a.k.a. DJ AFOS: A Blog by J. John Aquino

Here we see a young Eddie Huang wondering why Margaret Cho's new sitcom is so fucking wack.

I was all set to dislike ABC's Fresh Off the Boat before its premiere. It wasn't because it was going to take celebrity chef Eddie Huang's candid and raunchy memoirs about his hip-hop-soundtracked childhood in Orlando in the '90s (which I've read only one or two excerpts of) and water down that book for network TV, which was what Huang, the show's off-screen narrator, said he was initially frustrated about while he consulted on the writing and filming of the Lynn Shelton-directed Fresh Off the Boat pilot (I wish Huang did a little more research about ABC sitcoms before he signed up to do business with ABC: someone should have reminded him it's the home of The Middle and The Goldbergs, not Louie and You're the Worst). I was all set to dislike the show for a different reason: it was going to be another goddamn story about second-generation Asian Americans dealing with identity issues, assimilation and generational differences with their elders.

As someone who's watched a shit-ton of Asian American indie movies, that kind of story was, for a long while, the only kind of Asian American indie flick that was getting made, whether it was Red Doors or American Chai. We're so underrepresented or poorly depicted in everything else in pop culture, and this shit is the best we can do on our own? It was becoming as much of a tired formula as Katherine Heigl rom-coms or "Die Hard on a boat!"--or "Die Hard in an office building!" The earnest indie drama about Asian American assimilation became so grating and hackneyed that graphic novelist Adrian Tomine spent the first five pages of Shortcomings hilariously tearing it apart.

"Why does everything have to be some big 'statement' about race? Don't any of these people just want to make a movie that's good?," grumbles Shortcomings' main character, Berkeley movie theater manager Ben Tanaka, after sitting through yet another Asian American drama about generational conflict.

My beef with the assimilation story has been more like "Can we get something else other than the assimilation story, like a story outside the family? Maybe a movie or show about an Asian American guy handling the many absurdities of the dating scene on his own? We do have lives outside the family, you know." That's why Emily Kapnek's Selfie was such a breath of fresh air--it was mostly about the love life and workplace dilemmas of John Cho's modern-day Henry Higgins, a pharmaceutical marketing whiz who gives rebranding advice to the show's social media-obsessed Eliza Doolittle counterpart, Karen Gillan's Eliza Dooley, and not once did the show insert Henry's parents into the narrative--and that's why its cancellation still stings. So after ABC deleted Selfie, I thought, "Alright, so the show I've longed to see on network TV for over a decade didn't last. I don't like the fact that you're yet another assimilation story, Fresh Off the Boat, but you better be damn well as funny as Selfie was."

Fortunately, Fresh Off the Boat is genuinely funny as it glimpses at the complexities of identity, and its slightly skewed take on the coming-of-age sitcom is what sets it apart from the overly earnest assimilation stories Ben Tanaka and I don't care for. That's mostly due to the guiding hand of showrunner Nahnatchka Khan, the veteran American Dad writer whose signature creation is Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23. Khan's sharply written mismatched-roommates comedy revealed James Van Der Beek to be a skilled comedic actor and featured the great unsung pairing of Krysten Ritter and Dreama Walker, who were often so hilariously expressive without dialogue that I could easily picture Ritter and Walker as silent movie comediennes, and I even wished for Khan to do an entire Don't Trust the B---- episode as a silent movie.

All I wanted from Fresh Off the Boat was for the show to retain the weirdness Khan brought to Don't Trust the B----, and it's been doing that frequently. Part of the effectiveness of the surreal gags about the hellishness of the back of the school bus Eddie (Hudson Yang) and his friends ride while pretending to be comatose in "Showdown at the Golden Saddle" is due to the episode never showing what goes on in the back of the bus, as if it's too unpleasant to show on network TV. A classmate character's obsession with an NES game based on the 1980 movie 9 to 5 is a dead-on riff on how NES games would be spun off from the strangest licensed properties, whether it was Home Alone or Wayne's World. And there's a great little scene in "Persistent Romeo" where Evan (Ian Chen), Eddie's youngest brother, screams like a little girl for what feels like two hours after he loses to Grandma Huang (Lucille Soong) during poker. I don't know if it's a reference to this '90s moment, but that would be wonderful if it were. Something about male characters screaming like little girls while their expressions remain absolutely blank always kills me (it must have killed a Fresh Off the Boat crew member too because he can be heard audibly chuckling on the set off-screen while Evan screams).

It helps that Fresh Off the Boat takes some of its stylistic cues not from All-American Girl, the last network sitcom to center on an Asian American family (not counting the TBS show Sullivan and Son), but from the often enjoyable '80s period piece Everybody Hates Chris, which itself took stylistic cues from Everybody Hates Chris co-producer Howard Gewirtz's Oliver Beene, a 2003 Fox sitcom that took place in the early '60s. I remember watching All-American Girl in the '90s and being underwhelmed by it like so many other Asian American viewers, mostly because its version of Margaret Cho--whom Huang actually turned to for advice while initially struggling with the changes that were being made to the depiction of his own life as an 11-year-old--wasn't the Margaret Cho I was familiar with from her raunchy stand-up act. The dominant creative voice on All-American Girl actually belonged not to her, but to a veteran of the lily-white Empty Nest, a huge sign that Cho's show was doomed.

Eddie Huang's mom discovered mom jeans way before Tina Fey did.

Fortunately, Fresh Off the Boat doesn't have a guy from Empty Nest in charge. Instead, it's the comedic mastermind behind Don't Trust the B----, surrounded by other writers of color like How I Met Your Mother veteran Kourtney Kang and stand-up comic Ali Wong. There wasn't a single authentic bone in All-American Girl's mad-homogenized and heavily micromanaged body, whereas Fresh Off the Boat captures many aspects of Asian American families quite well (like the Huangs' couch being covered in plastic or the Huang parents'"success perm," which isn't just a Chinese thing--it's kind of a Filipino thing as well) and gets a lot of the '90s right, whether it's the music Eddie prefers or the mom jeans look rocked by his cantankerous, Caddyshack-loving mother Jessica. Can we talk about Constance Wu for an hour? She's doing wonders with her role, turning it into something more nuanced than the Tiger Mom caricature that could have emerged in much lesser comedic hands.

Wu is actually much younger than her character, like how Nick Offerman, in real life, is much younger than his Parks and Rec alter ego Ron Swanson, but Ron is such a unique comedic creation that you can't picture anyone else but Offerman playing him had the casting gone differently (except maybe Sam Elliott, who wound up guest-starring as Ron's counterpart in Eagleton), and only Offerman could bring him to life so effectively. I feel the same way about Jessica Huang now. Despite her youth, Wu just brings a certain bearing and dimension--not to mention a certain kind of comic timing--to Jessica that I don't think any other actor could pull off.

ABC was going to retitle this show as Far East Orlando.

Far East Orlando? What the fuck? I don't think Danny Brown would have had such an easy time coming up with bars that would rhyme with 'Orlando.'

Another hero of the show--and this person isn't getting as much praise from the press as Wu--is whoever has been music-supervising Fresh Off the Boat. Securing pricey hip-hop classics by the likes of Ol' Dirty Bastard and Snoop Dogg--it's thrilling to hear on a network sitcom all these tracks I grew up with just like Eddie--was probably no easy feat. The show's '90s hip-hop soundtrack is anchored by an original theme song by Danny Brown, whom Huang himself recruited to record the theme, probably just for the thrill of saying that he slipped Danny Brown, who often makes 2 Live Crew look like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, into an ABC family sitcom. The brief tune introduces Danny Brown to a new audience and will hopefully get those viewers to become enthralled by the Detroit rapper's storytelling skills in tracks like "Grown Up" and "25 Bucks."

But perhaps my favorite musical moment on the show so far takes place in "Showdown at the Golden Saddle," when Eddie's crush on his neighbor and babysitter Nicole (Luna Blaise, who looks like a teenage Krysten Ritter) is soundtracked by the DeBarge-sampling remix of the Notorious B.I.G./Faith Evans/Mary J. Blige tune "One More Chance." As with all the other existing songs on Fresh Off the Boat, you don't hear "One More Chance" on network TV every day. That "One More Chance" remix is like "I've Got You Under My Skin" to a certain generation. It's that smooth of a song. I could easily imagine Tom Haverford and Donna Meagle ordering bottle service at the Snakehole Lounge to the sounds of "One More Chance" at one time or another. The airing of "Showdown at the Golden Saddle" last week was a stroke of beautiful timing too: yesterday was the date of Biggie's death.

If the show hadn't been able to nab almost all those hip-hop chestnuts that have appeared so far, Fresh Off the Boat would still soar anyway. The writing is frequently sharp (in her piece "Fresh Off the Boat uses black culture to talk more candidly about Asian culture," critic Danielle Henderson put the show's unique Asian American perspective best when she said, "I can't help but feel like Fresh Off the Boat is going to help another generation of kids feel like they're a little less alone"), and the cast, with Wu and Randall Park (as Eddie's dad Louis, whose Orlando steakhouse business is actually a Filipino fried chicken joint in Glendale) as the standouts, is an enticing collection of comedy nerd favorites (Park, Paul Scheer) and always-welcome serial guest stars (Ray Wise, C.S. Lee buried under a success perm wig). For a show that's another goddamn story about second-generation Asian Americans dealing with identity issues, assimilation and generational beefs, Fresh Off the Boat is far from stale.

I wouldn't be surprised if that wig perched on top of the head of Masuka from Dexter in that episode came from a T.J. Hooker toupee clearance sale.

If the show cut to a poster of the Menendez brother with a perm, I'd be really worried about Louis.

Vampires Suck has the same 85-minute running time as What We Do in the Shadows, but unlike What We Do in the Shadows, the jokes during Vampires Suck are probably so hacky that Vampires Suck feels like it's 85 hours long.

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. This week, I pulled out the ticket that said "Man of Steel." But I don't want to write about that goddamn movie, so instead, I'm going to sing the praises of a low-budget movie I saw last week in the theater. In America, it has probably grossed only less than a tenth of what Man of Steel grossed at the box office, but it's 10 times more entertaining than Man of Steel.

One of my favorite SNL sketches that Yahoo's "complete SNL archive" currently doesn't carry is a 1989 Dracula sketch written by Jack Handey and James Downey, who told interviewer Mike Sacks in his 2014 book Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today's Top Comedy Writers that a few other SNL writers disliked his sketch when they first heard about its premise because they thought it sounded hacky: "What if Dracula were AIDS-aware?" The sketch, which featured James Woods as an inquisitive Dracula who asks his potential victims about their medical histories (one of whom was played by the late, great Jan Hooks), turned out to be funny anyway, and it's a shame that Yahoo doesn't have it. If you do fondly remember that James Woods Dracula sketch, then you're bound to get a kick out of the similar "old-world vampire who's had to adapt to the modern world" humor of co-stars/co-directors Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi's clever 2014 mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows.

At only 86 minutes, What We Do in the Shadows doesn't wear out its welcome. It ends before it can exhaust any of its gags about vampire housemates who are hardly as suave as the stars of True Blood and bicker over household chores or fashion choices, fussy werewolves, chatty and verbose zombies and a modern-day Renfield who's more like a personal assistant than a spider-eating mental patient. If Christopher Guest or the geniuses at Aardman Animations ever wanted to make a mockumentary where all the main characters are famous movie monsters, the result would probably resemble What We Do in the Shadows.

Wow, the production budget for this 258th season of MTV's The Real World is considerably lower than in previous seasons.

The film, which takes place mostly in an apartment in Wellington, New Zealand that's shared by a group of vampire friends, could have been a one-joke mockumentary. But thanks to the rich screenplay and capable direction by Clement, the bespectacled half of Flight of the Conchords, and Waititi, a fellow New Zealand comedian who directed Clement in the 2007 film Eagle vs. Shark and a few Flight of the Conchords episodes, What We Do in the Shadows is packed with so many effective jokes that it's difficult to catch them all in a single viewing, which makes it a film worth watching again and again.

It's also got a tender side underneath the comedic gore--you're as insane as Renfield if you're expecting What We Do in the Shadows to be a bloodless affair--and the gags about vampire genre clichés. Much of that tender side involves Waititi's character Viago, a 379-year-old aristocrat who traveled to New Zealand in a coffin to marry his girlfriend, but thanks to a coffin postage error, he wound up lost at sea and she married someone else instead. Viago's pining for his lost love is handled beautifully: it's sad, but it's also tinged with some raunchy humor (I've seen tons of TV shows and movies where people fuck each other in coffins, but I've never seen a moment where someone masturbates from inside a coffin, until What We Do in the Shadows came along), which keeps that side of the movie from turning unbearably sappy.

The nicely drawn characters created by Clement and Waititi are a plus, but what's even more enjoyable about What We Do in the Shadows is how its vampire universe is more enticing than most vampire universes from other genre works because it's so amusingly mundane and lived-in. I love the offbeat rules and customs Clement and Waititi came up with for their vampire world, like the bloodsuckers' inability to eat French fries or the little bit of business where they have to draw on notepads to each other how they look in outfits they're trying out because they can't see themselves in mirrors. By emphasizing the mundane, whether it's in those little details or the humorous neuroses of either Viago, his housemates or their werewolf rivals (whose leader is played by Clement's old Conchords co-star Rhys Darby), What We Do in the Shadows takes back the vampire genre from the detestable and banal Twilight and makes vampires relatable--and human--again.

You gotta love how Kat Dennings still mangles the name of Thor's hammer so that it sounds like the name of some French movie star.

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.

I've heard of sequels that underwent budget cuts and ended up costing significantly less than the smash-hit first installment, but what Marvel Studios did to Thor: The Dark World, the 2013 follow-up to director Kenneth Branagh's 2011 smash Thor, was ridiculous. Take a look at how those budget cuts affected costume designer Alexandra Byrne's grandiose and stylish Asgardian costume designs from the first Thor.

As far as Marvel Studios character recastings go, this was no 'Terrence Howard getting replaced by Don Cheadle' upgrade.

The new, much cheaper Thor in Thor: The Dark World apparently favors ironic trucker hats now--yo, trucker hats are so 16 years ago, player--and has ditched the armor and red cape for oil-stained tank tops that were unearthed from Sly Stallone's 1987 Over the Top laundry pile. And what happened to Chris Hemsworth? I didn't know he was Edward Norton-ing everyone on the set of the first Thor and being such a diva. And we all know what Kevin Feige does to anyone who's a diva. It's called "Recasting time!"

Thor: The Dark World is so cheap it makes Roger Corman's shelved Fantastic Four movie look like Interstellar. They didn't even bother to maintain Thor's Aussie accent from the first movie! How pathet... Huh? That's not Thor: The Dark World?

Woops, wrong Thor.

In actuality, frequent Game of Thrones director Alan Taylor's Thor: The Dark World, which was co-written by Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes story editor and MVP Christopher Yost, had a slightly bigger budget than its predecessor and is a good example of a superhero movie sequel that improves upon the first installment in a few ways. The action sequences are more inventively staged; the score by Brian Tyler, a last-minute replacement for composer Carter Burwell, who departedThe Dark World over creative disagreements, is more powerful and tuneful than even regular Branagh collaborator Patrick Doyle's score from the first Thor; and the humor, the best part of Hemsworth's scenes on Earth with Natalie Portman, Kat Dennings and Stellan Skarsgård during the first film, is snappier, thanks to some last-minute, uncredited punch-ups by Avengers director (and veteran script doctor) Joss Whedon. The Dark World's superiority isn't because Branagh's Thor was such a dud. In fact, Thor was far from it. The film was a solid Marvel Cinematic Universe blockbuster, and its appeal was due to both the film being an intriguing hybrid of a Branagh Shakespeare epic and a fish-out-of water action flick rather than a standard superhero movie and the effective way the film handled Thor's redemption arc from egotistical god to selfless hero.

My primary beef with the first Thor was that it didn't give Rene Russo, one of the best things about director Barry Sonnenfeld's outstanding film version of Get Shorty, much to do in the role of Frigga, Thor and Loki's mother, her first role after a long absence from the screen (many of her scenes as Frigga got cut). In The Dark World, Russo's screen time is about the same as her minimal screen time in the first film. But The Dark World makes better use of her screen time, creates a stronger sense of her personality as the queen of Asgard and gives her a dramatic mother/son scene with Tom Hiddleston's Loki in a prison cell that maintains some of the first film's Shakespearean overtones and must have given Branagh some Shakespearean fits over choosing to step away from directing the sequel to work instead on Jack Ryan: Shadow Dancer or whatever the hell it's called.

Loki kept using his shape-shifting magic to get rid of the orange jumpsuit they required him to wear in prison.

