I Can't Believe I've Never Seen It Till Now!: Labyrinth

(Photo source: FictionMachine)

An updated-in-2020 version of the following blog post can be found in If You Haven't Seen It, It's New to You: The Movies and TV Shows Some of Us Regretted Not Catching Until Later. The 2020 book was written and self-published by yours truly. Get the paperback edition of If You Haven't Seen It, It's New to You now!

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"I Can't Believe I've Never Seen It Till Now!" is a new series of posts that will appear sporadically here on the AFOS blog rather than weekly. In each post, I will reveal that I never watched a certain popular movie until very recently, and that's largely because I'm Filipino, we're always late to the party and that's how we do.

Luther is turning into yet another TV show that has no reason to go on after the departure of its breakout star, and I'm not talking Idris Elba. The star I'm referring to is Ruth Wilson, who's currently busy with Showtime's The Affair. But I can see why Elba is eager to go on playing DCI John Luther for as long as possible and why he enjoys playing him way more than any other role, like the role so many of his fans want him to aggressively pursue, James Bond. And who could blame him? As Luther, Elba gets to live out fantasies he must have always had about outwitting or intimidating all the ugly-looking white psychos who either make life difficult and unpleasant for people of color in the U.K. (and in any other country marred by racism) or scare Chris Rock out of sharing an elevator with them.

At times, Luther interestingly feels like a non-comedic version of Rock's post-Columbine stand-up routine in which he takes away power from the racist Trenchcoat Mafia in the only way he knows how: by making mincemeat of them and their whininess comedically. But as a procedural, Luther is nothing really extraordinary, and the psychos Luther tangles with tend to be boring and one-dimensional--except for gorgeous but sociopathic astrophysicist Alice Morgan, an antagonist-turned-ally beautifully played by Wilson. Without Alice to play off of, Luther as a character feels a little less alive. All the character has going for him are the badass way he stuffs his hands into his pockets, Elba's charisma and occasional sense of humor in the role and my favorite trait of Luther's. It's the one trait of Luther's that has kept me interested in Elba's show, even though I dislike shows built around serial killers: an immense love for the late David Bowie, whose music helps Luther to think.

Luther's favorite hero isn't Sherlock or Shaft. It's Bowie, and it's hard to dislike a detective character who worships Bowie and applies his songwriting process to criminal profiling. Without Alice, the show doesn't really have a reason to go on living. But I'm not worried about the show right now. I'm more worried about DCI Luther. How's he dealing with Bowie's passing? Without Bowie around to record another album and give him motivation to outwit serial killers, Luther's probably now an even more broken man than he already is.

In the underwhelming, Wilson-less Luther two-parter that premiered last month on BBC, the only enjoyable moment briefly revisits Luther's admiration of the Thin White Duke and his ability to quote the deepest of Bowie deep cuts. In this case, "We Are the Dead," a track from 1974's Diamond Dogs, gets Luther to realize that a cannibalistic serial killer is suffering from Cotard's syndrome, a mental disorder in which the patient thinks he's dead. DS Emma Lane (Game of Thrones alum Rose Leslie), a younger detective who partners up with Luther to track down this madman, who killed DCI Theo Bloom (Darren Boyd), her partner, with a bomb, quotes a line from Star Wars to Luther--she and Bloom were Star Wars fans--but Luther's tastes in sci-fi lean more towards Bowie concept albums like Diamond Dogs. That's probably the only kind of sci-fi Luther's into, so the Star Wars reference sails past him. Sensing that Star Wars isn't helping a still-grieving Lane to stay focused on her work, Luther attempts to get her to stay focused by introducing to her his favorite method of staying focused. He asks Lane, "Do you know any David Bowie?" She replies, "Um, yeah, I liked him in that film, the one in the maze, with the baby and the puppets," and Luther's wordless response is a funny little look that says, "Are you bloody kidding me?"

The film Lane's referring to is, of course, the Jim Henson-directed, George Lucas-produced Labyrinth. She outs herself as having come from the generation of little girls who grew up watching on telly a teenage Jennifer Connelly rescue her kidnapped baby brother from Bowie's Tina Turner wig-wearing, codpiece-clad Goblin King, and that film was their first taste of Bowie. Meanwhile, I'm from the generation that was first exposed to Bowie via MTV, which was dominated by Bowie's outlandish and suave presence for most of the '80s. But MTV would only play either the Lodger/Scary Monsters years (the funereal, gloomy-looking video for "Ashes to Ashes" used to creep out my five-year-old self, who was allowed to watch anything that wasn't R-rated movies, and that anything included funereal, gloomy-looking Bowie videos), the chart-topping Nile Rodgers era or the "Blue Jean"/Labyrinth/Glass Spider stuff. So I was totally unaware of the sounds of pre-1979 Bowie--a lot of his pre-'79 material (like the 1973 tune "Drive-In Saturday," which I was originally going to name the AFOS weekend block "Hall H" after) is on some other level of excellence--and I had to discover those sounds somewhere else, and that place was the local new wave station, which, in my teen years, was Live 105. In the late '80s and early '90s, that station was especially fond of "Suffragette City," "Golden Years" and "Young Americans," so those three became among my favorite Bowie tunes (my all-time favorite Bowie tune, by the way, is a tune I discovered much later, when I started downloading singles off iTunes: his Giorgio Moroder-produced Cat People theme, which is currently in rotation on AFOS, until my station goes off the air for good on January 31).

KITS also ended up being the station where I first learned Bowie passed away. I was flipping from station to station (no pun intended) on my portable FM radio while making myself a late dinner, and I stumbled into a double shot of "Rebel Rebel" and "Ziggy Stardust," two Bowie tunes I hadn't heard in ages. I couldn't help singing along to both tunes while cooking and was like, "Wow, Live 105's listenable again."

Then the Live 105 DJ explained that he was playing nothing but Bowie tracks for an hour, after being shocked to receive about an hour ago the news of the death of this legendary musician (and sometime actor) he admired because Bowie made it okay for him to be different. I too was stunned to learn about his death because Blackstar, the Kendrick Lamar-influenced album that's, sadly, now his final album, had been released only two days before on Bowie's 69th birthday, and also because Bowie was a seemingly immortal alien from the planet Rocksalot. I thought he was going to live forever.

