The Dissolve has sadly but elegantly irised out (so you win again, terribly written pop-culture news sites that are full of typos and annoying listicles)

Back in May, Pitchfork.tv posted a well-made animated short adapted from an anti-PG-13 essay published by the Pitchfork Media-owned film review site The Dissolve, and I wrote, "I'd like to see [Pitchfork.tv animator Mack] Williams do more animated tie-ins with The Dissolve. The site's discussions of Midnight Run with Adam Scott and Running Scared with Paul Scheer are crying out for the animated treatment, as is Noel Murray's essay 'Why great comics don't always make great movies.'" Sadly, there won't be any more animated Pitchfork.tv/Dissolve team-ups because during a three-week break I took from posting AFOS blog material (but I wasn't able to take a complete break from writing that material), The Dissolve closed up shop after two years of publication, simply because the economics haven't been kind to The Dissolve.

Although The Dissolve's reviews of new releases were well-written, they weren't the reason why The Dissolve was my favorite destination for discussions of film--other than The Onion Film Standard with Peter K. Rosenthal, of course. In an age when click-bait--particularly superhero movie costume news updates and listicles that are so lazily written and mindless they've caused me to stop writing listicles for good--has dominated film writing and made it less appealing to me, the content that made The Dissolve special and unique was all the articles that clearly weren't generating as many hits as the kind of empty and forgettable click-bait The Dissolve stubbornly refused to succumb to publishing in order to stay alive. I'm talking lengthy but never-boring and never-pretentious articles like the essays about the challenges of adapting graphic novels for the screen or the fascinating changes in recent film score music and the "Movie of the Week" roundtable discussions of older films like Repo Man and John Carpenter's Snake Plissken flicks and more recent cult favorites like Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story and MacGruber, discussions that often made you look at an old film in a new light. The reassessments of Spike Lee's work as a music video director or the reassessments of the filmographies of directors like Frank Tashlin and Ernst Lubitsch were also among the things former Dissolve staffer Scott Tobias and his colleagues "knew few people would read" when Tobias and Keith Phipps discussed the demise of their site, but The Dissolve was admirable for not caring that only a few film geeks would read those pieces.

The Dissolve's articles were often as impeccably edited as the movies the Dissolve writers adored and celebrated in their "Movie of the Week" discussions. Typos or misspellings were such a rarity over at The Dissolve. The only typos I spotted were in articles by--ooh, big surprise--Nathan Rabin, who, as an easily bored and barely awake TV recapper for the Onion-owned A.V. Club, once memorably wrote that Jack Donaghy "sneaks pills into Tracey's [sic] jelly beans and transforms him from a space case to an Adderal [sic] achiever" when Jack was so clearly not drugging Tracy Jordan, so Rabin would repeatedly get mocked for his pills mistake in the A.V. Club's comments section. Ooh, look, here's another one of those Rabin typos now.

Typos aside, Rabin's pop-culture writing is actually often worth reading. Like so many of the other former Dissolve writers, Rabin (who perhaps saw the writing on the wall and actually left The Dissolve a couple of months before the site's demise) came from the A.V. Club, which championed and fostered the same kind of smartly written and witty pop-culture writing that was found on The Dissolve and continues to do so, although the A.V. Club, along with Indiewire and Uproxx, has lately become much less of a favorite destination for me because of how often its gazillion ads (fuck you, Flowplayer) cause my browser to freeze up. Meanwhile, The Dissolve refused to clutter its articles with ads, which I assume is what also brought about the end of The Dissolve. But it's better that The Dissolve went out fighting with the integrity in its writing intact instead of dying out as yet another slow and laggy site full of articles that are either littered with or disrupted by ads that slow down my browser and can't be turned off.

If you write or blog about film or pop culture, you might get asked by someone the following: "The Internet's as overwhelming as Comic-Con. There are too many sites to choose from when I want to read stuff on the Internet. How can I tell apart the sites that are worth visiting from the sites that aren't worth visiting?" It's simple. Any publication that frequently makes typos like the following isn't worth the time of day.

Neither is any publication that posts "20 Things You Didn't Know About the Catering for Ant-Man."

Remarkably, The Dissolve was neither of those things, although it did publish a listicle, but only occasionally, like when it discussed "The 50 most daring film roles for women since Ripley" or was presumably ordered by Pitchfork to assemble "The movies' 50 greatest pop music moments." Listicles aren't the only form of digital publishing that bores me. Blog posts that are simply hastily written regurgitations of press releases bore me as well. Sure, The Dissolve had a news section that consisted of hastily written regurgitations of press releases too, but otherwise, 90 percent of its content was the thoughtful and lengthy pieces about movies like Heat, a movie I was obsessed with in college, or Midnight Run, a movie I'm still obsessed with and was a favorite subject of the Dissolve writers because of its countless highlights, like Danny Elfman's "Try to Believe" theme, and because, as Noel Murray said, "This is a movie about adults, made for adults."

