A longer and heavily-updated-in-2020 version of the following blog post can be found in If You Haven't Seen It, It's New to You: The Movies and TV Shows Some of Us Regretted Not Catching Until Later. The 2020 book was written and self-published by yours truly. Get the paperback edition of If You Haven't Seen It, It's New to You now!
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This is the 12th of 14 or 15 all-new blog posts that are being posted on a monthly basis until this blog's final post in December 2017.
Back in 2011, I typed out an outline for a graphic novel or screenplay I wanted to someday write about the Minneapolis rock music scene in 1985, and the story was to be told from the point of view of a female Filipino American Prince fan who leads a band of otherwise all-male musicians called the Beautifully Complex Women. In the outline, I explained that a rumor spreads around Minneapolis that Prince, the city's favorite son, is looking for a new act to sign to his Paisley Park label, and the Beautifully Complex Women and a whole bunch of other local bands vie, often over-aggressively, for the attention of the unseen Purple One.
I called the script idea The Beautifully Complex Women. It was going to be my way of exploring why it's so difficult for Asian American artists--whether they're the power pop band Moonpools & Caterpillars in the '90s or the Philly rap group Mountain Brothers in the early 2000s--to find mainstream success in the recording industry:
Bad Rap, African American filmmaker Salima Koroma's 2016 documentary about the various hardships Asian American rappers have to deal with in the industry, covers all those above questions and more in a lean, efficient and enjoyably provocative manner that makes me say, "Wow, I think I'll let this 1985 Minneapolis battle-of-the-bands script idea remain a script idea." Her film turned out to be better than my script idea.
Koroma's documentary was the 2016 film I most eagerly wanted to watch last year, even more so than a tentpole blockbuster like Captain America: Civil War or a critics' darling like Moonlight. (Sorry, Barry Jenkins.) Now Bad Rap is streamable on Netflix after a run on the festival circuit, and, man, the doc was worth the wait.
Bad Rap producer Jaeki Cho and director Salima Koroma
Bad Rap, which was crowdfunded on Indiegogo, took Koroma and Korean American producer Jaeki Cho--the (now-former) manager of one of the film's four main subjects--three and a half years to make. The doc follows four Asian American spitters who either have often toured together or have done guest features on each other's tracks.
The amiable and quick-witted Jonathan Park, who's now in his thirties, was an L.A. skater kid who, as a teen, stumbled into the battle rap scene--the Detroit version of the battle rap scene was famously depicted in 8 Mile--and fell in love with the art form, or as I like to call battle rap, "Don Rickles insult humor by people who, unlike Rickles, have rhythm." Park, a.k.a. Dumbfoundead, is a hero in L.A.'s Koreatown (judging from his music videos and YouTube shorts, he is to K-town what De Niro is to New York: the unofficial mayor) and in battle rap circles, but he's unknown elsewhere. Bad Rap reveals--and I wasn't previously aware of this--that Drake is a fan of Dumbfoundead's battle raps, which makes me like Drake a little more.
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.
After directing Selma, the 2014 movie that won a Best Original Song Oscar for the Common/John Legend track "Glory," Ava DuVernay has, in addition to being the first filmmaker to ever inspire a Barbie doll based on her likeness, racked up an intriguing bunch of directorial credits. She directed the 2016 Netflix documentary filmThe 13thand the first two episodes of the OWN dramaQueen Sugar(a show she also wrote for during its first season), and she signed up to direct the forthcoming Disney adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time, a classic sci-fi novel I remember reading as homework in grade school (here's how long ago it was when I read Wrinkle: the cover artwork on my copy was the version that had the disembodied head of a Darkseid lookalike encased in a crystal ball). The following is a repost of a February 5, 2015 discussion of DuVernay's breakout film in the mainstream. Selma, a historical film about civil rights activism, will continue being timely, especially in a year that will inevitably see an increase in activism against both America's next president (God, those last three words sound like the title of the world's shittiest reality show, which is fitting because reality TV-loving idiots are among the ones who put him and the likes of Omarosa in office) and his inflammatory rhetoric.
The Selma Oscar snubs have disappointed all of us moviegoers who were mesmerized by director Ava DuVernay's third feature film, a historical drama about the civil rights movement's push to get the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, via civil disobedience and legal strategizing. But Larry Wilmore, currently the only African American host on late-night TV and hardly a stranger to the struggles of bringing more diversity to Hollywood (he was the creator and original showrunner of The Bernie Mac Show and he helped showrun the first few episodes of Black-ish this season), said something enlightening about the Selma snubs, and it's helped me feel a little less disappointed about those oversights. The host of Comedy Central's solidly funny Nightly Showsaid to the Hollywood Reporter that awards at the end of the day don't really mean as much as making sure a black female director like DuVernay gets a shot at making a movie ("That, to me, is more important; the other stuff is gravy," said Wilmore).
Occasionally on Friday, I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. It's the "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week. Stream "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," my one-hour mix of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, right now!