The Dark World is the third Marvel Cinematic Universe movie to involve Thor's conflict with his power-hungry adopted brother, and the Thor/Loki material takes several interesting turns in this installment, especially when Thor is forced to turn to the incarcerated God of Mischief for help in taking down an evil Dark Elf named Malekith (Christopher Eccleston). The shifty Loki has become one of the MCU's most compelling characters, thanks to Hiddleston's charisma and the various MCU screenwriters' sheer delight in writing material for Hiddleston. MCU blockbusters often suffer from dull villains--Guardians of the Galaxy is the most recent example of this--but in The Dark World, Loki is an antagonist done right: he's a lively mixture of humor, pathos and chess-like thinking and is so engaging as both a character and a thorn in the side for Thor and his pals (including Portman's Jane Foster, whose first encounter with Loki has her punching him in the face for the mayhem he caused in New York in The Avengers) that Malekith, The Dark World's real villain, pales in comparison as an antagonist.

The God of Thunder's temporary alliance with Loki leads to the main reason why I like The Dark World slightly more than the first Thor: the film's midsection, in which Thor defies the orders of his frequently irrational father Odin (Anthony Hopkins) in order to bring Malekith to justice, turns into a heist movie, a genre I love 10 times more than the superhero movie. The sequence where Heimdall (Idris Elba), Lady Sif (Jaimie Alexander, whom I wish Marvel Studios would add as a regular to Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. if her John Doe-ish pilot for NBC doesn't get picked up, due to the dynamic Sif brings to S.H.I.E.L.D. whenever she's around) and Warriors Three members Volstagg (Ray Stevenson) and Fandral (Zachary Levi) assist Thor in breaking Loki out of prison is reminiscent of the rousing sequence that helped elevate Star Trek III: The Search for Spock from a rather cheap-looking directorial debut for the late Leonard Nimoy to a great (and long-overdue) ensemble piece: the theft of the Enterprise. However, it's a shame that The Dark Worldsidelines Tadanobu Asano's Hogun, the third Warriors Three member, after the battle scene in Hogun's homeworld of Vanaheim (was Asano too busy to do the sequel?). The film doesn't involve him on this nifty, heist flick-ish mission where all the other warrior sidekicks from the first Thor receive an extra moment to shine, depriving one of the Thor movie franchise's few characters of color of substantial screen time.

Here we see Lady Sif taking on her worst enemy: the Friend Zone.

So instead of Russo getting shafted, this time it's Asano's turn. His only other appearance in The Dark World briefly takes place during another bit of business that edges The Dark World above the first Thor: the visually clever climax where, due to the laws of physics going screwy in London, the fight between Thor and Malekith shifts back and forth between different realms, and Thor's sentient hammer Mjolnir (which Dennings' comic relief character Darcy continues to mispronounce as "Mew-Mew," a funny callback to Darcy's same line from the first film) has to zip through outer space to find Thor. The climax is a welcome departure from the standard--and often boring--MCU climax of giant ships crashing into buildings.

The screwy-laws-of-physics storyline is something you'd expect to see in a Superman/S.T.A.R. Labs story rather than a pre-Guardians of the Galaxy MCU blockbuster. Speaking of which, I'm neither a Superman comics fan nor a Thor comics fan, but I've found the Thor movies to be more satisfying as superhero movies that feature a red-caped alien hero than any of the Superman movies, including even the best of them, 1978's plot hole-heavySuperman (by the way, it's always been called just Superman, not Superman: The Movie, just like how the second X-Men movie's actual title has always been simply X2, not the insipid-sounding, in-advertising-only X2: X-Men United). Richard Donner's 1978 blockbuster isn't aging well, despite Christopher Reeve's enjoyable interpretation of the character, John Williams' classic score and the entertaining, Howard Hawks-ish Daily Planet office scenes.

The redemption arc Thor experiences in the Branagh film, the fascinating dickishness of Odin in both Thor films and Loki's quasi-redemption arc in The Dark World all shed light on, respectively, the inherent dullness of the Superman character, the similar dullness of Jor-El and Jonathan Kent as father figure characters (a hero's father is more interesting when he doesn't know best) and the lousy writing surrounding all the non-Zod villains in the Superman movies. That's why the best on-screen interpretation of Superman is not the Reeve version but Bruce Timm's version from both Superman: The Animated Series and Justice League Unlimited. Timm and his fellow writers found several ways to work around the dullness of Superman, and those ways included emphasizing Clark Kent's hard-boiled reporter side, allowing Tim Daly to tap into his comedic side for the dual role of Bizarro and Superman and surrounding Supes with adversaries who are genuinely menacing and formidable (you'd never see Lex Luthor plotting some lame real estate scheme on Superman: TAS) instead of dumb wastes of space like Otis from the first two Superman flicks.

This also relates to a great point raised by Elton Wong of the blog Nerdy Views. In the blog post "Thor: The Dark World is What Man of Steel Should Have Been," he says, "Thor 2 has this wonderful balance never spending too much time in darkness, while Man of Steel wallows in it," and refers to a credo by none other than a certain uncredited Dark World co-writer: "Make it dark, make it grim, make it tough, but then, for the love of God, tell a joke." The result of the efforts of Whedon and his fellow writers is a better Superman movie than any of the actual Superman movies themselves.

Thor wonders why the London Underground smells worse than the Asgardian Dungeons.

None of the score cues from Thor: The Dark World by Brian Tyler, whose terrific Marvel Studios logo fanfare made its debut at the start of The Dark World, were in rotation on AFOS before I rewatched The Dark World in preparation for today's edition of Throwback Thursday, but I enjoyed Tyler's score so much the second time around that I'm adding the film's primary theme to both "AFOS Prime" and "Hall H."

This is John Carpenter in New York in either 1980 or 1981, wisely staying away from filming within the craziness that was early '80s Times Square, or as Desus Nice calls Times Square, 'Herpes with more electronic billboards.'

John Carpenter, shooting exterior footage for Escape from New York

The most significant and impressive piece of work John Carpenter has made in the last 15 years is neither a feature film nor a TV-movie. It's John Carpenter's Lost Themes, a new collection of original Carpenter instrumentals that, in the Albertus font-loving filmmaker/composer's own words, are "meant to score the movies in your head." The Sacred Bones Records album is Carpenter's entry into the imaginary soundtracks genre, where the likes of Black Dynamite composer Adrian Younge (2000's Venice Dawn) and the duo of Danger Mouse and Magic City composer Daniele Luppi (2011's Rome) have created score cues or theme tunes for movies that don't exist.

Lost Themes tracks like "Vortex" and "Abyss" resemble outtakes from Carpenter's scores to the 1988 cult favorite They Live and the mad-underrated In the Mouth of Madness, and except for the really cheesy Big Trouble in Little China end title theme sung by Carpenter himself, that Carpenter synth sound Lost Themes reacquaints us with has aged remarkably well. It's aged so well that Carpenter's pulsating and frequently sampled 1976 Assault on Precinct 13 main title theme--which Carpenter has said was influenced by Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" and is in rotation during both the AFOS morning block "Beat Box" and "AFOS Prime"--sounds like it could have been recorded yesterday, while the likes of Steven Price, frequent Steven Soderbergh collaborator David Holmes and It Follows composer Rich Vreeland, a.k.a. Disasterpiece, dig the Carpenter sound so much that they borrow from Carpenter in their respective film scores.

John Carpenter and Kurt Russell can't come to a consensus over who should take over the role of Snake Plissken. That's because remaking Escape from New York is a dumb fucking idea.

I'd add some of the Lost Themes instrumentals to AFOS rotation, but the station format focuses only on score music written for movies and TV shows that aren't imaginary, and I don't have enough station hard drive space to launch a new imaginary soundtrack music block just to stream Lost Themes selections. For about a year, the station schedule included "Rome, Italian Style," an imaginary soundtrack music block I named after one of my favorite SCTV sketches (and a rare SCTV sketch that's not marred by an annoying laugh track). Younge's Venice Dawn tracks and Luppi's Rome tracks were part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist, and if the block still existed, those tracks would have shared space with the Lost Themes pieces. The Carpenter sound, which is basically '70s and '80s Italian film music, would have been a nice fit with the '60s Italian film vibe of the Venice Dawn and Rome tracks.

Junta Juleil's Culture Shock and Consequence of Sound both have gotten creative and used the Lost Themes instrumentals to fancast fictional Carpenter movies featuring those tracks. For example, in their movie idea built out of the Lost Themes track "Purgatory,"Consequence of Sound imagined a 1988 murder mystery starring Kevin Dillon, Ernie Hudson and Daryl Hannah in her At Play in the Fields of the Lord skinny-dipping scene heyday, while "Purgatory" got Junta Juleil author Sean Gill to envision a completely implausible but much more enticing movie: a Big Trouble in Little China mini-reunion between Dennis Dun and Kurt Russell, who reprises his non-Carpenter role as Captain Ron.

Lo Pan's signature weapon is his Lee Press-On Nails.

I'd indulge in some Lost Themes-inspired fancasting too, but I don't want to bite Junta Juleil and Consequence of Sound's style, so I'm going to do a completely different approach to playing around with Lost Themes and demonstrating how Carpenter's new instrumentals can make anything sound exciting and atmospheric. I'm going to unearth a plot synopsis I wrote three years ago for a never-finished horror short story and spice it up--or rather, Carpenter it up--with Lost Themes selections.

"The Pet" was my attempt to create a new Filipino monster that would have joined the creepy likes of the aswang and the manananggal. The story would have mixed Filipino monster folklore with one of the most unsettling horror tropes, eye trauma. Here's a good example of how unsettling that trope can be: I was so bothered by a Lasik operation-gone-wrong episode of the short-lived early '00s supernatural show The Others (no relation to the Nicole Kidman haunted house flick of the same name) that I've refused to undergo Lasik surgery to improve my eyesight. At the time I was trying to write "The Pet" as a submission to a Filipino YA horror anthology (it was called HORROR, with the title in all caps, as if it were a book by Meek Mill), I thought, "Eye trauma is terrifying, so how do I work that into the creation of a new monster?"

The result was a story where I only got as far as completing four pages. I ended up missing the anthology submission deadline because I was never satisfied with both the dialogue I wrote and the legal hurdles the story's characters would have overcome in order to acquire the titular creature. Also, I think "The Pet" would be better off as either an episode of a horror comedy anthology show or a short film rather than as a short story in print. I always imagined it as a Joe Dante suburban comedy/thriller with a John Carpenter score--and a Filipino American backdrop.

In the first Gremlins--most recently referenced on Community when the show amusingly imagined a PortugueseGremlinsripoff called Knee-High Mischief--Keye Luke shows up in the suburbs to take Gizmo back with him to Chinatown and tells Billy, "You do with Mogwai what your society has done with all of nature's gifts! You do not understand! You are not ready." I wanted to take a Filipino American divorcee and his son and put them in the place of Billy. Their inability to "be ready" for handling a Filipino monster and their assumption that it would be okay to keep the creature as a pet both wreak havoc on the suburbs. But very little of the type of suburbia we would have seen in "The Pet" would have been worth saving. Like what Dante conveyed in the Gremlins movies or The 'Burbs and what Carpenter was getting at in the anti-Republican, anti-yuppieThey Live, suburbia is a part of America that's always asking for Gremlins-style havoc, whether it's because of its delusional, George Zimmerman-ish authority figures or the mindless consumerism of suburbanites like the ones who were going to be depicted in "The Pet," particularly the white husband of the dad's Filipino ex-wife.

The white husband character's first name was Tucker, and the vacuous character was going to be my way of riffing on a few things, like--in the only line I'm going to show from the story's four completed pages--someone who's "sporting a fauxhawk that doesn't belong on a man of his age" or white people who use "Tucker" as a first name. That's such a white name I could easily see it written on an order for a cup of pumpkin spice latte. Whenever I hear "Tucker" being used as a first name, it reminds me of a great George Carlin routine where he made fun of common white names like Todd and, of course, Tucker. Anyway, here, from 2012, is the synopsis of the anti-Tucker-as-a-first-name "Pet"--enhanced by the lost themes of John Carpenter.

Cue up "Abyss" from John Carpenter's Lost Themes, starting at 3:25.

Underneath a pet store in L.A.'s Historic Filipinotown section, gamblers bet on underground cockfights that are held there at night. They're organized by Rodolfo, the store owner's son, without his father's knowledge.

Neil Dizon is a divorced 43-year-old L.A. graphic artist who has custody of his 12- or-13-year-old-ish son Allen on weekends. He takes his son to the pet store one afternoon. Neil also frequently takes Allen to the cockfights below the store. This afternoon, Allen spots in one of the cages behind the counter a blind bat-like animal neither he nor Neil have ever seen before. Rodolfo says it's a rare creature known as a bulagyakukkulatnit.

Allen likes the demure-looking bulagyakukkulatnit and wants Neil to buy it for him. Rodolfo's grandfather, who's wearing an eyepatch, tells Rodolfo in Tagalog that he's not allowed to sell the bulagyakukkulatnit. Rodolfo ignores his grandfather and sells the bulagyakukkulatnit to Neil. Allen names his blind pet Murdock, after the blind Marvel superhero Daredevil, whose secret identity is Matt Murdock. Around Allen and Neil, Murdock is demure and unassuming.

But when neither Allen nor Neil are around, the bulagyakukkulatnit is far from friendly. As Allen discovers later in the story, Murdock sucks people's eyeballs out of their sockets in order to have eyesight. Murdock absorbs its victims' sight but can only see temporarily, so it has to constantly deprive people of their eyes in order to be able to see at all times.

Neil's ex-wife Sharon, who remarried and whose white husband Tucker Saunders runs a flagging chain of DVD rental stores, isn't charmed by Murdock and argues with Neil over buying Allen a pet that might be dangerous. "No," says Sharon to Neil, "we're not adding a bat house to our yard." Then Tucker says to Sharon, "It's okay, honey. I can install one. I know your son doesn't like me. Just let me get on his good side for once."

Allen takes Murdock along with him to the senior citizens' home where Sharon has placed her father, and Allen's grandfather Pong reacts in horror to Murdock because he remembers a Filipino monster story about bulagyakukkulatnits that was told to him as a kid.

Cue up "Mystery" from Lost Themes. Let it play until 2:31.

Pong dismissed the bulagyakukkulatnit as a not-so-scary Filipino monster when he first heard it as a kid, so he can't believe this lesser monster from Filipino folklore actually exists. He snaps at his grandson for being unfamiliar with the bulagyakukkulatnit. Allen tells Pong that Neil never told him any Filipino monster stories, and he had never heard of aswangs or manananggals until friends at school told him about them. "The only stories Dad told me at bedtime were the second half of The Empire Strikes Back," Allen says, "and what turned out to have been a Cliffs Notes synopsis of Road House."

"Why do so many Filipino monsters prey on unborn kids?," Allen wonders aloud. "Why don't they try snacking on full-sized people for a change? Are these monsters on a diet?"

Cue up "Vortex" from Lost Themes. Let it play until 0:13.

Then Murdock, who senses hostility from Pong, attacks the old man, presses its mouth over his left eye and sucks his eyeball out of its socket. Pong survives the attack but becomes unconscious.

An upset Sharon wants Murdock out of her house. Allen refuses to let Murdock go and yells back at his mother (while also sneaking in a jab at her decision to send her father away), "You never cared about Lolo. Why the hell do you care about him now?!" He sneaks out of Sharon and Tucker's house and runs away to Neil's apartment, taking Murdock with him.

The next day at school, Allen takes Murdock to show-and-tell. Bringing this bulagyakukkulatnit turns out to be a bad idea as it proceeds to attack each and every one of Allen's enemies at school (from a teacher who thinks Allen is a troublemaker to a Pinoy jock who's trying to put the moves on a girl Allen likes) and yank their eyeballs out of them.

Cue up "Obsidian" from Lost Themes.

The police is forced to intervene as Murdock goes on a winged rampage, which ends when Murdock is shot down and killed by Animal Control. The story concludes with the revelation--which none of the characters are aware of--that Murdock was raising a child in a cavern below the cockfight ring that's underneath the pet store.

The bulagyakukkulatnit offspring is now looking for its mother: Murdock, whose offspring develop at an accelerated rate.

Cue up "Purgatory" from Lost Themes, starting at 2:25.

I kind of wish Gene Belcher would turn Midnight motherfucking Run into a musical as well.

