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.
I was too young to catch the late Muhammad Ali in his prime as a boxer and civil rights activist. So it wasn't until the 1996 release of When We Were Kings, Leon Gast and Taylor Hackford's Oscar-winning documentary about the lead-up to Ali's 1974 victory over George Foreman at the Rumble in the Jungle in Zaire, when I started to understand why from the '60s to the early '80s, the world was captivated by this former athlete whom teenage In Living Color viewers like myself knew only as a lethargic roach spray pitchman.
The nicely edited doc caused me to be won over by both Ali's sense of humor--which remained a part of his personality even during his weakened state due to Parkinson's disease, like when he pretended to doze off in the middle of David Frost's 2002 interview with him--and his activism, particularly the brave stand he took against the Vietnam War, which cost him his heavyweight title and his boxing license. He once amazingly said, "Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No, I'm not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over."
Also noteworthy for featuring "Rumble in the Jungle," a catchy original theme song that united the Fugees, Busta Rhymes and A Tribe Called Quest, one of whose members was another beloved African American figure who died this year, Phife Dawg (2016 can go fuck itself), the stirring When We Were Kings remains one of my favorite movies from the '90s. But When We Were Kings suffers from something San Francisco Bay Guardian columnist Johnny Ray Huston criticized Gast and Hackford for at the time of the doc's release--Huston was the only writer I saw point this out back then--and that flaw is devoting too much of its running time to George Plimpton and Norman Mailer doing what's known today as whitesplaining both Ali and a moment of worldwide black pride like the Rumble in the Jungle. Huston's attitude was like "Who gives a fuck what these old white men think, especially when a black perspective would be the perfect one to recall these moments?" He had a point there.
Gast's fascinating archival footage of the G.O.A.T. in his prime more beautifully conveys the speed, grace and brash personality of Ali than any of the talking-head segments Hackford shot in the '90s with Mailer, whose cringeworthy black guy voice while impersonating the boxing legend keeps reminding me of Wyatt Cenac's anecdote about how an improv session between him, another black comic and the late Robin Williams went from awesome to mildly uncomfortable when Williams started trotting out his clichéd black guy voice in front of them. Moments of interminable whitesplaining aside, When We Were Kings is a rare doc that deserves to be seen at least once in a theater with an audience, just to hear how other viewers react to Ali's one-liners, the trash-talking mind games he subjected his rivals to outside the ring and his rapport with his youngest fans.
While other heavyweight boxers at the time tended to be either glum or inarticulate, Ali knew how to charm a crowd. He was the ultimate boxer-as-rock-star. The 1997 theater audience I saw When We Were Kings with wound up cheering for Ali or enjoying his spontaneous antics as if it were 1974 again. That's how charismatic he was. The crowd gets turnt up even when it's just archival footage of him interacting with the press.
"I couldn't stand the Michael Mann film Ali starring Will Smith... The film's great flaw is the fact that no one can really play Muhammad Ali except for Muhammad Ali," wroteNation sports columnist Dave Zirin in 2013. "That is why Muhammad Ali has always been served better by documentaries than dramatic films."
(.GIF source: Muhammad Ali - The Greatest)
And that is why after Ali's death from respiratory problems last Friday, I marathoned for the rest of the weekend a bunch of docs about Ali instead of watching either Mann's beautifully shot but hugely flawed (and stolen by Jamie Foxx as Drew "Bundini" Brown) biopic on HBO Go or 1977's The Greatest, a much less beautifully shot and much more stilted biopic where Ali stars as himself, but, as Zirin noted, "it was a disaster precisely because the wicked improvisation that marked both his style of speech and boxing were [sic] thuddingly absent." Ali's passing makes you eager to revisit the real, unscripted Ali on film, not the Hollywood versions of Ali like Smith's faithful and respectful but also overly mopey (which isn't really Smith's fault--the mopiness is due to Mann's propensity for brooding and largely humorless male lead characters, outside of Dennis Farina on Crime Story and Al Pacino in Heat) recreation of Ali.
My marathoning of all these Ali docs I highly recommend has made me realize there will probably never be another sports figure as simultaneously entertaining and humane as the Greatest was (although he wasn't so humane towards the late Joe Frazier, calling him an Uncle Tom despite the fact that Frazier actually vouched for the reinstatement of Ali's boxing license, but we'll just consider that a rare slip-up by Ali). In the world of hoops, current Oakland hero Steph Curry could be another Ali, but it's too early to tell. And for a while, to us Filipino Americans, it looked like Manny Pacquiao was going to be our humble Pinoy superhero who would make us even more proud to be Filipino because of his heroism in the ring, but then Pacquiao had to open his mouth about same-sex marriage, and he went from being a kindly Ali type to the embarrassing drunk uncle at the merienda table who should really shut the fuck up about politics.
