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

Quick! Make up a name for a porno version of a Jackie Chan flick in five seconds! Shanghai Poon! Armour of Cock! The Suxedo! Drunken Masturbator!

Disney's recent decision to scrap its Tron threequel may be due to the studio becoming cautious about its spending after yet another one of its big-budget films, Brad Bird's Tomorrowland, tanked at the box office, but I think that cancellation is also due to the fact that threequels tend to suck. However, the hugely entertaining 1992 Jackie Chan/Michelle Yeoh action classic Police Story 3: Supercop--a recent subject in Stereogum editor Tom Breihan's "Netflix Action Movie Canon" column for Deadspin, as well as a movie recently brought up in this blog's comments section by both Bay Area film critic Richard von Busack and I--is a rare case where a threequel doesn't suck.

In its overviews of the films of Chan the modern-day Buster Keaton, Subway Cinema noted that Police Story 3"was a movie that feels like a breath of fresh air for Chan... The foreign locations give things an expensive sheen, and [director Stanley] Tong's eschewing of complex choreography in favor of wide, clearly presented stunt sequences brings a crisp, new feel to Chan's movie repertory." It was also, according to Subway Cinema, a movie Tong (who took over as director after Chan directed the first two Police Story flicks) offered to Yeoh as a way to keep her spirits up after her divorce. The addition of Yeoh's mainland cop character to the mayhem ended up being the high point of Chan's Police Story franchise.

Chan and Tong's wild symphonies of comedic property damage (achieved without any fake-looking CGI!) and "look, Ma, no stunt doubles!"-style martial arts slapstick are represented on the AFOS playlists by J. Peter Robinson's main theme from Jackie Chan's First Strike, the American version of Police Story 4: First Strike. That 1996 installment also had Chan and Tong venturing into foreign locations, for a 007-style story where Hong Kong police inspector Chan Ka-kui, the hero of the franchise in its classic era, gets embroiled in international espionage (the American First Strike theme is part of "AFOS Incognito" rotation, to be exact). The franchise made its return in 2013 with the non-comedic Police Story 2013, which has nothing to do continuity-wise with the previous adventures of Inspector Ka-kui (Chan's playing a completely different character, just like in 2004's New Police Story). A massive hit in mainland China, the mainland-made Police Story 2013 debuted in American theaters and on digital platforms just last week--to mostly negative reviews--under the title Police Story: Lockdown.

Present-day American viewers are lucky to be able to see Police Story: Lockdown in English subtitles and in its original Mandarin (whereas the previous Police Story movies, all Hong Kong-made, were originally in Cantonese, the most common dialect in Hong Kong), just like how I was lucky to see the original version of Police Story 3 back in 1993, at a Bay Area AMC multiplex that was experimenting at the time with showing badly subtitled--instead of badly dubbed--but thankfully uncut action flicks from Hong Kong. This was three years before Chan had his first box-office hit in America with a redubbed version of Rumble in the Bronx, the filmed-in-Vancouver action comedy that gave us a Bronx surrounded by snow-capped mountains. The surprise hit led to several older Chan flicks hitting American theaters and getting redubbed and butchered as well, as part of a misguided attempt--there's always a tinge of imperialism to this shit--to make them more palatable to American moviegoers. One of those flicks was Police Story 3.

Here we see a typical morning of Michelle Yeoh on her way to work.

I refuse to ever watch the version of Police Story 3 everyone in America has seen, even though Yeoh's crazy and legendary motorcycle-to-train jump stunt and all the other jaw-dropping stunts remain intact. It's the version that concludes with a very '90s Tom Jones cover of Carl Douglas'"Kung Fu Fighting," the same version that Dragon Dynasty--an Asian action film imprint of The Weinstein Company that's otherwise respectful of the Asian action classics it introduces to non-Asian audiences and gives them the option of watching those films uncut and subtitled--stupidly chose as the only version of Police Story 3 for the film's special edition DVD release.

