Asian action filmmakers: Nobody does it better

I finally saw Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen via Netflix last week because I wasn't interested in watching it in the theater, where I would have been subjected to Devastator's testicles and the close-up of John Turturro's naked asscheeks in IMAX. Michael Bay's six-hour orgy of military hardware porn, incomprehensible action sequences, overdesigned CG characters and unfunny gags about dogs and black people makes both the mediocre first live-action Transformers film and 2009's other Hasbro-inspired blockbuster, the equally mediocre G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, look like Shakespeare. (Film Freak Central's Walter Chaw put it best when he said Revenge of the Fallen, which includes an inane swipe at Obama, is "so last administration.") Revenge of the Fallen was so unentertaining and racist I had to seek relief in a Johnnie To flick, even though it's a film To only co-directed (with Wai Ka-Fai, whom To generously credited as being the primary mastermind): 2007's Mad Detective, which made its American TV premiere during the Sundance Channel's "Asia Extreme" block last weekend.

The incredibly prolific To, who often directs two or three films per year, is my current favorite action filmmaker. Like most other Asian action filmmakers, To shoots action coherently, favors stillness over fast-cutting and hyperactive camerawork and makes me invested in the characters in his set pieces. He's the anti-Michael Bay. When I'm watching a To action sequence, I know I'm not going to be ever saying to myself the following words like I did during any of the live-action Transformers movies' robot fights: "Hold up. Is that supposed to be his foot or his elbow?" To is more consistent than John Woo (whose latest joint Red Cliff I'm looking forward to seeing because many reviewers have said it's his best work since Face/Off) and as skilled at tackling various genres as Howard Hawks was. Unlike Woo, To hasn't made the jump to Hollywood. I'm glad he has stayed put in Hong Kong because the Hollywood suits would most likely attempt to dilute To's work, tinker with his preference for long takes and dark, understated humor and throw him off his game.

Satires about cops and criminals manipulating the media have been a tired genre (Natural Born Killers, 15 Minutes), but To's Breaking News, from its amazing single-take opening shootout to its beautifully drawn characters (especially during the dinner cooking sequence), made the genre interesting again. Just when I thought I was out of the gangster genre after the demise of The Sopranos, To's Election movies pulled me back in. My favorite To flick, The Mission, a tersely written actioner about a group of bored and bickering Triad bodyguards, and its unofficial sequel Exiled are what the Mission: Impossible feature films should have been in the first place: great ensemble pieces in the mold of Seven Samurai, The Great Escape and The Dirty Dozen.

Even when To isn't working in total action mode, like in the cerebral Mad Detective, where the gunplay doesn't erupt until the end of the movie, the result is a more exciting film than the tepid, bloated and uninvolving Revenge of the Fallen.

I don't want to give too much of Mad Detective away for those who have never heard of it because the movie, which I highly recommend, is best enjoyed by knowing very little about it in advance like I did. All I can say is it's about a Hong Kong police detective (Andy On) who partners up with a mentally ill ex-profiler (Lau Ching Wan) to track down a missing cop. Lethal Weapon-esque hijinks do not ensue. Mad Detective is more reminiscent of small-screen whodunit procedurals like Life, the American version of Touching Evil, Monk and Law & Order: Criminal Intent, where the genius detective also happens to be a bit of a nutcase. But in Mad Detective, ex-Inspector Bun, who keeps his shirts buttoned all the way to the top like Monk, is even more batshit crazy than the heroes of those procedurals. The way Mad Detective visualizes Bun's powers of observation is the film's cleverest touch and a great example of why Asian action directors like To continually surpass their testicle joke-loving American counterparts.

Trailers from hell (yeah)

A Tumblrer recommends listening to A Fistful of Soundtracks if you need to get your screenwriting mojo back. His favorite part of my channel is the movie trailer clips I've inserted into the "Assorted Fistful" block:

The coolest thing is that every now and then it plays a random old movie trailer. I just heard one for an old kung-fu flick. It sounds like the ones you’d hear on an old VHS tape before the feature presentation.