Venture Bros. creator Jackson Publick's statement that "this season, like Season Five, lacks a satisfactory finale, because we didn't write one" is an interesting lament because Publick does an outstanding job intertwining this season's storylines and building those storylines towards that unsatisfactory finale in his consistently funny script for "Tanks for Nuthin'." Sometimes I think maybe Publick is trolling his fans and he likes to dupe them into thinking the finale will be a letdown like "The Devil's Grip" was to a segment of the fans (newsflash: "The Devil's Grip" is actually better than those fans think).
Or maybe Publick's just being honest. I don't know. It's all a mystery--like whether or not Dr. Venture and the Monarch are actually a second pair of titular brothers.
The sexual mishaps that have led to Dr. Venture having a brother he doesn't know about (and possibly an additional child out there who was mentioned once in the second season and has never been mentioned again), the narcissism of the wealthy and the failure of a space age that promised us jetpacks and hasn't yet delivered aren't the only recurring themes on The Venture Bros. There's also the recurring idea that many of the second-in-commands or underlings in the Ventureverse are far more deserving to be running things than the idiots who somehow ended up with the keys to the car, whether that idiot is the Monarch or Dr. Venture.
This season, Dr. Mrs. the Monarch--the wifey who's always been too smart to be playing second fiddle to supervillains but is also too principled and levelheaded to be in the business of arching--gets to run things. The Sovereign's death has resulted in her trying to keep both the Guild of Calamitous Intent and the Council of 13 from falling apart, in addition to her new tasks as Councilwoman 1. But "Tanks for Nuthin'" implies that Dr. Mrs. the Monarch is turning into yet another idiot in power. She's apparently developed Lois Lane-itis in the eyes and ears and is unable to look more closely at the evidence of the Blue Morpho's return to recognize that the man in the Morpho's old mask is actually her husband, not Dr. Venture. But unlike the Monarch and Dr. Venture, that's not because she's a lifelong imbecile. It's because she's becoming distracted by both the marital problems that are being caused by her new job and the stress of that very job.
"Tanks for Nuthin'" follows Dr. Mrs. the Monarch (I know it'd be easier to simply call her Sheila, but Dr. Mrs. the Monarch is just a funny name to repeatedly say in its entirety) on a part of that job nobody would enjoy doing: informing the spouse of a Guild member that her husband's dead. Accidentally killed by Gary when he tossed him into a pit in Ventech Tower's under-construction lobby at the end of "Rapacity in Blue" last week, Haranguetan left behind a wife who also happens to be a supervillain: Battleaxe (Barbara Rosenblat from Orange Is the New Black), a Celtic warrior woman who, by day, runs an Irish pub full of costumed villains who drown their misery over the drudgery of arching in booze (one of those villains is Brick Frog, the loser in the frog costume whose whole deal is the throwing of bricks, and a great little touch during one of the pub scenes is the off-screen jukebox blasting some depressing Irish song). While investigating the whereabouts of Haranguetan's unseen killer, whom everyone assumes is the Morpho, Dr. Mrs. the Monarch has to go break the news of his demise to Battleaxe, who turns out to be inconsolable, even though she clearly bickered a lot with Haranguetan and "his breath was crap and he beat me."
A current storyline on CW's The Flash centers on Jay Garrick moping--and then doing some more moping--over the loss of his ability to run at superhuman speeds. Jay fought crime under the name of the Flash in a parallel universe where their version of Barry Allen, the show's main character, doesn't have any superpowers, so Barry's not the Flash over there. Unless he's actually been the Tony Todd-voiced supervillain known as Zoom this whole time, Jay is too much of a goody-goody to regain his speed with the help of cocaine, so the only way Jay can get his speed back temporarily is to inject himself with an experimental drug called Velocity-6.
I suffer from writer's block all the time, which was never a good thing when I worked in the newspaper biz, and it's the last thing you want to deal with when you're running a blog and you're trying to come up with one or two posts per week. But I don't need Velocity-6 or blow to type out a post at a superhuman speed. All I need is the Bay Area classical music station KDFC.
I recently discovered that having KDFC in my headphones has helped me to finish writing posts. DJ mixes sometimes do the trick, but they can occasionally be distracting, especially when the DJ throws on a beat like the one from Pete Rock and CL Smooth's "The Creator" or the one from Kendrick Lamar's "Alright," and then all I want to do is nod my head repeatedly or do the Robot instead of finish writing. Film and TV score music, the Internet radio format I dabbled in from 2002 to last month, is even more distracting. Like I wrote a few weeks ago, score music comes with too much baggage.
"That kind of music often wrecks my attempt to concentrate on filling a blank space with a paragraph and causes me to start thinking about the action sequence the cue was written for, followed by all the camerawork that went into it... And then my brain starts to shout, 'Yeaaaah, go, Iko Uwais!,' or 'Yeaaaah, throw that shovel hook, Michael B.!,' and my concentration is completely destroyed," I wrote on January 26.