(Photo source: cosmicbreadcrum)

Thanks to cancer, Bowie wasn't able to live as long as Jareth the Goblin King, whom I've always assumed is hundreds of years old. I also always assumed that Labyrinth was inessential, watered-down Bowie, both music-wise and acting-wise, which was why I never watched the film until shortly before Netflix streaming removed it from its library in December (watching Labyrinth for the first time after marathoning Netflix's Jessica Jones resulted in Jones and Labyrinth turning into a fascinating double-header about women who triumph over sexual predators who are basically spoiled man-children, and that's exactly how Bowie approached Jareth, as "a big kid"). I'm glad to admit I was so wrong about Labyrinth.

Thinking outside the Fox: A speculation over how The Force Awakens will open without the Fox fanfare (accompanied by my older brother's doodles in the 1978 Star Wars Storybook from when he was six)

When Star Wars: The Force Awakens premieres in just two weeks, it will be the first live-action Star Wars film to open without composer Alfred Newman's majestic 20th Century Fox fanfare, due to Disney's 2012 acquisition of Lucasfilm and the transfer of the role of distributor of the Star Wars films from Fox to Disney. The last Star Wars film that played in theaters actually didn't open with the Fox fanfare either: 2008's CG-animated Star Wars: The Clone Wars, a prelude to the CG-animated TV show of the same name, was distributed by Warner Bros. instead of Fox.

Yet some Star Wars fans are still experiencing separation anxiety in regards to Newman's fanfare, a familiar staple of previous live-action Star Wars installments, even after learning to live without it when they saw the Clone Wars film.

But I mean really, how do you NOT open a Star Wars movie without the FOX fanfare audio over the Lucasfilm title screen??

— Carmichael Dave (@CarmichaelDave) October 22, 2015

This is what Star Wars will sound like without the Fox Fanfare. Sounds kinda clunky and gross. http://t.co/ZyX0VjHF2c

— Cue The Music (@CueTheMusic) April 10, 2015

If a Star Wars fanboy you know or tolerate is saying something along the lines of "It just ain't Star Wars without the Fox logo music," it's time to get him to rip that Band-Aid off. It's time to tell him to get over the absence of the Fox fanfare and grow up, fuzzball. To borrow the words of Jacob Hall over at ScreenCrush, are we really going to get sentimental and worked up about a movie studio's theme music being removed from a film franchise the studio no longer owns? "We shouldn't," said Hall. "That would be silly. But we are!"

Well, I'm not. There are other things I'm much more concerned about than the disappearance of a corporation's fanfare. Those things include the original score music within the new film, provided once again by the beloved John Williams (meanwhile, Hamilton mastermind Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote the film's new cantina music?: that's what I call a coup), and the ways the George Lucas-less Force Awakens will handle the much-needed return of the kind of character who was missing for too long from the Star Wars films and whose absence was the biggest reason why I despise the Lucas-directed prequel trilogy. That would be the character who takes a gander at all the mysticism and craziness surrounding him and says, "Yeah, this is bullshit. But I'll just go along with it. For now." In other words: Han Solo.

My older brother was a calligraphy nerd in grade school, and his 1978 copy of The Star Wars Storybook, which I unearthed from our parents' garage a couple of years ago, was clearly the beginning of that.

The prequels badly needed a foil to gruffly react to "hokey religions and ancient weapons." In the classic trilogy, Han--the reluctant hero who will be played once again in The Force Awakens by similarly reluctant Star Wars star Harrison Ford, who once famously grumbled to Lucas that "You can write this shit, but you can't say it"--served that purpose entertainingly, and to a certain extent, so did Princess Leia, whose barbs were directed at walking carpets and nerf herders rather than hokey religions and ancient weapons.

A character like Han (and occasionally, Leia) is integral to breaking up the monotony of the ultra-solemn Jedi characters (the prequels clearly intended Ewan McGregor's slightly cranky version of Obi-Wan to be the new Han figure, but it just wasn't the same), the similarly solemn politician characters and the mostly dour Sith characters. Han's presence also supplies to the proceedings a certain dose of grown-up comedic energy (as opposed to the brand of humor that was written for six-year-olds like Jar Jar's puerile and Fetchit-y bits of comic relief during The Phantom Menace). Without a character like Han, the Star Wars films unfortunately turned into a stuffy BBC costume drama in space. Or as Screen Junkies announcer Jon Bailey astutely summed up Attack of the Clones during the Honest Trailer for that prequel, "People sitting and talking, standing and talking, walking and talking, one person standing and talking while another is sitting and talking, people standing and talking, then taking a seat for more talking."



Back to things that aren't as lethargic. Look, I agree that Newman's rousing 1954 arrangement of his own 1933 Fox fanfare--an extended update that was designed to herald Fox's CinemaScope logo for films shot in the CinemaScope widescreen format Fox introduced in the '50s to compete with square-shaped TV--is a great little piece of music. It's so great it inspired Williams to write the Star Wars opening title theme in the same key. In fact, the studio suits so enjoyed hearing again the 1954 version at the start of a Fox film when Star Wars brought it back to accompany the "A Lucasfilm Limited Production" card--by the way, the demise of the CinemaScope label caused the studio to revert to the shorter 1933 fanfare for most of the '70s, while the studio's Planet of the Apes franchise opted to completely ditch studio artist Emil Kosa Jr.'s animated Fox logo--that the 1954 version became the permanent arrangement of the fanfare after Star Wars. (That move by Fox resulted in two of my favorite takes on the 1954 fanfare: musician Bennie Wallace's Dixieland funk version at the start of White Men Can't Jump and Ralph Wiggum's rendition of the last few notes of the 1954 fanfare at the start of The Simpsons Movie.) But it's time to move on, man. Star Wars is not going to fall apart without that 1954 fanfare (and if you really can't let go of that fanfare, bring your phone or mp3 player along with you to the theater like they suggested over at the A.V. Club, put on your earbuds and cue up either the fanfare or "20th Century Foxney" when The Force Awakens begins). However, I'm curious about how The Force Awakens will open without it.