On some Fridays, I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. It's the "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

"Midday Run" is the second episode during Bob's Burgers' fifth season to riff on a classic movie that was released in 1988. "Work Hard or Die Trying, Girl," the show's fifth-season premiere, transformed both Die Hard and Working Girl into school musicals, with memorable and intentionally awful-sounding results ("I'm Grubin'/I'm Hans Gruber and I'm Grubin'/And sometimes that could mean shootin'/Mr. Takagi in the head!"), and now "Midday Run" pays tribute to another movie from 1988, and it's one I adore even more than Die Hard: the extremely foul-mouthed and eminently quotable Midnight Run.

The Robert De Niro/Charles Grodin buddy flick wasn't a big box-office hit like Die Hard and Working Girl, but it has a cult following that includes the likes of Dan Harmon and Paul Thomas Anderson, whose first feature film, 1996's Sydney (a.k.a. Hard Eight), is basically a spinoff movie all about Philip Baker Hall's Midnight Run mob lawyer character Sidney (spelled differently in PTA's movie due to what I presume are legal issues that PTA was clever enough to skirt around, unlike Larry the Cable Guy). Midnight Run is special to me because it's where I first learned the terms "chorizo and eggs" and "white-collar criminal," as well as 132 different ways to say "fuck." Like I once said to another Midnight Run fan on Facebook, Midnight Run was my Sesame Street when I was in junior high.

Episode writer Scott Jacobson must have felt the same way about Midnight Run when he was younger because he bases Tina's zeal for her duties as a Wagstaff hall monitor on Jack Walsh's intensely driven mission to deliver the Duke to L.A. (so that means in addition to her male butt-obsessed erotic fanfic author side, Tina's also got a stern lawwoman side). In Tina's case, her Duke is Zeke (Bobby Tisdale). He's in trouble for stealing the costume of the school mascot, the Wagstaff Whaler, so Mr. Frond (David Herman), the guidance counselor and hall monitor supervisor, assigns his toughest hall monitor to deliver Zeke to the principal's office. Of course, Zeke constantly attempts to escape, and like Jack, Tina finds out her prisoner is a much more noble soul than she originally thought: he stole the costume to entertain his grandma (also voiced by Tisdale) at her retirement home before she goes into surgery.

What I like most about "Midday Run" is that instead of referencing the not-so-prime-time-friendly dialogue from Midnight Run (the one bit of movie dialogue that's reenacted in "Midday Run" comes from a different movie, The Fugitive), the episode opts to reference Midnight Run's ambience, particularly on the musical side. Bob's Burgers creator/composer Loren Bouchard and his fellow composers Chris Maxwell and Phil Hernandez, the duo known as the Elegant Too, are the MVPs of "Midday Run." They amusingly channel themes from Danny Elfman's bluesy and lively score to Midnight Run, which is currently in rotation on "AFOS Prime" on AFOS.

You can make out bits and pieces of "Walsh Gets the Duke" and "J.W. Gets a Plan" throughout the "Midday Run" score. After that score he wrote for Midnight Run early on in his film music career, Elfman went on to pen scores that are far more profound or popular--whether for Tim Burton or various tentpole franchises--and yet, the Midnight Run score remains my favorite Elfman score (for a brief time in the late '80s, the Midnight Run score was particularly popular with trailer houses). While Elfman's work for Burton frequently brings to mind the weirdest moments of his Oingo Boingo days, the Midnight Run score channels Boingo at its most tuneful and dance floor-friendly (it's no surprise that Elfman's Boingo bandmates took part in the recording of the Midnight Run score). The "Midday Run" score is the best tribute to a rather underappreciated Elfman score that doesn't often receive such tributes.

The part of Dorfler will now be played by Regular Sized Rudy.

As a story that's primarily about the Belcher kids and their Wagstaff classmates (speaking of which, another appearance by Brian Huskey's likable hypochondriac Regular Sized Rudy, who looks up to Tina as a hall monitor role model, is always welcome), "Midday Run" is more pleasant than laugh-out-loud funny, but Regular Sized Rudy and Zeke nicely receive substantial character development here (while Mr. Frond remains an inflexible and clueless bureaucrat, and why does he seem to be in charge of everything at Wagstaff, as if he's a mini-Mr. Belding who, as many comedians would say about Belding on April Richardson's Saved by the Bell podcast Go Bayside!, just can't seem to go away?). The episode's amiableness also brings to mind a second work in addition to Midnight Run. This particular work is an animated show the Bob's Burgers writing staff might not have been aware of while working on "Midday Run": the forgotten early '00s Disney show Fillmore!, which was created by a pre-Walking DeadScott M. Gimple.

Fillmore! was a '70s cop show spoof where the buddy cops were a pair of middle school hall monitors, black skater kid Cornelius Fillmore and his goth partner Ingrid Third, and all the characters on the show were named after San Francisco streets, an odd touch I especially enjoyed because the Bay Area's my home turf (the San Francisco street thing was actually both Gimple's way of paying tribute to the '70s cop show The Streets of San Francisco and a shout-out to Bay Area friends whose couches he previously crashed on). Like "Midday Run,"Fillmore! wasn't laugh-out-loud funny, but there was much to like about it, whether it was the '70s-isms, the diverse cast or the Latino kid who acted as the show's version of the obligatory irritable police captain (he was voiced by then-SNLer Horatio Sanz). There's this Fillmore!-esque vibe to "Midday Run," particularly in the scenes between kiddie cops Tina and Regular Sized Rudy, that makes the episode appealing, in addition to all the Midnight Run score references.

Ingrid was clearly modeled after Beetlejuice-era Winona Ryder, but I have a feeling she outgrew her gothiness and grew up to become Krysten Ritter.

And now that Bob's Burgers has just been renewed for a sixth season, I wonder what other movies from 1988 will get the Bob's Burgers treatment (as this ode to the movie year of 1988 reminds me, the summer of '88 also included Big, which I could envision being turned into a Gene story where he thinks he's been magically transformed into a grown-up but he actually wasn't, or maybe it should be a Louise story), as well as what other facets there are to Tina's unique and unusually confident personality. We've seen the erotic fanfic author with a crazy imagination, the investigative journalist, the avid Equestranauts toy collector, the "bat-zilla" who craves attention and now in both "Tina Tailor Soldier Spy" and "Midday Run," the lawwoman. It's not a bad life for an oddly heroic kid who doesn't consider herself a hero because she puts her bra on one boob at a time like everyone else.

Memorable quotes:

... from what's known as the hidey-hole.

The hidey-hole sounds like a strip joint in the motel district outside Disneyland.

She looks like the very hot Natalie Morales from both The Middleman and Trophy Wife. Like double-0s, Natalie Morales TV shows have a very short life expectancy.

A spy genre music block made up of score cues from both completely fantastical genre pieces (Mission: Impossible--Ghost Protocol, A View to a Kill) and much more grounded genre pieces that are closer to former CIA agent Valerie Plame's tastes in spy fiction (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Russia House) has been in the works for the nighttime part of the AFOS station schedule for a while. With both the premiere of the eagerly anticipated Agent Carter--it's basically Alias in bobby socks--and the return of Archer on FX this week, as well as the February 13 American release of Kingsman: The Secret Service, X-Men: First Class director Matthew Vaughn's adaptation of Mark Millar's Secret Service comic, now is the perfect time to launch "AFOS Incognito," a midnight block that will begin airing Monday, January 12.

The regular time slot for "AFOS Incognito" will be Mondays through Thursdays from midnight to 2am Pacific, with a bonus one-hour airing on Fridays at 9am. "AFOS Incognito" will rotate many of the espionage genre score cues that are scattered throughout "AFOS Prime" in the middle of the day, as well as 15 tracks that won't be streamed anywhere else on the AFOS schedule.

The 15 "AFOS Incognito" exclusives will include Sammy Davis Jr.'s theme from 1965's The Second Best Secret Agent in the Whole Wide World--which was memorably sung by drunken Christmas party attendees in one of my favorite scenes during Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy--and Christopher Lennertz's Bond-inspired score cues from the 2013 Marvel One-Shot short film "Agent Carter," an enjoyable little extra on the Iron Man Three Blu-ray that marked Hayley Atwell's first solo outing as her '40s British spy character from Captain America: The First Avenger. Lennertz has also scored Atwell's Agent Carter miniseries, and some of his themes from the 2013 short have resurfaced on the new show.

A few years ago, I was considering adding to AFOS an all-electronic midnight block that would have been called "Nightspeed," due to the popularity of both the Daft Punk/Joseph Trapanese score for Tron: Legacy and The Chemical Brothers' score for Hanna. But I think "AFOS Incognito"--which, at one point, was going to be called "Channel D," as in "Open channel D" from the original Man from U.N.C.L.E.--would be better suited for the midnight hour because of the jazzy and melancholy nature of several of the tracks on the playlist, particularly Alberto Iglesias'"George Smiley" from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, where the lonely trumpet basically says, "This ain't Bond. This is le Carré. No bloody invisible cars or steel-toothed thugs here." With some nighttime Scotch, of course, "AFOS Incognito" might also bring back memories of some of your favorite old spy shows and make you ponder over how the Steed and Peel Avengers'"Mrs. Peel, we're needed" scenes would be much different--or even be rendered obsolete--in the age of texting.

If you haven't seen it yet, Whiplash is that new Marvel spinoff movie starring Mickey Rourke as his Russian villain character from Iron Man 2. Rourke speaks for only two seconds in the entire movie, just like in Iron Man 2.

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.

One of the most terrifying movie monsters ever is a pale and bald creature that disturbingly resembles a disembodied penis with arms and legs. It possesses superhuman hearing and can discern sounds that are unnoticeable to everyone else's ears. This creature prefers to psychologically destroy its victims or leave them a bloodied mess when it's done with them. It frequently screams and barks, but it's at its most terrifying when it's in quieter modes because you don't know when it's going to attack. Dressed in all black, it goes by the name of Terence Fletcher, and it stalks the music halls and rehearsal rooms of New York, looking for future jazz musicians to bully around in last year's mesmerizing Sundance hit about the blood, sweat and tears that go into creating art, Whiplash.

During director Damien Chazelle's second feature film, J.K. Simmons, who won a Golden Globe this week for his terrific performance as Fletcher and is now a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nominee, looks like one of H.R. Giger's aliens whenever he shouts. The lighting techniques of Whiplash cinematographer Sharone Meir accentuate the prickly jazz ensemble conductor's blobfish-like, gelatinous skin and the angry Malcolm Tucker veins and lines on his face or head when he grimaces or browbeats his conservatory students into becoming perfect musicians, as if to convey that Fletcher is not of this Earth. This tyrant who snaps at drummers whenever the double-time swing isn't played to his liking has been compared to the drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket and the foul-mouthed alpha males in David Mamet plays, but the vibe I get from Fletcher is more like part Giger alien, part Nosferatu, part Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast and part that muscular and effeminate dance instructor douchebag who tried to rape Lucinda Dickey in the first Breakin' movie.

A newly buffed-up and steroids-addicted Paul Shaffer whips the guest drummers into shape for Drum Solo Week on Letterman.

So when Fletcher's latest unfortunate protégé, Andrew Neiman--an aspiring jazz drummer who worships Buddy Rich and is excellently portrayed by Miles Teller as an introverted and self-destructive perfectionist who's more along the lines of Travis Bickle, rather than a Tom Cruise-style maverick that the audience is supposed to root for--finally expresses that he's had enough of Fletcher's abuse, you end up cheering for Fletcher's beating like you did when Don Logan got his ass whupped by Gal, his wife and their housemates in Sexy Beast. That's how abusive Fletcher is in Whiplash. He approaches Don Logan levels of inflicting verbal abuse.

But unlike Don, Fletcher gets back up after his beating like it never happened and continues to find other ways to torment Andrew. In a nicely sneaky move, Chazelle robs the audience of the cathartic comeuppance that Fletcher would receive in a lesser movie. Chazelle is all about flouting expectations. He steers Whiplash away from turning into a crowd-pleaser about an unconventional musician who triumphs over conventionality and adversity and ends up besting his detestable mentor. Chazelle is after something darker and more complex and ambiguous. In Whiplash, Chazelle, who based Andrew's ordeals on his own high school experiences as a drummer who had an abusive mentor, raises questions like "If there's a case, even one isolated case, that brutalizing someone yields great art, does that justify the behavior?" and then leaves them unanswered.

How much of the things Fletcher spouts about jazz, the ways he thinks it should be performed and the story of Charlie Parker's rise to greatness is really bullshit? Is fabricating lies about music a huge part of Fletcher's brand of sadism as well? (Speaking of deception about music, you know that jazz standard Andrew identifies as "Jackie Hill, 1932" to impress his girlfriend Nicole when they hear old jazz during their pizzeria date? If you tried to Google "Jackie Hill 1932" after watching Whiplash, that standard was actually a fake tune created for the scene by Justin Hurwitz, Whiplash's clever and skilled primary composer, whose vibrant Whiplash"Overture" theme, which Hurwitz calls "fast, complicated and dense," is now in rotation on AFOS.) Chazelle also leaves it up to the audience to marinate on Fletcher's opinions on jazz, but in the movie's only misstep, it doesn't let the audience in on what black jazz musicians, particularly Andrew's black bandmates, really think of this self-aggrandizing white bandleader, a guest in their house. I would have loved to have seen a couple of those musicians share a laugh about how Fletcher fails to intimidate them and they don't buy his bullshit, much like how several black artists or writers find Iggy Azalea's music to be bullshit. Simmons hasn't been this intimidating since the first few times he made his mark on screen, as a racist church bomber during a guest shot in the first Law & Order/Homicide: Life on the Street crossover event, a corrupt NYPD sergeant in a New York Undercover episode that aired only a month after his Homicide guest shot and then much more famously, neo-Nazi leader Schillinger on Oz a year after those villainous guest shots. What about his portrayal of J. Jonah Jameson in the Spider-Man movies? Wasn't he intimidating there? That's a Disney version of intimidating, pal.

And what would be the Disney version of Whiplash? It would probably end with Fletcher and Andrew reaching some sort of understanding after their falling-out--Fletcher apologizes for being a dick, instead of justifying his dickishness like he does in Chazelle's movie when he lambasts the rest of present-day jazz for becoming subpar--and then they team up to give a perfect big blowout of a jazz concert that all the jazz critics in the audience will be writing and tweeting about. Or it would probably end with Andrew walking away from music forever and deciding that living a normal life is better than turning into another Fletcher because his miserable time at the conservatory made him realize that he doesn't need affirmation from Fletcher and that this asshole of a teacher is an egomaniac who, to borrow the late Sir Peter Ustinov's favorite description of his difficult-to-please Spartacus co-star Charles Laughton, hangs around waiting to be offended. But Chazelle's movie doesn't end either way because it isn't a simplistic bad-teacher story about the student who's right and the teacher who realizes he was wrong. Andrew is just as culpable for his own bloody-fingered suffering and misery as Fletcher is. The only likable thing about Andrew is his taste in heist movies (he's seen going to a repertory theater screening of the classic 1954 French heist flick Rififi).

It's not like Andrew fell off the turnip truck when we first see his introverted and workaholic self, practicing in the conservatory and keeping to himself. The seeds for Andrew's transformation into an unlikable mini-Fletcher are there before he joins Fletcher's band, even in something as minor and innocuous as Andrew's distaste for the weird but inoffensive way his failed author dad Jim (Paul Reiser) likes to scatter Raisinets into his movie theater popcorn at the Rififi screening. Andrew's drive to become the best jazz drummer stems from what appears to be a mostly silent resentment of his dad's preference for walking away from writing and living an ordinary, pressure-free life over becoming the successful author that Andrew thinks he should have become. It also stems from his resentment of Jim's brother (Chris Mulkey) and his sports jock sons, who bully Jim and Andrew about their past and present preferences for artistic pursuits over athletic ones, but in less brutal forms of bullying than Fletcher's (okay, maybe Andrew's verbal smackdown of his cousins at the dinner table after what appears to have been years of quietly putting up with their competitive and outgoing nature is the one other likable thing about Andrew). That drive of Andrew's is so intense he doesn't mind putting up with Fletcher's abuse even when he hates it and he doesn't care who he alienates to become the best. The scene where Andrew breaks up with Nicole (Melissa Benoist) because he thinks she'd be too much of a distraction from his drumming and he finds her to be too much of an underachiever is so difficult to watch I kept waiting for the camera to turn away like cinematographer Michael Chapman's camera does to accentuate the painfulness of Travis getting dumped on the phone in Taxi Driver. But in another of Chazelle's many ways of making the audience squirm throughout Whiplash, the camera never does.

The camera also emphasizes how stifling and cage-like Fletcher and Andrew's world of both contentious conservatory rehearsals and striving for perfection can be. The competitive atmosphere Fletcher creates to keep the members of his jazz band sharp and focused--none of them ever look happy when they're rehearsing or performing--makes you think of all those behind-the-scenes stories from SNL alums about what they view to be Lorne Michaels' distant father side and why they believe he fostered a competitive atmosphere between SNL cast members.