Neither classical music nor instrumental hip-hop come with that kind of baggage, so when I need music to help me to concentrate, only those two genres can get me to start typing (classical music has also helped me to sleep well late at night). So right when I've started turning to KDFC as a reliable place for instrumentals that cure my writer's block instead of distracting or annoying me, the station, which tosses in a few movie themes on its playlists here and there, has been increasing the airplay of film score music.
KDFC chose last June's Varèse Sarabande album Back in Time... 1985 at the Movies, Galaxy Quest composer David Newman's re-recording of film score cues from 1985, as its "CD of the Week." All this week, the station has been spotlighting selections from 1985 at the Movies, which is a solid album from Newman, although I would have swapped out the love theme from St. Elmo's Fire for either a selection from the John Morris score to Clue or a Lee Holdridge instrumental from Moonlighting, and I would have packaged the six-disc edition of 1985 at the Movies exactly like a McDLT, so that "The hot stays hot and the cool stays cool!"
Then all next week, KDFC will join in the countdown to Oscar night and play one theme composed by John Williams per hour as a salute to Williams. He's one of this year's Best Original Score Oscar nominees for his work in Star Wars: The Force Awakens ("Rey's Theme" is especially terrific).
After trying to avoid film score music because it doesn't help as an accompaniment for writing, I should be irritated that KDFC is playing more film score music this month. But I'm not. I'm actually kind of delighted to see film score compositions like "Rey's Theme" receiving airplay on terrestrial radio outside of a college station, although KDFC tends to prefer concert arrangements of film score music over the actual score cues that were used in the films. So that means you won't hear "The Scavenger," the cue that nicely introduces Rey in The Force Awakens, but you will hear "Rey's Theme," the concert arrangement of the Daisy Ridley character's motif. But it doesn't matter; it's just sofa king good to hear such cues on a non-college terrestrial station.
Not everyone agrees.
Anonymous needs to go walk into traffic. That's just stupid talk. As someone who streamed film and TV score music for 13 years, I can't stand people like that.
And as a film score music DJ who would then encounter racist, neo-con film music nerds who think hip-hop, one of my favorite genres, is evil or unworthy to be considered music, I can't stand those people either. They need to go walk into traffic too.
KDFC's Dianne Nicolini and KDFC president Bill Lueth (Photo source: SFCV)
I don't have time to deal with narrow minds. I don't miss the part of being a film score music DJ where I'd be subjected to "Hip-hop causes violence!" or "C'mon, really? Who wants to listen to just the instrumentals? Am I right?" I also don't miss the part of it that involved trying to pronounce baffling-looking names of composers, filmmakers (I would love to hear someone say "Krzysztof Kieslowski" while they're on Novocaine) and record labels. But whenever I encountered such a name, I would always Google its pronunciation. I didn't mind doing that. I never wanted to sound like an imbecile or Alec Baldwin in that SNL "Soap Opera Digest" sketch where he's playing a doctor and he keeps mangling medical terms and university names, like when he says, "There's no class at Yeah-leh Medical School that can prepare you for this!"
But how did I find out about mysterious pronunciations before Google? I simply asked around. One particular name that used to make me scratch my head in the '90s was "Varèse Sarabande." That one was cleared up for me by Jeff Bond, the author of The Music of Star Trek and a film score music expert who has written score album liner notes for everyone from Varèse to La-La Land Records. I simply asked him how to pronounce the inkblot-logoed record label's name while recording with him a phoner for my college radio program.
So that's why it's amusing to hear KDFC DJs attempt to tackle "Varèse" during the week of Varèse's 1985 at the Movies in the spotlight, without even checking its pronunciation. Morning host Hoyt Smith pronounced it as "vuh-reez." Early afternoon host Dianne Nicolini said "vuh-rez" (rhymes with Pez). Afternoon drive-time host Ray White went with "vuh-ray-say."
Only Nicolini is correct. It's "vuh-rez."
I'm glad to see 1985 at the Movies--and film and TV score music in general--receiving this much exposure from the KDFC DJs, but they ought to follow Nicolini's lead. The key to pronouncing "Varèse" isn't hard to remember. It would simply be "It rhymes with Pez."
If movie theaters need bouncers, then classical stations need pronunciation consultants. Who wants to end up looking like Alec Baldwin in the SNL "Soap Opera Digest" sketch? No name is too intimidating for a pronunciation consultant. Such a consultant would always be ready and on call to tackle the predicament of trying to figure out how to say a puzzling-looking musician's name on an album cover. There's no class at Yeah-leh that can prepare you for "Sofia Asgatovna Gubaidulina."