When Disney reissued the previous six live-action Star Wars films on digital platforms earlier this year and replaced the Fox fanfare with Lucasfilm's fanfare on five of those films (but with no Disney castle logo, much like how movies produced by Marvel Studios, another arm of Disney, never open with the Disney logo), that Lucasfilm fanfare wasn't favorably received. "The new score will now accompany all Star Wars films going forward, with the only exception being the original film, which 20th Century Fox still hold [sic] distribution rights for," wrote Kwame Opam about the Lucasfilm fanfare over at The Verge. Opam is kind of incorrect. The Lucasfilm fanfare isn't a newly written piece. It's merely some Skywalker Ranch grunt's Pro Tools re-edit of the last few notes of Williams' end title music from The Empire Strikes Back.

Illustration by six-year-old Jonas Aquino

Illustration by Aquino

Illustration by Aquino

Many fanboys assume The Force Awakens will open with the same fanfare that's been tacked on to The Empire Strikes Back and the four subsequent Star Wars films for their digital releases. I have a feeling The Force Awakens won't use that chopped-up fanfare. I think the new film should open with complete silence before the classic Williams theme kicks in--it's more powerful that way and it's preferable over some old Williams fanfare from 1980 or even a new Williams fanfare--and I think it will.

Disney's Force Awakens marketing campaign has been effective at building suspense and excitement and not giving too much of the film away. I have a feeling the film itself will continue in that vein by opting for silence right before the return of the classic Williams theme. But whatever Disney, Lucasfilm and Bad Robot decide to do at the start of The Force Awakens, like my older brother cornily scrawled in pencil about the Rebels inside the Death Star when he was six, the Force will be with them.

And whatever they do will be far better than "People sitting and talking, standing and talking, walking and talking, one person standing and talking while another is sitting and talking, people standing and talking, then taking a seat for more talking."

The music of Star Wars is part of "AFOS Prime" and "Hall H" on AFOS. Star Wars is represented in both those blocks by the Empire Strikes Back score cues "The Battle of Hoth" and "The Rebel Fleet/End Title," which was, as mentioned earlier, later compressed and re-edited into the Lucasfilm fanfare at the start of the digital releases of the Star Wars films.

The casting of John Boyega and Oscar Isaac boosts Star Wars: Episode VII from "Why is this being made?" to "Shit done got interesting"

(Photo source: Tor)

"I'm not going to play Luke again. He's over. He had a beginning, a middle and an end," said Mark Hamill to me in a phone interview we recorded on a late Sunday night in 1998 for a Batman: The Animated Series-related episode of the terrestrial radio incarnation of A Fistful of Soundtracks.

Flash forward to 2014. Disney has finally confirmed--after about a year of "Lucasfilm's been talking to us"-type comments to the press from the original Star Wars trilogy stars--that Hamill will reunite with Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca), Anthony Daniels (C3P0) and Kenny Baker (R2D2) for J.J. Abrams' tentatively titled Star Wars: Episode VII.

So much for "I'm not going to play Luke again."

A Star Wars: Episode VII cast read-through at Pinewood Studios

I'm what you call a lapsed Star Wars fan. I love the first two Star Wars films. That's about it. I don't care for the rest of the franchise, although Genndy Tartakovsky's cel-animated Clone Wars shorts from the early 2000s were pretty solid and way more satisfying than George Lucas' dreadful and woodenly executed prequel trilogy (as is Matthew Haley and David Walker's fake Blackstar Warrior trailer, which I still wish would be made into an actual movie). So when Hamill, Ford and Fisher started giving hints to the press about reprising their roles in Episode VII, I was both glad for their return and skeptical about it because the last time Ford reunited with a former co-star for a Lucasfilm project, it resulted in another post-1989 Lucasfilm sequel I'd like to have Lacuna'd from my memory: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

One of the reasons why Crystal Pepsi was underwhelming was because Crystal Gravy was badly in need of a rewrite from Lawrence Kasdan, who co-wrote Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi (Kasdan, who, along with Ford, wanted Han Solo to be killed off in that threequel but were both overruled, isn't to blame for the problems of that film). Abrams' recruitment of Kasdan for the Episode VII screenplay was the first good sign about Episode VII. (However, I'm still concerned about Abrams as a director: are we getting the Abrams who directed both the still-excellent Lost pilot and the first and best Chris Pine Star Trek film--and also got a great villainous performance out of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman in Mission: Impossible III--or the Abrams who directed the mediocre, Khan-whitewashing Star Trek Into Darkness?)

An equally promising sign of things to come is this week's confirmed casting of John Boyega, the British star of one of my favorite sci-fi flicks of the last 10 years, Attack the Block, and Oscar Isaac, who was terrific as a dickish '60s folk singer in the Coen Brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis, as two of the new Star Wars leads. (With Isaac's Llewyn co-star Adam Driver on board in a villain role, it'll be especially fun to see Isaac go from crashing on Driver's couch to firing ion cannons at him. And with Max von Sydow playing what I assume to be Driver's Sith master too? Sweet.)

I've noticed that Boyega, who received accolades at Sundance this year for his performance as a South Central L.A. ex-con in Imperial Dreams (a film that, by the way, was scored by the talented Flying Lotus, who ought to be scoring more films), is first billed in the non-alphabetical cast list in Disney's Episode VII casting announcement. Is this a hint that this trilogy under Abrams' direction will be the first Star Wars trilogy with a person of color as the lead? As someone who wants to see more diversity in, well, everything, I sincerely hope so. As early as Attack the Block, Boyega proved that he's capable of the gravitas that's required to spearhead a sci-fi/fantasy franchise like Star Wars.

John Boyega in Attack the Block

"Moses' trajectory from irresponsible thug to adult who decides to own up to his mistakes... is believable and compelling, thanks to Boyega," I wrote back in 2011, when I first saw Attack the Block. "He has a couple of intriguing little moments where the badass and authoritative gang leader façade disappears, and with some great acting by Boyega with just his eyes, we see a scared kid who's in over his head and whom the film later reveals--in one of its best scenes--to be much younger than he appears to be."