Why do I refuse to watch that Miramax/Dimension version? I don't want my memories of Police Story 3 to be soiled. Police Story 3 in its original form was perfect, man--even with "I Have My Way," the slightly cheesy Cantopop tune Chan sang during the outtakes that concluded the film. Don't get me wrong: Tom Jones is the illest. His Burt Bacharach/Hal David-produced theme from Promise Her Anything, which is part of "AFOS Prime" rotation, is an underrated tune, graced with a guitar riff that's like "Jimmy Page fronting the Byrds," as Allmusic once put it, as well as a tune that's so evocative of Carnaby Street in the '60s. But "Kung Fu Fighting" and its asinine and stereotypical "Oriental riff"? What the hell's it doing in Police Story 3? Miss me with that shit.

I want to always tell anyone whose only taste of Police Story 3 was the Miramax/Dimension version that these Hong Kong films are always better in their original form and that something vital is lost when a terrific sequel like Police Story 3 is deprived of its connections to previous installments. Inspector Ka-kui may not have much of an arc in the four classic-era Police Story movies--in each movie, no matter what rank he's at, he's the same fallible but stalwart character, a "frustrated conformist," to borrow the words of Film Comment's Dave Kehr, rather than a rebel--but in this age of Netflix streaming and Amazon Prime, I wish I could be able to marathon on a lazy afternoon the inspector's fall to demoted cop, followed by his rise to respected lawman (and finally, globe-trotting defender of the security of the world), without any of the changes Miramax/Dimension and New Line Cinema made to the last two classic-era movies (Police Story 4 remains the only classic-era installment I've seen in just its butchered form).

Let's take another enjoyable threequel from a long-running action franchise just like Police Story. Now imagine if Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade got imported to another country, and an editor in that country replaced the first few minutes of Last Crusade's elegant opening sequence in the Utah countryside (actually a seamlessly edited amalgam of Utah and Colorado locations and movie sets in England and Hollywood) with a montage of Tiger Beat snapshots of Harrison Ford, and then the editor changed Indy's name to Adventure Jones. So that when Brody barks on horseback at the end, "Indy, Henry, follow me! I know the way! Ha!," he's been redubbed to say, "Adventure, Henry, follow me!" Then that's followed by John Williams' end credits score music getting replaced by Engelbert Humperdinck doing a cover of the Dazz Band's "Let It Whip" that horribly updates the tune for the '90s. That's exactly what happened to Police Story 3, and that's how inane Miramax/Dimension's butchering of it was.

Paul Nice, the beathead behind one of my favorite mixtapes, 2005's Do You Pick Your Feet in Poughkeepsie?, dropped an enjoyable (but not exactly danceable) Shaw Brothers tribute mix full of Shaw Brothers movie soundbites and Shaw library music cues last week. His tribute to everyone's favorite movie studio with a logo that clearly was filmed against someone's office door window has got me thinking that unless Marvel Studios tops the Raid-inspired fight choreography on Daredevil with even more impressive choreography on its planned Iron Fist martial arts project for Netflix or in the Daughters of the Dragon adaptation I've been wishing for, I doubt anyone's going to assemble a similar tribute mix about Marvel Cinematic Universe filmmaking 40 years from now, in the same way that the Poughkeepsie DJ sampled The Daredevils and Masked Avengers about 40 years after their release.

Throwback Thursday guest blogger Hardeep Aujla and Marvel Studios' harshest critics might be onto something about the MCU movies not holding up as action filmmaking 15 years from now. But if they ever YouTube how Universal Television shot Captain America in the '70s, they'd probably be like, "Wow, that was wack. It makes the studio that brought you Sharknado look like Spielberg. Okay, Joe Johnston and the Russo brothers for the win."

