Nobody says "Huh?" like Denzel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The late James Horner was the master of suspenseful '90s hacking scene music during Sneakers and Clear and Present Danger

"There were so many Horners," said Matt Zoller Seitz to fellow journalist S.I. Rosenbaum during a RogerEbert.com conversation about the work of legendary film composer James Horner, who died at 61 in a single-engine plane crash earlier this week. "There was the shoot 'em up, macho, urban Horner of 48 HRS and Commando and Red Heat, the grand adventure Horner of the Trek films and Aliens and Titanic and Avatar, the caper Horner of Sneakers... He really did have range."

Anyone who's a film music fan has a favorite Horner. Film music heads who are into Horner deep cuts--and are of the opinion that Horner tended to repeat himself, especially in the middle part of his career--will likely say the Horner of Battle Beyond the Stars is their favorite, while more casual film music heads will likely pick the Horner who made teenage girls cry with his score to Titanic. For me, it's either the Horner who made nerds cry with his scores to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek III: The Search for Spock or the Horner who gave the third best performance, right below Denzel Washington and Andre Braugher, in Glory and crafted, with the help of the Boys Choir of Harlem, a powerful and operatic score for that 1989 white-savior-movie-that's-somehow-better-than-the-average-white-savior-movie.

The eerily prescient Sneakers is one of many movies I just never got around to seeing until more than 20 years after its release. On New Year's Eve 2014, it was one of several titles Netflix streaming was getting rid of from its library after that night, so I couldn't pass up the chance to stream before its expiration this caper movie I--a fan of caper movies--bizarrely overlooked for too long. I instantly fell in love with the score Horner wrote for Sneakers. It's now one of my favorite Horner scores. Like Gimme the Loot composer Nicholas Britell said about the Sneakers score, it's music you wouldn't expect to hear in a hacker movie. "It features unlikely elements--choirs, folk themes, minimalist piano, the saxophone of Branford Marsalis--that lend the film an unusual emotional richness and depth," wrote Britell.

Dig the score cue Horner created for the scene where Robert Redford's crew discovers the codebreaker to end all codebreakers, and Redford and Sidney Poitier both realize it's too much power for anyone to have. I'm not a musicologist--I'd be unable to tell you the difference between an arpeggio and an ostinato--so I have no idea what Horner was doing with the piano during this scene. It sounds like he grabbed a cat that was wandering around the recording studio and let it walk all over the keys. It turned out to be an inventive and effective way to build tension for that scene.



So now I have a new favorite Horner: the Horner who, through his music, could take something as mundane-looking and boring on the screen as typing things into a PC and make it exciting. Horner's work in Sneakers reminds me of Clear and Present Danger, where Horner also worked his magic on a similar moment of computer-related tension. The nerve-wracking Bogota ambush sequence is what everyone remembers about Clear and Present Danger, but an equally memorable sequence--and one that's handled with a bit more humor, especially when Harrison Ford discovers there's no paper in his printer--is Ford's attempt to salvage all evidence of the government conspiracy Henry Czerny helped orchestrate right when Czerny deletes it from what we now call "the cloud." It's the second best action sequence in the movie, even though nobody fires a gun or a missile and nobody dies. Horner had a lot to do with that.

There's an old featurette TCM used to frequently air between movies about how crucial Elmer Bernstein's score was in enhancing The Magnificent Seven. The featurette took a clip where Bernstein's rousing main theme accompanied shots of Yul Brynner and his crew riding on horseback rather lethargically and posited that without Bernstein's theme, the scene was dead. Without Horner's "Deleting the Evidence" cue, which is part of the playlist for the AFOS espionage genre music block "AFOS Incognito," the computer showdown sequence would have been dead too.



Throughout Clear and Present Danger, Horner made use of a shakuhachi, a Japanese flute, to heighten tension. It's kind of an unconventional choice, just like the clumsy kitty cat stepping on the piano keys during Sneakers, because it makes you think, "Did one of those Peruvian pan flute bands that invaded South Park also invade the orchestra?," but it works for the hacking sequence. Horner would get pilloried a lot by film music critics for recycling his own previous motifs when he was alive, but that's not the case here: his score to Clear and Present Danger, a blockbuster that came out two years after Sneakers, sounds much different from his score to Redford's movie, and it echoes the differences in tone between the serious-minded Clear and Present Danger and the much more light-hearted Sneakers.

Today, hacking scenes are such a cliché that I can't watch another hacking scene without thinking of Jimmy Kimmel Live's transformation of Scandal into a telenovela. In one of those Kimmel Live sketches, Scandal star Guillermo Diaz made fun of the ways actors pretend to type on laptops by basically channeling the piano-playing sight gags in Tom and Jerry's "The Cat Concerto" and Bugs Bunny's "Rhapsody Rabbit" while he was typing. So from now on, every time I sit through a dramatic hacking scene, I can't get out of my head the funny image of Guillermo Diaz typing like Bugs Bunny on the piano. But back when these scenes hadn't yet crossed the line into unintentional silliness and very '90s Fisher Stevens entrances, Horner was the master of scoring these scenes, and his skills with those scenes were honed while working on the franchise that made his career: Star Trek. Again, it all goes back to Star Trek. Hell, everything goes back to Star Trek. What David Strathairn and Harrison Ford are doing at their terminals is basically what Kirk and Spock did to trick Khan into lowering his starship's shields in Star Trek II and what Kirk and Scotty similarly pulled off to steal back the Enterprise from Starfleet in Star Trek III. Horner's brilliance with musical texture and enlivening action that has the potential to look as dull as office work was also key to why those moments of starship bridge console trickery are such highlights of those Trek films.

I haven't been interested in a Horner score in ages, but now that his score to the upcoming Chilean miner survival drama The 33 has ended up being one of the last things he composed before his death, I'm curious about his work in The 33 (and in this summer's Antoine Fuqua-directed boxing drama Southpaw). I wouldn't be surprised if Horner was able to take another potentially static-looking scenario like a bunch of miners trapped for more than two weeks under a collapsed mine and help make that compelling as well. Which Horner are we getting for his last couple of scores?

Selections from Horner's scores to Star Trek II and The Rocketeer can be heard during both "AFOS Prime" and "Hall H" on AFOS, while selections from his score to Clear and Present Danger (and hopefully someday, selections from his score to Sneakers) can be heard during "AFOS Incognito."