Now envision Boyega bringing all those moments of believability and vulnerability to a Jedi who's learning the ways of the Force, under the direction of a filmmaker who didn't take a 22-year break from directing that resulted in his storytelling skills becoming as rusty as the chassis of a Gonk droid. Perhaps my lapsed faith in Star Wars will finally be restored.

British newcomer Daisy Ridley will help keep Star Wars: Episode VII from turning into a sausage fest.

Hear the music of Star Wars during "AFOS Prime" and "Hall H" on AFOS. Star Wars is represented in both those blocks by the Empire Strikes Back score cues "The Battle of Hoth" and "The Rebel Fleet/End Title," by John Williams, who's returning to score Episode VII.

5-Piece Cartoon Dinner (10/31/2012): Tron: Uprising, Motorcity, Kaijudo, Ultimate Spider-Man and Regular Show

Motorcity, Michigan's hottest Halloween costume of 2162 is the Slutty Eco-Terrorist.

Every Wednesday in "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," I dine on five of the week's most noteworthy animated cable shows that are found outside my Adult Swim comfort zone. The episodes are reviewed in the order of when they first aired.

One of Batman: The Animated Series' best episodes was the emotional "Robin's Reckoning" two-parter. It used Robin's origin story to delve into why Batman adheres to a code of never killing criminals (unless he's directed and partially written by Tim Burton) and to present a great dramatic dilemma: should such a code be broken when the man who ruined your life resurfaces to ruin more lives?

The two-part "Scars" episode is the Tron: Uprising equivalent of "Robin's Reckoning," except instead of Batman attempting to stop Robin from killing the gangster who murdered his family, it's Beck who's trying to keep his mentor Tron from going too far in his pursuit of Dyson (John Glover), the turncoat soldier who Tron vaguely referred to in "Identity" as the reason for his trust issues (I originally thought the former ally Tron was referring to in that episode was Clu, who makes his first series appearance here since the premiere episode and is voiced by Fred Tatasciore instead of Jeff Bridges). And instead of a compelling protagonist like the B:TAS reimagining of Batman, "Scars" is stuck with the less compelling Beck, whose dullness as a hero sheds light on the fundamental problem with the Tron franchise: so many of its characters, who are nothing more than pixels in a hard drive, are about as deep as, well, pixels in a hard drive.

(Photo source: What.Jane.Says)

However, Tron: Uprising has been making an effort to bring depth to the character who was previously the dullest element of the franchise: Tron himself. Most of the fun of part 1 of "Scars" comes from watching this previously noble hero lose his cool and badly hide how mentally and physically damaged he has been from both Dyson's betrayal and Clu's maiming of him. At the end of part 1, the mentor, who assaults his own protégé to keep him from getting in the way of his plan to derezz Dyson, has become the loose cannon, and the protégé is now the level-headed one. Will this character switch help to make Beck more interesting or will he continue to be such a colorless bore?

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This has been an insane week of news: Hurricane Sandy, the election, the San Francisco Giants' World Series win and now another Bay Area-based shocker, the Disney/Lucasfilm merger, a surprise wedding in the entertainment industry that came out of nowhere, like the surprise nuptials of Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel. We all knew JT and JB were going to get hitched someday, but not this quickly. The same goes for Disney and Lucasfilm. For a long time, George Lucas has positioned himself as a Walt Disney for the 21st century, so his ties with Disney ever since the Star Tours rides aren't surprising. But his decision to suddenly cede control to Disney is unexpected. Or was it hinted at as early as last January?

"I'm retiring," said Lucas to the New York Times in a profile that the paper published shortly before the Black History Month release of what the profile described as Lucas' final film project, Red Tails, which he produced but didn't direct. "I'm moving away from the business, from the company, from all this kind of stuff."

In another surprise move, Lucas is also ceding control of the Star Wars film franchise to "a new generation of filmmakers" and Disney, which will release the next three Star Wars films. Whether it's the current Clone Wars animated series (which I don't watch, even though it's well-animated and it has been better received than the much-maligned live-action prequels, because--except for that Chewbacca guest shot that I really enjoyed last year--it focuses on the prequel characters, who are hardly as interesting to me as Han, Leia, Lando and Luke) or 1988's Willow, Lucasfilm will not rest until it recaptures the magic of the first three Star Wars films.

(Photo source: MotorCity Disney XD Wiki)

To me, the next Star Wars--or rather, the closest someone has gotten to channeling the spirit of the Han/Leia/Lando/Luke era of that franchise--is actually a little-known animated series that Lucasfilm's future new owner introduced on iTunes and cable a few months ago. Like the original Star Wars trilogy, Disney XD's dazzling Motorcity is about a plucky band of freedom fighters who battle an evil empire, and it stars Mark Hamill, who plays the Darth Vader figure here--a corporate bully who dresses like a douchey gym manager--instead of one of the heroes. (In another link between Motorcity and Star Wars, one of Motorcity's most frequent writers is Clone Wars scribe George Krstic.)

The show has always felt more like a Lucasfilm joint than a Disney production, from the dizzying action sequences, which are like a post-apocalyptic, instrumental metal-scored and earthbound variation on Star Wars' dogfights in space, to the fetish for fast rides that's reminiscent of Lucas' fetish for hot rods and muscle cars in American Graffiti and both Star Wars trilogies. Even both the hot dog stand run by Jacob (Brian Doyle-Murray), the show's resident health food nut, and Antonio's, the pizzeria where the Burners frequently hang out, bring back memories of Mel's Drive-In from American Graffiti. But there's none of the ponderousness (or woodenly delivered dialogue) that marred the live-action Star Wars prequels.