In the '80s, Marvel Comics published a Larry Hama G.I. Joe story about Snake Eyes and Scarlett that contained no dialogue and is still remembered as a groundbreaking piece of comic book storytelling. If Marvel Studios wants to be remembered for more than just snappy banter or one-liners and the transformation of Andy Dwyer into an action star and be thought of as an innovative action movie studio like Shaw Brothers, they're going to have to do something ballsier than even single-take fight scenes in a hallway or in front of a blind Chinese guy singing in Mandarin. I think they should make a silent action movie like that classic G.I. Joe issue and goddamn commit to it like Hama did.

(Photo source: Mars Will Send No More)

... if only G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra...

Mad Max: Fury Road is nearly a silent action movie. The guy from Skins is chattier than either Tom Hardy or Charlize Theron. The enthralling 15-minute White Walker/wight attack on the Free Folk and the Night's Watch two Sundays ago on Game of Thrones--in which David Benioff and D.B. Weiss basically knocked on The Walking Dead's door that night and said to Scott M. Gimple, "Try and top this"--isn't exactly chatty either. I'm surprised no one outside of the TV industry has attempted to do a silent action flick like Buster Keaton's The General, which George Miller cited as an influence on his latest Mad Max installment. Think of all the Akiva "My Best Work Was on the Underrated Fringe" Goldsman-penned blockbusters that would have been improved--or ~~all the post-1996~~ ~~two of the~~ ~~one of the~~ all the three-fourths of one of the post-1996 Michael Bay blockbusters that would have been improved--if they'd been completely scrubbed of dialogue.

Oh yeah, there's director J.C. Chandor, whose 2013 film All Is Lost, with Robert Redford alone on a boat, almost contains no dialogue--Chandor said he wanted to see what Redford would be like as an actor if his voice was taken away--but All Is Lost is a survival drama, not an action flick. Whether part of the action genre or not, a huge part of what makes Fury Road, the "Hardhome" massacre sequence and All Is Lost riveting is their minimal dialogue and the performers' reliance on their physicality to carry the story. Before Fury Road, Game of Thrones and All Is Lost, a few writers and directors--all working for TV--were aware of how riveting depriving their actors of their voices could look, especially in a dialogue-heavy medium like TV, so they experimented with near-silence.

Some of Breaking Bad's most memorable cold opens were done as mini-silent action movies. Genndy Tartakovsky, who drew storyboards for Iron Man 2, did a silent action movie a few times on Samurai Jack and Star Wars: Clone Wars (the minimized dialogue is why I always preferred Tartakovsky's cel-animated Star Wars prequel tie-in over George Lucas' actual prequels, which, at their worst, turned into C-SPAN in space). The director of Avengers: Age of Ultron himself did it once for almost an entire hour on Buffy, and it remains one of the show's most popular episodes. I'd make a silent action movie if I had the money and the connections. So what's stopping the studios from experimenting with wordless action sequences for two hours?

Sure, The Artist was one of the lowest-grossing Best Picture Oscar winners, but a modern-day silent movie isn't exactly box-office poison. People (who are open-minded enough to put aside the notion that a silent movie is too old-timey) will go see such a movie if they're fans of whoever's going to be doing all the non-talking. Mel Brooks' star-studded Silent Movie was a hit in 1976, and I bet that if IMAX theaters show for just one week the "Hardhome" massacre sequence--and only that sequence--droves of Game of Thrones fans will roll into those theaters that week like that creepy "Hardhome" zombie avalanche.

With their one-act or one-episode experiments, Vince Gilligan (and his Breaking Bad army of imaginative directors like Michelle MacLaren), Tartakovsky and Joss Whedon proved once again that far braver creative souls have been emerging from TV. So maybe a silent movie would be too bizarre for the playing-it-safe (and now Joss-less) film division of Marvel Studios. Someone said Jackie Chan, who worships Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Charlie Chaplin, should be the one to tackle a silent movie, but I doubt Chan would get that experimental these days: he's in the "Steve Martin shifting back and forth between Father of the Bride and more serious movie roles" phase of his career, not the "Steve Martin doing weird shit like recording banjo albums" phase. But you know who I think would be up for a silent actioner because he has proven that just because you're a 70-year-old filmmaker, that doesn't mean you have to phone it in? George Miller.

