Throwback Thursday: Hanna

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.

Cate Blanchett is a terrific actress--I've enjoyed much of the Australian star's screen work ever since Elizabeth, the story of Fred Sanford's dead wife--but her attempt at a Southern accent in the 2011 teen assassin thriller Hanna is horrendous. British or Australian actors who mangle American accents have been a pet peeve of mine for a long time. The onslaught of these actors starring as American icons (Martin Luther King) or superheroes (the current Superman is a Brit, and so were the last cinematic Batman and the last pre-Marvel Cinematic Universe-era Spider-Man) is kind of worrisome because most of them really cannot do an American accent. The sight of many American roles in film and TV getting outsourced to white actors from other countries particularly bugs me because there are tons of Asian American or African American actors who are far better qualified at sounding American than those British or Aussie performers, and they're not getting those parts.

There's always one single word during a British or Aussie actor's performance as an American character that trips them up or brings their whole façade crashing down. Most often, that word is "anything." They tend to pronounce it as "en-nuh-thin"--Scottish star Karen Gillan's otherwise flawless American accent would slip during Selfie whenever she said "ennathin'"--instead of the American way: "en-nee-thing." During John Boyega's performance as a falsely accused American drone pilot on last summer's 24: Live Another Day, that word was "missile." Boyega pronounced it the U.K. way: "mis-eyel," as in making it rhyme with "aisle." The believability of Aussie actor Guy Pearce's performance as an ambitious '50s LAPD detective in L.A. Confidential was ruined at the very end of the film by Pearce's pronunciation of "Angeles" as "an-juh-lees"--a non-American way of saying it--instead of "an-juh-lehs." In Hanna, the word that trips up Blanchett is the movie's goddamn title! Her evil, 1998 Gillian Anderson-haired CIA agent character refers to the titular heroine she's chasing as "Hahn-uh." Yeah, that's not exactly the Southern way to pronounce it.

It's not like Blanchett can't do a Southern accent at all. She actually mastered it once before as a Georgia fortune teller with genuine psychic powers in the 2000 Sam Raimi thriller The Gift (dig the musicality Blanchett brings to the line where her psychic character, who's being threatened by a customer's scummy redneck husband, explains to her son why she's grabbed a baseball bat: "Don't worry, honey, I'm just working on my swing"). Blanchett shouldn't really be blamed for an accent that's so all over the map Google Maps would throw up its hands in frustration and mutter, "I fucking give up. You're on your own." The blame should fall on the dialect coach Hanna director Joe Wright hired for Blanchett. It's clearly not the same dialect coach who helped Blanchett speak during the filming of The Gift. The Hanna dialect coach should be kidnapped, locked in that punishment cabin from the summer camp in Addams Family Values and forced to watch Hillbilly Handfishin' on a loop. (And then the casting director who told Wright that it would be a good idea to hire the whitest actress to star as Tiger Lily in this summer's Pan should be dropped off in an Indian reservation and forced to live there without money and a smartphone for a month.)

Did they really need to make Agent Marissa Wiegler an American, along with all the other CIA agents in Hanna who are unconvincingly portrayed by British actors? It's not like everyone in that agency's personnel is American. There are foreigners who work there. Take, for example, the funniest CIA agent of them all: Avery Bullock, the deranged agency boss Patrick Stewart voices on American Dad. He's a Brit. I would have rather had seen Wright and screenwriters Seth Lochhead and David Farr shoehorn into Hanna some little backstory that Wiegler isn't American--like how Schwarzenegger flicks used to always squeeze in some dialogue about the hero's Austrian roots to explain what an American supercop is doing walking around with a thick Austrian accent--instead of the unintentionally funny attempt to pass Wiegler off as a Southerner. And that's not the only over-the-top and theatrical-sounding accent in Hanna. In fact, everyone in the film--who's not a member of the family of ordinary British tourists Hanna befriends while she's on the lam, that is--has a bizarre accent. There's the campy fake German accent Tom Hollander uses while he steals parts of the film as Wiegler's sadistic German associate Isaacs. But that accent somehow works. Meanwhile, Blanchett's campy fake Southern accent does not.

Her lousy accent fails to bring down a solid first action movie from a director who was previously known for period costume dramas like Atonement and Anna Karenina, just like how Wiegler fails to bring down this tough little German girl she wants to eliminate. Hanna is Saoirse Ronan's movie all the way, a remarkable coming-out party for the Atonement star's action side. Since Hanna, Ronan's starred in another art-house teen assassin flick, Violet & Daisy, and the Stephenie Meyer YA sci-fi adaptation The Host. Like in The Host, Ronan did all her own stunts as Hanna. She received martial arts training from legendary Bruce Lee protégé Dan Inosanto, and her verisimilitude as an action heroine--not once can you detect shitty CGI that pastes Ronan's eyebrowless face over some 42-year-old double's body--lends the film a certain edge and raggedy energy, whether she's leaping over shipping containers in an epic chase scene or simply snapping the pretty neck of Downton Abbey star Michelle Dockery, who briefly appears as one of Hanna's first human kills.

