My favorite monthly section in old Source magazine issues was "Hip-Hop Quotables," in which the Source editors printed out their favorite new rap verse of the month, from the first bar to the last. "Tip-Top Quotables," which I've named after that Source section, is a collection of my favorite quotes of the week from anywhere, whether it's a recent TV show or a new rap verse. "TTQ" won't appear on this blog every week. It'll appear whenever the fuck I feel like it.
So this week, I wrote my first piece for Splitsider, "The 'Gas Leak Year' of The Boondocks," about why I, a Boondocks fan, have been disappointed with most of the show's new episodes. Complex podcaster Desus, who's big on Black Twitter and writes frequently hilarioustweets, retweeted the link to my Splitsider article, so thanks to Black Twitter, my piece received more RTs and faves than I expected. If there's any half of Twitter you'd be glad to have on your side, it would definitely be Black Twitter, and not having Black Twitter on your side is something Stacey Dash would know all too well.
If I didn't write the Boondocks critique and someone else wrote it instead, I would have included an excerpt from it below. But because I wrote it, I won't quote from it in "TTQ" because doing so would be masturbatory and self-congratulatory, like favoriting your own tweet. Sorry, Harry Allen, you'll always be a hip-hop journalism hero of mine, but favoriting your own tweet is the epitome of being way too up your own ass. I hope the favoriting of his own tweet was an accident (maybe he was trying to favorite the retweeting DJ QBert did of his tweet, and instead, it ended up looking like he was favoriting himself). He's middle-aged. Folks on Twitter who are middle-aged always make a bunch of blunders over there, like hyphenating a hashtag or doing the social media equivalent of wearing squeaky Selina Mayer shoes. Speaking of which, those very shoes are the subject of a couple of this week's best quotes.
* "It just destroyed me. I mean, I was bulimic the whole first year, and I didn't even lose any weight from it."--Chief of Staff Ben Cafferty (Kevin Dunn) on his first year as the last president's Chief of Staff, Veep, "New Hampshire"
* "It's like she's walking on a carpet of mice."--Mike McLintock (Matt Walsh) reacting to the squeaky high heels Gary Walsh (Tony Hale) gave to President Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) as a gift, Veep, "New Hampshire"
* "Sounds like the theme from Psycho."--Ben on Selina's squeaky shoes, Veep, "New Hampshire"
* "It's like getting divorced in the '50s. People didn't go to divorce court. They just looked at their wife like, 'Baby, I'm gonna go get a pack of cigarettes. I'll be right back.'"--Dave Chappelle on the controversial way he bounced from Chappelle's Show and became "seven years late for work," during his first Letterman interview in 10 years
* "It's not a criticism to say that Jon Brion absolutely bullies his score onto the screen in Paul Thomas Anderson's 2002 romantic drama Punch Drunk Love--in fact, the director rather preferred it that way. Distracting, percussive, and chaotic, there's a parallel storyline happening with Brion's work in the film next to Adam Sandler's rage-ridden character Barry, and viewing the film is a fantastically exhausting attempt to figure each thread out. Together, Anderson and Brion achieved a new expressionistic form with a film score, down to the instruments used on-screen and behind the scenes. The broken harmonium that Barry decides to fix was planted in Anderson's mind before the script was even finished, and as it turned out, Brion recalled a harmonium that he fixed with duct tape before going on tour with Aimee Mann--a situation which ended up in the final film."--Charlie Schmidlin, The Playlist, "16 Musicians-Turned-Film Composers and Their Breakout Scores"
* "Depending on how much time you have, explaining Ruby's impact on African-American women in Hollywood could take hours."--The Smoking Section's J. Tinsley on the late Ruby Dee
* "I anticipate that I'll always write about race and racism in some professional capacity. Still, wouldn't it be wonderful if writers and creatives on the periphery were welcomed in from anonymity, not thanks to their accounts of woe, but simply because they have things to share--tales of love, joy, happiness, and basic humanity--that have nothing to do with their race and also everything to do with their race. I'm ready for people in positions of power at magazines and newspapers and movie studios to recalibrate their understanding of what it means to talk about race in the first place. If America would like to express that it truly values and appreciates the voices of its minorities, it will listen to all their stories, not just the ones reacting to its shortcomings and brutality."--Cord Jefferson, Medium, "The Racism Beat: What it's like to write about hate over and over and over"
* "Just before they got rid of Owen Gleiberman, EW trumpeted the launch of 'The Community,' a blog 'featuring superfans with passion and unique voices' recruited from the blog's readership. In other words: a way for EW to exploit the labor of fans, students, and other aspiring bloggers who'll write for free, a model made notorious by The Bleacher Report... The idea of working for free for Time Inc., which had $3.35 billion in gross revenue, and $337 million in pre-tax operating income, in 2013, seems beyond absurd."--Anne Helen Petersen, The Awl, "The Trials of Entertainment Weekly: One Magazine's 24 Years of Corporate Torture"
Babyface featuring Toni Braxton, "Give U My Heart (Upscale R&B Remix)," and Toni Braxton, "Love Shoulda Brought You Home"(both from Boomerang; now playing during "The Whitest Block Ever")
Love, Marriage & Divorce, the new album "starring" Toni Braxton and Babyface, is the first time I've paid attention to new music by either one of them in like 13 years (when Babyface tried to update his sound and recruited the Neptunes to produce "There She Goes," to be exact). The project--a collection of tunes about rocky relationships (where the fighting often leads to sex), infidelity, divorce and post-divorce reconciliation that stem from Braxton and Babyface's experiences with divorce--plays to each of their strengths as artists: Braxton's terrific contralto, especially when she sings a blistering kiss-off to an ex like Love, Marriage & Divorce's "I Wish," and Babyface's skills as a craftsman of New Jack-era, pre-Jodeci/R. Kelly R&B of the baby-making kind.
