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.

Dear White People, whose score can be heard on AFOS, resonates not just for black millennials, but for any person of color whose hair has been subject to getting creepily touched by white people

In late October, Japan's DJ Muro, whom I remember from the Super Disco Friends mix he assembled with Dimitri from Paris in 2005, put together for Stussy Clothing a mostly terrific Curtis Mayfield mix that includes frequently sampled selections from the soundtracks Mayfield produced and performed for the '70s films Superfly and Short Eyes (a few of the Superfly songs can be heard during "AFOS Prime" and "Beat Box" on AFOS). It also includes a Mayfield tune I never heard before and have become taken with, "Make Me Believe in You" from 1974's Sweet Exorcist album (it starts at 1:01:19 in the mix). That song knocks.

I've listened to Muro's Mayfield holiday 2014 mix repeatedly after Stussy released it, and it's a delicious mix--up until the last seven minutes. Those last seven minutes, where the mix segues into 1980's "Love Me, Love Me Now" and then closes out with 1978's "You Are, You Are," are pretty fucking dire. Let's just say disco and Mayfield were not a good combination.



I would replace those last seven minutes with the seven-minute "(Don't Worry) If There's a Hell Below, We're All Going to Go." How can anyone ignore that classic 1970 Mayfield tune, especially when--"Nixon talking about don't worry" lyric aside--it's so relevant in this period of Michael Brown and Eric Garner not getting justice? There are two pieces of music that have been on my mind as people across the country peacefully protest the treatment of Brown and Garner (and are now getting cruelly subjected to counter-protests--really?): "Fuck the Police" by the late J Dilla ("On the count of three, say...") and "(Don't Worry) If There's a Hell Below, We're All Going to Go."

I always hear complaints about how R&B or hip-hop has gotten too mindless and it isn't as thoughtful as it used to be. But there are a few artists out there who are making thoughtful music. Like I've said before, you just have to know where to look. So who in R&B today is the modern-day equivalent of the type of insightful and socially conscious (but not-so-preachy) songwriting Mayfield in his prime was known for? It's most definitely either any of these artists The FADER's Aimee Cliff praises in her essay about the inanity of the "alternative R&B" tag, The Roots or D'Angelo, whose first album in 14 years, Black Messiah, which was occasionally co-produced by Roots member Questlove, finally dropped last week and lived up to everyone's high expectations, including my own.

And who this year has been the cinematic equivalent of the modern-day R&B equivalent of Mayfield--in other words, they're bringing complicated points of view to their work that aren't just either "the Tyler Perry black movie" or "ooh, it's the more incendiary Spike Lee black movie"? That would be directors like British filmmaker Amma Asante, who came up with an intriguing hybrid of legal drama involving the abolitionist movement and Jane Austen-esque corset drama, last summer's sleeper hit Belle, and Justin Simien, the writer/director of the Sundance hit Dear White People, a more nuanced movie about campus racial tensions than John Singleton's unintentionally funny Higher Learning.

Simien's indie comedy is about four black university kids trying to figure out their identities in fictional Winchester University, a predominantly white Ivy League school, as well as how they deal with both microaggressions and more overt forms of racism from their white classmates ("Dear white people, the minimum requirement of black friends needed to not seem racist has just been raised to two; sorry, but your weed man Tyrone does not count"). It's like nothing else on the big screen in 2014, both material-wise and aesthetics-wise. Simien clearly admires Spike Lee's earlier work, but he's also a fan of Stanley Kubrick, Wes Anderson and Robert Altman, so he emulates the camera movements of Kubrick, Anderson and Altman. At one point, sci-fi nerd and undeclared major Lionel (Tyler James Williams), the openly gay outcast who's clearly a stand-in for Simien, even mentions his love for Altman movies, but he doesn't specify which ones. (Is Lionel a fan of only popular Altman movies like the original M*A*S*H and The Player or is he so hardcore that he's into deep cuts like Quintet, the unwatchable 1979 Altman sci-fi flick starring Paul Newman? That's what I want to know). As for the Kubrick-ian aspects of Dear White People, they're most hugely reflected in composer Kathryn Bostic's solid original score, which sometimes evokes the classical music-quoting scores in A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon. You can hear for yourself how Bostic channels the music in Kubrick movies either below or during "AFOS Prime" and "The Whitest Block Ever" on AFOS.