There's a reason why I included trailer clips during "Assorted Fistful." Four years ago, the names of the tracks during "Assorted Fistful" weren't being posted on iTunes Radio's ticker for some inexplicable reason, which made the block a difficult listening experience for iTunes listeners who wanted to know the track names. So to help those folks out, I started attaching audio clips of trailers or radio/TV spots to tracks from the movies that were promoted in those trailers or spots because I didn't want to go through the trouble of switching on both my mic and GoldWave and recording a back-announcement for every single track.

First, I experimented with attaching the vintage radio spots for Black Caesar and Foxy Brown to the themes from those movies and liked how the old ads sounded as intros (any old ad or trailer that features the voice of either the late, great Adolph Caesar or the equally late and great Percy Rodrigues is always fun to listen to). Then shortly thereafter, the Batman Begins soundtrack came out, and I was looking for an effective and ominous way to announce "This next track is from the Batman Begins score" without having to say those words. I found it in an audio clip of the Batman Begins TV spot that consisted solely of the bat swarm graphics from the film's opening titles and thought that was an even niftier intro than the blaxploitation radio ads, so from then on, I attached trailer or promo clips to almost every single "Assorted Fistful" track (in another example, each score cue from Battlestar Galactica seasons two, three and four that's in rotation during "Assorted Fistful" opens with the TV spot for the Galactica episode from which the cue was taken from).

Here are two trailers that can be heard during "Assorted Fistful"--the trailers for two of my favorite flicks, the original Assault on Precinct 13...



... and Heat. I like the Hugh Morgan-voiceovered Heat trailer so much that I didn't shorten it for broadcast (unlike other trailers I've shortened because either they don't translate well to radio or they're too lengthy), so the trailer airs in its entirety before the Kronos Quartet's Heat suite begins. The trailer includes a couple of deleted scenes, which are a bit of a treat for Heat fans like myself (footage of De Niro's crew at what appears to be a dinner celebration and additional dialogue between De Niro and Jeremy Piven):



In June 2007, iTunes finally got its act together and started posting my channel's track names in the ticker, so I was thinking of getting rid of the trailer clips, but because listeners have told me they always enjoy hearing those clips, I haven't removed them. (I'm surprised AFOS listeners enjoy the trailer clips because people on the Film Score Monthly boards always complain about the movie dialogue clips that XM's Cinemagic channel intersperses between tracks.)

However, one listener once wanted me to get rid of the Black Caesar radio spot because he was offended by the clip of Fred Williamson referring to himself as a "jungle bunny"--and this listener was clearly a white guy. Listena please. I'm not going to censor or remove something from my channel just because one listener can't stomach it. That's such a stupid request. I hate censorship in any form.

Shows I Miss: Phil Ramone's The Score

I usually don't enjoy listening to musicians talk in interviews because most of the ones whom I've heard gab at length about themselves have tended to be inarticulate or boring (no wonder they're more at ease when they express themselves through their music), but film composers like Danny Elfman and Quincy Jones are an exception. They're always great interviewees, which is why another show I miss seeing on the air is The Score, an insightful interview series about both film scoring and pop song soundtracks that esteemed record producer Phil Ramone (Frank Sinatra's Duets, Michael Sembello's "Maniac" from Flashdance) hosted and produced for the now-defunct Trio cable channel in 2002.

In front of a studio audience, Ramone interviewed directors like Rob Reiner and Taylor Hackford together with composers they've frequently collaborated with (Marc Shaiman in Reiner's case, James Newton Howard in Hackford's case). The directors and composers discussed the craft of film music and played on piano a few themes from their scores. Other guests on The Score included Elfman, Lalo Schifrin, Christopher Young, Dave Grusin, the late Sydney Pollack, Matthew Sweet, Darius Rucker and singer Monica Mancini, who performed a few of her late father Henry's movie theme songs.

Not much of The Score has been archived online, other than a lengthy promo for the show on Ramone's site and a CNN transcript of Ramone talking briefly about The Score with then-CNN anchor Kate Snow. No clips of The Score have been posted on YouTube. Ovation TV currently airs reruns of a similar show about film music, the British-made 2001 documentary series Music Behind the Scenes, but The Score was a little less stuffy about its subject, and it benefited from the involvement of film/TV music historian and frequent soundtrack album liner notes writer Jon Burlingame, who wrote incredible booklets for Film Score Monthly's Man from U.N.C.L.E. score CDs.

