The ruthless and the Toothless: These are among the tracks I've added to AFOS rotation this month

Ennio Morricone, "The Strength of the Righteous" (film version) (from The Untouchables; now playing during "AFOS Prime")

"I had an art director that I was working with and we kept looking at shadows. I got the idea that the shadows should be actually cast by the word. And the art director kept saying, 'It's boring,'" recalled Superman: The Movie title designer Richard Greenberg to Art of the Title about his noirish concept for the Untouchables opening titles. "Finally I just looked at him and said, 'It's supposed to be boring.' I wanted it to take its time."

"Boring"? Really? Because I've seen a few alternate Untouchables opening titles on the Internet that were made by Untouchables fans and are much more busy-looking than Greenberg's titles, and they just don't fit Brian De Palma's operatic crime flick like Greenberg's titles do. It's one of my favorite Greenberg intros, partly because of Greenberg's simple and elegant title design and the way it evokes the shadows of prison bars at the start of the sequence.

(Photo source: Radiator Heaven)

But the main reason why those titles leave such an impact--without it, Greenberg's colleague might have been onto something about the titles being boring--is Ennio Morricone's propulsive "Strength of the Righteous." The main title theme, one of my favorite Morricone main title themes, establishes the steadfastness of Eliot Ness and the Untouchables while introducing another motif. The harmonica was the instrument of choice for Charles Bronson's vengeance-seeking protagonist Harmonica in the Morricone-scored Once Upon a Time in the West, but in The Untouchables, Il Maestro used the harmonica to represent one of the villains, Frank Nitti (Billy Drago, who's more menacing than Robert De Niro in the film and with much less dialogue too), the psychotic chief enforcer for ruthless Al Capone (De Niro).

"The fact that Morricone's main title music showcases Nitti's theme rather than Capone's hints at the fact that Ness can never truly confront Capone (in fact the two never met in real life)," wrote Geek magazine's Jeff Bond in the liner notes for La-La Land Records' 2012 expanded reissue of the Untouchables soundtrack, "and that his only physical satisfaction in taking down the crime lord is in executing Nitti."

La-La Land's 2012 reissue opens with the version of "The Strength of the Righteous" that's heard in the film--the major difference between the film version of "Strength" and the 1987 A&M Records version is that Nitti's harmonica motif begins at a much earlier point in the former--and that film version has finally been added to "AFOS Prime" rotation. The Untouchables may be as historically accurate as a Drunk History sketch (Nitti didn't die right after being thrown off a rooftop by Ness in 1930; he committed suicide in 1943), but elements like "Strength," Sean Connery's Oscar-winning performance and that classic "Odessa Steps"/baby carriage sequence Untouchables screenwriter David Mamet reportedly still despises are why, as ScreenCrush writer Damon Houx nicely puts it, the 1987 film forms with the 1976 Carrie and the 1996 Mission: Impossible "an interesting De Palma trilogy of 'fuck you, I can do mainstream better than anyone.'"

Howard Shore, "Barrels Out of Bond" and "The Forest River (Extended Version)" (from The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug; now playing during "AFOS Prime" and "New Cue Revue")

The Hobbit remains the only J.R.R. Tolkien novel I've read. Back when I was a kid who watched the 1977 Rankin-Bass Hobbit repeatedly on VHS and wanted to see what Tolkien's original vision of the story was like in print, I dove into the Ballantine Books softcover edition of The Hobbit (the one with the cover artwork of Gandalf and his cohorts taking shelter in the nest of one of the giant eagles that rescued them), and I have to say: Did this light adventure novel about a treasure hunt really have to be stretched out into three 180-minute movies?

Sure, two movies would have been alright to tell Bilbo's journey on the big screen, but three? Padded out to nearly 180 minutes each? With no intermission (because this is a really annoying era of moviegoing where the studios no longer include intermissions--which were, long before I was born, actually a good idea that helped make some of the studios' most interminable epics less of a grueling experience for moviegoers--and now the fuckwads who creep into theaters these days with their smartphones left on think every single minute of the feature presentation is an intermission)?



Though The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug is a more enjoyable installment than The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (the Phantom Menace of this franchise), Peter Jackson's Hobbit prequel trilogy has so far paled in comparison to his beloved Lord of the Rings trilogy, which itself wasn't perfect (one of my favorite lines in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is "Don't worry. I saw the last Lord of the Rings. I won't have the movie end 17 times"), but it was a well-made trilogy, even though I'm not much of a sword-and-sorcery genre stan. One of the few additions Jackson has made to The Hobbit that actually works is the newly created character of Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly), an elf warrior who defies her dickish king's isolationism to help protect the dwarves and the inhabitants of Laketown from hordes of orcs. I like Lilly and the action heroine she plays in The Desolation of Smaug, even though Jackson and his credited co-screenwriters Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens have placed Tauriel at the center of a love triangle that wasn't in Tolkien's novel either, a blatant attempt to take the novel and Twilight it up for tweens who would most likely become bored with Bilbo's journey and would rather journey through the texts on the phones they've left on inside the theater.

