The best thing about Pee-wee's Big Holiday is that it will introduce a new generation of viewers to Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

"You ever been in a fight?," wonders Joe Manganiello--who stars as himself in the new Netflix original movie Pee-wee's Big Holiday--to Pee-wee Herman (Paul Reubens), the Magic Mike star's new best friend, as Joe realizes Pee-wee has never left his hometown of Fairville and has basically lived an uneventful life.

"No," replies Pee-wee.

"You ever broken a rule?"

"No."

"You ever had two women fight over you?"

But this time Pee-wee has to pause for a couple of beats to try to remember. If you've been down with Pee-wee since the classic 1985 Tim Burton movie Pee-wee's Big Adventure (or maybe even as far back as The Pee-wee Herman Show, Reubens' early '80s L.A. stage show at the Roxy, which the Groundlings alum revived on Broadway to much success in 2010), you might recall that the bow-tied man-child had to choose between the affections of a really hot Italian trapeze artist played by Valeria Golino--her hotness is the most rewatchable part of 1988's poorly received Big Top Pee-wee, the last Pee-wee flick--and a schoolteacher played by Penelope Ann Miller during Big Top. In this age of meta-humor permeating everything from Rick and Morty to Deadpool, you'd expect Pee-wee to break the fourth wall, wink at the audience and make a reference to that love triangle from 28 years ago.

But Pee-wee doesn't do so. He instead replies with "Have I? No." Or maybe Reubens is indeed referencing the last movie, and the brief pause is his way of saying, "Yeah, the public was right: Big Top Pee-wee was kind of a mistake. But enough about that movie!"

Whatever the case, Pee-wee movies aren't known for being constantly self-aware and meta like the Muppet movies. Pee-wee's Big Holiday, which centers on Pee-wee's cross-country odyssey to attend Joe's star-studded birthday party at his Manhattan penthouse, doesn't really acknowledge any of the events from the prior Pee-wee movies because it actually takes place in its own separate continuity, just like how the Randal Kleiser-directed Big Top doesn't take place in the same continuity as Pee-wee's Big Adventure's. Certain traits of Pee-wee's will always remain constant--the red bow tie, the too-small gray suit, the white shoes, the mischievous giggling, the Rube Goldberg gadgets, the weird animal sidekicks (whether they're puppets or actual animals)--but Reubens has interestingly always rebooted his own character in each Pee-wee project, including the beloved and timeless Pee-wee's Playhouse. Even after 38 years of man-child antics, Pee-wee's basically still a work-in-progress.

You know the amiable Pee-wee who hosted a Saturday morning kids' show that was meant for all ages--aside from an occasional double entendre related to Miss Yvonne, the most beautiful woman in Puppetland, or an L.A. Law-era Jimmy Smits cameoing as a repairman who catches Miss Yvonne's eye and suggestively talks about his "tools" and knowing how to use them? That Pee-wee was quite different from the more devilish Pee-wee who attached mirrors to his shoes to peek at girls' panties in the not-for-kids Pee-wee Herman Show, which was a parody of the type of old-fashioned, Howdy Doody-ish kids' show Pee-wee's Playhouse would later channel in a much less parodic fashion that was also still somehow subversive, due mostly to the presence of then-unprecedented-on-American-TV characters like a black cowboy and an animated Latino superhero who speaks only in unsubtitled Spanish.



One of the funniest running jokes in Pee-wee's Big Adventure centers on Pee-wee's obliviousness to how much Dottie (future legendary voice actor E.G. Daily), the pretty bike shop employee who tries to cajole him into taking her out to the drive-in, is in love with him. He's more in love with his bike. It's a riff on the weird behavior of little boys who think the opposite sex is yucky and haven't quite figured out yet that the opposite sex--or whatever sex they'll later become attracted to--isn't really so yucky. In another bit of soft rebooting way before the term existed, Big Top rebooted the "Ew, girls are gross" Pee-wee as a slightly more mature Pee-wee who juggles two women and gets laid off-screen.

Big Top turned Pee-wee into yet another conventional rom-com lead, and it wasn't what the public wanted from Reubens at the time. They weren't interested in a more sensitive and lovey-dovey Pee-wee (they also clearly wanted to see the playhouse itself make the jump to the big screen, not Pee-wee in some '50s circus movie). The public was right: Big Top's elimination of one of Big Adventure's best running jokes ended up sapping Pee-wee of a lot of the comic anarchy that made Big Adventure so enjoyable and endlessly rewatchable.

But Reubens' refusal to repeat himself in Big Top, even when it results in artistic failure, is also one of the most admirable things about the Pee-wee movies as a comedy franchise in a world of comedy franchises that misguidedly believe that constantly rehashing jokes is a wise creative move. When the audience wanted Pee-wee to remain asexual, Reubens pushed against that. Or when the audience was itching for the immensely popular likes of Chairy, Pterri and Conky 2000 to share the big screen with Pee-wee, Reubens gave them a talking pig instead.