The Trip, Sex and Lucia and Juice are among Netflix Instant's current non-Orange Is the New Black-related highlights

If you want to be taught the proper way to do a Sir Michael Caine impression, go stream:
The Trip (2010)

The first time I took notice of Steve Coogan was on a Comedy Central stand-up show in 1991. The then-ponytailed comedian busted out dead-on impressions of Sean Connery leafing through a grocery list and Roger Moore attempting to be a Method actor.



On The Trip, the slightly melancholy, Louie-esque 2010 British show where Coogan and another impressionist, Rob Brydon, star as fictionalized versions of themselves who embark on a road trip where they review classy European restaurants, Coogan gets to revisit his impressions of the 007s. The show also features Coogan's Michael Caine impression, which collides with Brydon's Caine impression in a dining scene that became a viral sensation.



However, Brydon's Caine wins that round of dueling Caines. On The Trip to Italy, a TV sequel that, like The Trip, has been shortened into a feature film for theatrical release here in America and will hit art-house theaters on our shores this August after a run on the film festival circuit, Coogan and Brydon experience another round of dueling Caines, and this time, they throw in a little Bane. Their impressions of both Caine and Tom Hardy's performances in The Dark Knight Rises are, to borrow the words of Bane, "Mrwmf ovrff ffrwff szrrv."

If you think blindfolded sex is hot, go stream:
Sex and Lucia

I despised the last few seasons of How I Met Your Mother, gave up on watching HIMYM right when the future wife of annoying-as-hell Ted finally appeared and was glad to have no longer been a HIMYM viewer when they did that racist episode where all the white cast members pretended to be Asian and put on yellowface. But I always loved Cobie Smulders on that show, because of her comedic skills and also because she looks like Sex and Lucia star Paz Vega. I like to think of Sex and Lucia as a special TV-MA-rated episode of HIMYM that was shot on location in Spain by Julio Medem, who hated everyone on the show except for Robin, and it took place during Robin's extra-horny, Enrique Iglesias-dating, sand-all-up-in-her-hair international tourist phase.

"Original Score by Hank Shocklee and the Bomb Squad" was something that didn't happen enough in the '90s.

If you want to see Tupac Shakur, who had no prior screen acting experience, soar in a role that Tupac's Digital Underground bandmate Money B (!) was initially considered for, go stream:
Juice

"There was so much Tupac put into the Bishop role. It wasn't like he was stepping outside of his boundaries. He put all of his pain from growing up--moving state-to-state and seeing different environments. A lot of his family was getting killed or were on the run," recalled Juice co-star and Naughty by Nature frontman Treach in a 2012 Vibe oral history about Tupac's work in the 1992 film and other films as well. Treach's group contributed "Uptown Anthem" to Juice's Hank Shocklee-produced soundtrack, a terrific snapshot of hip-hop and R&B in the early '90s (when Shocklee and his Bomb Squad were in their prime as beatmakers). The album has aged remarkably well. For a few years, it even overshadowed the film itself.

But after Tupac's death put an end to a body of acting work that started to get interesting with his turn in Gridlock'd as a junkie musician who wants to get clean, Juice grew in stature as a film about inner-city violence and the anger that fuels the Bishops of the world. Tupac's performance as Bishop is on a par with the likes of James Cagney in White Heat and Michael K. Williams on The Wire, and like Cagney and Williams, he goes out in spectacular fashion in Juice. (Eric B. and Rakim's "Juice (Know the Ledge)," the equally spectacular crown jewel of the soundtrack, as well as the tune that kicks off the film, can be heard during "Beat Box" and "The Whitest Block Ever" on AFOS.)

(Photo source: Films in Films)

If you want a lesson in where not to take a woman on a first date, go stream:
Taxi Driver (streaming until July 1)

So how did that date at the porno theater work out for you, Travis?

("A Reluctant Hero/Betsy/End Credits," from Bernard Herrmann's terrific Taxi Driver score, can be heard during "AFOS Prime.")

(Photo source: Dooby Reviews)

If you like your SoCal private-eye heroes mumbly and disheveled, go stream:
The Long Goodbye

Wonder Boys, the recent subject of an interesting Greg Proops Film Club episode, is my favorite Michael Douglas movie, as well as one of the most enjoyable movies ever made about the unsuccessful side of being an author. Critics loved Wonder Boys more than audiences did, as did Paramount, which released it twice in the same year and overhauled its marketing campaign, with the hopes that it would win over moviegoers like it did with critics, and it failed to do so either time. In 1973, The Long Goodbye, an equally enjoyable and smart film that, like Wonder Boys, is anchored by a rumpled protagonist whose delivery of dialogue is the definition of "stoner," received the same treatment as Wonder Boys later did. United Artists released the Robert Altman film twice and tried different kinds of marketing campaigns to make the film look more appealing to moviegoers, the East Coast press ended up adoring the film (much more than the West Coast press) during its re-release and yet it still didn't make much of an impact at the box office. Today, The Long Goodbye is a classic and one of Altman's most beloved works (hopefully, Wonder Boys will become as lovingly discussed and dissected as The Long Goodbye frequently is).

