Today's post totally repurposes shit from August 26, 2014, except for one sentence, which is in bold.
I've been asked twice or thrice "What's your favorite score?" My answer to that will always be "55-10, Niners over Broncos."
I don't have one favorite score. I have lots of favorite scores, but there are too many out there to name. I've listened to thousands of them since my college radio programming days. It's impossible to pick one that's the best. It's like asking a parent who his or her favorite kid is.
Plus my answer to that "favorite score" question would change every other minute. One minute, it would be "Out of Sight by David Holmes," and then the next minute, it would be "An Oversimplification of Her Beauty by Flying Lotus." Then that would change to "the frequently rapped-along-toSamurai Champloo by the late, great Nujabes, Fat Jon, Force of Nature and Tsutchie." And so on.
The same thing applies to "favorite hip-hop album." It'll ping-pong back and forth between "De La Soul Is Dead," "good kid, m.A.A.d. city," "Barkada" and "whatever I bumped in its entirety last week."
But one thing I do know is that Drive composer Cliff Martinez's anachronistic score music to Cinemax's 1900s medical drama The Knick is a sublime piece of work. I've added Knick season 2 score selections to "AFOS Prime" rotation on AFOS, in addition to the season 1 score selections that are still in rotation. Martinez's Knick episode scores are the automatic winner of "best score to a TV show I'll never watch because I hate watching extremely graphic medical procedures."
A longer and heavily-updated-in-2020 version of the following blog post can be found in If You Haven't Seen It, It's New to You: The Movies and TV Shows Some of Us Regretted Not Catching Until Later. The 2020 book was written and self-published by yours truly. Get the paperback edition of If You Haven't Seen It, It's New to You now!
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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 first-run movie I didn't see in the theater. I caught this movie instead on Netflix, and it's a good one. This week marked the season premiere ofFresh Off the Boat, the single-camera sitcom that made waves last season as the first genuine hit show on network TV to center on an Asian American family--and also has been consistently funny to boot--so I'm discussing an equally intriguing sci-fi film from earlier this year that's also told from an Asian American point of view.
On the surface, America in the year 2041 looks enticing early on during Advantageous, indie director Jennifer Phang's second feature-length film. Nobody in the future seems to complain anymore that "We were promised spacecars" because the unnamed city Advantageous takes place in appears to be surrounded by such spacecars. The city's sleek architecture gleams prettily in this low-budget film's surprisingly convincing matte paintings. It's like a city where all the skyscrapers were aesthetically inspired by the gleaming, bean-shaped Cloud Gate, that giant Chicago sculpture I remember so well from Source Code and one of the musical numbers during Dhoom: 3. Best of all, small mom-and-pop restaurants that tout their hormone-free fried chicken have managed to survive gentrification.
But as the film digs deeper into 2041 America, it becomes clear how really fucked-up the future is underneath all that surface prettiness. The spacecars aren't actually spacecars: they're surveillance drones deployed by both the police and tech firms like the Center for Advanced Health and Living, whose name sounds like a shady Scientology subsidiary. Domestic terrorism has become so commonplace that barely anybody bats an eye at a terrorist attack or objects to the loss of their personal freedoms due to the increase in drone tech. "The 2033 bubble" has apparently led to an end to the middle class. The unemployment rate for women has skyrocketed, resulting in an increase in homeless women on the streets. A radio news report that could easily be missed underneath the dialogue during first viewing depressingly rattles off stats about "the recent rise in child prostitution in our country." Education has become unaffordable.
When single mother Gwen Koh (Jacqueline Kim), the Center for Advanced Health and Living's spokeswoman, becomes one of the unemployed after losing her job due to the corporation's plans to replace her with a younger spokeswoman, she chooses an unusual last resort for ensuring that her 13-year-old daughter Jules (Samantha Kim, no relation) stays in the country's super-expensive private school system, a broken system that ends up being the only way to protect Jules from a bleak future of hooking on the streets. Gwen agrees to earn a living as a guinea pig for the Center's newest product: a risky alternative to cosmetic surgery that allows people to transfer their minds into younger bodies.
Advantageous, which is like the best Black Mirror story Charlie Brooker hasn't written, originated as a 2011 short film Phang and Jacqueline Kim co-wrote as part of the FutureStates series of shorts for PBS. The scenes from that 2011 version resurface in the feature-length version and are surrounded by newly shot material featuring Jennifer Ehle as a sinister Center executive and, in an atypically non-comedic and surprisingly effective role, Ken Jeong, who co-produced the 2015 version (James Urbaniak, who's so sublime at playing manipulative and evil assholes on comedy shows like The Venture Bros. and Review, gets to demonstrate some non-comedic chops in Advantageous as well). The biggest and most satisfying difference between the 2011 short and the 2015 film is the film's lack of an opening crawl establishing all of the above details about the dystopian future.