If you're one of those moviegoers who kept checking your phones during The Desolation of Smaug's barrel escape sequence, just kill yourself. Right now. The barrel escape sequence, a moment where Tauriel gets to shine as an action heroine as she and Legolas (Orlando Bloom) take on the dwarves' orc enemies along the riverbanks, is one of the most entertaining action sequences of 2013. The sequence is also easily the biggest highlight of Howard Shore's Desolation of Smaug score. Shore gives the heroic theme he wrote for Tauriel its fullest statement in "The Forest River." ("Its elegance and avidity is balanced by a razor-sharp fierceness," said Lord of the Rings/Hobbit score music expert Doug Adams about Tauriel's theme.)

The elf guards aren't the only characters who get to shine during the sequence. The mute dwarf Bombur (Stephen Hunter), who, up until this sequence, has been a gluttonous buffoon, smashes his arms through the wine barrel he's escaping in and fights off the orcs with his weapons. The image of Bombur rolling around in his barrel has led, of course, to a bunch of artists' recreations on deviantART and Tumblr. 2013 was the year of rotund nobodies pulling a Sammo Hung and revealing themselves to be agile action heroes: Nick Frost's reserved ex-rugby player wiled out on hordes of alien robots in The World's End, and then Bombur finally made himself useful in The Desolation of Smaug.

(Photo source: TheRisingSoul)

(Photo source: Strangely Charismatic)

(Photo source: Just Jingles)

The biggest Shaft of all in the illest retro CD packaging of all

Honey, someone shrunk the Shaft LP.

Because I changed the title of A Fistful of Soundtracks' default block from "Assorted Fistful" to "AFOS Prime" last week, I've had to painstakingly search through the "AFOS Prime" mp3 library for every single track that contains an "Assorted Fistful" sweeper and delete each of them from "AFOS Prime." Then I've had to go back into my CD collection, re-rip many of the tracks I deleted from "AFOS Prime," replace the parts of the tracks that were previously occupied by "Assorted Fistful" sweepers with new intros (most of them are just movie or TV trailer audio clips) and re-upload those tracks to "AFOS Prime."

And I'm having a blast! Seriously, no, I'm not.

So far, the only thing about the above tasks that's been nice is revisiting Hip-O Select/Geffen's now-out-of-print Shaft in Africa soundtrack CD because I dig its retro packaging (Hip-O Select/Geffen packaged their 2004 reissue of the Willie Dynamite soundtrack in the same fashion as well). I had to pull out the Shaft in Africa CD from the cabinets where I store my soundtrack CDs because the tracks that I ripped a few years ago from that disc, including Johnny Pate's "Shaft in Africa (Addis)," which was most memorably sampled by Just Blaze in Jay-Z's "Show Me What You Got," contain now-outdated sweepers.

In 2005, the 1973 LP for the threequel that MGM declared "The biggest Shaft of all in the hottest place of all" made its debut on CD as part of the limited-edition Hip-O Select series of Universal Music Group-owned album reissues that are available only through Hip-O's site. The CD packaging was simple and not-so-flashy but inspired. Instead of sticking the CD in a jewel case, Hip-O recreated the LP packaging--they didn't mess with the Shaft in Africa cover's original typefaces or its ABC Records emblems or its washed-out-looking color scheme and they even brought back the inner sleeve--and shrunk the cardboard sleeve and inner sleeve to CD size. It looks like something I unearthed during a crate-digging session at the used LP section of a CD store, except it somehow wound up in a washer and dryer that were being used incorrectly like in some bad sitcom or an old cartoon, and it shrunk along with all the other clothes.

The "CD-Sized Album Replica" packaging appears to be eco-friendly too. Why don't more labels package their reissues on CD like this?

Vinyl is awesome, but I hate how much space vinyl takes up (my music collection currently consists of only CDs, mp3s or AACs). I'm like an anti-hoarder. I try to make my carbon footprint as small as possible, so I rejoiced when albums became downloadable. I love how music, movie and TV show formats have gotten smaller and smaller so that the content on those formats can be carried around in your pockets now.

