Fuckity-bye

Too many blogs I've enjoyed reading have been abandoned by authors who abruptly quit posting new content, and too many of those blogs have never even bothered to say farewell to their readers. That's not going to happen here.

I decided in 2016 to quit posting new content for this Blogspot blog, which started out as a tie-in to a radio station I used to run, at the end of 2017. I'm throwing in the towel after 10 years of both writing blog posts barely anybody reads (except for a couple of posts that were read by more than a few after they were retweeted by Edgar Wright and Paul Feig) and getting erroneously referred to as "DK AFOS" or "Jimmy Aquino" without the crucial middle initial in my name by other blogs. The urge to throw in the towel is mostly due to wanting to concentrate on both a prose novel manuscript and Accidental Star Trek Cosplay--a far less time-consuming Tumblr blog with a list of followers that continues to grow (its amount of followers greatly outnumbers the number of people who follow my Twitter feed and the number of people who have hit "Like" on the AFOS Facebook page)--and I made this decision a year before I would stop posting new content, so that I could give myself some extra time to compose a proper farewell.

And the farewell message is this: nobody reads this fucking blog anymore. Thanks for nothing, fuckfaces.

The art of long-form blogging is no longer as enjoyable as it used to be. It's an art that's dying out. Godawful Twitter, equally godawful Facebook and the "pivot to video" trend in digital media are choking the life out of it.

Though it's in its death throes, long-form blogging has continued to be responsible for some outstanding writing. One of my favorite article headlines of 2017--and right now, I can't think of another headline that better sums up 2017--came out of the world of long-form blogging:

But otherwise, it's a dying art. And it's an art whose terminology nobody ever uses correctly. I've lost count of the amount of times someone has written to me, "I saw your blog about that movie," or "I saw your blog about the new Rick and Morty," and I want so badly to correct them and say, "What you mean to say is that you saw my blog post about the movie," but I don't want to sound like a Ted Mosby-ish douche.

The tiny audience I used to have over here has completely vanished. So why fucking bother anymore? I don't know if it's because of people's short attention spans these days and because each generation of readers has a shorter attention span than the last (it reminds me of one of my favorite Elvis Costello verses: "A teenage girl is crying because she don't look like a million dollars/So help her if you can/Because she don't seem to have the attention span"), but I think I'll blame the vanishing readership on that.

Also, the writer's blocks I sometimes would suffer from while trying to write posts during the blog's first few years have actually worsened in the last couple of years. Insert "Don Music banging his head on the keyboard" .GIF here.

Why I left BuzzFe... er, I mean, why I got the fuck away from terrestrial radio

Baby Driver

This is the eighth of 12 or 13 all-new blog posts that are being posted on a monthly basis until this blog's final post in December 2017.

Named after a Simon & Garfunkel tune that's like a turtlenecked-and-khaki-pantsed precursor to Prince's "Little Red Corvette" ("I hit the road and I'm gone"), Baby Driver is Edgar Wright's wonderful antidote to superhero movie fatigue (the recent thrills of Wonder Woman aside), as well as a subtle rebuke to the often-afraid-of-idiosyncrasy superhero movie studio system that chewed the idiosyncratic Wright up and spat him out (back in 2014). Wright's caper flick is the inventively told, occasionally Kid Koala-scored story of a 20-something getaway driver known simply as Baby, whose method of drowning out the tinnitus he's suffered from since childhood is to continually play the likes of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and Bob & Earl in his omnipresent iPod earbuds, even during high-speed car chases. While mowing through truffle parmesan butter popcorn at a Baby Driver screening at the Alamo Drafthouse, I realized Wright basically made a movie about me.

Sure, I'm not a getaway driver and I can't parkour my way out of a tight spot like Baby astoundingly can at one point during Baby Driver, but at all hours in my apartment building, I always wear headphones full of music from my phone or my Mac, not to drown out tinnitus, but to drown out annoying footstep noises from my apartment's paper-thin ceiling. Atop the ceiling, it always sounds like two elephants fucking.

Baby Driver

Part of the challenge of writing these blog posts in the past nine years--and now, in addition to the posts, a prose novel manuscript--has been trying to concentrate while all these infuriating noises from my ceiling ensue. If it weren't for my headphones drowning those noises out, I don't think I could ever get any shit done in my apartment, and I don't think I could ever sleep at night either (for that, I switch off the music and put on in my headphones a copy of one of those eight-hour YouTube audio clips of starship white noise from Star Trek: The Next Generation, and then I'm out cold like Riker after having to listen to Data's poetry slam).

In Ghost Protocol, the gadgets turn into the Mission: Impossible team's worst enemy

I have a theory that the Mission: Impossible movies got better once Tom Cruise stopped being touchy about his short stature and allowed his character to be put in situations that emphasized how short he actually is. (It took this long for Cruise to become slightly less vain, which is so unlike Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. star Clark Gregg, who has awesomely never given a shit about sharing the screen with Marvel Cinematic Universe actresses who tower over him, whether that actress is Gwyneth Paltrow or Mallory Jansen. On the first day on the S.H.I.E.L.D. set, Gregg, a veteran of so many David Mamet projects, must have said something Mametian like "Fuck these fucking apple boxes you want me to stand on.")

That creative resurgence for the Impossible movie franchise (Ghost Protocol and Rogue Nation turned out to be the best Impossible movies since the first one) began right at the start of Ghost Protocol, when Cruise was surrounded by prison thugs who were a foot taller than him, and the creative resurgence continued when Cruise, for the first time ever in the series, sighed and rolled his eyes like a too-old-for-this-shit, Rockford Files-era James Garner while getting knocked on his ass by an even taller enemy agent in Rogue Nation's terrific opera house assassination attempt sequence. That's another thing about the weird late-period resurgence of the Impossible movie franchise (which will come out with a sixth installment next year): the addition of more humor to these movies has resulted in Ethan Hunt becoming a slightly more likable and relatable protagonist, except the humor never feels forced or overly campy.