Fuck the #WhiteOscars: A mash-up of Jill St. John's 1966 Oscar striptease and AlunaGeorge is far more satisfying in its two little minutes than the Oscars will ever be

Somebody who goes by "LOSANGELENA" has combined two of my favorite things: the atrocious, unintentionally funny and long-out-of-print 1966 showbiz melodrama The Oscar and the British R&B duo AlunaGeorge's 2014 joint "Supernatural." Actually, The Oscar isn't exactly one of my favorite things. I wouldn't say I like The Oscar. What I do like is chuckling over almost every inept element of this Harlan Ellison-scripted, MST3K-worthy movie, from Stephen Boyd's overacting and his weird Hayden Christensen-esque voice (while he shrilly plays the part of Frankie Fane, an ambitious Hollywood asshole who ends up becoming an Oscar contender) to the equally shrill Tony Bennett's visible nervousness in his first acting role.

It's no wonder that the singer of "I Left My Heart in San Francisco" and "Rags to Riches" never acted again, aside from his cameos during The Simpsons, Muppets Most Wanted and Alec Baldwin's endlessly quotable "Tony Bennett Show" sketch on SNL. The only stars in The Oscar who give what could be considered non-cringeworthy and not-so-clichéd performances are a non-comedic Milton Berle as an oddly principled talent agent and an equally non-comedic Jack Soo as an Asian houseboy who--and this is kind of remarkable because this is a movie from the not-exactly-racially-enlightened '60s--doesn't have an accent. It's funny how the two stand-up comics in the Oscar cast--two guys who weren't known for possessing dramatic chops when they were alive--give the least cringeworthy and most naturalistic performances in the whole movie.

(Photo source: Catfan's Feline Fatale Follies)

The best way to approach this kind of soapy "I don't give a shit who I bang or who I ruin to climb my way to the top" material is to do it as a comedy. That's why I love Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, which is so razor-sharp in its humor that it's made it difficult to take any musician biopic seriously anymore. Walk Hard takes musician biopic clichés like any scene where a white musician as a kid appropriates black musicians' sounds, basically says to the audience, "Hasn't this always looked ridiculous and stupid to you?," and then proceeds to make those clichés look even more ridiculous and stupid.

Instead, The Oscar plays it completely dead serious when it should be, oh, I don't know, more like Soapdish or the forgotten WB single-camera sitcom Grosse Pointe, which was basically Soapdish for the 90210/Dawson's Creek crowd--or better yet, more like John Waters. In fact, in an alternate universe far more entertaining than our own, The Oscar was probably directed by John Waters instead of being under the hacky, mid-'60s network TV-ish direction of D.O.A. co-writer Russell Rouse, with Divine in the role of a feminized Frankie Fane. And then in another alternate universe even more entertaining than that one, The Oscar was directed by Russ Meyer. Either of those guys would have transformed The Oscar into a comedic masterpiece.

This 1966 atrocity--which would have swept the Razzies had the Razzies existed in the '60s--is not on DVD. The only place where viewers can catch The Oscar is TCM, which shows a terrible-looking print. That's where I saw The Oscar and realized that as a dramatic actor, Tony Bennett is a decent watercolor painter. The movie features a striptease by future Bond girl Jill St. John that I assume was racy for its pre-Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?/Blow-Up time, and that's the scene from The Oscar that "LOSANGELENA" perfectly mashed up with singer Aluna Francis and producer George Reid's pulsating "Supernatural," along with footage from some late '60s Italian sexploitation flick I'm not familiar with.



I get more enjoyment out of the mash-up of The Oscar and AlunaGeorge than I ever would out of the tedious Oscar telecast--which I haven't watched in eons--and its annual array of frustrating snubs and overall out-of-touchness. Instead of dozing off during the 20,528th Chuck Workman montage of the night or fuming over "Selma is a well-crafted movie, but there’s no art to it" (I'd like to know what drugs that Academy member was on) and the absences of Selma star David Oyelowo and his director Ava DuVernay in the Oscar categories (plus the absences of a few other actors of color who delivered exceptional performances that went unrecognized), I'll be spending time with The Walking Dead, where an Asian American guy gets to be a hero who gets the girl for a change and actors of color like Steven Yeun and Danai Gurira receive far juicier material than the hackneyed kind the Academy would rather pay attention to when one or two actors of color actually do enter their often fucked-up radar.

TCM celebrates 20 years of being more than just a channel full of old American movies only old white people like

(Photo source: The Branding Source)

Turner Classic Movies first launched on April 14, 1994 with Robert Osborne as its host, so the channel turns 20 years old today. I don't have cable anymore, but I was able to hold onto hours and hours of unwatched programming in my DVR (whattup, Pacquiao/Clottey fight), and I DVR'd so many movies off TCM it was as if I still had access to TCM long after I lost all those channels. I don't like really old things--especially old racist movies--and TCM airs a lot of old racist movies. Yet it remains one of my favorite channels because it does much more than air the usual old racist movies. (Most of its audience is also surprisingly young. Two-thirds of the channel's estimated 62 million viewers each month are ages 18 to 49, according to the New York Times' 2013 piece on TCM.)

During Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, Hispanic Heritage Month and Black History Month, TCM devotes hours of programming to works featuring actors of color (or made by filmmakers of color) and gets film historians of color to sit with Osborne and provide their input on those films. It's aired cult favorites and obscure gems like The Crimson Kimono and Killer of Sheep that I was dying to see and weren't available on DVD when they aired (before a manufactured-on-demand service like Warner Archive came along to rescue many of those titles from unavailability) or were difficult to get access to on Netflix because they'd get stamped with that dreaded "Very long wait" status. The channel frequently exposes you to marathons of works by filmmakers you wish you were more familiar with. TCM is like film school without the outrageous tuition fees.