Omitting the crawl that opened the short causes the feature-length Advantageous to be ballsier storytelling-wise than even the director's cut of Blade Runner, which was never shorn of its explanatory crawl about replicants in the future despite completely removing Harrison Ford's clunkily delivered, "Grrr, can't wait to be done with recording this shit in the booth 'cuz I gotta go meet my weed connect"-ish voiceover narration. Phang wisely trusts the viewers to figure out piece by piece--and on their own, without much expository dialogue to hold their hands (other than the aforementioned fake news soundbites)--the future's worst aspects and its gender or racial inequities, as well as its strange customs. There's a great little scene where Gwen wants some time to herself to consider the "consciousness transplant," so she checks into a hotel that specializes in letting its guests go off the grid and be rid of all of their devices, as well as be rid of drone surveillance. In 2015, we have the freedom to go off the grid and take as long a break from social media or technological distractions as we want to, while in the fucked-up future Advantageous depicts, people have to pay to do that. But the most beautiful thing about that hotel scene is the lack of awkward exposition from the concierge like "Welcome to the Bedford, the hotel that grants you privacy from surveillance." It's world-building at its finest.
Another thing that makes the feature-length Advantageous superior to the 22-minute version is how the added material with Jeong (and an unseen Jeanne Sakata as Gwen's deeply religious mom) causes Gwen's desperation to make more sense and be more believable, even while Phang does subtle things with the dialogue and the editing to make the future slightly difficult to understand and more like a puzzle, narratively speaking. Phang's puzzle-like storytelling approach is reminiscent of one of my favorite Steven Soderbergh movies, The Limey, and it made me wonder at times if the entire movie was actually a flashback inside Gwen's head, just like how The Limey interestingly implies that Terence Stamp is playing back the entire movie in his head on his flight home to England. Even composer Timo Chen's Advantageous score is as similarly ethereal as Cliff Martinez's score to The Limey, and on his YouTube account, Chen details the unconventional ways he performed his effective score, like the sliding of a toothbrush across piano strings or the use of a sex toy as a plectrum.
As Chen says, Phang's puzzle-like approach inspired him "to develop new tools to play [instruments] in different ways." That phrase could also describe how a new and much-needed voice in sci-fi like Phang's takes a familiar, Children of Men-style dystopia and plays that dystopia in a different way by filtering it through her rarely acknowledged--and rarely visible on the screen--perspective: the perspective of women of color who are clearly fed up with classism, ageism, sexism and racism. Advantageous is an angry political work, but it's also hopeful about social change and fortunately, not completely humorless. Instead of Jeong supplying the film's humor, its humor emerges in the way Gwen and her co-workers sound exactly like Hollywood types when they discuss their work, like when Urbaniak's character says to Gwen, "We're obligated to go a different direction for the face of the Center."
Kim--whom Star Trek heads will remember as Sulu's grown-up daughter in Star Trek: Generations and who gets to show far more range in Asian American indie projects like Advantageous rather than in something like Generations--clearly took her experiences of hearing the drivel of Hollywood casting directors who babble in coded language about race and worked those experiences into the film's script. So Advantageous also becomes a satirical comment on Hollywood's treatment of Asian women and its tendency to either whitewash characters who were Asian females in the source material (like when Arrow changed the DC Comics character Sin from an Asian girl to a white one) or cast in leading roles Asian performers who look "less Asian" and are closer to Hollywood's beauty standards.
Gwen is so brainwashed from her days of working at the Center that when she chooses her new body, it turns out to be, of course, a racially ambiguous one. Gwen 2.0 (Freya Adams) may look as outwardly pretty as the city she's been raising Jules in, but just like the city, the new Gwen's concealing an enormous amount of pain and unease. In a manner that brings to mind how the late Roddy Piper so gruffly and amusingly tried to get anyone in L.A. who hadn't joined the alien invaders--as well as the Reagan-era theater audience--to listen to him about the world around them during John Carpenter's classic dystopian satire They Live, Advantageous dares us to stop taking a blind eye to that same kind of pain and unease that exists outside the screen (and on the streets of present-day cities or in the power structures within our own Center-like workplaces) and take a closer look.
Advantageous is now streaming exclusively on Netflix.
Every Throwback Thursday, I randomly pull out from my desk cabinet--with my eyes closed--a movie ticket I saved. Then I discuss the movie on the ticket and maybe a little bit of its score, which might be now streaming on AFOS.
Getaway drivers are like the bassplayers of heist-movie crews: nobody gives two shits about them. Adapted from the 2005 James Sallis novel of the same name by screenwriter Hossein Amini, director Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive is a heist flick that takes a different turn and gives getaway drivers their due by telling everything from the point of view of the wheelman. The film's two heist sequences literally leave out all the lock-picking bits and all the breaking-into-the-vault bits, and as a bit of a sly joke that's reminiscent of Andy Kaufman standing around on stage and waiting for his cue to lip-sync the "Here I come to save the day!" part of the Mighty Mouse theme, the heist sequences just show Ryan Gosling waiting in the car and considering his next move in case the heist goes wrong. Refn is so skilled at building tension in Drive that these sequences are still gripping even without ever setting foot inside the electronics warehouse that's broken into or the pawn shop that gets held up.
Drive is also Gosling and Refn's twisted version of a superhero movie (regarding the subject of superhero movies, Gosling joked, "All the good ones were taken, so I made up my own"). It's done not like a quippy Marvel Cinematic Universe blockbuster or a shouty Zack Snyder speed-ramp fest but in the nearly silent, actions-speak-louder-than-words style of older action flicks Refn and the Drive producers (and I) love, whether it's Michael Mann's Thief, Peter Yates' Bullitt, John Boorman's Point Blank or Walter Hill's The Driver (Hill's movie is the only one I haven't seen out of those four older actioners).