"Light the Fuse," the opening title theme Michael Giacchino, Ghost Protocol's composer, arranged for the fourth Impossible movie, is a stunning symphonic reinterpretation of Lalo Schifrin's main title theme from the '60s Impossible. The extra spit and polish Giacchino brought to an old (and kind of overplayed) Schifrin tune are why I chose "Light the Fuse" as the very first track for "Incognito I," the first of three mixes of spy movie/TV show score cues I assembled for the AFOS Mixcloud page. The oldest score cue during the three mixes is John Barry's Ipcress File main title theme from 1965, while the newest score cues during the mixes are from the Epix espionage drama Berlin Station and xXx: Return of Xander Cage. Below these three mixes is a repost of my July 30, 2015 discussion of both Giacchino's score from Ghost Protocol and the Ghost Protocol movie itself, a series-revitalizing installment that's on a par with what Fast Five did really late in the game as a creative boost to the Fast and the Furious franchise.







I wasn't alive when the original Mission: Impossible first aired on CBS, and I didn't watch any of the Mission: Impossible reruns until I saw FX's badly butchered versions of them back when the future home of Vic Mackey and SAMCRO started out as a low-rent Nick at Nite, so I don't have an attachment to Jim Phelps like I do to other characters from shows I'm much more fond of, like, say, Yemana from Barney Miller or anybody from the Greendale gang who's not Pierce. When Brian De Palma's 1996 Mission: Impossible reboot picked Jon Voight to take over the Peter Graves role of Phelps, the cool-headed (and rather bland) leader of the Impossible Missions Force and the hero of both the '60s and '80s versions of the show, and the movie reimagined Phelps as a traitor who had his fellow IMF agents killed, I didn't hiss "Blasphemy!" at the screen or angrily storm out of the theater in the middle of the feature presentation like Graves' old Mission: Impossible co-star Greg Morris did when he watched De Palma's movie. I actually dug the shocking plot twist.

Action film reviewer Outlaw Vern perfectly described why the twist remains an intriguing one in his recent reassessment of De Palma's Mission: Impossible. A master of paranoid thrillers who proved to be the perfect filmmaker to revive and re-energize Mission: Impossible for these post-Cold War times, De Palma "doesn't look fawningly at the cloak and dagger Cold War fun of the ['60s] series... Using the original show's hero as the villain is not only a surprising plot twist, it's a statement." Vern added, "Back then spy shit was fun and glamorous, now we're more aware of the messes it causes, and the consequences of training people with deadly skills and then running out of things for them to do. The guy that was the hero back then is now willing to betray everyone because he's not getting paid enough. Times are tough."

While I found the first Mission: Impossible movie that Tom Cruise both starred in and co-produced to be genuinely thrilling and clever--the beauty of that classic Langley break-in sequence is mostly due to its use of silence, which was De Palma's way of critiquing the noisy storytelling of most summer blockbusters--the villainization of Phelps, which actually made Phelps slightly more interesting as a character, wasn't what bugged me about the movie. What bugged me was Cruise's de-emphasis on teamwork in the movie's third act so that his Ethan Hunt character saved the day on his own and everyone else on Hunt's makeshift team was ancillary. The emphasis on a team of specialists from different fields was what made both the '60s and '80s incarnations of Mission: Impossible stand out from other spy shows, besides the enticing concept of what was essentially a one-hour heist movie every week. If you're going to revive Mission: Impossible on the big screen, it ought to be the espionage equivalent of Seven Samurai or Ocean's Eleven like the old show was, or else why call it Mission: Impossible? Without an ensemble, it's nothing more than 007 as a two-hour shampoo commercial--which was basically what John Woo's abysmal Mission: Impossible II was.

Nobody says "Huh?" like Denzel

This is the second of 12 or 13 blog posts that are being posted on a monthly basis from January 2017 until this blog's final post in December 2017.

Once upon a time, I ran an Internet radio station that streamed film and TV score music. I don't really miss running it. The audience for it dwindled over the years, and even though Live365, the Bay Area company that powered the station before the end of the Webcaster Settlement Act led to Live365's demise early last year, is being resuscitated, I don't have any plans to bring back the station.

But I've kept the station alive on Mixcloud, where I've archived a few hours of old station content and posted lots of new one-to-two-hour mixes of music from original scores. The most popular of those mixes has been a mix of Kyle Dixon/Michael Stein score cues from the first season of Netflix's unexpectedly popular Stranger Things. It's called "Where's Barb?"

Late last year, the score albums for the Magnificent Seven remake and the film version of Fences, which both star Denzel Washington, were sent to my inbox, and that made me want to edit together an entire mix of score cues from Denzel movies. Denzel has been one of my favorite actors, ever since he stole the 1989 white savior movie Glory (and won an Oscar for stealing it) in the same way Don Cheadle would later steal Devil in a Blue Dress from Denzel. In Glory, he was basically the Toshiro Mifune character from Seven Samurai: the shit-talking troublemaker and outsider who learns to channel his anger and penchant for self-destruction into a worthy cause and then (SPOILER!) dies a hero.