Ted Turner's movie channel isn't the first basic cable channel to broadcast movies uncut, commercial-free and in their original aspect ratios, but as competitors like TCM's precursor AMC, IFC and FXM succumbed to censoring their movies and inserting commercials to stay afloat, TCM has stubbornly stuck to its principles of never laying a finger on its movies (if a movie from the '70s, '80s or '90s is full of profanities, TCM airs it only late at night). Instead of ads, TCM makes a profit through experiential marketing, or as the Times explains that lofty term, "a guided tour of New York movie sites and sights on a sightseeing bus, to be offered by TCM and On Location Tours three days a week, beginning on Thursday; an annual Hollywood film festival in April; a yearly TCM Classic Cruise in December; an auction of movie memorabilia, planned for November, in partnership with Bonhams; screenings of movies like Frankenstein and To Kill a Mockingbird in theaters around the country; and DVD collections sold online and by retailers." As Osborne told the Times, all those things are "anything we can do to keep the company making enough of a profit so we don’t have to have commercials, sell underarm deodorants and all that."

Isn't Osborne just the coolest host? He's the anti-Rex Reed, as in he knows what he's talking about and he isn't a racist douchebag. And when he interviews older movie stars or filmmakers, he's the anti-James Lipton, as in he's respectful to them without coming off as creepy and he doesn't do that stupid "I'd like you to respond as your character from blankety-blank" thing. It's amazing that Osborne's still the face of TCM, even though he's started cutting back on his on-air time due to his age and recent health problems. The day when he either completely retires or dies is going to be a very sad one for TCM. I'm grateful to TCM for the following 20 moments in the channel's history (16 of them are movies I first saw on TCM and the rest of them are either special programming events or activities outside the channel schedule).

The Crimson Kimono
Asian America loves it when a young Asian American actor gets to defy Hollywood's tendency to emasculate Asian guys and play the romantic lead on TV for once, whether it's John Cho hooking up with Gabrielle Union on FlashForward or currently, Steven Yeun romancing Lauren Cohan on The Walking Dead. But decades before Cho or Yeun, James Shigeta actually got the girl in Samuel Fuller's amazing 1959 noir The Crimson Kimono. As Philip W. Chung wrote in YOMYOMF, "Now Fuller wasn't perfect. His House of Bamboo (1955) was a typical white man in Asia action thriller, and in China Gate (1957), he couldn't resist putting Angie Dickinson in yellow face, but overall, his films were pretty progressive." And The Crimson Kimono is a great example of Fuller's progressiveness, as Shigeta's Nisei homicide detective Joe Kojaku falls for art expert Christine Downs (Victoria Shaw) while he and his partner (James Corbett) investigate a stripper's murder in Little Tokyo, a part of L.A. that receives a remarkably non-stereotypical treatment from Fuller's film. As Ryan Reft said in his piece on The Crimson Kimono for KCET, "Fuller attempts to distinguish Little Tokyo, but not in any exoticized way; these are just normal Americans going about their business." The Crimson Kimono is one of several Fuller films I was introduced to by TCM, and it's made me want to see more of his works.

Killer of Sheep
A black-and-white 1977 gem that UCLA grad student Charles Burnett made about the working class in Watts, Killer of Sheep wasn't released theatrically until 2007 and is a landmark achievement in both African American cinema and indie cinema I was first exposed to through a TCM marathon of Burnett works hosted by Burnett and Osborne. Too many contemporary American films that are centered on communities of color are heavy on the speechifying or pandering and do more telling than showing. Killer of Sheep simply shows. At one point, Burnett's camera captures a little girl (dog mask-wearing Angela Burnett, the director's daughter) playing with her doll and clapping and mumble-singing along to Earth, Wind & Fire's "Reasons." The kid's off-key sing-along and a wordless slow dance between her parents to Dinah Washington's "This Bitter Earth" are examples of how Killer of Sheep establishes the film's setting and mood more effectively than any piece of lengthy dialogue or voiceover ever could. Another moment along those lines is the visual of kids leaping from rooftop to rooftop--hey, they're the first parkourers--and it's such a striking shot that it's no wonder Mos Def turned it into the cover of his 2009 album The Ecstatic.

Three Days of the Condor
I first caught Three Days of the Condor back-to-back with Marathon Man as part of a TCM night of '70s political thrillers, one of the channel's countless, cleverly programmed theme nights. Long before Robert Redford gave one of the best performances in a Marvel Studios blockbuster in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, he was attempting to outwit assassins hired by his own CIA employers to snuff him out in this enjoyable 1975 conspiracy thriller that heavily influenced the Russo brothers when they directed The Winter Soldier. While Chris Evans is joined in his crusade against HYDRA by a nicely diverse cast of allies (Scarlett Johansson, Anthony Mackie, Samuel L. Jackson and Cobie Smulders), Redford, the lone survivor of a CIA office massacre, has only his wits to keep him alive. The silliest part of Three Days of the Condor is that Redford's supposed to be playing a book nerd, and when you think "book nerd," you don't picture Redford. You picture sickly Steve Rogers before the super-soldier serum transformed him into Captain America. But it's a testament to Redford's skills as an actor that he makes you buy his character's nerdiness and inexperience in the field despite his movie-star looks.