There's a scene early in Boomerang where a heavy-handed--and enthusiastic, of course, because he's played by Geoffrey "No Caffeine: Never Had It, Never Will" Holder--TV ad director presents Eddie Murphy's skirt-chasing ad exec Marcus Graham with a rough cut of a hilariously unsubtle lipstick ad, which is full of shots of supermodels wagging their tongues between pairs of cherries and sucking on bananas. Marcus' response to the footage is "I like the orange, and I like the ice cream. You gotta get rid of the cherries and lose the banana... That's a little too overt, you know? We should go a little more subtle... At least there wasn't no sausages in this one." His preference for classing things up also best sums up why most of Babyface's hits still hold up today and you can sing along to them without snickering, while the much lewder slow jams that followed Babyface's string of hits--like, for example, Silk's "Freak Me"--come off as unintentionally funny when you re-encounter them these days, mostly because their lyrics have been parodied so often by the likes of Murphy's Boomerang co-star Chris Rock ("Suck Your Big Toe"), Dave Chappelle ("Piss on You") and The Lonely Island ("Dick in a Box").
It's nice to hear Braxton and Babyface singing together again because I remember very well when I first heard them together: the duet "Give U My Heart," which Babyface produced for the Boomerang soundtrack. That album, which represented the best in mainstream R&B at the time, dominated the R&B airwaves in 1992 (you couldn't hide from the mammoth radio hit that was Boyz II Men's "End of the Road," which is the very last song featured in the film's end credits). "Give U My Heart," a New Jack tune that still holds up today, made me think, "Who's this chick with the smoky voice? She's like a younger Anita Baker. I'd like to hear more from her." And five months later, we did get to hear more from her when the Boomerang soundtrack hit us with the single "Love Shoulda Brought You Home," which, in fact, was written for Baker, but she declined to record it because she was pregnant at the time, so she suggested to Babyface and L.A. Reid that they give the song to the girl who sang its demo version: Braxton.
The release of Love, Marriage & Divorce isn't just why "Love Shoulda Brought You Home," which Angela (Halle Berry) quotes from when she breaks up with Marcus in Boomerang, and the film version of "Give U My Heart," known as the "Upscale R&B Remix," have been added to "Whitest Block Ever" rotation. It's Black History Month, and I think Boomerang is just as important and vital a film for directors and moviegoers of color as, say, the box office hit Lee Daniels' The Butler and 12 Years a Slave. In 1992, there wasn't a film like director Reginald Hudlin's Boomerang. "Part of the appeal of Boomerang for the Hudlins was that the film's subject matter--a brazen look at the battle of the sexes--had never been explored in a black film with multimillion-dollar production values," said the Philadelphia Inquirer in its 1992 profile of Hudlin and his producer brother Warrington Hudlin, who were fresh off the success of House Party.
The Hudlins' 1992 hit paved the way for the current hot streak of black, or as USA Today likes to say, "race-themed," rom-coms: Think Like a Man (soon to be followed this summer by Think Like a Man Too), The Best Man Holiday and Kevin Hart's About Last Night. That's why Boomerang, which I just saw for the very first time, is worth another look. It's also a damn good comedy (peep its ensemble cast--there are so many funny performances throughout Boomerang) and one of Murphy's best, even though, like Odie Henderson says in his post about the film, it sort of falls apart at the end. (That's due to the Hudlins rewriting the film at the last minute so that Marcus wins back Angela instead of winding up without either Angela or Jacqueline, the marketing department boss--and freak in the bed--played by Robin Givens. It was supposed to originally end with that shot of the Empire State Building lighting up behind Murphy, his future Life co-star Martin Lawrence and David Alan Grier hugging each other--again, that cast!--on the rooftop.)