Motorcity takes its action seriously, but it bears the irreverent touches of series creator Chris Prynoski's Titmouse studio. So while the show channels the original Star Wars, RoboCop, The Warriors, Escape from New York and the Macross arc of Robotech (the subterranean Motorcity setting owes so much visually to Macross City, the one that was erected inside the hull of the SDF-1, not the original city), it also has bits and pieces of past Titmouse cult favorites like Downtown and Megas XLR in its DNA. Motorcity's teen freedom fighters are as brash, fun-loving and sometimes self-centered as the 20-something New Yorkers on Downtown and the gamers and gearheads on Megas. The threats the Burners face on Motorcity are sometimes as comical as the Captain Harlock and Battle of the Planets analogs that Coop encountered on Megas, like the unwanted reality show the Burners are forced to participate in during "The Duke of Detroit Presents..." or the Halloween candy that emits fear gas in "Mayhem Night," the latest Motorcity episode.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot about "Mayhem Night." This is the show's Halloween episode, and while we aren't treated to seeing any of the Burners getting their cosplay on--you'll have to click through tons of Motorcity fan art on Tumblr and Deviantart for that--we get to see what sorts of phobias paralyze Julie, Texas, Claire (Dana Davis) and Mike, who hinted at such phobias last week in "Fearless" when he admitted to the constantly fear-stricken Chuck that a brave leader like him isn't immune to fear, just like everybody else. The Terra Dwellers, the eco-terrorist tribesmen from "Texas-ify It!," want to topple KaneCo by collapsing Motorcity's ceiling--an insane plan that would destroy both Detroit Deluxe and Motorcity in the process--so they've tainted Halloween candy with fear gas to distract the Burners and prevent them from getting in their way.

Exposure to the gas causes Julie to relive the terror she felt when her father Abraham Kane (Hamill) nearly discovered her allegiance to the Burners in "Off the Rack." Mike has nightmares of being attacked by himself, or rather, his past self as a cadet in Kane's army, which means he continues to be racked with guilt over not being able to save a tenement building full of Motorcity residents from being demolished by KaneCo, a moment that was glimpsed in flashbacks in "Vendetta." Claire and Texas' nightmares are far more comical. Julie's class-conscious friend, who finds both Motorcity and Chuck to be repulsive, thinks she's trapped in Motorcity and married to Chuck (their baby girl looks more like Chuck than Claire), while Texas, who has a habit of binging on candy every Halloween, hallucinates that his candy is attacking him and trying to eat him. Chuck and Dutch--who has just started dating Tennie (Aimee Garcia), a resourceful mechanic from the Cabler settlement in Motorcity--are the only Burners who aren't poisoned, but we know that Dutch fears the wrath of Tennie's tough mechanic dad Bracket (Carlos Alazraqui).

So while "Mayhem Night" isn't really disturbing, it might be difficult to watch for hypochondriacs who have issues with Halloween candy. The most unsettling image in "Mayhem Night" isn't the demonic vision Julie has of her evil father's face while he taunts her on the road. It's the sight of an unconscious Texas from a previous Halloween, sprawled on the ground in his red-and-black boxers with his chocolate-smeared mouth open and the word "candy" scrawled in some sort of melted red candy on a belly that's distended from too many treats. Distended bellies aren't disturbing, but when they're seen on someone who's shirtless? Yikes.

Many lapsed Star Wars fans have said Star Wars is dead, and it'll continue to be a shell of itself when Lucasfilm drops Episodes VII, VIII and IX. I don't believe it's dead because I think the spirit of the original trilogy lives on. Well, sometimes it does on The Clone Wars--especially when Chewie resurfaced--but it's much more present on Motorcity. Now if only more people out there--not just kids--would just watch this damn show.

March Madness March of the Day: "Washington Ending & Raiders March" from Raiders of the Lost Ark by John Williams

My favorite Raiders of the Lost Ark score cue is actually "The Map Room: Dawn" (Indy discovers the Ark's location, and the London Symphony Orchestra is both stoked and disturbed), but the end title theme, which features a full statement of some obscure composition called "The Raiders March" and "Marion's Theme," ain't too shabby either.

"A piece like that is deceptively simple to try to find the few right notes that will make a right leitmotivic identification for a character like Indiana Jones. I remember working on that thing for days and days, changing notes, changing this, inverting that, trying to get something that seemed to me to be just right. I can't speak for my colleagues but for me things which appear to be very simple are not at all, they're only simple after the fact. The manufacture of these things which seem inevitable is a process that can be laborious and difficult."

--John Williams on "The Raiders March," from the liner notes of DCC Compact Classics' 1995 expanded reissue of the Raiders score

Terence Blanchard's Red Tails score swoops into "AFOS Prime" on A Fistful of Soundtracks

George Lucas and Terence Blanchard (Photo source: Jessica Drossin)

Even though TV spots for feature films flash the cast and crew member credits so quickly you have to pause the DVR to read them, I was able to make out the name of Aaron McGruder in the split-second credits at the end of a TV spot for frequent CSI: NY and Treme director Anthony Hemingway's Tuskegee Airmen flick Red Tails, which came out just in time for Black History Month and was a longtime pet project for George Lucas, who produced it.

"Hold up," I thought. "The Aaron McGruder? The same Aaron McGruder who made Red Tails star Cuba Gooding Jr. and George Lucas such frequent punching bags in his Boondocks comic strip?"

If someone told me 10 years ago that Lucas and McGruder, the most vocal lapsed Star Wars fan outside of Simon Pegg, would work together someday, I would have said, "Sure, they will. When pigs fly."

Raiders of the Lost Ark turns 30 years old this week, while George Lucas makes plans to digitally tweak the Indy/Marion foreplay scene so that it's now nothing more than an Eskimo kiss

Raiders of the Lost Ark is a movie I've loved since I was a kid in the '80s and have considered the best of the Indiana Jones series, partly because, as blogger Odienator once noted, "Raiders reveals a lot about its characters by showing rather than telling."

Everyone who was involved in Raiders did incredible work in this film, including Steven Spielberg, John Williams, editor Michael Kahn, cinematographer Douglas Slocombe, stars Harrison Ford and Karen Allen, truck chase stunt double Vic Armstrong and even Alfred Molina, in a bit part that was his first role in a feature film (Molina was last seen revisiting the sci-fi/fantasy genre when he played an assistant D.A. who quit prosecuting and was somehow able to get back his never-before-mentioned old job as a cop on Law & Order: L.A.).