I'd hate to be the guy who has to clean these pool cues LL Cool J shoved up that naked guy's ass during In Too Deep.

Whiplash also causes you to reflect on how much great art has been created under prickly behavior or cruel and dictatorial conditions, which exemplifies the thought-provoking power of Chazelle's material. The movie makes you ponder whether or not that kind of difficult behavior sours your appreciation for the work that resulted from it, like how the stories of Bill Cosby's off-screen behavior, whether sexual or non-sexual, forever soured Cosby Show fans' enjoyment of the show's reruns, and they're now unable to separate the fictional dad from the accused sexual predator. Carsey-Werner, the TV studio that The Cosby Show helped build into an '80s and '90s Hollywood powerhouse, became known for granting its sitcom stars immense power and creative freedom as their stardom rose, which led to many of them becoming as cruel as they wanted to be on the set (the headlines about the infighting between Cybill Shepherd and the writers on the set of Carsey-Werner's Cybill are better remembered than the show itself). Meanwhile, under slightly less dramatic conditions, Carsey-Werner's hit Cosby Show spinoff A Different World became a funnier, sharper and more accurate show about black college life in its second season, thanks to choreographer and Fame star Debbie Allen, whom Carsey-Werner picked to replace Square Pegs creator Anne Beatts as showrunner. But was the mandatory morning workout that Allen put the Different World cast through, the kind of physical regimen you'd expect dancers like Allen's to experience rather than sitcom actors, really necessary? Over on the hip-hop side, Q-Tip had no problems working with legendary engineer Bob Power, who played a pivotal role in turning the Tribe Called Quest albums The Low End Theory and Midnight Marauders into hip-hop masterpieces and received shout-outs from Quest during "8 Million Stories" and "The Chase Pt. II," but in journalist Brian Coleman's Check the Technique Volume 2: More Liner Notes for Hip-Hop Junkies, the members of Stetsasonic found Power to be too anal for their tastes when they worked together on "Go Stetsa I." Q-Tip's ability to get along with Power was also probably because Q-Tip himself could be prickly too, as Phife Dawg noted about the bumpiest days of his friendship with Q-Tip during Michael Rapaport's Beats, Rhymes & Life documentary about Quest (no wonder Q-Tip didn't care for the film).

But perhaps the most memorable example of great art birthed from the prickliest behavior is director David O. Russell's history of shouting matches with actors, particularly on the sets of Three Kings, I Heart Huckabees and the long-delayed and might-not-be-so-great Nailed, which was renamed Accidental Love after Russell left the troubled film. While stars like George Clooney and James Caan are unwilling to work with Russell again after lousy experiences with him, why are the likes of Mark Wahlberg (who starred in Russell's The Fighter, as well as Three Kings and I Heart Huckabees), Christian Bale (The Fighter, American Hustle), Bradley Cooper (Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle) and Jennifer Lawrence (SLP, AH) far more tolerant of Russell? Is it because they're just like Andrew: they're so ambitious about their art that they don't mind putting up with a tyrannical bully for a few months in order to put out quality work, perhaps because one or two of them are bullies themselves?

Again, if brutalizing someone yields great art, does that justify the behavior?

"Overture" from Whiplash can be heard during "AFOS Prime" and "New Cue Revue" on AFOS.

Podrick from Game of Thrones wishes he were this well-endowed.

The rehashed multiple-orgasm gag is a glaring misstep (this show is capable of coming up with cleverer ways to depict Dynamite's month of fighting and fucking), while the rest of the hour-long "Wizard of Watts" is the animated Black Dynamite at its best, whether it's demonstrating why White, who's otherwise known as a star of straight-to-DVD action flicks like the beautifully choreographed MMA fight film Blood and Bone, is a pretty skilled comedic actor (he doesn't overplay the humor) or offering a demented comedic spin on not-so-funny subjects like Donald Sterling's racist attitudes and racially motivated police brutality. The finale was written about a year before the nationwide furor over both Ferguson and Eric Garner's death at the hands of the NYPD (showrunner and episode co-writer Carl Jones' attempt to make the episode more up-to-date by dubbing in audio of Honey Bee saying "I can't breathe" during a riot scene screams out "last-minute"). "The Wizard of Watts" has to be one of the few pieces of television that made me laugh at something so wrong: the sight of Rodney King--he's depicted here as an orphan at the Whorephanage and referred to during the episode as "Little Orphan Rodney King"--getting a beatdown from cops. If you're uncomfortable with humor being mined from the sight of children getting beat up, stay away from "The Wizard of Watts." Honey Bee's big musical number in the episode has her slapping around unruly orphans at the Whorephanage with '60s Batman-style onomatopoeia filling the screen.

"The Wizard of Watts" presents what has to be the world's first parody of the '70s Broadway hit The Wiz. (Let's just forget the unsuccessful 1978 movie version with a badly miscast Sidney Lumet and an ill-suited-to-be-director Diana Ross existed. Get it? Because Diana Ross bossed around both Universal and Motown in order to become part of... Okay, you get it.) The episode jokingly refers to its vision of Watts-as-Oz as "the black version of The Wiz" and places Dynamite in the Dorothy role, a leg-humping, foul-mouthed poodle named Broto (rapper/Loiter Squad star/extraneous comma lover Tyler, the Creator) in the Toto role and the Wicked Bitch of the Westside (Tim Blake Nelson), a pig from the LAPD who's literally a pig, in the nemesis role. The musical numbers in "The Wizard of Watts," which are riffs on both The Wiz's show tunes and '70s hits like the Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight," exemplify why second-season composer Fatin "10" Horton has been a nice addition to the show: he's like a less family-friendly Weird Al, perfect for the animated Black Dynamite's profane--and according to Jones, "socially irresponsible"--brand of humor.

My favorite numbers in this episode are the ones based on "Don't Nobody Bring Me No Bad News"--Dynamite's chicken-and-waffles chef friend Roscoe sings about both the joys of "mixing Fiddle Faddle, chitlins and fondue" and his promise to "never bring you no fucked-up food"--and "Home." Yes, White himself attempts to sing this episode's version of "Home," without the aid of Auto-Tune to make him sound on-key, and it's one of the funniest things this show has ever done. White once explained in the 2009 Black Dynamite DVD's commentary that his performance in the film was intended to parody Jim Brown's stiffness as an actor, like Brown's visible discomfort with trying to look relaxed during a simple romantic scene like going out on a date (it's easy to forget that White was portraying an injured ex-football star portraying a blaxploitation hero, and the stoic demeanor was partly due to his injured neck). On the animated Black Dynamite, White is committed to making Dynamite sound uncomfortable with any other moment where he has to show some vulnerability--is there anything more vulnerable-looking than singing in public?--and that commitment pays off hilariously here when Dynamite has to sing to get back home. This is what I mean when I say White is a skilled comedic actor. He doesn't treat the material like it's comedy. He treats it like it's any other dead-serious action flick he's starred in and lets the comedy come to him, just like how Dynamite lets the women come to him. Part of that is probably due to Jones' additional work as the show's voice director (I bet the direction Jones gave to White for Dynamite's musical number--or maybe White thought of it himself--was "Sing it like how Jim Brown would have sung it," which is perfect). Erykah Badu, who reprises her recurring role as Whorephanage employee Fatback Taffy (named after the Jill Scott jam, perhaps?) in "The Wizard of Watts," once praised Jones as a voice director and said he's an actor's director who "helps us bring the best out of our characters to leave us room to create who they are."

I was initially worried when Black Dynamite switched from Titmouse Inc. to MOI Animation for the animation work this season. But MOI ended up being a great substitute for Titmouse, and the Korean studio's work on "The Wizard of Watts" resulted in a remarkable-looking finale, a swirly, mindfucky '60s psychedelicization of a '70s Broadway musical that's being retold through 2015 eyes. The clips of past Black Dynamite episodes that are shown during Dynamite's climactic musical number lend "The Wizard of Watts" a sense of finality, not just as a last episode of the season (by the way, the episodes about Roots, Bob Marley and Bill Cosby were my favorites from this season) but as a possible last episode of the show as well. A third season for Black Dynamite hasn't been announced by Adult Swim yet, and if this is indeed the last episode of Black Dynamite, "The Wizard of Watts" is a hell of a way to go out. But part of me feels like the show still has more work to do. There are a lot more stories for Black Dynamite to tell and a lot more subjects from the forever-lampoonable '70s to lampoon or humorously tackle--or rather, a historically inaccurate version of the '70s that's as intentionally and amusingly inaccurate as Everybody Hates Chris and The Goldbergs' respective depictions of the '80s, although Jones' decision to give legendary Asian American Soul Train dancer Cheryl Song a fobby accent in the American Bandstand-vs.-Soul Train episode "American Band Standoff" really bugged me (she doesn't have an accent, bruh). I'm surprised that the show hasn't riffed on the 39-year-old Rocky franchise--which, by the way, will pair up Sylvester Stallone with Michael B. Jordan as both Apollo's grandson and Rocky's protégé in a spinoff movie tentatively titled Creed--because Tommy Davidson, who voices Cream Corn, does the best Stallone impression in the game. The way Davidson nails how white actors like Stallone shout when their characters get angry always kills me. I really wish the show found an opportunity for Davidson to trot out that comedic trump card of his.

And as long as police brutality or the microaggressions within something like New York Times TV desk moron Alessandra Stanley's treatment of Shonda Rhimes continue to be problems, we'll always be in need of satirical takes on these problems from unapologetically black shows like Black Dynamite. Towards the end of "The Wizard of Watts," Dynamite, who usually settles things with violence, finally manages to defeat the Wicked Bitch of the Westside--he melts to the ground, of course--after he chooses to handle the Wicked Bitch in a way that's completely different from how he usually handles his adversaries. Dynamite figures out that "the only way to defeat a crooked pig is to catch him on tape." The scene reminded me of "Oskar Barnack ∞ Oscar Grant," a great 2011 track about responding to police brutality by Blue Scholars (the duo of Prometheus Brown, one of hip-hop's wittiest Filipino American rappers, and producer Sabzi, who's currently killing it as the producer half of another duo, Made in Heights). "Oskar Barnack ∞ Oscar Grant" calls for regular citizens to use cameras as their weapons against racist cops ("Shoot the cops/Shoot the cops/Shoot the cops/Take your cameras out your pocket, people"), and Dynamite kind of does the same thing when he defeats the Wicked Bitch, but he arrives at that decision to use a camera without speechifying about it, which would have been beneath this show. If someone told me 10 years ago that Adult Swim would become a haven for largely experimental, sharply written and sometimes socially conscious comedy from black folks, whether it's a scene like that one between Dynamite and the Wicked Bitch or a show like Black Dynamite, Jones' previous show The Boondocks, Tyler and Odd Future's Loiter Squad, Black Jesus or The Eric Andre Show, I would have said, "Sure, when cops fly."

***

"Speakeasy Rider" is a strange case where Bob's Burgers borrows from some of the staff writers' favorite sitcoms but never once feels derivative or tired. It's also a case where the episode title recycles a pun. "Speakeasy Rider" is the second Bob's Burgers episode to play around with the title Easy Rider, after "Ear-sy Rider." Not even that is tired. It's Bob's Burgers. It can get away with it--for now.

The story of siblings becoming Williams sisters-style rivals in the same sport is a familiar one. "Lisa on Ice" is one of my favorite Simpsons episodes because of its outstanding gags about the lunacy of Springfield's citizens, represented in "Lisa on Ice" by their bloodthirsty attitudes about hockey, and its poignant look at the relationship between Bart and Lisa. "Speakeasy Rider," which centers on Tina and Louise's rivalry as go-kart racers (their racing scenes are impressively animated, under the direction of Jennifer Coyle) and was written by Rich Rinaldi, contains a tension-filled dinner table scene between the sisters that's reminiscent of the "I won't have any aggressive condiment passing in this house!" scene in "Lisa on Ice." Even the ending is similar to the outcome of Bart and Lisa's conflict on the hockey rink. And the B-story of Bob and Linda trying to sneak Teddy's surprisingly good home-brewed beer past the tenacious eyes and noses of health inspectors Hugo (Sam Seder) and Ron (Ron Lynch) is essentially one of those old Cheers stories where the bar has to pretend everything's normal while it's operating without a liquor license or the bar has to pretend it's a gay one.

But "Speakeasy Rider" is unmistakably Bob's Burgers all the way, which means it's weird, weird, weird--like when Tina has conversations with her go-kart or when H. Jon Benjamin and Robert Ben Garant ad-lib an awkward picnic moment between Bob and Garant's biker character Critter--as well as warm and affecting in the least expected of places and consistently funny. The day when Bob's Burgers stops being this consistently funny is going to be a sad one, as sad as a burger without buns, unless Loren Bouchard and his crew manage to avoid shark jumping or, to borrow some racing lingo, they end up sandbagging the competition.

I wish I could snap a photo of this World's End movie ticket lying on an actual pub counter covered with coasters, water marks left by drinking glasses and boozehound vomit, but the pic wouldn't turn out well under such dim lighting--and boozehound vomit.

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.

Rosamund Pike looks like she's cosplaying as the Fifth Doctor in this fight scene. Too bad Brad Allan didn't get her to use that scarf as a weapon. That would have been bomb.

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 Kylie Minogue song that's featured during this scene is one of the few World's End songs that's not on Spotify. Millions of gay Spotify users are side-eyeing Spotify right now.

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

The scene where Nick Frost sticks his hand in Sophie Evans' stomach to pull out his wedding ring is like the weirdest 'He went to Jared' ad ever.

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.

And they'll snap off... the head. Go Voltron!

This house is crazier than the Jamiroquai house, where everybody walks around like they're on a treadmill.

It's been such a long time since I've written enthusiastically about a short film that I've forgotten how my own blog style guide's policy goes for when I have to type out titles of short films. So I've had to go back to older material from my blog and verify that policy. It turns out that I'm supposed to bookend titles of short films with quotation marks instead of italicizing them, just like with titles of short stories or TV series episodes.

Stop-motion animator Timothy Reckart's 2012 short ~~Head Ov...~~"Head Over Heels," which Reckart just recently made available to watch in its entirety online for free, is so good I kind of wish it won the Best Animated Short Oscar in 2013 instead of Disney's "Paperman." (In 2013, "Head Over Heels" and "Paperman" also happened to be up against the Simpsons theatrical short "The Longest Daycare," which I love for both its jab at Ayn Rand and the adversary "Longest Daycare" writers James L. Brooks, Matt Groening, Al Jean, David Mirkin, Michael Price and Joel H. Cohen chose to pit Maggie against.) Like "Head Over Heels,""Paperman" is a clever short about a man struggling to communicate his feelings to a woman he adores. But "Head Over Heels" is about adult problems--like how do you salvage a long-term relationship that has lost its spark, and how do you do that when so many obstacles to communication are in the way?--and that makes it the more intriguing of the two Oscar-nominated 2012 romantic shorts.

The Annie Awards ceremony is my favorite award show named after an orphan who was born without eyeballs.

Timothy Reckart, accepting his Annie Award for "Head Over Heels" (Photo source: Animation Magazine)

An Annie Award winner for Best Student Project (it was made at the National Film and Television School in the U.K.), Reckart's 10-minute film is both a dialogue-less and surprisingly affecting comedy about a strained marriage and a nifty sci-fi short story set in a bizarre and unexplained reality where the laws of physics are different from our world's laws of physics. So because of the reality the short takes place in, the biggest obstacle to communication between middle-aged Walter and his ex-ballet dancer wife Madge isn't the increasingly common problem of smartphone addiction. Instead, it's gravity.

Walter and Madge live in a floating house where Walter's ceiling is Madge's floor and her ceiling is his floor. We don't know what exactly caused their marriage to become strained or why they no longer share the same gravity. All we do know is that it's entertaining to watch them go about their day as if everything's normal in their topsy-turvy world.

HEAD OVER HEELS from Timothy Reckart on Vimeo.

Meanwhile, in our topsy-turvy world where special features, which, for a long time, have been the best part of a DVD or Blu-ray, are unfortunately becoming an endangered species because younger viewers prefer to stream movies instead of watching bonus-filled physical copies of them, Reckart's strategy of getting viewers to watch his short online is noteworthy. It's not just because of his wish to keep special features alive by treating viewers to a bunch of fascinating little extras about the making of "Head Over Heels" ("On the one hand, the death of DVD is great, because the physical production of DVDs has been a barrier to entry for short filmmakers like me. On the other hand, what happened to special features?,"says Reckart). It's also because one of those bonuses is an audio-only featurette about film scoring--and it's almost three times longer than "Head Over Heels" itself, like how the documentary about the making of Superman Returns is much longer than Superman Returns itself (and a slightly more enjoyable film too, simply because of the moment when Kevin Spacey cracks up the film's crew with his Brando impression while audio of Brando as Jor-El is being played aloud on the set).