The superhero Gosling plays is a garage mechanic and Hollywood stunt driver who's never referred to by name in the movie, not even by Shannon (Bryan Cranston, who guest-starred in a standout 1998 X-Files episode that's also called "Drive"), his boss at the garage and father figure. The Gosling character is listed in the end credits as simply "Driver," a shout-out to the way Hill's movie identifies Ryan O'Neal's character as just "The Driver." The mechanic's superpower is his badass stunt driving skills, which he puts to use at night in his side gig as a getaway wheelman. In case we miss Refn's interpretation of Driver (no relation to Adam or Minnie?) as a superhero, the scorpion emblem on the back of Driver's white satin jacket is designed to look like Spider-Man's, and the theme music for the love story between Driver and his neighbor Irene (Carey Mulligan) is "A Real Hero" by the Toronto duo Electric Youth and French producer/remixer College.
There's one other superpower I almost forgot: Driver's prowess with a hammer or knife (or a gun, even though like O'Neal, he prefers not to carry one) whenever either his life is threatened--both Driver and Shannon frequently get into business with dangerous people--or the lives of Shannon, Irene and her six-year-old son Benicio (Kaden Leos) are threatened. You don't want to be on the other end of a fight with Driver whenever he's wielding a hammer or knife. And that's where the twisted part of this Refn take on a superhero movie comes in: Driver also happens to be a sociopath who's capable of terrifying, childlike and almost-got-slapped-with-an-NC-17-rating violence when you least expect it. Refn and cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel, who regularly handles the cinematography for Bryan Singer's directorial efforts (like the bizarrely orange-hued pilot episode Singer directed for House), both shoot Driver's nighttime retribution against an L.A. crime boss named Nino (Ron Perlman) like a horror movie sequence, right down to the creepy, Michael Myers-style stuntman mask Driver chooses to don for his pursuit of Nino.
Amini and Refn also upend one other aspect of superhero movies: the romance (SPOILER). Many of them end with the superhero (unless he's a bizarre monkish type like the Tobey Maguire version of Peter Parker, who doesn't have time for sex even though Kirsten Dunst, Mageina Tovah, Elizabeth Banks and Bryce Dallas Howard all throw themselves at him) getting the girl, while Drive ends with Driver forcing himself to leave behind Irene and Benicio because it's the only way he can protect them from any remaining associates or underlings of Jewish gangster Bernie Rose (a cast-against-type and convincingly intimidating Albert Brooks). Driver's chaste romance with Irene--who's still on good terms with her husband and Benicio's father, Standard Gabriel (Oscar Isaac), an ex-con who happens to be returning home from prison right when Driver's starting to bond with Irene--is more interestingly played and more maturely handled than most romances in actual superhero movies. That's because it's depicted with minimal dialogue and expressed mainly through glances between Gosling and Mulligan.
"He sees her in a grocery store. Cut to the parking lot... Cut to them in the elevator. He's helping her carry her bags upstairs. Cut to them in her apartment. She's giving him some water, and an entire movie is happening between them, and we don't need to hear the fuckin' dialogue! It's all in their looks, it's all in the shots. It's just absolutely beautiful," said A History of Violence screenwriter Josh Olson during his Trailers from Hell discussion of Drive and its refreshing lack of unnecessary exposition.
The idea to discard most of the dialogue that was written for their scenes together came from both Gosling and Mulligan. It was a bold and terrific choice. Moviegoers who either giggled over Driver's laconicism (I'd hate to see them watch Steve McQueen in Bullitt because they'll probably end up fracturing a rib) as if they were watching that old and bizarre clip of Gosling singing some Jodeci on The Mickey Mouse Club or complained that "Gosling doesn't talk enough in this movie!" clearly want everything spoon-fed to them (Drive received a C- from moviegoers at CinemaScore in 2011). I know I keep quoting my favorite line from Road House, but it's very apt here: they're too stupid to have a good time.
Driver is so terse and so uninterested in talking about his past that the only line of dialogue about his past comes from Shannon when he recalls to Irene the day Driver came to his garage looking for work (whereas by the end of that great diner scene between James Caan and Tuesday Weld in Thief--which is full of exposition, but it's delivered naturally and realistically and in the manner of a typical diner conversation--we know every little bit of the Caan character's incarcerated past and what makes him tick). Both Driver's terseness and the lack of information about his past before the garage have caused Drive and its enigmatic main character to be open to interpretation, which is part of what makes this movie continue to be fascinating. Moviegoers like Olson believe Driver is somewhere on the autism spectrum, while an actual psychologist who preferred to remain anonymous and was asked by a movie blog in 2011 to profile Driver's behavior concluded that he's more like someone with obsessive compulsive personality disorder (which isn't the same as OCD) than an autistic savant. That psych profile also theorized that Driver was raised on a farm (!).
My interpretation of Driver is that he did time when he was younger, and Shannon took him in right after he got out of prison (I don't view him as someone who grew up on a farm). It's a backstory Gosling tells primarily through his eyes and body language, just like what Charlize Theron does with her character Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road. For instance, look at how Driver silently reacts to the presence of Standard, whose past decision-making hasn't exactly been the best and whose sizing-up of Driver when he first encounters him in their apartment building's hallway is fraught with unspoken hostility towards "Mom's new friend." Driver gives a look in that hallway scene (and in a later scene where Standard tells him he's into the mob for some money) that says, "Bad decision-makers like Standard were all over the yard."