It's not just a strong physical performance. It's a really good dramatic one too. Ronan skillfully balances Hanna's fierce killing machine side with her vulnerable, innocent and curious child side. Wright frequently said he envisioned Hanna as a modern-day Grimm fairy tale--this one has an espionage backdrop and a dental hygiene-obsessed CIA scumbag as the evil witch--but I always interpreted Hanna as less of a fairy tale and more like an alien-on-Earth story a la The Iron Giant. Just replace the sentient robot soldier who discovers the wonders of Earth and decides that he doesn't want to be a gun with a home-schooled, feral and genetically engineered German teen who gets a taste of the world outside her wilderness classroom and realizes she wants no part of the kind of life her ex-CIA associate dad (Eric Bana, also working with a campy German accent) trained her for.

And how about that futuristic original score by the Chemical Brothers? It's like a fifth character in the movie, but it's definitely my favorite character, even more so than Hanna herself. The Hanna score, which can be heard during both "AFOS Prime" and the new AFOS espionage score music block "AFOS Incognito," is a remarkable aural achievement from a duo that never scored a film before. The tongue-in-cheek and creepy melody they wrote for Isaacs to whistle repeatedly--it's known on the score album as "The Devil Is in the Details"--is an all-time great villain theme.

Part of why the Chemical Brothers' propulsive score will stand the test of time is because the Chemical Brothers were simply allowed to be the Chemical Brothers, and they didn't acquiesce to the ubiquitous Inception foghorn from old Love Boat episodes--which was popular then and is still all over action film score music--or any other Hans Zimmer-esque flourish like the ones that are evidence of John Powell's roots as a member of Zimmer's Media Ventures collective during Powell's scores for the Bourne movies. Sure, the equally beloved Daft Punk/Joseph Trapanese score from 2010's Tron: Legacy contains some "BRAHM!," but it works for that video game-inspired gladiator movie. It wouldn't have worked for either Hanna or what the Chemical Brothers were aiming for, and that was to sound as alien as Hanna herself. "BRAHM!" would have stuck out like a really bad Southern accent.

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Space Dandy, "Never-ending Dandy, Baby"

This is the 100th edition of "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week" (formerly known as "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner"), in which I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

I can't believe it's taken me until "Never-ending Dandy, Baby," the final episode of Space Dandy, to finally notice that the first Japanese lyric in the opening theme "Viva Namida"--"Doko kara kita ka nante wakaranai hodo no hibi de" ("These days, I don't know where I've come from")--ties in to Dandy's lack of knowledge about his origins. Although "Never-ending Dandy, Baby" doesn't explain where Dandy came from--his past remains a mystery, and thankfully, in this way-too-origin-story-obsessed age of entertainment, the series finale doesn't care that it remains that way--it does conclude Space Dandy's run on a spectacularly animated and entertaining note that's most fitting for an anthology-like show that, like I said last week, has captured the adventurous and exploratory spirit of both The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the original Star Trek. In "Never-ending Dandy, Baby," Space Dandy even finally shouts the original Trek out in an eyecatch where the show's title is displayed in the classic Trek typeface.

In a nice bit of role reversal, Dandy, who was about to be captured by the Gogol Empire when Space Dandy last left him, is the damsel in distress for most of the episode, and Scarlet and Honey, the characters who would usually be the damsel in distress in a story like this, are instead given the task of rescuing him together with Meow and QT by their side. The Gogol Empire has always wanted control of Dandy because the abundance of pyonium, "the God particle," in his body will give them immense power over space and time, much like how the evil corporation on Orphan Black wants to maintain control of the bodies of Sarah and her sister clones for commodity reasons (and misogynist reasons as well).

Dandy is a pawn in a battle between the Jaicro Empire, led by Johnny (Hiroshi Kamiya), the wanna-be rock star who temporarily shirked his duties as a soldier and a spy to join Dandy's short-lived rock band in "Rock 'n' Roll Dandy, Baby," and the Gogol Empire. The latter gets caught in an inner power struggle of its own, between Dr. Gel and a double-crossing Bea, whose loyalty to Dr. Gel turns out to have been an act, and Bea's actually been attempting to have Dandy all to himself so that he can gain control of the various universes on his own.

Although the space battle imagery is spectacularly visualized by the BONES Inc. animators, and the Hawaii Yankee, the Aloha Oe shuttlecraft that can transform into a Hawaiian shirt-wearing mecha, makes one last crowd-pleasing, fan service-y appearance, the battle for all existence is the least interesting part of the finale. Where "Never-ending Dandy, Baby" starts to really distinguish itself as a Shinichiro Watanabe series finale is all the material after Dandy chooses to steer Dr. Gel's Statue of Liberty ship on his own (the Aloha Oe is too badly damaged) and right into the maelstrom created by the Super Hulkider, the Gogol Empire's ultimate weapon, in order to use the pyonium in his body to overpower the Super Hulkider and save all existence. In the finale's only emotional moment, Dandy takes one last look at his four friends on the ship's monitor as he attempts to withstand the rigors of the maelstrom and pilots himself to his own likely demise (but because this is a comedy first and foremost--and because Dandy has never exactly been Alan Alda in space--he sneaks a peek at Honey's thong). He proceeds to unleash on the Super Hulkider the full power of his pyonium, but he winds up wiping out all existence.