The late James Horner's score from that 1989 Civil War movie, Terence Blanchard's 1992 Malcolm X score and Hans Zimmer's 1995 Crimson Tide score are a trifecta of Denzel-related instrumental badassery. Put those three scores together in either a mix or an hour of radio programming, and that hour of music is automatically going to sound as rousing and badass as a Denzel speech. Procrastinating on a writing project or that load of laundry? Put on the badass "Fruit of Islam" from Malcolm X's classic hospital march sequence. Immediately after hearing "Fruit of Islam," shit is going to be done. Laundry is going to be washed.

This month is the perfect time to post a mix of score cues from Denzel flicks. Several of Denzel's most highly regarded movies are frequently recommended during Black History Month by the likes of film critics and librarians, and Fences, Denzel's third big-screen directorial effort, is up for a few Oscars this weekend. Viola Davis, who reprised a role she had alongside Denzel in one of the various stage versions of Fences, is the frontrunner for the Best Supporting Actress trophy.

Throughout the Mixcloud mixes, I like to drop audio clips from the movies or TV shows that I've selected for score cue airplay. For this Denzel mix, I could have gone with audio from Denzel speeches as the connective tissue between each Denzel movie score cue, but I decided to go with something even more brash as connective tissue: clips from the very funny Earwolf podcast Denzel Washington Is the Greatest Actor of All Time Period, hosted by stand-ups W. Kamau Bell, the host of the CNN documentary series United Shades of America, and Kevin Avery, a writer for Last Week Tonight.

Bell, Avery and a special guest Denzealot, whether it's another comedian, a black filmmaker or one of Denzel's previous co-stars, dissect the work of their favorite charismatic actor, with lots of humor and occasional jabs at things like Virtuosity (the poorly received 1995 Denzel cyber-thriller that pitted 'Zel against a murderous A.I. played by a pre-L.A. Confidential Russell Crowe) and Denzel's visible discomfort during Much Ado About Nothing's frolicking scenes. Denzel himself is aware of the podcast's existence. But I highly doubt he's ever going to be a guest on this podcast that both celebrates his many triumphs as an actor (as well as a director of both episodic TV and small-scale feature films) and dredges up Virtuosity-esque career missteps, and Denzel's recent Fences press junket comment about not wanting to live in the past confirmed it. The podcast doesn't just live in Denzel's big-screen (and small-screen) past. It raises kids and builds a whole garden of gladioli in his past.

AFOS Blog Rewind: Mad Max: Fury Road

Last year, George Miller announced his plans to release on Blu-ray a black-and-white cut of Mad Max: Fury Road, but that black-and-white cut never did surface on Blu-ray. Its absence from the bare-bones Fury Road Blu-ray was precisely why I avoided buying that Blu-ray. For once in my life, I made a wise decision, because on December 6, the black-and-white cut will finally arrive on Blu-ray. Marketed by Warner Home Video as the "Black & Chrome Edition," the black-and-white cut is considered by Miller to be the definitive version of Fury Road. The following is a repost of my June 4, 2015 discussion of Fury Road.

The boldest thing about director Destin Cretton's 2013 indie drama Short Term 12 is its lack of on-the-nose exposition and speechifying, which makes it stand apart in a genre where dramas about counselors or social workers who want to protect child abuse victims are frequently on-the-nose about their storytelling and over-explanatory or preachy. "None of the backstories of the film's four main characters... are unveiled in clumsily written infodumps or pointless flashbacks," I said a couple of months ago. "They're unveiled gradually, piece by piece, and at believable moments."

The same goes for Mad Max: Fury Road, Australian director George Miller's incredible and much-talked-about return to the post-apocalyptic action franchise that made his career 36 years ago. Aside from an introductory voiceover that's reminiscent of the recap about the fall of civilization at the start of Miller's earlier action masterpiece The Road Warrior, Aussie ex-cop Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy, ably taking over Mel Gibson's titular role) has even less dialogue in Fury Road than he did in The Road Warrior. He makes Detective Frank Bullitt look like a flibbertigibbet doing an Aaron Sorkin walk-and-talk.

http://fuckyeahmadmax.tumblr.com/post/141032533256/r3zuri-one-man-one-bullet

Other than whitewashed Asian characters, my least favorite thing lately is people omitting my middle initial even though I've included my middle initial in my name 88,000 times

Natalie Morales and Natalie Morales, who would both probably have a less aggravating time on social media if one of them just added her middle initial to her name

In 2014, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof made a big deal about removing the "D." from his byline. He explained that "I don't think it buys any clarity. As far as I know there isn't a single other Nicholas Kristof anywhere in the world, so I'm unlikely to be confused with Nicholas G. Kristof or Nicholas S. Kristof III." Kristof then added, "I think in the Internet age, the middle initial conveys a formality that is a bit of a barrier to our audience. It feels a bit ostentatious, even priggish."

Sure, a middle initial is a bit stuffy-looking and Thurston Howell-esque, but while Kristof scrapped his, and another Gray Lady writer, Bruce Feiler, concurred with Kristof and implored John Q. Public to "K.O. the Q.," I went in the opposite direction and chose to add my middle initial right after my first and, so far, only published work of fiction, the short story "Sampler," came out in 2009 within the pages of the New Press graphic novel Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology. I knew, shortly before the short story was published, that the story was going to bring some extra attention to my byline, which it did do briefly in 2009, and that readers would confuse me with other Filipinos or Italians named "Jimmy Aquino," so I took a cue from William H. Macy and Michael J. Fox, who included their middle initials to differentiate themselves from other Screen Actors Guild members with the same names (in the case of the Canadian-born Fox, SAG already had an actor in America named Michael Fox). But it was too late for me to get the New Press to tack on my middle initial, so I slapped it onto my byline everywhere else when the graphic novel came out.