When I recently watched McCabe and Mrs. Miller for the first time ever (I checked it out from the San Francisco Public Library, a great alternative for whenever Netflix's DVD rental service comes up short), the first place I clicked to after watching the Robert Altman western was The Dissolve because the site had once picked McCabe as a "Movie of the Week." I wanted to read what the Dissolve staff had to say at length about Altman's offbeat western about the struggles of independent businesses against Big Business, struggles that were similar to The Dissolve's own financial struggles. Not even the late Altman's McCabe audio commentary was satisfactory enough for me. The "Movie of the Week" section is the thing I'll miss the most about The Dissolve. I'm worried that Pitchfork Media will someday remove all these Dissolve articles from the Web because there are so many other older movies I haven't seen yet and were given the "Movie of the Week" treatment by The Dissolve, and I still want to read what its writers had to say about those movies.

I will admit that one of my recent blog posts was written in the style of a Dissolve piece. That post was "The Game of Thrones 'Hardhome' massacre and Mad Max prove that near-silence is golden, so why hasn't anyone stepped up to make the first great modern-day silent action movie?" It's a depressing, "Hardhome"-ish time for film writing: The Dissolve has been shut down, and nobody can make a living from film writing like the late Roger Ebert used to be able to do because the tech world is run by corrupt assholes who don't pay their writers. At the risk of sounding like William Fichtner's "Criminals in this town used to believe in things" line from The Dark Knight, when I was a stringer for a major newspaper in the '90s, I wasn't paid a lot for the movie reviews I wrote, but at least I was actually paid back then. Listicle click-bait like "The 5 Best-Looking Buttcracks in Minions" may have won this round, but let's continue fighting against that type of writing. Let's keep The Dissolve--and what it stood for--alive in our approaches to writing about film or pop culture. It will make the sting of its demise less painful. We can do better than listicles about yellow buttcracks.

Trevor Noah is taking the reins of The Daily Show, not the "reigns"

After I watch any movie, whether on Netflix or in the theater, I like to read the reviews it received or the think pieces it spawned, if it's a movie that has left or is leaving an impact on the zeitgeist. Since its release, Avengers: Age of Ultron has been the subject of many think pieces about either robot sci-fi; the ways innocent bystanders are portrayed in superhero movies; the fear that the Marvel Cinematic Universe will lead to the infantilization of cinema; the lack of female leads in MCU movies (which shows how badly the MCU--the film division, that is, not the TV division behind Agent Carter and A.K.A. Jessica Jones, both projects anchored by female leads and spearheaded by female showrunners--is lagging behind the progressiveness and diversity of current Marvel superheroine comic books like Ms. Marvel, the Marvel Now! revamp of X-Men, the gender-swapped Thor, Spider-Gwen, Silk and A-Force); feminism on social media; or the fact that people on social media really need to take a breath and siddown, relax, have a sandwich, drink a glass of milk, do some fuckin' thing, will ya?

Age of Ultron's connection to the last two items is due to female Marvel geeks' Twitter rants about their frustrations with the film and Age of Ultron director Joss Whedon's departure from Twitter after he encountered so much Twitter vitriol from a not-so-civil segment of those female geeks. I planned to watch this blockbuster that caused these lapsed Whedon fans to Hulk out on Twitter--and broke Whedon's spirit "a little bit" while he worked on it--about three or four weeks after its crowded opening weekend, which is when the crowds for these tentpole blockbusters usually dwindle completely, as does the possibility of having your morning or afternoon movie screening be ruined by an imbecile who brings his tablet to the theater and keeps switching on his tablet during the feature presentation (that, by the way, happened during Kingsman: The Secret Service). Trying not to click to any of the Age of Ultron think pieces during those three weeks before I saw the movie was quite a challenge. I was interested in what the writers of these pieces were talking about, but at the same time, these pieces gave away much of the movie, and I hadn't watched it yet. So it was a relief to finally be able to read them after watching Age of Ultron.

For Age of Ultron and other summer blockbusters, YOMYOMF likes to take several of their writers and have them give roundtable discussions of those blockbusters. I'm often interested in what YOMYOMF has to say in these discussions, even if it results in an inane moment like one of their writers giving director Bong Joon-ho's terrific Snowpiercer--a Chris Evans-led comic book adaptation that, as a movie, is superior to even any of the MCU comic book adaptations that either feature Evans or don't--only one out of four stars (actually, YOMYOMF uses bananas instead of stars for their movie rating system). So I went over to YOMYOMF's discussion of Age of Ultron, and the most interesting part of the discussion has to be the spelling of "take over the reins" as "take over the reigns." Yeah, that's not how you spell it.

It's a common mistake. "Reigns" and "reins" are both homonyms related to control and dominance, so they can be easily mixed up. I don't want to single out YOMYOMF because everyone does it. Even newspapers like the New York Observer misspell "reins" as "reigns" too, like when the Observer brought up South African stand-up comic Trevor Noah's controversial--and, of course, just like in the case of Age of Ultron, led-to-an-outcry-on-Twitter--promotion from Daily Show correspondent to Daily Show host.

It should be "Mr. Noah will officially take the reins on September 28," not "Mr. Noah will officially take the reigns on September 28." The reign of "reigns" over "reins" continues elsewhere.

Like Ann Peebles said, I can't stand the "reigns" against my window. Here's how I differentiate "reigns" from "reins" and avoid misspelling one or the other: yes, both words are related to control and dominance, but "reign," when used as a noun, means the time period when someone--or a team like the Golden State Warriors--is in charge or is dominant. "Rein," as a noun, means either a restraint, as in Tobey Maguire pulling on Seabiscuit's reins to slow the horse down, or a metaphorical steering wheel ("Mr. Noah will officially take the reins").

