Throwback Thursday: Attack the Block

Every Throwback Thursday, I randomly pull out from my desk cabinet--with my eyes closed--a movie ticket I saved. Then I discuss the movie on the ticket and maybe a little bit of its score, which might be now streaming on AFOS.

"Folks who exasperatedly dismiss discussion of color with 'Not everything is about race,' are usually people who (unknowingly) have the privilege of being viewed as race-less (white). The race-less of course have the freedom to decide what is and isn't about race. Those that are not seen as race-less (people of color) don't. [Joe] Cornish seems to understand what many people don't want to admit, that a person's race shapes their experience in the world. Whether it should or shouldn't, it very much does. Ignoring this fact, even if well intentioned, perpetuates inequality. The boys in Block, as young men of color, are always aware of racial dynamics. So constant is this awareness, neither positive nor negative, that it becomes unconscious, like breathing. It's always there. The film takes place completely within this understanding."--Kartina Richardson (2011)

If it weren't for its teen characters' awareness of the elephant in the room called race, as well as the equally intriguing way Joe Cornish avoids being heavy-handed about it, Attack the Block--the British comedian's 2011 feature-length directorial debut--would just be an ordinary low-budget monster movie with a diverse cast instead of the above-average low-budget monster movie with a diverse cast it wound up becoming. Sure, it's always nice to see a black teen or an Asian American as the main protagonist in a sci-fi story, but what really matters in the end is how that story makes that protagonist of color come alive as a credible human being, and Attack the Block succeeds in that department.

Cornish is white, but one thing that makes him bolder than other white creators who have placed characters of color at the center of the sci-fi action is his decision to make Moses (John Boyega) a regular street kid instead of the saintly (and more palatable to older and more affluent white folks) cop or soldier of color who's usually pitted against unfriendly creatures in sci-fi. At one point, Sam (Jodie Whittaker), a 20-something white nurse who's mugged by Moses and his mostly black friends at the start of the film and evolves from despising them to relying on them for her survival, is seen suggesting to them that they turn to the police for help in protecting their South London neighborhood from bloodthirsty alien beasts that have suddenly landed in South London for mysterious reasons.

Moses and his male and female friends want nothing to do with the Five-0--"You think the police is gonna help them? They might not arrest you, but they'll arrest them," says Tia (Danielle Vitalis), a neighborhood girl with a crush on Moses, to Sam--and Moses believes the aliens were sent to South London by the same government that sics the police on black kids and is responsible for various other things in what the British call the block and what we Americans call the projects. "Government probably bred those creatures to kill black boys. First they sent drugs to the ends. Then they sent guns. Now they sent monsters to get us. They don't care, man. We ain't killing each other fast enough, so they decided to speed up the process," says Moses. Right when Tia points out to Sam the privilege she has as a white person and Moses spouts his theory about the aliens being government-made, an acknowledgement of the racism that permeates the world outside the theater or TV screen finally emerges in the dialogue of this escapist movie--rather than the movie acknowledging it through coded dialogue from white characters like one lady's earlier view of Moses and the hoodies as "fucking monsters"--and Attack the Block, which was co-executive-produced by Edgar Wright, becomes something truly special and alive as escapist entertainment.

At that moment, this sci-fi story that takes place in the projects declares that, for once, it's not going to shy away from race and hide behind silly sci-fi metaphors to address race or naively attempt to put a Band-Aid on racism (the teens' frankness about the ignorant attitudes of the police in blocks like Moses and Sam's makes this film continue to resonate, especially during the rise of #BlackLivesMatter and the stupidity of #AllLivesMatter, a hashtag that could only come from the minds of privileged dolts). Also at around that point in the story, Attack the Block makes it clear that a cop won't be the hero of the narrative like he or she often is. Instead, the misunderstood kid who frequently gets harassed or cuffed (or killed) by such cops becomes the hero here, and though he's tougher than the other hoodies and will outlive some of them, he's extremely human, thanks to Cornish's writing for Moses and Boyega's ability to balance toughness with vulnerability. It's no wonder Boyega was cast in the J.J. Abrams-directed Star Wars: The Force Awakens: he's great at reacting to the mayhem surrounding him, just like how his Force Awakens co-star Harrison Ford was terrific at reacting to mayhem in action classics like Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Fugitive.



While being interviewed by Esquire about the upcoming 007 movie Spectre, Daniel Craig said he admires Ford's performance in Raiders because "he's so fallible, to the point of comedy. You know at any time he might fuck up, and that adds to the danger and the excitement and the joy of it." That's also the key to why Boyega's performance in Attack the Block is equally enjoyable. There's a scene where you expect Moses to have a grand action hero moment and save Tia and her best friends from aliens who have invaded Tia's flat, but his katana gets stuck in a wall behind him, and Sam ends up having to save him. Meanwhile, Tia and Dimples (Paige Meade) don't really need Moses' help and are doing quite okay on their own, thanks to their fighting skills with whatever item they can get their hands on. Fuck Matt Damon. These ice skate-wielding South London girls should be the stars of Damon's next Bourne movie. Later on, when Moses gets his opportunity to finally blow each and every alien to smithereens with his lighter, his hands start to shake out of nervousness.

A lesser filmmaker would write Moses as being badass and flawless all the time, but Cornish prefers to make his protagonist a bit more complicated. He's as flawed as the Park siblings from the Bong Joon-ho masterpiece The Host (a double feature of Attack the Block and The Host, by the way, would be like the illest double feature ever) and is perhaps even more thoughtless than either of the Parks because in addition to mugging Sam, he's made the mistake of getting into business with an impulsive, murks-anybody-who-looks-at-him-wrong neighborhood drug lord named Hi-Hatz (Jumayn Hunter) and has made the additional mistake of murking the female alien whose pheromone summons all the male "gorilla wolf motherfuckers" to South London. In Predator, Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn't responsible for bringing to the jungle the titular hunter from outer space, whereas in Attack the Block, our hero is the cause of all the bloodshed and the losses of some of his friends. So when it's up to Moses to fix what he started and decide what kind of adult he wants the block to remember him as, the climax of Attack the Block takes on an unexpected power, aided by both slow motion that doesn't look clichéd and silly for once and "Moses vs. the Monsters," a pulsating score cue by composer Steven Price and Basement Jaxx partners Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe ("Moses vs. the Monsters" is in rotation during the AFOS blocks "Beat Box," "Hall H" and "AFOS Prime").

