AFOS Blog Rewind: Not everyone's a critic, which was why Fox's enormously funny The Critic didn't last

Last week, Uproxx posted a lengthy and enjoyable interview with longtime writing partners Al Jean and Mike Reiss about their short-lived but well-remembered creation, the '90s animated show The Critic. The show centered around Jay Sherman, a persnickety film critic nobody likes, except for Marty, Jay's 13-year-old son, and Margo, Jay's teenage foster sister, who both look up to Jay, and Jeremy Hawke, an easygoing Aussie B-movie star who considers Jay his best friend ever since he was the only critic who didn't trash his first movie. In the Uproxx article, Jean and Reiss recalled the main reason why The Critic lasted from only 1993 to 1995 (the new Fox network president at the time hated it) and the challenges of attempting to give Jay and the other Critic characters the same kind of revival Family Guy and Futurama experienced after they were cancelled by Fox too (three of The Critic's regular voice actors are no longer alive, and Reiss also points out that "Siskel and Ebert are dead and those kinds of shows don't exist anymore. Movie critics used to be all over TV and they used to wield great influence and they just don't"). So from March 18, 2008, here's a post about The Critic, originally posted under the title "'Now who wants to boogie with Baby '37?'"

This weekend, I was surprised to find an eight-hour ReelzChannel marathon of the short-lived animated series The Critic, James L. Brooks' second foray into animation after the success of The Simpsons. Created by Simpsons writers Al Jean and Mike Reiss, The Critic aired on ABC during its first season (1993-94) and then for its second and final season (1994-95), it went to die on Fox (where the show's "Hey! We're on Fox" gags were amusing, while on a non-Fox channel in reruns years later, uh... not so much). The show, which comes complete with Simpsonian catchphrases that never took off ("It stinks!," "Hotchie motchie!," the Chuck McCann-referencing "Hi guy!"), later enjoyed a cultish afterlife in webisode form and on both DVD and Comedy Central's animation lineup.

AFOS Blog Rewind: Wolfpop has a pair of movie talk shows that are worth your time

The following is a repost of my November 20, 2014 discussion of Maltin on Movies and Denzel Washington Is the Greatest Actor of All Time Period.

Midroll Media's Wolfpop is a new sister network to the Earwolf podcast network, and its aim is to bring both plenty of production polish and big names (from the worlds of comedy, publishing and entertainment reporting) to a type of podcast format that's been around since podcasting's not-so-polished-sounding beginnings: pop culture talk. On November 4, Wolfpop--which is being curated by Paul Scheer, star of The League and co-host of his own movie talk podcast, Earwolf's How Did This Get Made?--launched 563,000 different pop culture podcasts. Even though I'm unemployed, I don't have time to listen to all 563,000 of them, but there are two Wolfpop shows that immediately caught my attention because of both the talent involved and the intriguing film-related subjects of their shows.

Maltin on Movies pairs up Leonard Maltin with comedian Baron Vaughn and gives the duo a different film-related topic to discuss each week (for example, episode 2 was about the unexpected rise of the McConaissance). Meanwhile, former Totally Biased host W. Kamau Bell and his fellow Totally Biased staff writer (and old Bay Area roommate) Kevin Avery make a case for why Denzel Washington is the illest on the succinctly titled Denzel Washington Is the Greatest Actor of All Time Period.

Vaughn, Bell and Avery are terrific choices for Wolfpop show hosts. Besides the conversational skills they've honed as hosts of previous podcasts (Vaughn hosted the All Things Comedy network's Deep Shit, while Bell did a podcast with Living Colour's Vernon Reid and had another movie talk podcast with Avery, Siskel & Negro, before they reteamed for the new Wolfpop show), it's also always wonderful to hear comedians of color hosting weekly podcasts. Sure, there's also Aisha Tyler (Girl on Guy), Margaret Cho (Monsters of Talk) and Kumail Nanjiani (The Indoor Kids, The X-Files Files), but, um, that's about it. The L.A. comedy podcast community is so lily-white it pours mayo into its tacos. It's so white it thinks Dilla was that lady who used to always tell jokes about her husband Fang on Carson. It's so white it has sex to Mumford & Sons. It's so white...

As an animation historian and an expert on older periods of film, Maltin is phenomenal. When I was a kid, I loved leafing through Of Mice and Magic, Maltin's thick tome about the history of American animation, so much that I would repeatedly renew it at the public library. But as a reviewer of live-action American films, the former Entertainment Tonight film critic isn't exactly one of my favorites. He gave only two (or two and a half) stars to Taxi Driver, The Long Goodbye, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid and Miller's Crossing, all movies I love. As long as Maltin doesn't talk about either Taxi Driver, The Long Goodbye, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid or Miller's Crossing on this new podcast, Maltin on Movies is worth a listen each week.