I contemplated Olson's reading of Drive as a story about an autistic wheelman and thought it made some sense for a few weeks. But then after rewatching Drive in its entirety, I realized his reading doesn't quite fit, despite Driver's savant-style memorization of the streets and freeways of L.A. for his gig as a wheelman. I don't think Driver's on the spectrum. He's simply a criminal who, like Neil McCauley from Heat, taught himself not to waste his words and to keep himself as quiet and invisible as possible to avoid attracting the attention of either the prison guards, the cops or his enemies.
Even though Driver often looks like he'd rather be behind the wheel of a muscle car or under some vehicle's hood than face-to-face with any of the hotheaded crooks who enlist his services, he's able to maintain eye contact with people whose company he likes, and he can read social cues. He's capable of understanding or expressing humor, especially when he's around Benicio (who's like a less chatty version of the kid in Shane), but he approaches humor stoically, of course. His interactions with Benicio and the only two scenes in the movie where he shows fear in his voice--that would be the scene where he expresses to Irene his remorse for failing to protect Standard even though he tried his best to help him and the scene where he gets mad at Shannon for accidentally putting Irene in danger and pleads with him to leave L.A. to stay alive--all prove he's not on the spectrum. As for Léon, the Manhattan hitman who drinks nothing but milk, wears Urkel pants that are four sizes too short, relates to his houseplant better than he relates to other people and doesn't recommend to a 12-year-old girl who makes a pass at him that she ought to look for boys closer to her age...
Refn never mentioned Léon: The Professional, which I actually watched for the first time last week, as one of his influences during interviews about Drive, but I like to pretend Refn also viewed Drive as a variation on Léon that doesn't contain all that bothersome and creepy material about a 12-year-old girl's sexuality and chooses to split the Natalie Portman character into two different characters: a six-year-old kid and his mom, a more age-appropriate female for the lead to experience romantic tension with. Or maybe Refn just viewed Drive as a metaphor for Christianity's encroachment on the Norse religions, like action film reviewer Outlaw Vern once joked. Whatever the reading, Drive is one of those movies that will be subjected for years to many different interpretations/theories ("He has Asperger's!" "Nah, he's actually an alien from a planet that won't eat cereal!") or film studies essays about its efficient script or stylized visual approach (meanwhile, mainstream Hollywood has started imitating Drive: Jack Reacher has taken the Lee Child novel series and coated it in a Drive-like stylized sheen, while the vicious side of Driver clearly influenced Antoine Fuqua's remake of The Equalizer, which originally had Refn attached to it as director).
I wouldn't be surprised if Drive someday winds up as the subject of an essay for a film studies course about Jews on screen, due to a part of Drive that's not as open to interpretation as other parts of the movie. That would be the uneasy alliance between Bernie, whose line about his Hollywood past as a Golan-Globus-ish producer of '80s B-movies is straight out of The Limey ("One critic called them European. I thought they were shit"), and Nino, whose resentment over demanding respect from his anti-Semitic Italian superiors and never getting it brings about everyone's downfall, including Driver's. Their alliance reflects tensions within the Jewish community over how Jewish modern-day Jews prefer to be, with Nino being the self-hating Jew in this situation (what's the Yiddish name for "Tom"?). I particularly like how instead of on-the-nose, They Came Together-style exposition, food is used in one of their earlier scenes together to illustrate the contrasting ways Bernie and Nino view their Jewish heritage: Bernie's preference for Chinese food gives away that he's Jewish to the core, while Nino's choice of a pizzeria as a front for his business illustrates that he's a Jew who thinks he's Italian. At one point, Bernie says all we need to know about his disdain for Nino when he addresses him by his real name: Izzy.
Drive is also bound to be subjected to many experiments with its music, like last year's BBC Three rescoring of Drive, which was music-supervised by Radio 1's Zane Lowe. He got artists like Banks and Laura Mvula to record new original tracks for Drive, and the results were negatively received, although Refn gave the rescore his approval. I haven't watched the rescored version in its entirety, but after watching just two of the new songs get grafted onto the movie (one of them, "Get Away" by Chvrches, is actually pretty solid, but I would have placed it in a different scene, like one that's unscored and could use a source cue), it proves how irreplaceable both the pulsating and well-chosen existing songs and Cliff Martinez's perfectly realized original score are.
Fans of Gosling or Drive who went over the top on Twitter and tweeted angry reactions to the rescore, I'll let you in on a little secret: you can always go back to the original version of Drive. It's not as if Lowe destroyed all copies of the original version--like what George Lucas was rumored to have done to the negatives of the pre-Special Edition cuts of the first three Star Wars movies--and replaced them with his rescore. But the fans who posted melodramatic tweets in response to BBC Three's rescore acted as if that had happened. The Drive that you know and love isn't going away any time soon. Electric Youth will still be there, serenading a pleasant afternoon drive along the L.A. River with their ode to "a real human being and a real hero." And a real badass with a hammer.
Selections from the Drive score are in rotation during "AFOS Prime" on AFOS.
I've been asked twice or thrice "What's your favorite score?" My answer to that will always be "55-10, Niners over Broncos."
I don't have one favorite score. I have lots of favorite scores, but there are too many out there to name. I've listened to thousands of them since my college radio programming days. It's impossible to pick one that's the best. It's like asking a parent who his or her favorite kid is.