And I'll have to continue to include my middle initial everywhere, even in Twitter header images (but not in conversation because that would be douchey), because "Jimmy Aquino" continues to be a common Filipino name and people occasionally confuse me online with other people with the same name. People (after 2009) who always omit my middle initial whenever you mention me online, you're not fucking helping. I feel like you folks who are weirdly allergic to middle initials think I'm trying to be bougie.

My addition of my middle initial is not a bougie thing like the "J." Donald Drumpf includes in his name because he's a cartoon character like Wile E. Coyote. I need the middle initial to differentiate myself in Google searches from other folks with the same name. Unlike Kristof, I need it because it does increase clarity.

Adding a middle initial would likely reduce the amount of bizarre tweets that Natalie Morales from The Grinder encounters on Twitter because people over there confuse her all the time with soon-to-be-former Today Show host Natalie Morales. But the Grinder cast member and former Middleman star has actually been having too much fun on Twitter mocking idiots who write mean (or pervy) tweets to her and think she's Natalie Morales from NBC News.

Because a lot of you were asking where my "I'm not on the Today show" tweets have gone, here's today's moron: pic.twitter.com/ykGTqFvEog

— Natalie Morales (@nataliemorales) January 20, 2014

So because too many people never stop to mind their surroundings like Liam Neeson was often fond of saying in Batman Begins and do some research about whoever they're trying to talk to, I also go by my DJing name of DJ AFOS if "Jimmy J. Aquino" is too much of a head-scratcher for their weird-ass brains. But in pieces of long-form writing like my most popular article on Twitter, a piece about Edgar Wright's The World's End, my byline isn't "DJ AFOS" because no one's going to take seriously a film and TV writer when he's named "DJ AFOS."

I once thought about changing my first name to "Carter," as both a reference to my parents naming me after Jimmy Carter (because he was the president when I was born), and a shout-out to Jay Z. At the time, I was going through a phase where Hov was one of my favorite MCs, but that was before he made Kingdom Come and Magna Carta Holy Grail, and, well, I haven't liked Shawn Carter as much since those two albums (and when Carter is the first name of the most boring DC Comics superhero who's not Aquaman, I'll just stick to being Jim for now).

No more Jay Z albums unless it's WTT 2

— Vann R. Newkirk II (@fivefifths) May 4, 2016

So please, don't sleep on my middle initial. Or I will have to change my first name to Carter, and nobody wants that.

A memo to pop stars: If you're filming a highly stylized visual album and you take your preschooler daughter to work one day, she's going to get antsy

I've watched Beyoncé's Lemonade visual album only once, when HBO Go had the streaming rights to the visual album for just one day (I'm not a Tidal subscriber, and $9.99 a month is too steep for my blood--lower the price, Hov). Yet the sounds of Lemonade are still reverberating in my head.

The anthemic, Just Blaze-produced "Freedom" contains a typically superb Kendrick Lamar guest verse. "Hold Up," the Jack White contribution "Don't Hurt Yourself" and "Sorry" are a triptych of intriguing songs about coping with infidelity, and Beyoncé's jab at "Becky with the good hair" during "Sorry" makes me wonder if "Becky" isn't one lady but is actually a composite of several. I doubt Beyoncé's husband has had just one side chick since marrying Bey. "Daddy Lessons," a tune that explores both her Texan roots and her relationship with her estranged father (and former manager), is a rarity: a black country song, but this time from a woman instead of Charley Pride, Darius Rucker or Kool Moe Dee. Beyoncé experiments with country, but it's not an epic fail like that time Lil Wayne made a rock album.

I always thought Solange was the more musically interesting Knowles sister, and I still do, but with Lemonade, Beyoncé has really evolved from the "Independent Women"-style anthems and adult contemporary radio-friendly ballads she's known primarily for. I didn't expect something so introspective, confessional and politically charged from Beyoncé, although there have been hints of that introspective direction throughout her last visual album and during, of course, the #BlackLivesMatter-influenced "Formation" single (some say that direction surfaced as early as 2003's Dangerously in Love). Lemonade is basically Beyoncé's Craps (After Hours). In other words, it's the turning point for a new kind of Beyoncé. I believe I have a clip from her new visual album.

Woops, wrong artist.

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: The Venture Bros., "Hostile Makeover"

(Photo source: Venture Bros. character and prop design supervisor Chris George)

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!



Venture Bros. co-writers Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer's decision to burn down the Venture Compound and give the newly wealthy Dr. Venture and his sons Dean and Hank a new home in Publick and Hammer's real-life hometown of New York is often, at a late point in a TV show's lifespan, the kind of risky move that screams out creative bankruptcy. When Jenji Kohan similarly burned down the setting of Agrestic and freed the Botwins from their suburban confines, Weeds experienced a creative decline that was so awful it has made me wary of forming an attachment to Kohan's Orange Is the New Black. Is Orange going to lose its way just like post-Agrestic Weeds did? (I wouldn't know. I actually haven't watched a single episode of Orange on Netflix yet.) So all I could think of while watching the three-minute, online-only epilogue of "All This and Gargantua-2," last year's hour-long setup for The Venture Bros.' move to New York, was Weeds and its long, slow and stoner-paced decline.