The boxing world, which is currently being eclipsed in popularity by MMA fighting (another sport that, like boxing, has just lost one of its black fighters: Kimbo Slice, the guy whom Tracy Morgan memorably said should be President Obama's Secretary of Defense on Late Night with Conan O'Brien), needs more humane Ali types and less ignorant types like Pacquiao. That's why Ali's passing is a huge loss for boxing. It's also a huge loss for Islam. It loses one of its most eloquent voices in terms of speaking out against the stereotyping of Muslims as terrorists, which has intensified again ever since Donald Drumpf started persecuting them as part of his Penguin-running-for-mayor-ish presidential campaign.
Ali's earlier allegiance to the Nation of Islam (an offshoot of traditional Islam) and the way that Ali's anti-war activism stemmed from his faith are deftly explored in director Bill Siegel's 2013 doc The Trials of Muhammad Ali, which is now streaming on Hulu. Zirin is right about the Siegel doc's ability to communicate with nuance Ali's journey of rebellion against racism and war. This is the film to see if you've always been curious about Ali's activist side, the allure Ali saw in the Nation of Islam (it provided the former Cassius Clay with a way to become empowered as a black man, right when he was starting to question both Eurocentricism and mainstream America's bizarre preferences for white over black in everything from Christianity to nursery rhymes) and the career sacrifices Ali made due to opting to be a conscientious objector.
I've watched Beyoncé's Lemonade visual album only once, when HBO Go had the streaming rights to the visual album for just one day (I'm not a Tidal subscriber, and $9.99 a month is too steep for my blood--lower the price, Hov). Yet the sounds of Lemonade are still reverberating in my head.
The anthemic, Just Blaze-produced "Freedom" contains a typically superb Kendrick Lamar guest verse. "Hold Up," the Jack White contribution "Don't Hurt Yourself" and "Sorry" are a triptych of intriguing songs about coping with infidelity, and Beyoncé's jab at "Becky with the good hair" during "Sorry" makes me wonder if "Becky" isn't one lady but is actually a composite of several. I doubt Beyoncé's husband has had just one side chick since marrying Bey. "Daddy Lessons," a tune that explores both her Texan roots and her relationship with her estranged father (and former manager), is a rarity: a black country song, but this time from a woman instead of Charley Pride, Darius Rucker or Kool Moe Dee. Beyoncé experiments with country, but it's not an epic fail like that time Lil Wayne made a rock album.
I always thought Solange was the more musically interesting Knowles sister, and I still do, but with Lemonade, Beyoncé has really evolved from the "Independent Women"-style anthems and adult contemporary radio-friendly ballads she's known primarily for. I didn't expect something so introspective, confessional and politically charged from Beyoncé, although there have been hints of that introspective direction throughout her last visual album and during, of course, the #BlackLivesMatter-influenced "Formation" single (some say that direction surfaced as early as 2003's Dangerously in Love). Lemonade is basically Beyoncé's Craps (After Hours). In other words, it's the turning point for a new kind of Beyoncé. I believe I have a clip from her new visual album.
Today is Terence Blanchard's birthday. His epic Malcolm X score--the second one he wrote for Spike Lee--is the first score that made me sit up and take notice of the sounds of the trumpeter/film composer (and now, stage play composer, because of his work in Chris Rock's Broadway debut The Motherfucker with the Hat).
The centerpiece of Blanchard's Malcolm X score is "Fruit of Islam," a fiery march written for a pivotal sequence that recreates the Nation of Islam's outcry over the police's treatment of an NOI member named Johnson Hinton, which catapulted Malcolm (Denzel Washington, in a nuanced performance he should have won the Best Actor Oscar for, not for his much showier and less subtly written turn in Training Day) into the public eye in 1957.
Assisted by the NOI's Fruit of Islam security force, Malcolm and other NOI members march to the hospital where Brother Johnson (stand-up comic and Do the Right Thing cast member Steve White in a silent role), a badly injured victim of police brutality, is being looked after to ensure that Johnson is given proper medical care. After Malcolm is assured by a resident physician that Johnson is receiving the best care possible, an NYPD captain (Peter Boyle) orders the crowd of black protesters outside the hospital to disperse. But they won't listen to the surly-looking white captain. They'll listen to Malcolm, who, in one of my favorite bits of acting by Washington in the film, flashes a smile at the captain and then turns to the crowd and gets them to quietly disperse with a simple hand signal.
"Fruit of Islam" is also notable for being--along with the Chariots of Fire theme and "Duel of the Fates" from The Phantom Menace--one of the few film music instrumentals to receive airplay on music video channels. The "Fruit of Islam" video that ran on BET in 1992 interspersed Malcolm X clips with footage of Blanchard and his orchestra. Blanchard also has a cameo in Malcolm X as a trumpeter who performs with Billie Holiday (R&B artist Miki Howard).