One other thing makes Cornish bolder than other white writers who are outsiders looking in on ethnic settings they've chosen to write about: the wide range of black teen characters Sam encounters as the alien invasion forces her out of her comfort zone. (Had Attack the Block been a mainstream hit in America, it would have caused that racist old moron Lou Dobbs to get his panties in a bunch over the kinds of characters it chooses to sympathize with.) A lesser white writer would probably make every black teen character interchangeable and as sullen and parentless as Moses or as hotheaded as Dennis (Franz Drameh), whereas each of Moses' friends is distinctive in background (Moses is the only one who comes from a broken home, and the closest thing he has to a parent is an uncle who's never there) and temperament. For instance, Biggz (Simon Howard) has a white mom and is less willing than the others to get himself into dangerous situations; Tia and Dimples are similarly disdainful about Moses' flirtation with a criminal lifestyle. This also ties into how Attack the Block doubles as a thankfully non-preachy critique of the demonization of the working class in England.

Cornish was a one-time mugging victim who wanted to better understand his muggers and their everyday lives instead of being resentful of them (the mugging of Sam, who's clearly a stand-in for Cornish, was based on the incident Cornish experienced), so he takes working-class kids like the kindly and dorky Jerome (Leeon Jones) and the dorkier Biggz, who spends most of the film hiding in a trash bin, and he fleshes out those characters to prove the irrationality of demonizing and simplifying the underclass. One minute, they're mugging somebody and not enjoying it at all (they later admit to being scared while doing the mugging), and the next, they're chatting with Mum or Grandmum on their phones like typical 13-to-15-year-olds trying to make it home in time for dinner.

What also makes Attack the Block stand out is the much-welcome absence of CGI ("We used CGI a little to enhance, but mainly to remove details," said Cornish to GQ in 2011). The creature FX work in Cornish's film is largely practical. The alien attacks are fast and brutal, and this is a rare case where the fast-cutting that so many film critics complain about when they critique contemporary action movies is absolutely necessary. The fast-cutting prevents us from noticing how low-budget the monsters are: they're essentially just stuntmen--led by the great Terry Notary, one of the motion-capture performers who starred as the apes in the last two Planet of the Apes movies and a movement coach for those movies, by the way--inside eyeless gorilla suits outfitted with neon green teeth. But because the Attack the Block aliens aren't CG, there's a formidability and weighty presence to them that's missing from most CG creatures.

On one of Attack the Block's Blu-ray audio commentaries, Cornish says the inability to afford extensive CG FX allowed him to get authentic reactions from his child actors since the monsters were physically there on the set. The performances of the kids--who hadn't been in the acting game long enough to receive training on how to look like you're not pretending during a job that requires you to pretend things that aren't there are actually there--wouldn't have been the same if they had to react to a tennis ball on a stick. Attack the Block is more of a sci-fi actioner than a genuinely scary horror flick--The Walking Dead contains 10 times more gore each week--but the film contains one horrific moment: the child actors may have been way more terrified of the aliens than us adult viewers are, but the split-second shot of a mutilated Hi-Hatz looking like a black Voldemort makes you finally understand the kids' genuine fear.

The year 2011 saw four different Steven Spielberg-produced projects about alien invasions emerge in the same summer: the Abrams-directed Super 8, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Cowboys & Aliens and the TNT original drama Falling Skies, which just recently ended its run. I barely remember any of them, aside from Elle Fanning's amusing transformation into a zombie for Super 8's movie-within-a-movie and the troublemaking antics of Colin Cunningham's biker character Pope during Falling Skies' first season, whereas Attack the Block, which was made for much less and details an invasion that's on a much smaller scale, is a film that's still on my mind. Its potent mix of monster movie thrills and nuanced, non-preachy social commentary about both racial inequality and white privilege makes it a film I keep revisiting. Attack the Block murks them all.

Steven Price and Basement Jaxx's outstanding score cues from Attack the Block can currently be heard during the AFOS blocks "Beat Box," "Hall H" and "AFOS Prime." The 1993 KRS-One classic "Sound of da Police" and Richie Spice's "Youth Dem Cold," the two most memorable existing songs during Attack the Block, cannot be heard on AFOS, but they would have been part of the now-defunct AFOS block "Rock Box," which was discontinued in 2012 due to limited station hard drive space and the elimination from rotation of anything that wasn't original score material.

Throwback Thursday: The World's End

Every Throwback Thursday, I randomly pull out from my desk cabinet--with my eyes closed--a movie ticket I saved. Then I discuss the movie on the ticket and maybe a little bit of its score, which might be now streaming on AFOS.

British director Edgar Wright is at the peak of his comedic filmmaking powers in 2013's The World's End, the third and final film in the Cornetto trilogy he co-wrote with Simon Pegg, the star of Wright's groundbreaking sitcom Spaced. Each film in the trilogy is a standalone piece--none of them take place in the same universe--but they all have a bunch of things in common: a Cornetto ice cream treat (a favorite hangover cure of Wright's) always makes a cameo appearance, hence the trilogy's unofficial name Cornetto; Wright reuses several actors; Pegg and his old Spaced co-star Nick Frost always play a pair of friends who are grappling with either the fear of losing their identity or being forced to let go of their adolescence; a fence jump always goes awry; and a seemingly tired genre gets revitalized in the inventive hands of Pegg and Wright each time.