Comedy movies like Boomerang get slept on simply because they're comedies, and we know how well the Oscar crowd treats comedy movies. The Butler and 12 Years a Slave garner lots of accolades (particularly for dramatizing tumultuous moments of African American history not from a white audience surrogate's point of view or the oppressor's point of view but from a black point of view) but are dismissed by some black moviegoers for being "misery porn." Armond White is a crazy old troll who hasn't written anything coherent or worth taking seriously in 13 years (the last White article I remember enjoying reading was his angry takedown of SNL's first post-9/11 episode because all the cops, firefighters and city workers Lorne Michaels brought out on-stage for Paul Simon's opening musical number were middle-aged white men), and White's heckling of 12 Years a Slave director Steve McQueen at the New York Film Critics Circle awards dinner was just plain rude and stupid, but I understand where he's coming from when he disses 12 Years a Slave for being "torture porn."
There's an interesting Tumblr exchange about this very subject between David Brothers from Image Comics, who's similarly said that he's had it up to here with misery porn, and another African American comics blogger, cartoonist Darryl Ayo. "I do feel like the [black-driven movies] that come across my desk tend to be what you describe--something about how much it sucks or sucked to be black, instead of just movies about people," wrote Brothers to Ayo. "The Butler, the Help, 12 Years a Slave, Django Unchained, Precious, The Blind Side, all these movies traffick [sic] in black misery. I feel like Hollywood's black people, outside of what feels like exceptions, have just a couple ideas as to what black folks are all about, and keep going to the misery well because it has a built-in triumphant narrative if you look at it right... I'm over feeling sad about being black."
Boomerang--which I watched on Netflix Instant because I was in the mood for a film with black stars that was neither somber Oscar bait nor a corny Tyler Perry film--may be a throwback to His Girl Friday, one of Hudlin's favorite movies and an influence on the Murphy film, or any one of those '50s and '60s ad exec rom-coms with Rock Hudson or Tony Randall, but one thing that keeps Boomerang remaining vital all these years is the humor based in political consciousness that Hudlin said he and his brother wanted to inject into House Party and Boomerang in that Philly Inquirer piece. Several of my favorite scenes in House Party involve awkward interactions between black folks and white authority figures, from the school principal who thinks the head bully called Kid's dead mom a garden tool to the inept cops who toss the not-exactly-thuggish Kid in jail and get their comeuppance at the end.
The Hudlins did the same thing in Boomerang, throwing in a little scene where Marcus and his friends, despite their Manhattan ad agency cachet, are racially profiled while browsing around a menswear store (Marcus' comedic handling of the racist clerk brings back a little bit of the fire Murphy brought to the scene that Roger Ebert memorably said was the moment that made Murphy a movie star, the 48 Hrs. redneck bar scene), as well as another bit where Berry says good night to Grier in fake Korean and jokes that it means "I'm sorry I shot you, but I thought you were robbing my store." It's the Hudlins' way of saying, "Sure, this is the same opulent and insular ad agency world from those Rock Hudson and Tony Randall rom-coms, but because our characters are black, these things that are unfortunately everyday to us--like racial profiling--are as much a part of this world as the tuxes, gowns and lavish product premiere parties." And in House Party and Boomerang, the Hudlins preferred to ridicule the racist assholes who keep these problems alive instead of building Oscar-bait dramas around these problems or speechifying about them, an approach I'd like to see more often from filmmakers of color. It's laughing to keep from crying (hey, that's the title of a Tyler Perry play).
Another thing that's made Boomerang age well is the ensemble, and unlike some other Murphy films in that pre-family-movie period of his career (particularly 1994's Beverly Hills Cop III, where, according to Bronson Pinchot, Murphy was so disengaged with the lame material that John Landis told him, "Just rest, Eddie, and I'll do the scene with Bronson," and he shot Pinchot's scenes with Murphy without Murphy), you can tell Murphy enjoyed being there because of the cast he was surrounded with. During one of the business meeting scenes, he looks like he's about to break character and corpse when the ponytail on Grace Jones' hat hits him in the face, and he looks like he's about to do the same thing too when John Witherspoon explains why "you got to coordinate" in a quotable scene Ludacris once referenced. In a later scene where Angela tries to cheer up a depressed Marcus by bringing him along to a kids' art class she teaches, the interplay between Murphy and the kids appears to be ad-libbed, and his amusement over interacting with those child actors brings to mind how much fun he clearly had watching Pinchot hilariously ad-lib in the first Beverly Hills Cop.