Throwback Thursday: The Dark Knight Rises (with guest blogger Hardeep Aujla from Word Is Bond)

Every Throwback Thursday, I randomly pull out from my desk cabinet--with my eyes closed--a movie ticket I saved, and then I discuss the movie on the ticket. This time I've gotten Hardeep Aujla, an editor from a U.K.-based hip-hop blog I've contributed pieces to, Word Is Bond, to come back after his guest TBT post about The Signal and discuss the movie on the ticket I drew.

I've noticed that the strongest Christopher Nolan movies contain the least amount of scenes of male actors crying, while the least satisfying Nolan movies are the ones with the most male cry-face scenes. Following? I haven't watched that one yet. Memento and Insomnia? Barely any male weeping scenes in those standout Nolan thrillers. Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and Inception? Slightly more male blubbering. But it was kept to a minimum--just three or four male crying scenes in the first two Batman films--and in each of those two films, one of those three or four scenes proved how much of an asset Gary Oldman, who's great at crying scenes and didn't overdo it in those films, was to Nolan's Batman trilogy. I can't remember if Hugh Jackman or Christian Bale were ever in need of one of those magician's hankies for more than just a magic trick in The Prestige, but I believe the crying was also kept to a minimum in that one.

As for The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar, Michael Caine had to cry in every single scene of his in The Dark Knight Rises, and he did it in that anguished voice I can't ever hear again without thinking of Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon's hilarious impressions of later-period Caine sounding like he's yodeling during emotional scenes, while 70% of Interstellar's nearly three-hour running time consisted of Matthew McConaughey blubbering exactly like Jon Hamm in the SNL auto-tuned crying sketch. The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar have turned out to be two of Nolan's least satisfying blockbusters, although I'll take The Dark Knight Rises over the Joel Schumacher version of Batman any day. So Mr. Nolan, if you want to win back some of the critics who weren't impressed with Interstellar, maybe you should try relying less on making several of your stars cry-talk like Felicity on Arrow all last season. Meanwhile, Hardeep enjoyed The Dark Knight Rises more than I did. He explains why.--JJA

The Dark Knight Rises
By Hardeep Aujla

Bob Kane thought the cake-bomb-pondering Batman of the 60's was an enjoyable farce, but that wasn't the character he had in mind when pencilling his way to a 6000% pay-rise in 1939. Such was the success of Batman. But it wasn't all enjoyable for the one-time kid who just wanted to draw goofballs like Popeye when he grew up. If things went south when he slapped the first sketches on DC editor Vince Sullivan's desk, he would have gladly gone back to drawing funnies. "I received more pleasure from drawing them than I ever did from drawing Batman", wrote Kane in his '89 auto-biography Batman and Me. And that's kinda the point of Batman; we're supposed to feel uneasy about being in the company of this character who at first glance looks like he reps the villainous axis. Furthermore, Batman is alluded to be a personal projection of Kane's; it's right there in the bio's title, the coalescence of a beat-down he took as a kid whilst pretending to be Zorro and rum-running-era New York. Roger Ebert found Tim Burton's noir-laden Batman (1989) to be "a depressing experience". Then many viewers deemed Christopher Nolan's recent trilogy, particularly the concluding entry Dark Knight Rises, to be sullen and overwrought, which was vindication in the ears of others who were on board with Bob's (and writer/character flesher-outer Bill Finger's) intimate, dark vision and had waited years to see it return to the screen.

Sure, the films might not bring a whole lot of new ideas to the table that the many weekly rags and hardback "graphic novels" have given us over the decades, but if you asked Bob Kane, nothing else ever did after Superman and Batman bookended the continuum of all superhero possibilities. Regardless, it's probably fair to say that Bob and Bill would've approved of Nolan's submersion of Batman back into the dark and his eagerness to use him as a device to speak to audiences on a different level. And I have enjoyed how Nolan speaks about contemporary issues pervading our times in these films.

In The Dark Knight Rises, Selina Kyle, covertly anomalous (or perhaps not entirely given the crowd) during a ballroom thing, whispers to Bruce Wayne, "You'll wonder how you ever lived so large and left so little for the rest of us..." While this does echo contemporary economic injustices and does unsettle Bruce in a similar way it probably unsettles the real-life financial "elite" in the West who are somehow surprised that billions in the East would like the same standard of living as them, this film doesn't have a neo-imperialist agenda just like The Dark Knight didn't have a pro-George Bush agenda, despite how many opinions would have you otherwise believe. Instead we have Bane, whose character is conveyed superbly, overriding the need for facial expressions with a menacing mask and subtly expressive body language, from placing the back of his hand on someone's shoulder to an unflinching walk despite the surprise revelation of the Bat-Glider: small touches that spoke volumes. Bane attacks a city we are shown to be undeserving of pity or protection primarily, again, through the indignation of Selina Kyle, who observes how the rich show no austerity and resorts to cat-burglary out of inevitability in an unjust city: a product of Gotham (a character in its own right in this film) as much as Batman or his supervillains are. Bane's storm on the stock exchange is therefore a not-so-subtle device to this end, and from there on in we get a few big plot holes and, more importantly, a Tale Of Two Cities-style discourse which Nolan openly footnotes the entire film with via a direct quote at the end.