The first Cornetto film, 2004's Shaun of the Dead, expanded upon Pegg and Wright's obsession with George Romero flicks from an early Spaced episode, and the result--a Romero flick with bumbling, hungover Crouch End blokes as the heroes--is still my favorite zombie movie ever. The second Cornetto film, 2007's Hot Fuzz, took Joel Silver and Jerry Bruckheimer cop flicks from America and amusingly tried to wedge the much more mundane reality of British policing into the body of one of those over-the-top cop flicks. Frequently described as "Lethal Weapon in Somerset," Hot Fuzz is not like any other action genre spoof. It's full of humor about fascism, conformity (a theme that resurfaces in The World's End), British genteelness and Grand Guignol violence that's often smarter than the average hacky "hey, let's just reference this recent movie and that recent movie and then call it a day" Friedberg/Seltzer spoof film. Hot Fuzz's genuine affection for American action flicks also elevates Wright's film above action genre spoofs that harbor contempt for the films they're parodying, much like how Shaun's affection for Romero flicks was key to making that film so appealing.

The World's End is more ambitious than the other two Cornetto films and juggles several ideas at once: it's a school reunion comedy about the dangers of nostalgia (set not at an actual class reunion but at a pub crawl Gary King, Pegg's immature alcoholic character, failed to finish as a teen and wants to finally finish with his estranged, now-teetotal friends), an addiction drama, an alien invasion flick and a critique of gentrification, or as Paddy Considine's character calls it, "Starbucking." In lesser hands, this all could have turned into a hot mess--an unwieldy, overly busy third movie that, like so many other third movies in a series, strains to juggle all the ideas running through Pegg and Wright's heads--but like the other two Cornetto films, The World's End is so tightly constructed by Pegg and Wright that the disparate components mesh beautifully and the seams never show.

When the comedic sci-fi action gives way for a scene straight out of an addiction drama, the dramatic scene doesn't feel out of place. Speaking of which, The World's End and Flight would make for a great double bill about alcoholics in denial. But why do the on-the-nose existing songs--particularly Saint Etienne's "Join Our Club" and The Doors' "Alabama Song (Whisky Bar)" in one great marriage of song and scene, due to the actors walking in step and drinking in time to the Doors tune as it was being blasted on the set--work so well for The World's End, while the on-the-nose existing songs don't work as well for Flight? That's because with the exception of the Soup Dragons' overplayed and annoying cover of the Rolling Stones' "I'm Free" and Primal Scream's '90s advertising staple "Loaded," neither of Wright and music supervisor Nick Angel's selections, which are mostly from the late '80s/early '90s era of Britrock, are tunes I've heard a million times before in movies or on TV, like Flight's overplayed choices of "Gimme Shelter" and "Sympathy for the Devil."

The original score by Gravity composer Steven Price is equally effective. My favorite moments of Price's score, which can be heard during the AFOS weekend block "Hall H" and "AFOS Prime," are textural rather than tuneful. They all involve cell phone interference sound FX, which represents the Network, the extraterrestrial collective of gentrifiers behind the gradual robot invasion of the friends' former hometown of Newton Haven, as well as all the technological advances on Earth from the early '90s to 2013 (that means Steve Jobs was a robot, which explains all those black-turtleneck-and-mom-jeans ensembles), and those advances are a huge part of the Network's strategy of seducing the smartphone zombies of the human population into getting rid of their humanity and becoming robots, or "blanks." The interference audio first appears in Price's score when Gary accidentally decapitates the teenage blank in the restroom. Never has cell phone interference sounded so menacing. After Black Mirror and the Network scenes in The World's End, the British are proving to be the craftiest satirists when it comes to material about how smartphone or tablet addiction is causing society to become even more soulless than it was before.

The result of Pegg and Wright's skills with meshing disparate components--and making inspired use of little things like mobile interference audio--is the most entertaining and clever critique of gentrification ever made. It's also the only gentrification satire to involve rousing and dazzlingly staged fight scenes where humans decapitate with their bare hands their blank adversaries and pulverize them with whatever weapon they can find, whether it's a pair of pub stools or the blanks' own torn-off limbs (the terrific World's End fight choreography was done by Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and Kingsman: The Secret Service stunt coordinator Brad Allan, a.k.a. the short white guy Jackie Chan fought during Gorgeous).

The film is so packed with detail that you pick up something new in each viewing. For instance, while watching The World's End for the fourth time in preparation for today's edition of Throwback Thursday, I switched on Pegg and Wright's Blu-ray audio commentary and learned that the film's school disco sequence--in which the Network attempts to lure Gary and his friends into becoming blanks by bringing back a trio of hot girls they liked who were known collectively as "the Marmalade Sandwich" and have eerily not aged a day--is based on an actual clubbing phenomenon. I didn't even know this was a thing in England--women get paid to dance in schoolgirl uniforms, which Pegg and Wright both find to be rather creepy as a male fantasy--and after listening to the commentrak, I received a crash course in school discos from a 2002 Guardian article about the then-new "formula of uniforms, booze and tacky tunes."

The grand entrance of "the Marmalade Sandwich" in The World's End

Sophie Evans (Marmalade Sandwich girl Becky Salt), out of uniform (Photo source: Wales Online)

In The World's End, Wright didn't just revitalize the old sci-fi trope of your friends and neighbors getting replaced by creepy duplicates by brilliantly linking it to the horrors of gentrification. He also revitalized the midlife crisis comedy, taking it back from the Wild Hogses and Old Dogses of the world. A pre-Gone Girl Rosamund Pike does wonders with what little screen time she has--she was pregnant during filming--in the role of Sam, the lone female in Gary's circle of friends (both Pike's delivery of "What happened to you?" to Pegg in the bathroom and her comedic gasp after first seeing Pegg decapitate a female blank are sublime bits of acting), while Pegg and Frost, who switched the roles they had in Shaun and Fuzz so that Frost played the more responsible half of the duo this time, show remarkable range when their characters' respective midlife crises take a turn for the dramatic. Speaking of midlife crisis movies, why do so many SNL alums, whether it's Billy Crystal or Adam Sandler, star in the same old goddamn movie about a middle-aged guy who has to learn to be a better dad? It's why my favorite Billy Crystal movie remains the not-so-maudlin Running Scared, and it's also partly why Anchorman 2, with its "Ron needs to be a better dad" subplot, isn't as consistently funny as its predecessor.