Any featurette about the film scoring process is worthwhile to me because I put strictly film and TV score music into rotation on my radio station, and I'm always interested in hearing about how that kind of music gets made. Film and TV scoring is a process not a lot of people understand or are aware of, even after the release of Forgetting Sarah Marshall, whose main character was a struggling (and way-too-frequently-naked) TV composer, so the audience saw a few scenes of him at work. Featurettes like the scoring discussion Reckart recorded with Jered Sorkin, his short's composer, are invaluable because they get those outsiders to understand the process.

I had only five questions for Reckart--whose prior stop-motion shorts include 2009's "Token Hunchback," a mockumentary about a Hollywood actor born with a hunchback--when I interviewed him over e-mail. That's because in the extras or in other interviews, he goes into so much detail about the animation process and the music that he basically answers all the other questions I had about the making of "Head Over Heels."

This is what every episode of Star Trek should have actually looked like, but a zero gravity setting would have been too difficult to film on a soundstage. Also, Shatner would have needed much stronger glue for his toupee.

Jimmy J. Aquino: The only other Oscar-nominated 2012 animated shorts I've watched besides yours are "Paperman" and "The Longest Daycare." All the nominated animated shorts from that year, including yours, contained no dialogue. What made you decide to go without dialogue for "Head Over Heels"?

Timothy Reckart: Yes, that's true--all five of the nominees that year were done without dialogue. For "Head Over Heels," I had an instinct that it shouldn't have dialogue, probably because the premise already said a lot using just an image and no words. So in order to be true to the spirit of the premise, I felt that we needed to find nonverbal ways to tell the story. It wasn't easy, actually! There are drafts of this movie that do have placeholder dialogue because I couldn't figure out how to boil it down to just a visual. The biggest breakthrough was creating that wedding picture, because it tells us that they used to be on the same level when they first got married, and it also becomes a prop where the disagreement can manifest visually, instead of verbally. We don't need to hear an argument if we can see them rearranging the photo on the wall.

JJA: Your short is only 10 minutes long, but it took about six months to animate the stop-motion puppets. What materials are those puppets made out of?

TR: The puppets are made of foam latex, the same material used for the puppets in The Nightmare Before Christmas. It's a look I really love and wanted to have for "Head Over Heels." Underneath the foam latex is a metal ball-and-socket armature, which holds the puppet in position and allows it to be animated. And then the heads are hard pieces made of Fast Cast--the only parts of the faces that move are the eyes, eyelids and eyebrows. The mouths change via a replacement mouth system--we had various options for smiles, frowns, open mouth, etc.

JJA: I love how Madge still moves like a ballet dancer even when she's vacuuming, a character detail I wasn't aware of until I watched the "Heels Over Head" version of the short, a.k.a. the same story told from Madge's point of view, right after the original version. Did you refer to ballet footage from a tablet or phone while animating those scenes, or did you refer to animatics of Madge?

TR: It's great to hear that you found new things in the "Heels Over Head" version! I think it's really interesting how the eye just can't register certain things when they're upside down. This is exactly why I wanted to make the upside-down version public. So, the only ballet reference I used for Madge was a Skype chat with my little sister Liz, who is a really talented ballet dancer. We talked through the moves that could be suitable for various moments with Madge. But then, as an animator, you have to internalize that movement, and so it wasn't so much about referencing outside footage as it was about teaching myself to move in that way, and then passing that movement on to the puppets. When you're animating, you're really acting, only you're doing the performance frame by frame. And so you have to get a physical understanding of the weight and strain of a particular movement, and the only way to do that is to do the movement yourself.

Heels Over Head from Timothy Reckart on Vimeo.

JJA: The most interesting part of your featurette about the short's score, other than Jered Sorkin pointing out that he actually recorded his guitar riffs under his kitchen table, is the explanation of temp tracking [layering footage of a work-in-progress with music that won't be used in the final cut] and how that shaped his score. I've never watched Paris, Texas, but I'm familiar with Ry Cooder's minimalist score, which you suggested to your composer as a model for the score.

What I like about "Head Over Heels" is that it's affecting without being sentimental, and so is the Paris, Texas score. Do you have any other favorite similarly minimalist film or TV scores?

TR: Yeah, the kitchen table thing was a surprise to me!

The Paris, Texas score is really amazing, and yes, like you say, it's not sentimental. It doesn't dictate the emotions of the film, but it suggests the depth of those emotions. I think of two other film composers who seem to have the same approach. The first is Carter Burwell, especially his score for Fargo. It's pretty much just one melody, but that melody is so key to the tone of the film. It's the only part of the film that's mournful, that actually suggests the tragic side of the story. Without it, I think the film would be too light and funny, and wouldn't have the same painful impact. But it resists the temptation to follow the emotional contours of the story. It's just there, this implacable voice telling you that this story is sad.

The other composer I think of is David Julyan, who I first encountered through his score for The Prestige, which gets you lost in this murky, dark, ambient fog. But the score I discovered later, that I like even better now, is his score for The Descent. It's one of the scariest movies I've ever seen, and I think part of what works so well about it is that David Julyan isn't just scoring horror cues to get your pulse up. There's a real deep beauty to the music, that mirrors the subtext: the main character's descent to a primal state. Just like Carter Burwell and Ry Cooder, David Julyan is adding depth to the film, rather than just emphasizing the emotions coming through the picture. The music is its own voice.

JJA: Studios are cutting back on DVD or Blu-ray extras. I have a million favorite DVD or Blu-ray extras, but because we're discussing animation, I'll cite the footage of the Fantastic Mr. Fox cast recording their dialogue outdoors and any deleted scene from classic-era Simpsons as examples of my favorite DVD or Blu-ray extras. What are some examples of your favorite DVD or Blu-ray extras?

TR: I was the perfect age for The Lord of the Rings--late high school, pretty sure I wanted to be a filmmaker but still very hungry for my own generation's Star Wars to inspire me. And so when the extended versions came out on DVD, my two brothers and I devoured that content. My youngest brother actually insisted on looking at every bit of data on the disc, including every image in the image galleries and the credits for the DVD production! But yeah, I loved those special features. It gave me a feeling of owning the film in a special way. I could watch it on two levels: the story level, and the level of a fellow filmmaker who knew "how they did it." It made filmmaking feel within reach for me. Another favorite is Henry Selick's commentary track for The Nightmare Before Christmas, which I must have watched like 10 times during high school. I can still recall parts of it. Personally, I'm a huge fan of commentary tracks, even more so than "Making Of" featurettes. And they're so easy to make that when a DVD or Blu-ray comes out without commentary, I can't help feeling like the filmmakers just got lazy.

More "Head Over Heels" extras can be found on Vimeo or the short's official site. The "Head Over Heels" score album is available via Bandcamp.

***

The 2015 Oscar acting categories are so fucking white the nominee who's got the most rhythm is tango enthusiast Robert Duvall.

The annual Oscar luncheon attended by all the acting nominees will be so white this year the menu will experience an 80 percent increase in mayonnaise. (Photo source: YOMYOMF)

The AFOS weekday morning block name "The Whitest Block Ever" is supposed to be a joke. The block is far from the whitest thing ever. It consists of original themes and score cues from films and TV shows directed by Asian American filmmakers and other directors of color. Jokey name aside, the two-hour 10am block is a way to celebrate these directors' efforts to break into and succeed (or in the case of Asian American YouTube content creators like Wong Fu Productions, to persevere on their own) in a largely white--and often discriminatory--industry that sadly doesn't reflect how most of the rest of America is headed towards becoming a more diverse place.

Bear McCreary's "Courthouse Brawl" and "Stop Running" from Human Target are part of the "Whitest Block Ever" playlist because African American director Kevin Hooks directed the Human Target episode that contains those cues, and the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme is in there because Debbie Allen directed the Fresh Prince pilot. Black, Latino and Asian directors aren't the only directors who are celebrated in "The Whitest Block Ever." BC Smith and ULALI's "Forgive Our Fathers Suite" from Native American director Chris Eyre's 1998 work Smoke Signals is part of the playlist, so Native American directors are celebrated as well.

Ava DuVernay directs David Oyelowo to not talk so slowly like Martin Luther King did on The Boondocks.

David Oyelowo and his Selma director Ava DuVernay

But when no actors of color were nominated for this year's Oscars--an overly long-winded award show I stopped caring about years ago because of how frustrating its annual snubs are--and it resulted in the 2015 Oscar acting categories literally being the whitest block ever, the name "The Whitest Block Ever" isn't so amusing anymore. In fact, it's become rather depressing. David Oyelowo's quietly powerful performance as Dr. Martin Luther King during his non-oratorial moments in Selma was overlooked by the 94 percent white, 77 percent male Academy, as was director Ava DuVernay's work on that riveting historical drama, which received from the Academy only Best Picture and Best Original Song nominations. Had DuVernay been nominated for Best Director, she would have been the first black female director to be nominated in that category. I like what Selma co-star Wendell Pierce said about moviegoers' frustrations with the snubs: "The people's reaction speaks for itself. To me, it's what the reaction would have been had Marlon Brando not been nominated for Godfather, if Rod Steiger had not been nominated for The Pawnbroker, if De Niro hadn't been nominated for Taxi Driver. That's what you felt this morning when David Oyelowo was not nominated for an Oscar."

Also, the time for a name change for "The Whitest Block Ever" has been long overdue. So because of those two reasons, I'm dumping the "Whitest Block Ever" name and renaming the 10am block. "Color Box" begins life under its new name with a new addition to the playlist. That addition is the song from the film that's the very thing on the minds of those who have trended #OscarsSoWhite, a tune that won the Golden Globe for Best Original Song last Sunday and is now up for an Oscar: "Glory," the anthemic Selma end title theme that ties the activism in Selma and Montgomery together with the activism in Ferguson and reteamed Selma cast member Common with John Legend, his guest vocalist from one of my favorite Common tracks, "They Say."

You can call it what you want to: "Oh, the Selma snubs were because of the negative publicity created by the smear campaign by LBJ's camp about Selma's portrayal of LBJ" or "Oh, it's because Paramount bungled Selma's Oscar campaign and didn't time it so well." But the Selma snubs are simply industry ignorance about anyone who's neither white nor male. The snubs are one of several ways that white Hollywood basically sends a message that writers and directors of color and their stories--especially stories that are told from the points of view of people of color for a change and aren't marred by the presence of a white savior character to misguidedly make the stories more palatable to white audiences--matter little to them.

It's the same kind of industry ignorance that causes a so-called reporter at the Television Critics Association winter press tour to ask both Eddie Huang--the celebrity chef whose book about growing up in a Taiwanese family, Fresh Off the Boat, has been adapted into an eagerly anticipated and promising-looking ABC sitcom where he provides voiceovers as the off-screen narrator--and the Fresh Off the Boat cast the following question: "I love the Asian culture. And I was just talking about the chopsticks, and I just love all that. Will I get to see that? Or will it be more Americanized?" I would have loved for Huang, who proved twice that he's not one for mincing his words, first in a Vulturetell-all piece about his frustrations with ABC's sitcom version of his own childhood and then again later on in that same TCA panel, to have replied with "That's a stupid fucking question" or--had that person in the audience not been female--"You love chopsticks, right? How about you go shove one up your ass? You'd love that, right, B?"

Fresh Off the Boat is set in Orlando, so Randall Park was going for the 'Wicked Bitch of the Dirty South' look with his dress socks.

So let's set aside those two depressing headlines from last week for now and look at where the new AFOS block name "Color Box" comes from. I named "Beat Box," the 7am AFOS block, after an Art of Noise track. That's why it's spelled "Beat Box," not "Beatbox." The "Beat Box" name continues an AFOS block name template that began with "Rock Box," a now-defunct AFOS block that consisted of existing songs that were used in movies by the likes of Martin Scorsese and Edgar Wright and shows ranging from The Wire to The Boondocks. "Beat Box" has double meaning: there's the connection to the Art of Noise instrumental and then there's the fact that the block is literally a box of beats on the Live365 Broadcast Scheduler grid. "Color Box," another continuation of the station's "Blablabla Box" name template, also has double meaning: it refers to both the directors of color whose works are being represented from 10am to noon on AFOS and the color boxes in Photoshop and Windows XP, which contain as much diversity as the "Color Box" playlist.

What else is in the future for "Color Box"? I'm adding a musical number from The Book of Life, Mexican animator Jorge R. Gutierrez's recent 3D-animated feature film about Día de los Muertos, to "Color Box" rotation later this month. And if Justin Lin--who's represented on the "Color Box" playlist by Semiautomatic's original music from Better Luck Tomorrow, Brian Tyler's score cues from Finishing the Game, Ludwig Göransson's score cues from the Lin-directed Community episode "Modern Warfare" and a few themes from Fast Five and Furious 6--doesn't end up exiting the 2016 Star Trek threequel that Bad Robot beamed him up to direct after Roberto Orci was kicked out of the captain's chair, maybe some Star Trek score cues will be added to "Color Box" some time in the future. What would be especially cool is having those cues sit beside the Fresh Prince theme, Eric B. & Rakim's Juice theme and Dre and Snoop's Deep Cover theme.

Sure, I love it whenever a person of color like Lin directs Star Trek (before the hiring of Lin, Next Generation regular LeVar Burton and Voyager regular Roxann Dawson both got their starts as TV directors helming episodes of their respective shows). But after the empty-headedStar Trek Into Darkness, a misfire that proved how ill-suited the Bad Robot version of Star Trek is in handling terrorism and war, two subjects Deep Space Nine previously tackled with much more nuance, Star Trek needs to be cerebral again. Bad Robot's own show Fringe, which had its protagonists constantly thinking their way through the sci-fi predicament of the week, was closer to the cerebral and exploratory spirit of the '60s Trek and its spinoff shows than Bad Robot's Trek movies themselves have been. I like Lin as both a director and an Asian American creative mind who's both conscious of and candid about industry racism, but his signature movies have been a high-school gangster melodrama with an action-flick aesthetic (Better Luck Tomorrow, still my favorite movie of his) and four action flicks that were sometimes flavored with gangster-melodrama elements (the Fast and the Furious sequels). The latter isn't exactly the cerebral direction I've been wanting Trek to return to. I'd be more thrilled about Hannibal showrunner and former Voyager writer Bryan Fuller--who always wanted to cast Angela Bassett as a starship captain and Rosario Dawson as her first officer, which I'd watch in a heartbeat--getting the chance to helm a new Trek project for TV, the medium where Trek works best. But we shall see what happens with this Trek threequel. At least Lin--who would be reunited with his Better Luck Tomorrow cast member John Cho--in the director's chair is far better than allowing Orci the crazy 9/11 truther to direct. I'm glad Paramount basically said, "Beam us up, Scotty. There's no intelligent life on Orci's planet."

I'm also a fan of that Don Cheadle movie Hote Rwanda.

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.

Alexandre Desplat's original score from Wes Anderson's farcical murder mystery The Grand Budapest Hotel is currently up for a Best Original Score Oscar, one of nine mostly technical Oscar nods The Grand Budapest Hotel has received (the most Oscar nominations ever for an Anderson film). Of the five films that are nominated for 2014's Best Original Score, The Grand Budapest Hotel is the only film I've seen, and Desplat's score is the only nominated score I've heard from start to finish, so even though I don't care for the Oscars for certain reasons and have avoided watching the tedious-ass telecast for years, I'd be glad if Desplat wins for that score (he's also nominated for his score to The Imitation Game).

That is a fucking delicious-looking birthday cake.

Desplat's Grand Budapest Hotel score immediately won me over with its jazzy brushed snares during cues like "Mr. Moustafa,""The New Lobby Boy,""Daylight Express to Lutz" and "Canto at Gabelmeister's Peak." The score inventively establishes the milieu of a European country that never existed (the film's primary setting is the fictional country of Zubrowka) by mixing and matching Russian balalaika, Hungarian cimbalom, Alpine horns and various other European elements, just as The Grand Budapest Hotel itself inventively realizes a '30s Europe that never existed (Anderson renamed the Nazis the Zig-Zag party and gave them a different-looking insignia) and is partially inspired by what Jonathan Romney referred to in Film Comment as "a half-imagined, half-remembered Europe created by émigré directors: Wilder, Sternberg, Mamoulian et al" in '30s and '40s Hollywood movies.