In verb form, to "reign" means to rule as a king or to conquer like one ("Marvel may currently reign supreme at the box office"), and to "rein" means to restrain, but unlike "reign," "rein" must always be accompanied by "in" or "back" (two such sentences are two of the above sentences with circled typos, which should be spelled as "It reined in character development!" and "The Wild Wild West reined itself in with Season 3"). Another difference between "reign" and "rein" when they're verbs is that "reign" is an intransitive verb, which means it doesn't take an object, while "rein" is more often a transitive verb, which means it needs an object ("character development," "itself"). Here's a fun way to remember how to differentiate "reign" from "rein": "reign" is the verb that prefers to be alone at the top, while "rein" is the verb that doesn't like being alone. It's the Al Green of verbs.

So on August 6, Jon Stewart will cause Daily Show fans' living rooms to get dusty when he vamooses his exhausted dad-bod out of Comedy Central and hands over the reins of his show to Noah, not the "reigns." Meanwhile, at the end of Age of Ultron, Danny Elfman temporarily takes over the musical reins from the film's other composer, Brian Tyler, and restates for the last time in the film his "New Avengers" theme, a straight-out-of-vintage-Elfman-circa-1990 update of Alan Silvestri's main theme from the first Avengers. Also at the end of Age of Ultron, Joss lets the Russo brothers take the reins of the Avengers movie franchise and is now probably giggling to himself the following: "They are gonna be so exhausted halfway through the making of Infinity War Part I."

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Bob's Burgers, "Midday Run"

On some Fridays, I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. It's the "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

"Midday Run" is the second episode during Bob's Burgers' fifth season to riff on a classic movie that was released in 1988. "Work Hard or Die Trying, Girl," the show's fifth-season premiere, transformed both Die Hard and Working Girl into school musicals, with memorable and intentionally awful-sounding results ("I'm Grubin'/I'm Hans Gruber and I'm Grubin'/And sometimes that could mean shootin'/Mr. Takagi in the head!"), and now "Midday Run" pays tribute to another movie from 1988, and it's one I adore even more than Die Hard: the extremely foul-mouthed and eminently quotable Midnight Run.

The Robert De Niro/Charles Grodin buddy flick wasn't a big box-office hit like Die Hard and Working Girl, but it has a cult following that includes the likes of Dan Harmon and Paul Thomas Anderson, whose first feature film, 1996's Sydney (a.k.a. Hard Eight), is basically a spinoff movie all about Philip Baker Hall's Midnight Run mob lawyer character Sidney (spelled differently in PTA's movie due to what I presume are legal issues that PTA was clever enough to skirt around, unlike Larry the Cable Guy). Midnight Run is special to me because it's where I first learned the terms "chorizo and eggs" and "white-collar criminal," as well as 132 different ways to say "fuck." Like I once said to another Midnight Run fan on Facebook, Midnight Run was my Sesame Street when I was in junior high.

Episode writer Scott Jacobson must have felt the same way about Midnight Run when he was younger because he bases Tina's zeal for her duties as a Wagstaff hall monitor on Jack Walsh's intensely driven mission to deliver the Duke to L.A. (so that means in addition to her male butt-obsessed erotic fanfic author side, Tina's also got a stern lawwoman side). In Tina's case, her Duke is Zeke (Bobby Tisdale). He's in trouble for stealing the costume of the school mascot, the Wagstaff Whaler, so Mr. Frond (David Herman), the guidance counselor and hall monitor supervisor, assigns his toughest hall monitor to deliver Zeke to the principal's office. Of course, Zeke constantly attempts to escape, and like Jack, Tina finds out her prisoner is a much more noble soul than she originally thought: he stole the costume to entertain his grandma (also voiced by Tisdale) at her retirement home before she goes into surgery.

What I like most about "Midday Run" is that instead of referencing the not-so-prime-time-friendly dialogue from Midnight Run (the one bit of movie dialogue that's reenacted in "Midday Run" comes from a different movie, The Fugitive), the episode opts to reference Midnight Run's ambience, particularly on the musical side. Bob's Burgers creator/composer Loren Bouchard and his fellow composers Chris Maxwell and Phil Hernandez, the duo known as the Elegant Too, are the MVPs of "Midday Run." They amusingly channel themes from Danny Elfman's bluesy and lively score to Midnight Run, which is currently in rotation on "AFOS Prime" on AFOS.

You can make out bits and pieces of "Walsh Gets the Duke" and "J.W. Gets a Plan" throughout the "Midday Run" score. After that score he wrote for Midnight Run early on in his film music career, Elfman went on to pen scores that are far more profound or popular--whether for Tim Burton or various tentpole franchises--and yet, the Midnight Run score remains my favorite Elfman score (for a brief time in the late '80s, the Midnight Run score was particularly popular with trailer houses). While Elfman's work for Burton frequently brings to mind the weirdest moments of his Oingo Boingo days, the Midnight Run score channels Boingo at its most tuneful and dance floor-friendly (it's no surprise that Elfman's Boingo bandmates took part in the recording of the Midnight Run score). The "Midday Run" score is the best tribute to a rather underappreciated Elfman score that doesn't often receive such tributes.