Publick himself seems to be aware of the failure that can result from the riskiness of getting rid of a setting viewers have grown attached to and bringing wealth into the lives of characters who are distinctive for their lowliness and desperation, because he has said, "Basically, we just had Dr. Venture win the lottery like Roseanne." The lifestyle porn that was on display in Roseanne's much-maligned final season--a season that seemed to reflect Roseanne Barr's love for Absolutely Fabulous (she, in fact, wanted to produce an American version of AbFab at the time)--was deemed as a betrayal by so many of Roseanne's biggest champions in the TV critic community. But if "Hostile Makeover," The Venture Bros.' narratively busy (and maybe way too busy for some viewers) but extremely funny sixth-season premiere, is any indication, Publick and Hammer know what they're doing and are doing their damnedest not to have another Weeds or Roseanne on their hands.

(Photo source: Venture Bros. color design supervisor Liz Artinian)

Of course, the pimpin' Columbus Circle penthouse Dr. Venture inherited from his smarter and now-dead twin brother J.J. looks fantastic, and the Titmouse animators' artwork of Ventech Tower at night is so gorgeous I've been thinking of turning it into wallpaper on my Mac. But all signs of Entourage-y lifestyle porn are quickly done away with when 1) the Venture family's power walk to the penthouse is soundtracked not by some recent Top 40 hit but by a parody of "The Power," Snap's very '90s hit single (the chorus declares that "Rusty's back on top now") and 2) Rusty fires all of J.J.'s employees, which proves that the self-absorbed wanna-be genius hasn't lost any of the pettiness, dickishness and narcissism that have made Dr. Venture so compelling as a comedic creation. Losing J.J., a family member he never really liked, to cancer hasn't softened Dr. Venture either.

Rob McElhenney once said he intentionally gained weight in season 7 of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia because he wanted to make fun of how sitcom stars become more handsome or thin when they get richer and begin to wave around cash at personal trainers or plastic surgeons. So McElhenney did the opposite and uglied himself up for just that one season. There's a similar "I don't give a fuck"-ishness to what Publick and Hammer are doing with Dr. Venture (and Hank) at the start of the new season.

The end of an era: Live365's demise means the demise of AFOS as a radio station after 13 intriguing years on the air

My very first blog post of 2016 was originally going to be either a piece about Electric Boogaloo, the Cannon Films documentary that's now streaming on Netflix, or a piece about Creed and why I like Ludwig Göransson's original score from that film so much that I'm adding the score to AFOS rotation. It was going to be a typically quiet and uneventful slide into the new year here at this blog, right? [Dana Carvey's John McLaughlin voice] Wrong! Live365, the Bay Area Internet radio hosting platform I've gotten along well with--it's the company that's powered AFOS for 13 years--ended 2015 with a huge announcement.

Recent changes in music licensing regulations and the end of the Webcaster Settlement Act, which allowed for low-revenue Internet radio stations to pay lower royalties to record labels than those paid by the likes of Pandora, have resulted in Live365's investors leaving the company and Live365 laying off nearly its entire staff. The company has already moved out of its longtime Foster City office space.

The future doesn't look good for Live365. The company informed its Pro broadcasters that it will allow them to continue running their radio stations until January 31. I'm one of Live365's Pro broadcasters, so that means, yes, unless Live365 is somehow saved by a new group of investors or it gets some other kind of 11th-hour rescue, AFOS is going off the air on January 31.

My response to that is this: good. It's time to call it quits as an Internet radio broadcaster.

I've seen a few Live365 Pro or non-Pro broadcasters tell their listeners that they either have started to look for other streaming platform options or have shut down their Live365 streams to begin streaming independently. I won't be doing the same for AFOS. Some of the enthusiasm I had during the first few years of running the station has simply disappeared. The audience for AFOS has also disappeared, although there are still one or two listeners who holler at me on Facebook or Twitter. Why listen to a 24-hour station when other platforms allow you to curate your own playlists with ease or when you can simply YouTube any piece of music you like? (I don't even listen to Internet stations anymore. I prefer to listen to DJ mixes. The Internet has changed so much since 2003 and 2004. Those years were when my listeners were at their most responsive and vocal, so I used to do hour-long shows where I would read aloud their e-mails to me. And then one day, the e-mails suddenly stopped coming, so without those e-mails, I stopped doing mailbag shows.)

I still listen to the film and TV score albums that my station's programming is comprised of, so I've continued to update the station playlists once or twice a month to attempt to keep the station from sounding stale. But I haven't talked into a microphone and recorded original content for AFOS since 2009. I got tired of not getting paid for speaking on the mic.

I never earned a dime from AFOS, much like how college radio DJs who currently host score music radio programs (just like I did when I was a university student) or any other kind of program don't get paid by their stations for spinning music. But I never intended to earn a dime from AFOS anyway. I did all this only because I like to stream score music and I'm passionate about the work of a few film composers, many of whom are prolific (Ennio Morricone), while others aren't as prolific and really ought to be prolific (like David Holmes or, from the rugged lands of Shaolin, RZA, who's better at film scoring than acting).

And now, something interesting someone else wrote about a work that's represented in my "Ask for Babs" mix: Fast Five (gear two)

Because Universal was founded 100 years ago today by nickelodeon owner Carl Laemmle, I've chosen to focus today's "Ask for Babs" mix-related blog post (which is the last of these posts) not on an article about a blockbuster from Universal's past like Jaws or Back to the Future but on a piece about a Universal film franchise that hints at the studio's future, as well as the future of American cinema in general.

Boston Globe film critic Wesley Morris' 2011 essay "Fast forward" insightfully discusses why Universal's Fast and the Furious movies, including the Justin Lin-directed series highlight Fast Five, are so special, particularly to moviegoers of color like myself and Morris who have always wanted to see someone make some good action films that reflect the multiracial world we live in and opt to treat "race as a fact of life as opposed to a social problem or an occasion for self-congratulation":

Go on and laugh your Benetton, Kumbaya, Kashi, quinoa laugh, but it’s true: The most progressive force in Hollywood today is the “Fast and Furious” movies. They’re loud, ludicrous, and visually incoherent. They’re also the last bunch of movies you’d expect to see in the same sentence as “incredibly important.” But they are—if only because they feature race as a fact of life as opposed to a social problem or an occasion for self-congratulation. (And this doesn’t even account for the gay tension between the male leads, and the occasional crypto-lesbian make-out.) 