Looking back lately on the artistic triumphs that resulted from Wright revitalizing weather-beaten genres for his Cornetto projects has made Wright's decision to walk away from the movie version of Ant-Man all the more heartbreaking (he had enough of getting into creative disagreements with Marvel Studios). Think of what Wright could have accomplished in revitalizing the superhero movie, a genre that's lately been showing signs of repetition, whether it's pointless and clumsy world-building or tiresome destruction porn. (Speaking of which, I love the shade Pegg once threw at the ways Man of Steel handled its destruction porn: "At the end, they're all at the Daily Planet office just going, 'Hey! Let's go see the Dodgers!' Isn't everyone dead? Isn't New York flat? What do you mean, go see the Dodgers?!" Pegg's involvement in the writing of the next Star Trek movie makes me more hopeful about the Trek movie franchise's return to quality after the mistakes that were made during Star Trek Into Darkness, and one of those mistakes was the same type of destruction porn Pegg was critiquing.) I wouldn't be surprised if Wright, who's kept mum about his tumultuous working experiences with Marvel, quit Ant-Man because what its studio execs wanted to do with his vision for the movie was too reminiscent of the Starbucking he so astutely skewered--or rather, decapitated--in The World's End, a rare third film that doesn't suck.

A playlist through space and time: The best of the AFOS block "Hall H" on Spotify

I named the AFOS weekend block "Hall H" after the huge-ass hall in the San Diego Convention Center, the home of San Diego Comic-Con, partly because at a total of 10 hours from 7am to 5pm Pacific on Saturday (and again on Sunday), the block is equally huge. "Hall H" is full of selections from scores to shows and films that are popular with the comic or anime con crowd, so it's all the fun and excitement of a comic or anime con, but without the horrifying smells.

So some British show celebrated the 50th anniversary of its premiere over the weekend. Inspector Spacetime didn't just prove that it hasn't shown any signs of aging even though it's a show that's so old Larry King discovered his first liver spot on the day it premiered. It also proved that even when the budget is at its lowest, the zippers on the Ocean Demon monster suits are at their most visible and the corridors that the Inspector and Constable Reggie are often seen running through are at their creakiest, it can still entertain, as long as there's plenty of charisma from whoever's portraying the Inspector and his associate and the storytelling is as impeccable as the Inspector's taste in bowler hats.

These days, Inspector Spacetime, or as it's known to people outside the Community universe, Doctor Who, looks much more spiffy and baller than it used to, and the interior of the time machine our favorite anti-authoritarian time traveler rides around in no longer looks like it's going to tip over if someone sneezed at the roundel-covered wall. The premise remains the same: an eccentric alien hops around space and time to protect the universe and a little planet he's come to love called Earth, and thanks to his bizarre alien physiology (he has two hearts instead of one), he regenerates into a completely different person whenever he dies. But now there's more of a focus on the humans he's befriended and how he's affected their lives, as well as a focus on the angst that makes him tick: guilt over the toughest decision he's ever made. That would be causing the destruction of his own native planet Gallifrey--he's responsible for killing off his own people, the Time Lords--to put an end to the off-screen Time War between them and the Daleks, one of the Doctor's biggest adversaries.

The PTSD from the Time War was added to the character by former showrunner Russell T. Davies, who revived Doctor Who 16 years after its cancellation by the BBC and modernized the show in ways that enhanced and improved it (the less said about Davies' love for farty alien jokes, the better), and not just in visual terms. Towards the end of Sylvester McCoy's late '80s run as the seventh Doctor, the show started to hint that the Doctor was less than saintly and could be as devious and shady as his enemies. Sure, in the past, he's been a cantankerous old man (the first Doctor) and an arrogant asshole (the sixth Doctor). But unless I'm mistaken because I haven't watched all the pre-Davies episodes, the show rarely raised questions about some of the Doctor's actions (I haven't seen all of them because--and longtime Doctor Who heads might disagree with me--I've found some of them to be too slow-paced for my tastes, even when I first caught some of the immensely popular Tom Baker episodes on PBS, and since all of them were shot on videotape, except one of my favorite old-school Doctor Who episodes, the shot-entirely-on-film "Spearhead from Space," they look like moldy '70s and '80s episodes of General Hospital).

Doctor Who was cancelled before it could further explore the dark side of McCoy's Doctor, but when Davies brought the show back and introduced the backstory of the Time War (which took place off-camera during the interval between the 1996 Doctor Who TV-movie starring Paul McGann and the show's 2005 return), he picked up on that dark side. He and several other writers, including current showrunner Steven Moffat, made the character of the Doctor more relatable, imperfect and human, even when the Davies seasons reimagined him as a cross between a thinking person's superhero, a god with a mischievous streak and a rock star who's charming to both women and gay guys (Billie Piper's lovestruck Rose Tyler was clearly a surrogate--some haters will say she was a Mary Sue--for the openly gay Davies; some probably consider John Barrowman's Captain Jack Harkness to be more of a surrogate, but Captain Jack is the dashing gay action hero Davies wishes he could be but isn't).