As a story that's primarily about the Belcher kids and their Wagstaff classmates (speaking of which, another appearance by Brian Huskey's likable hypochondriac Regular Sized Rudy, who looks up to Tina as a hall monitor role model, is always welcome), "Midday Run" is more pleasant than laugh-out-loud funny, but Regular Sized Rudy and Zeke nicely receive substantial character development here (while Mr. Frond remains an inflexible and clueless bureaucrat, and why does he seem to be in charge of everything at Wagstaff, as if he's a mini-Mr. Belding who, as many comedians would say about Belding on April Richardson's Saved by the Bell podcast Go Bayside!, just can't seem to go away?). The episode's amiableness also brings to mind a second work in addition to Midnight Run. This particular work is an animated show the Bob's Burgers writing staff might not have been aware of while working on "Midday Run": the forgotten early '00s Disney show Fillmore!, which was created by a pre-Walking Dead Scott M. Gimple.

Fillmore! was a '70s cop show spoof where the buddy cops were a pair of middle school hall monitors, black skater kid Cornelius Fillmore and his goth partner Ingrid Third, and all the characters on the show were named after San Francisco streets, an odd touch I especially enjoyed because the Bay Area's my home turf (the San Francisco street thing was actually both Gimple's way of paying tribute to the '70s cop show The Streets of San Francisco and a shout-out to Bay Area friends whose couches he previously crashed on). Like "Midday Run," Fillmore! wasn't laugh-out-loud funny, but there was much to like about it, whether it was the '70s-isms, the diverse cast or the Latino kid who acted as the show's version of the obligatory irritable police captain (he was voiced by then-SNLer Horatio Sanz). There's this Fillmore!-esque vibe to "Midday Run," particularly in the scenes between kiddie cops Tina and Regular Sized Rudy, that makes the episode appealing, in addition to all the Midnight Run score references.

And now that Bob's Burgers has just been renewed for a sixth season, I wonder what other movies from 1988 will get the Bob's Burgers treatment (as this ode to the movie year of 1988 reminds me, the summer of '88 also included Big, which I could envision being turned into a Gene story where he thinks he's been magically transformed into a grown-up but he actually wasn't, or maybe it should be a Louise story), as well as what other facets there are to Tina's unique and unusually confident personality. We've seen the erotic fanfic author with a crazy imagination, the investigative journalist, the avid Equestranauts toy collector, the "bat-zilla" who craves attention and now in both "Tina Tailor Soldier Spy" and "Midday Run," the lawwoman. It's not a bad life for an oddly heroic kid who doesn't consider herself a hero because she puts her bra on one boob at a time like everyone else.

Memorable quotes:

Throwback Thursday: The Simpsons Movie

Throwback Thursday begins today, the first day of the new year, on the AFOS blog. Every Thursday in 2015, I'll be randomly pulling out from my desk cabinet--with my eyes closed--a movie ticket I saved. Then I'll discuss the movie on the ticket and maybe a little bit of its score, which might be now streaming on AFOS.

Much of why 2007's The Simpsons Movie succeeds as both a Simpsons story and a movie is because the movie's writers, a murderers' row of veteran Simpsons scribes (including reclusive former Simpsons writer John Swartzwelder), didn't recycle too much material from its TV counterpart like one of the first genuine blockbusters based on a TV show, 1979's Star Trek: The Motion Picture, so boringly did. Sure, longtime Simpsons gags like Homer choking Bart, the chalkboard gag during the TV version's opening titles and Mr. Burns releasing the hounds are revisited in the movie, as is the light drama of the marital challenges Marge must deal with while living with the perpetually lazy man-child that is Homer, a thread that's been a part of the long-running animated show since 1990's "Life on the Fast Lane." But not once does The Simpsons Movie feel like a tired rehash of the show's greatest hits in the same way that Star Trek: TMP was a rehash of Kirk's battle of wits with a rogue space probe in the classic Trek episode "The Changeling"--or that many Simpsons episodes after season 8 (the show's last consistently great season) have been rehashes of plots from earlier episodes.

It helps that the story in The Simpsons Movie, which FXX included as part of the unprecedented 12-day Simpsons marathon that revived media interest in the show last summer, is both a story that The Simpsons, despite its post-season 8 habits of repetition and derivativeness, hadn't previously done and an ideal one for the scope of the big screen: Homer's clueless treatment of the environment gets Springfield into trouble with the EPA. But when the agency intervenes and makes an already crummy town an even crummier existence for the town's citizens--Simpsons creator Matt Groening and his fellow Simpsons Movie screenwriters enclosed an entire town in a giant dome two years before Stephen King did the same in his novel Under the Dome, which King actually first tried to write back in the '70s--an exiled, on-the-lam Homer must undo the damage he's done and save Springfield. Another bit of storytelling in the movie that the show hadn't done before was a surprisingly affecting subplot where Bart, tired once again of Homer's antics, considers adopting the kindly and deeply religious Flanders as his new father figure. Screw all those Squishees, Buzz Colas and Duff energy drinks Simpsons fans flocked to 7-Eleven for when the convenience store chain temporarily converted some of its stores into Kwik-E-Marts to promote The Simpsons Movie. What I really wanted more than any of those items was the cup of cocoa Flanders makes for Bart.