Like Kent Jones said in the liner notes for the Criterion Collection's Royal Tenenbaums DVD, the frequently parodied Anderson is a filmmaker you either get or you don't. I get him. I love the Anderson films Rushmore and Fantastic Mr. Fox and had a blast watching The Grand Budapest Hotel in the theater, especially when the film plays around with aspect ratios and uses them to distinguish which of the film's three--or four, if you count the framing device of a girl reading the book The Grand Budapest Hotel in a cemetary--different time periods you're watching. It's Anderson's track record with characters of color in these upper-class white fantasy worlds of his that I don't get. There are occasional characters of color who are fortunately far from problematic, particularly Danny Glover's Henry Sherman, a widowed accountant who becomes Etheline Tenenbaum's fiancé and whose harmonious relationship with his Navy midshipman son hints that he'll be an even better dad to the grown-up Tenenbaum children than Royal ever was. And then there's, well, Royal's obedient (except for one memorably stabby occasion) Indian lackey Pagoda (the late Kumar Pallana, an Anderson staple) and a bunch of interchangeable and one-dimensional Filipino pirates as the villains in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. You can tell how much research Anderson did about the Philippines during the most unintentionally funny part of his Life Aquatic audio commentary. That would be when Anderson mispronounced my parents' secondary dialect of Tagalog so terribly that the word sounded like it refers to a graffiti artist spray-painting a log (the only white person to ever get right the pronunciation of "Tagalog" on screen--it's "tuh-gaw-luhg," not "tag a log"--was Jeffrey Donovan during a Burn Notice episode).

Here we see Cool Runnings getting reenacted by just two guys who aren't exactly Jamaican.

(Photo source: CreativeCOW)

As the first Anderson film where the main character is non-white, The Grand Budapest Hotel fares alright. In the initially servile-looking role of Zero Moustafa, a lobby boy at the titular hotel who helps concierge and wrongly accused murder suspect Monsieur Gustave (Ralph Fiennes) clear his name, Tony Revolori, a teenage newcomer of Guatemalan descent, imbues the orphaned Zero, the most fully realized character of color in an Anderson film to date, with a quiet dignity that's reminiscent of both Jared Gilman's similarly orphaned Sam from Moonrise Kingdom and Henry Sherman, plus he gets to have a love life. His hotel baker girlfriend Agatha (Saoirse Ronan) uses her baking skills--which Ronan once admitted were harder to pull off than any of the fight scenes in Hanna--to help Gustave escape from prison in an enjoyable prison break sequence. The one strange thing about Zero, besides the mustache he pencils onto his upper lip each morning, is that he apparently gets whiter as he gets older. His elderly self, who recounts his adventures with Gustave to an unnamed author (Jude Law in the 1968 scenes, Tom Wilkinson in the 1985 scenes), is played by F. Murray Abraham. "Little effort was made to match the two [Zeros], and while Abraham is actually of Syrian/Italian descent, it sort of looks like Zero transforms into a Jewish grandfather by 1965," noted Kailyn Kent in The Hooded Utilitarian.

While Anderson may not be so attentive when it comes to race, The Grand Budapest Hotel is the latest example of how no other filmmaker loves putting characters in uniforms like Anderson does, whether it's Chas Tenenbaum and his sons' Adidas tracksuits, the Khaki Scouts in Moonrise Kingdom or the hotel employees in both The Grand Budapest Hotel (outfitted by Oscar-winning Chariots of Fire costume designer Milena Canonero, whose work landed The Grand Budapest Hotel a costume design Oscar nomination) and The Royal Tenenbaums. Scenes where communities or subcultures pull together in a crisis never quite soar or dazzle like Anderson's do, whether they're moments from Moonrise Kingdom's third act or The Grand Budapest Hotel's rousing Society of Crossed Keys sequence, in which an underground network of concierges from all over the world--three of them are played by three of the stars of Anderson's first two movies--swoops in to help out Gustave. All these exercises in style, visual design and slapstick during The Grand Budapest Hotel would be empty if they weren't surrounded by a modicum of heart and a melancholy longing for both departed friends or loved ones and bygone eras, moments in time that would be lost forever if it weren't for what The Grand Budapest Hotel is ultimately an affecting tribute to, via its bizarre framing-device-within-a-framing-device-within-a-framing-device structure: the power and necessity of storytelling through the ages.

None of Alexandre Desplat's score cues from The Grand Budapest Hotel are currently in rotation on AFOS, but they ought to be.

I've been working this graveshift and I ain't made shit. I wish I could buy me a spaceship and fly past the sky.

On some Fridays, I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. It's the "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

A year and a half after the airing of its fifth-season finale, The Venture Bros. returns to Adult Swim with the one-hour special "All This and Gargantua-2." Just like "What Color Is Your Cleansuit?," the fifth-season premiere, did after a similarly long gap between seasons, the consistently funny one-hour special proves that The Venture Bros. hasn't lost a step despite its long absence.

I didn't become an instant Venture Bros. fan when the show, which Comedy Central turned down (brilliant move, Comedy Central), premiered on Adult Swim in 2004. The show's character designs failed to hook me at first because I was never a Jonny Quest fan and I didn't think a Jonny Quest parody could be sustainable as a TV series. Also, the Warner Bros. Animation superhero spoof Freakazoid! had already come up with the Jonny Quest parody to end all Jonny Quest parodies, a hysterically funny fake '60s cartoon called Toby Danger. I caught up with The Venture Bros. much later, via DVD rentals of the first two seasons from Netflix, and that's when I fell in love with the show.

On DVD, I saw it evolve from a one-joke Jonny Quest parody to both an imaginative pastiche of all the non-Jonny Quest things creators/writers/voice actors Jackson Publick (a.k.a. Chris McCulloch) and Doc Hammer are in love with, from spy fiction to old Marvel Comics titles like Strange Tales or Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. and forgotten figures from '80s and '90s music videos (for example, the girl from Republica of "Ready to Go" fame), and an exploration of adult disappointment and failure, built around a fully realized comedic universe of losers and costumed deviants that rivals Springfield from The Simpsons and Melonville from SCTV (so many different shows could be spun off from The Venture Bros., and I wish McCulloch and Hammer would spin the Order of the Triad off into their own show, but I doubt they'd go for it). "All This and Gargantua-2," which centers on the disastrous opening of the titular space casino resort run by Jonas "J.J." Venture Jr. (James Urbaniak), exemplifies how the show has come a long way from its Jonny Quest riffs and humble Flash-animated roots and taken on epic proportions. The top-notch animation work by Titmouse Inc. has a lot to do with the one-hour special's epic sheen. I'm reluctant to revisit on Netflix Instant the 2004 episode "Careers in Science," the first time Dr. Venture (also Urbaniak) and his sons Dean (Mike Sinterniklaas) and Hank (McCulloch) went up into space (the deceased Jonas Venture Sr.'s Gargantua-1 station, to be exact), simply because the primitiveness of how "Careers in Science" looks would be jarring, in comparison to what Titmouse is able to achieve with The Venture Bros. nowadays.

As is the case with many other animated or live-action sitcoms, The Venture Bros. was trying to find its comedic voice when it started, so early episodes like "Careers in Science" don't have the confidence "All This and Gargantua-2" has in spades. "Gargantua-2" is The Venture Bros. firing on all cylinders comedically, whether it's Dr. Venture's gripes about both J.J.--his more confident and successful brother--and the new casino or the ability of the Sovereign, an adversary more menacing than the Monarch (also McCulloch) will ever be, to somehow find time between Guild of Calamitous Intent meetings to watch Totally Spies, which isn't exactly the kind of entertainment you'd think a criminal mastermind would be aware of. I'm also fond of the fact--which somehow goes unnoticed by the continually dissatisfied and unimpressed Dr. Venture--that J.J. blatantly copied much of Star Trek for the look of Gargantua-2. J.J.'s outfit at the casino opening is Kirk's admiral uniform from Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

The hair replacement system is the reason why Star Trek: The Motion Picture cost so fucking much in the '70s.

(Photo source: TrekCore)

It's especially great to hear Stephen Colbert reprise his role--for what Hammer has confirmed will be one last time before Colbert takes over Late Show on CBS--as Professor Impossible/Incorrigible, the Mr. Fantastic-style jerk Colbert voiced in the show's first two seasons. Bill Hader was a decent substitute for Colbert in the role of Richard Impossible, but Colbert, who can play arrogant characters in his sleep, is preferable to Hader in that role.

McCulloch and Hammer refuse to talk down to the audience, which explains why there's no "Previously on..." recap at the start of the special to reorient viewers after the year-and-a-half-long gap. I love the omission of that. McCulloch and Hammer figure that their viewers must have watched the fifth-season finale either dozens of times already or right before "Gargantua-2," so why bother with the previously? The only thing McCulloch and Hammer do to reorient viewers is to repeat a scene from the end of "The Devil's Grip" where the Monarch, Dr. Mrs. the Monarch (Hammer) and Henchman 21 (also Hammer) find a new home after the destruction of their cocoon headquarters.

Some viewers were underwhelmed by "The Devil's Grip" as a season finale and didn't find it dramatic enough for their tastes. But I thought there was plenty that was dramatic about it: the Monarch, Dr. Venture and Dean had moments of "What am I doing with my life?," a recurring question on this show. Even Colonel Gentleman--McCulloch's inspired reimagining of both Sean Connery and his Allan Quatermain character from the mediocre movie version of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen as a bisexual author with a penchant for scribbling down pre-listicle fluff like "Colonel Gentleman's Hollywood Actresses Who Need a Smack in the Mouth"--had a "What am I doing with my life?" moment in "The Devil's Grip" too. "Gargantua-2" is a cross between the kind of explosive, death-ridden season finale some viewers expected out of "The Devil's Grip" and a comic book annual. I think an annual would be a better way to describe "Gargantua-2." It's an annual where a few character arcs are wrapped up (unlike Molotov Cocktease, who faked her death at the end of the fourth season, it looks like cancer-stricken J.J., General Treister and the Sovereign will stay dead) and the primary setting is destroyed--the Monarch's theatrics and the ineptitude of Dr. Venture's security systems both cause the Venture Compound to be burnt down--in order to make way for the sixth season's New York backdrop, which is tantalizingly introduced at the end of the epilogue at J.J.'s funeral.

As amusing as all the pop-culture references are during "Gargantua-2"--I'd like to know who did uncredited work voicing Roger Moore at the baccarat table--they're, as usual, just the icing on the cake for what really makes The Venture Bros. stand out: the character writing. McCulloch and Hammer are able to take a premise that was sustainable for only 11 minutes on Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law and was bound to run out of gas beyond that running time--like "What if Shaggy from Scooby-Doo were the Son of Sam?," which Tick creator and current Gotham writer Ben Edlund actually once imagined during The Venture Bros.' second season--and make it work as a half-hour piece of character-driven comedy or, in the case of "Gargantua-2," longer. This show isn't merely "Spot the Reference" humor a la Friedberg/Seltzer in animated form, and the characters on The Venture Bros. aren't simply joke machines. They talk more like either ordinary people--for a guy who's an extraordinary killing machine, Brock Samson (Patrick Warburton) sounds less like a quippy action hero and more like an ordinary and jaded cubicle jockey--or the self-loathing nerds McCulloch and Hammer clearly are.

I've said before that The Venture Bros. mines much of its humor and dramatic moments from how most nerds really are and the ugliness and emptiness of their behavior--the day Dr. Venture stops being so self-centered is the day this show is over--instead of being another nerd fantasy that glorifies what nerds imagine themselves to be. On The Venture Bros., that kind of fantasy gets taken down and skewered with the same kind of precision Dr. Killinger delivers while stabbing or impaling the lightsaber-wielding Investors--his own brothers--with his umbrella towards the end of "Gargantua-2." If there's any kind of message that could be found on this show, which doesn't care for talking down to its audience or delivering any form of speechifying, it would have to be "Life would be easier if you stopped drowning in your own delusions," an idea Dr. Venture is bound to ignore as he and the rest of Team Venture settle into the Venture Industries New York headquarters J.J. bequeathed to Dr. Venture in his will, during a season that will hopefully be as satisfying as "Gargantua-2" is in its 47 epic minutes.

Memorable quotes:
* "Never baccarat. It's a dead giveaway. Nobody but spies play baccarat."

* The Sovereign, attempting to lure Dr. Mrs. and her colleagues into a trap by disguising himself as 21: "The Monarch's waiting, and you guys are acting like Alex, Sam and Clover of Totally Spies!"

He may be dead for now, but the Sovereign has a lot of explaining to do about his tastes in spy shows.

* Professor Impossible, after shape-shifting into a black mechanic: "Say, that doesn't count as blackface, does it?"

* Professor Impossible: "You'd have me back?"
Sally Impossible (Mia Barron): "No, idiot. But I'm not about to let our son lose his father because he joined the LARP society."

* Guild Command Dispatch Agent Watch (McCulloch), referring to the Sovereign, who enjoys shape-shifting into the Thin White Duke: "Where did David Bowie go?"
Dr. Mrs: "He's not David Bowie."
Ward (Hammer), Watch's partner: "Aw great, all my signed albums just became worthless."

Ed Koch would have hated seeing this out in the street. Anything that anti-graffiti prick would have hated is something I would love. Like Sonny from Do the Right Thing once said, 'It's cheap, I got a good price for you, Mayor Koch, how-I'm-doing, chocolate-egg-cream-drinking'--uh, I'll leave out the anti-Jew part.

(Photo source: No Curves)

Sometimes I'm just in awe of some of the people who read this blog. For instance, Edgar Wright stumbled last week into my Throwback Thursday discussion of the brilliance of The World's End as both an anti-gentrification satire and a midlife crisis comedy and retweeted it to his fans. And I know that writers from Bob's Burgers and the short-lived Motorcity, two animated shows I greatly admire, have read this blog because they've thanked me on Twitter for what I've written over here about their shows.

A Bob's Burgers writer is as amazing to me as, say, Rick Ross (ruh!) is amazing to some female fan who faints over getting his autograph. Now I wouldn't faint in the presence of either the controversial MMG impresario or a Bob's Burgers staffer--and I wouldn't say I'd get "the feels" around either of them because I'm over 21, and if you're over 21 and you go around telling people that you get "the feels," miss me with that asinine-sounding shit--but around that Bob's Burgers staffer, I'd be like, "So in episode S05E04, was H. Jon Benjamin actually blotto when he ad-libbed that turkey baster monologue? Was he? Huh, huh, huh, huh, huh?"

In another instance, I once blogged about regretting not buying when I was a kid an issue of Billy Nguyen, Private Eye, a largely forgotten indie comic book that remarkably featured an Asian American P.I. as the protag. My post caught the attention of Billy Nguyen artist Stan Shaw. Stan and I exchanged a few e-mails about Billy Nguyen (Stan turned out to also be an AFOS listener), and months later, he sent me in the mail a gift I'll always treasure: an issue of Billy Nguyen.

About a couple of months ago, I wrote about a now-defunct Canadian DJ mix podcast I miss hearing, Sounding Out the City. It was where I first encountered the late Amy Winehouse's "Valerie," and it was also where I first took notice of Mayer Hawthorne and TOKiMONSTA. The TOKiMONSTA track I heard on Sounding Out the City was "The World Is Ours," which flipped a classic Marvin Gaye/Tammi Terrell duet and is a tune TOKiMONSTA says she loves so much that she's never released it officially.

Back when I had a day job in the racist and misogynist shithole called the Silicon Valley tech world, Sounding Out the City helped make getting through that job, which I started to get bored with about four years into it, a hell of a lot easier. Sounding Out the City selector Rob Fragoso saw my post about his podcast and is now the latest person whose work I've admired to surprise me with an appreciative comment that made my day.

Besides SCTV, Drake, Shad, Dream Warriors and Shay Mitchell, I also gotta give it up to Canada for Sounding Out the City.

It turned out not to be the Ernestine Anderson "Love for Sale" that Rob featured on his podcast in 2009, but a completely different jam of the same name by Bay Area singer Lillian Alexander, as Rob realized several hours later. Come back to the ones and twos, Rob, we need you! Or if you're actually still mixing, the podcastosphere needs you! Some currently miserable Silicon Valley or Silicon Alley worker who's basically me eight years ago might need you!

Short Term 12 star Brie Larson was a frontrunner for Emilia Clarke's role of Sarah Connor in Terminator: Genisys. The way that movie spells 'genesis' is so fuckyng insypyd.