The Aussie director considered making Fury Road silent. A silent version of Fury Road is even being planned as an extra for its Blu-ray release. Also, it looks like Mad Max is getting less chatty with each installment. I wouldn't be surprised if by the time Hardy does his last movie as Max--and Hardy's inevitably going to make more of them--he'll say only one line in the whole movie: "Oy."

The General: Fury Road from Walter Rafelsberger on Vimeo.

Judd Apatow's next female-led comedy movie is the Amy Schumer vehicle Trainwreck, whose title automatically disqualifies it from getting shown as entertainment aboard Amtrak.

Every Throwback Thursday, I pull out from my desk cabinet--with my eyes closed--a movie ticket stub I didn't throw away, and then I discuss the movie on the ticket. Today, instead of drawing some random ticket, I'm intentionally pulling out the ticket that says "Bridesmaids" because of last week's release of the enjoyably subversive Spy, the third--and certainly not the last--film in a bunch of collaborations between Melissa McCarthy and director Paul Feig, whose successful partnership started with Bridesmaids.

The 2011 smash hit Bridesmaids may be the first Judd Apatow-produced comedy where I prefer the unrated cut on Blu-ray/DVD over the shorter theatrical cut. Unrated cuts of Apatow comedies usually wind up with a little too much filler--these already two-hour-plus comedies end up becoming even longer--but the unrated Bridesmaids cut rules over them all, simply because it contains a genuinely funny scene that should have been part of the theatrical cut. It's when star/co-screenwriter Kristen Wiig's character Annie (named after Annie Mumolo, Wiig's Bridesmaids writing partner)--a single lady in her late 30s who's not enjoying the loneliness of the single life and is worried that she's being similarly shunted aside by her bride-to-be best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph)--gets grilled by the inquisitive son of one of her blind dates. The kid, who, of course, has no filter, is too young to understand that his questions and comments are on the rude side ("Your hair looks burned").

I can see why it was excised. Paul Feig--a longtime master of cringe comedy, whether it was in the episodes he directed for The Office or the material he wrote for Freaks and Geeks, the classic Feig/Apatow collabo that lifted tons of real-life cringeworthy moments from the adolescences of both Feig and Apatow--must have felt that Annie had been through enough humiliating moments in the theatrical cut already, and this awkward living room talk with the little boy was one too many. But the uncomfortable talk amusingly points out how Annie's douchey fuckbuddy Ted (an uncredited Jon Hamm)--the most evil character in the film, even more so than Rose Byrne's character, who, unlike Ted, actually changes and becomes less evil over the course of the film--behaves exactly like this kid. "Your hair looks burned" and "My grandma died where your sitting... right where your underpants are..." are lines that could have easily come out of Ted's mouth.

Also, I'm a connoisseur of scenes where actors are trying their damnedest not to laugh. Towards the end of the living room scene, Wiig can be seen breaking character and laughing, just like when she had to turn her face away from the camera during her MacGrubersex scene with Will Forte because his weird-sounding moans and the sweat droplets landing on her face were causing her to corpse. Part of the enjoyment of the living room scene is due to Wiig's own enjoyment of interacting with this weird kid, and her reactions bring to mind Eddie Murphy's visible amusement over Bronson Pinchot's ad-libs during Beverly Hills Cop, which Elvis Mitchell once pointed out as a rare moment of Murphy getting a kick out of letting another comedic performer upstage him.