Everyone in that Boomerang cast gets a chance to shine, even bit players like the actor who plays the butler for Eartha Kitt's Lady Eloise character, plus there are three cast members who appeared in Bond movies (Holder was in Live and Let Die, Jones showed up in A View to a Kill and Berry later starred in Die Another Day) and the two black Catwomen (Kitt and Berry). Berry would have been an okay Catwoman had the idiots behind Berry's Catwoman fiasco adapted Ed Brubaker's Catwoman comics instead of inserting all that Patience Phillips/Egyptian superpowers shit. On the other hand, her romantic rival Givens would have been a great Catwoman. Peep how Givens dominates her sex scenes with Murphy. It's very Selina Kyle.
That willingness to take a brief break from the heroism of Reggie Hammond and Axel Foley to play such an emasculated character (who, at one point in one of his sex scenes with Givens, starts sucking his thumb) and win back women who hated the misogyny of Raw and wanted more of Murphy's Coming to America rom-com side--plus hitching his wagons to Black New Wave filmmakers--were good career moves for Murphy. Early '90s "Hammer Time in her shoe" line aside, Boomerang stands the test of time, thanks to the Hudlins, the cast they assembled ("I remember talking to one of the producers at the time and saying, 'Ten years from now, people won't believe we had all these people in the same cast,'" recalled Hudlin to Blackfilm) and a soundtrack that still slaps.
Yesterday, Pharrell Williams marked the arrival of Despicable Me 2 in digital download form--and capped off a crazy year of hit tracks like Daft Punk's "Get Lucky" and Robin Thicke's divisive "Blurred Lines"--by debuting the world's first 24-hour music video, "24 Hours of Happy." It consists of countless variations of either Pharrell or some unknown but totally game dancer getting their groove on in a different L.A. spot while lip-synching "Happy," the theme Pharrell wrote and performed as part of his original score to Despicable Me 2. You're batshit crazy if you actually watched the entire thing--and you're mad disgusting too because you didn't stop to wash your ass.
As for the rest of us saner cats who have chosen to click on specific dots on the "24 Hours of Happy" clock and watch bits and pieces of "24 Hours of Happy" rather than the whole video uninterrupted, it's actually a pretty captivating snapshot of different parts of L.A. At one point, "24 Hours of Happy" brings its roving Steadicam to the L.A. River, the shooting location made famous by Grease, Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Drive and countless other films, shows and music videos. It helps that the "24 Hours of Happy" site comes with a mute button because hearing "Happy" after six or seven consecutive times can get tiresome, so I later replaced the audio with music from an episode of Sunday Night Sound Session off my iTunes music library.
I was enthralled by this beast for nearly an hour. The 24-hour interactive piece, which took 11 (non-consecutive) days to shoot, was directed by the French music video directing duo We Are from L.A. It looks like it was shot by the cinematography genius who came up with the memorable look of Punch-Drunk Love (that would be Robert Elswit, who took non-descript, industrial-looking parts of SoCal and the insides of supermarkets and made them look sumptuous and otherworldly in Punch-Drunk Love, with the help of some pre-J.J. Abrams lens flares, but Elswit wasn't involved with this Pharrell video). I wish the resolution of We Are from L.A.'s footage was in HD rather than crappy-res because then "24 Hours of Happy" would look even more incredible.
"Happy" can be heard in rotation during the "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" and "New Cue Revue" blocks on AFOS, but that doesn't compare to the "24 Hours of Happy" experience of watching regular people (and occasional celebrities like Despicable Me 2 lead voice actor Steve Carell and Tyler, the Creator and even the yellow Despicable Me Minions themselves) losing themselves to "Happy" and eliciting various reactions from L.A. bystanders (some of them join in, especially little kids). My favorite segments involve the pair of Asian lady dancers, the puppeteer lady, the chick with the neon hula hoop and Pharrell's semi-choreographed bit inside a bowling alley (the rest of the video was pretty much improvised on the spot). It's like that 24-hour remake of Denzel Washington's Fallen I always wanted to see, but with the Despicable Me 2 theme and improvised dancing instead of "Time Is on My Side" and people being killed.
Starting tomorrow, the 2003 Fistful of Soundtracks: The Series episode "Super Groover Mama Dalai Lama" (WEB09) airs Tuesdays and Thursdays at 4am, 10am, 3pm, 7pm and 11pm and Saturdays and Sundays at 7am, 9am, 1pm, 3pm and 5pm for the rest of July on the Fistful of Soundtracks channel. WEB09 first aired during the week of April 21-27, 2003. I haven't aired "Super Groover Mama" on the channel since '03 and was recently surprised to find it's a pretty good early episode from my archives.