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. This week, I drew the ticket that said "Thor." But I feel like I've said all I could say about the first Thor movie in my discussion of Thor: The Dark World a couple of weeks ago. Also, I'm tired of talking about superhero movies. So I'm ditching the movie I drew--it's my blog, I can do what I want--and focusing my attention this week on a smaller-scale movie about a completely different kind of hero. Even after its release two years ago, it still deserves as much attention as the kind a superhero movie always gets from the press before its release, and if you're not familiar with this little movie, familiarize yourself with it now on Netflix streaming.

There was only one word that kept surfacing in the mental notes I took in my head as I was watching Short Term 12 for the third time, in preparation for today's edition of Throwback Thursday, and that word was "economical." Asian American indie filmmaker Destin Cretton's second feature film, the story of a group foster home counselor (Brie Larson) and her determination to save her facility's newest resident (Justified's Kaitlyn Dever) from the same kind of child abuse she herself used to be subjected to, is a triumph of economical storytelling, a film that prefers to show rather than tell, while many other films with similar subject matter opt to smother the audience with dollops of on-the-nose exposition, speechifying and worst of all, mawkishness.

'SXSW has a lot of companies that specialize in pens, T-shirts and beer cozies.'--Hari Kondabolu

Destin Cretton (center), the Short Term 12 cast and the film's SXSW Grand Jury Award

Neither of those three things show up to ruin Short Term 12, which Cretton based on his own 2009 short film of the same name. The only major exposition the audience receives at the start of the film is the terse instructions Larson's character Grace gives to Nate (Rami Malek), the facility's newest staffer, about how to handle the at-risk kids they're assigned to look after ("Remember, you are not their parent, you are not their therapist; you are here to create a safe environment, and that's it"). None of the backstories of the film's four main characters--Grace, her good-humored co-worker and boyfriend Mason (John Gallagher Jr.), Dever's character Jayden and Marcus (Keith Stanfield), a resident with both musical and ichthyological aspirations who's turning 18, so his new age requires him to move out of the short-term home, but he's deeply troubled about having to leave--are unveiled in clumsily written infodumps or pointless flashbacks. They're unveiled gradually, piece by piece, and at believable moments. For example, when Marcus refuses to celebrate his 18th birthday with a party or cake and simply requests to have his head shaven, the film withholds for a while from the audience Marcus' reason for his request. When the film finally makes clear--after the haircut--why Marcus wanted it, it's an unexpected and quietly devastating moment.

Nobody in the film says "My dad's been hitting me" or "I was raised by the system" when they first appear on screen. It just wouldn't ring true. Grace, Jayden and Marcus are survivors of abuse who have difficulties with communication and trusting anyone, so Jayden and Marcus prefer to express the pain they're experiencing through the art they create. In Marcus' case, his art takes the form of a mesmerizing freestyle Cretton shot in one long uninterrupted take.

Marcus' freestyle scene is a good example of the effectiveness of Short Term 12's digital cinematography.

Short Term 12 was shot with Red cameras.

Winter's Bone was also shot with Red cameras.

I like any digital camera that's named after a Bruce Willis action flick.

The believable and stripped-down dialogue is a great example of the verisimilitude Cretton aimed for in Short Term 12 (Cretton himself once worked at a similar facility for at-risk youth, and his experience with social work is evident in moments like Grace's thorough inspection of the kids' rooms for drugs and the scene where Mason and Nate have to carefully restrain Jayden when she has a meltdown in her room). This is the kind of off-kilter film where a character like Mason introduces himself not in a monologue about how his foster family saved him from the streets--that monologue is saved for later, for the most fitting occasion--but in a monologue to Nate about a comedically disastrous workday: the day he shit his pants in front of a kid who tried to run away from both him and Short Term 12, to be exact. It's a brilliant way to establish Mason's compassion and doggedness--a doggedness that surfaces later when he has to deal with Grace's sudden reticence about both being pregnant with his child and accepting his marriage proposal--without lapsing into the standard bad-movie-writing method (ridiculed most memorably by Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story) of having Mason declare that "I'm compassionate and dogged."

Grace is equally compassionate and dogged in both her attempts to help the introverted Jayden, who's too scared to report her father's abuse, and her interactions with another similarly introverted charge of hers, Sammy (Alex Calloway), who frequently makes escape attempts that are foiled by Grace, Mason and another counselor, Jessica (a pre-Brooklyn Nine-Nine Stephanie Beatriz, who bizarrely looks and sounds 10 years younger than how she normally looks in her leathery, Emma Peel/Catwoman-esque cop outfits on Nine-Nine). But because Grace didn't grow up with the type of loving and nurturing parents Mason was lucky to have and she still bears emotional and self-inflicted scars from the years of physical and sexual abuse she suffered, social work is more of a challenge for her emotionally and mentally than it is for Mason. Margaret Cho recently said in an interview that the late Robin Williams, one of the kindest comedians she knew in the business, "knew how to give but he had a problem receiving." That perfectly describes Grace.

Kaitlyn Dever also played the kid Raylan has to rescue from Mags Bennett on Justified. I'm two seasons behind on Justified. I wonder if Jeremy Davies is still being outacted by his own hairdo on the show.

Jayden's ordeals outside the facility--combined with Grace's fear that the system will fail Jayden, as well as the distressing news that Grace's abusive father is about to be released from prison--reawaken inner demons Grace has fought so hard to suppress. They cause Grace to have doubts about her future with Mason and to shut her fiancé out of the pain she's experiencing and he so desperately wants to help her overcome. Much of the beauty of Larson's excellent performance as Grace is due to her ability to physically express Grace's private worries that she might someday pass on the cycle of abuse to her and Mason's child--without ever verbalizing those worries.

The film's implication that artistic expression has saved and will continue to save these troubled kids' lives--including Grace's--is never spelled out in dialogue either. It's nicely conveyed in only visual terms. Speaking of which, as someone who'd always get huge pencil stains on the sides of the hands while doodling or sketching with pencils, I love how Cretton and cinematographer Brett Pawlak let the audience see the pencil stains on the sides of Grace and Mason's hands while they're relaxing at home by sketching portraits of each other.

I know I've sworn off writing listicles because I now hate them so much, but up next is a list of people Mason's pencil sketch of Grace bears more of a resemblance to instead of closely resembling Brie Larson.

Larson's performance is another one of those performances that make you say, "Why, Academy? Why the hell did you sleep on this performance?" The SXSW audience was far more attuned to Short Term 12's stripped-down wondrousness. They awarded Short Term 12 with Audience and Grand Jury prizes in 2013. This gritty but life-affirming film makes me eager to see what else Larson, Dever and Stanfield have up their sleeves acting-wise, as well as any of Cretton's future film work. It's hard to dislike any film where a character names his pet fish after a certain legendary Queensbridge rapper who happens to have a way with telling a story, just like Short Term 12 itself.

Spoiler alert: Nas suffers a terrible fate at the facility. In other words, Short Term 12 let Nas down.

None of Joel P West's minimalist score cues from Short Term 12--which, to borrow the words of animator Timothy Reckart regarding Ry Cooder's Paris, Texas score, don't dictate the emotions of the film and instead suggest the depth of those emotions--are currently in rotation on AFOS, but they ought to be.

It's Madam Secretary, After Earth guy and Black Knight, together in one movie, yo.

What I said about Bad Boys as an "eye Teen Reviewer" for the San Jose Mercury News back in 1995 (April 14, a week after Bad Boys' April 7 opening, to be exact), word for word and with every single Merc style guide preference preserved, straight off a clipping I still have of my own article:

'Bad Boys' is fun — for a formula movie

EYE TEEN REVIEWER
Jim Aquino

THE cop-buddy comedy "Bad Boys" (not to be confused with the 1983 Sean Penn prison pic of the same name) is the latest flashy action movie from the Simpson-Bruckheimer assembly line, which has churned out such blockbuster hits as "Beverly Hills Cop" and "Top Gun."

Directed by Michael Bay, the genius behind the popular, Clio-winning "Aaron Burr?" milk commercial, "Bad Boys" sticks to the tried-and-true formula that made Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer big-name producers back in the '80s: gaudy visuals, extravagant action sequences, a big-time soundtrack and a script that's high on concept and low on subtlety.

After producing a low-profile film such as the dark, dialogue-driven comedy "The Ref," it appears that Simpson and Bruckheimer want to go back to making big, dumb movies again. "The Ref" worked because it fit star Denis Leary's edgy, verbose persona, and never tried to soften Leary's cynical humor. "Bad Boys" could have been as satisfying as "The Ref," if its script were as clever overall as the snappy, entertaining interplay between its two leads, sitcom stars Martin Lawrence and Will Smith.

Lawrence and Smith, playing mismatched Miami police detectives Marcus Burnett and Mike Lowery, rise above the formulaic cops-vs.-heroin thieves plot to deliver top-notch performances. "Bad Boys" runs too long at more than two hours, but it remains watchable because of these charismatic, energetic stars and their fast, funny and often improvised delivery.

"Bad Boys," originally written for Dana Carvey and Jon Lovitz, is strong on visuals, thanks to first-time director Bay, who must have watched a lot of Tony Scott movies. The Miami setting is wonderful to look at, and the set pieces are well-staged.

But "Bad Boys" suffers from uninteresting bad guys and a story line that offers few surprises, aside from the amusing subplot in which neurotic family man Burnett and smooth ladies' man Lowery switch identities. Tea Leoni, who was so memorable as the sexy bohemian girlfriend on the short-lived sitcom "Flying Blind," plays a key witness.

"Bad Boys" isn't original or groundbreaking, but it's fun and entertaining, thanks to Lawrence and Smith.

What I think about Bad Boys in 2015, on the day before the date of the 20th anniversary of its release:

Of all the movie reviews I wrote for the Mercury News while in high school and then college, the mixed review of Bad Boys--at that point in his filmography, the Fresh Prince had just won over critics because of his big-screen debut in the film version of Six Degrees of Separation, but he hadn't made Independence Day yet--is one of the only two or three reviews where I still stand by every word. For instance, Michael Bay was at his best as a director of commercials like that classic "Got milk?" ad (although putting the words "Michael Bay" and "genius" in the same sentence back then makes me cringe); The Ref remains a terrific antidote to Yuletide mawkishness; and I still can't remember the name of Burnett and Lowery's boring nemesis. Like Dana Gould did when he couldn't remember the name of the villain Ben Gazzara played in Road House, I'm just going to call their boring nemesis Drago.

All the other reviews I wrote back then can go in the shredder. That was the biggest problem with being a film critic for print media. If some part of your opinion about a film would change (and my opinions sometimes do), you couldn't go back and change what you said in print like you can now easily do on a blog or in digital media.

Aside from a clunky and racist bit of attempted comedy where Shaun Toub--a.k.a. Dr. Yinsen from the first Iron Man flick--shows up as a stereotypical Middle Eastern convenience store clerk (an ominous sign of comedic things to come in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen) who racially profiles Lawrence and Smith because of the visible guns in their holsters, Bad Boys remains one of Michael Bay's few tolerable movies. That's mainly due to the dialogue between Martin and Will ("Don't be alarmed, we're Negroes"), the most enduring part of the first Bad Boys, which cost only $17 million to make. I prefer smaller-scale Michael Bay over larger-scale, giant-robot-testicles-flashing Michael Bay, which is why I never bothered to watch 2003's much bigger-budgeted and longer-in-running-time Bad Boys II, even though Simon Pegg and Nick Frost were seen worshiping Bad Boys II in Hot Fuzz, an Edgar Wright film that trounces Bad Boys in all sorts of ways, simply because it's an Edgar Wright film (I hear 2013's Pain & Gain is supposed to be a return to Bay's smaller-budgeted roots, but I haven't seen that one yet either).

The Bad Boys original score by Mark Mancina still holds up too and hasn't aged poorly at all. During "AFOS Prime" and "Beat Box" on AFOS, you can hear a previously unreleased version of the film's dancehall-influenced main title theme, Mancina's "Prologue - The Car Jacking," taken from La-La Land Records' out-of-print Bad Boys score album and featured below. (The Bad Boys song album's not too shabby either. I remember practicing to get my driver's license to the sounds of Diana King's dancehall-style "Shy Guy.")

If you still find Bad Boys--or Drago--to be too generic for your tastes, perhaps reading Shield creator Shawn Ryan's mostly sardonic live-tweets of Bay's Bad Boys DVD commentary while he watched Bad Boys for the first time ever in 2012 will make the film go down easier. "Michael goes silent on commentary for a few minutes,"tweeted Ryan, who actually likes the movie, during a lull in Bay's pontifi-bating. "Perhaps he took a break to write nasty email to Megan Fox."

Jack's is as awesome as One-Eyed Jacks from Twin Peaks, except nobody there looks as hot as early '90s Sherilyn Fenn and nobody talks like David Lynch characters.

(Photo source: A Burger a Day)

I don't like looking back at the past. I'd rather think about the present and the future, which is why a recent subject in this blog's Throwback Thursday series, The World's End--a cautionary film about the dangers of nostalgia and remaining in the past--resonates so much with me. Edgar Wright's film agrees a lot with me about staying focused on the future and never looking back. If I look at the blog archive at the bottom of my blog and the last few posts I wrote are all about subjects that took place before the '00s, I get really worried. "Uh-oh, I better not spend too much time in the past. Stay in the now," I think to myself. That's why I did for a couple of years a weekly series of posts about new TV (but focused on animation). Newer TV is always more fascinating to me than older TV. I don't even like film or TV blogs where the authors write only about old films or old TV, a.k.a. what Arthur Chu would call the pre-Selfie, pre-Fresh Off the Boat world. It's like those authors are basically saying, "Film and TV were better when it was all white folks." Uh, no, it wasn't, Teabagger.

This year, UC Santa Cruz--the university whose alums include Maya Rudolph, Cary Fukunaga and more recently, DJ Dahi--is celebrating its 50th anniversary. As part of the festivities, UCSC's campus radio station is inviting all former DJs, from Bullseye host Jesse Thorn to a classmate who occasionally keeps in touch with me, Yukiya Jerry Waki, to return to the station later this month and reminisce about their time there. I hate reunions and prefer to avoid them like the plague. So on some mornings in the past few weeks, I'll wake up thinking to myself, "Nah, I'll skip this Santa Cruz one." But then on other mornings, I'll wake up thinking, "Okay, maybe I'll drop by, probably tell someone a wacky story about that terrible time I did my radio show immediately after a sweaty, all-white drum circle performed live at the studio--so the studio smelled like the inside of an outhouse at a summer music festival for the rest of that afternoon--and after only a couple of hours of reminiscing, I bounce, and then it's straight to grabbing both a burger at Jack's and the next bus back north."

I'll always be grateful for what the station taught me about radio, broadcasting, chart reporting, interacting with the labels and so on--it was where AFOS began, as a two-hour show where I got the chance to interview on the phone Mark Hamill, '60s Star Trek composer Gerald Fried and my personal favorite interviewee on the phone during those UCSC years, a now-retired TV critic named Joyce Millman--but my time at the station also consisted of a few things I'm not proud of or that were just plain stupid. A reunion will just make me relive those cringeworthy moments I'd rather not revisit.

For example, out of the 200-something episodes I hosted on KZSC and the 100 hour-long episodes I did strictly for Internet radio, only 10 of those episodes are ones I'm satisfied with today, and most of those 10 were recorded at Studio Paradiso inside the Mosser Hotel in San Francisco. The original one-or-two-hour incarnation of AFOS, before it morphed into a 24-hour Internet radio station, didn't really gel and become a different kind of film music radio show--very modern-sounding, as well as not too dry or boring regarding the subject of film and TV score music and extremely silly and goofy during Halloween and Christmastime--until a high school classmate named Necip, who re-encountered my voice while driving around the Central Coast with the stereo on one day, gave me video editing software and taught me how to use it for producing my radio show.

Oh, so that's where Kanye got his idea for all that corny-ass slow-motion horse footage in the 'Bound 2' video.

The Windows version of Adobe Premiere improved the sound quality and pacing of the AFOS show and made it possible to both do a bunch of things that couldn't be done on live radio--I never liked doing AFOS live anyway--and keep archives of episodes that, thanks to digital advances and the addition of a CD burner to my PC at the time in the year 2000, will never shrivel up or break like cassette tapes of old radio material likely would. I wish I had learned how to use Premiere sooner (another KZSC DJ previously introduced me to editing software, but I never took the time to sit down and learn how to master using that software). Premiere made me say goodbye to cassette tapes, which was how I would piece together the show before 2000, and never look back.