In fact, quite a few of the other deleted scenes that made it to Bridesmaids' extended cut contain shots of actors corpsing or trying to hide it. The audio commentary even points out when Byrne--so good as Annie's wealthy and ultra-competitive nemesis Helen--is corpsing behind an airplane seat that's shielding her lips from the camera. She does it while watching Melissa McCarthy improvise dialogue as Megan--the amusingly unfiltered, Guy Fieri bowling-shirt-clad character who landed McCarthy a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination and kicked off a De Niro/Scorsese-style partnership with Feig that's continued with The Heat, Spy and next year's all-female Ghostbusters reboot featuring Thor as the new Janine--during Megan's attempt to seduce her seat neighbor (McCarthy's real-life husband, Tammy director Ben Falcone) as Annie's experiencing her pill-induced airborne meltdown. Also, Byrne's eyes are clearly saying, "Aw shit, Kristen, please don't cause me to corpse during this take," when she sees Wiig singing gospel in an old-timey voice. That's how funny the material in Bridesmaids was: not even the actors whom you'd expect not to corpse because of their largely non-comedic bodies of work (Byrne is best known for that hilarious knee-slapper of a show, Damages) were immune to corpsing.

Speaking of immunity, I've always been immune to chick flicks. During the holiday season, I'm allergic to Love Actually. I prefer Johnnie To over Johnny Depp. So I wouldn't have given Bridesmaids the time of day had I not known the Freaks and Geeks duo of Feig and Apatow was involved. But any time those two join forces, the results are bound to be terrific, and, of course, Bridesmaids turned out to be better than the average chick flick. It makes sharp observations about class issues (Annie is still reeling from the failure of her Milwaukee bakery, which she made the mistake of opening during the recession, and her economic woes are partly to blame for the dissolution of her friendship with Lillian) and the excesses and absurdities of American wedding culture. It doesn't end with Annie making a clichéd rom-com run through the city streets to tell Chris O'Dowd's cop character she loves him. Old SNL buddies Wiig and Rudolph (I love how her character's parents are Franklin Ajaye and Miss Yvonne) have chemistry for days, including during their one dramatic scene together. Feig's ability to let all six of the female principals--many of whom are, by the way, Groundlings alums--shine comedically makes me eager to see him handle the Ghostbusters reboot that's set to drop in summer 2016. The cameo by Wilson Phillips of "Hold On" fame makes for a good gag about Helen's competitive nature, even though Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle's use of "Hold On" remains funnier.

Oh yeah, and the film is consistently hilarious. You're left wanting more of Annie and the new friends she's made from her duties as maid of honor, but at the same time, you're relieved that Wiig--whose movie canon, as Vanity Fair once said a year before she had her first massive hit with Bridesmaids, has been an acting lesson on how to be funny without being the loudest person in the room--never gave in to greed and rejected the idea of a Bridesmaids sequel. Except for The Great Muppet Caper, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, Police Story 3: Supercop, Addams Family Values, 2011's The Muppets, A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas and 22 Jump Street, modern-day (as in post-Star Wars) comedy movie sequels have never been any good, and I get the feeling Wiig is aware of that. "We knew during the first one, this was it," said Wiig to Harper's Bazaar in 2013. A sequel would be as pointless as one of Annie's many blind-dates-gone-bad.

That glove she wears to treat her carpal tunnel problem looks oddly cool in a Michael Jackson kind of way.

Diminish the role she played in the making of GoodFellas, and she'll inflict cuts on you that are as bad as a jump cut in a Ridley Scott movie.

Thelma Schoonmaker

When I recently wrote aboutThe Wolf of Wall Street, I said, "A lesser filmmaker would rain down judgment on Travis [in Taxi Driver]... or he'd make Rupert [in The King of Comedy] and Belfort... experience a personality change and become remorseful after their short prison time. But not Scorsese. He wants to sit back, let the audience judge Travis/Rupert/Jordan for themselves and see what happens. If many in the audience squirm over their behavior and the repercussions, that's great. If others view them as their hero or spirit animal--like how several Homer Simpsons out there cheered The Wolf of Wall Street on as if it's School of Hard Knockers... to the dismay of those who completely sympathize with Belfort's victims--that's great too. It's weird but great. As for a man named John Hinckley..."

Right-wing film critic Kyle Smith definitely belongs in the "It's weird" category. If you stayed away from Twitter all last week like I've been frequently doing lately, you might have missed the appalled reactions to Smith's umpteenth attempt to troll everyone: "Women are not capable of understanding GoodFellas," his so-ridiculous-it-could-be-easily-mistaken-for-a-ClickHole-parody New York Post op-ed.