Then a certain narrator who's been a part of almost every Space Dandy episode and has been the most Douglas Adams-esque element of the show summons Dandy and presents him with a huge offer. The narrator reveals that he was God all along, which means that when the narrator turned into a zombie at the end of "Sometimes You Can't Live with Dying, Baby," an early episode that remains the show's funniest half-hour, not even God was immune to becoming a zombie, which may just be the nuttiest thing this show has ever accomplished. Try to beat that, American Horror Story.

As a reward for sacrificing himself to attempt to save all existence, even though he didn't exactly save it, God offers Dandy the chance to replace him as God and be in charge of a bunch of newborn universes when the current ones cease to exist. But when Dandy learns becoming God doesn't allow him to touch any kind of matter, particularly breasteses, he rejects the offer. Dandy basically tells God to fuck off, without exactly saying so. He'd rather be a free spirit than an authority figure tied down to obligations like overseeing the universes, so the option he non-verbally chooses instead is to return to the Aloha Oe, at a point in time that resembles his normal state at the start of the series, with no Meow on the ship (heh, Meow got screwed over again), with just QT in tow and with a course heading for Boobies the restaurant.

That point in time reveals that what has taken place is the longest non-Futurama time jump in recent TV history, longer than either the five-year time jump on Young Justice: Invasion, True Detective season 1's 10-year time jump from 2002 to 2012 or the 100-year time jump during the end credits of 30 Rock's series finale. The show has skipped ahead to 14.8 billion years (!) after Dandy rejected God's offer, which means the various--as well as now God-less--universes have survived countless attempts by the likes of the Gogol Empire and its descendants to destroy them. It's not specified if Dandy has already experienced a lifetime's worth of adventures after his encounter with God or if Dandy's about to start a whole new cycle of adventures, but the ending confirms two things: Dandy never ages--another clue, along with the lack of DNA, the pyonium in his body and the ability to cross dimensions, that he's some sort of godlike being--and in a sign that Dandy has grown and softened a bit after his heroic deed, his fetish has changed from boobs to a less juvenile fetish for ladies' calves.

Dandy's refusal of godhood is another example of how he's a Captain Kirk type through and through, and that's why the Trek-style eyecatch (which is followed after the commercial break in the finale's Japanese airing by a Star Wars-inspired eyecatch) is a perfect eyecatch for this finale. He's too much of an adventure-seeking spirit, and an authoritative desk job like God's would be too stifling for him. His rebooted life also leaves open the possibility of either an animated feature film version like Watanabe's Cowboy Bebop: The Movie or a series of OVA (original video animation) projects like the direct-to-video Futurama movies and Warner Bros. Animation's direct-to-video DC Universe Animated Original Movies (that's the format I'd prefer to see Space Dandy come back in rather than as a theatrical feature). The "May be continued?" title card after the end credits is basically an invitation for the show's non-Japanese fans (it's more popular outside of Japan than within it) to make enough noise to cause BONES to bring back Space Dandy in some form.

But would a two-hour animated theatrical feature--which, like the Trek movies, would have to be designed to satisfy two different audiences at the same time (the show's fans, the mass audience that's not so familiar with Space Dandy)--be an effective representation of what made Space Dandy enjoyable on the small screen? I don't think it would. What made Space Dandy stand out was its anthology nature and the week-to-week unpredictability of not knowing what to expect from whatever idiosyncratic special guest animator was recruited to direct, and the only way a theatrical feature could capture that essence of Space Dandy would be to do it as an anthology in the style of Batman: Gotham Knight and Robot Carnival, rather than as a straightforward sci-fi actioner that's more in the vein of this action-heavy finale and Cowboy Bebop: The Movie. Otherwise, just like the literal throne that Dandy declined to accept from God, the two-hour format would be too constraining for what Space Dandy is capable of when it's at its best.

Plus I'm satisfied with the 26 episodes we've got, even though some of them didn't always work, particularly the earlier ones that preceded "Sometimes You Can't Live with Dying, Baby." Twenty-six episodes are the perfect length for marathoning an entire run of an animated show, especially Watanabe shows, and Space Dandy is no exception, although the more self-contained nature of its episodes would have made it better suited for an additional 13 episodes or more after the initial 26 than either Cowboy Bebop or Samurai Champloo were. Bebop and Champloo finished off their 26-episode runs at logical endpoints for Spike Spiegel and the Fuu crew, respectively, while Space Dandy wraps up its run with Dandy and QT off on another adventure, even though it's just another visit to Boobies.