Godzilla (1954)
If your idea of Godzilla is that it's a cheesy and campy franchise, prepare to be surprised by how dark and suffused with post-Hiroshima/Nagasaki paranoia the first and most serious of the Toho Godzilla films really is. Monsters director Gareth Edwards' upcoming Godzilla remake is reportedly modeled after the 1954 Godzilla, so if you're turnt up by the recent Godzilla trailer footage, check out the 1954 film to get a taste of what Edwards intends to accomplish with his gritty remake. The version of the 1954 film I saw on TCM was the original Japanese version, so if you wind up with the version where Perry Mason is frequently seen interrupting Zilla's rampage, get the hell rid of it.

Dersu Uzala
My journalism teacher Conn Hallinan once recommended Dersu Uzala to me in class while we were discussing a capsule I wrote in the campus paper about the video release of one of my favorite films, Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai. So when the 1975 Kurosawa film turned up on TCM 17 years after he first mentioned it to me, I finally saw it and was particularly impressed by the nail-biting sequence where Russian explorer Arseniev (Yuri Solomin) and his Siberian guide (Maksim Munzuk), the titular woodsman, battle both the harsh winter winds and their own physical exhaustion to build a straw hut in order to save themselves. It's one of my favorite sequences in a Kurosawa film.

(Photo source: DVD Beaver)

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow
Like Kurosawa, Vittorio De Sica, the director of Bicycle Thieves, is another foreign filmmaker whose works I got to see on TCM. I don't think I've ever seen a film like De Sica's Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, a 1963 triptych of stories each set in a different part of Italy, with Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni starring as a different couple in each one. Loren's striptease towards the end of the film still sizzles despite its chasteness.

Juggernaut
Why do the only good disaster movies--Juggernaut and A Night to Remember--both come from the U.K.?

Lord Love a Duck
Roddy McDowall is the least convincing high-schooler ever. When McDowall did Lord Love a Duck, he was 90210 years old.

James Wong Howe was one of Hollywood's greatest Asian American craftsmen, so because it's Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, peep Howe's handiwork below

Sweet Smell of Success (Photo source: DVD Beaver)

The Elmer Bernstein-scored Sweet Smell of Success is one of my favorite older movies because it's cynical, hard-bitten, pre-curse-words-allowed-in-movies Hollywood screenwriting at its best. Its cinematographer was James Wong Howe.

Sweet Smell of Success (Photo source: DVD Beaver)

Sweet Smell of Success (Photo source: DVD Beaver)

Howe's sterling work in black and white also graced the first Thin Man installment and Hud, two films that I first saw on TCM and are always worth revisiting on that channel, partly because of Howe's cinematography.

The Thin Man (Photo source: FilmFanatic.org)

The Thin Man (Photo source: FilmFanatic.org)

Hud (Photo source: This Distracted Globe)

Hud (Photo source: This Distracted Globe)

In 2004, I wrote and recorded three Asian Pacific American Heritage Month interstitials for the Fistful of Soundtracks channel. One interstitial centered on Howe. The other two were about Margaret Cho and Homicide: Life on the Street writer James Yoshimura. Below is the entire three-minute interstitial I did on Howe. The last time I heard my Howe segment was about eight years ago. I forgot that I worked Method Man's "Bring the Pain" into the segment. Nice choice for a bed, 2004 me.

Take it away, partial transcript of 2004 me:

"Howe was one of the first cinematographers who perfected deep focus photography, in which both the foreground and the distant background are clearly seen. Another Howe innovation was the way he shot the boxing sequences in Body and Soul. A boxer himself when he was a teenager, Howe grabbed a pair of roller skates, climbed into the ring with the actors and filmed the action with a handheld camera. Though only five-foot-two, Howe was a badass. He was described by those who knew him as a tough perfectionist and a taskmaster. He was openly hostile to film crews. He was particularly hostile towards racists and had to deal with them on and off the sets. In an L.A. Times article, Howe's Caucasian widow recalled an incident at a restaurant in which a bigot tried to humiliate Howe and his wife by shoving them off their seats. Howe got the best of the bully using his high school boxing skills… Howe died in 1976, leaving behind a body of work that influenced cinematographers everywhere. Howe was a man who worked hard with his lights and camera to capture beauty, even if it was in a town that exhibited the ugliest behavior towards him and his people."

Come on, everybody, wear your roller skates today. (Photo source: Film Monitor)

James Wong Howe prepares to film The Thin Man on the 1934 movie's set. (Photo source: Dr. Macro's High Quality Movie Scans)

An irresistible impulse to play it again and again: Anatomy of a Murder, which just got Criterion-ized, featured the first Hollywood film score by a black composer

Anatomy of a Murder star Lee Remick, Duke Ellington and bassist Jimmy Woode

Otto Preminger's 1959 film Anatomy of a Murder, which finally received the Criterion Collection treatment last week, is a classic of the courtroom genre. Every time Anatomy of a Murder turns up on TCM, I get an irresistible impulse a la the late Ben Gazzara's hotheaded soldier client character to stop whatever I'm doing and revisit the entire (and rather lengthy) film or at least a chunk of it.

Criterion posted three reasons why AOAM continues to shine, especially in a bothersome age of right-leaning, constantly-parodied-during-NTSF:SD:SUV:: procedurals, or as I like to call them, "Dad shows."