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Other film and TV score compositions played by KDFC (from snapshots I took of score music appearing on the KDFC site's playlists)
Usually on Throwback Thursday, I pull out from my desk cabinet--with my eyes closed--a movie ticket stub I didn't throw away, and then I discuss the movie on the ticket and maybe a little bit of its score, which might be now streaming on AFOS. Today, instead of drawing some random ticket, I'm going to focus today's TBT piece on the Muppets' return to the big screen after a 12-year absence, due to next Tuesday's premiere of The Muppets on ABC.
Network TV appears to be in such a sorry state this fall--original content on either streaming services or cable is where it's at these days--that the only new network comedy I'm looking forward to is ABC's The Muppets, which is being billed as "a more adult Muppet Show" (wait a minute, we've already had a more adult Muppet Show: it was called The Larry Sanders Show). As much as I love the film that was both the first Muppet feature film I ever saw and my unlikely gateway into the caper genre, the Jim Henson-directed, partially Jay Tarses-scripted Great Muppet Caper--it's my favorite of the Muppet feature films and a film subsequent Muppet films haven't surpassed, not even 2011's well-received The Muppets--TV, the medium the Muppets were created for, is where they work best and are at their funniest. I'm talking episodic TV, not movie-of-the-week TV, which was where Kermit the Frog and company spent most of the 2000s (and disappointed the franchise's most die-hard fans by starring in TV-movies like the poorly received Muppets' Wizard of Oz). Like the A.V. Club's resident Muppets fan, Erik Adams, said last year, a new take on The Muppet Show would give the Muppets' writers and puppeteers the proper space to stretch their ambitions and allow the franchise's gargantuan cast of characters to shine again in a format that's not as cramped as a two-hour movie.
But I have one huge reservation about this new weekly Muppet comedy from showrunners Bill Prady, the Big Bang Theory co-creator who got his start working for the late Henson, and Bob Kushell, and that would be the show's rehash of the confessional/mockumentary format that was popularized by The Office, Parks and Recreation and Modern Family. It's such a tired format these days that even Modern Family is starting to find ways to break away from the format, like when it told an entire story using nothing but Skype chats last season. No matter how many times Gonzo points out the tiredness of the confessional gimmick, I really wish the Prady/Kushell show would phase out the confessionals because much of the Muppet characters' appeal is due to their timelessness, and the confessionals scream out 2005.
Timelessness is also integral to why Flight of the Conchords episode director James Bobin's 2011 big-screen reboot works so well, despite occasional missteps like the film's ill-advised needle drop of Starship's 1985 radio hit "We Built This City," an anthem about maintaining the "purity" of rock n' roll that neither rocks nor rolls. Although I'm not a fan of musicals, I would rather hear another musical number written by Flight of the Conchords star Bret McKenzie--who won a Best Original Song Oscar for penning the film's clever and very Conchords-ish number "Man or Muppet"--than have to endure "We Built This City" again.
References to anger management classes and the crassness of reality TV (and terrible Starship songs) aside, Bobin's The Muppets could have come out of 1981 or 1991. There was a lot of grumbling to the press from Muppet project veterans like the retired Frank Oz about Bobin's movie before its release. They felt (no pun intended) the screenplay by lead actor Jason Segel and his writing partner Nicholas Stoller disrespected the Muppet characters by having them tell fart jokes or experience Martin-and-Lewis-ish bitter feuds. The film's story has Segel's character and his Muppet Show-loving little brother Walter, a new Muppet character voiced and performed by Peter Linz, helping Kermit (Steve Whitmire, whose most sublime bit of Muppet acting in the film has to be the distraught expression his hand gives to Kermit's face when he finds out Miss Piggy kidnapped Jack Black) to get the other stars of The Muppet Show back together after years of estrangement and unfulfilling jobs away from the limelight.
A bit of the old guard's skepticism about Segel and Stoller's screenplay is understandable because, conceptually, their screenplay is on the creaky side. Much of it is a rehash of the "Muppets put on a show to stop a greedy developer from tearing down their theater" story from 2002's made-for-TV It's a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie, which starred Joan Cusack as the greedy developer instead of Chris Cooper, who--despite being trained to rap by McKenzie, a skilled Beastie Boys parodist who once proved he could flow on Conchords, for a brief number where his villain character raps about himself--should never ever rap on screen again.
But otherwise, Segel, Stoller and Bobin take that "Muppets reunite to put on a show" premise and make it a timeless and effective way to reintroduce the Muppets and get a new generation of viewers to understand why the Muppets' irreverence and warmth were a big deal to those of us who grew up watching The Great Muppet Caper repeatedly or enjoying The Muppet Show and either its shtick involving Animal (the description of Animal's untold backstory in ego trip's Big Book of Racism! is hilarious: "Drunk, inarticulate and wilder than Tijuana on a Jerry Springer celebrity spring break--naturally, he's Mexican") or its various musical numbers. One of those numbers was the show's cover of Piero Umiliani's "Mah Na Mah Na," a nonsense song that resurfaces in the Segel/Stoller/Bobin movie's end credits and is notorious for originating not as a Muppet Show number but as an original song during the 1968 Italian softcore porno Svezia, inferno e paradiso (Swedish: Heaven and Hell).