Although the end credits sequence for "Never-ending Dandy, Baby" is neither as moving as the Bebop finale's end credits nor as uplifting as the Champloo finale's end credits, it's my favorite end credits sequence out of all the different ones Space Dandy has done this season. The sequence is nicely soundtracked by the '80s freestyle throwback jam "Space Fun Club" by Japanese rapper Zen-La-Rock (with an artist named Robochuu as the guest feature), a tune that falls under Watanabe's unusual mandate that no piece of music on Space Dandy can contain any instruments that were built after 1984. The "Never-ending Dandy, Baby" end credits are a terrific way for the animators to convey that life goes on in space while Dandy and QT continue living their free-spirited lives off-screen, as the sequence scrolls past nifty glimpses of an outer-space drive-in, a few other similar examples of Futurama-esque architecture and a school of giant space swordfish.

About halfway through Space Dandy's first season, I wondered if the show would emerge as another Watanabe classic. Now that its run is over, I can safely say that after following up first-season high points like "Sometimes You Can't Live with Dying, Baby" and "Plants Are Living Things Too, Baby" with a bunch of equally distinctive installments like "The Big Fish Is Huge, Baby" and "A World with No Sadness, Baby," yes, Space Dandy can now take its place beside Bebop and Champloo as a Watanabe classic.

This is the end

Because today is the last day ever, I ain't going out like no sucka. Go ahead and cry in the shower. Meanwhile, I'm posting 30 of my favorite original score cues or songs on Spotify that accompany the end credits of feature films. None of them are re-recordings (I love me some Spotify, but it's befouled by the stench of terrible re-recordings of film and TV music). All of them are the originals.

The last playlist ever kicks off with the summer of 2012's best end title theme (Alan Silvestri's "The Avengers," from an art-house film called Anna Karenina), followed by perhaps my all-time favorite original end title theme (Willie Hutch's "Brother's Gonna Work It Out," from a Dean Jones family film called The Mack). Tron: Legacy and Superman: The Movie both had end credits that ran so long they had two or three end title themes instead of one. Most of the end title themes below can be heard on AFOS, but some of them aren't in rotation because I simply don't have them in my library (Silvestri's Who Framed Roger Rabbit score is an album I always wanted to have, but I was never able to nab the score because it went out of print again before I could do so). The playlist concludes with Earl Rose's end title theme from a fascinating doc that aired on PBS in 2012: Johnny Carson: King of Late Night.

Too bad Adele's theme for Skyfall isn't featured in the film's end credits (it's also not on Spotify). I wanted to include "Skyfall" in the playlist because its Jim Morrison-esque opening lyric happens to be "This is the end," which is also the name of this playlist. In another interesting tidbit, "Skyfall" is simultaneously one of the most emotional songs to open a Bond film (the song is written from the point of view of M and is one big spoiler, and no wonder Daniel Craig cried when he first heard it--without giving too much away, it must have brought him back emotionally to the scene the song is basically about) and one of the most wry (an apocalyptic song about mortality is ironically the theme for a film that's all about revitalizing the 50-year-old Bond film franchise and keeping it going, and Adele and her producing partner Paul Epworth seemed to have written "Skyfall" so that it could also be interpreted as a tune about the 2012 apocalypse).

Goodbye, cruel world!

"This Is the End" tracklist
1. Alan Silvestri, "The Avengers," Marvel's The Avengers
2. Willie Hutch, "Brother's Gonna Work It Out," The Mack
3. Curtis Mayfield, "Superfly," Superfly
4. k.d. lang, "Surrender," Tomorrow Never Dies
5. Daft Punk, "TRON Legacy (End Titles)," Tron: Legacy
6. Daft Punk, "Solar Sailer," Tron: Legacy
7. Radiohead, "Exit Music (For a Film)," Romeo + Juliet
8. Dominic Cooper, "Jail-bait Jody," Tamara Drewe
9. Alan Silvestri, "End Title," Who Framed Roger Rabbit
10. John Williams, "The Rebel Fleet/End Title," The Empire Strikes Back
11. Alan Silvestri, "Captain America March," Captain America: The First Avenger
12. Prince, "Scandalous," Batman
13. Siouxsie and the Banshees, "Face to Face," Batman Returns
14. Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard, "A Watchful Guardian," The Dark Knight
15. John Williams, "Finale and End Title March," Superman: The Movie
16. John Williams, "Love Theme from Superman," Superman: The Movie
17. Michael Giacchino, "The Incredits," The Incredibles
18. Michael Giacchino, "Up with End Credits," Up
19. Jerry Goldsmith, "End Credits," Star Trek: First Contact
20. Danny Elfman, "End Credits," Sleepy Hollow
21. Bruce Broughton, "End Credits," The Rescuers Down Under
22. Gladys Knight & the Pips, "Make Yours a Happy Home," Claudine
23. Mader, "Rhumba (End Credits)," The Wedding Banquet
24. Michael Giacchino, "End Creditouilles," Ratatouille
25. John Carpenter, "The Fog End Credits," The Fog
26. David Shire, "Finale and End Credits," The Conversation
27. John Williams, "Finale & End Credits," Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
28. Earl Rose, "End Credits," Johnny Carson: King of Late Night
2014 additions
29. Alexandre Desplat, "The Heroic Weather-Conditions of the Universe, Part 7: After the Storm," Moonrise Kingdom
30. Alexandre Desplat, "Traditional Arrangement: 'Moonshine,'" The Grand Budapest Hotel
31. Michael Giacchino, "To Boldly Go," Star Trek
32. Michael Giacchino, "End Credits," Star Trek
33. M83 featuring Susanne Sundfør, "Oblivion," Oblivion
34. Ramin Djawadi featuring Tom Morello, "Pacific Rim," Pacific Rim
35. Blake Perlman featuring RZA, "Drift," Pacific Rim
36. Brian Tyler, "Can You Dig It (Iron Man 3 Main Titles)," Iron Man Three
37. Brian Tyler, "Legacy," Thor: The Dark World