"I kind of wish I wasn't [on-camera]. I thought I was going to have this big line, 'Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Billie Holiday,' but no, Spike said, 'Just stand in the corner and play your horn, and we'll tell you action and cut,'" said Blanchard to the Associated Press while promoting his Malcolm X Jazz Suite arrangement of his score in 1993. "And Denzel had the most fun, especially after Mo' Better Blues when I was behind the camera watching him. Now our situations were reversed and he kept saying, 'Now you know what it feels like.'"
While the NCAA is caught up in March Madness, A Fistful of Soundtracks: The Blog's version of March Madness will be a series of posts that will focus each weekday on a particular standout march written for film or TV.
They've opened and closed some of our favorite action films. Some of them have even wound up as marching band music at football games or as campaign anthems for politicians who try to claim these marches as their own (their association with these themes helps to kill our enjoyment of these tunes, just like how Michele Bachmann's choice of Tom Petty's "American Girl" as a rally anthem or Newt Gingrich's use of Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger" pissed off those of us who like "American Girl" or "Eye of the Tiger" but don't care for Bachmann and Gingrich's politics, until Petty and Survivor took action and got them to stop co-opting their music). Whether it's the controversial and Oscar-nominated "Blame Canada" from South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut or my personal favorite film music march, Terence Blanchard's "Fruit of Islam" from Malcolm X, the "March Madness March of the Day" series will devote a couple of grafs and maybe a video clip to it.
The series begins next Monday with a Lalo Schifrin piece that serves as great motivational music for when you're elaborately mindsmegging somebody, and it concludes on Friday, March 30 with a march from a Steven Spielberg flick that must have been more fun to act in than watch.
This was originally going to be a regular feature on my blog. Two April Fools Days ago, I posted some fake movie posters I made in Photoshop and was going to create some more, but I forgot that I suck at Photoshop, so Coming Soon to a Theater in an Alternate Reality Near You never became a regular thing.
The Minority Militant, a Chicago blogger who's a fan of my webcomic The Palace, recently asked me to design a T-shirt for his Project X fund, which he'll use to "reward any independent film director or producer with an outstanding treatment that casts at least one lead role for an Asian American male or female."
Check out the evolution of my Project X shirt design.
Because Project X is about supporting Asian American cinema, I originally wanted to draw an image of the Minority Militant literally kicking the backside of a white actor who's in yellowface and dressed up as the very dated Charlie Chan, whom Hollywood studios keep threatening to revive every few years (last failed attempt: that time when 20th Century Fox tried to get Lucy Liu to star as Chan's granddaughter). The image of Chan with a foot in his ass had stemmed from an idea I've had for a teaser trailer for the Asian American private eye movie or TV series I always wanted to create, in case it would ever get greenlit. The trailer, which would be a sendup of Chan movies, would show a white actor as a Chan-esque character who's trying to reveal the killer in a roomful of suspects, but before the Chan-esque detective can finish his corny, Confucius quotation-laden summation, he gets run over by a car driven by the movie's real hero, whom the trailer announcer would describe as not being "the same old Asian detective played by a guy who's as Asian as a Dutch clog dancer."
I told TMM my initial concept for the Project X drawing, and he joked that he's non-violent, which gave me an idea for the pose that became part of the tee's final design. I based TMM's pose on the famous 1964 "By Any Means Necessary" photo of an armed Malcolm X peering through window curtains, which an Uzi-wielding KRS-One memorably imitated on the cover of Boogie Down Productions' By All Means Necessary album. But instead of a rifle or an Uzi, TMM is holding his preferred weapon, his blog, which is represented by a laptop.
That's too much pressure, Matt! I dig so many of them. Scores come in many different categories or genres (film, TV, synthesizer, 80-to-100-piece-orchestra, blaxploitation, espionage, poliziotto, lederhosen porn...). It's too broad a question, and it'd be difficult to narrow them down to 10.
I don't spend much time on Facebook(*) anymore (mostly because I now prefer the more stripped-down Twitter), but there's one thing I enjoy doing on Facebook: making lists(**) of my favorite pieces of music on Facebook's LivingSocial and iLike apps.
(*) Damn, even Facebook's CFO doesn't like the new Facebook either. He hates it so much he quit!
(**) The title of this post refers to the "List Habit" tag that Kim Morgan uses for her list-crazy posts.
In LivingSocial's case, the app has you post Top 5 lists of your favorite things. So instead of a "Top 10 favorite scores" list, I'll repost the Top 5 lists of favorite score cues (or scores) under certain categories that I've been posting on LivingSocial and Twitter.