I second those reasons, but I'd combine reasons #1 and #3 so that it's "It gets the law right and it's not all black and white" and give the reason #3 slot to Duke Ellington's sensational, Grammy-winning score. It captures well both the tranquil Sunday-morning-stroll-through-the-town-square side (like in "Sunswept Sunday" and "Low Key Lightly") and the seamy white-trash side of the film's small-town Michigan backdrop (some, like Wynton Marsalis, think that the score is poorly edited into the film, a gripe that Marsalis expressed while discussing Ellington's score in the liner notes of Sony Legacy's 1999 AOAM CD reissue, which can be heard during the "AFOS Prime" block on A Fistful of Soundtracks).

Besides introducing then-controversial words like "intercourse," "contraceptive," "spermatogenesis" and "panties" into movie houses where conservatives reacted to hearing those words by crapping said panties, AOAM is notable for containing the first original score for a Hollywood film written by an African American composer. (A year before Ellington's effort, Miles Davis contributed a score to a French film, Louis Malle's Elevator to the Gallows, a.k.a. Ascenseur pour l'échafaud.) It's fitting that Criterion drops the AOAM Blu-ray during Black History Month because of that milestone.

The first Hollywood score by an African American is distinguished by a catchy theme Ellington described as "gutbucket." Written for the bass and first known as "Pie Eye's Blues," the composition wasn't originally intended to be the film's main theme. It was supposed to represent Pie Eye, the roadhouse bandleader character played by Ellington during his cameo in AOAM (in South Africa, Ellington's scene with Jimmy Stewart was banned from the film because interracial two-man piano playing was apparently too disturbing for them). But then someone in the AOAM crew changed the order of the cues ("Was this Duke's idea?," wondered CD reissue producer Phil Schaap in the reissue liner notes) and must have found "Pie Eye's Blues" to be the perfect fit with those jazzy and striking Saul Bass opening titles, and the rest is history.



Then Sir Duke handed AOAM's main theme over to Peggy Lee, who added lyrics to the melody in her cover version, which was titled "I'm Gonna Go Fishin'," a nice reference to the film it originated from and its main character's love of fishing.

After Ellington's AOAM score, in walked Quincy Jones (who had an impressive hot streak of crime or comedy film and TV series scores from the '60s to the '70s) and then the slightly less prolific blaxploitation-era likes of Isaac Hayes, Curtis Mayfield, Johnny Pate and J.J. Johnson (while over on the Asian American side, Japanese American composer Paul Chihara contributed scores to Death Race 2000 and Prince of the City). Then in the '90s, Stanley Clarke, the still-active Terence Blanchard (who did a cover of the AOAM main title theme for his 1999 Jazz in Film album) and even RZA followed in Ellington and Jones' footsteps. They all penned great original scores, but there needs to be more film and TV composers of color besides those maestros.

Court's adjourned.

"Grandpa, tell us the story again about the man whose life got flipped, turned upside down": 10 amusing tweets related to TV theme music

--recent New York Times Magazine profile subject and Office star/writer Mindy Kaling

--Patton Oswalt and A.V. Club writer Noel Murray on TCM's TV ratings graphics music

--Patton Oswalt and John Fugelsang on CSI and The Who

"If I wanted Chekhov, I'd have worn my polo neck": The best existing songs that are theme music for shows you've probably never heard of

1. "Somebody Start a Fight or Something" by TISM (The Green Room with Paul Provenza)
This rousing 2004 track by the Aussie alt-rock band TISM delivers a message of "Drop your pretentious airs and start keeping it real" ("Listen, motherfucker, let me make this clear/I've had your fucking poetry up to here... If I wanted Chekhov, I'd have worn my polo neck"), so it's the perfect theme music for a frank and uncensored Showtime stand-up comic panel show that's the anti-Comics Unleashed with Byron Allen.

In other words, the stand-ups are required to have an actual conversation with each other, instead of pretending they're having a conversation when what they're really doing is just reciting their routines. Moderator Paul Provenza's anti-Comics Unleashed format has resulted in lively and thought-provoking discussions like the one Provenza, Bill Burr, Lizz Winstead, Russell Peters, Colin Quinn, Caroline Rhea and Tony Clifton (!) had about Tracy Morgan's apologies for his homophobic jokes during a recent episode that took place at Montreal's Just for Laughs festival. (Also in that same episode, Peters, an Indian Canadian comic, gives the funniest description of what porn flicks are like in a country where its movie stars can't even kiss onscreen. I can't do Peters' Indian porn joke any justice if I attempt to repeat it, so I won't attempt to.)

During an interview to promote The Green Room, Provenza said one of the purposes of his show is to get stand-ups who are always "on" to leave behind their one-liner comfort zones or stage personas and just be themselves. The frequent archness of the present-day stand-up world is a trend he dislikes:

Many comedians these days "take on characters. It's a lot of winking and nodding. Some comedians almost even apologize for the fact that they're working in the form of comedy, and they make fun of the form as they're doing it. That's the overriding trend. So what you get is people who are not actually talking from the heart. They're always putting some layer of detachment from their real, you know, emotional and intellectual passions."

In other words, he wants them to pull no punches, whether it's onstage or on The Green Room. Somebody start a fight or something.



