That gum you like is going to come back in style, thanks to Showtime's Twin Peaks revival

I'm glad David Lynch and Mark Frost's recently confirmed Showtime revival of Twin Peaks--an extremely influential show with many classic Angelo Badalamenti score cues that you can vibe out to during "AFOS Prime" on AFOS--won't be another goddamn prequel or origin story. I was never really a Twin Peaks fan, but as a kid who saw all of the first season and was only interested in the second one when it revealed Laura Palmer's killer, I had crushes on Sherilyn Fenn as Audrey Horne and Mädchen Amick as Shelly Johnson, and I loved both Badalamenti's score music and the character of Agent Cooper, who, as the A.V. Club's Zack Handlen once tweeted, "is a great example of how to create an idiosyncratic genius without making him a misanthropic ass," in what I assume to be a jab at how tiresome the abrasive and self-destructive lead characters on House and Sherlock became after a few seasons.

(Photo source: Idle Fascination)

Kyle MacLachlan's eccentric and perpetually enthusiastic Cooper ("Damn good coffee") was, like Jeff Goldblum's Zack Nichols on Law & Order: Criminal Intent, a great detective character on a show that I wish had been as terrifically written as its lead was (let's face it: Twin Peaks was kind of boring outside of Cooper, the weirdos at the police station, the Palmers and Audrey--I never gave a shit about the Dallas-esque sawmill and hotel stuff, and I don't think Lynch ever did either, kind of like how True Detective season 1's Carcosa cult conspiracy seemed superfluous to Nic Pizzolatto, who, judging from interviews, appeared to be more invested in working on the philosophical and character study sides of his show than its procedural side). Cooper, who, outside of the Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me prequel, was last seen being possessed by the evil spirit known as Bob, was such a defining role for MacLachlan that almost every character he's played since Twin Peaks has wound up channeling Cooper's weirdness, whether it's "the Captain" on How I Met Your Mother or the mayor on Portlandia.

You see Cooper everywhere on procedurals these days--on one of my current favorite shows, Sleepy Hollow, Tom Mison's Ichabod Crane is basically Cooper as an easily irritable 18th-century polymath--but back in 1990, MacLachlan's character was a breath of fresh air. He was a heroic detective imbued with several quirks that made him more interesting than the average pre-1990 FBI agent protagonist (I don't think Diane, the supposed secretary he addresses in his tape recordings, even exists), but he wasn't '70s and '80s network TV detective quirky, like Kojak (he loves his lollipops!), Baretta (he has a cockatoo!), Crockett (he has an alligator!) and Jessica Fletcher (she's old!).

Instead of being quirky in the cutesy and gimmicky ways pre-1990 network TV preferred the likes of Kojak, Baretta, Crockett and the serial killer who went by the name of Jessica Fletcher to be, Cooper was David Lynch quirky, which meant he, like Audrey, the Log Lady and a few other characters on Twin Peaks, was from some other fucking planet that speaks in a language only Lynch understands. That's why the world, which had grown bored with the cutesiness and blandness of American network TV at the time, became so taken with Cooper and Twin Peaks, although for only a brief time.

If ABC hadn't interfered so much in Twin Peaks' much-maligned second season and Lynch and Frost were allowed to handle the show's central mystery their way (Lynch wanted Laura's killer to remain unidentified), like how HBO and FX were more willing to roll the dice with the limited series format and let Pizzolatto and Noah Hawley, respectively, do whatever they wanted to do with the storylines on True Detective and Fargo, maybe Twin Peaks would have been a masterpiece instead of a near-masterpiece with one classic season and one season that was all over the map. It's partly why Lynch's 2001 cult favorite Mulholland Dr.--which was originally supposed to be a Twin Peaks spinoff about Audrey in Hollywood and contains the weirdest and cleverest recycling of footage from an unsold TV pilot outside of the original Star Trek's transformation of a failed pilot into a courtroom story--stands the test of time for me better than Twin Peaks does: because it ended the way Lynch wanted it to end.

Showtime isn't the timid and prudish network that ABC was when Lynch and Frost made Twin Peaks, but its network execs also ruined Dexter (they wouldn't let the show kill off Dexter) and Homeland (they were responsible for Brody outliving his usefulness), so their history of tinkering with their scripted programming is the one thing that makes me skeptical about the nine final Twin Peaks episodes that are being planned for Showtime. They'll probably turn Cooper into a lumberjack or something.

Selections from Twin Peaks' first-season and second-season score albums can currently be heard during "AFOS Prime" on AFOS.

Shows I Miss: Keen Eddie

Tonight, prime-time takes another stab at adapting the DC comic Human Target when Fox premieres a much-hyped, Bear McCreary-scored series loosely based on Peter Milligan's Vertigo version, one of my favorite comics during its too-brief run. In a previous TV version of Human Target that was produced by Flash TV series showrunners Danny Bilson and Paul DeMeo, Rick Springfield starred as bodyguard Christopher Chance, who disguised himself as his victimized clients to throw off the bad guys and flew around in a pimpin' stealth bomber/bachelor pad that's the only thing I remember about the show. This time, Jericho co-creator Jon Steinberg is the showrunner, the master-of-disguise gimmick has been ditched, the stealth bomber has been left to rot in a hangar somewhere and Chance is played by Mark Valley, who will always be Keen Eddie to me.

Human Target reunites Valley with Con Air director Simon West, who also worked on the much-missed, Guy Ritchie-esque Keen Eddie, which first aired on Fox in the summer of 2003. Early reviews have said Human Target is less like the gritty Vertigo comic--which put Chance through one hell of a psychological wringer by having him suffer from an identity crisis--and more along the lines of lighter fare like The A-Team, MacGyver and Keen Eddie.

I doubt the new show will be as offbeat or raunchy as Keen Eddie, which premiered (and then died) a few months before Janet Jackson's Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime wardrobe malfunction caused the major networks to overreact and kill some of the fun out of prime-time by overpolicing their raunchier shows. There are certain storylines and bits of dialogue during Keen Eddie that teleplay writers probably can't get away with in today's post-Janetgate prime-time landscape--they're more likely to be able to get away with them on FX. Cable was where Keen Eddie belonged.

In fact, cable was where most of Keen Eddie's cult following first discovered the series. After Fox's top exec at the time--who was as impatient with Keen Eddie as the shit-for-brains NBC execs have been with The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien--defied the wishes of other Fox execs who loved Keen Eddie and abruptly cancelled it, Bravo picked it up and debuted its unaired episodes.

The series, which last popped up on Sleuth a couple of years ago, is a lost comedic gem from creator J.H. Wyman, who currently co-produces Fringe, where Valley was briefly a regular before he moved on to Human Target. The Desert Storm vet-turned-actor was terrific as NYPD detective Eddie Arlette, who travels to London to track down an elusive drug dealer and winds up joining Scotland Yard. Eddie doesn't quite find his drug dealer (Crockett and Tubbs had far better luck with their nemesis Calderon on Miami Vice), but the fish-out-of-water falls in love with the city and takes a liking to both the British crooks he locks up (they're more like the not-so-dangerous oddball criminals from Barney Miller than the mustachio-twirling villains from Miami Vice) and his hot but snooty and argumentative flatmate Fiona Bickerton (a then-unknown Sienna Miller). The series was a love letter to London, where it was filmed on location on what was clearly a ginormous budget. Wyman's creation was too foreign, anarchic and weird for mainstream America (it wasn't dour and moralistic enough for them--the original CSI, the #1 prime-time hit that year, was more up their conservative-leaning, bodybag-filled alley). But it won the hearts of some TV critics (Marvin Kitman called it "a show that could have started something new, like how Miami Vice took police shows out of L.A.") and whoever were the three or four viewers who watched it on Fox. I was one of them.

Eddie is a roguish, down-on-his-luck crime show hero in the mold of Jim Rockford and Black Tie Affair's Dave Brodsky. If Rockford's Achilles heel was having knuckles made of Kleenex, Eddie's Achilles heel is thinking with his boner too much--one reason why this show wouldn't fly on prime-time today. Eddie's crush on his gorgeous informant, the mysterious gangster's moll who tricks him and the NYPD into busting down the wrong door, is the whole reason for his banishment to London. The series' most enjoyable running joke involves Carol (Rachael Buckley, who's even hotter than Miller but seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth), a Scotland Yard secretary Eddie nicknames "Miss Moneypenny," and the never-answered mystery over whether her flirtatious exchanges with Eddie about her tastes for crotchless panties or being on all fours are real or the figment of Eddie's oversexed imagination. But Eddie's a prude in comparison to his floppy-haired partner Monty Pippin (Julian Rhind-Tutt), whose off-duty sexcapades make Jimmy McNulty from The Wire look like a monk (even though because this isn't HBO, we never see Monty in the middle of one of his swingers club orgies).

Another highlight of Keen Eddie is its awesome, pitch-perfect soundtrack. The pilot episode underscored a drug bust sequence with the Archies' "Sugar Sugar"--an early indication that Keen Eddie was no ordinary cop show. For the carelessly compiled DVD release, which should be avoided at all costs, Paramount Home Entertainment removed many of the songs that helped make Keen Eddie such a memorable show, due to clearance fees Paramount refused to pony up for ("Keeping Up Appearances," an episode in which Eddie inherits Jimi Hendrix's Bentley, is utter shit without "Crosstown Traffic"). But the studio didn't lay a finger on the songs in the reruns, so whenever Keen Eddie turns up on cable, fire up the DVR.

Because of the arrival of Valley's first star vehicle since Keen Eddie, I'll soon be adding to the Fistful of Soundtracks channel's "F Zone" playlist some of the tunes that were cut out of the Keen Eddie DVDs: Madness' "One Step Beyond," New Order's "Crystal" and of course, "Crosstown Traffic."

"The Best of Jimmy J. Aquino on Twitter," Part 4

My sampling of what I've been up to on Twitter continues.

Previously on A Fistful of Soundtracks: The Blog: Parts 1, 2 and 3.

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@aots I'm dying to know the reason for Richard Alpert's agelessness. I bet it has to do with that guyliner he's always wearing.
11:18 AM May 13th from web in reply to aots

A FISTFUL OF SOUNDTRACKS: THE BLOG: An old G.I. Joe comic has some eerie parallels to Laura Ling's ordeal: http://tinyurl.com/otblwr
12:42 PM May 15th from web

Maya Rudolph admits her Michelle Obama sucked. Now if only someone can get the otherwise funny Fred Armisen to admit his Fauxbama sucks too.
5:25 PM May 16th from web

@gcdb Kevin Smith on Superman Returns: "Shouldn't [Lois'] first question to [Supes] be 'When did you rape me?'": http://tinyurl.com/242kjp
11:33 AM May 17th from web in reply to gcdb

@gcdb I would have had Supes come back to find Lex is President of the U.S. instead of rehashing Lex's real estate plot from the '78 film.
11:38 AM May 17th from web in reply to gcdb

Saw Far from Heaven for the 1st time on IFC. Man, I miss Elmer Bernstein. Ghostbusters made me fall in love w/ NYC and Bernstein's scores.
8:26 PM May 17th from web

@ALBaroza I'm finding out the L.A. quake was 4.7. On March 30, I woke up to a 5.6 shaker up here in San Jose. Beat that, Angelenos.
8:56 PM May 17th from web in reply to ALBaroza

@ALBaroza @JavierHernandez 6.7, huh? Well, say hello to... my 6.9. The same 6.9 that made Al Michaels shit his pants on live TV.
9:22 PM May 17th from web in reply to ALBaroza

Why did Michael Mann shoot Public Enemies on digital video? It worked for Collateral, but I'm not sure if DV would work for a period piece.
11:52 AM May 19th from web


Digital video makes the fedora-clad Depp, Bale and Crudup look like they're in a very low-budget gay porno gangster movie (Pubic Enemies?).
11:53 AM May 19th from web

But if there's any director who can make digital video not look shitty, it's definitely Michael Mann.
11:54 AM May 19th from web

I mentioned earlier that Elmer Bernstein was a key reason why I enjoyed Ghostbusters. Ghostbusters II wasn't the same without him...
4:50 PM May 19th from web

... and I'm not sure if Ghostbusters III will measure up without Elmer Bernstein either: http://tinyurl.com/o58nby
4:50 PM May 19th from web

Dushku as a Ghostbuster? I'm so there--though NY is a far different NY from the '80s NY. Will GBIII be less funny in a kinder, gentler NY?
4:52 PM May 19th from web

@gcdb I wonder why you hate Mann's Miami Vice film. I've never seen it because Colin Farrell as Crockett was such a dealbreaker for me.
4:54 PM May 19th from web

@gcdb Farrell as Crockett: one of the worst cases of miscasting ever. Josh Holloway, a.k.a. Sawyer, should have been cast as Crockett.
4:55 PM May 19th from web

R.I.P. Frankenstein. http://bit.ly/x3tSf. (Frankenstein in Death Race 2000 is my favorite Carradine role.)
11:32 AM Jun 4th from web

A FISTFUL OF SOUNDTRACKS: THE BLOG: Jimmy J. Aquino's Lacuna Matata: MIGHTY MOUSE: THE NEW ADVENTURES: http://bit.ly/19n2wg
4:20 PM Jun 5th from web

One Million B.C. + Pertwee-era Doctor Who + Jonny Quest - the xenophobia and the neo-Nazi scriptwriters = '70s version of Land of the Lost
6:54 PM Jun 6th from web

'70s version of Land of the Lost - the drugs Sid and Marty Krofft were on + a hot cave-chick = '90s version of Land of the Lost
6:55 PM Jun 6th from web

Scrubs - everyone except Carla + House's pill addiction + the twist ending of Mad Men's pilot episode = Nurse Jackie's pilot episode
4:10 PM Jun 7th from web

A FISTFUL OF SOUNDTRACKS: THE BLOG: I got a basketball jones, oh baby, ooooo. Favorite b'ball movie scores: http://bit.ly/4UPwR
4:26 AM Jun 8th from web

A FISTFUL OF SOUNDTRACKS: THE BLOG: Jimmy J. Aquino's Lacuna Matata: BLACK TIE AFFAIR starring Bradley Whitford: http://bit.ly/kdqni
4:27 AM Jun 8th from web

Why did they put a cover of "Dancing w/ Myself" in ads for Eddie Murphy's latest kids' movie? That's a song about masturbation, you sillies!
1:12 PM Jun 9th from web

Didn't expect to crack up so much during a rerun of the Married... with Children 2-parter in which Al fights the cancellation of Psycho Dad.
5:30 PM Jun 14th from web

"I Want My Psycho Dad" has great jabs at Washington DC, the DC murder rate and lame '90s sitcoms (Blossom, Full House, Saved by the Bell).
5:30 PM Jun 14th from web

"Uh, close your eyes first, Dad, 'cause there's still a few minutes left of Saved By the Bell: The Prison Years."
5:31 PM Jun 14th from web

To be concluded.

Why so many damn '80s songs about heartbeats?

I heard King Crimson's "Heartbeat" on Radio Nigel recently, and it got me thinking the above question.

Pop songwriters must have really been out of ideas in the '80s, a decade that gave us such gems as Reaganomics, widespread Asian-bashing humor, crappy sitcoms featuring creepy little girl robots and wisecracking babies who share a roof with third-rate stand-up comics who think Bullwinkle impressions are the height of comedy, and of course, overly earnest power ballads about heartbeats.

Manhunter is my favorite movie based on a Thomas Harris novel, but the one thing that dates that movie is Red 7's very '80s closing credits theme, also entitled "Heartbeat." Michael Mann has great musical tastes (I'm looking forward to the Public Enemies soundtrack), but I don't get his love for Red 7's "Heartbeat," which he used in both the original Miami Vice and Manhunter.

Okay, I somewhat get it. Joan Allen listened to a tiger's heartbeat earlier in the movie, hence "Heartbeat." But otherwise, I'm not feelin' the song.

And somebody at the "Heartbeat" video shoot should have told the Red 7 lead singer, "Dude, the mullet's not gonna cover up the fact that you're balding."

Or "Hey, party in the back, dying lawn up top."

Speaking of things dying, Don Johnson's "Heartbeat"--his attempt to launch a singing career during Miami Vice's run--makes me die inside. It was the lamest of 25 videos Jon Stewart, Denis Leary, Janeane Garofalo and Chris Kattan literally destroyed during MTV's legendary and unlikely-to-be-rerun-again 25 Lame special in 1999. In the case of "Heartbeat," Leary and Kattan destroyed the channel's master copy of the Johnson video by stuffing it in a blender. The four hosts' commentary during "Heartbeat" was one of many highlights of 25 Lame. (What's the difference between 25 Lame and the countless VH1 Awesomely Bad Videos specials it spawned? 25 Lame was funny.)

An agony booth recapper wrote that when they watched "Heartbeat," "the comedians were mostly sitting in stunned silence. Was this post-traumatic stress disorder brought on by the Vanilla Ice [baseball bat] incident? Or were they just completely stupefied and confounded by what they were watching?" Actually, they weren't mostly silent. I remember they got in a few good lines about the Miami Vice star's overdramatic lip-syncing, the constant footage of exploding stuff and the baffling storyline (Johnson as a war photographer who's into dead terrorist chicks? Huh?).

The one '80s heartbeat song I like isn't a power ballad. It's Taana Gardner's funky and frequently sampled "Heartbeat" from 1981. Otherwise, like I said, '80s pop tunesmiths must have really been out of ideas. The fact that I'm blogging about this means I'm out of ideas too.

My snarky movie summaries (Part 2)

Previously: Part 1.

The Hills Have Eyes II
Somebody should feed Larry the Cable Guy to these redneck mutants.

The Host
This popular monster movie from South Korea has a deleted scene in which the mutated sea creature snacks on that Korean-bashing douchebag Rex Reed. Then the monster pukes up his remains because it can't stand the taste of washed-up movie critic.

The Illusionist
Edward Norton stars as a magician who comes to Jessica Biel's rescue. He makes her memories of Stealth disappear.

The Invisible
¿Quien es mas emo? ¿Justin Chatwin de The Invisible o Milo Ventimiglia de Heroes?

Killer of Sheep
You know African American cinema is in trouble when Soul Plane gets better treatment than this long-buried Charles Burnett cult favorite.

Lady in the Water
The much-maligned M. Night Shyamalan based his latest film on a bedtime story he told to his kids. It could have been worse, like Uwe Boll grabbing a pile of his own feces and calling it a movie. Oh wait--that was BloodRayne.

The Last Mimzy
Aliens befriend a couple of kids by giving them toys. Isn't that how Michael Jackson preys on little boys?

Lemming
Another one of those movies where you're left wondering which part of it is a hallucination and which part is real. Unfortunately, those lame car commercials before the feature presentation are not a hallucination.

Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man
The acclaimed Canadian singer/songwriter is the subject of a new doc. Once upon a time, Cohen's "Hallelujah" wasn't a bad song. Now thanks to repetitive airplay on prime-time drama shows, "Hallelujah" has turned into the depressed white person's "Macarena."