Plus my answer to that "favorite score" question would change every other minute. One minute, it would be "Out of Sight by David Holmes," and then the next minute, it would be "An Oversimplification of Her Beauty by Flying Lotus." Then that would change to "the frequently rapped-along-toSamurai Champloo by the late, great Nujabes, Fat Jon, Force of Nature and Tsutchie." And so on.
The same thing applies to "favorite hip-hop album." It'll ping-pong back and forth between "De La Soul Is Dead," "good kid, m.A.A.d. city," "Barkada" and "whatever I bumped in its entirety last week."
But one thing I do know is that Drive composer Cliff Martinez's anachronistic score music to Cinemax's 1900s medical drama The Knick is a sublime piece of work. I've added Knick score selections like "Son of Placenta Previa" to "AFOS Prime" rotation on AFOS. Martinez's Knick episode scores are the automatic winner of "best score to a TV show I'll never watch because I hate watching extremely graphic medical procedures."
My favorite monthly section in old Source magazine issues was "Hip-Hop Quotables," in which the Source editors printed out their favorite new rap verse of the month, from the first bar to the last. "Tip-Top Quotables," which I've named after that Source section, is a collection of my favorite quotes of the week from anywhere, whether it's a recent TV show or a new rap verse. "TTQ" won't appear on this blog every week. It'll appear whenever the fuck I feel like it.
* "Much as I scoffed at the very notion of a good MacGruber movie, I'd probably put it at the very top of SNL adaptations. At a minimum, it's the one SNL-to-screen adaptation to take a mostly one-joke sketch idea (e.g. 'It's Pat' or 'The Roxbury Guys') and successfully expand and reconfigure it for the screen. And while I'm here, I'll echo the praise for [Will] Forte's performance, which is committed and fearlessly self-deprecating. After all the things he does in this movie—the loud back-to-back sex scenes, the celery stick, the 'just tell me what you want me to fuck' scene—he can probably bid farewell to any Al Franken-like political aspirations he might have had."--Scott Tobias, The Dissolve, "The '80s ambience, jury-rigged gags, and dumb bravado of MacGruber"
* "Every good spoof needs a straight man. Airplane! had Leslie Nielsen's Dr. Rumack, who never cracked even as he pulled eggs out of a sick woman's mouth. Blazing Saddles had Gene Wilder's Waco Kid, who didn't bat an eye at outlaws punching horses in the face. [Powers] Boothe's unflappable Col. Faith is a sturdy presence throughout MacGruber, but the movie's true straight man is [Jorma] Taccone, who shoots MacGruber as if it were a legitimately badass balls-to-the-wall action spectacular. Most modern spoofs, shot on the cheap by hacks, look like garbage. MacGruber looks good enough to stand beside (or, in some cases, ahead of) its inspirations. No matter how broad Forte gets—and at one point, he's waddling through an action scene naked, with a celery stalk hanging out of his ass—Taccone never shoots him like he's in on the joke. There are many deadpan actors; Taccone is the rare deadpan director."--Matt Singer, The Dissolve, "From box-office bomb to cult favorite in the making: Classic MacGruber"
(NOTE: The Harold Faltermeyer-esque score cue from the "celery stalk hanging out of MacGruber's ass" scene starts at 2:00 of "MacGruber's Suite" by MacGruber score composer Matthew Compton. Don't miss the profane hidden track that starts at 5:30.)
* "There was no main title... and I didn't make a theme for [the end credits] either because I always wanted to leave on whatever tone the outgoing scene had. So there was a different end-title piece of music each time. It's one of the most important chunks of musical real estate because it's a chance to sum up your musical story, but there's no picture, there's no dialogue. It's not competing with any other sound. It's a great spot to showcase the music. So, the end titles became my favorite spot. But I also used it as a place to do something that was unexpected. One track is called 'Falling off a Bicycle,' and another one is called 'Goodnight Nurse Elkins.' Those started out as one-of-a-kind pieces. I hadn't written anything like that for the rest of the show. So, I threw my hardest musical curveballs for the end credits."--Cliff Martinez, discussing with TVGuide.com the electronic score music he wrote for the first season of The Knick
* "Composers were close, and often attended each other's recording sessions. One such day, Elmer and his friends were listening to one of their peers record a score with a strikingly memorable theme. They snuck a few musicians to a smaller studio, and recorded a jazz combo version of this composer's theme, arranging it from memory. That night, when they all got together socially, they played their tape, telling their mark it was the radio. Shocked to hear a small combo playing his own theme, the panicked composer turned white and asked what the music was. Elmer and his friends told him it was a hit song that had been on the radio for weeks. The poor composer thought he had accidentally ripped off a popular song, and momentarily contemplated the task of rewriting his entire score! Elmer and his fellow pranksters laughed, and poured him a drink."--Outlander composer Bear McCreary, recalling an elaborate prank that his mentor Elmer Bernstein told him he used to pull on other film composers