Had I used Premiere before 1999, I wouldn't have been as embarrassed as I am about how AFOS sounded during the first half of its five-year run on KZSC, and I would have been able to digitally create radio edits--like DJ Hyphen would do when he hosted Sunday Night Sound Session on KUBE, before his recent move from Seattle to England--of profane hip-hop or stand-up comedy tracks I wanted to play while hosting other KZSC shows, but I was unable to because I didn't have the software for editing them or I just didn't want to bother with censoring them live on the air. As a show of gratitude for introducing me to Premiere, I often gave Necip the funniest lines to say during the sketches I wrote for the AFOS Halloween and Christmas specials on KZSC ("Bea Arthur, get down!"). Most of my favorite memories of pre-2010 AFOS actually have little to do with Santa Cruz and involved either recording at Studio Paradiso or Necip's skills with both finding sound FX to slip into Premiere and doing celebrity impressions (I learned how to imitate Schwarzenegger's voice by listening to Necip's Schwarzenegger impression and then reciting Kindergarten Cop lines rather than Terminator lines, simply because Kindergarten Cop has Schwarzenegger saying, "Who ees your daddy?").

I don't use Premiere as much anymore--I currently prefer Audacity for Mac for whenever I take audio clips from movie trailers or TV promos and edit them into intros to the film and TV score tracks I put into rotation on the AFOS channel--but the software forever changed AFOS. Sure, I'm satisfied with only 10 of the episodes I pieced together on Premiere, but a shitload of enjoyable one-to-six-minute audio memories resulted from Premiere, and as I vacillate between deciding to visit and deciding not to visit the station reunion, I present the most enjoyable of those memories, via my SoundCloud page, to you now.

Okay, maybe some of the past isn't so bad.

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.

Cell phones have ruined movies forever. They've made it more difficult for screenwriters to come up with suspenseful situations. You couldn't write either Rear Window or North by Northwest today because every moment of suspense would become impossible for the nitpickers in the audience to take seriously due to "Hmm, you know he or she could use his or her smartphone to save his or her own ass in this situation." The constant advances in cell phone technology have even affected movies that have aged pretty well--when they don't involve phone scenes, that is. The appearance of any kind of phone in a largely timeless movie that's not a present-day cell phone immediately makes that otherwise timeless movie dated.

Thanks to the cutting-edge work of cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth and director David Fincher, whose visuals have always been cutting-edge and distinctive (whether in Fincher-directed music videos like Aerosmith's "Janie's Got a Gun" video or more recent Fincher films like the Cronenweth-lensed Gone Girl), the 1999 anti-consumerism cult favorite Fight Club looks like it could have been filmed yesterday, and it stands the test of time--for several minutes. But then Edward Norton is seen standing in a pay phone booth to dial up his new soap salesman friend Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), and Fight Club instantly becomes dated.

I had not watched Fight Club in 16 years, before rewatching it as prep for today's edition of Throwback Thursday. In addition to containing the only film score by the Dust Brothers of Paul's Boutique fame (who really ought to compose more scores, due to their outstanding work on the 1999 film, which can be heard during either "AFOS Prime" or the first 33 seconds of the trailer below), Fight Club remains my favorite Fincher film. It's still my favorite even when the appearance of a pay phone wrecks the timelessness and anonymity both Fincher and the various adapters of Chuck Palahniuk's thought-to-have-been-unfilmable 1996 novel of the same name, including credited screenwriter Jim Uhls and uncredited Andrew Kevin Walker from Seven, tried to aim for in their portrayal of modern-day malaise (the city Fight Club takes place in is unspecified, despite the frequent use of L.A. locations, as is the name of Norton's narrator character, although the shooting script referred to him as Jack--we'll call him Jack from this point on).

Much of the appeal of Fight Club stems from the fact that we've all experienced Jack's feelings of malaise (he's nameless for a reason: so that male audience members can name the narrator after themselves). Okay, so you may not be a privileged white male yuppie like Jack, but you can definitely relate to his dissatisfaction with his job as an auto recall specialist and the feeling of emptiness that triggers his insomnia and has him doing anything to feel alive, whether it's going through an IKEA shopping phase, faking diseases and crashing support group meetings with his frenemy Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter) or forming with Tyler an underground fight club to blow off steam, for men only (no Marlas allowed).

A good example of the film's ability to connect with viewers long after it tanked at the box office (Palahniuk's material isn't unfilmable--it's unmarketable, as 20th Century Fox realized while inanely trying to sell Fight Club as a TBS Movie for Guys Who Like Movies back in 1999) was when former RogerEbert.com editor Jim Emerson interestingly called Fight Club one of the most accurate depictions of clinical depression ever made and praised how it captures the way that depression is all-consuming. "It helped shake me out of the grips of a depression that was sucking me down at the time,"wrote Emerson.

Funny how the most dated thing in this shot is not Brad Pitt's Soul Train outfit. Instead, it's that fucking pay phone.

(Photo source: DVD Beaver)

(Spoiler time. Weirdos who have never seen Fight Club can leave now.)

Fight Club is also one of the cleverest satires about the formation of cults--the creepy kind, not the more harmless midnight-movie kind that enjoys Fight Club--and how they sucker people in (someone ought to put Fight Club on a double bill with Going Clear). In a twist as great as the revelation that Tyler is really Jack's imaginary friend and the voice in his head, the fight club, which grows to nationwide proportions, evolves into a terrorist cult called Project Mayhem and takes extreme measures to address what were valid gripes about consumerism. Like Putney Swope, Fight Club explores how, as Nelson Kim wrote while discussing in Hammer to Nail why Putney Swope is still relevant, "people will be cruel and craven no matter what side of the power dynamic they occupy."

Every Ferguson protester's favorite scene in Fight Club

(Photo source: DVD Beaver)

Fincher's film isn't an endorsement of fascism. It's a humorous critique of both that and masculinity when it gets taken to absurd and homoerotic-looking extremes, something that the Rosie O'Donnells and Kenneth Turans of the world failed to grasp (part of what makes Norton's Fight Club audio commentary with Pitt and Fincher enjoyable is the hatred Norton frequently expresses for Turan and his "obsolescence"). O'Donnell hated Fight Club so much that she spoiled its twist ending on her 1996-2002 talk show, the third most despicable thing she's done on TV, right below her lame "ching chong" bit on The View and any time she tries to sing. It's not surprising why O'Donnell disliked Fight Club: both she and her talk show/daily one-hour commercial for Koosh Balls were extremely corporate, and in addition to fascism, the film critiques what Emerson described as an "insidious kind of corporate enterprise--the kind that markets itself as your best friend and uses cutesy branding images to get under your skin and into your wallet." Sounds an awful lot like O'Donnell.

Fight Club--a film that wowed Palahniuk so much he considers it superior to his own original version (its cult popularity has led Palahniuk to team up with both Batgirl revamp artist extraordinaire Cameron Stewart and Dark Horse Comics on a Fight Club sequel in graphic novel form)--is a strong example of the inventiveness that distinguished 1999, perhaps the most extraordinary year of filmmaking ever. It's a year that included Election, Office Space, The Iron Giant, South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, the better-than-the-original Thomas Crown Affair remake, The Limey, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, Being John Malkovich, Galaxy Quest and Johnnie To's Hong Kong action classic The Mission, all films that didn't make as much moolah as The Matrix did in the same year but are equally (and in some cases, even more) enduring and inventive. Sure, American Beauty, which, like Fight Club, sends up both materialism and the immature posturing of its anti-materialist protagonist, also came out of 1999 and became an award-show darling, and sure, Kevin Spacey was great in it, but have you taken a look at that film lately? It hasn't aged as well as Fight Club has.

Try not to snicker during Wes Bentley's frequently parodied, corny and oh-so-serious monologue about the beauty of a dancing plastic bag. You can't. "Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world, I feel like I can't take it, and my heart is just going to cave in" vs. "I felt like destroying something beautiful"? Oh, I think we all know which movie wins this round.

Those weird hip muscles that Brad Pitt has in Fight Club that point to his dick? Just made peace w fact that I'll never have 'em. Big day.
— Kumail Nanjiani (@kumailn) March 1, 2012

Seeing Brad Pitt shirtless in Fight Club was my 9/11.
— Kumail Nanjiani (@kumailn) July 26, 2013

If Francis Dolarhyde from Manhunter were a Goth

Over the weekend, I marathoned all 13 episodes of Netflix's Daredevil after the streaming service unveiled all 13 on Friday. I don't call it "binge-watching." It makes watching TV sound like an eating disorder, and I don't believe in "binging" shows. TV should be savored gradually, in one- or two-episode viewings, with breaks for a meal or living life in between, instead of some extremely weird 780-minute, all-in-one-sitting session where the couch potato never showers or changes his underwear. I prefer the term "marathoning" over "binge-watching" because it sounds more proactive and productive, and it makes you feel like you've accomplished something special, like sitting through three days and two hours of Ted Mosby's obnoxiousness without ever trying to stick your head in the oven.

Daredevil follows the spy shows Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Agent Carter as the third Marvel Studios TV show that takes place in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and is the first in a bunch of interconnected Netflix original shows that will culminate in Marvel Studios' introduction of a superteam called the Defenders to the MCU. I've never read the Daredevil comics, even though I'm a lapsed Catholic like blind lawyer/vigilante Matt Murdock, whose issues with his faith fuel much of the drama of the comics and have turned Daredevil into the most intriguing crime show about Catholic guilt since Wiseguy. I never watched either of 20th Century Fox's two pre-MCU movies featuring the Daredevil characters because the negative reviews drove me away from wasting my time with them (but I did see as a kid the not-so-good 1989 TV-movie The Trial of the Incredible Hulk, starring Rex Smith as Matt and John Rhys-Davies as Wilson Fisk, a.k.a. the Kingpin). One of those negative reviews included one of my favorite putdowns from Bay Area film critic Richard von Busack, a fan of the Frank Miller-era Daredevil comics. He wrote, "Playing blind was perfect for [Ben] Affleck, as it allowed for his customary inability to express feeling through his eyes."

Despite never seeing a single minute of Affleck's version of Daredevil, I knew early on that British actor Charlie Cox is far more nuanced and expressive than previous portrayers of Matt in this MCU version of Daredevil. There's a scene in one of the earlier Daredevil episodes where Matt, his business partner Foggy (Elden Henson) and their secretary Karen (Deborah Ann Woll, who, together with Henson, helps keep this dark show from becoming a relentlessly humorless slog) have a meeting at their struggling law firm with mob consigliere Wesley Owen Welch (Toby Leonard Moore). Cox remarkably expresses Matt's distrust of Wesley, even though his eyes are shrouded in Matt's trademark red-tinted glasses, he doesn't have any dialogue and the conversation doesn't contain any of the elaborate sound FX the show frequently relies on the rest of the time to depict Matt's heightened senses. He conveys Matt's distrust in just the way he breathes, a great early example of how genuinely mature--as opposed to Zack Snyder's idea of mature--and nuanced Daredevil is as a street-level and more grounded MCU show, as well as how surprisingly compelling Daredevil is as a legal drama, in addition to being a solid introduction to a comic book character I've never warmed up to.

Netflix has Daredevil and the Marvel Cinematic Universe shows, while Overstock.com will be streaming episodes of the Super Fuzz reboot.

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has often suffered from being generic-looking-as-fuck, but that's been starting to change in its second and current season, due to the increasing involvement of Kevin Tancharoen, showrunner of the not-so-generic-looking webseries Mortal Kombat: Legacy and younger brother of S.H.I.E.L.D. co-showrunner Maurissa Tancharoen, as episode director. He directed the standout S.H.I.E.L.D. episode where Agent May and an imposter posing as May fight each other. That May-vs.-May fight remains the show's best fight scene. But even the May-vs.-May showdown and the surprisingly impressive Batroc-vs.-Steve fight in Captain America: The Winter Soldier are conventional in comparison to what Cabin in the Woods director/co-writer Drew Goddard (Daredevil's showrunner for just the first couple of episodes, before Spartacus veteran Steven S. DeKnight took over), director Phil Abraham, a Sopranos cinematographer who's directed several Mad Men episodes, and stunt coordinator Philip J. Silvera pulled off for three minutes at the end of Daredevil's second episode, "Cut Man."

The single-take fight scene has been done before, but the novelty value of the single-take fight scene at the end of "Cut Man" stems from seeing it within the context of a superhero genre piece. The strengths of the MCU movies have never really been the action sequences or the fight choreography. Their strengths have always been the character writing, the snappy dialogue and the charismatic, "this is why I'm a movie star" performances from the likes of Robert Downey Jr. However, Marvel Studios seems to be starting to respond to criticisms that MCU action filmmaking is too generic and assembly-line, as exemplified by the creative freedom they gave to Shane Black for Iron Man Three (before they Britta'd things up with Edgar Wright)--Black's involvement in the MCU resulted in my favorite MCU action sequence that doesn't involve any combat, the Air Force One passenger rescue sequence--and the aforementioned Kevin Tancharoen episodes of S.H.I.E.L.D. And now along comes Daredevil, which proves in the one-shot fight scene--a moment I don't think will be up on YouTube in its entirety for too long--that it won't be another superhero genre piece where the filmmakers purposely avoid clarity during the fight scenes and let the editors and CGI FX technicians do all the work. That's the same exact complaint DVD Savant author Glenn Erickson had about the fights in The Bourne Ultimatum, which he said are "the equivalent of the dances in Chicago (2002), where every musical number is splintered into so many shots, we can't really tell if the performers can dance."

Daredevil shows this Russian thug how he do-si-dos.

Matt Murdock: the most badass Child Protective Services agent ever.

By opting for the single-take approach, Daredevil wants to show that the performers can dance, which makes the hallway fight scene so riveting to watch. "It was always scripted that this scene was going to be a one-shot," said Silvera in a New York ObserverQ&A about his fight choreography for Matt and the Russian crew of child traffickers he takes down all by himself (and with the help of an unplugged microwave at one amusing point). The scene isn't just style for style's sake. The single-take approach also advances character and perfectly reflects the intensity and single-mindedness of Matt in his mission to clean up his home turf of Hell's Kitchen, as well as the difficulty of his mission (the TV-MA-rated Daredevil--which allows its characters to curse but won't allow them to say "fuck," so it'd be perfect for FX's prime-time schedule--is the first MCU project to not shy away from showing in graphic detail the wounds and battle scars its primary hero experiences). The single-take "Cut Man" fight is the show's most clever way of establishing a mission statement, and it's far better as a mission statement than any of the standard-issue "this is my city" dialogue the writers give Matt to say in later episodes.

It's great to see an MCU project taking some cues from Asian action cinema of the past 15 years. The Daredevil hallway fight is like the love child of the single-take hallway fight from another equally dark and ultraviolent comic book adaptation, director Park Chan-wook's Oldboy, and The Protector's single-take restaurant sequence, and it might remind premium-cable drama fans of the crazy six-minute tracking shot Cary Fukunaga orchestrated for True Detective last season. Fight scenes where characters are never seen getting tired and winded often bug me. That's why almost all my favorite fight scenes--whether it's the Oldboy hallway fight, the showdown in the streets between Dan Dority and the Captain on Deadwood, the brutal brawl between Lucas Hood and an MMA rapist on Banshee or the unprecedented 1970 Darker Than Amber fight where the blood all over Rod Taylor was reportedly real--are ones that emphasize the physical exhaustion of the combatants. The Daredevil hallway fight automatically shoots itself to the top of the pantheon of MCU action sequences by showing how tired Matt, who hasn't fully recovered from the injuries he sustained earlier in "Cut Man," gets while he fights his way to rescue a kidnapped boy.

Daredevil isn't a perfect show. Some feminist Marvel geeks have found most of the show's female roles to be underwhelming, even when Rosario Dawson is portraying a modernized version of Night Nurse in an intriguing nod to that non-superhero Marvel comic, and later episodes (spoilers) aren't going to impress viewers of color who complain about how the MCU shows have a tendency to opt for the POC equivalent of "women being fridged" to increase the heroes' angst. But you can't deny how Daredevil, like Arrow and The Flash's enjoyable-so-far Eobard Thawne arc before it, proves that serialized TV, when it's done right, is a better fit than a 103- or 152-minute movie for the kind of ambitious and sophisticated storytelling Clouds of Sils Maria director Olivier Assayas admires about superhero comics but has found to be lacking in superhero movies ("The movies are ultimately an oversimplification of those comic books,"notes Assayas), and you can't deny the power and effectiveness of Daredevil's single-take fight. That riveting scene is an encouraging early sign of how more shades of gray are finally being introduced into the previously family-friendly and brightly lit MCU, first with the arrival of Daredevil last Friday and then with the premiere of A.K.A. Jessica Jones, the forthcoming Marvel/Netflix adaptation of Brian Michael Bendis' for-mature-readers private eye comic Alias. Now if only Daredevil had an opening title theme that's as cool and batshit--or rather, devil-may-care--as CHiPs season 1 theme composer John Parker's opening title theme for Darker Than Amber.

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