Both longtime Simpsons episode director David Silverman, who directed The Simpsons Movie, and the movie's writers clearly wanted to craft a large-scale comedic blockbuster in the mold of The Incredibles, Galaxy Quest and Ghostbusters (in fact, The Simpsons Movie's chief villain, voiced by frequent Simpsons guest star Albert Brooks, is an EPA employee, much like the main antagonist in Ghostbusters). They largely succeeded at crafting such a blockbuster. They went bigger and bolder with the action and the humor (many of my favorite sight gags in the movie, like the wide shot of the churchgoers in Rev. Lovejoy's parish and the customers in Moe's Tavern switching places, make clever use of the widescreen, thanks to Silverman being inspired by the widescreen compositions of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and Bad Day at Black Rock), but without neglecting the irreverence and sharp social satire of many of the show's funniest half-hours, whether it's 1997's "The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show" or "Homer Badman," the 1994 episode that, in one of my favorite Simpsons sight gags, turned Gentle Ben into a daytime talk show host. A great example of The Simpsons Movie's sharp social satire is an eerily prescient gag about NSA surveillance of phone calls, which is especially eerie and funny nowadays due to the NSA scandal.

Moments like that NSA scene or the church and bar gag bring us back to why we fell in love with The Simpsons in the first place and why we still catch the show on Fox from time to time, despite its many post-season 8 missteps, whether it's the show inanely revealing Principal Skinner to be an imposter or more recently, the Comic Book Guy getting married to a one-dimensional, clichéd-as-fuck Japanese geek girl (an ugly and unattractive white guy hooking up with a hot Asian woman: yeah, I haven't seen that before) or the show's bizarre attachment to Hank Azaria's increasingly dated character of Apu. That character really ought to be retired from the show ever since Simpsons fan Hari Kondabolu sparked an insightful discussion about why The Simpsons' primary Indian character is a tiresome stereotype and a "weird relic from another era" when his humorous Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell rant about Apu went viral ("A white guy doing an impression of a white guy making fun of my father! If I saw Hank Azaria do that voice at a party, I would kick the shit out of him!"), and Azaria surprisingly agreed with Kondabolu's criticisms.

The Simpsons Movie is as close as Simpsons co-executive producer James L. Brooks--who, outside of The Simpsons, is best known for smaller-scale, character-driven fare like The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Taxi, Broadcast News and As Good as It Gets--has gotten to making a crowd-pleasing action comedy. Brooks had more creative input in The Simpsons Movie than in more recent seasons of the show: for instance, he chose Hans Zimmer, his musical collaborator from the 1994 fiasco I'll Do Anything, As Good as It Gets and Spanglish, over longtime Simpsons series composer Alf Clausen for the task of composing the movie's score. Zimmer took Danny Elfman's Simpsons theme and etched out of it a charming new motif for Homer, the movie's most significant and memorable composition that's not "Spider-Pig." While I would have wanted to hear Clausen work his usual magic on The Simpsons Movie, Zimmer did a solid job musically bringing the characters to the big screen. (By the way, one Simpsons character who didn't make that jump to the big screen and should have was Rainier Wolfcastle, the star of the hilariously over-the-top McBain action flicks the Simpsons were frequently seen watching in the show's earlier seasons. The absence of McBain, a character I would have loved to have seen on the big screen, is the movie's biggest misstep. Rainier was replaced in the movie by a presidential version of the action star Rainier was a parody of, Arnold Schwarzenegger, voiced not by the former Cully-forn-ya governor himself but by Rainier's usual alter ego Harry Shearer.)

Brooks also directed the movie's voice actor recording sessions, something he hadn't done since The Simpsons' earlier seasons. His input, which veteran Simpsons writer Jon Vitti once noted was crucial in making the beloved 1991 episode "Lisa's Substitute" resonate with viewers, is most evident in the movie's most emotional moments, particularly a videotaped farewell message from Julie Kavner's quietly anguished Marge to Homer. "We were really trying to get to a woman who is completely broken and her spirit is defeated. I got there I guess by breaking the actress' spirit. She worked so hard at it and she wanted it to be as good and that's also a big impact Jim had on that whole scene," said Simpsons Movie co-writer Mike Scully to the Canadian site MoviesOnline in 2007. Kavner reportedly did between 100 and 150 takes for Marge's video message scene. The take that was used in the movie is perhaps her most sublime moment as a voice actor.

The perfectionism Silverman, Brooks and the writers aimed for in The Simpsons Movie's voice acting was also evident in the movie's outstanding animation work, which was divided among four different studios, including Film Roman, the primary animation studio for The Simpsons since its fourth season. Groening grumbled in 2013 that "[the movie] took us four years [to make] and it killed us." So it's unlikely we'll ever get that Simpsons Movie sequel Maggie was hinting at in the movie's end credits. But if the Simpsons characters' appearances on the big screen are limited to terrific theatrical shorts like 2012's Oscar-nominated Maggie solo short "The Longest Daycare," which Silverman also directed, then I don't mind the lack of a second Simpsons feature film.

