie theater (so that fucking phone light emerges out of nowhere and distracts everyone who's paying attention to the movie) drive me so bonkers--much more so than even people who talk out loud in the theater--that I wish Alamo Drafthouse, the theater chain that has broken the mold and won praise for actually doing something about texters and kicking them out of its theaters, would go the extra mile and not just kick them out. I would like Drafthouse to also take them to a back room and show them the respect and kindness they deserve. Here's an example of that kindness.
It's simple etiquette, man. I know there are moviegoers of color out there who, unlike this moviegoer of color, think it's okay to switch their goddamn flashlight on in the middle of the feature presentation. To them, I would like to say the following: don't you fucking frame this as "Man, enforcing etiquette like that is #peak" (as in Caucasity, for people who don't speak Desus Nice-ese). No, it's not.
I like making fun of moments of Caucasity as much as the next brown man, but someone telling you to shut off your phone in the theater isn't white privilege exerting itself. It's not white man etiquette. It's human etiquette.
#TheConjuring wasn't scary.The #millenials in the audience who couldn't stop texting, talking and taking pics during it were.
You're not just rudely distracting everyone who paid to watch a movie, whether the movie is good or Michael Bay; they didn't pay to watch you play with your phone. You're also making everything about yourself and diverting everyone's attentions in the theater to you, attention whore. Now that--the petulant "I have the right to keep my phone on whenever I want to!" defense--is acting exactly like the privileged white morons you so despise.
One of those privileged white morons is Madonna. You want to behave just like Madonna? I'm glad to see Lin-Manuel Miranda setting an example for how to handle lousy phone etiquette by banning Madonna from attending his Broadway musical Hamilton after she texted during one of Hamilton's Off-Broadway performances. "That bitch was on her phone. You couldn't miss it from the stage. It was a black void of the audience in front of us and her face there perfectly lit by the light of her iPhone through three-quarters of the show," grumbled Jonathan Groff, Miranda's Hamilton co-star. I'm even more glad to see Patti LuPone verbally and physically getting tough on these tech addicts who come to Broadway performances and show no respect for the actors. LuPone once paused in the middle of one of her Gypsy musical numbers to chew out an audience member who was snapping photos. Then a couple of weeks ago, she stepped out of character again during a performance of Shows for Days to confiscate a phone from a texter who's another one of what LuPone perfectly describes as "self-absorbed and inconsiderate audience members who are controlled by their phones."
Now if only those indifferent movie theater owners whom Matt Zoller Seitz complains about in his frequent tweets about lousy theater behavior would be as tough on morons in their theaters as LuPone has been on morons in hers. I like the writing of Anil Dash, but his idiotic defense of texting in theaters is both a lowlight of his writing and reason number 4,082 for why I hate the tech world. I'll always admire Seitz for his impassioned response to Dash's piece.
After I threw in the towel after seeing Spy and said, "I give up dealing with this shit," I happened to stumble into a comment about lousy theater behavior that was written a long time ago by one of my AFOS radio station listeners, graphic artist and Drafthouse theater fan Vincent Bernard, over in the comments section of the Drafthouse-owned Birth.Movies.Death., back when it was known as Badass Digest. Vincent's opinion is exactly the same as mine. He said, "When I want to watch a movie, I want to watch a movie. I don't give a flying fuck what anyone else thinks or feels about it. I'm trying to immerse myself in art, not sing Kumbaya around a campfire. I treat film the way I treat all serious art. I certainly don't want to read great literature or view great paintings surrounded by ill-mannered buffoons, so why should film be any different?"
That's precisely how I feel about moviegoing: it gives you the opportunity to immerse yourself in visual art, and you should be able to do that without any distractions or interruptions. I'll still enjoy the ability to be free from any distractions and immerse myself in a movie, which is what the Drafthouse folks--and now over on the stage acting side of showbiz, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Patti "The Cut-Wife" LuPone--are fighting so hard to preserve. I just won't be doing so in a theater anymore, until the day Drafthouse finally opens its Mission District theater. If you can't even manage to immerse yourself for two hours, you have no business being inside a theater. Just leave and take your shitty little screen with you. I hope a car hits you on your way out because you were too stupid to look where you're going, and I hope that car was driven by someone who wasn't paying attention to the wheel because that person was too busy texting.
Song: "Walk on the Wild Side" by master Hammond B-3 organ player and Beastie Boys "Root Down" sample source Jimmy Smith Released: 1962 Why's it part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist?: I first took notice of "Walk on the Wild Side"--not to be confused with the Lou Reed classic of the same name--when I heard it during Martin Scorsese's Casino. I later discovered that Smith's exhilarating instrumental was a cover of a movie theme, Elmer Bernstein's theme from the 1962 New Orleans bordello drama Walk on the Wild Side, which starred Laurence Harvey, Capucine and Jane Fonda (that was an interesting way for Scorsese to insert a shout-out to Bernstein, whom he previously worked with on Cape Fear and The Age of Innocence: he needle-dropped a cover of one of Bernstein's earlier compositions).
The instrumental version of Bernstein's Walk on the Wild Side theme accompanies one of legendary movie title designer Saul Bass' best opening title sequences, which, unlike most of Bass' other sequences, doesn't use any animation and is simply footage of an alley cat, cleverly edited to the tempo of Bernstein's slinky-sounding theme. The catfight at the end of Bass' titles pits a black cat against a white cat. It's like a Real Housewives of Atlanta fight scene with better acting.
Though its lyrics contain gospel-style references to the promised land of heaven, it's odd how this theme from a then-risque '60s movie about New Orleans hoes has become a gospel standard. It's like if Blondie's "Call Me" from American Gigolo got rewritten as "Call Me (Hello Lord)" or something.
Walk on the Wild Side star Jane Fonda models Timbuk2's new "Hitchhiking Ho" line.