In The Long Goodbye, Elliott Gould trudges through L.A. like he just woke up from a long nap in his suit and tie. His Marlowe is as much of a wiseass as Humphrey Bogart's Marlowe in The Big Sleep, but Gould's hardly as suave or as prone to exposition as Bogie (if you're looking for long stretches of exposition from Gould's Marlowe to help you make sense of things like in The Big Sleep, say a long goodbye to that). John Williams' Long Goodbye score is equally off-kilter. Altman wanted the score to consist of nothing but different variations on the same melody. Wherever Marlowe goes, the Long Goodbye theme follows, whether it's as supermarket Muzak or as a doorbell ring. The score nicely reflects Marlowe's sense of displacement--he's a '40s guy in a '70s world. (The version of "The Long Goodbye" that was sung for the film by Jack Sheldon of Schoolhouse Rock fame--it's kind of weird not to hear Sheldon singing about words and phrases and clauses--can be heard during "AFOS Prime.")

AFOS: "Zero Churn" playlist

Airing next Wednesday at 10am and 3pm on A Fistful of Soundtracks is the Fistful of Soundtracks: The Series episode "Zero Churn" (WEB69) from November 28-December 4, 2005.

All the tracks during "Zero Churn" come from soundtracks to movies that aired on L.A.'s beloved Z Channel in the '70s and '80s (examples include Nashville, The Harder They Come and the much-maligned Heaven's Gate). The ep's title refers to the Z Channel's "zero churn rate," a fancy business term that means subscribers never cancelled the service.

I never heard of the Z Channel--which was a really interesting and ahead-of-its-time cable channel--until I Netflixed the critically acclaimed Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession documentary by both IFC and director Xan Cassavetes, the daughter of John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands. My favorite parts of A Magnificent Obsession are the segments about Z Channel fare like Le Magnifique, Laura Antonelli's Mogliamante and Something of Value (interviewee F.X. Feeney, who wrote movie reviews for the listings guide that the channel mailed to its subscribers, does a funny impression of Winston Churchill's appearance in the prologue for Something of Value). And though Quentin Tarantino should really consider switching to decaf, he tells an amusing story in the middle of the doc about watching a tape of a Z Channel presentation of Mogliamante.

In 2005, I thought an AFOS: The Series ep based on A Magnificent Obsession would be a cool idea because the playlist would be eclectic, just like the channel itself was back in the day.

"200 Years"

1. Nino Rota, "La Strada," Fellini & Rota: I Film, Le Musiche--Movies & Music, CAM
2. Jean Constantin, "Générique et Car de Police" (from The 400 Blows), Cannes Film Festival: 50th Anniversary Album, Milan
3. Giovanni Fusco, "Titoli" (from L'Avventura), I Film di Antonioni, Le Musiche di Fusco, CAM
4. The City of Prague Philharmonic, "The Bomb Run" (from Dr. Strangelove), Dr. Strangelove... Music from the Films of Stanley Kubrick, Silva Screen
5. The City of Prague Philharmonic, "Train Montage" (from The Wild Bunch), Cinema Century: A Musical Celebration of 100 Years of Cinema, Silva Screen
6. Bob Dylan, "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" (from Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid), Movie Music: The Definitive Performances, Columbia/Epic/Legacy
7. Jerry Fielding, "On the Road" (from Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia), Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia/The Killer Elite, Intrada
8. Pino Donaggio, "Tema di Clayton" (from Amore piombo e furore, a.k.a. China 9, Liberty 37), Spaghetti Westerns, Volume One, DRG
9. Jimmy Cliff, "The Harder They Come," The Harder They Come, Island
10. Henry Gibson, "200 Years," Nashville, MCA Nashville
11. David Mansfield, "Overture," Heaven's Gate, Rykodisc
12. Ennio Morricone with Gheorghe Zamfir & Edda Dell'Orso, "Cockeye's Song" (from Once Upon a Time in America), The Ennio Morricone Anthology: A Fistful of Film Music, Rhino
13. Piero Piccioni, "La Bella Signora" (from Tutto a posto e niente in ordine, a.k.a. All Screwed Up), (Italian Girls Like) Ear-Catching Melodies, Dagored
14. Gene Wilder and Peter Boyle, "Introduction/Puttin' on the Ritz," Young Frankenstein, One Way
15. Jerry Goldsmith, "Love Theme from Chinatown (End Title)," Chinatown, Varèse Sarabande

Count me as a Heaven's Gate hater, but God, the overture by Mansfield is such a beautiful piece of music.