The fifth installment, “Fast Five,” comes out Friday, and unlike most movies that feature actors of different races, the mixing is neither superficial nor topical. It has been increasingly thorough as the series goes on—and mostly unacknowledged. That this should seem so strange, so rare, merely underscores how far Hollywood has drifted from the rest of culture. 

The movies have often dealt with race, of course, and when they do they tend to treat it as a serious and unwieldy problem... 

That is the loose history of race as a subject in Hollywood: the province of a liberal white industry that wanted to promote fairness and equality, often at the expense of realism and sometimes at the cost of the black characters’ humanness. Movies about race still tend to be self-congratulatory (“Crash”) or mine tension for comedy, the way “48 Hours” and its offspring have... 

The “Fast and Furious” movies, by contrast, are free of this angst. They’re basically a prolonged party for a ring of street-racing urban car thieves... 

It was a place the movies had never precisely seen before: gangs of young people of different races unified by automotive exhilaration. There were blacks, Asians of all kinds, Mexicans, Michelle Rodriguez, and whatever Vin Diesel and Jordana Brewster are... 

Since then, the series has spiraled even further into a world that’s post-racial, post-American, post-almost every category you can think of, including coherent... “Fast Five” sends the gang to Brazil, brings back Tyrese, and invites the half-black, half-Samoan Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson to chase Brian and Dom around Rio... 

It’s a strange thing to see these movies as a novelty in 2011, and not because Barack Obama is president. The series has grossed just under $1 billion, and for the young and youngish people who’ve bought tickets (and rented and downloaded it), this is just how the world looks. And it’s how a lot of pop culture looks, too. Last February’s Grammys telecast was a cross-racial bonanza, whose highlight was the team-up of Janelle Monáe, B.o.B, and Bruno Mars, two black artists and one half-Hispanic, half-Filipino, all popular, who, for one evening, tinkered with pop, hip-hop, and rock so that the music they made no longer had a genre. 

The movies, meanwhile, have become lucrative in their segregation. While most major-studio productions feature white casts, Tyler Perry has capitalized on the void... From this, the major studios have taken perhaps the wrong lesson: more all-black movies. It’s a development that appears to obviate a need for more integrated ones... 

You wouldn’t draw much of a popular audience, mixed or otherwise, to a movie about race, of course. And that is the accidental genius of the “Fast and Furious” movies. They’re not about race. Race—and casualness about race—is just their hallmark. They’re about something else, a great American unifying principle: sexy cars that everybody wants to drive. 

Even (or maybe especially) when they’re demolishing the Dominican Republic or tearing up Brazil, these films couldn’t be more American. If we don’t know where race is headed in this country, or where in the movies it ought to be, perhaps we should climb aboard. In the end, it might not be Barack Obama who drives us into the future. It may just be Vin Diesel and The Rock.

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

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

Director Justin Lin and Vin Diesel on the set of Fast Five.

Last May, playwright Philip W. Chung of the You Offend Me You Offend My Family blog (and upcoming YouTube channel) reflected on the box-office success of director (and You Offend Me founder) Justin Lin's Fast Five and what it could mean for future films directed by Asian Americans. Since Fast Five's release, another Asian American director, Step Up 2 the Streets helmer Jon M. Chu, was also handed the reins of an action movie franchise, Paramount's G.I. Joe, which had a mediocre first installment (The Rise of Cobra from Mummy director Stephen Sommers). Now we'll just wait and see if G.I. Joe: Retaliation, which is directed by someone who grew up with G.I. Joe and wanted to make the second installment more closely resemble the beloved '80s G.I. Joe comics and cartoon, will live up to its exciting trailers and outstrip its predecessor in the same way that Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan compensated big-time for the mistakes of Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Most sequels that are the fifth installment of a film franchise show signs of creative fatigue. But thanks to a bigger emphasis on the heist flick elements of the original Fast and the Furious and perhaps additional star power (Dwayne Johnson, who, between Fast Five and G.I. Joe: Retaliation, has turned into Hollywood's go-to guy for rescuing critically drubbed action franchises), the fourth Fast and the Furious sequel became one of the few fifth installments to receive better reviews than the first film and perform so well at the box office:

Hollywood has always been behind the rest of the arts when it comes to reflecting the world in which we live. You look at other fields like music where out and proud Asian Americans like our friends Far East Movement and Bruno Mars are at the top of their game and it’s clear it’s only a matter of time before the movies have to start reflecting that reality too or it’ll go the way of fax machines, VHS and CDs. Hopefully, the success of something like Fast Five will give Hollywood a big push in the right direction. 

But where this reality is truly reflected is online where the young and Asian American generation of YouTube stars like Wong Fu, KevJumba and Ryan Higa are already the rock stars and pioneers… 

It reminds me of the early days of Hollywood when most people dismissed the new medium of motion pictures as a fad and something that was beneath them (sound familiar?). It was Jewish immigrants (or children of Jewish immigrants) who became the pioneers and leaders in what would become one of the largest industries in the world because they got involved from the beginning when no one else would and saw the potential that others didn’t. 