I've been thinking lately about venturing into club or lounge DJing. Ever since I got myself my first MacBook last month, I've been adding onto its iTunes so many mixes, including Paul Nice's Do You Pick Your Feet in Poughkeepsie? mixtape and DJ sets from props, SFNY and Sweater Funk. Listening to those mixes nonstop on my MacBook Pro has made me want to someday become a DJ like Nice, props, his SFNY cohorts and the Sweater Funk members. If I end up doing that kind of DJing, I'm so going to enjoy carrying around all those damn records.

The why of fly: Michael A. Gonzales' "Gangster Boogie" details the making of the Superfly soundtrack

(Photo source: Michael A. Gonzales)

I got my first taste of the late Curtis Mayfield's Superfly soundtrack when I watched a tape of a faded-looking print of the 1972 blaxploitation flick in either 1996 or 1997. Three elements of the movie stood out for me: the late Ron O'Neal's Shakespearean performance as a coke dealer who wants to quit the game, Sheila Frazier's nice body during the bathtub love scene and Mayfield's exceptional original songs, which are more insightful than the screenplay itself (Elvis Mitchell noted that "Mayfield's score rebels against the movie's insidious mythologizing of Priest"). Any piece of music Mayfield wrote or produced for movies just plain sizzles, whether it's any of the tunes in Superfly, the Let's Do It Again theme he produced for the Staple Singers or the Claudine theme "On and On" by Gladys Knight & the Pips.

Superfly fan Michael A. Gonzales has written what has to be the definitive chronicle of the making of the Superfly soundtrack, "Gangster Boogie," the must-read cover story in the latest issue of Wax Poetics magazine (what an issue it is: Mayfield! David Holmes! Roc Raida! Do the Right Thing! Black Dynamite! Funkdafied '70s European library music!). The Superfly soundtrack's influence on R&B and hip-hop shows no signs of waning (I didn't notice "Little Child Runnin' Wild" was sampled in Kanye West's "Flashing Lights" until it was pointed out by The-Breaks.com).

What makes Michael's piece stand out from other writings I've read about the 1972 soundtrack is that it doesn't neglect the importance of the sidemen and arrangers who helped Mayfield craft the soundtrack. Michael has said he wanted to avoid writing about Superfly through the lens of the auteur theory like other writings about classic albums he's read, hence the substantial interviews with Superfly guitarists Craig McMullen and Phil Upchurch and arranger Johnny Pate, who composed a terrific instrumental score for Shaft in Africa after Superfly.

"Gangster Boogie" also sheds light on the tensions between rock musicians and traditional film scorers that arise from projects like Superfly. I wasn't aware of Mayfield's lawsuit against his former friend Pate, who claimed he was solely responsible for writing Superfly's "Junkie Chase" and "Think" instrumental cues. It's one of many juicy tidbits in a fly article about the flyest of '70s movie soundtracks.

"AFOS A-Go-Go" 09/02/08-09/08/08 playlist

1. Peter Thomas Sound Orchestra, "Space Patrol," Futuremuzik, Scamp
2. Stanley Clarke, "Passenger 57 Main Title," At the Movies, Epic Soundtrax
3. Bear McCreary, "Precipice" (from the Battlestar Galactica episode "Precipice"), Battlestar Galactica: Season 3, La-La Land
4. Hans Zimmer, "Why So Serious?," The Dark Knight, Warner Sunset/Warner Bros.
5. The John Gregory Orchestra, "The Sweeney," Six Million Dollar TV Themes, Spectrum
6. Tyler Bates, "Block 41," Doomsday, Lakeshore
7. Mark Mancina, "Jojo, What You Know?," Original Score from the Motion Picture Bad Boys, La-La Land
8. Mark Mancina, "Dead Guy," Original Score from the Motion Picture Bad Boys, La-La Land
9. Johnny Pate, "El Jardia," Shaft in Africa, Hip-O Select/Geffen
10. Roy Budd, "Fear Is the Key (Main Theme)," Rebirth of the Budd, Sequel
11. Peter Thomas Sound Orchestra, "The Hump" (from Edgar Wallace: The Hunchback of Soho), Futuremuzik, Scamp
12. Royal Scottish National Orchestra, "Judge Dredd Trailer," Hollywood '95, Varèse Sarabande
13. Franz Waxman, "The Ride to Dubno," Taras Bulba, Rykodisc
14. Isaac Hayes, "Main Title (Truck Turner)," MGM Soul Cinema Vol. 2, Beyond/MGM Music
15. Huey Lewis & the News, "Pineapple Express," Pineapple Express, Lakeshore