How else should the Segel/Stoller/Bobin movie have reintroduced the Muppets? Put them through another half-baked parody like a Wizard of Oz remake? The "Muppets never grow apart or do fart jokes" complaints strike me as very "Gene Roddenberry won't allow the Enterprise-D officers to get into conflicts with each other"-ish. The skeptical Muppet veterans were wrong about Segel, Stoller and Bobin being too crass and cynical in their approach to bringing back the Muppets. In fact, I think Segel, Stoller and Bobin were so reverent at times about honoring the most beloved of Muppet movies, 1979's sweet-natured Muppet Movie, and pleasing the old guard (plus the Disney execs) that their movie doesn't have enough terrific little "whoa, how did that get snuck into a family film?" gags like Janice's random aside in The Great Muppet Caper about her past ("And I said, 'Look, Mother, it's my life, okeeey? So if I want to live on a beach and walk around naked...' Oh").
Fortunately, Segel, Stoller and Bobin didn't do away with the self-aware dialogue that's classic Muppets ("Didn't you see our first movie? We drive") or the occasional jokes only a few adults in the audience will understand, like the Muppets showing up on the cover of Ebony on a wall in Kermit's mansion or Rashida Jones threatening Kermit with "I will rerun Benson if I have to." I'm sure that line led to a lot of kids in the audience saying, "Mommy, who's Benson?" Segel, Stoller and Bobin also came up with the first moment in a Muppet movie that genuinely moved me and nearly made me tear up:
Whoops, not that scene. This scene:
The Muppets is noteworthy for being the first Muppet movie to take The Muppet Show and all its episodes and make them a pivotal part of the storyline. While Kermit's discovery of the crowds of fans waiting outside the Muppet Theater nearly made me tear up, some Muppet Show fans have said the film's archival audio clip of Kermit introducing guest star Bob Hope was the part of the film that first made them emotional.
That's how beloved The Muppet Show is as a variety show (variety is, by the way, a long-dead-in-America genre Neil Patrick Harris is attempting to bring back to American network TV this fall with NBC's Best Time Ever, which is loosely based on Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway from the U.K.), and the show receives a satisfying tribute in the form of The Muppets, the most enjoyable comedy movie about a variety show since 1982's My Favorite Year, director Richard Benjamin's thinly veiled movie about the making of Your Show of Shows. The Muppet Show was such a huge part of my childhood that words like "Time once again for Veterinarian's Hospital, the continuing story of a quack who has gone to the dogs" are easier for me to remember than any of the lyrics of "The Star-Spangled Banner."
Every Throwback Thursday, I randomly pull out from my desk cabinet--with my eyes closed--a movie ticket I saved. Then I discuss the movie on the ticket and maybe a little bit of its score, which might be now streaming on AFOS.
In addition to those star turns by Dujardin, who won an Oscar for his role, and the luminous Bejo, a smart and heroic Jack Russell terrier--played by three different dogs--often entertainingly steals the show (the Artist DVD's outtakes of the canine actors missing their cues or ignoring their trainer's instructions are equally entertaining, proving Robert Smigel's theory that much of the funniness of animal actors is due to them not having "any idea what they're part of"). James Cromwell brings his usual material-boosting gravitas to a role that's non-villainous for a change, a stoic and loyal chauffeur who enjoys his work, while, like Dujardin and Bejo, the frequently funny Missi Pyle was born to act in a silent movie, as we see in a way-too-brief role that's clearly an homage to Lina Lamont, Jean Hagen's villainous silent movie star character from Singin' in the Rain.
Another plus is Hazanavicius' attention to the details of late '20s/early '30s Hollywood, with some assistance from his regular composer Ludovic Bource. His Oscar-winning Artist score was influenced by the studio-system-era likes of Max Steiner, Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Bernard Herrmann, whose classic "Scene d'Amour" cue from Vertigo was needle-dropped at one point in The Artist by Hazanavicius, a Hitchcock fan. But the inclusion of a score cue from a well-known 1958 Hitchcock picture during a movie that takes place way before 1958 was too much of an off-putting distraction for some moviegoers, especially Vertigo star Kim Novak, whose bizarre public statement where she angrily referred to the needle drop as "rape" led to a hilarious reaction from Kumail Nanjiani.
Hey Kim Novak, did you know that only 10% of iconic soundtrack theft is actually reported?
— Kumail Nanjiani (@kumailn) January 9, 2012
Guessing Kim Novak's never been raped.