Five favorite marches from original film or TV scores
5. John Williams, "The Imperial March (Darth Vader's Theme)," The Empire Strikes Back
4. John Williams, "March from 1941"
3. Jerry Goldsmith, "Main Title," Star Trek: The Motion Picture
2. John Williams, "Main Title," Superman: The Movie
1. Terence Blanchard, "Fruit of Islam," Malcolm X
God, the Oscars are a joke. How could they not nominate Terence Blanchard for his 1992 Malcolm X score, which is filled with awesome themes like "Fruit of Islam," the cue he wrote for the film's Harlem march sequence? What was the score that won in 1993? Oh right, Aladdin. Give me a break.
Gene Roddenberry dug the Star Trek: The Motion Picture march so much that he recycled it for Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1987. TV composer Dennis McCarthy wrote an updated arrangement of the march, and it was performed by an orchestra that was smaller than the 90-piece orchestra that performed it back in 1979. That explains why the TNG version lacks oomph. I prefer the original 1979 rendition. I like how the brass sounds jazzier.
Five other favorite marches
5. Ennio Morricone, "March of the Beggars," Duck, You Sucker
4. Jerry Goldsmith, "Attack," Patton
3. Elmer Bernstein, "Main Title," The Great Escape
2. Elmer Bernstein, "Stripes March"
1. John Williams, "End Credits," Raiders of the Lost Ark
Five favorite film scores frequently sampled by beatmakers
5. The Mack (Willie Hutch)
4. Superfly (Curtis Mayfield)
3. Trouble Man (Marvin Gaye)
2. Enter the Dragon (Lalo Schifrin)
1. The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (David Shire)
Five favorite Danny Elfman film scores
5. Dead Presidents
4. Pee-wee's Big Adventure
3. Mission: Impossible
2. Batman
1. Midnight Run
Five favorite original TV themes
5. It Takes a Thief (third season version) (Dave Grusin)
4. I Spy (Earle Hagen)
3. Barney Miller (Jack Elliott and Allyn Ferguson)
2. The Persuaders! (John Barry)
1. Cowboy Bebop (Yoko Kanno)
Listeners like Portland film critic and CulturePulp artist Mike Russell have told me they became Yoko Kanno fans after hearing her Cowboy Bebop score tracks on my station.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, what's the crappiest original TV theme of all time? I was going to say Enterprise, but then I remembered the Diane Warren-penned "Where My Heart Will Take Me" wasn't an original work. It was recycled from Patch Adams, of all movies. (In a sketch I wrote for A Fistful of Soundtracks' 2002 Halloween special, gangbangers torture a hostage by subjecting him to the Enterprise theme.)
1. Name a movie that you have seen more than 10 times. Star Trek II.
2. Name a movie that you've seen multiple times in the theater. Batman (1989).
3. Name an actor/actress that would make you more inclined to see a movie. Marisa Tomei, naked edition.
4. Name an actor/actress that would make you less likely to see a movie. Actor: Steven Seagal. Actress: Zac Efron.
5. Name a movie that you can quote from. Midnight Run. Hey Tony, Tony. Hopalong Cassidiche. Got your camera? Take a picture.
6. Name a movie musical that you know all of the lyrics to all of the songs. None.
7. Name a movie that you have been known to sing along with. Johnnie To's The Mission. That theme music is infectious!
8. Name a movie that you would recommend everyone see. If you're not averse to subtitles, I recommend The President's Last Bang, a hilarious 2005 South Korean comedy about the 1979 assassination of Korean dictator Park Chung-hee. If you are averse to subtitles, I recommend the original Taking of Pelham One Two Three, one of the most underrated action flicks ever. It was Die Hard before there was even a Die Hard.
9. Name a movie that you own. Chan Is Missing.
10. Name an actor that launched his/her entertainment career in another medium but who has surprised you with his/her acting chops. Donnie Wahlberg in The Sixth Sense and the Boomtown TV series.
11. Have you ever seen a movie in a drive-in? If so, what? The Goonies.
12. Name a movie that you keep meaning to see but just haven't yet gotten around to it. Slumdog Millionaire.
13. Ever walked out of a movie? No.
14. Name a movie that made you cry in the theater. None, although Malcolm X nearly made me tear up.
15. Popcorn? Yes, it is.
16. How often do you go to the movies (as opposed to renting them or watching them at home)? I never go out to the theater anymore, unless it's an event movie like The Dark Knight.
17. What's the last movie you saw in the theater? The Dark Knight: The IMAX Experience.
18. What's your favorite/preferred genre of movie? Comedy.
19. What's the first movie you remember seeing in the theater? Star Trek II.
20. What movie do you wish you had never seen? Dancer in the Dark.