* "Even though that theme was used on The Next Generation, I associate it with Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which was like the coming of Jesus Christ to me. The score is super thematic, it's deep, it employs many modern sounds. Despite the fact that Goldsmith was traditional, he was always trying to find ways to be with the times that were, so he'd bring in the blaster beam, that thing that was the new thing and some of his efforts had dated themselves, like in the '80s we used some of those electronics, but Star Trek remains timeless. That Blaster Beam thing, a lot of the water phone sounds they use and so forth. you combine that beautiful sweeping version of that theme over the most beautiful thing ever created by man— the Enterprise— and it's just complete, absolute orgasm."--X-Men: Days of Future Past composer John Ottman on the one film score he'd take with him to a desert island
* "The heart of the film is that the Guardians are all adrift in their universes, emotionally and spatially lost. So, it's appropriate that the film starts on a song that croons, 'Nothin's a matter with your head, baby, find it/ Come on and find it/ Hell, with it, baby, 'cause you're fine and you're mine.' It's a mission statement as much as a stylistic choice, a ballad of inclusion in a cold universe. It's also Star-Lord's best way of seeking out maternal advice while lost in space; the song's inquiry of 'Don't you feel right, baby?' allows Star-Lord to converse with a woman that he's lost, one who he rejected right before her passing in a fit of childish sadness. The film is, among about 50 other things, the chronicle of Star-Lord's struggle to accept that he was just afraid and not a bad person."--Dominick Mayer, Consequence of Sound, "How Guardians of the Galaxy Topped the Charts"
* "I can't believe that the only name they got right was fucking Kumail Nanjiani."--Harmontown co-host Jeff B. Davis, mocking L.A. Times TV critic Robert Lloyd's typo-ridden positive review of Harmontown, which misidentified Davis as "Jim Davis" and misspelled "podcast" as "pocast" (in fact, Davis was wrong--not even the L.A. Times critic got Nanjiani's name right either)
* "It looks more like a colonoscopy than a costume. Plus, even if you have superpowers, it's impossible to crawl along the roof while keeping your back arched and your rear high. Too many covers like that, and Spider-Woman is going to need physical therapy."--Amanda Marcotte, mocking Spider-Woman's ass-up pose in the poorly received variant cover artwork drawn by erotic comic book artist Milo Manara for the first issue of Marvel's relaunch of Spider-Woman, as part of a Slate post called "This Week in Butts"
I never really cared for Skrillex's music, but I thought a couple of the score cues that the EDM DJ/producer composed for Spring Breakers were decent (the film also features score cues by the always terrific Cliff Martinez, who worked on Drive). I added one of the Skrillex cues to "AFOS Prime" rotation last week. And then while enjoying Jezebel's guide to hipster racism, a post from last year that I've seen a few blogs mention but I've never gotten around to actually reading until now, I encountered this:
Uh, no, you're not "aloud" to use that word at all, Skrillex.
This Milli Vanilli-haired shithead's off the playlist.
He's being replaced by the never-before-released score cues from Trouble Man, which are bonus tracks on the Trouble Man soundtrack's recent 40th anniversary reissue and were composed by someone who'd probably beat the shit out of Skrillex if he heard him use that word.
Every Wednesday at 10am and 4pm and every Friday at 11am, A Fistful of Soundtracks streams the most recent additions to the station's "Assorted Fistful" library (or in the case of Akon & Hamskia Iyer's "Chammak Challo," the "Chai Noon" library) for an hour-long block entitled "New Cue Revue." Here's what's currently on the "New Cue Revue" playlist.
1. Akon & Hamsika Iyer, "Chammak Challo" (from Ra.One)
Ever since it was announced in 2010 that R&B artist Akon, best known for "Smack That," "I Wanna Love You" and the hilarious Lonely Island/SNL digital short "I Just Had Sex," was lending his pipes to an original song for a Bollywood film (like another non-Indian singer, Kylie Minogue, had done for the imaginatively titled 2009 Into the Blue clone Blue), I've been dying to hear the Akon track. The end result, "Chammak Challo" from Bollywood star Shahrukh Khan's recently released superhero movie Ra.One, finally dropped in September and is a smash hit in India. (In this latest round of one of my favorite games, Guess the American Movie or TV Show That This Bollywood Film Is a Bizarre Clone Of, Ra.One, which features Khan in the dual role of a dorky video game designer and a heroic character from his game who enters the real world, appears to be a clone of the largely forgotten '80s superhero show Automan.)
Akon acquits himself nicely as he alternates between English and Hindi during "Chammak Challo" (the song title is basically "nice-looking shawty" in Hindi slang). The catchy "Chammak Challo" proves that it's much better when Bollywood soundtrack composers enlist actual R&B or rap artists from America to do their thing on their soundtracks than when they attempt to rap or ape current American R&B trends on their own. The latter has led to several theme tunes that are as painful-sounding as the time when Prince stopped being a hater of hip-hop and attempted to incorporate rap into his Diamonds and Pearls album--for instance, go YouTube "Desi Boyz." Or maybe you're better off if you don't.
2. Howard Shore, "The Thief" (from Hugo)
The former SNL bandleader and Oscar-winning Lord of the Rings trilogy composer nicely apes the rhythms of a clock for Martin Scorsese's clock imagery-filled tribute to silent-era filmmakers like Georges Méliès (played during Hugo by Ben Kingsley).
3. Alberto Iglesias, "George Smiley" (from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy)
The lonely trumpet during Alberto Iglesias' effective score for the latest screen adaptation of John le Carré's 1974 spy novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy announces that "This ain't Bond. This is le Carré. No bloody invisible cars or steel-toothed thugs here."