Fan-made poster

But like he did in The Dark Knight with the ferry climax, Nolan counters villainy with the kind of virtuous responses that all great comic books often do (Raimi also struck gold with the same idea during the train sequence in Spider-Man 2). This time Batman must re-live his genesis following a beat-down of his own that would've had Bob Kane flashing back. Spurred on by the words of his late-father that've echoed throughout the entire trilogy, he rises once again from defeat but this time things are noticeably different. Most striking cinematically is that his final punch-up with Bane is in broad daylight, a departure from pretty much every major fight scene in the series. He no longer relies on the shadows as an accomplice; his mission now is not to strike fear into the enemy but to inspire Gotham's oppressed inhabitants. The classic formalities of narrative dictate that Batman too must perish with the darkness of the city that created him, and his sacrifice at the end achieves this whilst also redeeming him from the long-standing dishonour established at the end of The Dark Knight. In this regard, The Dark Knight Rises has a much more positive and conclusive ending than many attribute it with: a story that shows Bruce Wayne won't always be a victim of both the city and himself, and a story that Bob and Bill, at least, might've taken professional and personal comfort from.

Hardeep Aujla writes and edits album reviews for Word Is Bond in Leicester, England. Selections from Hans Zimmer's Dark Knight Rises score can be heard during the AFOS blocks "AFOS Prime" and "Hall H."

The Wolf of Pop Street: Paul Scheer's new pop culture-themed podcast network introduces a pair of movie talk shows that are worth your time

Midroll Media's Wolfpop is a new sister network to the Earwolf podcast network, and its aim is to bring both plenty of production polish and big names (from the worlds of comedy, publishing and entertainment reporting) to a type of podcast format that's been around since podcasting's not-so-polished-sounding beginnings: pop culture talk. On November 4, Wolfpop--which is being curated by Paul Scheer, star of The League and co-host of his own movie talk podcast, Earwolf's How Did This Get Made?--launched 563,000 different pop culture podcasts. Even though I'm unemployed, I don't have time to listen to all 563,000 of them, but there are two Wolfpop shows that immediately caught my attention because of both the talent involved and the intriguing film-related subjects of their shows.

Maltin on Movies pairs up Leonard Maltin with comedian Baron Vaughn and gives the duo a different film-related topic to discuss each week (for example, episode 2 was about the unexpected rise of the McConaissance). Meanwhile, former Totally Biased host W. Kamau Bell and his fellow Totally Biased staff writer (and old Bay Area roommate) Kevin Avery make a case for why Denzel Washington is the illest on the succinctly titled Denzel Washington Is the Greatest Actor of All Time Period.

Vaughn, Bell and Avery are terrific choices for Wolfpop show hosts. Besides the conversational skills they've honed as hosts of previous podcasts (Vaughn hosted the All Things Comedy network's Deep Shit, while Bell did a podcast with Living Colour's Vernon Reid and had another movie talk podcast with Avery, Siskel & Negro, before they reteamed for the new Wolfpop show), it's also always wonderful to hear comedians of color hosting weekly podcasts. Sure, there's also Aisha Tyler (Girl on Guy), Margaret Cho (Monsters of Talk) and Kumail Nanjiani (The Indoor Kids, The X-Files Files), but, um, that's about it. The L.A. comedy podcast community is so lily-white it pours mayo into its tacos. It's so white it thinks Dilla was that lady who used to always tell jokes about her husband Fang on Carson. It's so white it has sex to Mumford & Sons. It's so white...

As an animation historian and an expert on older periods of film, Maltin is phenomenal. When I was a kid, I loved leafing through Of Mice and Magic, Maltin's thick tome about the history of American animation, so much that I would repeatedly renew it at the public library. But as a reviewer of live-action American films, the former Entertainment Tonight film critic isn't exactly one of my favorites. He gave only two (or two and a half) stars to Taxi Driver, The Long Goodbye, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid and Miller's Crossing, all movies I love. As long as Maltin doesn't talk about either Taxi Driver, The Long Goodbye, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid or Miller's Crossing on this new podcast, Maltin on Movies is worth a listen each week.