BONUS TRACK: "Summer in America," DJ Blue & Chubb Rock's rousing original song from the end credits of the hilarious cult classic Wet Hot American Summer.

5-Piece Cartoon Dinner (05/15/2012): Tron: Uprising, Young Justice, Ultimate Spider-Man, The Avengers and Motorcity

Each Tuesday in "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," I review five of the week's most noteworthy animated cable shows that are found outside my Adult Swim comfort zone.

The series launch of Tron: Uprising, the animated prequel to Tron: Legacy, doesn't take place at the show's permanent home of Disney XD until June 7. But in a move similar to what Fox did with New Girl last fall, what Showtime did with House of Lies last Christmas and what NBC did with Smash earlier this year to increase the buzz for their respective shows, the channel unveiled all 31 minutes of "Beck's Beginning," Tron: Uprising's first episode, on YouTube over the weekend (for American viewers only), a few days before the episode's May 18 premiere on The Disney Channel and May 21 premiere on Disney XD.

The Beck of the premiere episode title is a teen "program" (Elijah Wood) who makes his living as a garage mechanic in Argon City, which is part of the computer world known as The Grid, the creation of software engineer Kevin Flynn, the Jeff Bridges character from the two Tron films. Flynn created a digital clone of himself named Clu (Fred Tatasciore, subbing for Bridges, who doubled as the evil clone via not-very-convincing CGI trickery in Tron: Legacy) to look after The Grid in his absence, but Clu went all Hosni Mubarak, imprisoned Flynn inside The Grid and has now ordered his forces to occupy Argon City.

When Beck's best friend is killed, or as the franchise's vernacular prefers to call it, "derezzed," by a guard who works for Clu's henchman General Tesler (Lance Henriksen), Beck seeks revenge. With the help of a Daft Punk helmet and a "re-coding tool" from the garage that he uses to change the appearance of his attire, Beck assumes the persona of the legendary warrior program Tron (Bruce Boxleitner), who, like Flynn, has been deposed by Clu. Tortured by the dictator and presumed dead, Tron takes notice of his impersonator's bravery and fighting skills and decides to secretly mentor Beck.

I don't really care for the Tron franchise or the undernourished screenwriting that was on display in both Tron films, but I did enjoy Tron: Legacy's dope Daft Punk score, the film's immersive visuals (especially when they're glimpsed in IMAX 3D, which is why I saw the film twice in that format) and Olivia Wilde's performance as Jules Verne-loving warrior woman Quorra ("Do you know Jules Verne? What's he like?"), so I've been curious about how Tron will turn out on the small screen each week. Will the show look as epic as Tron: Legacy did, even on a much tinier screen? Will the writing--shepherded by Tron: Legacy co-writers and Once Upon a Time creators Edward Kitsis and Adam "I Ain't Ad-Rock and by the Way, He's Horovitz, While I'm" Horowitz--be as undernourished as it was in Tron: Legacy?

Despite being in 2D, Tron: Uprising still looks incredible. The rainy nighttime metropolises and sleek glowstick aesthetic of Tron: Legacy are maintained here (and though none of Daft Punk's themes are repurposed here, composer Joseph Trapanese, who arranged and orchestrated the French duo's score over the course of two years, channels their sound with satisfying results). The highlight of "Beck's Beginning" is a gorgeously animated battle between Beck and one of Tesler's guards atop a speeding monorail. I wonder who the fight choreography consultant is for this show because the fighting moves in "Beck's Beginning" outstrip the choreography in Tron: Legacy and are reminiscent of Spike Spiegel's martial arts scenes on Cowboy Bebop. However, I'm not as enamored with the character design by Robert Valley. Why does Beck look like Matt LeBlanc? I keep expecting him to greet Tesler's second-in-command Paige (Emmanuelle Chriqui)--the show's most interesting character so far--with "How you doin'?"

As for the writing on Tron: Uprising, many critics found the Tron: Legacy screenplay to be too colorless (I could see their gripes, although I thought the occasional flashes of humor, like Quorra's awkwardness around humans, Bridges' Big Lebowski-esque portrayal of an older Flynn and Michael Sheen basically playing Alan Cumming, actually helped to enliven the 2010 film), but Kitsis and Horowitz's exposition-heavy premiere episode is more colorless and humorless than Tron: Legacy. Unlike any of the Burners from Motorcity, Disney XD's other futuristic animated series with a young gearhead as the hero, Beck has zero personality. Sure, Beck is a computerized being, but so was Sheen's nightclub owner character, whose lively, scenery-chewing presence is sorely missed here. Hopefully, Tron will smuggle to Beck a personality disc in an upcoming episode.