New AFOS episode: "The Inmates Are Taking Over the Asylum"

This week, the United Artists 90th Anniversary Film Festival hits both the Castro Theatre in San Francisco and the Nuart Theatre in L.A., so the next episode of A Fistful of Soundtracks will feature my favorite selections from scores to films that were distributed by UA. "The studio without a studio" thrived during an era when rival studios couldn't keep up with their audiences--and the social changes of the period--and kept releasing dull and staid product. UA's smart and daring films during the Arthur Krim/Robert Benjamin regime and Krim and Benjamin's championing of filmmakers--they let them do their thing--are always worth celebrating. Oh yeah, and most of these flicks had terrific original music too.

"The Inmates Are Taking Over the Asylum" (WEB96) will begin streaming tomorrow (Thursday, May 1 at midnight, 4am, 10am, 3pm, 7pm and 11pm). I've included themes from some of UA's most popular releases (The Great Escape, 007), but I also wanted to fill most of the episode with music from cult classics (The Taking of Pelham One Two Three) or soundtrack albums that are out of print (The Long Goodbye).

Pelham, a thrilling caper movie with Walter Matthau at his sardonic best as a cynical transit cop who's the perfect disheveled hero for an even more disheveled New York, and The Long Goodbye, Robert Altman's clever reimagining of Philip Marlowe, are two '70s UA flicks I instantly fell in love with. I first caught Pelham on TCM a few years ago and discovered The Long Goodbye on DVD last year.

Pelham composer David Shire and Long Goodbye composer John Williams achieved so much with what little they had. Shire wrote each Pelham score cue under the 12-tone method of composition to evoke "organized chaos"--in other words, the funkiest film score not written by a black dude ever.

Williams' Long Goodbye score--one of the shortest he ever wrote--is equally off-kilter. It consists of nothing but different variations on the same melody. Wherever Elliott Gould's Marlowe goes, the Long Goodbye theme follows, whether it's as bar piano music or as a doorbell ring. I don't know exactly why Altman asked Williams to write the score like that. (Jaime J. Weinman says Williams' score is a spoof of the incessant pimping of movie title songs in the '60s and '70s--an issue that caused the previously stable working relationship between Alfred Hitchcock and the less pop-minded Bernard Herrmann to fall apart during the making of Torn Curtain. The Something Old, Nothing New blogger theorizes that Williams' score could also be an homage to Roy Webb's similarly structured score during Out of the Past.) But whatever the intentions were, the Long Goodbye score nicely reflects Marlowe's sense of displacement--he's a '40s guy in a '70s world.

Whereas UA was a '70s studio in a '50s Hollywood that struggled to keep up with the '60s.

Roman Coppola's CQ

WEB96 also covers UA's recent art-house phase, before Tom Cruise took over the company. One of my favorite films to emerge from UA's art-house years is Roman Coppola's CQ, a fun little film about filmmaking in the mold of Day for Night and Ed Wood. It contains a great loungey score by the French trio Mellow, which evoked the likes of Piero Umiliani, Piero Piccioni and Ennio Morricone during the cues for the movie-within-the-movie Codename: Dragonfly, a mash-up of Barbarella and Danger: Diabolik (the source of Angela Lindvall's sexy rolling-around-in-cash scene).

The '70s logo

A Half-Assed History of UA's Logos

I remember the first appearance of the '90s UA logo when I saw GoldenEye in 1995. The logo actually received cheers from GoldenEye's opening weekend audience--they were just so happy to see Bond again after a six-year absence.

The '90s logo

The sadly discontinued jingle was composed by Jeff Eden Fair and Starr Parodi.

The husband-and-wife duo recalled to SoundtrackNet that "We did that with a 90-piece orchestra at the Sony Scoring Stage... Our instructions were, 'We want something that represents the past, present, and future of United Artists.' So we started with classic orchestral instrumentation, moving to futuristic sounds and concepts at the end."

The '00s logo

Defamer's funny idea of what the UA watertower now looks like

Next AFOS episode: I'm taking a break after five consecutive eps. I don't know when I'll stream the next new ep.