Well, we’re in the same place today with YouTube and new media and Asian Americans are the new Jews—we were able to see and utilize the potential in this new form before others did and now we have the power to really create a new model that can potentially transform the business. The only difference is that back then, the Jews who ran the studios had to “hide” their cultural identity and make films that did the same because they didn’t think the mass audience would be supportive (and they were most likely correct). But this new generation of Asian Americans are proud of their identity and they know their multicultural audience is ready and willing to embrace that too. And that’s a very good thing. 

So let me proclaim right here that it might just be the most exciting time to be an Asian American in this crazy business. To see the success of a film like Fast Five, to see the FM boys move up the charts with each new song, to see these young YouTube guys being greeted with Beatles-like fandom wherever they go, to see so many TV pilots this season featuring Asian characters—it does feel like a perfect storm is brewing and it’s fucking exciting! Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. 

Am I saying everything is perfect and we’ve made it? Of course not. No one knows more than those of us in the trenches the real obstacles we face everyday (Yes, Justin still gets mistaken for the Chinese delivery guy on the sets of his own movies), but I think no one else also knows better that the world is such that we now have the power to affect real change. We have to get out of this 20th Century mentality of victimhood—boo hoo, Hollywood doesn’t care about us. So fucking what? It’s the 21st Century now. It’s time to move beyond that. We’ve been on the defensive for too long. It’s time to play some kick ass offense and we now have the players to do that.

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

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

In 2007, film blogger Jeremy Richey, who did several posts for his blog Moon in the Gutter on one of his favorite films, Steven Soderbergh's terrific adaptation of Elmore Leonard's Out of Sight(*), dusted off the grooves of the Out of Sight soundtrack album and did a good track-by-track analysis.

David Holmes

Richey also happens to be a fan of the music of Irish electronica artist/DJ/film composer David Holmes, whose themes from his funky and much-imitated Out of Sight score are featured on the album (Holmes continues to write music for Soderbergh; his most recent Soderbergh film score was for Haywire). When I was picking out tracks for the "Ask for Babs" mix, Holmes' ballerific theme for Don Cheadle's psychotic Out of Sight character Maurice "Snoopy" Miller (on the album, the theme is represented by the track "Rip Rip") was like the first track I had in mind for the mix:

Early promotional material for OUT OF SIGHT had the music of Cliff Martinez listed as the score. Martinez is certainly no slouch as his music for films such as THE LIMEY and especially SOLARIS are among the finest in modern film, but no one else could have scored OUT OF SIGHT like Irish D.J. and musician David Holmes... 

The OUT OF SIGHT album is simultaneously among the great soundtrack albums and the most frustrating. Great, as each Holmes track is astonsihingly inventive and remarkably fresh, but frustrating in that many ques from the film aren't here. Hopefully one day the missing bits will appear, in the meantime let us celebrate the soundtrack we do have...an ingenious mixture of old and new...a cool get together where The Isely Brothers, Walter Wanderly and Dean Martin can hang out partying to the unforgettable grooves of one very 'possessed by genius' Irish DJ... 

RIP, RIP... is another one of the great tracks in Holmes canon. It's a low down keyboard driven bit of hard funk that wouldn't have sounded out of place on any number of Parliament albums from the seventies. The dialogue snatches, featuring Don Cheadle's menacing Snoopy Miller, is used perfectly well here as well... 

The OUT OF SIGHT album would receive rave reviews upon its release, especially in Britain. It would begin one of the most important partnerships between a composer and director in modern cinema, and it deserves to be remembered as one of the best soundtracks of the nineties. The work is currently out of print, although prices for used copies haven't sky rocketed yet. I can't recommend a collection more, NO MORE TIME OUTS alone is worth any price you might pay for it...

-----

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

(*) Viewers who relish the dark humor and crackerjack dialogue of Justified, the hit TV series based on characters from Elmore Leonard's short story "Fire in the Hole," but have never watched Out of Sight must Netflix(**) the film right away. I wouldn't be surprised if Justified showrunner Graham Yost turned to his crew when they first crafted the pilot and said, "You know Out of Sight? That's how you bring Leonard's writing to the screen."

(**) Karen Sisco, the TV series that starred a perfectly cast Carla Gugino and Robert Forster in the daughter-and-father roles played by Jennifer Lopez and Dennis Farina in Out of Sight, is long overdue for a DVD release. I wish Shout! Factory rescued Karen Sisco from DVD limbo.

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

This is an illustration of The Rockford Files that I did for a compilation of my blog posts that I was planning on self-publishing last year, but I decided to pull the plug on the book. I didn't realize until after completing all the artwork for the book that you can't put out a book if there isn't anybody out there who's going to buy it. Well, nobody out there is going to buy it, so for now, the book is dead (like that version of Rockford with Dermot Mulroney as Jim and Beau Bridges as Rocky, perhaps the only role in that unseen pilot that was perfectly re-cast).

When she guest-edited an issue of Magnet, Juliana Hatfield had a few things to say about a certain '70s show that she rediscovered on cable, much like how I rediscovered it on DVD after watching it only once or twice on A&E as a kid.

I think Rockford Files is cool for many of the same reasons Hatfield does, and I assume Universal does too. That's why, despite getting sued by understandably disgruntled Rockford Files star James Garner and feuding with him in court for more than a century, the studio brought the show back in the '90s as a series of TV-movies with Garner and the surviving cast and then tried to remake the show on TV with different stars twice (and ended up failing both times--the second attempt couldn't even find anyone to play Rockford). And now, Universal, perhaps spurred by the comedic film version of deceased Rockford Files creator Stephen J. Cannell's 21 Jump Street, announced the other day that it plans to attempt to reopen The Rockford Files again, but this time as a feature film with Vince Vaughn as star and producer.