2. "Yalili Ya Aini" by Jah Wobble's Invaders of the Heart (The Smartest Man in the World)
I first heard this hypnotic 1994 track by former Public Image Ltd bassist Jah Wobble, his band Invaders of the Heart and singer Natacha Atlas (Allmusic calls it "one of the best bits of sexy, North African lurch that Wobble and [guitarist Justin] Adams have ever set to tape") while tuning in to SomaFM's Secret Agent, which has it on constant rotation. So when it wound up as the theme music for comedian Greg Proops' stream-of-consciousness podcast The Smartest Man in the World, I thought, "Sweet! It's that Arabian-sounding chillout joint from Secret Agent with the title that always escapes me."

WHAT IF... Dick Tracy co-starred Bernadette Peters instead of Madonna?

Steve Palopoli once said Return of the Jedi directed by David Lynch--who rejected George Lucas' offer to direct the threequel--was one of his picks for Best Cult Movies That Don't Exist. I told Steve I would have loved to have seen Ragtime directed by the filmmaker who almost directed it, Robert Altman, Sergio Leone's Leningrad, Resident Evil directed by George Romero, The Phantom directed by Joe Dante and Blazing Saddles starring Richard Pryor instead of his replacement Cleavon Little (although Little was great as Black Bart).

Other movies from alternate universes I would have dug are Out of Sight co-starring Carla Gugino (the small-screen Karen Sisco) instead of Jennifer Lopez and Dick Tracy co-starring Bernadette Peters instead of Madonna.

After rewatching Warren Beatty's suddenly ubiquitous Dick Tracy (it aired during TCM's Dick Tracy movie marathon yesterday afternoon and again on Syfy this morning because when I think sci-fi, I think Dick Tracy), I checked out film historian Glenn Erickson's DVD Savant review of the 1990 adaptation of Chester Gould's comic strip. I agreed with Erickson's comment on Madonna's performance as femme fatale Breathless Mahoney: "you can't help but picture Bernadette Peters in the role, singing better and being sexier too."

Peters, a frequent Stephen Sondheim interpreter, would have been perfect as Breathless, who sings several original Sondheim-penned tunes during Dick Tracy. But Peters wasn't banging Beatty at the time, so we were stuck with Madonna.

A better actress than Madonna (whose best performance was in her big-studio follow-up to Dick Tracy, A League of Their Own), Peters would have been more at ease than Madonna with the humorous side of the mostly humorless Breathless role. Plus, even though Peters is older, she's far more attractive (she's so hot in Mel Brooks' Silent Movie). I'm entertained by Peters' vocal skills--and how her dress barely stays on--during this taste of what Dick Tracy would have been like with Peters as Breathless. It's her performance of Dick Tracy's "Sooner or Later" from a concert at the Royal Festival Hall in London.

"In this movie, this song was sung by a blond bombshell... not me," Peters says in my favorite part of her intro to "Sooner or Later." "Although we both have religious names."

If you can find Disney Comics' Star Trek: Countdown-style two-part prequel to Beatty's Dick Tracy, it's worth checking out. I remember buying as a kid the Dick Tracy: Big City Blues and Dick Tracy vs. the Underworld graphic novels, which were my first exposure to the art of then-rising star Kyle Baker. What I would give to see Baker's original cut of the prequel, before the famously narcissistic Beatty insisted on forcing Baker to redo the comics so that Dick's likeness would look more like Beatty than the Chester Gould version.

AFOS: "Living in Paradise" playlist

Airing tomorrow at 10am and 3pm Pacific on the Fistful of Soundtracks channel is the Fistful of Soundtracks: The Series episode "Living in Paradise" (WEB19) from July 21-27, 2003. WEB19 was a salute to one of my favorite cable channels, TCM, the greatest non-porno, non-sports channel ever. The cleverly programmed, commercial-free channel celebrated its 15th anniversary in April and launched the Classic Film Union, a film geeks' social networking site, earlier this month.

I borrowed the "Living in Paradise" title from an Elvis Costello track. I briefly went through a phase where I was naming AFOS episodes after Costello and Clash songs.

The first half of this playlist consists of themes from movies I first saw on TCM, from classics like The Great Escape and The Asphalt Jungle to lesser-known flicks like Richard Lester's The Knack... And How to Get It, which is now on Hulu. The Knack opens with my favorite John Barry movie theme that wasn't written for a 007 film.

1. Elmer Bernstein, "Main Title," The Great Escape, Rykodisc
2. Elmer Bernstein, "Main Title and Calvera," The Magnificent Seven, Rykodisc
3. Miklós Rózsa, "The Asphalt Jungle (Main Title)" (from The Asphalt Jungle), Crime Jazz: Music in the Second Degree, Rhino
4. John Barry, "The Knack (Main Theme)," The Knack... And How to Get It, Rykodisc
5. Henry Mancini and His Orchestra, "It Had Better Be Tonight (Instrumental)," The Pink Panther, BMG France
6. John Morris, "Springtime for Hitler," Music and Dialogue from Mel Brooks' The Producers, Razor & Tie
7. John Barry featuring the Voices of the Accademia Monteverdiana, "Chinon/Eleanor's Arrival," The Lion in Winter, Legacy/Columbia
8. Mark Knopfler, "Going Home (Theme of the Local Hero)," Local Hero, Warner Bros.
9. Duke Ellington Orchestra, "Main Title and Anatomy of a Murder," Anatomy of a Murder, Columbia/Legacy
10. Ray Charles, "In the Heat of the Night" (from In the Heat of the Night), In the Heat of the Night/They Call Me MISTER Tibbs!, Rykodisc
11. Miklós Rózsa, "Overture," King of Kings, Turner Classic Movies Music/Rhino Movie Music
12. Herbie Hancock, "Bring Down the Birds" (from Blow-Up), Blue Break Beats, Volume 4, Blue Note
13. The M-G-M Studio Orchestra, "Main Title (alternate version)," Singin' in the Rain: The Deluxe Fiftieth Anniversary Edition, Turner Classic Movies Music/Rhino Movie Music
14. Robert Preston, "The Shady Dame from Seville (Rehearsal)," Victor/Victoria, Turner Classic Movies Music/Rhino Movie Music
15. Miklós Rózsa, "Finale (extended choral track)," Ben-Hur, Turner Classic Movies Music/Rhino Movie Music