— Kumail Nanjiani (@kumailn) January 9, 2012
It's not as if Hazanavicius soundtracked the movie's angsty climax with Evanescence's "Bring Me to Life," but the purists in the audience who were bent out of shape about the climax would rant and rave as if the director Evanescenced it. Whether or not anachronistic music choices in The Artist or other period pieces like Inglourious Basterds and Public Enemies set off your inner Pierre Bernard, you can't deny how The Artist remarkably never looks like it was made in 2010, thanks mostly to the striking black-and-white visuals of Hazanavicius' regular cinematographer Guillaume Schiffman. At one point, the movie, which Hazanavicius shot entirely in Hollywood, makes beautiful use of the distinctive staircase inside the Bradbury Building, the 122-year-old L.A. filming location most memorably featured in Blade Runner and the 1964 Outer Limits episode "Demon with a Glass Hand."
So like I said before, The Artist is impossible to dislike. But it's hardly the best picture of 2011. As silent movies that were made long after the silent era, Mel Brooks' 1976 farce Silent Movie and Charles Lane's 1989 indie flick Sidewalk Stories are more inventive than The Artist, which, while it does recapture '20s and '30s filmmaking quite well, never really does anything inventive or new with the silent gimmick, other than a memorable nightmare sequence where Dujardin's George Valentin imagines the horrors of being trapped in a new world full of sound. The scenes where George drinks himself into a stupor--over his artistic decline and his inability to adapt to Hollywood's transition from silents to talkies like the box-office successes of Bejo's Peppy Miller--really drag. George's self-pity is about 10 minutes too long. It becomes so repetitive that an enticing-looking two-second clip of Peppy from a fake movie where she stars as a female baseball player ends up being a movie I'd rather watch instead of the actual movie surrounding it.
Every Throwback Thursday, I randomly pull out from my desk cabinet--with my eyes closed--a movie ticket I saved. Then I discuss the movie on the ticket and maybe a little bit of its score, which might be now streaming on AFOS.
What I wrote about Ratatouille here on the AFOS blog back in 2007:
Ratatouille is a love story, but it's not your usual one. The main romance of the film is not the Linguini/Colette relationship--it's Remy the rat's love of cooking and fine dining. Giacchino's lush and playful score beautifully captures Remy's optimism and enthusiasm for the art of cooking without getting all overly gooey on us, which is why I'm adding to "Assorted Fistful" rotation four cues from the Walt Disney Records release of Giacchino's Ratatouille soundtrack.
Other things I dug about Ratatouille: the clever casting of Ian Holm, who played a similar "sellout" restaurateur character in the Deep Throat of food porn flicks, Big Night; Bird's jabs at the merchandising tactics of a certain parent company with a name that rhymes with "piznee" (during the scenes in which Holm's villainous Skinner plans to launch an inane line of frozen dinners exploiting the image of his deceased former boss, celebrity chef Gusteau); and the refreshing absence of corny and unsubtle pop culture reference gags that have been abundant in sub-Pixar animated flicks.
What I think about Ratatouille in 2015:
An unlikely box-office hit with one of the weirdest plots ever to be found in a summer blockbuster (an unusually intelligent rat's determination to become a gourmet chef), Ratatouille still holds up, and the 2008 Best Animated Feature Oscar winner will hold up forever. The DVD and Blu-ray releases of Ratatouille don't contain an audio commentary, but Baron Vaughn and Leonard Maltin's interesting Maltin on Movies discussion of why Ratatouille is such a sublime Brad Bird movie would suffice as a short commentrak for the movie ("If I see Brad Bird ever, I am going to kiss him on his mouth," jokes Vaughn), even though their 15-minute discussion, which takes place at the start of Maltin on Movies' recent "Food Movies" episode, isn't exactly scene-specific.
Bird's animated ode to culinary artistry isn't just an outstanding food movie. It's also a great Bay Area movie--even though it takes place in Paris. "The Bay Area is so obsessed with food that just finding the latest cheese, the tangiest sourdough or the richest coffee is enough to spark passionate debates," said the San Francisco Chronicle in its 2007 interview with celebrity chef Thomas Keller, Ratatouille's primary food consultant, and producer Brad Lewis about their movie. Like all other Disney/Pixar movies, Ratatouille was animated in the Bay Area, but it's the most Bay Area-esque out of all of them, because of how much Northern California's epicurean approach to food and wine suffuses Ratatouille. Pixar's location deep in the heart of the Bay Area culinary scene made the animators' culinary research really easy to access, and man, that research, which entailed cooking classes and visits to kitchens in both the Bay Area and Paris, really pays off in the movie.
Ratatouille is the quintessential family film for people like me who hate most family films. It's so enjoyably un-Disney-like--and adult--for a Disney film. Nobody bursts into a grating musical number; the film bites the hand that feeds it through its criticisms of Disney-style mass-merchandising; there's lots of dialogue about wine (in fact, Disney wanted to introduce a line of Ratatouille wines and sell it at Costco, but the studio nixed it after the California Wine Institute argued that it would encourage underage drinking); and one of the film's heroes was born out of wedlock, usually a no-no in animated Disney fare.