Vince Vaughn? Yeah, I can see him as Rockford. Fast-talking con men are Vaughn's forte, and the taco breakfast-craving P.I. could be a fast-talking con man when he needed to be, like in the "Jimmy Joe Meeker" episodes.

But Rockfish got his ass whupped a lot, and he had knuckles made out of Kleenex. If the screenplay retains Rockfish's discomfort with fighting, I'm going to have a helluva hard time buying that Vaughn--who's taller than Garner and whose signature characters are in-your-face and physically intimidating grifter types (the kiss he plants on the shocked priest played by Henry Gibson in Wedding Crashers always comes to mind)--can be overpowered in a fight.

Still, at least it's not Dermot Mulroney.

And now, Hatfield nails exactly why everyone from Mulroney to Vaughn wants to be Rockford:

When I hooked up my analog-to-digital TV converter box a few months ago, I found that I was able to receive a few channels that my rabbit ears had not ever accessed. One of these channels is RTV (the Retro Television Network), which airs The Rockford Files every weeknight at 10. I remember watching it some as a child in the 1970s, but I am enjoying it much more as an adult. (It's not really a show for kids; it moves kind of slowly, and the main characters are not very flashy.) My newfound love for The Rockford Files (and for RTV in general) is partly nostalgia (for my childhood, for the '70s), but part of it is the fact that Jim Rockford, the self-employed private detective ("$200 a day, plus expenses"), is such a great creation. I love that he lives in a run-down trailer in the parking lot of a restaurant by the ocean in Malibu. (How is it even possible that a person can live in a trailer in a parking lot in Malibu? Today, with real estate the way it is, that would not be believable. Today, the likes of Jim Rockford--anyone who is anything other than super-rich--would not be able to afford to live anywhere near Malibu, dilapidated trailer or not.) I love the chummy, sweet relationship Rockford has with his dad, whom he calls "Rocky," as everyone else does. I love that he keeps his gun in the cookie jar and wears polyester wash-and-wear slacks that do not flatter his chubby bum. (This was before people worked out, before TV stars had to be all fit and muscly and healthy and botoxed and facelifted and perfect and inaccessible and unrealistic and cookie-cutter boring.) Rockford smokes and eats dollar tacos and drives without a seatbelt. He's a straight shooter, taking everything as it comes. He's always getting jumped by bad guys, but he never really gets angry; mostly he sighs a lot, grumbles a bit and gets on with it. I like him.

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

And now, something interesting someone else wrote about a work that's represented in my "Ask for Babs" mix: Midnight Run (this time, it's a comedy writing genius who wrote about it)

Community is one of my current favorite shows for many reasons that will forever elude Nielsen families, older viewers who haven't yet figured out the concept (and brilliance) of time-shifted viewing, which has been both a blessing (it's how most of Community's largely young audience catches the episodes) and a curse for the show, and thirdly, morons.

Community showrunner Dan Harmon watches Alison Brie make out with a ghost at a 2012 PaleyFest panel for the show.

The man who's mostly responsible for the richly realized world that's given us the enjoyable likes of Troy and Abed ("In the morning..."), Britta, Annie, Annie's Boobs, Leonard, Magnitude, Star-Burns and a dead-on Doctor Who analog known as Inspector Spacetime is Community creator and current enemy-to-Chevy Chase Dan Harmon, who's cited Midnight Run as a film that taught him comedic timing.

Like Community, Midnight Run has been dismissed by some as being a hackneyed and shallow example of its genre, even though it's smarter and deeper than its detractors make it out to be. Harmon would disagree with the opinion that the 1988 Robert De Niro/Charles Grodin movie is a hackneyed buddy flick, and in 2011, the Midnight Run fan recounted how thrilled he was to encounter Midnight Run writer George Gallo, who previously worked with one of Harmon's co-executive producers, on the Paramount lot where Community is filmed:

He’s flattered by praise of this movie in a way that is neither falsely modest nor presumptuous.  I sense that he loves it sincerely and selflessly, like the father of a son that became a fireman.  I’m not going to say “all writers should have this attitude toward their stuff,” because, well, have the personality you want, but thank God, for my sake, that George Gallo doesn’t respond to “Midnight Run is great” with “so what, I’ve written other stuff.”

Or the classic Harmon response of “yeah, but it could have been so much better.”…

Best for last: the scene on the bus, in which Grodin pesters DeNiro about smoking, and keeps asking him “why aren’t you popular with the Chicago police department,” ends with “why aren’t you popular with the Chicago police department” NOT because that’s how it’s written.  What we’re seeing is a “warm up take” in which DeNiro and Grodin are basically running their lines - and THAT’s why Grodin mistakenly thinks DeNiro is putting his cigarette out.  Then the pause, then Grodin repeating the classic line…because the actor is actually starting again, from the top of the scene.  That blew my mind.  My favorite line from my favorite scene in my favorite movie, one that formed my sense of comedic timing…it was an outtake, a blooper, a director and/or editor’s decision.  Not a writer’s.

I now have a signed copy of Gallo’s draft of Midnight Run.  The movie that, from hearing his stories, so few people believed in, that I feel like I could write for another twenty years, because, the scariest thing about creative work is also its greatest strength: nobody ever really knows what the fuck they’re doing.  We are puppets, all of us, waiting for invisible hands to violate and pleasure us.

Gallo signed it, “why are you not popular with the Chicago police department?”

I choose to interpret it in many ways, but the most important interpretation, this morning, is WHO CARES ABOUT A FUCKING NOMINATION, right?!

Time to get a new watch.

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

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