Despite some of his tastes in live-action films, Maltin is--like he's always been during his appearances on other podcasts--likable and level-headed in many of the same ways that the late Roger Ebert was. He may not agree with you about an unconventional indie flick you might adore, but at least he's not going to be a dick about it. He's never going to say something racist about your Korean friend like Rex Reed would do, and he's never going to boo you off the stage like Armond White rudely does to actors and directors he incomprehensibly dislikes.

Maltin's friendliness and approachability ("The friendliest film critic I know," says DVD Savant author Glenn Erickson) must have been why Joe Dante let bygones be bygones after he was disappointed with Maltin's negative review of his first Gremlins movie, and he got Maltin to appear during Gremlins 2: The New Batch in a cameo as himself--delivering that same negative review of Gremlins. It's also why the L.A. comedy community likes to hang out with Maltin. Sarah Silverman memorably got him to pretend to be her date in the audience during her parody of award show acceptance speeches on Comedy Central's Night of Too Many Stars autism telethon ("Richard Roeper cannot hold a candle to you as a film critic or as an oral lover"), and Doug Benson frequently has Maltin on as a guest on Doug Loves Movies, which uses the Leonard Maltin Movie Guide app on Benson's phone to run the show's Leonard Maltin Game.

But does that same congeniality make for lively and entertaining discussions about film like the frequently contentious pairing of Siskel and Ebert did? Not very often. So this is where Baron Vaughn--who's actually as knowledgeable about modern-day cinema as Maltin but isn't quite as familiar with older periods of film like him--comes in. Vaughn's light banter with Maltin and his ability to keep their conversations engaging are why he's an ideal partner for Maltin. They're not contentious like the Sneak Previews and At the Movies hosts used to be, but fortunately, Vaughn and Maltin's congruent opinions about the three films they select for discussion each week (the first film is one they highly recommend, the second film is one they agree is an artistic failure and the third is a lesser-known title that they both wish had received more shine) haven't resulted in boring talk.

For the first time in his long career as a reviewer (and host of various film talk shows where, unlike in podcasts, the conversations have to be much shorter and snappier and completely edited down), Maltin is as interesting a conversationalist as either Siskel or Ebert, thanks to Vaughn. He's brought out some great stories from Maltin, like his recollection of the first time he taped a press-junket interview with the late Robin Williams, a famously energetic and laugh-inducing interviewee, for Entertainment Tonight.

Denzel Washington Is the Greatest is a less serious movie talk show than Maltin on Movies, but it's equally worthwhile. I was a fan of W. Kamau Bell's late, lamented Totally Biased and its progressive brand of humor about race (Totally Biased was as close as we got to a weekly TV version of one of my all-time favorite humor books, ego trip's Big Book of Racism!), so it's comforting to have a piece of that show back, even if it's just in the form of a podcast about Denzel movies starring two of its writers.

"Denzealots" Bell and Kevin Avery intend to analyze a different Denzel movie each week--I can't wait until they reach either Crimson Tide or Malcolm X, which are neck and neck as my favorite Denzel movie--and rate it in terms of "Denzelishness," like how often "Denzel does that thing with his lip." Because Washington has starred in so many movies since his big-screen debut in Carbon Copy, a 1981 comedy where George Segal co-starred as his newly discovered biological father, the size of his filmography is making me wonder if the run of Bell and Avery's new podcast will be as long as the decade-long run that's been estimated for Mission Log, the Roddenberry Entertainment podcast that's been reviewing every single episode of each screen incarnation of Star Trek in chronological order.

Whatever the case, I'm excited about where this Denzel podcast is going to go, especially because Bell says he wants to have guests on the show. I can't think of a more ideal guest than either Slate's Aisha Harris, who wrote a good piece about Washington's recent Liam Neeson-style career turns as a "geriaction" hero; stand-up comic Reggie Reg, who does the best Denzel impression anywhere; or Bronson Pinchot, who once said he hated working with Washington during the filming of Courage Under Fire--and due to Avery's current stint as a writer for the incredible Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, that has me crossing my fingers for Oliver himself to show up one day on Washington Is the Greatest. (That's mainly because Washington played a British military vet in 1988's For Queen & Country, and I want to hear Oliver evaluate Washington's accent in that film.)