It builds up Anton Ego, the late Peter O'Toole's intimidating restaurant critic character, as this typical Disney villain (note how his office is shaped like a coffin, and the back of his typewriter resembles a skull face), but then it takes O'Toole's antagonist in an unexpected, completely different and believable direction. And it moves you not by killing off some child character's parent (although both of Linguini's parents are long-dead) or through some other form of misery porn. It moves you through an understated climactic voiceover, eloquently and magnificently delivered by O'Toole and nicely scored by Michael Giacchino, about the power of art and the need for critics--whether in the haute cuisine community, the film community or any other artistic community--to not be set in old ways.
O'Toole steals Ratatouille from Patton Oswalt--whose brilliant stand-up routine about overly aggressive Black Angus steakhouse ads interestingly landed him the role of Remy--whenever Ego's on screen. I especially love how O'Toole pronounces "popular" as if it's a dirty word. I wish Ego had more screen time. But then again, that's part of what makes O'Toole's performance such a highlight of Ratatouille. To borrow Ego's own words, his performance leaves you hungry for more.
Selections from Giacchino's Ratatouille score can be heard during the AFOS blocks "AFOS Prime" and "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round."
It's been such a long time since I've written enthusiastically about a short film that I've forgotten how my own blog style guide's policy goes for when I have to type out titles of short films. So I've had to go back to older material from my blog and verify that policy. It turns out that I'm supposed to bookend titles of short films with quotation marks instead of italicizing them, just like with titles of short stories or TV series episodes.
Stop-motion animator Timothy Reckart's 2012 short Head Ov... "Head Over Heels," which Reckart just recently made available to watch in its entirety online for free, is so good I kind of wish it won the Best Animated Short Oscar in 2013 instead of Disney's "Paperman." (In 2013, "Head Over Heels" and "Paperman" also happened to be up against the Simpsons theatrical short "The Longest Daycare," which I love for both its jab at Ayn Rand and the adversary "Longest Daycare" writers James L. Brooks, Matt Groening, Al Jean, David Mirkin, Michael Price and Joel H. Cohen chose to pit Maggie against.) Like "Head Over Heels," "Paperman" is a clever short about a man struggling to communicate his feelings to a woman he adores. But "Head Over Heels" is about adult problems--like how do you salvage a long-term relationship that has lost its spark, and how do you do that when so many obstacles to communication are in the way?--and that makes it the more intriguing of the two Oscar-nominated 2012 romantic shorts.
Timothy Reckart, accepting his Annie Award for "Head Over Heels" (Photo source: Animation Magazine)
An Annie Award winner for Best Student Project (it was made at the National Film and Television School in the U.K.), Reckart's 10-minute film is both a dialogue-less and surprisingly affecting comedy about a strained marriage and a nifty sci-fi short story set in a bizarre and unexplained reality where the laws of physics are different from our world's laws of physics. So because of the reality the short takes place in, the biggest obstacle to communication between middle-aged Walter and his ex-ballet dancer wife Madge isn't the increasingly common problem of smartphone addiction. Instead, it's gravity.
Walter and Madge live in a floating house where Walter's ceiling is Madge's floor and her ceiling is his floor. We don't know what exactly caused their marriage to become strained or why they no longer share the same gravity. All we do know is that it's entertaining to watch them go about their day as if everything's normal in their topsy-turvy world.
Meanwhile, in our topsy-turvy world where special features, which, for a long time, have been the best part of a DVD or Blu-ray, are unfortunately becoming an endangered species because younger viewers prefer to stream movies instead of watching bonus-filled physical copies of them, Reckart's strategy of getting viewers to watch his short online is noteworthy. It's not just because of his wish to keep special features alive by treating viewers to a bunch of fascinating little extras about the making of "Head Over Heels" ("On the one hand, the death of DVD is great, because the physical production of DVDs has been a barrier to entry for short filmmakers like me. On the other hand, what happened to special features?," says Reckart). It's also because one of those bonuses is an audio-only featurette about film scoring--and it's almost three times longer than "Head Over Heels" itself, like how the documentary about the making of Superman Returns is much longer than Superman Returns itself (and a slightly more enjoyable film too, simply because of the moment when Kevin Spacey cracks up the film's crew with his Brando impression while audio of Brando as Jor-El is being played aloud on the set).
Any featurette about the film scoring process is worthwhile to me because I put strictly film and TV score music into rotation on my radio station, and I'm always interested in hearing about how that kind of music gets made. Film and TV scoring is a process not a lot of people understand or are aware of, even after the release of Forgetting Sarah Marshall, whose main character was a struggling (and way-too-frequently-naked) TV composer, so the audience saw a few scenes of him at work. Featurettes like the scoring discussion Reckart recorded with Jered Sorkin, his short's composer, are invaluable because they get those outsiders to understand the process.
I had only five questions for Reckart--whose prior stop-motion shorts include 2009's "Token Hunchback," a mockumentary about a Hollywood actor born with a hunchback--when I interviewed him over e-mail. That's because in the extras or in other interviews, he goes into so much detail about the animation process and the music that he basically answers all the other questions I had about the making of "Head Over Heels."