4. Mike Skinner, "Fernando's Theme" (from The Inbetweeners Movie)
British rapper Mike Skinner has retired his stage name The Streets and entered the world of film scoring with his original music for the film version of The Inbetweeners, the Britcom about a group of Superbad-style dorky teens whose anthem would be the aforementioned "I Just Had Sex." The clubby "Fernando's Theme" is the best example of "Wow, I never knew this pasty white guy had a Latin side and maybe he should express it more often" since Michael Giacchino wrote the awesome "Spanish Heist" for the TV series Alias.
5. Alan Silvestri, "Howling Commando's Montage" (from Captain America: The First Avenger)
This cue accompanies a sequence in Captain America: The First Avenger that's a bit too short: a montage of Cap on his missions with the Howling Commandos. Will the Captain America sequel be a flashback to one of those missions with the Howling Commandos that The First Avenger glossed over? As someone who wanted to see more Howling Commando scenes in the film, I hope so.
6. Quincy Jones featuring Little Richard, "Money Runner/Money Is (Medley)" (from $ [Dollars])
As I've said before, say the following five words--"caper movie score by Q"--and I'm there, baby. This funky theme from the 1971 Warren Beatty/Goldie Hawn heist flick $ (Dollars) would fit right in with the Occupy era, except "Inflation in the nation don't bother me" would have to be changed to "Recession in the nation don't bother me."
7. Ludovic Bource, "1927 A Russian Affair" (from The Artist)
After the arrivals of The Artist and Hugo, is silent cinema making a comeback? This better not mean a return to white people stealing Asian roles from Asian perform... d'oh!
Drive is a film I initially dismissed as Faster: Caucasian Edition (the main characters in both Faster and Drive share the same minimalist name as the Ryan O'Neal character in Walter Hill's The Driver: "Driver"). I also kept thinking, "What's up with that hot-pink '80s font on the Drive posters and soundtrack album cover? Is this a Hill-style action film or a spinoff of Alice with Linda Lavin?" That was all before I discovered Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn's artsy action flick--a European outsider's vision of L.A., much like John Boorman's surreal 1967 classic Point Blank--is one of the most finely crafted pieces of cinema in 2011.
Many critics and bloggers have been crazy about Drive, which Refn adapted from the 2005 James Sallis noir novel of the same name, ever since it earned at Cannes both a 15-minute standing ovation and a Best Director prize for Refn (I wonder what Parker, Taylor Hackford's upcoming adaptation of Donald E. Westlake's The Hunter, the same novel that Boorman made into Point Blank, would have been like under the direction of Refn, whose latest thriller has all the leanness and meanness of a Parker caper).
But to moviegoers who are neither critics nor film geeks who are well-versed in the cinematic and visuals-driven language of Hill, Boorman and Michael Mann, the offbeat and ultraviolent-when-you-least-expect-it Drive--which was influenced by the works of those three directors and many others, yet it doesn't feel derivative and hackneyed--is a love-it-or-hate-it film. It received a C- at CinemaScore, even though it features Albert Brooks in a surprisingly convincing villain role and stars Ryan Gosling in one of his most appealing roles, as an introverted Hollywood stuntman-by-day/getaway driver-by-night who's as contradictory a figure as Steve McQueen in Bullitt or Takeshi Kitano in Fireworks (buried under the laconic, calm and non-threatening-looking exteriors of Gosling, McQueen and Kitano are some really violent dudes) and is as mysterious and somehow beloved by kids as Alan Ladd in Shane.
The C- is most likely due to moviegoers who expected Drive to be what was known in the '90s as a "TBS Movie for Guys Who Like Movies" and were unprepared for a film that's a little less conventional than that and is "fearless about being corny," as Elvis Mitchell said about Drivewhile interviewing Refn on The Treatment. At the Drive matinee screening I attended, a group of teenage Latinas didn't understand the film or why Gosling's Driver barely spoke to his MacArthur Park neighbor/love interest Irene (Carey Mulligan) and felt it was their responsibility to let everyone in the theater know that they didn't understand--loudly. It resulted in a moviegoing experience that was so lousy--it's one of the lousiest I've ever had--I ranted about it on Twitter, but Drive is so intriguing not even the smug attention whores who snickered in the theater during every scene could taint my enjoyment of the film or its soundtrack.
Speaking of the Drive soundtrack, which consists of '80s-sounding but surprisingly recent Euro-synth tunes that Refn once described as "like Joy Division with a beat" and an ambient original score by Narc composer Cliff Martinez, both the songs and score are pitch-perfect for the film's decadent '80s Thief/To Live and Die in L.A. vibe and are totally addictive outside the context of the film. A few of the selections from the Drive soundtrack can be heard on A Fistful of Soundtracks, but if you're too impatient to wait to catch one of the Drive tracks on AFOS, the Lakeshore Records release, which is selling like gangbusters on iTunes, is worth downloading or picking up.
Here are 10 facts about the music of Drive:
1.In the film, Gosling's wheelman character likes to turn on the radio while waiting for his criminal accomplices to finish their heists. That character detail stemmed from the first time Gosling truly bonded with Refn. Gosling, who wanted to make a superhero movie and thought of Drive as his superhero project, hand-picked Refn to direct the film because he was a fan of the director's previous works, but as Gosling has noted in several interviews, he initially had a difficult time communicating with a standoffish, under-the-weather and high-on-flu-medicine Refn about how they should approach the project until...