"I can't believe we're paying to see something we get on TV for free. If you ask me, everybody in this theater is a giant sucker, especially you!," says Homer from his movie theater seat as he breaks the fourth wall at the start of the movie. Yes, Homer, you're a bit right. All of us who flocked to The Simpsons Movie in the theaters back in the summer of 2007 were giant suckers. But the still-funny Simpsons Movie is hardly a sham.

Selections from Hans Zimmer's Simpsons Movie score can be heard during the animation music block "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

Tip-Top Quotables: Special Halloween Edition

(Photo source: DVD Beaver)

My favorite monthly section in old Source magazine issues was "Hip-Hop Quotables," in which the Source editors printed out their favorite new rap verse of the month, from the first bar to the last. "Tip-Top Quotables," which I've named after that Source section, is a collection of my favorite quotes of the week from anywhere, whether it's a recent TV show or a new rap verse. "TTQ" won't appear on this blog every week. It'll appear whenever the fuck I feel like it.

* "I worked harder on that probably than anything I'd done in my life, so I was really, really sad that it didn't find an audience when it came out. But then, over the course of 10 or 15 years, to see that it really did—it just was a slow-cooking thing—it was one of those really rare things that just took on a life of its own. It was incredibly gratifying. I've worked on many things that failed, and that, more than anything else at that point, was something that I really wanted people to find. But when it came out, nobody knew how to market it. Nobody knew what it was. It wasn't a marketable entity. But to Disney's credit, they saw that it was developing a following, and they sensed they could nurture that and make it have a second and third life. So really, kudos to them. To say, 'You know what? This thing has potential now, 10 years later. Let's feed it, let's nurture it, let's develop it more. Let's re-release it, let's do an 'inspired by' record.' They really did catch on after the fact. But at the time, it really was heartbreaking."--Danny Elfman on 1993's The Nightmare Before Christmas, the sixth of 842 feature films he scored for Tim Burton, A.V. Club

(AFOS programming note: "This Is Halloween" from The Nightmare Before Christmas can be heard during the annual AFOS Halloween night block "Buckets of Score," from 5pm to 11pm Pacific.)

* "Halloween is when every hack comedian's premises turn into costumes."--Hari Kondabolu

* "Do you know why we carve jack-o'-lanterns on Halloween? The origins of this curious tradition actually date back hundreds of years, to the early Puritan settlers in the American colonies. The Puritans believed that every Halloween, the Devil would enchant the pumpkins' faces so that they would come to life and say complimentary things about the legs of all the Puritan men, such as, 'Nice legs. Very muscular,' and 'Your legs are tremendous!' The man who got the most leg-based compliments from the jack-o'-lanterns would then be forced to spend Halloween in jail."--ClickHole, "Exploring The Origins Of 4 Halloween Traditions"

* "To increase blood pressure in the black community, we are adding sodium to sports clothing."--the Nixon Administration's '70s robot R.A.C.I.S.T. (Robotic Asynchronous Computerized Information System Two-Thousand), Black Dynamite, "Black Jaws! Or Finger Lickin' Chicken of the Sea"

* "Later, an interracial couple was attacked, but the shark did not eat the white girl. In fact, the shark even gave her a ride home."--R.A.C.I.S.T., updating President Nixon on the activities of a shark that attacks only black swimmers, Black Dynamite, "Black Jaws"

* "It's only a beach, Cream Corn. Just a big-ass bathtub with fish in it. And if you seen one big-ass bathtub with fish in it, you seen 'em all."--Black Dynamite (Michael Jai White), Black Dynamite, "Black Jaws" (true that, Dynamite; the beach is overrated as fuck)

* "I'm in love with chicken waings/Fuck them string beans/Gotta feel that hypertension/Tuggin' my heartstrings/And when I'm feelin' hungry/Start it off with ribs and fries/Ham hocks and bacon grease/Diabetic paradiiiiiiiiise!"--"Thick James" (Phonte), singing the "Mary Jane"-style "Chicken Waings" (composed by music supervisor Fatin "10" Horton) during Black Dynamite's "Black Jaws" end credits

Marry Me's Halloween episode

* Julie (Jessica St. Clair) to her son Mason (Jet Jurgensmeyer): "Well, you are in a lot of trouble, Mister, so you get inside and you start practicing that Mandarin."
Mason: "I wish Annie and Jake were my mom! [Proceeds to say to Julie a bit of Mandarin dialogue that's so shocking to her that she gasps]"
Jake (Ken Marino): "What does that mean?"
Julie: "'Die, white devil.' He's going through a phase."
--Marry Me, "Scary Me"

* "Wow, babe, you are just like Oprah. You don't have any kids of your own, but you tell everybody else what to do with theirs."--Jake (Marino), complimenting his fiancée Annie (Casey Wilson) on the advice she gave at the end of Halloween night to her arch-enemy Julie about kids, Marry Me, "Scary Me"

* "We have no idea how prevalent sugar is in almost everything that we eat. Look at Clamato juice, the original tomato cocktail with clam. One serving has 11 grams of sugar in it, so they clearly thought, 'Well, look, let's improve the taste by adding sugar,' instead of thinking, 'Let's improve the taste by removing the clam.'"--Last Week Tonight's John Oliver

Robin Williams' podcast appearances illustrate what the beloved funnyman was like off-stage and off-screen

(Photo source: Marc Maron)

Robin Williams' A Night at the Met taught me as a kid that these things called stand-up albums can still be funny even without visuals. I played the fuck out of my cassette copy of A Night at the Met when I was either 13 or 14. I practically memorized the first two minutes of that album, where Williams introduced himself as Minnie Pearl ("Hooooooowdy! Oh, wrong opera house...") and then smoothly handled an annoying heckler.