Bell and Avery's entertaining podcast has also made me look back on the huge amount of terrific soundtracks or original scores in Washington's filmography, from Terence Blanchard's rousing Malcolm X score to Elmer Bernstein's work on Devil in a Blue Dress. Speaking of which, Bernstein's "Theme from Devil in a Blue Dress" and the Branford Marsalis Quartet's "Mo' Better Blues" can currently be enjoyed during "The Whitest Block Ever" on AFOS, while Hans Zimmer's "Roll Tide" from Crimson Tide and selections from Blanchard's Malcolm X score can be heard during "AFOS Prime." "Chaiyya Chaiyya," A.R. Rahman's classic tune from the 1998 Hindi film Dil Se, which is also part of "AFOS Prime" rotation, wasn't written for Inside Man, but that Spike Lee/Denzel collabo is the first place where most American moviegoers like myself vibed out to it (although in a slightly modified form with added trumpet riffs by Blanchard and newly recorded guest verses by Panjabi MC).

Best of all, Bell and Avery's discussions of why black people often leave movie screenings so early (Bell points out that it's most likely because they have to pick up their kids from school) or why Bell considers historical dramas like A Soldier's Story (Avery refers to the 1984 movie as "the thing that red-alerted a lot of black women to Denzel Washington") and Glory to be "black people homework" are imbued with the same insight and hilarious observations about life as a person of color that made Totally Biased such a keeper during its short life span. Here's hoping Wolfpop doesn't front on Washington Is the Greatest and abruptly put an end to it like FXX did to Totally Biased.

Salamat, Chan Is Missing

The following piece was written three years ago as an exclusive article for an aborted print compilation of both a webcomic I drew and several of the posts I've written for this blog, and all the posts that were going to be collected in the book were about lesser-known films I dig. I was going to put the book together by myself and self-publish it, but I ultimately decided not to publish it because I'm not exactly well-known, so no one would want to buy it. I even drew an illustration that would have accompanied the piece, which is a lengthy discussion of a favorite movie of mine, a pivotal work in the history of Asian American cinema that dropped in April 1982 in New York and then three months later in San Francisco.

I was too young to be interested in movies when Chan Is Missing hit the art-house circuit. The only movie I gave a shit about in 1982 was The Great Muppet Caper on HBO. Ten or 11 years later, my tastes in film had matured to the point where I was ready to tackle a black-and-white art-house oddity like Chan Is Missing. I first caught it on KQED, the perfect San Francisco station to watch--with no interruptions, although with lots of audio dropouts that removed the F-bombs--what I consider one of the best San Francisco films, much like how two of my other favorite films, Do the Right Thing and the recently Proopified 1974 Taking of Pelham One Two Three, are great New York films, and how another favorite film of mine, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, is a great L.A. film.

I've updated the piece about this 1982 classic a bit, and I'm unveiling it for the first time now because it's Asian Heritage Islander American Pacific Month or whatever it's being called this year.

Thank you, Chan Is Missing, for recognizing that there are actually Filipinos in San Francisco and for depicting Filipino characters who aren't maids, houseboys or sex slaves. Even though those characters--a philosophical Manilatown senior center manager named Presco (Presco Tabios) and the title figure's elderly friend Frankie (Frankie Alarcon)--don't get a lot of screen time in Chan Is Missing, the sequence they appear in is one of the film's most enjoyable sequences, and it's not just because I'm Filipino, and hey, it's an American film representing us flatteringly!

In director Wayne Wang's 1982 breakthrough film, which he shot in black and white on a $22,000 budget, Chinatown cabbie Jo (Wood Moy) and his nephew Steve (Marc Hayashi) are scouring the streets of San Francisco to track down their business partner Chan Hung, who mysteriously disappeared and took with him $4,000 that Jo and Steve need in order to start their own cab company. At one point, Chan's trail leads the amateur sleuths to a Manilatown senior center where Chan is a frequent visitor because he's a fan of the mariachi musicians who entertain the center's manong (elderly Filipino) regulars.

Wang takes a minute to drink in the laid-back atmosphere of the senior center where Chan, a recent immigrant who hasn't had the easiest time assimilating into American culture, felt accepted despite his different nationality. During the interlude, elderly couples are seen dancing to a recording of "Sabor a Mi" by Los Lobos (back when they were known as Los Lobos del Este de L.A.), and we see why Chan felt so at ease at the senior center.

The manongs' enthusiasm for dance and Latin music is infectious, and it's not an unnatural-looking enthusiasm like in that insipid early '90s Pepsi ad where elderly actors pretended to get their dance on to Young MC's "Bust a Move" while awkwardly using phrases they just learned on the set after the director played them a tape of a first-season episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air between takes. The fact that the Manilatown old-timers weren't actors--they were regulars at the actual Manilatown Senior Center, captured by Wang's camera--might have something to do with their natural-looking enthusiasm.

That documentary realism--Wang did location shooting in areas of San Francisco like Manilatown that Hollywood rarely ventures into--is a reason why I'm more taken with Wang's indie snapshot of Chinatown and Manilatown than with a product of the studio era with a similarly all-Asian American cast like the quaint, mostly confined-to-the-studio-backlot 1961 screen version of Flower Drum Song, which Chan Is Missing references in a charming closing montage that's accompanied by the original 1958 recording of "Grant Avenue."