Every Throwback Thursday, I randomly pull out from my desk cabinet--with my eyes closed--a movie ticket I saved. Then I discuss the movie on the ticket and maybe a little bit of its score, which might be now streaming on AFOS.
Robert Zemeckis' Flight, the story of an airline pilot whose heroism in the cockpit is called into question after investigators discover he was intoxicated, is a rare example of the mismarketing of a film actually paying off. Paramount sold Flight primarily as a "prestige" disaster flick, even though Flight's riveting plane crash sequence lasts only eight minutes in the movie's first half-hour. How the hell do you sell the rest of the movie, a dark addiction drama about both Denzel Washington and Kelly Reilly's struggles to get clean? You just simply don't.
Nobody really enjoys addiction dramas. The only people who enjoy them are the actors who make them and get their kicks--and occasionally, an impressive paycheck--from going Method to portray junkies or alcoholics. Addiction dramas are often such a repetitive slog, due to the addict characters' repetitive habits and relapses, while the ones that are less tedious or simply better-crafted aren't really made for repeat viewing. I admire the filmmaking on display in Requiem for a Dream, but the film's third act was so harrowing and nightmarish I'm not itching to watch it again.
Leaving out Flight's addiction footage and only hinting at it in the legal drama clips was as risky a marketing move for Paramount as emphasizing the addiction angle would have been: what if the most hardcore Denzel stans--particularly black moviegoers with conservative tastes in film (read: Tyler Perry movies) who love it when Denzel plays either a positive role model or an action hero, which, by the way, are the kinds of roles where I tend to find Denzel to be at his least compelling as an actor--come to Flight to see their hero valiantly pilot an endangered plane as advertised, but they wind up being turned off by seeing him portray such a flawed and often unsympathetic boozer for the rest of the film? And then what if they leave the theater feeling had, took, hoodwinked and bamboozled, and as a result, the word-of-mouth for Flight turns sour? Yet Paramount's odd strategy somehow worked because all of Denzel's dramatic material after the badass plane crash sequence turned out to be equally captivating anyway--his subtle, gutsy and convincing performance as alcoholic airline pilot Whip Whitaker is more worthy of a Best Actor Oscar trophy than his Oscar-winning turn in Training Day--and Flight ended up becoming a critical and financial success in 2012.
After a string of often creepy-looking motion-capture fantasy movies that divided both critics and moviegoers, Flight marked the welcome return of the craftsman behind Used Cars, Back to the Future and Cast Away to grown-up filmmaking (yes, he made the Best Picture Oscar winner Forrest Gump, but the sappy and underwhelming Gump is hardly grown-up filmmaking). I haven't watched Used Cars, Zemeckis' only R-rated film until he made Flight, but I'm aware that the 1980 cult favorite is Zemeckis at his most biting and raunchy, raunchier than what the animators attempted to get away with during much of the material involving either Jessica Rabbit, Baby Herman or Betty Boop in Zemeckis' 1988 classic Who Framed Roger Rabbit. This mischievous side of Zemeckis from Used Cars and Roger Rabbit resurfaces in the unlikeliest of movies: Flight.
Part of what makes Flight better than the average addiction drama is the levity Zemeckis sneaks into this mostly somber piece of Denzel Oscar-bait, whether it's in the comic relief scenes where John Goodman temporarily steals the show as Harling Mays, Whip's oddly maternal drug dealer, or the opening hotel room scene where former My Name Is Earl viewers got to finally see Nadine Velazquez in all her full-frontal glory. The opening scene, which establishes Whip's alcoholism and coke habit, as well as the similar substance abuse problems of Velazquez's flight attendant character Katerina, is almost comedic in how it upends moviegoers' expectations about a typical introduction of a Denzel character and basically says, "Whip's not exactly the noble character Denzel frequently plays" (although he's played tormented alcoholics before, like in Courage Under Fire). It's even got Whip making a Bond-style pun while staring at Katerina's naked ass:
Zemeckis even sneaks in a pair of in-jokes about one of Denzel's most frequent collaborators and a past Denzel movie. I'm going to invert the following screen shot like Whip does with his plane.
Hmm, I wonder why Virtuosity isn't in that stack of videos. Anyway, another element that elevates Flight above the standard addiction drama is the movie's engaging and non-didactic legal drama side, particularly in the scenes between Denzel and Don Cheadle as Whip's efficient--and quietly frustrated, especially over Whip's behavior--lawyer, which are at times as electric as the scenes between Denzel and Cheadle in Devil in a Blue Dress. In Flight, Denzel and Cheadle reverse their Devil in a Blue Dress roles as, respectively, the straight arrow and the troublemaker who has to be kept in line by the former. Flight is as close to the Denzel-as-Easy/Cheadle-as-Mouse reunion movie we'll sadly never get to see due to Devil in a Blue Dress' box-office failure during the weekend of the O.J. Simpson verdict in 1995.