"I turn on the radio to quiet the silence and REO Speedwagon's 'Can't Fight This Feeling' comes on," said Gosling, recalling to New York Times writer Dennis Lim his first car ride with Refn (whom Gosling would frequently chauffeur around SoCal because Refn doesn't drive and stopped working on getting his driver's license after failing his driving test eight times). "And I see [Refn] start to cry and he looks at me with tears in his eyes and he starts singing at the top of his lungs and hitting his knees, and he says, 'I know what this movie is, it's a movie about a guy who drives around listening to pop music because it's the only way he can feel.'"
The sounds of a 1985 high school prom bring out the waterworks in Refn? Wow. Remind me not to play Foreigner's "I Want to Know What Love Is" around Refn or else someone's snot will start flowing.
The last time I saw The Limey was on an Artisan Entertainment screener tape during its art-house run 10 years ago. Steven Soderbergh's superb follow-up to the beloved Out of Sight was one of many highlights of a great and still-unsurpassed movie year (1999), and after stumbling into the film on IFC the other night and stopping whatever I was writing on my computer to watch it for the second time, it still is a highlight of '99.
I noticed a few things in this second viewing. The hot gangster's moll (played by a pre-daytime TV Amelia Heinle) spends a lot of time getting wet during the movie; Lesley Ann Warren is one of the finest-looking untouched-by-plastic-surgery sixtysomething actresses; Bill Duke must have been hired to play the marshals' disabled boss in the Out of Sight spinoffKaren Sisco based on his now-classic reaction to Terence Stamp's long speech from his DEA office desk ("There's one thing I don't understand. The thing I don't understand is every motherfuckin' word you're saying."); and some of the themes in Cliff Martinez's eerie score appear to have been an homage to equally eerie scores from late '60s/early '70s thrillers like Klute and Point Blank (which The Limey is often compared to, and Soderbergh is such a fan of the John Boorman classic that he recorded a commentrak for it).
I've read about the Limey DVD's infamous Soderbergh/Lem Dobbs commentrak--in which Dobbs argued with Soderbergh about the changes the director made to his script--but never listened to it. Now I'm itching to hear the commentrak.
My year-long postings of past or long-buried writing continue with a piece I wrote about The Limey at the time of its release.
The Limey
Artisan
Starring Terence Stamp, Peter Fonda, Lesley Ann Warren, Luis Guzman, Barry Newman, Joe Dallesandro, Nicky Katt, Amelia Heinle
Music by Cliff Martinez
Photographed by Ed Lachman
Written by Lem Dobbs
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
If Sarah Flack never gets an Oscar nomination for her ingenious editing of Steven Soderbergh's witty, melancholy revenge thriller/character study The Limey, then the members of the Academy ought to be taken out. The story of a British ex-con named Wilson (Terence Stamp) who tries to reconnect with his murdered daughter while searching the streets of L.A. for her killer, The Limey is told in a jigsaw-puzzle narrative style that shuffles past and present events. For instance, whenever Wilson discovers an important clue about his daughter's whereabouts before she was killed, the film cuts to a shot of a pensive, brooding Wilson, alone in a motel room or on an airplane. Are we watching him before he embarks on his journey through L.A. or are we seeing him on his way home to England, reflecting on his trip?
The nonlinear technique will befuddle some viewers, especially those expecting to see a "TBS Movie for Guys Who Like Movies." But it's a crucial--and inspired--device because it underscores how time makes very little sense to Stamp's title character, who, when the film opens, has just been released from a nine-year prison sentence that has messed with his concept of time, like it would do to any long-term inmate.
Wilson isn't the only character in The Limey who's disconnected from time. Terry Valentine (Peter Fonda) is a faded Hollywood record producer who never got over the end of the free-spirited '60s. This uneasy rider has gone to seed and turned to the drug trade to stay wealthy as he lures young starlets half his age with his hedonistic lifestyle and with stories about the '60s. One of these aspiring actresses is Wilson's daughter Jenny (Melissa George), who dated Valentine and lived with him before her death. Wilson's trail leads him to Valentine, but is Jenny's former lover really responsible for her tragic fate?
Stamp and Fonda are compelling as older, wearier versions of their '60s screen personas. Luis Guzman has an amusing and poignant supporting turn as a friend of Jenny's who assists Wilson on his manhunt, despite the language barrier between the two (the Angelenos' inability to understand Wilson's cockney slang is a running joke that fortunately isn't overused). Soderbergh calls The Limey "a very simple revenge film with a lot of '60s baggage." Although the plot may be a bit on the thin side, The Limey is anything but a simple revenge film. The characters are hardly the automatons of Charles Bronson shoot-'em-ups. Soderbergh and screenwriter Lem Dobbs refuse to paint them in simplistic strokes. The seedy Valentine, sort of an underworld Humbert Humbert with his taste for younger women, may be the villain here, but like Humbert, he's more pathetic than malicious; the film empathizes with his yearning for his younger, less desperate days. It's Valentine's associates, volatile, snarky hitman Stacy (Nicky Katt) and his older partner Uncle John (Joe Dallesandro), who are more greedy and evil than Fonda's character. As for Wilson, he's a man of contradictions. He has regrets about the life he led before prison (cleverly depicted in flashbacks composed of footage taken from Stamp's 1967 film Poor Cow, in which he also played a criminal named Wilson), most of all because it severed his relationship with his daughter. Yet he finds himself reverting back to the criminal life that drove her away in order to find her killer, which leads to another explanation for the jigsaw-puzzle storytelling: it suits the story of a man who's a puzzle, even to himself.