(Because Tron: Uprising's online debut is a big deal and "Flight Club," the latest Green Lantern: The Animated Series episode, is a lighthearted trifle compared to Young Justice: Invasion's momentous newest episode and the other equally momentous superhero cartoon installments this week, I put the Tron: Uprising premiere in Green Lantern's spot in this week's column.)

***

Wow, that was quick. The very plot-heavy and action-packed "Alienated," the latest Young Justice: Invasion installment, immediately clears up the mystery of what Superman (Nolan North), Batman (Bruce Greenwood), Wonder Woman (Maggie Q), Martian Manhunter (Kevin Michael Richardson), Green Lantern Corps patrolman John Stewart (also Richardson) and the dialogue-less Hawkwoman were up to during the 16 missing hours when they were brainwashed by Vandal Savage (Miguel Ferrer). Neither hookers nor blow were involved. Under Vandal Savage's control, the six Justice Leaguers attacked the citizens of the planet Rimbor, and their actions--which neither of them have any memory of--made Earth a target for the Kroloteans, who landed on Earth before the events of the season premiere and have been impersonating Earth's politicians and scientists while preparing for their all-out assault on the planet.

And in a reveal that's shocking to this viewer whose last DC reading experience was an All-Star Superman TPB a few years ago but isn't as shocking to DC fans who are experts on who's-related-to-who in the DC universe, Kaldur'ahm (Khary Payton), the Atlantean formerly known as Aqualad, is now working for his terrorist father Black Manta (also Payton), the nemesis of Kaldur'ahm's former mentor Aquaman (Phil LaMarr, a.k.a. Green Lantern from Justice League Unlimited!). I thought it's because Kaldur'ahm is furious that Cartoon Network won't bring back Toonami, but the reason for his Theon Greyjoy-style turn towards villainy is far more dramatic.

During the five-year interim between Young Justice's first and second seasons, Kaldur'ahm learned of his parentage, while Tula (Cree Summer), Aqualad's love, joined Young Justice, took up the alias Aquagirl and died during a mission. Kaldur'ahm blamed the team for Aquagirl's death and was pissed at Aquaman for hiding the details of his parentage and then quit and switched sides. Some Young Justice fans believe that Kaldur'ahm's working undercover to bust his own dad. I hope not. Kaldur'ahm's genuine conversion to villainy would be a more interesting arc to me than Kaldur'ahm being in opposition to his supervillain father the whole time a la Runaways.

It turns out that the Kroloteans aren't the major players of this season's title event when Black Manta plants a bomb on the Krolotean base to get them out of the way, so that his allies from The Light, the consortium of supervillains that fought the Young Justice crew and their mentors last season, can step in and take over Earth with the help of a figure whom the Kroloteans referred to in their language as "The Competitor." Superman attempts to warn the Kroloteans about the bomb and offers to rescue them, but they prove how much of a dipshit alien race they are by firing their weapons at Supes in response. He's unable to save any of them from the bomb.

Meanwhile, Superboy (also North) continues to be unsettled by his ex-girlfriend Miss Martian (Danica McKellar) and her increasing reliance on telepathically torturing the team's enemies. Oh yeah, and the Justice League's popularity with the public is waning, thanks to anti-Justice League propaganda spouted by cable news loudmouth G. Gordon Godfrey (Tim Curry, the original voice of The Joker on Batman: The Animated Series before the producers opted for Mark Hamill). Will the six accused Justice Leaguers' departure from Earth to clear their names on Rimbor put them back in everyone's good graces again?

A busy Young Justice episode like "Alienated" is exciting to watch but a bitch to recap. I wish I could break down the episode's events in just less than 10 words a la the wonderfully terse recap of Superman's origin on the very first page of All-Star Superman ("Aqualad's a traitor. Nighty night, Krolotean dipshits!").

Young Justice is largely more somber than previous animated DC shows, but luckily, this action-packed episode found time to insert a great quip or two (Wonder Woman to Wonder Girl, who's in such awe of her mentor's heroics: "A little less fangirl, a little more Wonder Girl."). (By the way, Wonder Girl is voiced by a much-less-sullen-than-usual Mae Whitman from Parenthood and Andre Braugher's Thief.) I don't know if "Maneuver Seven," a Fastball Special-style fighting move in which Nightwing (Jesse McCartney) hurls Batgirl (Alyson Stoner) at their adversaries and she kicks all of them in the face before landing on her feet, is a regular thing in the more recent Batman comics, but that moment in "Alienated" is especially badass. With this episode, Young Justice just Maneuver Sevened almost all my doubts about this series being a worthy successor to Justice League Unlimited.

"It's the only way he can feel": 10 tidbits about the excellent Drive soundtrack

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 Drive while 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.