"The Day of the Doctor," last Saturday night's satisfying 50th anniversary episode, revisits the previously unseen tough decision that's haunted the Doctor since the first season of the Davies/Moffat era and finally gives us glimpses of that much-discussed Time War. To the show's fans, Moffat has been as polarizing a showrunner as Davies was in the last few episodes of his reign--Moffat haters think Moffat's writing on Doctor Who is overly convoluted, repetitive, misogynist and possibly racist and they're not so fond of his rather dickish response to their opinion that the Doctor doesn't have to always regenerate into a white guy--but Moffat has excelled at making us feel the giddiness the Doctor experiences whenever he achieves the impossible, whether it's during the climax of "The Doctor Dances" or during Matt Smith's current run as the 11th Doctor (which will come to a close in next month's Christmas episode, in which the 11th Doctor dies and regenerates into a profanity-free Peter Capaldi).

The quintessential moment of Moffat's take on the Doctor as "the mad man with a box" is that funny and clever scene in "A Christmas Carol" where the Doctor demonstrates to Michael Gambon's skeptical, Scrooge-like miser character that he's going to change his past and make himself appear on screen in the childhood home movie Gambon's watching, right after he leaves the room--and a few seconds later, thanks to the magic of the TARDIS, there he is, up on screen with Gambon's younger self. The Doctor is always rewriting history, and in "The Day of the Doctor," with the help of his current sidekick Clara Oswald (Jenna Coleman), his most recent self (David Tennant), the War Doctor (John Hurt), the "forgotten" past incarnation who obliterated both his own race and the Daleks, and a mysterious figure only the War Doctor can see and who looks an awful lot like Rose (the three Doctors wind up meeting each other for reasons too convoluted to explain here), the Doctor figures out how to rewrite history to fix his biggest mistake, and it's a moment as exhilarating as that home movie scene in "A Christmas Carol." It exemplifies why Doctor Who remains appealing to viewers all over the world (and why the BBC, which is now remorseful about the 1989 cancellation, has gone all-out for the franchise's 50th anniversary by bringing "The Day of the Doctor" to theaters in 3-D and producing An Adventure in Space and Time, a TV-movie that flashes back to Doctor Who's unusual and humble beginnings as TV that originally wasn't designed to scare or thrill kids but to educate them): the three Doctors' solution is--to borrow the words of longtime fan Craig Ferguson when he sang about why he loves the show--the ultimate triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism.

Selections from Murray Gold's epic score music for the third, fifth and sixth seasons of modern Doctor Who are featured during "Hall H," and they kick off the following sampler of tracks from "Hall H" that are found on Spotify. The complete sampler tracklist is at the very bottom of this post.

(Photo source: Greendale A.V. Club)

The fictional Inspector Spacetime, the Doctor Who counterpart we've seen bits and pieces of on Community (some of Ludwig Göransson's Community score cues are in rotation during "Hall H" but aren't part of the above sampler), is so popular with Community fans that's it's been made into a web series. It's even been cosplayed at cons.

(Photo source: The Casual Costumer)

(Photo source: The Casual Costumer)

(Photo source: !Blog)

The best of "Beat Box" on Spotify

Foxy Brown (Photo source: Denver Westword)

On A Fistful of Soundtracks, "Beat Box" airs Mondays at 6-9am and noon-3pm, Tuesdays through Thursdays at 6-9am and 1-4pm and Fridays at 7-9am and 1-3pm. The three-hour block, which is two hours long on Fridays, contains selections from '70s film scores that have been sampled by beatmakers in hip-hop and electronica (like the late Willie Hutch's music from Foxy Brown). If you find most film music to be too staid for your tastes, then "Beat Box" is most likely for you.

Also part of the block are selections from scores that hearken back to the blaxploitation era. One such score is the 2009 Black Dynamite score by Adrian Younge, who also wrote the original music for Titmouse's animated version of Black Dynamite (which concluded its first season on Adult Swim last night with special guest star Clifton Powell voicing the sleazy preacher dad who abandoned Dynamite when he was "a children").

Although some listeners feel like they're '70s macks when they tune in to "Beat Box," the playlist isn't all-'70s all the time. There are also original themes that were performed by hip-hop artists (Public Enemy's "Fight the Power" from Do the Right Thing and The Roots' "What You Want" from The Best Man) and cuts from recent scores that appeal to beatheads, like Steven Price and Basement Jaxx's excellent 2011 Attack the Block score, which Talib Kweli and Z-Trip sampled in their new Attack the Block mixtape.

Attack the Block

On Spotify, I was surprised to find that the service carries the entire Attack the Block soundtrack album, as well as 41 other tracks that are part of the "Beat Box" playlist. Here's a sampler of "Beat Box."

Complete tracklist after the jump...

The Academy's snub of the Attack the Block score is such bollocks, innit?

HitFix's Kristopher Tapley considers the Attack the Block score by Steven Price and Basement Jaxx to be the year's best original film score and is bummed that it's not one of the 97 scores that are eligible for consideration in this year's Best Original Score category. I'm bummed too--the cutting-edge score from British comedian/filmmaker Joe Cornish's enjoyable inner-city-vs.-outer-space thriller is one of my favorites of 2011--but I'm not surprised that the Academy would exclude it.

The Academy rarely nominates the scores I like the most (not one bloody nod for any of Irish DJ/composer David Holmes' Ocean's scores during the '00s?). Plus, Price and Basement Jaxx's (and Holmes') sounds aren't middlebrow and tweedy enough for the Academy. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross aside, cutting-edge things tend to frighten and confuse them.

There's one upside to the snub: I don't have to be subjected to a lame interpretive dance to "The Ends" from Attack the Block.

A track-by-track rundown of the current "New Cue Revue" playlist on A Fistful of Soundtracks

Every Wednesday at 10am and 4pm and every Friday at 11am, A Fistful of Soundtracks streams the most recent additions to the station's "Assorted Fistful" library (or in the case of Akon & Hamskia Iyer's "Chammak Challo," the "Chai Noon" library) for an hour-long block entitled "New Cue Revue." Here's what's currently on the "New Cue Revue" playlist.