Because it's celebrating its 30th anniversary this week (Paramount premiered it on June 12, 1981), here's a clever tribute to Raiders that I first posted in 2009. Ivan Guerrero is a videographer who's a whiz at crafting alternate-reality trailers for contemporary movies out of footage from much older movies. He recently put together a "pre-make" of Joss Whedon's currently-being-filmed Avengers adaptation that showed what the movie would have looked like in a parallel universe where it was made in 1952. One of Guerrero's earlier videos was a similar pre-make of Raiders that used tons of clips from Charlton Heston's Secret of the Incas, a 1954 Paramount B-movie that's been cited as an influence on Raiders.



In the parallel universe that's established by Guerrero's pre-make, their Indy sounds more like Moses than a regular guy who turns into Don Knotts whenever he's around snakes.

Paramount has never released Secret of the Incas on DVD, so Guerrero's fake trailer is one of the few places where we can get glimpses of this proto-Raiders. I enjoyed the fake trailer so much back in 2009 that I even played around in Photoshop and created a snapshot of an old-timey-sounding blurb about the alternate-universe Raiders that would have fit right in with the pre-make.

A teen who was in a coma from 1974 to 2008 recaps the first Star Wars prequel

By special guest blogger Sonny Gautier

(EDITOR'S NOTE: Sonny Gautier is a Fistful of Soundtracks listener from Bed-Stuy who previously wrote for this blog a review of the 2008 trailer for Star Trek because his favorite TV show was Star Trek--the '70s animated series, not the much more popular '60s live-action show the cartoon was based on. Due to brain damage caused by exposure to too many Sid and Marty Krofft shows, a then-adolescent Sonny lapsed into a coma in 1974 and didn't wake up until 2008. Sonny has had a lot to catch up on. When I suggested he check out New Jack City because it has far doper production values than the pre-New Jack blaction flicks he grew up watching, he said, "I've seen that flick so many times already." He was much more interested in a series of fantasy flicks he'd never seen before: Star Wars. Here's Sonny's recap of one of the six Star Wars installments, which he opted to watch in chronological order, from The Phantom Menace to Return of the Jedi, instead of the way most of the rest of us watched the series, from A New Hope to Revenge of the Sith.)

Star Wars: Episode I--The Phantom Menace

Holy shit.

I had never seen a movie open like that before. BLAAAAM! Horn stabs out of nowhere! It felt like a pimp kicking you in the nuts with one of his high heels. And there was no "Starring James Cagney in..." or "Pam Grier is..." It just cut to the chase and said, "Screw the opening credits. Who gives a shit about the old lady who sewed together all the robes or the sucker who shined the skinny robot's shoes? This is what you need to know about the phantom menace."

I used to play trumpet for my high school marching band, so I dug the abrupt fanfare that kicked off The Phantom Menace. Jim told me the music was written by a man named John Williams. Where was this Williams cat when I was in my coma? If he had been by my bedside and gotten together a bunch of musicians to play the Phantom Menace theme, that would have woken my ass up.

After the opening theme, an Irish priest in space brings along with him a younger priest for a mission to keep the peace in the galaxy. I forgot what exactly their mission was because I couldn't remember most of the yellow words that scrolled upward into the horizon before the opening action scene--some complicated bullshit about "trade" and "taxation," I think. I felt like I was watching my eighth grade history teacher Mr. Greenblatt try to write a screenplay about the Revolutionary War but then gave up early on and turned it into a movie about Irish priests in space.

The Jedi priests carry swords of light that buzz and can cut through steel walls. Those are some dynamite-looking weapons. The bug-eyed aliens who interfere with the priests' mission talk like the dudes who run the nearby sushi bar. Later on, a donkey who talks like a gay Jamaican ice cream man and is named Jar Jar tags along with the priests. What's up with all the accents in this movie? It's set in an unspecified future where priests pilot spaceships and arm themselves with light swords, yet the priests and aliens all sound like they're from certain parts of the other boroughs. If that shufflin' donkey's supposed to be the comic relief, he's not very funny. (The queen in whiteface who sounds like a transsexual ho cracked me up much more than the donkey or the little robots that kept saying "Roger, roger.") The six-year-old white kids in the audience might find Jar Jar funny, but I don't. I'd rather see Redd Foxx be the comic relief. Is he still busy?

Father Jinn, his "padawan" Obi-Wan and the Jamaican donkey are forced to get their damaged ship repaired on a desert planet, where they encounter a slave woman and her son, whom Jinn believes to be the Messiah because of his "midichlorians." You know it's science fiction because the slaves are a white woman and her blond son. Yet I kind of enjoyed seeing a couple of white folks in shackles. Still, that doesn't make up for the Stepin Fetchit shit with the donkey.

Father Jinn needs to stay off the, uh, gin because the kid doesn't look like much of a savior. A future leader in a star war needs to have what white folks call charisma, and this sulky little turkey doesn't. The kid must be half-robot, half-human because he only had one expression for the entire movie.

I dug the kid's futuristic car race and the sword fight between the Jedis and Darth Maul, but where's the "wars" of the title? There wasn't much bloodshed like there is in the war movies I know--and most of them don't even have "wars" in the title. I know this is only the first installment in the series, and they're building towards something monumental, but that's kind of false advertising. The Phantom Menace script comes off as boring instead of exciting, although I like how Star Wars doesn't got any overdramatic scenes of somebody shaking their fists at the sky and crying "Nooooooooo!!!"

The Irish priest looks constipated for the whole movie and then dies in the climactic sword fight. Obi-Wan takes over as the kid's mentor so that he can teach him how to make some new facial expressions. A brother named Mace Windu looks like he could whup some ass with his purple blade but isn't given shit to do in the movie. The cat who plays Mace must be one of those strong, silent types who never scream and shout in their movies.

I heard Billy Dee Williams, an even cooler dude than Mace, doesn't show up until Episode V. This is going to be one long-ass space saga. In this first movie, there wasn't enough of that Darth cat or Mace, and there was way too much of unfunny Jar Jar. Man, I feel sorry for all the Jamaican ice cream men out there who have to be subjected to this dumbass donkey.