I took the ep's title from a lyric in the album version of "Ask DNA," which Yoko Kanno and lyricist Tim Jensen wrote for the opening titles of Cowboy Bebop: The Movie (an animated feature that had a better title in Japan, Cowboy Bebop: Knockin' on Heaven's Door, which resumed the Bebop TV series' tradition of naming eps after classic rock tunes). "Ask DNA" is one of 10 original opening theme songs on the WEB09 playlist that are either quirky, out-of-place or incomprehensible (during the "Thunderball" recording session, Tom Jones asked John Barry "What's a thunderball?"--something I wondered too when I first heard the song but hadn't seen the movie yet--and Barry responded to Jones with "Just sing it, Tom").
There's a mistake during this ep. I said Jon Brion's terrific "Here We Go" is from the Punch-Drunk Love score. Actually, "Here We Go," the vocal version of Brion's main Punch-Drunk Love theme, isn't used at all during the movie (however, Columbia Pictures used "Here We Go" during its Punch-Drunk Love TV spots). I didn't know "Here We Go" wasn't in the movie because I hadn't watched it yet when I recorded WEB09.
1. Seatbelts featuring Raju Ramayya, "Ask DNA" (from Cowboy Bebop: The Movie), Ask DNA, Victor
2. Jon Brion, "Here We Go," Punch-Drunk Love, Nonesuch
3. Isaac Hayes, "Buns O'Plenty" (from Three Tough Guys), Double Feature: Music from the Soundtracks of Three Tough Guys & Truck Turner, Stax
4. Tom Jones, "Thunderball--Main Title," Thunderball, EMI/Capitol
5. Elmer Bernstein, "Frankie Machine" (from The Man with the Golden Arm), Crime Jazz: Music in the First Degree, Rhino
6. Elmer Bernstein, "Autumn in Connecticut," Far from Heaven, Varèse Sarabande
7. Randy Newman, "A Fool in Love," Meet the Parents, DreamWorks
8. Yoko Kanno, "N.Y. Rush," Cowboy Bebop: Blue, Victor
9. The Dust Brothers, "Hessel, Raymond K.," Fight Club, Restless
10. Badly Drawn Boy, "Something to Talk About," About a Boy, ARTISTdirect/Twisted Nerve/XL/BMG
11. Willie Hutch, "I Choose You" (from The Mack), Pimps, Players & Private Eyes, Rhyme Syndicate/Sire/Warner Bros.
12. Queen, "Flash's Theme," Flash Gordon, Hollywood
13. Craig Safan, "Confrontation," Thief, Elektra
14. The MASH, "Suicide Is Painless" (from M*A*S*H), Movie Music: The Definitive Performances, Columbia/Epic/Legacy
15. The Five Blobs, "The Blob" (from The Blob), Sci-Fi's Greatest Hits Vol. 3: The Uninvited, TVT
16. The Hollies and Peter Sellers, "After the Fox," After the Fox, Rykodisc
17. Mark Mothersbaugh, "Kite Flying Society," Rushmore, London
18. Simon Brint, "Julverset," Monarch of the Glen, BBC Music
19. Howard Shore, "The Riders of Rohan," The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Reprise/WMG Soundtracks
20. Curtis Mayfield, "Freddie's Dead (instrumental version)," Superfly: Deluxe 25th Anniversary Edition, Curtom/Rhino
21. Michael Brook, "Bar-B-Que," Charlotte Sometimes, Visionbox Pictures
22. Semiautomatic, "Can't Spell," Better Luck Tomorrow, MTV Films
23. Duran Duran, "A View to a Kill" (from A View to a Kill), The Best of James Bond: 30th Anniversary Limited Edition, EMI
24. The Dickies, "Killer Klowns from Outer Space" (from Killer Klowns from Outer Space), Sci-Fi's Greatest Hits Vol. 3: The Uninvited, TVT
25. Bernard Herrmann, "Prelude/Outer Space/Radar" (from The Day the Earth Stood Still), Sci-Fi's Greatest Hits Vol. 3: The Uninvited, TVT
26. John Williams, "Finale and End Title March," Superman: The Movie, Warner Archives/Rhino
27. John Williams, "Love Theme from Superman," Superman: The Movie, Warner Archives/Rhino
28. Jerry Goldsmith, "End Titles (Your Zowie Face)" (from In Like Flint), In Like Flint/Our Man Flint, Varèse Sarabande