While promoting his 2008 indie films A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and The Princess of Nebraska (Wang still makes indies when he's not directing Lifetime channel-friendly studio fare I'm not exactly dying to see), Wang told an interviewer from AsianWeek that he made Chan Is Missing as a response to previous examples of Asian American cinema. "Documentaries and fictional Asian American films were very seriously sort of talking about how we were discriminated against, and how difficult our history was, blah blah blah blah blah, in a way [that] was almost too serious. And almost like perhaps complaining about our experiences. Or trying to be too rah-rah about how positive we have to be," Wang said. "So Chan Is Missing was kinda looking at the complexity of Chinatown in a different way."

Chan Is Missing's impact on Asian American filmmakers or writers, whether they're Chinese or Filipino, is so immense that Wang's film is still being discussed and prodded and poked, primarily in Asian American film classes at universities, while those '70s films Wang was referring to are largely forgotten. It's also a film that--except for a couple of dated-sounding Chinese pop songs on the soundtrack, the occasional sight of poofy hair and the pronunciation of "FOB" (short for "Fresh Off the Boat") as "ef-oh-bee" instead of the presently more common "fob"--looks timeless. (Charles Burnett's similarly shot 1977 indie Killer of Sheep has that timeless quality too.) Sure, the Flower Drum Song movie has its charms (among them are Nancy Kwan's legs), but if I check out a clip from that movie, I know right away I'm watching something from 1961. Chan Is Missing is the Homicide: Life on the Street to Flower Drum Song's NYPD Blue: the scruffier and more improvisational and down-to-earth work that feels more alive and relevant than the better-known, mostly backlot-based and sometimes forced and self-conscious latter work.

AFOS finally adds to rotation the expanded score from a great Chicago movie, The Fugitive, while it's time to look back at Chicagoan and Fugitive admirer Roger Ebert's tastes in film music

(Photo source: DVD Beaver)

Jurassic Park, which stomped back into theaters a couple of days ago in a 3D-converted 20th anniversary edition, conquered the box office in the summer of 1993. But that summer, because I was at that time a fan of A&E's reruns of The Fugitive, David Janssen's noirish, anti-authoritarian show from the '60s, I was more excited about--and ended up more enthralled by--a different blockbuster, director Andrew Davis' film version of The Fugitive. Sure, dinosaurs are cool, but white-knuckle, non-CGI-assisted action sequences involving narrow escapes from bus-train collisions and spur-of-the-moment swan dives from dams into waterfalls are cooler.

So are both Harrison Ford in the role of Janssen's memorably laconic and twitchy Dr. Richard Kimble (perfect recasting) and Tommy Lee Jones' entertaining reinterpretation of Gerard, who was a much more unlikable and humorless cop on the original series (Jones won an Oscar for his work, and let's pretend U.S. Marshals never happened). Blink and you'll miss Neil Flynn as a transit cop in a scene that Scrubs later used as a clever gag about the murky past of Flynn's nameless janitor character on the show. A not-as-tiny element of The Fugitive is James Newton Howard's original score.

The first score that Howard composed for a blockbuster is a pretty decent score with a couple of terrific cues. "Helicopter Chase" is the same theme that Debbie Allen's dancers performed a bizarre interpretive dance to at the 1994 Oscars (a moment that elicited snickers from many TV critics, including then-New York Times film critic Janet Maslin, who cracked, "Who ever said the score from The Fugitive had a good beat? Who said you could dance to it?"). The other standout cue is "It's Over/End Credits" (the theme for Kimble during this cue was later recycled by composer Louis Febre in CBS' 2000 Fugitive reboot with Tim Daly as Kimble and William T. Michaelson, er, Mykelti Williamson as Gerard).

In 2009, La-La Land Records released an expanded edition of the Fugitive score and corrected a huge audio mistake on the previous release of Howard's score, which nobody outside of Howard and his fellow musicians would have noticed (someone accidentally reversed the left and right channels on all the tracks). The booklet art on this two-CD La-La Land set is strange because it doesn't contain a single photo of Jones' craggy face and is filled with pics of the One-Armed Man, for the two people out there who are fans of the One-Armed Man. DVD producers can't clear pop songs on box sets of TV shows without ponying up an arm and a leg, and now movie stars' faces inside soundtrack album booklets can't be cleared either?

Though I enjoyed the 1993 film, I never got around to copping the 2009 release until a few weeks ago, when La-La Land posted that the album will go out of print in April. Selections from the now-out-of-print album are now part of the "AFOS Prime" playlist, so you don't have to search every warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse and doghouse to hear some of this album.