"Aw hell, Chewbacca": 10 genuinely funny stand-up routines about movies

Patton Oswalt, one of the few stand-ups who have publicly sworn off Twitter ("I like having radio silence. I think radio silence is an important part of any public figure's day."), did the unthinkable this past weekend when he succumbed to the Twittersphere and started an account. As one can see from his act and his stint as a guest programmer at L.A.'s New Bev Cinema, movies are a topic the Big Fan star and Hollywood script doctor is passionate about, and they've led to some of my favorite Oswalt routines. Maybe we'll get a taste of some more Oswalt material about movies on his new Twitter page. To mark Oswalt's arrival on Twitter, where he's already on a roll and is demonstrating why stand-ups and comedy writers are the best kind of celebrity to follow on Twitter (unlike most other celebs, their tweets are rarely boring or shallow), here are 10 standout routines from the stand-up world about cinema. Four of these routines are Oswalt's.

10. Richard Pryor rewrites The Exorcist
The horror genre has always fascinated the late Pryor's former writing partner Paul Mooney, who's done brilliant jokes about the Frankenstein monster, white filmgoers' fears of the shark from Jaws and movies that skeevily put women in romantic situations with sci-fi monsters. He must have had a hand in writing Pryor's material about The Exorcist, which he and Pryor actually saw together at its Hollywood premiere. When Pryor guest-hosted SNL and brought along Mooney as a sketch writer, they did an amusing Exorcist sketch in which a pair of black priests (Pryor and Thalmus Rasulala) lose their patience with the possessed kid (Laraine Newman), who taunts Rasulala's priest with the cleaned-up-for-TV "Your mama sews socks that smell."



9. Scott Thompson sinks Titanic during an interview on Late Night with Conan O'Brien
"I don't think that to be a leading man, you have to be Harrison Ford, but I do think that you should be able to do at least one push-up. When little Leo finally kisses big Kate, I thought it was a lesbian scene."



8. Robert Klein reenacts every single Our Gang short you've seen
I actually like this routine from the 1973 album Child of the 50's more than "I Can't Stop My Leg." Klein's recreation of the Our Gang score music ("Hal Roach had four tunes that he played over and over again") is priceless.

7. Oswalt wonders what Star Wars would have been like if Nick Nolte won the role he actually auditioned for: Han Solo
"Fuckin' droids, beep, beep..."

6. Oswalt recalls one of the reasons why he left his hometown of Sterling, Virginia
The Blast of Silence-loving film geek gets worked up over the aggravating opinions of an NBC affiliate's out-of-touch film critic ("Yeah, so there's this new movie from Australia... called The Road Warrior. Now let me get this straight. It's the future, there's no gasoline, but everyone's driving around in cars. I don't get it. No stars!"). It's an oddly affecting routine that anyone who's aching to leave the hometown they despise--including right now, yours truly--can identify with.

5. Steve Byrne imagines how Bruce Lee had sex
This is a hilarious little routine that must be watched, not listened to. Why Byrne included it as a track on his 2005 CD Little by Little boggles the mind because 90 percent of it relies on visual gags. Without the visuals, it's like listening to a Marcel Marceau record album.



4. Mario Cantone does an impression of that annoying classroom song from The Birds
I'm disappointed that no one has posted Cantone's Birds routine on YouTube. If you watched a lot of Comedy Central during the late '90s like I did, you might have fond memories of the routine. The channel frequently reran it, yet it never got old. I always dug how instead of the Psycho shower scene or the North by Northwest crop-duster attack, Cantone chose a lesser-known Hitchcock movie moment to mock (and add some profane new lyrics to). And yes, when you watch The Birds, that song really does work your last nerve and make you want to go peck a defenseless hobo's eyes out like he's Suzanne Pleshette.

3. Oswalt wishes he could go back in time and kill George Lucas with a shovel
A lapsed Star Wars fan, Oswalt delivers a terrific argument against prequels. Yet that didn't stop Oswalt from joining the cast of one of them--Caprica.



2. Paul Mooney rips apart white Hollywood
During the long-out-of-print 1993 album Race, Mooney makes you never look at Disney's Beauty and the Beast the same way again ("Don't take your kids to see that shit. Four or five years from now, your kid'll be in the kitchen fucking the dog, singing 'Beauty and the Beast!'") and disses sci-fi and horror filmmakers for both their misogyny and weird fetishes for "exotic" interspecies romances (I wonder what Mooney has to say about Twilight and True Blood). But the best part of Mooney's amazing rant is when he explains why he detests Driving Miss Daisy ("I don't like that coonin' happy slave bullshit"). The movies that Mooney jokes about on the 1993 CD may be old now, but unfortunately, the stereotypes they reinforced still remain. Now if only there were an Asian American stand-up who isn't so subservient to the Man and will go onstage and rant about the Asian American version of all this.



1. Oswalt channels movie producer Robert Evans
I love how Oswalt often picks the most obscure pop culture-related topics for his act (Death Bed: The Bed That Eats is a recent example). An audience favorite at past Oswalt performances was his parody of the little-remembered ESPN radio ads that the Godfather and Rosemary's Baby producer recorded to promote the channel's programming. We see why Oswalt is frequently employed as a punch-up scriptwriter when he lets his imagination run wild with colorful, almost poetic-sounding descriptions of wild escapades with '70s celebrities ("Tom Wopat loved the three F's: food, fun and fisting. We took Gil Gerard out on my cigarette boat Memorial Day Weekend 1978, and I swear to you, over those sweet, savage 72 hours, he turned that poor man into his personal finger puppet.").

The Fistful of Soundtracks station schedule--both past and present

Here's a detailed guide to the current Fistful of Soundtracks station schedule for listeners who aren't sure when certain programming blocks air or what kind of music is streamed during each block. I've also included descriptions of series I used to air on AFOS to show you the programming history of the station, which I launched in 2002. I pieced together parts of this post from program synopses I wrote for the now-defunct jim.aquino.com site, and I've updated those passages.

Current programming blocks

JANUARY 16, 2011 UPDATE: "Assorted Fistful" "AFOS Prime"

During this block, which occupies most of the day's programming, the channel streams random film and TV score cues. At noon on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, "Assorted Fistful" "AFOS Prime" switches to "Soda and Pie" mode and focuses on '80s tracks from the library.