Repeats of A Fistful of Soundtracks: The Series air Wednesdays at 10am and 3pm.

Ricardo Montalban (1920-2009) and Patrick McGoohan (1928-2009)

As I found out about Montalban's death, TCM happened to be airing the MGM: When the Lion Roars documentary, which features the former MGM contract player and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan star as an interviewee. The lengthy doc traces the rise and fall of "the Tiffany studio," and Montalban, in his smooth Latin playah voice, laments how "the lion stopped roaring."

Montalban was one of the few remaining survivors of the era of the studio system--a system that both helped and hurt his career. In an interesting 2002 Palm Beach Post article that unfortunately is no longer online, Montalban, who at the time was promoting TCM's Hispanic Heritage Month tribute to Hispanics in cinema, recalled his days as one of Hollywood's few Latino movie stars:

Montalban, a star in his native Mexico -- his parents were Castilian Spanish, but his physician father moved the family to Mexico before he was born -- had his troubles in Hollywood. When he was signed by MGM in 1946, there was a movement afoot to change his name to -- wait for it -- Ricky Martin.

"They couldn't pronounce my name," he says today. "Joe Pasternak, the producer, would introduce me to people as Richard Mandelbaum. Eight times out of 10, I was Richard Mandelbaum, but a couple of times I was Richard Mountbatten, and at least once he said Richard Musclebound. He had a hell of a time with it.

"So they thought my name was impossible, and they were going to change it, but then they consulted with the man who was in charge of the Latin America market, and he said, 'He has a following here, you can't change his name.' And that's the only reason I managed to retain my dignity."

The studios' strengths were in stereotyping -- the blond bombshell, the ultra-masculine leading man, etc. -- so the Hispanics they had under contract were no exception.

"I approached directors, producers, executives and tried to convince them to create other characters besides the Mexican bandit and the hot senorita. Call it ignorance, but they would tell me, 'We're trying to put as many colorful characters in the movies as we can.' They called these stereotypes 'colorful.' "

Not only that, but Montalban was aware of an even subtler prejudice. Montalban played Cubans, played Argentinians, played Brazilians, but it took years before he could play a Mexican.

"Mexico didn't sound quite right, even though we have the best muralists in the world, some of the best painters, the best heart specialists. Where were they on the screen, people of dignity, wealth and culture? Or even the very honorable middle-class man who struggles to give his kids a better education. 'An architect is not colorful,' they would tell me."

MGM didn't stint on Montalban; he worked opposite the studio's top leading ladies, from Lana Turner to Jane Powell, and was given several films in the early '50s as a stand-alone lead, though he points out that they were B films.

Even when Montalban resented the roles he was assigned, his options were limited. "When I would say, I don't want to do it, it's vapid, they would say, 'All right, you don't have to do it. But we'll put you on suspension for six months.' So that vapid role became a great role. I had a wife and four children; I never went on suspension because I couldn't afford it."

There was no cohesion within the Hispanic community in Hollywood -- everybody worked at different studios, and went home to their different houses. That would eventually lead Montalban to found Nosotros, an organization to promote Hispanic talent so that, as he puts it, "we could be judged on our ability or lack of ability, not by our names."

Paul Newman (1925-2008)

If you've never seen the Newman cult favorite Slap Shot, you're missing out on one of the 10 greatest sports flicks of all time. After reading about the death of Newman, whose performances I've always enjoyed watching because of what Alan Sepinwall calls Newman's "anti-vanity," I immediately popped into my DVD player the only Newman movie in my DVD collection, Slap Shot. (I wish I had a copy of Nobody's Fool in my collection, but Slap Shot sufficed.)

Every time someone posts a list of their favorite sports movies, they tend to pick the earnest ones (Rocky, Rudy, Field of Dreams, The Pride of the Yankees) as their favorites. You know, movies that make grown men cry? To borrow a classic Kay Howard line from Homicide: Life on the Street, "Oh, make me puke!" I prefer the more off-kilter and humorous sports flicks like Slap Shot, Diggstown, Breaking Away and Shaolin Soccer.

Nobody's Fool may be my favorite Newman movie, but Slap Shot contains my favorite Newman character, Reggie Dunlop, the aging hockey coach with a rather relaxed attitude towards on-the-rink behavior. Dunlop's insults are so delightfully foul-mouthed and politically incorrect that I'd hate to see what this movie is like when it airs on basic cable ("You know, your son looks like a fuddy-duddy to me. You better get married again 'cause he's gonna wind up with somebody's sock in his mouth before you can say Jack Robinson.").