1. Akon & Hamsika Iyer, "Chammak Challo" (from Ra.One)
Ever since it was announced in 2010 that R&B artist Akon, best known for "Smack That," "I Wanna Love You" and the hilarious Lonely Island/SNL digital short "I Just Had Sex," was lending his pipes to an original song for a Bollywood film (like another non-Indian singer, Kylie Minogue, had done for the imaginatively titled 2009 Into the Blue clone Blue), I've been dying to hear the Akon track. The end result, "Chammak Challo" from Bollywood star Shahrukh Khan's recently released superhero movie Ra.One, finally dropped in September and is a smash hit in India. (In this latest round of one of my favorite games, Guess the American Movie or TV Show That This Bollywood Film Is a Bizarre Clone Of, Ra.One, which features Khan in the dual role of a dorky video game designer and a heroic character from his game who enters the real world, appears to be a clone of the largely forgotten '80s superhero show Automan.)

Akon acquits himself nicely as he alternates between English and Hindi during "Chammak Challo" (the song title is basically "nice-looking shawty" in Hindi slang). The catchy "Chammak Challo" proves that it's much better when Bollywood soundtrack composers enlist actual R&B or rap artists from America to do their thing on their soundtracks than when they attempt to rap or ape current American R&B trends on their own. The latter has led to several theme tunes that are as painful-sounding as the time when Prince stopped being a hater of hip-hop and attempted to incorporate rap into his Diamonds and Pearls album--for instance, go YouTube "Desi Boyz." Or maybe you're better off if you don't.



2. Howard Shore, "The Thief" (from Hugo)
The former SNL bandleader and Oscar-winning Lord of the Rings trilogy composer nicely apes the rhythms of a clock for Martin Scorsese's clock imagery-filled tribute to silent-era filmmakers like Georges Méliès (played during Hugo by Ben Kingsley).

3. Alberto Iglesias, "George Smiley" (from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy)
The lonely trumpet during Alberto Iglesias' effective score for the latest screen adaptation of John le Carré's 1974 spy novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy announces that "This ain't Bond. This is le Carré. No bloody invisible cars or steel-toothed thugs here."

4. Mike Skinner, "Fernando's Theme" (from The Inbetweeners Movie)
British rapper Mike Skinner has retired his stage name The Streets and entered the world of film scoring with his original music for the film version of The Inbetweeners, the Britcom about a group of Superbad-style dorky teens whose anthem would be the aforementioned "I Just Had Sex." The clubby "Fernando's Theme" is the best example of "Wow, I never knew this pasty white guy had a Latin side and maybe he should express it more often" since Michael Giacchino wrote the awesome "Spanish Heist" for the TV series Alias.

5. Alan Silvestri, "Howling Commando's Montage" (from Captain America: The First Avenger)
This cue accompanies a sequence in Captain America: The First Avenger that's a bit too short: a montage of Cap on his missions with the Howling Commandos. Will the Captain America sequel be a flashback to one of those missions with the Howling Commandos that The First Avenger glossed over? As someone who wanted to see more Howling Commando scenes in the film, I hope so.

6. Quincy Jones featuring Little Richard, "Money Runner/Money Is (Medley)" (from $ [Dollars])
As I've said before, say the following five words--"caper movie score by Q"--and I'm there, baby. This funky theme from the 1971 Warren Beatty/Goldie Hawn heist flick $ (Dollars) would fit right in with the Occupy era, except "Inflation in the nation don't bother me" would have to be changed to "Recession in the nation don't bother me."

7. Ludovic Bource, "1927 A Russian Affair" (from The Artist)
After the arrivals of The Artist and Hugo, is silent cinema making a comeback? This better not mean a return to white people stealing Asian roles from Asian perform... d'oh!

Occupy anti-Halloween conservatism with A Fistful of Soundtracks' "Buckets of Score"

Do you have a conservative neighbor or two who are part of the anti-Halloween camp and are trying to recruit people to their cause? On October 31, show those opponents of Halloween how much you feel about their hatred of fun by paying them a visit and then taking out your phone and blasting A Fistful of Soundtracks' "Buckets of Score" block in their faces.

From 5pm to 11pm on Halloween, AFOS will be streaming for the second Halloween in a row original music written for the horror, thriller and paranormal genres. The playlist--which is full of Goblin tracks, cues from Elmer Bernstein's out-of-print score to Ghostbusters and original music from either non-glittery vampire flicks (The Omega Man, From Dusk Till Dawn) or supernatural genre shows (Buffy, Angel)--will be joined this year by selections from Alan Howarth and Larry Hopkins' new re-recording of the mostly synthesized cues Ennio Morricone and John Carpenter separately composed for the 1982 version of The Thing.

Howarth, who collaborated with the filmmaker/composer on the scores to such classic Carpenter flicks as Escape from New York, Big Trouble in Little China and They Live, recreated with Hopkins the tracks from the long-out-of-print Thing soundtrack album (with some help from the Digital Orchestra Toolbox) and re-sequenced them so that they're in the chronological order of the 1982 film. The re-recording is being released by the record label wing of BuySoundtrax (a site I once had such a lousy mail-order experience with--and I'm relieved to see I'm not alone--that every time I receive an e-mail from BuySoundtrax, I angrily delete it without reading it).

(Photo source: Alex Pardee)

Also added to "Buckets of Score" this year are selections from Steven Price and Basement Jaxx's terrific, if-Carpenter-were-a-dubstepper score to the recent inner city-vs.-outer space thriller Attack the Block, a film that's now on Blu-ray (I disagree with the opinion that Attack the Block loses much of its entertainment value on the small screen and is a less interesting film if you don't watch it with an amped-up crowd in the theater--I saw Attack the Block in an empty theater and still enjoyed it).

"If you like your beats on the monstrous side, you've come to the right place," wrote Attack the Block writer/director Joe Cornish in the Attack the Block soundtrack liner notes. "We wanted the Attack the Block score to do the things that film scores used to do. To be as exciting and escapist as a John Williams adventure, and as gritty and percussive as the great John Carpenter's electronic scores."