Forecast calls for Daft-y conditions

I've been frequently flipping to The Weather Channel lately, and I've noticed the channel's "Local on the 8s" forecast interstitials have ditched most of the smooth jazz instrumentals that would usually accompany the temperature graphics for slightly edgier music like the beat digger favorite "Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic" from Isaac Hayes' 1969 Hot Buttered Soul album.

When I first heard "Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic" during "Local on the 8s" a few months ago, I was like, "I have no idea which Weather Channel employee picked 'Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic,' but I'd like to buy that person a beer or--and this would be more fitting because of its presence in DJ Quik's 'Born and Raised in Compton'--a 40."

Then last month, I noticed Daft Punk's Tron: Legacy end title theme, the "End of Line" theme for the club of the same name in Legacy and John Williams' "Theme from Jurassic Park" were added to "Local on the 8s" rotation (those three tracks still surface during the segment even though they're intended for May airplay and it's not May anymore). I thought I was imagining things. I wasn't:

Jurassic Park's stately and warm-toned main theme isn't really surprising as a choice for "Local on the 8s," but the propulsive grooves from Tron: Legacy are a surprise (by the way, the Legacy end title theme, "End of Line" and "Solar Sailer" can also be heard during A Fistful of Soundtracks' "Assorted Fistful" block, along with other Legacy tracks like "C.L.U.," the ubiquitous but still-awesome "Derezzed," "Outlands," "Rinzler" and "The Game Has Changed"). Someone in Atlanta or wherever the "Local on the 8s" updates are produced has great taste in film and TV score albums.

There's an explanation behind the channel's move towards less bland-sounding instrumentals during "Local on the 8s." In a 2009 Atlanta Journal-Constitution article about the segment's switch from artists like Spyro Gyra to folks like The Stones, a Weather Channel exec said, "I think we've been doing an injustice to our viewers playing, for the lack of a better word, elevator music on the segments for all these years."

The calming shores of Spyro country were causing "Local on the 8s" viewers to doze off or lose interest.

"People would have it on but they wouldn't be watching and they wouldn't be listening," said the exec. "We wanted music that would get their attention--and this has."

An Idolator blogger who was impressed with the "Local on the 8s" playlist upgrades joked in 2009 that "I never thought, ever, that I would see former Yankees great Bernie Williams and the Smiths on the same playlist--but that's just an amuse for after 8 p.m., when things get really crazy and Phish gets added to the proceedings. Whoa Nelly!"

Hold up. Did he say Phish? Let's look at that May 8pm-1am playlist again:

Things are way past crazy now.

(Photo source: TWC Today)

Unlike that short-lived experiment where The Weather Channel added movies like The Perfect Storm and Misery to its programming last year, this is a change I can agree with.

14 favorite elements of songs I currently have on rotation while I create artwork for my own book

1. The cinematic-sounding French horn lines during Kanye West's "All of the Lights"
Ye is a modern-day Mozart--as in batshit crazy, but a total musical genius.



2. The military drums during Pusha T's "My God"

(Photo source: Trebles and Blues)

3. The piano sample during Trebles and Blues' "The Tempo"

4. The handclaps during The New Pornographers' "Sweet Talk, Sweet Talk"



5. The bloops that open The Chemical Brothers' "Car Chase (Arp Worship)" from the Hanna score

6. The bass line of Lyrics Born and Sam Sparro's "Coulda Woulda Shoulda"

7. The really tight brass section during The Heavy's live 2010 performance of "That Kind of Man" for KEXP

8. The "Love You Save"-esque beat of Dennis Coffey and Mayer Hawthorne's "All Your Goodies Are Gone"

9. Dres' flow during the Black Sheep track "Elevation"

10. Bambu's delivery of "I used to sit in church and look at the stained glass and wonder why none of them look like me" during "Misused"

11. The electronic bass line of Daft Punk's Tron: Legacy end credits cue "Solar Sailer"

12. Ernie Isley's smokin' guitar solo at the end of The Isley Brothers' "Summer Breeze"
I only listen to that cover of sappy Seals and Crofts just to get to that guitar solo.

13. Teena Marie (R.I.P.) leading the female half of the Long Beach audience in a playful battle of the sexes with Rick James over which gender is louder during the live 1981 version of "I'm a Sucker for Love" that's on the deluxe edition CD of Street Songs

14. "The Michael McDonald of the rap game," Nate Dogg (R.I.P.), proving he wasn't your father's Michael McDonald when he crooned "And you even licked my balls" during Snoop Dogg's "Ain't No Fun (If the Homies Can't Have None)"

The killer sounds of The Chemical Brothers' Hanna score are now on "Assorted Fistful" on A Fistful of Soundtracks

I know I said I wouldn't be blogging here for a while, but a lot of great new music has made me want to temporarily break my silence and post a few items today.