***

The Fugitive made great use of Chicago locations--that St. Patrick's Day parade where Kimble hid from Gerard wasn't in the script and was an event Davis, a Chicago native, received permission to shoot in at the last minute--but that's not the only reason why the late Roger Ebert, who was also a Chicago native, loved the film and considered it "the best of all the summer thrillers" that dropped in 1993.

(Photo source: DVD Beaver)

The louder parts of Jones' Oscar-winning performance are what everyone from Scott Glenn in a 2008 Monk guest shot to more recently, Tim on Justified imitates or quotes from (and by the way, Tim was referencing a movie Justified cast member Nick Searcy appeared in), but the quieter parts of Jones' performance were also fascinating to Ebert. "As the chase continues, [Gerard] gradually becomes convinced of the innocence of his prey," wrote Ebert, "but this conviction is wisely never spelled out in dialogue, and remains ambivalent, expressed in the look in his eyes, or his pauses between words."

The original series was notable for delivering exposition through opening voiceovers by narrator William Conrad, which 2000 Fugitive series showrunner John McNamara said were a holdover from radio in an Entertainment Weekly article about the 2000 reboot. The film ditches the narration and avoids having characters deliver infodumpy dialogue, except in believable situations where minor infodumps are called for, like in Gerard's famous "Our fugitive has been on the run for 90 minutes!" speech to his team. As Ebert observed, the characters instead gradually reveal the way they are thinking, mostly through their facial expressions.

"The Fugitive has the standards of an earlier, more classic time, when acting, character and dialogue were meant to stand on their own, and where characters continued to change and develop right up until the last frame," wrote Ebert at the end of his four-star review of the film.

Ebert himself was a writer from an earlier, more classic time, when the newspaper industry that he and Gene Siskel emerged from wasn't in shambles and film criticism was everywhere on TV. Both lovers of all things Chicago and haters of deep-dish "Chicago-style" pizza (I agree with their opinion of "thumbs down" regarding that kind of pizza), Siskel and Ebert pioneered the movie review show format of two critics debating each other. It's a format that, frankly, sucked when Siskel and Ebert weren't the critics debating each other because "the original frenemies," as one of Ebert's Chicago Sun-Times colleagues referred to the duo in an oral history about their friendship, were the only ones who were great at it on-screen.

"Now who wants to boogie with Baby '37?"

This weekend, I was surprised to find an eight-hour ReelzChannel marathon of the short-lived animated series The Critic, James L. Brooks' second foray into animation after the success of The Simpsons. Created by Simpsons writers Al Jean and Mike Reiss, The Critic aired on ABC during its first season (1993-94) and then for its second and final season (1994-95), it went to die on Fox (where the show's "Hey! We're on Fox" gags were amusing, while on a non-Fox channel in reruns years later, uh... not so much). The show, which comes complete with Simpsonian catchphrases that never took off ("It stinks!," "Hotchie motchie!," the Chuck McCann-referencing "Hi guy!"), later enjoyed a cultish afterlife in webisode form and on both DVD and Comedy Central's animation lineup.

The ReelzChannel marathon reminded me how funny The Critic could be, though the rest of America didn't agree, including TV critics who found it difficult to warm up to the show like they had with The Simpsons. Even Matt Groening, Jean and Reiss' on-and-off-and-on-again boss, had gripes about The Critic. (The Simpsons creator opposed Brooks' idea of a Simpsons/Critic crossover show and took his name off the credits of that episode. Some of Groening's gripes are understandable. The crossover added more continuity errors to a series that was already drowning in them--in the Critic universe, the Simpsons characters were established as fictional.)

The titular loser is Jay Sherman (Jon Lovitz), the miserable host of a Manhattan-based movie review show that's constantly being tinkered with by cable network CEO Duke Phillips (Charles Napier), a Ted Turner-like chicken and waffle house magnate. While getting reacquainted with The Critic, I was struck by how the love/hate relationship between Jay and his intrusive boss seems to have been carried over in the dynamic between Liz the principled comedy writer and Jack the well-meaning but meddlesome network exec on 30 Rock (and like Duke, Jack thinks his favorite employee is gay). The big difference between Jay/Duke and Liz/Jack is that most of Jack's ideas have actually helped Liz's program The Girlie Show (Jack's hiring of movie star Tracy Jordan boosts the ratings of the rebranded TGS), while none of Duke's ideas have ever worked (one of my favorite Critic episodes--also the source of the classic Franklin Sherman line that I referenced in this post's title--involves Duke's insistence on pairing Jay with sidekicks, which range from a grizzly bear to a sassy black kid named "Lil' Shabazz").