Price and the Jaxx duo's score lives up to Cornish's intentions. As the hoodies in Attack the Block would say, believe it, bruv.

That's the Attack the Block score that you're hearing on A Fistful of Soundtracks, bruv, believe it

(Photo source: Alex Pardee)

Back in March, I said, "Add The Chemical Brothers' richly written and often dance floor-friendly original score from the teenage assassin thriller Hanna to the list of awesome scores by electronica or rock musicians who never scored for film before." It's time to add another one.

Set in a rough South London neighborhood attacked by "gorilla wolf muthafuckas" from outer space, the British cult favorite Attack the Block is the best popcorn movie this summer. Beleedat. (Most American moviegoers still haven't heard of Attack the Block, but Screen Gems has been hoping to change that by expanding Attack the Block's release to six more cities last week.) One of the movie's most enjoyable elements is the original score, the first ever written by the British dance act Basement Jaxx, whose tunes have often popped up in advertising (my first exposure to Basement Jaxx was an early '00s Coke ad that featured a group of svelte campfire partiers and an isolated and not-as-svelte nerd dancing in the woods to the catchy "Red Alert," while "Do Your Thing" was all over Disney's ads for Ratatouille).

Basement Jaxx (a.k.a. Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe) co-composed the score with Scott Pilgrim vs. the World music editor Steven Price, and their score accomplishes well what it set out to do, which, according to Attack the Block writer/director Joe Cornish in the score album's liner notes, was "to do the things that film scores used to do. To be as exciting and escapist as a John Williams adventure, and as gritty and percussive as the great John Carpenter's electronic scores."

Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 theme is so beloved by beatmakers that its influence can be felt in many of their instrumentals, including Buxton, Ratcliffe and Price's cues in Attack the Block. Starting this week, my favorite Attack the Block cues attack three blocks on A Fistful of Soundtracks: "Assorted Fistful," "New Cue Revue" and "The Street." One of these selections that I've added to rotation is the bagpipes-filled, dubstep-style cue "The Ends."

Attack the Block is inventive sci-fi with a youth of color as the lead for a change, as well as an inspired critique of the demonization of the working class in the U.K. A one-time mugging victim who wanted to better understand his muggers and their lives instead of being resentful and fearful of them, Cornish takes working-class kids like Moses (John Boyega) and the bespectacled and brainy Jerome (Leeon Jones) (their mugging of Jodie Whittaker's nurse/neighbor character Sam at the start of the film was based on the incident Cornish experienced) and fleshes out those characters to prove the irrationality of demonizing the underclass.

"At the beginning of the film these kids are masked, they're hooded, you don't know how old they are, you have no sense of their humanity or identity and indeed, with their language, you're confused, you're alienated from them," said Cornish to RopeofSilicon. "Then the purpose of the story is to strip away all those barriers and to make you understand they're human beings. Not perfectly good, squeaky clean human beings, flawed human beings like all of us."

On Twitter, I've seen people say they refuse to give Attack the Block the time of day because its ads' imagery of South London "hoodies" violently defending their council estate from alien invaders either reminds them too much of the U.K. riots (which erupted a few weeks after the movie hit American theaters) or appears to condone those riots. They're inanely passing judgment on a movie they haven't seen. Attack the Block is hardly as one-dimensional as they think. It's a story about the consequences of thuggish behavior, whether it's the hoodies' mugging of Sam and Moses' killing of the alien at the start of the film or the looting that went down in the U.K. riots.

"People really suggested the riots in my home town were linked to the movie? Unbelievable," tweeted BBC journalist Ben Fell to an Attack the Block fan after he saw Twitterers denounce the movie before watching it.

To borrow the title and chorus of one of Basement Jaxx's biggest hits, I'd like to say to the haters, "Where's your head at?!"

Related links:
• "Too Much Madness to Explain in One Text: On the U.K. Riots and Attack the Block" [The Playlist]
• "'We're Not All Vile Thugs'" (an Attack the Block cast member blasts both the looters and the London police) [Daily Star]
• "Rap responds to the riots: 'They have to take us seriously'" [Guardian]

(Photo source: RopeofSilicon)

Attack the Block is the best summer movie you've never heard of

Edgar Wright is a filmmaker whose film and TV work I've enjoyed so much that if the Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz director tells me to jump off a bridge, I'll happily do it, but with a bungee cord tied around me. Or if Wright tells me during Doug Loves Movies or on Twitter to see a movie he co-executive-produced like Attack the Block, I'll go see it, even if it's only playing in eight theaters across the country, and I have to hop on a couple of planes, a train and an automobile to get to one of those theaters (luckily, that theater is the Metreon in San Francisco, so I didn't have to go very far).

I first heard about Attack the Block during a Doug Loves Movies episode recorded at SXSW with last-minute guest Simon Pegg (who showed up without his frequent collaborator Wright by his side but busted out a dead-on impression of his absent friend). At SXSW, Attack the Block was so well-received that Sony Pictures' Screen Gems division acquired it for distribution in America, and since its release last week, everyone from Wright himself to author Nelson George has taken to Twitter to urge everyone to see this little film that Screen Gems has barely advertised on TV. Attack the Block contains a wonderful premise that's never been done before (in a South London ghetto, both a predominantly black teenage gang and the white female nurse they mugged are pitted against extraterrestrial monsters) in a genre that's been done to death (the alien invasion genre--between the Steven Spielberg-produced TNT drama Falling Skies and three other Spielberg productions, Super 8, Transformers: Dark of the Moon and Cowboys & Aliens, aliens have had a busy summer). The directorial debut of British comedian Joe Cornish (who also wrote the screenplay), the low-budget actioner has no familiar faces in the cast, aside from Venus star Jodie Whittaker and Wright regular Nick Frost in a comedic bit part as a weed dealer, and most of the stars speak in lower-class British accents as thick as Dizzee Rascal's (for folks like me who are familiar with artists like Dizzee or The Streets, that kind of accent isn't too difficult to decipher, but for the rest of the moviegoing audience in America, it's like Klingon). So no wonder Screen Gems is giving Attack the Block a limited release and cautiously unveiling it to an audience that prefers their alien-invasion flicks to be bigger-budgeted, smoother-accented and well, let's face it, dumber.