Williams' knack for both improv and juggling various accents and zany voices first made me laugh via Mork & Mindy reruns and 1987's Good Morning, Vietnam, the first movie to let Williams be Williams instead of a watered-down screen version of himself, which was why it became his first box-office hit after nearly a decade of one underperforming comedy movie after another (although I'm fond of Moscow on the Hudson and The Best of Times, a Ron Shelton-scripted sports flick that paired him with the less manic but equally great Kurt Russell). His ability to bring all those accents and voices to life was so strong that even when it's divorced from the visuals during the Night at the Met album, it still cracked me up.

Williams, who was battling alcoholism and depression and unfortunately, took his own life yesterday, was the kind of larger-than-life, anarchic entertainer you love the most when you're a kid or teen. A generation of '70s and '80s kids loved him for being the bizarre Mork. The generation after that loved him for his shtick as either the Genie from Aladdin, the perfect embodiment of Williams' freewheeling brand of humor, or Mrs. Doubtfire. But like many things you enjoy as a kid, parts of A Night at the Met haven't aged well, just like how Williams' dialogue about chasing Vietnamese women in Good Morning, Vietnam screams out that it's the '80s, even though it's supposed to be the '60s, or how his reference to the Dog Pound from The Arsenio Hall Show during Aladdin is so 1992. When you're 13 or 14, Williams' imitation of a slow Chinese driver in A Night at the Met doesn't make you cringe because you haven't been taught yet that you don't have to tolerate non-Asian comedians' often lousy and offensive impressions of Asian folks. When you're in your thirties and your tastes in comedy have leaned more towards the likes of Hari Kondabolu, Aamer Rahman, Kristina Wong and W. Kamau Bell, who, like Williams, hails from the Bay Area, Williams' Chinese driver character makes your eyes roll.

That's why, when I outgrew some of the hyperactive, accent humor-driven shtick Williams brought to his family-friendly (and often mawkish) comedy movies, the talk show appearances where he'd frequently puncture the stuffiness of both his interviewers and the talk show format and finally, last year's CBS show The Crazy Ones, I was glad to see Williams expand his range and show a different side of himself: as an effective and understated dramatic actor (Insomnia, World's Greatest Dad). And something that's been overlooked in all the obits that have mentioned his comedic achievements, his film work and his kindness as a person was that way before WTF with Marc Maron and the comedy podcast explosion, Williams was one of the world's earliest celebrity podcasters. From 2000 to 2002, Williams hosted a radio show for Audible.com and mixed free-form material with interviews with other comedians and actors, as well as authors like John Irving and Harlan Ellison.



"Once I started doing it, I went, 'Oh, this is great!' It's like going back to the great comedy albums, like Jonathan Winters, Firesign Theater, George Carlin," said Williams while he promoted his Audible.com show to Charlie Rose, who's really showing his age while trying to understand and then explain to viewers the concept of downloadable audio.

Williams' Audible show is no longer available "due to licensing contracts expiring," which sucks because it'd be really nice to re-experience Williams the radio host and what his free-form humor was like when he wasn't playing to a theater crowd, a studio audience or a club full of drunks. In all the time I've spent up in San Francisco, I never got to meet or stumble into Williams, who called San Francisco home and preferred it over showbiz-minded L.A. ("I once got stopped by a cop [in L.A.] and he handed me a script"), but I was always curious about what he was like off-stage or without any cameras to play to. Williams' guest appearances on WTF and Harmontown offer some good glimpses of what that true--and rather shy--self was like.

The 2010 WTF episode, which Maron removed from premium subscriber-only status immediately after Williams' death so that he could let everyone access the episode, makes for poignant listening now, not just because it features a soft-spoken Williams being honest and candid with Maron--who's had similar struggles with drugs and divorce--about his relapse while filming a movie in Alaska, his divorces, the accusations that he was a joke thief and the moments of depression he (and David Letterman) experienced after heart surgery. It's also because the WTF episode--the episode that was my first exposure to Maron's podcast, as well as many listeners' first exposure to WTF--is like the passing of the torch from a short-lived early podcaster to a podcaster who has gone on to do much more with digital media than Williams even achieved as part of Audible and has turned into a podcasting pioneer. While it's mostly serious, Williams' WTF installment is still funny as hell, like when he recalled how the shooting of Awakenings in New York got disrupted by a wino who was a De Niro fan or when he imagined a conversation with his own conscience. Williams was even more subdued during his brief 2013 appearance on Harmontown with Bobcat Goldthwait, who, as a filmmaker, got perhaps my favorite dramatic performance out of Williams in the dark comedy World's Greatest Dad.