I doubt TCM will include Slap Shot in its inevitable Newman marathon tribute. Even though TCM never censors its movies, I don't think they've ever aired a movie that's filled to the brim with F-bombs like Slap Shot.

Moviegoers in 1959 winced when they saw Jimmy Stewart discuss panties and sperm in the courtroom in Anatomy of a Murder. They probably had a coronary when they heard Newman curse up a storm in Slap Shot.

No wonder Newman considered Dunlop to be his favorite character and called Slap Shot the most fun movie shoot he ever did. I guess he didn't mind wearing what has to be some of the ugliest pants in movie history. (Plaid trousers? That pair of bell-bottom leather pants Newman tried to rock later in the film? Not even someone as cool as Newman in Slap Shot, Kurt Russell in Escape from New York or Eddie Murphy in his concert movies could persuade me to slip into a pair of leather pants. There are two things I'll never wear: leather pants and open-toed shoes. They're the least manly-looking pieces of fashion ever invented.)

It's interesting that Newman's final role was in another sports movie (and an animated one too!), Cars. I'm glad he went out as a talking Hudson Hornet instead of a planet-eating lardass.

Sunset Gun: Better Know a Blogroll Link, Part 3

In addition to running the Sunset Gun film and music blog, Kim Morgan frequently contributes posts about film to The Huffington Post and MSN Movies. She was the "DVDuesday" reviewer on The Screen Savers before the program morphed into Attack of the Show (Film Threat's Chris Gore assumed the "DVDuesday" duties after her departure).

Hey Robert Osborne, hire Kim to be your next co-host on TCM's The Essentials. Unlike current Essentials co-host Rose McGowan, she won't annoy me with post-movie commentary about why Seven Samurai, a film recently featured on The Essentials, is inferior to the remake, The Magnificent Seven. McGowan's biggest gripe with Seven Samurai--one of my favorite films--is that it's overlong. WTF? For a film that's "too long," Seven Samurai is one of the least tedious ever made.

So McGowan prefers the good but not great Magnificent's sometimes stilted dialogue and direction (the filmmakers enlisted Elmer Bernstein to spruce up the film's rather lethargic pace, hence Bernstein's fantastic score) and its flat depictions of the peasant characters (they talk like the villager mice in Speedy Gonzales cartoons) over Samurai's more complex characterizations and more intense and mesmerizing action sequences? It's like if someone had to choose between The Wire and CSI: Miami to take along with them as a desert island disc box set and that person went with CSI: Miami. You lost me there, Cherry Darling.

Anyway, here are some of my favorite posts by Kim.

"Sexy Sleaze with Cheese--'70s Cop Shows on DVD":

The show's range in quality but they all reveal a mutual commonality--though a brilliant era for film and probably the last real sleazy FUN anyone had, the '70s were hard. Hard on people's faces. I don't know if it was the drugs, the clothes, the film stock, the lighting, the jaded post '60s malaise or the surge of swingin' Auto-Focus-esque divorced men, but everyone looks tough and sun-damaged. If you assume someone is 30, they're probably in real life, 20. And 40? Who the hell knows? In their polyester double knits, bad toupees, sweaty urine tinted undershirts, crinkled brows and hairy chests, everyone looks about 50. The '70s was a great time to be an unattractive character actor. You're fat, old and like to wear tight red pants? You've got the part!

"Sunset Gun's Ten Best Movies Of 2007":

This is the movie that the obnoxious, overrated, trying-way-too-hard Juno should have been. Smart teenagers not straining to be quirky and clever -- Jonah Hill and the great Michael Cera simply are clever. And smart. And not pulling quips out of some screen-written arsenal -- they're natural ("honest to blog" they are!). And the soul and funk soundtrack is an absolutely perfect celebration of teenage energy, sexuality and hope. I want to tongue kiss whoever decided to keep the movie devoid of any twee music. Seriously, I do. Preferably with a Curtis Mayfield song blasting.

"Kiss With a Bang--'Kiss Me Deadly'":

There are so many masterful opening shots, some I find works of genius or some I simply love. But the more I thought about it, the more I drifted back to where my mind always manages to drift back to — stark, hard-boiled cruelty, paranoia, insanity and psycho sexual angst — so there it was again, Kiss Me Deadly.

"Car Power":

Bullitt actually makes me think Mustangs are not the most obvious "muscle" car you can own. Still, the villain's car, the 1968 Dodge Charger was much, much cooler.

"One Brilliant Ball Of Fire":

All dolled up in pom-pom heels, creamy sweaters and dramatically lined lips, Stanwyck's Phyllis, who's not as young as she used to be and not quite as lush, can't hide the poison within her. And her chemistry with MacMurray sizzles as they swap barbs and coos (co-written by Raymond Chandler from a James M. Cain crime novella) with sleazy ease. They yearn for more, but Stanwyck, the prototypical noir siren, seems perfectly aware of how fatalistic this kind of dream really is. Sometimes murder really does smell like honeysuckle.

The best film writers do the following: they get you interested in films you're unfamiliar with, they make you see things that you never noticed before in past films you've watched, they leave their egos at the door and they manage to do it all with a sense of humor. The unpretentious and not-so-annoyingly-tweedy Kim Morgan is one such writer.