"Chai Noon"

Every Tuesday and Thursday at noon and every early Wednesday and early Friday at 4am, AFOS airs an hour-long block of assorted tracks from Bollywood movies like the Amitabh Bachchan classic Don and the Dhoom films. None of the other film music radio stations on the Web are doing something like this, which is pretty damn absurd. How can they not recognize the moviemaking capital of the world?

In a 2006 blog post that's no longer online, I talked about why I created this block:

"Chai Noon" came about after I glanced at ImaginAsian Radio's program lineup one day and noticed it consisted mostly of bhangra and Bollywood shows. Then it hit me: why aren't any of the film music radio stations on the Web streaming any Bollywood music shows or blocks like ImaginAsian and the desi radio stations do? And why didn't I have a Bollywood block on my station's lineup?

It was something I felt my station needed, even though I'm no expert on Bollywood soundtracks, and I've never sat through an entire Bollywood musical. (I wish DirecTV carried AZN Television, which my older brother is able to receive, thanks to his Berkeley cable company. When I was at my bruh's place one time, I caught an AZN broadcast of Fiza. I wasn't able to watch the whole flick, but the parts I saw were interesting. Only in Bollywood could you have song-and-dance numbers during a politically charged drama about terrorism.)

That Asha Bhosle song that's better known to your 15-year-old sister as the Black Eyed Peas' "Don't Phunk with My Heart" will be on the "Chai Noon" playlist. That Hindi tune that got Smithers shakin' at the end of a recent Simpsons ep will be there too (it's from Johny Mera Naam). And of course, I didn't forget "Chaiya Chaiya" from both Dil Se and Inside Man.

FEBRUARY 27, 2010 UPDATE: "Chai Noon" also airs Wednesday at noon and early Thursday at 4am.

JANUARY 1, 2011 UPDATE: "New Cue Revue"

This hour-long block streams selections from new releases (or albums that aren't exactly new but are new to the "Assorted Fistful" "AFOS Prime" playlist). It airs Wednesdays at 10-11am and 4-5pm and Fridays at 11am-noon.

JANUARY 1, 2011 UPDATE: "The F Zone" "Rock Box"

Existing songs from movies and shows like GoodFellas, The Wire, The Boondocks, Better Luck Tomorrow and Pineapple Express are streamed during this daytime shuffle-mode block that's in the style of "Chai Noon" and "Soda and Pie." It airs Mondays at 4am, 9am and 3pm, Wednesdays at noon and Fridays at 5am, 9am and 3pm.

Even-numbered Indiana Jones movie curse? (Part 2)

"Screenwriter David Koepp looked at all the film's previous drafts, and kept what he felt were good ideas. He tried not to make his work a 'fan script,' avoiding any trivial references to the previous films. He noted that the story would have to acknowledge Ford/Jones's age, and also aimed for the mix of comedy and adventure from the first film, trying to make it less dark than the second film and yet less comic than the third film." [IMDb]

I saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull on opening day, but I kept my thoughts about the movie to myself until now. The Crystal Skull screenplay sounded great on paper. So why doesn't most of the movie live up to the above IMDb description of what Koepp was intending to do?

From the opening credits to the all-practical, CGI-free motorcycle chase, Crystal Skull holds promise. It acknowledges Dr. Jones' age, and there are some clever, witty touches that must have been Spielberg's ideas: the suburban neighborhood that's revealed to be a bomb testing site, Indy's anxiety about turning into an anachronism, which is reflected in the McCarthyism references and the film's only great CGI-created image--Indy gazing up at the mushroom cloud--and finally, a brief diner brawl straight out of a '50s B-movie. Spielberg's current favorite cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, filling in for a retired and now-blind Douglas Slocombe, is even faithful to the legendary Slocombe's bold, crisp pre-CGI cinematography from the previous Indy installments. But then the film moves to the jungle and lets the fakey CGI take over, allowing Kaminski to resume his trademark washed-out color schemes from later Spielberg films like Minority Report and War of the Worlds. The washed-out cinematography works for those more somber films but not for an Indy adventure. All it does is worsen the artificial, soundstagey look of this installment.

Crystal Skull goes downhill once Indy starts to deliver tedious exposition about the skulls to his new sidekick Mutt inside the mental asylum. My eyes glazed over like they do whenever I struggle through reading the opening scroll of The Phantom Menace. From there, the film abandons much of what was wonderfully established in the first half, particularly the references to the Cold War era and Indy's age. If it weren't for the 1957 setting, the rest of the movie could be set in 1987, for all I care. Indy, who utters a certain Star Wars catchphrase for the first and hopefully last time in the series, turns into an infallible superman (this is where the hand of Raiders co-writer Lawrence Kasdan is sorely missed--think of the self-deprecating lines he could have given to this older, frailer Indy). A potentially exciting sword duel between Mutt and Natasha Fatale 2.0 that was obviously shot against a green screen devolves into a rehash of the similarly green-screened light saber fights from the last two Star Wars prequels. The action is disrupted by a lame, overly cutesy Temple of Doom-ish interlude involving a Tarzan-like Mutt and monkeys with greaser hairdos. It's all evidence that Lucas' hand dominated the film's second half.

The best part of the second half is the too-brief interplay between Harrison Ford and his Raiders leading lady Karen Allen. "I don't know how Allen and Ford feel about each other in real life, but boy do they look thrilled to be back together in the movie. At any rate, Indy and Marion are clearly thrilled... It's the rejuvenating moment we've been waiting for and then...nothing comes of it," notes blogger Lance Mannion, who effectively sums up the merits and weaknesses of Crystal Skull in his post.

One of the gazillion Indy clones that have emerged since Raiders better captured the spirit of that first Indy installment than the current real thing. After he co-wrote Last Crusade, the late Jeffrey Boam went on to co-create The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. with Lost showrunner Carlton Cuse. That cult show--a winning mash-up of Boam's own Indy sequel and the '60s Wild, Wild West--integrated extraterrestrial-related intrigue into a period setting more entertainingly than Crystal Skull does.

The last thing I wanted was a retread of Temple of Doom. The second-to-last thing I wanted was a schizophrenic Indy installment, and that's what Crystal Skull is.