Though it was given great time slots by both networks (ABC paired it with Home Improvement, while on Fox, it followed The Simpsons), why wasn't The Critic able to attract viewers like The Simpsons and King of the Hill did? There's a theory in a post by Jaime J. Weinman that could explain The Critic's inability to find an audience. He thinks 30 Rock is a ratings underperformer because it suffers from the same flaw that he says is also plaguing How I Met Your Mother: the central character, the one figure that the audience is supposed to identify with, is the show's weak link. (Weinman feels Liz and Ted, the "I" in How I Met Your Mother, lack presence as central characters--they're constantly overshadowed by the other characters on their respective shows--and the less patient viewers have abandoned these shows because they can't find any characteristics in the leads that they could relate to.) While I don't consider the characters of Liz or Ted to be the weak links (for me, the weak link on these ratings-addled cult shows has often been the stunt casting), I could see why Jay's irritable film critic persona could be off-putting to viewers because you know how much America loves film critics.

I also think The Critic failed to connect with viewers because of its offbeat cosmopolitan setting, which, for me, was one of the show's charms. The setting was reflected in everything from Hans Zimmer's sprightly, "Rhapsody in Blue"-inspired main title theme (an early taste of what was to come in his surprisingly enjoyable Simpsons Movie score) to the character design, a shout-out to the drawing styles of New York cartoonists like Al Hirschfeld and the New Yorker illustrators. Viewers tend to embrace animated sitcoms set in suburban neighborhoods (The Simpsons, King of the Hill, South Park, Family Guy) and avoid cartoons set in the city (The Critic, Futurama, The PJs), perhaps because the characters on these city shows have been too abrasive for their tastes, and Jay was no exception.

Here's another Weinman theory: viewers avoid darker-toned sitcoms (The Honeymooners and Brooks' own Taxi were ratings flops during their initial runs). The Critic was far from dark, but my God, Jay the adopted, divorced and luckless schlub suffered through life more often than Charlie Brown--even though he seemed to get as much tail as George Costanza.

Too bad viewers bolted because they couldn't stomach seeing those brash qualities in a prime-time cartoon. They missed out on other great elements of The Critic, like any gag involving the show's funniest character, Jay's WASPy adoptive father Franklin (Gerrit Graham), a former New York governor whose main vice while in office seemed to be cocktails rather than whores. Had The Critic continued for more than 23 episodes, I would have loved to have seen what else the writers had in store for the insane and eternally tipsy Franklin, who, like Ralph Wiggum on The Simpsons and Tracy on 30 Rock, lives in "a different and more wonderful universe than everyone around him," as the A.V. Club's Nathan Rabin once wrote about Ralph and Franklin. A couple of the secondary settings in Jay's fully realized universe could have functioned well as separate shows of their own, like the mansion where Jay's adoptive family lives or his son Marty's U.N. private school, where the kid from Easter Island can't catch a break and the African headmaster creepily laughs at his own jokes.

There was clearly more to the show than just the movie/TV/pop culture parody gags, some of which haven't aged well, while others are amazingly dead-on, like a sequence involving a musical version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame--this was two years before Disney released its animated song-and-dance version of Hunchback. (Speaking of which, the random movie/TV spoofs make more sense in the showbiz setting of The Critic than they do in the non-showbiz setting of Family Guy. My favorite Critic parody is a 007-style depiction of Fifth President James Monroe, who spits game at a damsel in distress with a Connery-esque "Welcome to the Era of Good Feelingsch.")

Critics who couldn't warm up to The Critic because they felt it lacked the heart of the earlier seasons of The Simpsons must have missed the poignant "Every Doris Has Her Day," the most Brooksian of all the Critic episodes (Brooks is credited with providing many of The Simpsons' more emotional moments). In that episode, Jay discovers a kindred spirit in his previously unfriendly, chain-smoking makeup artist Doris (the late Doris Grau, who also voiced Lunch Lady Doris on The Simpsons) and begins to think she's his birth mother. But to Jay's disappointment, DNA results prove otherwise. Now that's one juicy thread the Critic writers could have pursued if Fox hadn't killed the series: would Jay ever find his birth parents?

The series could have lasted longer had it been produced for a cable channel like IFC, which would have understood The Critic because IFC's specialty is original programming that satirizes showbiz (Greg the Bunny, The Minor Accomplishments of Jackie Woodman), and its audience consists primarily of Jay Sherman types. The Critic just had the misfortune of airing on a network that found it too crass and a network that found it too tame.

And that stinks.

Boogie with Baby '37 when The Critic airs Mondays at 6:30pm ET/3:30pm PT, 8:30pm ET/5:30pm PT and 11:30pm ET/8:30pm PT on ReelzChannel. Most DVR-worthy Critic episode: the break-up of Siskel and Ebert (who voiced themselves).