Okay, Attack the Block isn't quite Shakespeare, but it has a certain inventiveness and vitality that's missing from all those aforementioned Spielberg-produced 2011 alien-invasion projects that aren't Super 8, although the treacly Falling Skies is redeemed by the presence of Colin Cunningham's not-so-treacly biker character Pope. Cornish's film takes its cues less from Spielberg and more from both Frost's previous film Shaun of the Dead and early John Carpenter, particularly one of my favorite Carpenter movies, the original Assault on Precinct 13, from its ghetto backdrop to its unconventional choice of a hero, a black wannabe thug who's like a mash-up of Precinct 13's two leads, Austin Stoker's untested black cop and Darwin Joston's antiheroic white convict. (Voice actor Yuri Lowenthal of Ben 10 fame calls Attack the Block "the best John Carpenter movie that John Carpenter never made.") Unknown John Boyega is a star in the making in his charismatic debut as Moses (when a mugging victim escapes from him and his gang, dig the way Boyega's laconic character simply commands his gang in his thick accent to "allow it," which must be his favorite phrase). Attack the Block is also like what would have happened if the showrunners of Falling Skies realized it was a mistake to make Noah Wyle's rather blandly written history professor character Mason the lead of the show and decided to shift the focus to Pope. At the start of Attack the Block, Moses is first seen doing something very Pope-like and not-so-heroic--he and his gang are mugging Whittaker's nurse character Sam--when he spots a meteorite crash-landing in his hood, and Moses, distracted by the meteorite and the dog-like creature it carried, runs off to kill the monster, not realizing that his killing of the beastie will ignite an alien invasion.

Moses' trajectory from irresponsible thug to adult who decides to own up to his mistakes and clean up the mess he started when he killed the monster is believable and compelling, thanks to Boyega. He has a couple of intriguing little moments where the badass and authoritative gang leader façade disappears, and with some great acting by Boyega with just his eyes, we see a scared kid who's in over his head and whom the film later reveals--in one of its best scenes--to be much younger than he appears to be.

Another Carpenter-esque element is newcomer Steven Price's effective score, which evokes both instrumental hip-hop and Carpenter's synthesizer scores from his Precinct 13/Halloween heyday. The electronica duo Basement Jaxx brings some star power to the score, which Jaxx co-wrote with Price. (Selections from the Attack the Block score will be added to the Fistful of Soundtracks blocks "Assorted Fistful," "New Cue Revue" and "The Street" in the near future.)

Attack the Block has four (or five or six or seven or eight) less screenwriters than Cowboys & Aliens and was made at a budget that's 10 times less than C&A's, and yet it has a smarter and better-constructed story. One of the cleverest touches in Cornish's script is the symmetry of Moses gaining a better understanding of the grizzly bear-like aliens (and why they're attacking him and everyone around him)(*) with Sam gaining a better understanding of her mugger Moses, who's basically an alien to her. Attack the Block is also about the "aliens" in our own neighborhoods due to racial and class divisions. Forced to turn to Sam for help when one of his cohorts gets injured during an alien attack, Moses realizes the stupidity of picking on good citizens like Sam, while Sam, along with the audience, discovers Moses' kind and vulnerable side, which Tia (Danielle Vitalis), a female friend of the gang's, already sees in Moses, whom Tia has an unspoken crush on. (Here's another reason to dig Attack the Block: it would probably cause that racist dickcheese Lou Dobbs to get his panties in a bunch over the kinds of characters it chooses to sympathize with.) Of course, by the film's climax, Sam and Moses no longer hate each other (enemies who are forced to put aside their differences to fight alien invaders is a thread that also appears in C&A), but Attack the Block wisely avoids the "Mookie and Sal hug and become friends and sing 'We Are the World'" ending that Paramount forced on Spike Lee when he pitched Do the Right Thing to them. Attack the Block is smarter and more ambiguous than that.

(*) I like Attack the Block's version of those pipe-smoking scientist characters in sci-fi B-movies who spout nothing but exposition and were memorably parodied by Pierce Brosnan in Mars Attacks! Instead of regular tobacco, Luke Treadaway's dorky white trust-fund kid Brewis prefers weed--and the sounds of KRS-One on his iPod--and is a zoology student who's watched enough National Geographic specials while baked to figure out why the aliens are invading the block and how to defeat them.

What also makes Attack the Block stand out from this year's batch of alien-invasion flicks is the absence of CGI (I'm not vehemently against CGI--I'm just against it when it's done poorly, which is way too often). All the creature effects in Cornish's film are practical. The alien attacks are fast and brutal, and this is a case where the fast-cutting that so many critics complain about when they see present-day action movies is absolutely necessary because here, it prevents us from noticing how cheap-looking the monsters are--they're essentially just guys running around in eyeless and coal-black bear suits outfitted with ginormous blue neon teeth. But because the Attack the Block aliens aren't CG, there's a realness and formidability to them that's missing from the CG creatures in films like Ang Lee's Hulk and Louis Leterrier's Incredible Hulk reboot, which both contain monster battles I've failed to get invested in and have found to be a chore to watch because the CGI in those sequences is as fake-looking as the cel-animated flying sequences in the '40s live-action Superman serials.

I'm not so worried about the fate of Attack the Block during its theatrical release here in America (though it played to a largely empty theater when I saw it, Screen Gems will expand its release to six more cities on August 19) because like other recent cult films that didn't attract huge crowds during their initial release, it'll eventually find a much bigger audience on Blu-ray and DVD. For now, it's a best-kept secret among us fans of little films that outshine most of the better-known and somewhat similar blockbusters they're competing against at the box office.