Add The Chemical Brothers' richly written and often dance floor-friendly original score from the teenage assassin thriller Hanna to the list of awesome scores by electronica or rock musicians who never scored for film before. It joins a list that includes 1999's Fight Club score by The Dust Brothers (hey, for a couple of years, The Chemical Brothers recorded under that name as well) and the recent Tron: Legacy score by Daft Punk. The Hanna score, which is available only as a digital download from iTunes starting today, joins another list too: the "Assorted Fistful" playlist on A Fistful of Soundtracks.

I caught The Chembruhs' full album stream of their soundtrack a few days ago and was impressed with cuts like "Car Chase (Arp Worship)" and "Container Park." Hanna, which has the little girl from Atonement going all Hit-Girl on CIA assassins (but only up to a PG-13-level point), was made by Atonement director Joe Wright and is the filmmaker's first foray into Bourne-style mayhem. We won't know until its April 8 release date if Hanna is another Tron: Legacy-like case where the score outshines the movie, but in the meantime, pay a visit to "Container Park" (below) and check out other highlights of the score during the "Assorted Fistful" and "New Cue Revue" blocks on AFOS.

The Rinzler boy

Most remixes of film or TV score music are meh, but French remixer Basic Slack's take on "Rinzler"--Daft Punk's thrilling cue from the Tron: Legacy "Disc Wars" skirmish between Sam (Garrett Hedlund) and Rinzler (Anis Cheurfa), the antagonist who always arms himself with two discs a la Chow Yun-Fat's double Beretta action in John Woo flicks and Darth Maul's double-bladed saber-wielding in The Phlaccid Menace--is a pretty good expansion of that two-minute cue.



Tron: Legacy music supervisor Jason Bentley told the MTV Movies Blog that "The score that [Daft Punk] set out to make was one that could stand with Star Wars or Superman." It sure does stand with them. The fact that I keep adding more tracks from Tron: Legacy to "Assorted Fistful" rotation and have listened to Daft Punk's score repeatedly, whether in its original form or in remixes like Basic Slack's--and even more often than I did with any of the Star Wars or Superman score albums--is proof of that.

I don't listen to just film score albums, you know

I don't even listen to any of them on most days of the week, although the Tron: Legacy score was on repeat a lot last week.

For the print compilation of my webcomic, I've been trying to write an article about one of my favorite movies, Chan Is Missing, and I've been fighting off a bad case of writer's block with the help of some music. There was an episode of Quantum Leap that mentioned that Sam and Al put on the Man of La Mancha Broadway cast album while building Project Quantum Leap. DJ Phatrick's Asian American Hip-Hop for Dummies, a 2008 compilation of his mixes from the KPFA-FM program Apex Express, has been my Man of La Mancha album.

Despite the censored curse words (stay out of my mixtape, profanity censor guy from Ping Pong Playa!), Asian American Hip-Hop for Dummies is a fantastic sampler of APA hip-hop. Hey, look, it's a pre-electro-hop-era Far East Movement joint.

DJ Phatrick's mixtape is an effective cure for writer's block. My piece on Chan Is Missing consisted of only 68 words last week. Then I started bumping the mixtape on my laptop to get myself to add some more words. The article is now up to 2,168 words.

Derezzer's edge: Daft Punk's Tron: Legacy score is now part of "Assorted Fistful" on A Fistful of Soundtracks

I'm a fan of Daft Punk, but I was never really into the Tron franchise. So the French duo's original score for Tron: Legacy, which Walt Disney Records released earlier this week, is the only element of the sequel I've been looking forward to, and it's as dope as I expected it to be.

Another thing I expected was negative reactions to the Tron: Legacy score from both film score music fans who are too conservative to get into Daft Punk and Daft Punk fans who find film score music--including even the kind of score music Daft Punk wrote for Tron--to be too conservative-sounding and old-fogey for their tastes. I don't belong to (or care for) either camp, of course, which is why I've added the duo's score to daily "Assorted Fistful" rotation (also new to "Assorted Fistful" are selections from the recently released two-CD score album for another franchise that's known for its futuristic motorcycle chases, 30 Rock).

Daft Punk's sound also graces another Disney property, the Iron Man movie franchise, but for only a few seconds (the late DJ AM mashed up their 2005 track "Robot Rock" with Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust" and Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock's "It Takes Two" during Tony's drunken brawl with Rhodey in Iron Man 2, the last of the Paramount-distributed Iron Man installments now that Disney is assuming distribution). In some alternate universe that's more musically imaginative and less clichéd than ours, the Iron Man movies were scored by Daft Punk, and the duo's catchy 2001 track "Superheroes" is either a needle drop in some other superhero flick or the main title theme for a superhero cartoon series, which is where that track always belonged (see Interstella 5555--"Superheroes" goes well with animation).

Daft Punk to score Tron 2.0 and give that creepy Tron Guy something to pop-lock to

Daft Punk (a.k.a. Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo) is switching from robot helmets to Tron helmets. Disney has enlisted the electronica duo to compose the score for the sequel to the other Jeff Bridges movie that flopped during its initial release but turned into a cult phenomenon. I'm not a fan of the original film, but Daft Punk is perfect for this franchise. The score is going to be kickass.

[Via Upcoming Film Scores]