On the night of the recording of Harmontown, Williams happened to be browsing through comics with Goldthwait at Meltdown Comics, the L.A. comic shop where Harmontown is frequently recorded, and hosts Dan Harmon and Jeff B. Davis surprised the Nerdist Theatre audience by bringing Williams and Goldthwait up to the stage. During the 2013 show, we learn about Williams' tastes in comics (Moebius and Transmetropolitan), which were as hip as his tastes in music (as Questlove recalled on Instagram, Williams once recognized in an elevator the members of the Roots, whose music one of his sons introduced him to, and he fangirled big time over meeting them). It exemplifies something that was so endearing about Williams: as he grew older, he continued to be delighted by new things, whether it was a younger comedian's work, a Warren Ellis comic or the sounds of Questlove and Black Thought. And like the WTF conversation, the Harmontown episode provides a glimpse of Williams' shyness.

When Williams wasn't on, like the way he was on stage at the Met or while promoting his latest movie at a press junket or on a talk show, he came across as a genuinely shy and humble person who felt more comfortable when he was channeling other characters--like "Robin Williams"--than when he was being himself. In the coming weeks, we're going to hear ad nauseum about "the clown who was crying on the inside" a la Bill Murray in Quick Change or Pagliacci. I'm already sick of that goddamn cliché. Using that cliché to describe his depression is as tired as all those Williams movie trailers that were soundtracked with James Brown's "I Feel Good." As those podcast appearances demonstrate, Williams was complicated, much like depression itself. That complicatedness is part of why we liked Williams and now miss him.

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

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

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

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



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



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

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

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



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

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

Waynestrumentals: And now, a different theme from every screen incarnation of Batman, including the crappy or racist versions

(Editor's note: Before we begin, here's what past Batverse comics writer Ed Brubaker tweeted about a certain senseless act in Colorado:

My thoughts exactly. Now on to the post.)

(Additional editor's note: The themes are in reverse chronological order as a nod to Dark Knight trilogy director Christopher Nolan's 2000 breakout film Memento, starting with a new score cue from The Dark Knight Rises as the track that represents the Nolan version of Batman on this post and concluding with music from a delightfully racist '40s Batman serial.)

Brittany Wakefield

(One more editor's note: Here on Blogger, I don't like to publish posts that don't contain a lot of text. That's what Tumblr is for. But I haven't had time to write so much text to accompany a Bat-load of Spotify and YouTube embeds, so Brittany Wakefield, a neighbor of mine who's a part-time beautician, volunteered to step in and provide the accompanying text to get more writing experience as preparation for the essay-writing portion of her GED test, even though she'd rather write about something called The Bad Girls Club, which she tells me is her favorite show. By the way, unlike a certain beautician who went on to become one of the modern-day Batverse comics' best writers, Brittany isn't familiar at all with Batman.)

In 1932, DC Comics began publishing the adventures of the world's first openly Jewish superhero, Ira Batman. By day, he was rich nightclub comedian Bruce Bruce, who played all the black rooms and some white rooms. By night, he suited up as Ira Batman (or The Batman, which is much less Jewish, or in later years, simply Batman). He chased after criminals to avenge the double murder of his Uncle Ben and Aunt Bernice. Ira's popularity in the funny books led to lots of screen versions of the Caped Crucifier, including the Christian Bale movies, which have come to an end with The Dark Knight Rises.

I'm sure I'll be texting during The Dark Knight Rises when I see it, but if there are at least two or three action scenes that aren't boring, then I'll totes take a break from my texts to look up at the screen and peep what's going on. In the Bale movies, Ira is referred to by other peeps as the Dark Knight because he could barely move around in his armor and had trouble removing it when he had to pee, just like a knight:

I don't know what Justice League: Doom is. Jim, do you know what that is?

(Editor's note: No, I've never watched it. I'm behind on the DC animated movies because I quit Netflix about a year ago. Netflix, wha happen?):


Batman: Year One flashed back to Ira's first year as a crimefighter. OMG, Ryan from The O.C. voiced Ira! I lurve him!:


Okay, I've seen Young Justice a few times, but only because Superboy's cute. Ira shows up sometimes in this cartoon, just to deliver buttloads of exposition to Robin and his peeps:


In Batman: Under the Red Hood, Ira fights someone named the Red Hood. If it's anything like that time Christina kicked Julie's booty on TBGC, then I'm on board:


In 2010, Ira appeared in Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths. Again, I don't know what that is. Jim?

(Editor's note: No clue either, Brittany.):

Ira teamed up with Superman in the cartoon movie Superman/Batman: Public Enemies and its sequel Superman/Batman: Apocalypse. In the clips I FF'd through, Superman sounded a lot like Pete, that cute but really old doc on Private Practice:

A few months after The Dark Knight ruled the summer, Cartoon Network premiered Batman: The Bold and the Beautiful, in which Batman was the CEO of a high-powered fashion house:

A week before the release of The Dark Knight, Warner Bros. Animation dropped Batman: Gotham Knight as a straight-to-DVD cartoon tie-in. Instead of a dark knight, in this movie, he was a Gotham knight, which meant he could barely move around while wearing a buttload of mascara like Criss Angel:

The cartoon movie Justice League: The New Frontier imagined Ira in the '50s, just like how J-Biebs dressed like a '50s dude at the NRJ Awards. OMG, J-Biebs was so cute when he slicked back his hair that night!: