"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of Last Week: Rick and Morty, "Mortynight Run"

Occasionally on Friday, I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. The "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week is no longer a weekly feature, but sometimes, I'll catch a really good piece of animated TV one week or a few weeks after its original airdate, and I'll feel like devoting some paragraphs to it despite my lateness to the party. Hence the "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of Last Week. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

In a Rolling Stone profile about the creative challenges Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon have faced while trying to equal the brilliant first season of their irreverent and renewed-this-week-for-a-third-season Adult Swim hit Rick and Morty, Harmon said, "Most second albums suck." Uh, Elvis Costello's This Year's Model, Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, the Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique, De La Soul Is Dead, A Tribe Called Quest's The Low End Theory, OutKast's ATLiens, D'Angelo's Voodoo and Kendrick Lamar's good kid, m.A.A.d. city would like a word with you, Harmon.

But yeah, otherwise, I see Harmon's point as he and Roiland admitted "A Rickle in Time"--Rick and Morty's complicatedly written second-season premiere about the side effects Rick and his grandkids Morty and Summer experience due to Rick's time-freezing device from "Ricksy Business"--is not as satisfying as they wish it could be. Harmon said, "It went off the deep end conceptually and got really over-complicated." I actually like "A Rickle in Time" a little more than Roiland and Harmon do, but the new season's second episode, "Mortynight Run," is where the season really starts cooking.



"Mortynight Run" taps into the thing that surprised me the most about Rick and Morty's first season and made the show stand out from other Adult Swim fare, outside of The Venture Bros.: its downbeat side (and more of that downbeat side surfaces in this week's Rick and Morty episode, "Auto Erotic Assimilation"). I hate to refer to a line from a movie I despise, but Gandalf's line to Bilbo about returning home a different person in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey really applies to Morty. His adventures with his scientist grandpa have made him a better person, and those adventures have allowed the learning disability-afflicted kid to prove to Rick that he's not as dumb as Rick thinks he is. But those adventures have also made Morty better understand his grandpa's misanthropic and nihilistic worldview, and like in "Meeseeks and Destroy" and "Rick Potion #9," we see how much Morty's gradual understanding of why Rick has that worldview wrecks Morty inside in "Mortynight Run." In only less than a half-hour, the episode ends up doing a better job than those interminable Hobbit movies of showing how these exhausting adventures affect the traveler who won't be the same.

Sure, "Mortynight Run" is hilarious. Special guest star Jemaine Clement gets to both sing and make fun of his own association with musical numbers. "Goodbye Moonmen," written by Harmon and credited "Mortynight Run" writer David Phillips and composed by series composer Ryan Elder, is the cleverest David Bowie parody since, well, Clement's Bowie tribute on Flight of the Conchords. Special guest star Andy Daly takes a stock hitman character and imbues him with amusingly incongruous chipperness in the mold of his Forrest MacNeil character from Comedy Central's Review. The Jerryboree--a day care center where the Ricks from various universes drop off the Jerrys of their universes when they don't have time to put up with the Jerrys' shit--is great "let's beat up on Jerry again" material, but it's also an intriguing subplot about Jerry's realization that his ordinariness isn't as awful as others think. I especially love how a maudlin VR game called Roy--the player determines the decisions of an ordinary guy in scenarios that are like a cross between a David Anspaugh sports movie and the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Inner Light"--is the biggest arcade sensation in outer space instead of a first-person shooter ("You beat cancer and then you went back to work at the carpet store? Boo!").

But what makes "Mortynight Run" especially stand out is the way it treats the moment when Morty--after defying Rick and protecting the life of Clement's character, a benevolent and frequently singing gaseous being, from assassins and cops because he believes all life forms are precious no matter what their flaws are--discovers the being (Rick calls him "Fart") intends to wipe out all life, so Morty makes a difficult decision that was foreshadowed by the scene of him playing Roy at the Dave & Busters-ish Blips and Chitz. "Mortynight Run" doesn't play Morty's moment of anguish for laughs.



On Community, Harmon couldn't have characters actually kill people--hence all those bloodless paintball episodes--but on the much more fantastical and bleak Rick and Morty, Harmon can. Through Morty's dilemma regarding Fart, Phillips, Harmon and Roiland treat the consequences of causing many lives to end because of foolishly sticking to a belief that it's all for the best--and the first time Morty kills somebody in front of him--with the proper weight they deserve. "Mortynight Run" is a good example of what Vox describes as Rick and Morty's "exploration of morality that manages to avoid simplistic fables with pat lessons," as well as the implication during that exploration that "Rick's cynicism is well-founded--and that following Morty's well-intentioned instincts can lead to calamity."

While Bob's Burgers channeled the ambience of Midnight Run in its tribute to that 1988 film (for example, that episode's score music paid tribute to Danny Elfman's score from the film), "Mortynight Run" chooses to pay tribute to the non-comedic side of Midnight Run--one of Harmon's favorite films--without ever quoting a single line from it (the only blatant references to Midnight Run are the scene where all the Jerrys are enjoying a copy of Midnight Run with director's commentary, an extra that, sadly, by the way, doesn't exist in real life, and the moments of Rick, Morty and Fart evading the cops like De Niro and Grodin). Midnight Run is one of my favorite films too. On some days, it skyrockets to being my absolute favorite. GoodFellas may be a more challenging and brutal crime comedy, and Do the Right Thing may be more meaningful because it has something important and complex to say about community and injustice, but at the end of the day, I just want to be entertained by a well-made escapist work that doesn't make me say, "Well, that plot point was dumb"--or "Great, another Asian Stepin Fetchit with a cartoonish accent who helps make it fucking difficult for so many of us to get dates or actual jobs." And Midnight Run is exactly that.

Midnight Run also pulls off shifts in tone from comedic to dramatic more seamlessly than most big-screen comedies--and almost every small-screen comedy from the '80s--where the cast and crew attempt to do the same kind of tonal shifts. Harmon seems to have absorbed Midnight Run's lessons on how to skillfully juggle humor and seriousness during his work on both Community and Rick and Morty, and the De Niro/Grodin film's skillful juggling act receives a proper tribute in "Mortynight Run." The quality of episodes like "Mortynight Run" is why Rick and Morty is now receiving slightly similar tributes from the Internet as well. The Internet's way of paying tribute to Rick and Morty is to recut the dialogue of alcoholic Rick to the rhythm of unapologetic teetotaler Kendrick Lamar's "King Kunta." It makes no damn sense. But it's also brilliant, much like Rick and Morty itself.

The Dissolve has sadly but elegantly irised out (so you win again, terribly written pop-culture news sites that are full of typos and annoying listicles)

Back in May, Pitchfork.tv posted a well-made animated short adapted from an anti-PG-13 essay published by the Pitchfork Media-owned film review site The Dissolve, and I wrote, "I'd like to see [Pitchfork.tv animator Mack] Williams do more animated tie-ins with The Dissolve. The site's discussions of Midnight Run with Adam Scott and Running Scared with Paul Scheer are crying out for the animated treatment, as is Noel Murray's essay 'Why great comics don't always make great movies.'" Sadly, there won't be any more animated Pitchfork.tv/Dissolve team-ups because during a three-week break I took from posting AFOS blog material (but I wasn't able to take a complete break from writing that material), The Dissolve closed up shop after two years of publication, simply because the economics haven't been kind to The Dissolve.

Although The Dissolve's reviews of new releases were well-written, they weren't the reason why The Dissolve was my favorite destination for discussions of film--other than The Onion Film Standard with Peter K. Rosenthal, of course. In an age when click-bait--particularly superhero movie costume news updates and listicles that are so lazily written and mindless they've caused me to stop writing listicles for good--has dominated film writing and made it less appealing to me, the content that made The Dissolve special and unique was all the articles that clearly weren't generating as many hits as the kind of empty and forgettable click-bait The Dissolve stubbornly refused to succumb to publishing in order to stay alive. I'm talking lengthy but never-boring and never-pretentious articles like the essays about the challenges of adapting graphic novels for the screen or the fascinating changes in recent film score music and the "Movie of the Week" roundtable discussions of older films like Repo Man and John Carpenter's Snake Plissken flicks and more recent cult favorites like Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story and MacGruber, discussions that often made you look at an old film in a new light. The reassessments of Spike Lee's work as a music video director or the reassessments of the filmographies of directors like Frank Tashlin and Ernst Lubitsch were also among the things former Dissolve staffer Scott Tobias and his colleagues "knew few people would read" when Tobias and Keith Phipps discussed the demise of their site, but The Dissolve was admirable for not caring that only a few film geeks would read those pieces.

The Dissolve's articles were often as impeccably edited as the movies the Dissolve writers adored and celebrated in their "Movie of the Week" discussions. Typos or misspellings were such a rarity over at The Dissolve. The only typos I spotted were in articles by--ooh, big surprise--Nathan Rabin, who, as an easily bored and barely awake TV recapper for the Onion-owned A.V. Club, once memorably wrote that Jack Donaghy "sneaks pills into Tracey's [sic] jelly beans and transforms him from a space case to an Adderal [sic] achiever" when Jack was so clearly not drugging Tracy Jordan, so Rabin would repeatedly get mocked for his pills mistake in the A.V. Club's comments section. Ooh, look, here's another one of those Rabin typos now.

Typos aside, Rabin's pop-culture writing is actually often worth reading. Like so many of the other former Dissolve writers, Rabin (who perhaps saw the writing on the wall and actually left The Dissolve a couple of months before the site's demise) came from the A.V. Club, which championed and fostered the same kind of smartly written and witty pop-culture writing that was found on The Dissolve and continues to do so, although the A.V. Club, along with Indiewire and Uproxx, has lately become much less of a favorite destination for me because of how often its gazillion ads (fuck you, Flowplayer) cause my browser to freeze up. Meanwhile, The Dissolve refused to clutter its articles with ads, which I assume is what also brought about the end of The Dissolve. But it's better that The Dissolve went out fighting with the integrity in its writing intact instead of dying out as yet another slow and laggy site full of articles that are either littered with or disrupted by ads that slow down my browser and can't be turned off.

If you write or blog about film or pop culture, you might get asked by someone the following: "The Internet's as overwhelming as Comic-Con. There are too many sites to choose from when I want to read stuff on the Internet. How can I tell apart the sites that are worth visiting from the sites that aren't worth visiting?" It's simple. Any publication that frequently makes typos like the following isn't worth the time of day.

Neither is any publication that posts "20 Things You Didn't Know About the Catering for Ant-Man."

Remarkably, The Dissolve was neither of those things, although it did publish a listicle, but only occasionally, like when it discussed "The 50 most daring film roles for women since Ripley" or was presumably ordered by Pitchfork to assemble "The movies' 50 greatest pop music moments." Listicles aren't the only form of digital publishing that bores me. Blog posts that are simply hastily written regurgitations of press releases bore me as well. Sure, The Dissolve had a news section that consisted of hastily written regurgitations of press releases too, but otherwise, 90 percent of its content was the thoughtful and lengthy pieces about movies like Heat, a movie I was obsessed with in college, or Midnight Run, a movie I'm still obsessed with and was a favorite subject of the Dissolve writers because of its countless highlights, like Danny Elfman's "Try to Believe" theme, and because, as Noel Murray said, "This is a movie about adults, made for adults."

When I recently watched McCabe and Mrs. Miller for the first time ever (I checked it out from the San Francisco Public Library, a great alternative for whenever Netflix's DVD rental service comes up short), the first place I clicked to after watching the Robert Altman western was The Dissolve because the site had once picked McCabe as a "Movie of the Week." I wanted to read what the Dissolve staff had to say at length about Altman's offbeat western about the struggles of independent businesses against Big Business, struggles that were similar to The Dissolve's own financial struggles. Not even the late Altman's McCabe audio commentary was satisfactory enough for me. The "Movie of the Week" section is the thing I'll miss the most about The Dissolve. I'm worried that Pitchfork Media will someday remove all these Dissolve articles from the Web because there are so many other older movies I haven't seen yet and were given the "Movie of the Week" treatment by The Dissolve, and I still want to read what its writers had to say about those movies.

I will admit that one of my recent blog posts was written in the style of a Dissolve piece. That post was "The Game of Thrones 'Hardhome' massacre and Mad Max prove that near-silence is golden, so why hasn't anyone stepped up to make the first great modern-day silent action movie?" It's a depressing, "Hardhome"-ish time for film writing: The Dissolve has been shut down, and nobody can make a living from film writing like the late Roger Ebert used to be able to do because the tech world is run by corrupt assholes who don't pay their writers. At the risk of sounding like William Fichtner's "Criminals in this town used to believe in things" line from The Dark Knight, when I was a stringer for a major newspaper in the '90s, I wasn't paid a lot for the movie reviews I wrote, but at least I was actually paid back then. Listicle click-bait like "The 5 Best-Looking Buttcracks in Minions" may have won this round, but let's continue fighting against that type of writing. Let's keep The Dissolve--and what it stood for--alive in our approaches to writing about film or pop culture. It will make the sting of its demise less painful. We can do better than listicles about yellow buttcracks.

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Bob's Burgers, "Midday Run"

On some Fridays, I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. It's the "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

"Midday Run" is the second episode during Bob's Burgers' fifth season to riff on a classic movie that was released in 1988. "Work Hard or Die Trying, Girl," the show's fifth-season premiere, transformed both Die Hard and Working Girl into school musicals, with memorable and intentionally awful-sounding results ("I'm Grubin'/I'm Hans Gruber and I'm Grubin'/And sometimes that could mean shootin'/Mr. Takagi in the head!"), and now "Midday Run" pays tribute to another movie from 1988, and it's one I adore even more than Die Hard: the extremely foul-mouthed and eminently quotable Midnight Run.

The Robert De Niro/Charles Grodin buddy flick wasn't a big box-office hit like Die Hard and Working Girl, but it has a cult following that includes the likes of Dan Harmon and Paul Thomas Anderson, whose first feature film, 1996's Sydney (a.k.a. Hard Eight), is basically a spinoff movie all about Philip Baker Hall's Midnight Run mob lawyer character Sidney (spelled differently in PTA's movie due to what I presume are legal issues that PTA was clever enough to skirt around, unlike Larry the Cable Guy). Midnight Run is special to me because it's where I first learned the terms "chorizo and eggs" and "white-collar criminal," as well as 132 different ways to say "fuck." Like I once said to another Midnight Run fan on Facebook, Midnight Run was my Sesame Street when I was in junior high.

Episode writer Scott Jacobson must have felt the same way about Midnight Run when he was younger because he bases Tina's zeal for her duties as a Wagstaff hall monitor on Jack Walsh's intensely driven mission to deliver the Duke to L.A. (so that means in addition to her male butt-obsessed erotic fanfic author side, Tina's also got a stern lawwoman side). In Tina's case, her Duke is Zeke (Bobby Tisdale). He's in trouble for stealing the costume of the school mascot, the Wagstaff Whaler, so Mr. Frond (David Herman), the guidance counselor and hall monitor supervisor, assigns his toughest hall monitor to deliver Zeke to the principal's office. Of course, Zeke constantly attempts to escape, and like Jack, Tina finds out her prisoner is a much more noble soul than she originally thought: he stole the costume to entertain his grandma (also voiced by Tisdale) at her retirement home before she goes into surgery.

What I like most about "Midday Run" is that instead of referencing the not-so-prime-time-friendly dialogue from Midnight Run (the one bit of movie dialogue that's reenacted in "Midday Run" comes from a different movie, The Fugitive), the episode opts to reference Midnight Run's ambience, particularly on the musical side. Bob's Burgers creator/composer Loren Bouchard and his fellow composers Chris Maxwell and Phil Hernandez, the duo known as the Elegant Too, are the MVPs of "Midday Run." They amusingly channel themes from Danny Elfman's bluesy and lively score to Midnight Run, which is currently in rotation on "AFOS Prime" on AFOS.

You can make out bits and pieces of "Walsh Gets the Duke" and "J.W. Gets a Plan" throughout the "Midday Run" score. After that score he wrote for Midnight Run early on in his film music career, Elfman went on to pen scores that are far more profound or popular--whether for Tim Burton or various tentpole franchises--and yet, the Midnight Run score remains my favorite Elfman score (for a brief time in the late '80s, the Midnight Run score was particularly popular with trailer houses). While Elfman's work for Burton frequently brings to mind the weirdest moments of his Oingo Boingo days, the Midnight Run score channels Boingo at its most tuneful and dance floor-friendly (it's no surprise that Elfman's Boingo bandmates took part in the recording of the Midnight Run score). The "Midday Run" score is the best tribute to a rather underappreciated Elfman score that doesn't often receive such tributes.

As a story that's primarily about the Belcher kids and their Wagstaff classmates (speaking of which, another appearance by Brian Huskey's likable hypochondriac Regular Sized Rudy, who looks up to Tina as a hall monitor role model, is always welcome), "Midday Run" is more pleasant than laugh-out-loud funny, but Regular Sized Rudy and Zeke nicely receive substantial character development here (while Mr. Frond remains an inflexible and clueless bureaucrat, and why does he seem to be in charge of everything at Wagstaff, as if he's a mini-Mr. Belding who, as many comedians would say about Belding on April Richardson's Saved by the Bell podcast Go Bayside!, just can't seem to go away?). The episode's amiableness also brings to mind a second work in addition to Midnight Run. This particular work is an animated show the Bob's Burgers writing staff might not have been aware of while working on "Midday Run": the forgotten early '00s Disney show Fillmore!, which was created by a pre-Walking Dead Scott M. Gimple.

Fillmore! was a '70s cop show spoof where the buddy cops were a pair of middle school hall monitors, black skater kid Cornelius Fillmore and his goth partner Ingrid Third, and all the characters on the show were named after San Francisco streets, an odd touch I especially enjoyed because the Bay Area's my home turf (the San Francisco street thing was actually both Gimple's way of paying tribute to the '70s cop show The Streets of San Francisco and a shout-out to Bay Area friends whose couches he previously crashed on). Like "Midday Run," Fillmore! wasn't laugh-out-loud funny, but there was much to like about it, whether it was the '70s-isms, the diverse cast or the Latino kid who acted as the show's version of the obligatory irritable police captain (he was voiced by then-SNLer Horatio Sanz). There's this Fillmore!-esque vibe to "Midday Run," particularly in the scenes between kiddie cops Tina and Regular Sized Rudy, that makes the episode appealing, in addition to all the Midnight Run score references.

And now that Bob's Burgers has just been renewed for a sixth season, I wonder what other movies from 1988 will get the Bob's Burgers treatment (as this ode to the movie year of 1988 reminds me, the summer of '88 also included Big, which I could envision being turned into a Gene story where he thinks he's been magically transformed into a grown-up but he actually wasn't, or maybe it should be a Louise story), as well as what other facets there are to Tina's unique and unusually confident personality. We've seen the erotic fanfic author with a crazy imagination, the investigative journalist, the avid Equestranauts toy collector, the "bat-zilla" who craves attention and now in both "Tina Tailor Soldier Spy" and "Midday Run," the lawwoman. It's not a bad life for an oddly heroic kid who doesn't consider herself a hero because she puts her bra on one boob at a time like everyone else.

Memorable quotes:

Who's that voice on AFOS?

(Portions of the following were culled from a series of "Who's That Voice on AFOS?" posts from July 13-17, 2010.)

The new indie film In a World... is distinctive for being the first comedy set against the voiceover industry. I took a bunch of voice acting classes back when I was considering breaking into the voiceover industry, so the subject of In a World... is of great interest to me. In a World... is the feature-length directorial debut of actress Lake Bell, one of the stars of the most hilarious 11-minute show on cable, Childrens Hospital, as well as an occasional director of Childrens Hospital episodes. Bell stars in In a World... as a vocal coach who attempts to break into the male-dominated movie trailer side of the industry and ends up competing with her announcer father for the lucrative gig of reading copy for an ad campaign for The Amazon Games, a much-hyped tentpole franchise based on a popular series of YA page-turners with similarities to a certain Suzanne Collins YA franchise.

In a World... opens with footage of the late Don LaFontaine--the copywriter-turned-legendary voiceover artist who's credited with coming up with the ubiquitous '80s and '90s trailer phrase "In a world where..."--cold killing it as a trailer narrator. In a post-LaFontaine world where everyone's still in awe of DLF's baritone and incredible work ethic, only two or three voiceover artists have carried on LaFontaine's raspy, imposing and frequently parodied style--most notably Ashton Smith, whose baritone was all over the TV spots for the first three Bourne movies (Smith once said, "When you die, the voice you hear in heaven is not Don's. It's God trying to sound like Don.").

But as Bell, a self-described trailer fanatic, noted when she and actor/voiceover artist Fred Melamed, who plays her dad in In a World..., both plugged the film on Fresh Air last week, trailer houses are increasingly veering away from voiceovers and letting the footage speak for itself. While that's great for trailer houses that want their product to look more sophisticated and stylish and sound not as dated as the '80s and '90s "In a world..." days of advertising, I'm a little concerned about that because it adds some difficulty to my task of tracking down more recent trailer audio clips I could use for AFOS, in which announcers like Smith portentously utter the taglines and titles of recent movies or TV shows.

I attach these clips of trailers or radio/TV spots to score tracks from the movies or shows that are promoted in these trailers or spots because I don't want to go through the tedium of switching on both my mic and Audacity and recording a back-announcement for every single track that's in rotation on AFOS. These intros I cull from trailers or TV spots are, to me, an entertaining way to let the listeners know what they'll be hearing next, as well as a way to keep them from asking me what they're hearing. (Only rarely will I receive a message from a really dumb and lazy listener who doesn't bother to either pay attention to the intro or read the track info on the radio station widget, so he'll ask me to identify the already-ID'd track that was streamed at yadda-yadda-yadda in the afternoon. Yo, Einstein, it's impossible for me to go back and check because I don't exactly keep a running tab on when shit was streamed during the day. I wish these dumb shits were more like illustrator Kevin Greene, who's much more helpful when asking me about a track he was having some trouble IDing.)

In 2005, I experimented with attaching the vintage radio spots for Black Caesar and Foxy Brown to the themes from those movies, and I liked how the old ads sounded as intros (any old ad or trailer that features the late Adolph Caesar's voice is always fun to listen to). Then shortly thereafter, Warner Bros.' home video division dropped the Batman Begins soundtrack album, and I was looking for an effective and ominous way to announce "This next track is from the Batman Begins score" without having to say those words. I found it in the form of an audio clip of the Batman Begins TV spot that consisted solely of the bat swarm graphics from the film's opening titles. I thought that was an even niftier intro than the blaxploitation radio ads, so from then on, I tacked on trailer or promo clips to almost every single track during the block that's now known as "AFOS Prime." (On AFOS, LaFontaine's voice can be heard during clips of trailers or TV spots that were produced for Purple Rain, The Untouchables, The Living Daylights, Mo' Better Blues, A Rage in Harlem, Passenger 57, Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, Hoodlum, South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, Ratatouille, The Simpsons Movie and Midnight Run.)



As In a World... gets audiences to better appreciate the art of trailer voiceovers and the talents who partake in such a faceless profession, here's a guide to some of the distinctive non-LaFontaine voices that surface during the movie or TV trailer clips that function as intros to the tunes during "AFOS Prime," "Beat Box," "The Whitest Block Ever" and "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round."

Adolph Caesar
Who's he?: A New York stage actor whose classy baritone was all over trailers and ads for blaxploitation flicks, Caesar earned acclaim late in his career for some of his acting work both on stage and screen before dying from a heart attack in 1986.
Most memorable on-screen role: A role he reprised from the stage: the self-hating light-skinned black sergeant in A Soldier's Story who, in the above pic, is preparing to whup the ass of some future double Oscar winner.
Most memorable voiceover work: The trailers and TV/radio spots for the original Dawn of the Dead ("When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth").
When can you hear him on AFOS?: The radio spots for Trouble Man, Foxy Brown and Claudine and the trailers for Three Tough Guys and Superfly.

"'Cause it tastes good": Midnight Run turns 25

On July 20, 1988, Universal released Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin's Midnight Run. It didn't make much of a splash at the box office--although it was popular enough to spawn a series of Midnight Run TV-movies with Happy Gilmore villain Christopher McDonald in the De Niro role--and in the 25 years since its release, the De Niro/Grodin cross-country road movie has received far less ink than either summer 1988's sleeper success story, the original and unsurpassed Die Hard, the subject of so many "Die Hard is 25!" listicles in the last few weeks, or summer '88's other cinematic success story, the still-amazing-looking blockbuster Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

Yet I find myself rewatching Midnight Run more often than Die Hard or Roger Rabbit. Why is that?

Sure, Die Hard contains far more impressive action sequences, and the humor in that classic Bruce Willis action flick was handled so perfectly (as was the humor in Roger Rabbit). But I'll always be drawn more to Midnight Run's De Niro/Grodin banter (Grodin: "Why would you eat that?" De Niro: "Why? 'Cause it tastes good.") and its lengthy bits of improv, something that director Martin Brest (who, at this point in his strange career, was a long way from the fiascoes of Meet Joe Black and Gigli) carried over from his earlier hit Beverly Hills Cop, presumably from seeing how energized his 1984 film became from the ad-libs of Eddie Murphy and Bronson Pinchot. Years before improv became an integral part of Judd Apatow-produced hit comedies like Bridesmaids, De Niro, as crafty bounty hunter Jack Walsh, and Grodin, as Jonathan "The Duke" Mardukas, a dorky bail jumper and white-collar criminal who turns out to be a lot craftier--and braver--than the burnt-out Jack, ad-libbed several of their scenes together and most of the brilliantly underplayed "Litmus Configuration" sequence.



Of course, Midnight Run didn't invent the wheel--before Brest made Beverly Hills Cop and Midnight Run, Robert Altman films were always full of improvised dialogue--but the dialogue and expressions that resulted from playing things by ear while the cameras rolled are consistently funny during Midnight Run (the chemistry between De Niro and Grodin helps a lot too). Each time I rewatch an ad-libbed De Niro/Grodin moment, I always notice something new and amusing, whether it's Jack nervously bumping into Mardukas while the Duke poses as an FBI agent during his "Litmus Configuration" scam to get money for groceries or a simple expression from a non-actor who's part of their scene (during the "chorizo and eggs" scene, peep the nervous look on the diner waitress who's clearly a non-actor).



In his think piece about Die Hard's 25th anniversary (by the way, that summer also gave us Big, Coming to America, A Fish Called Wanda and Bull Durham), RogerEbert.com editor-in-chief Matt Zoller Seitz noted that John McTiernan's film surrounded Willis with a bunch of terrific supporting players ("McTiernan and his credited screenwriters Steven E. DeSouza and Jeb Stuart stuff every nook and cranny with beguiling little character touches," wrote Seitz, who mentioned the classic bit of comedic business where a candy bar gets stolen by ubiquitous '80s stuntman Al Leong--soon to be experiencing a bit of a career resurgence, by the way, as a cast member in National Film Society's upcoming Awesome Asian Bad Guys web series). Midnight Run's supporting players are equally terrific, and most of these character actors are familiar faces from various crime movies and shows.

As Alonzo Mosely, the dyspeptic FBI agent whose badge and identity get stolen by Jack, Yaphet Kotto deserved some sort of award for "Outstanding Achievement in Comedic Acting During a Role with Minimal Dialogue." It's an entertaining performance, but Kotto's dourness was apparently real. He reportedly didn't enjoy shooting Midnight Run, due to both a fever he caught and weariness from Brest's insistence on multiple takes. As the much more chatty Jimmy Serrano, the ruthless Vegas mobster the Duke embezzled millions from to give to a good cause, after realizing he was managing the accounts for a mobster (I guess the words "waste management" weren't enough of a hint for the Duke), Dennis Farina is endlessly quotable, whether he's berating his always-rational attorney (Philip Baker Hall) or the incompetent underlings (mob genre fixtures Richard Foronjy and Robert Miranda) he's sent to rub out his former accountant ("Is this moron #1? Put moron #2 on the phone."). Because Farina worked as a cop in Chicago before he became an actor, I wouldn't be surprised if some of the criminals he encountered in Chicago formed the basis for his performance as Serrano.

Also twisting the word "fuck" through many sorts of imaginative, George Gallo-scripted iterations (the inactive site Listology counted 132 F-bombs during Midnight Run, just one F-bomb above De Niro's later film Jackie Brown) are Joe Pantoliano as the slimy L.A. bail bondsman who assigns Jack to deliver the Duke and John Ashton as Dorfler, a rival bounty hunter with a walnut for a brain. I hate the term "movie magic," but that's exactly what ensues when these character actors are thrown together on-screen or when De Niro and Grodin are either winging it--the improvised dialogue makes Jack and the Duke's growing friendship feel more natural than most other buddy flick pairings I've been subjected to--or helping to elevate Midnight Run from being a disposable buddy flick during their more dramatic moments. Midnight Run pulls off the shifts in tone from comedic to dramatic more seamlessly than most big-screen comedies that attempt to do so. Community creator and on-and-off-and-on-again showrunner Dan Harmon has cited the comedic timing in Midnight Run as an influence on his show. Harmon also seems to have been influenced by the film's skillful juggling of humor and seriousness. Many of Community's strongest episodes juggle the two as effectively as Midnight Run does.



Jack and the Duke are such well-drawn and likable characters I could spend more than 126 minutes watching them interact, and yet, I still don't want to see them in a sequel at all. A sequel reuniting De Niro with the semi-retired Grodin, a project that Brett Ratner threatened to direct last year, remains a colossally terrible idea. Remember The Odd Couple II, which Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau made together 30 years after the first Odd Couple feature film? Yeah, I'm not looking forward to a repeat of whatever the hell The Odd Couple II was.

And what sort of implausible circumstance would bring Jack and the Duke back together? The way things ended between them at LAX--Jack and the Duke part ways, then Jack turns around to say one more thing to the Duke, but the Duke's already vanished--was perfect.

And now, something interesting someone else wrote about a work that's represented in my "Ask for Babs" mix: Midnight Run (this time, it's a comedy writing genius who wrote about it)

Community is one of my current favorite shows for many reasons that will forever elude Nielsen families, older viewers who haven't yet figured out the concept (and brilliance) of time-shifted viewing, which has been both a blessing (it's how most of Community's largely young audience catches the episodes) and a curse for the show, and thirdly, morons.

Community showrunner Dan Harmon watches Alison Brie make out with a ghost at a 2012 PaleyFest panel for the show.

The man who's mostly responsible for the richly realized world that's given us the enjoyable likes of Troy and Abed ("In the morning..."), Britta, Annie, Annie's Boobs, Leonard, Magnitude, Star-Burns and a dead-on Doctor Who analog known as Inspector Spacetime is Community creator and current enemy-to-Chevy Chase Dan Harmon, who's cited Midnight Run as a film that taught him comedic timing.

Like Community, Midnight Run has been dismissed by some as being a hackneyed and shallow example of its genre, even though it's smarter and deeper than its detractors make it out to be. Harmon would disagree with the opinion that the 1988 Robert De Niro/Charles Grodin movie is a hackneyed buddy flick, and in 2011, the Midnight Run fan recounted how thrilled he was to encounter Midnight Run writer George Gallo, who previously worked with one of Harmon's co-executive producers, on the Paramount lot where Community is filmed:

He’s flattered by praise of this movie in a way that is neither falsely modest nor presumptuous.  I sense that he loves it sincerely and selflessly, like the father of a son that became a fireman.  I’m not going to say “all writers should have this attitude toward their stuff,” because, well, have the personality you want, but thank God, for my sake, that George Gallo doesn’t respond to “Midnight Run is great” with “so what, I’ve written other stuff.”

Or the classic Harmon response of “yeah, but it could have been so much better.”…

Best for last: the scene on the bus, in which Grodin pesters DeNiro about smoking, and keeps asking him “why aren’t you popular with the Chicago police department,” ends with “why aren’t you popular with the Chicago police department” NOT because that’s how it’s written.  What we’re seeing is a “warm up take” in which DeNiro and Grodin are basically running their lines - and THAT’s why Grodin mistakenly thinks DeNiro is putting his cigarette out.  Then the pause, then Grodin repeating the classic line…because the actor is actually starting again, from the top of the scene.  That blew my mind.  My favorite line from my favorite scene in my favorite movie, one that formed my sense of comedic timing…it was an outtake, a blooper, a director and/or editor’s decision.  Not a writer’s.

I now have a signed copy of Gallo’s draft of Midnight Run.  The movie that, from hearing his stories, so few people believed in, that I feel like I could write for another twenty years, because, the scariest thing about creative work is also its greatest strength: nobody ever really knows what the fuck they’re doing.  We are puppets, all of us, waiting for invisible hands to violate and pleasure us.

Gallo signed it, “why are you not popular with the Chicago police department?”

I choose to interpret it in many ways, but the most important interpretation, this morning, is WHO CARES ABOUT A FUCKING NOMINATION, right?!

Time to get a new watch.

Ask for Babs (Universal 100th Anniversary Mix) by Dj Afos on Mixcloud

And now, something interesting someone else wrote about a work that's represented in my "Ask for Babs" mix: Midnight Run

Why did I put together a 67-minute DJ mix about Universal, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary (the official anniversary date is April 30)? Because Universal was the studio that Spike Lee turned to when Paramount wanted him to change the ending of Do the Right Thing, and Universal simply said, "Don't change it." And when Martin Brest wanted to make Midnight Run with difficult-to-work-with, not-exactly-a-box-office-draw-anymore Charles Grodin as The Duke because he saw in Grodin a certain something he couldn't see in other stars if they played The Duke, Paramount kept insisting to Brest that he hire Cher (WTF?) or Robin Williams instead. But not Universal. They said yes to the casting of Grodin.

Do the Right Thing and Midnight Run are two of my favorite movies, and I know my "Ask for Babs" mix makes it look like I'm fawning over a corporation, but Universal is a major reason why those movies are two of my favorites. They didn't interfere with what Lee and Brest wanted to accomplish with their respective works.

And why am I doing so many posts about the Universal movies that are referenced in my "Ask for Babs" mix? I want some more people to listen to the mix. It's not attracting as many people as say, HitFix TV critic Alan Sepinwall's blog posts do.

Sepinwall, whom I once had the honor of running into at a very small line at Comic-Con while waiting to get a graphic novel purchase signed (I had forgotten what Sepinwall looked like, so I didn't realize it was him until he introduced himself to the novel's author), does many of the best recaps of Mad Men and Community, and long before Mad Men, his weekly analysis of The Wire was the best. There's a Sepinwallism I've picked up from reading so many of his recaps. It's this.(*) It sometimes irritates me if he does it more than once in a recap, and I hate that I picked it up from him for a while. It's a habit I recently got rid of.

(*) Putting asterisked footnotes between paragraphs instead of placing them where they belong: at the very bottom of the article. I've started putting all footnotes at the bottom again.

This Sepinwallism can make his posts have a bizarre and choppy flow(**) to them. The placement of footnotes between grafs makes it feel like Pop-Up Video, the show that turned viewers into experts on important sociopolitical concerns like the making of Lionel Richie's 1983 "Hello" video, is invading my reading.

(**) Like Das EFX's "diggity-diggity" flow, which every other rapper started biting in 1992 before finding it to be passé in 1993.

Sepinwall is an excellent writer, but if a post of his is interrupted by five of these asides--hello!(***)--instead of just one or two, it can be a little frustrating. However, I've learned to live with it. To borrow a memorable line from a drama Sepinwall used to cover, I've learned to let Sepinwall be Sepinwall.

(***) The not-so-blind actress who played Laura, Lionel Richie's blind object of desire, was always mistaken for being blind by people on the street.

I especially like how Sepinwall is a Midnight Run fan. He's blogged at length about the 1988 movie twice.

An AFOS listener once whined on my Facebook wall about having to hear so many selections from Danny Elfman's Midnight Run score get shuffled by AFOS in one day. The reason why there are so many selections from Midnight Run in rotation is because I adore Midnight Run and its score, moron #1. The dismissal by some people of Midnight Run as just another lousy buddy movie (it isn't, moron #2, moron #3 and moron #4), as well as the fact that film and TV score album labels like La-La Land or Intrada haven't reissued the film's out-of-print score, which, for a couple of years, was ubiquitous in movie trailers, are examples of how underappreciated the film has been since its release (even though home video made it popular enough to spawn a series of '90s TV-movies starring Christopher McDonald as Jack Walsh).

When I discovered this delightfully foul-mouthed, mostly improvised road movie and its score in 1989, a few months after the movie had to compete with the likes of Die Hard and Who Framed Roger Rabbit in theaters and ended up getting lost in the summer shuffle, I felt like the only kid in the world who loved Midnight Run (I even read the novelization, which must have been adapted from a really early version of George Gallo's script because the book depicted Jack as a total racist, a trait that was eliminated from the movie). It's fantastic to see I wasn't alone in 1989:

Here's the thing: if "Midnight Run" was just an action comedy about an odd couple joined at the wrist while dodging bullets across the country, it would still be a fun, memorable movie. But what's always elevated it above that, to me, are a pair of scenes, with the first and most important being Jack's visit to his ex-wife Gail's house in Chicago. It starts out funny, with The Duke telling Gail's young son that he's a white collar criminal, then turns ugly as Jack and Gail relive the same old arguments for the 5000th time, then goes heartbreaking when the daughter Jack hasn't seen in nine years appears in the door and, like flipping a switch, stops the argument in an instant…

In that moment, you feel the weight of every single thing Jack has lost and how far he's fallen, and then once you connect Serrano to Jack, it becomes a redemption story. You don't want Jack to bring The Duke to jail and set him up to be killed, but you do want Jack to get a win, badly.

And not only does that scene give much greater heft to Jack's character, but to the relationship between the two men. From that moment on, while they still fight and curse and claw and argue, it's different. The Duke saw a part of Jack Walsh that very few people have ever seen, and he was quiet and respectful in that moment (and never once brings her up again, even though it would be so easy to push Jack's buttons that way), and Jack respects and appreciates him in turn for that…

And here's the other big dramatic moment, as Serrano finally comes face to face with the man who embezzled millions from him and gave it to charity. To this point, it's not like the stakes of the movie have been low - Jack and The Duke have been shot at and beaten up many, many times over - but the violence was all on some level cartoonish (again, see Jack and the helicopter) and Serrano was mostly used as comic relief, showing up for 30 seconds at a time to threaten to hurt someone in an amusing way. But when he gets into the back of that car with The Duke, there's nothing funny happening. This is stone-cold, sincere menace (the added promise to kill The Duke's wife is a nice touch), it is a man who will do anything to hurt the characters we've grown to like, and it makes the tension of the airport scene that follows so much more palpable than if Serrano was always played for comedy…

And this post is now at least one week later and a thousand words longer than I had planned. (And that's without even going into other parts of the movie, like Danny Elfman's marvelous blues-y score, which I will listen to if the writer's block is really hitting me hard.) There's really no point to writing 3000+ words about a two-week-old screening of a 23-year-old movie. But it's the movie I love watching most in all the world. And every now and then it's nice to be able to articulate the many reasons why.

Ask for Babs (Universal 100th Anniversary Mix) by Dj Afos on Mixcloud

"Ask for Babs" mix-ology: The reasons for the order of the tracks

Thanks to beyond, deux for mentioning my "Ask for Babs" mix. What do I gotta do to spread the word about this mix? I'm new at this. I'm often not comfortable promoting myself. I'll be satisfied if at least one another blog or Twitter feed besides beyond, deux mentions the mix.

Ask for Babs (Universal 100th Anniversary Mix) by Dj Afos on Mixcloud

Here are the connections between each "Ask for Babs" track (besides the Universal connection, of course).

1. Nigel Godrich, "Universal Theme," Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: Original Motion Picture Score, ABKCO
2. Alan Silvestri, "End Credits" (from Back to the Future Part III), Hollywood Soundstage: Big Movie Hits Volume I, Varèse Sarabande

Scott Pilgrim/Back to the Future connections: Scott Pilgrim and the Back to the Future trilogy are FX-heavy flicks with constantly bullied loser musicians as heroes; the Pilgrim film is nostalgic for '80s and '90s 8-bit video games like the BTTF game for the NES.

2. Alan Silvestri, "End Credits" (from Back to the Future Part III), Hollywood Soundstage: Big Movie Hits Volume I, Varèse Sarabande
3. Rose Royce, "Car Wash," Car Wash, Motown

BTTF/Car Wash connections: Fancy-car porn; pop star cameos; the BTTF fanfare is in the same key as the Car Wash theme.

3. Rose Royce, "Car Wash," Car Wash, Motown
4. Public Enemy, "Fight the Power," Music from Do the Right Thing, Motown

Car Wash/Do the Right Thing connection: Both films have multiracial ensemble casts and wall-to-wall soundtracks and are set over the course of one day.

4. Public Enemy, "Fight the Power," Music from Do the Right Thing, Motown
5. J.J. Johnson, "Willie Chase," Willie Dynamite, Hip-O Select/Geffen

Do the Right Thing/Willie Dynamite connection: Willie Dynamite star Diana Sands appeared with Do the Right Thing star Ruby Dee in the stage and film versions of A Raisin in the Sun.

5. J.J. Johnson, "Willie Chase," Willie Dynamite, Hip-O Select/Geffen
6. Giorgio Moroder, "Tony's Theme," Scarface, Geffen

Willie Dynamite/Scarface connection: Both films are crime flicks with huge followings in the hip-hop community.

6. Giorgio Moroder, "Tony's Theme," Scarface, Geffen
7. Jan Hammer, "Chase," Miami Vice: The Complete Collection, One Way

Scarface/Miami Vice connections: '80s; Miami; gangsters; synth-pop; drugs (speaking of which, the second soundbite during "Tony's Theme" is from Jon Stewart's cameo in the Universal cult favorite Half Baked, in which a blazed Stewart mentions Scarface and another Universal film starring Al Pacino, Scent of a Woman).

7. Jan Hammer, "Chase," Miami Vice: The Complete Collection, One Way
8. Stu Phillips, "Knight Rider," NBC: A Soundtrack of Must See TV, Tee Vee Toons
9. Timbaland and Magoo, "Clock Strikes (Remix)," Blackground
10. Busta Rhymes, "Turn It Up (Remix)/Fire It Up," Elektra
11. Punjabi MC, "Mundian To Bach Ke," Sequence

Miami Vice/Knight Rider connection: Both shows were NBC hits that aired at about the same time (and for one season, on the same night).

11. Punjabi MC, "Mundian To Bach Ke," Sequence
12. Johnny Harris, "Odyssey (Pt. 1)" (from Buck Rogers in the 25th Century), Sunshine Sound Disco

Knight Rider/Buck Rogers connection: Glen A. Larson produced both shows.

12. Johnny Harris, "Odyssey (Pt. 1)" (from Buck Rogers in the 25th Century), Sunshine Sound Disco
13. Danny Elfman, "Main Titles," Midnight Run, MCA

Buck Rogers/Midnight Run connections: Buck Rogers is set in New Chicago and Midnight Run anti-hero Jack Walsh used to be a cop in the old Chicago; "Odyssey" and the Midnight Run theme are both heavy on the bass.

13. Danny Elfman, "Main Titles," Midnight Run, MCA
14. Oingo Boingo, "Weird Science," Best O' Boingo, MCA

Midnight Run/Weird Science connection: Danny Elfman.

14. Oingo Boingo, "Weird Science," Best O' Boingo, MCA
15. Nigel Godrich, "Chau Down," Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: Original Motion Picture Score, ABKCO
16. Dan the Automator, "Ninja Ninja Revolution," Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: Original Motion Picture Score, ABKCO

Weird Science/Scott Pilgrim connections: Weird Science and Scott Pilgrim are FX-heavy fantasy films with dorky youngster heroes; Pilgrim is nostalgic for the era when the Weird Science movie and TV series were made.

16. Dan the Automator, "Ninja Ninja Revolution," Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: Original Motion Picture Score, ABKCO
17. Randy Edelman, "Dragon Theme," Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, MCA

Scott Pilgrim/Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story connections: Scott's temporary girlfriend Knives Chau is like the Bruce Lee of blades; scenes of action movie stars kicking the shit out of non-celebrities on movie sets; Asians who kick ass.

17. Randy Edelman, "Dragon Theme," Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, MCA
18. Henry Mancini, "The Boss," Touch of Evil, Varèse Sarabande

Dragon/Touch of Evil connections: Dragon was about Lee having to put up with yellowface/brownface, and Touch of Evil had Charlton Heston in brownface; Lee starred in The Big Boss, and the Touch of Evil cue is called "The Boss."

18. Henry Mancini, "The Boss," Touch of Evil, Varèse Sarabande
19. Henry Mancini, "Main Title" (from Charade), Music from the Films of Audrey Hepburn, Big Screen

Touch of Evil/Charade connection: Henry Mancini.

"Ask for Babs (Universal 100th Anniversary Mix)"

To mark its 100th anniversary, Universal unveiled a revamped version of its globe logo (The Lorax is the first Universal release to open with it) and got frequent Fast and the Furious sequel composer Brian Tyler to update Jerry Goldsmith's rousing 1997 Universal logo fanfare with a choir and additional percussion.



What was originally supposed to be just a blog post I was going to do about Tyler's spiffy arrangement of the Goldsmith fanfare evolved into the mix below. Because of Universal's centennial, I've put together a mix--my very first one, in fact. It consists of favorite tunes that were written for Universal films or TV shows.

Ask for Babs (Universal 100th Anniversary Mix) by Dj Afos on Mixcloud

It's hard to find original score material from Universal films or shows that's as dance floor-friendly (or full of rhythm that makes my head nod) as J.J. Johnson's "Willie Chase" from Willie Dynamite or David Holmes' "Rip Rip" from Out of Sight, so I had to really dig deep into my station library.

Universal smash hits like the Bourne franchise and 8 Mile are represented on the "Ask for Babs" mix, as well as Universal releases that didn't exactly set the box office on fire but are great or good films and have gained--and I hate this term because cults are creepy--cult followings (Midnight Run[*], Scott Pilgrim vs. the World). The mix also includes material from some Universal films I've never seen (like the not-on-DVD 1969 curio The Lost Man, which has a couple of problems that bother the African American cinema blog Shadow and Act: "It's not good" and as a black militant, Sidney Poitier "is simply miscast in the role, and clearly looks uncomfortable"), but I love the music that was written for those films.

Determining the ways each track would transition into another and basing the order of the tracks on certain connections between them were particularly fun. I blended Vic Mizzy's Ghost and Mr. Chicken main title theme with 30 Rock's fake novelty song "Werewolf Bar Mitzvah" to show how much 30 Rock composer Jeff Richmond must have been inspired by Mizzy's Ghost and Mr. Chicken score. Tracy Morgan is followed by The Roots' original track for the Best Man opening titles because both Morgan and The Roots are employees of Lorne Michaels. I had a Touch of Evil score cue follow the Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story main title theme because Dragon was about Lee having to put up with yellowface/brownface, and Touch of Evil was full of brownface. Plus, Lee starred in The Big Boss, and the Touch of Evil cue is called "The Boss." "Lose Yourself" from 8 Mile segues into the best original theme from Out of Sight (the theme for Don Cheadle's Snoopy character) because both movies involve Detroit. Fast Five, the best of the Fast and the Furious films, was placed next to The Rockford Files because, uh, car chases.

Except for Quincy Jones' cowbell-licious re-recording of his own Ironside theme (a staple of vintage kung fu movie soundtracks that Kill Bill introduced to a new generation of moviegoers), the excerpts of beatmakers sampling Knight Rider and Public Enemy's classic sample of Queen's Flash Gordon theme, I didn't want this mix to contain covers of Universal film or show themes like the Lalo Schifrin disco version of the Jaws theme. I wanted it to be all-original music, but edgy, propulsive or funky original material instead of strictly symphonic material. So that meant crime-jazz-era Henry Mancini (Touch of Evil, Charade) instead of NBC Sunday Mystery Movie theme/A Warm Shade of Ivory-era Mancini, and no Jaws, Jurassic Park, E.T., To Kill a Mockingbird, Spartacus or--*yawn*--Out of Africa (although some of Alan Silvestri's Back to the Future theme turns up at the beginning). Yeah, Jaws was Universal's biggest cash cow shark for a while, and the Jaws theme was a great achievement in John Williams' career, but it doesn't make my head nod (there is, however, a brief soundbite of Jaws, which like all the other soundbites during the mix, comes from a Universal film or show).

My only disappointment with the "Ask for Babs" mix is that I so wanted John Barry's Ipcress File main title theme and Iggy Pop's Repo Man theme to be part of the mix, so I tried editing them into the mix, but all my editing trickery just couldn't get either of them to fit in well. Sorry, Harry Palmer and Harry Dean Stanton.

[*] Director Martin Brest's last enjoyable film is neck and neck with Do the Right Thing for my favorite film that was released by Universal. It features my favorite Danny Elfman film score. And years before lengthy bits of improv were an integral part of Judd Apatow-produced Universal comedies like Bridesmaids, there was the duo of Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin, ad-libbing most of their interplay and most of the brilliantly underplayed Red's Corner Bar sequence.

1. Nigel Godrich, "Universal Theme," Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: Original Motion Picture Score, ABKCO
2. Alan Silvestri, "End Credits" (from Back to the Future Part III), Hollywood Soundstage: Big Movie Hits Volume I, Varèse Sarabande
3. Rose Royce, "Car Wash," Car Wash, Motown
4. Public Enemy, "Fight the Power," Music from Do the Right Thing, Motown
5. J.J. Johnson, "Willie Chase," Willie Dynamite, Hip-O Select/Geffen
6. Giorgio Moroder, "Tony's Theme," Scarface, Geffen
7. Jan Hammer, "Chase," Miami Vice: The Complete Collection, One Way
8. Stu Phillips, "Knight Rider," NBC: A Soundtrack of Must See TV, Tee Vee Toons
9. Timbaland and Magoo, "Clock Strikes (Remix)," Blackground
10. Busta Rhymes, "Turn It Up (Remix)/Fire It Up," Elektra
11. Punjabi MC, "Mundian To Bach Ke," Sequence
12. Johnny Harris, "Odyssey (Pt. 1)" (from Buck Rogers in the 25th Century), Sunshine Sound Disco
13. Danny Elfman, "Main Titles," Midnight Run, MCA
14. Oingo Boingo, "Weird Science," Best O' Boingo, MCA
15. Nigel Godrich, "Chau Down," Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: Original Motion Picture Score, ABKCO
16. Dan the Automator, "Ninja Ninja Revolution," Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: Original Motion Picture Score, ABKCO
17. Randy Edelman, "Dragon Theme," Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, MCA
18. Henry Mancini, "The Boss," Touch of Evil, Varèse Sarabande
19. Henry Mancini, "Main Title" (from Charade), Music from the Films of Audrey Hepburn, Big Screen
20. Vic Mizzy, "Gaseous Globe," The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, Percepto
21. Vic Mizzy, "Main Title," The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, Percepto
22. Tracy Morgan & Donald Glover, "Werewolf Bar Mitzvah," 30 Rock, Relativity Music Group
23. The Roots feat. Jaguar Wright, "What You Want" (from The Best Man), Home Grown! The Beginner's Guide to Understanding The Roots Volume One, Geffen
24. Quincy Jones, "Main Squeeze" (from The Lost Man), The Reel Quincy Jones, Hip-O
25. Quincy Jones, "Ironside," TV Land Crimestoppers: TV's Greatest Cop Themes, Rhino
26. John Powell, "Jason's Theme," The Bourne Identity, Varèse Sarabande
27. Brian Tyler, "Tego and Rico," Fast Five: Original Motion Picture Score, Varèse Sarabande
28. Mike Post, "The Rockford Files," Synth Me Up: 14 Classic Electronic Hits, Hip-O
29. Richard Gibbs, "Main Title (UK Version)," Battlestar Galactica: Season One, La-La Land
30. Queen, "Flash's Theme," Flash Gordon, Hollywood
31. Public Enemy, "Terminator X to the Edge of Panic," It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Def Jam/Columbia
32. Stevie Wonder, "Jungle Fever," Jungle Fever, Motown
33. Eminem, "Lose Yourself," 8 Mile, Interscope
34. David Holmes, "Rip Rip," Out of Sight, Jersey/MCA
35. Brian Tyler, "The Perfect Crew," Fast Five: Original Motion Picture Score, Varèse Sarabande
36. Oingo Boingo, "Goodbye Goodbye," Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Full Moon/Elektra