Letters From Iwo Jima
Clint Eastwood depicts Iwo Jima from the Japanese POV in the second of two Iwo Jima movies. A third Iwo Jima movie will be produced by the people behind the Look Who's Talking movies. This time, it'll be told from the POV of babies whose thoughts are voiced by Bruce Willis ("Do tanks tank? Do rifles rifle?").

License to Wed
We always cry at wedding movies that suck.

Lions for Lambs
Meryl Streep, you don't know the history of U.S. military strategy in the Middle East. Tom Cruise does. You're being glib.

Live Free or Die Hard
John McClane has been described more than once as "an analog man in a digital world." Nah, he's more like "an R man neutered by a PG-13 movie."

The Lookout
The title character is a man who suffers from brain damage and amnesia after a traumatic accident. You would want to also if you saw that horrifying White House Correspondents Dinner clip of Karl Rove trying to rap and dance.

Manda Bala
Errol Morris called this documentary about corruption and frog farming in Brazil "powerful," while Vomiting Kermit from Late Night with Conan O'Brien gave it two out of four oatmeal raisiny heaves.

Miami Vice
Where the hell is Elvis the alligator? Did he want too much money?

Miss Potter
Renee Zellweger is so squinty-eyed she makes Clint Eastwood look like Astro Boy.

Next: Parts 3 and 4.

Movie soundtrack iPod shuffle meme

I got a kick out of this meme in which I got to be the music supervisor for the movie about my own life ("If your life were a movie, what would the soundtrack be?").

1. Open your music library (iTunes, Winamp, Media Player, iPod, etc).
2. Put it on shuffle.
3. Press play.
4. For every question, type the song that's playing.
5. When you go to a new question, press the next button.
6. Don't lie and try to pretend you're cool.

Opening credits:
Jan Hammer, "Crockett's Theme" (from Miami Vice)

Waking up:
Devo, "Freedom of Choice"

Average day:
Los Amigos Invisibles, "Pipi"

First date:
The Clash, "Charlie Don't Surf"

Falling in love:
Herbie Hancock, "Bring Down the Birds" (from Blow-Up)*

* Deee-Lite sampled the bass line from this track in "Groove Is in the Heart."

Love scene:
The Reverend Horton Heat, "In Your Wildest Dreams"

Fight scene:
Blondie, "Heart of Glass"

Breaking up:
Living Colour, "Love Rears Its Ugly Head"

Getting back together:
The X-Ecutioners, "Play That Beat (Lo-Fidelity All-Stars Remix)"

Secret love:
Eminem feat. Jay-Z, "Renegade"

Life's okay:
Tangerine Dream, "Love on a Real Train (Risky Business)" (from Risky Business)

Mental breakdown:
Maxine Nightingale, "Right Back Where We Started From"

Learning a lesson:
Trick Daddy, "Let's Go"

Deep thought:
The Who, "Bargain"

Flashback:
Madvillain, "Figaro"

Partying:
Elvis Costello, "I Just Don't Know What to Do with Myself (live)"

Happy dance:
Magazine 60, "Don Quichotte"

Regretting:
Los Straitjackets, "Espionage"

Long night alone:
De La Soul, "Supa Emcees"

Death scene:
Portishead, "Glory Box"

Closing credits:
Sonny Rollins, "He's Younger Than You Are" (from Alfie)

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Hear the Slap Shot theme "Right Back Where We Started From" and "Don Quichotte" (a memorable part of the Northern Exposure episode "Jules et Joel") during the "F Zone" block, which airs Mondays at 4am, 9am and 3pm, Wednesdays at noon and Fridays at 5am, 9am and 3pm on A Fistful of Soundtracks. "The F Zone" streams kickass existing songs that have been used in films and shows.

"Crockett's Theme" and "Love on a Real Train (Risky Business)" can be heard during both the "Assorted Fistful" block and the "Soda and Pie" '80s block, which airs Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays at noon on AFOS.