Because The Ref is my favorite Christmas movie, The Score was also noteworthy (no pun intended) for featuring a Ref mini-reunion between Kevin Spacey, who discussed his favorite scores, and his Ref director Ted Demme, who made what ended up being one of his final public appearances on Ramone's show before his death.

The Score was basically Inside the Actors Studio for film composers, but without the pretentiousness or the creepy, funereal Angelo Badalamenti theme music. Speaking of Badalamenti, he would have been a great guest on Ramone's show because I bet he's full of colorful anecdotes about working with a guy who defines normal, David Lynch.

Aaron Takahashi and his golden pipes

Improv comic Aaron Takahashi (Yes Man, Reno 911!) is turning into Madison Avenue's go-to guy for pop song reinterpretations that are entertainingly embarrassing (but not in a cringe-inducing William Hung minstrel show kind of way). Last night, a World Series commercial break contained this amusing State Farm ad in which Takahashi goes buck wild over a Kansas song:



Takahashi is the same guy who got caught singing the E-40/T-Pain/Kandi Girl chune "U and Dat" to himself in an office men's room in an equally funny Amp'd Mobile ad a few years ago:

Community, "Introduction to Statistics": I don't know what a Mexican Halloween is, but I bet it's lewder than an Alabama Hot Pocket

I would have raved about Community's Halloween episode on Twitter or here on Blogspot on the night it aired, but I wasn't able to post about it until now because I was computerless all last week (thanks, creaky old PC--which stands for Piece o' Chit--for dying on me the week before and causing me to look like yet another Filipino who's late for everything, like this Halloween ep). "Introduction to Statistics" is so terrific it'll be staying in my DVR for a while. It's the funniest of the four Halloween eps NBC aired last Thursday night, as well as my favorite Community ep so far, thanks to elements ranging from Danny Pudi's side-splitting impression of Christian Bale's Batman to a B-plot about Shirley's divorce that allowed Yvette Nicole Brown to shine both comedically and dramatically.

In fact, everyone in the ensemble--including "Star-Burns"--got a chance to shine during "Statistics," which was written by Jon Pollack and Tim Hobert. I especially liked seeing Ken Jeong dial it down a bit as Señor Chang in this ep (shouting at the top of his lungs at his students every week was getting old). Did Donald Glover's Troy get his Delirious-era Eddie Murphy costume (complete with fake mic) from the same shop where J.D. and Turk copped their Eddie Murphy: Raw jumpsuits during Hobert's earlier series Scrubs? Gillian Jacobs looks so tiny inside the dowdy squirrel costume that Britta amusingly wears as a statement against slutty costumes (during the Community pilot, I was surprised to learn she's petite--I thought she was 5-foot-10 when I first saw her appear as a stripper in the TV spots for Choke). Too bad frequent guest star John Oliver was missing from the proceedings because I would have liked to have seen him somehow work in his Daily Show impression of a Long Island Guido.

The biggest surprise about "Statistics" was that it was directed by Justin Lin, whose indie work (Better Luck Tomorrow, Finishing the Game) I find way more interesting than his Fast and the Furious sequels, which I've never bothered to watch. One thing I've dug about Community as a single-camera comedy is that it has eschewed the mockumentary format of The Office and Parks and Recreation and opted for a more cinematic approach, particularly in sweeping crane shots of the Greendale Community College campus that would have made Johnny LaRue cream his pants. Because of Lin's involvement, "Statistics" is the most cinematic ep of the series so far. The strapping-a-camera-to-an-actor's-chest-to-simulate-a-bender trick during the Chevy Chase "tripping balls" sequence is reminiscent of Better Luck (I know, it's a camera trick that's been around since Mean Streets). And just when I thought I had my fill of Dark Knight parodies, "Statistics" pulled me back in. The director perfectly aped cinematographer Wally Pfister's camera angles from the film (I don't know who writes Community's original score music, but whoever does it nailed the essence of Hans Zimmer's Batman theme). Lin is a great addition to the series, so I was jazzed to find out from his You Offend Me You Offend My Family blog that he's slated to direct another Community ep. I'm always up for seeing more Asian Americans direct comedy so that Jay Chandrasekhar isn't all by his lonesome.