It's funny how--like a clown--the New York Post published Smith's op-ed the day after GoodFellas re-entered my consciousness when I stumbled into the film's 25th Anniversary Blu-ray in a rack of Blu-rays at Target, and I became worried that I'd have to double-dip because the new Blu-ray contains a cast and crew commentrak with Scorsese, Ray Liotta, Lorraine Bracco and Paul Sorvino (I was relieved to find out a few days later that my copy of the 2004 GoodFellas DVD contains the same commentrak). In his article, Smith says things like "To a woman, the GoodFellas are lowlifes. To guys, they're hilarious, they're heroes. They rule the roost." Remember Henry Hill's coke-fueled meltdown on his last day as a wiseguy? Yeah, that was really heroic.

Fans of GoodFellas, both male and female, went apeshit on Twitter over Smith's sweeping statement--his op-ed is such a hacky '80s stand-up routine about the differences between men and women that I can practically smell the brick wall--but they went apeshit in sardonic and entertaining ways that made nuance-free, often way-too-shrill-and-humorless-for-my-tastes Twitter worth reading again.

That NY Post GOODFELLAS article akin to having someone explain to you that BREAKING BAD was all about how Walter White is the man.
— Alison Willmore (@alisonwillmore) June 11, 2015

it's not a gender thing, NO ONE is gonna "get" Goodfellas unless theyve already seen the animaniacs pigeon cartoons it was based on
— gregory erskine (@cat_beltane) June 11, 2015

Sexism, sure, but the worst thing about that Kyle Smith article is that he makes Goodfellas sound like Entourage.
— Scott Beggs (@scottmbeggs) June 11, 2015

Hold on. Did @rkylesmith compare #Goodfellas to #Entourage? It would appear that you, sir, are the one who doesn't understand Goodfellas.
— Olivia Raeann (@goudyliv84) June 11, 2015

Shout out to the editor of GOODFELLAS pic.twitter.com/eZovHNFLy6
— Annapurna Pictures (@AnnapurnaPics) June 11, 2015

Pretty sure Thelma Schoonmaker understands Goodfellas considering she fucking edited it.
— Neil Mitchell (@nrm1972) June 11, 2015

Yo @kylesmith, the crew of Goodfellas: Exec. Producer: Barbara DeFina Editor: Thelma Schoonmaker Casting: Ellen Lewis I think they got it
— Charles Clymer (@cmclymer) June 11, 2015

Why do right-wing film critics often misread gangster movies as endorsements of gangster behavior, just like how so many right-wingers misinterpret rap lyrics? Smith's misreading of one of his favorite mob movies as Entourage with guns (I'm looking forward to someone--with way too much time on their hands--mocking the much-ridiculed Smith article by replacing GoodFellas' dialogue with dude-bro dialogue from Entourage) reminds me of when Armond White, who currently writes for the right-wing National Review, panned Better Luck Tomorrow in 2003 because he was dissatisfied with what he thought was the Justin Lin film's endorsement of the Asian American friends'slide into crime and bloodshed. Better Luck wasn't endorsing and fetishizing the murder in the garage towards the end of the movie, you old conservative fuck. Same to you, Mr. Rosso lookalike who prefers his entertainment to be Pollyannaish and, like White, condescendingly accused Lin of selling out his own people by making an "empty and amoral" portrayal of Asian Americans in Better Luck.

What GoodFellas and Better Luck--and in a not-as-gory way, The Wolf of Wall Street--are doing is initially reveling in the allure of a gangster lifestyle (for me, the most alluring part of the gangster lifestyle in Better Luck was Roger Fan's sociopathic character beating up at a party a racist jock who needed his ass kicked). Those films have to do so in order to sell you on why these characters are attracted to crime--Scorsese once described the Copacabana sequence in GoodFellas as a moment when the gangster lifestyle seduces Henry--but then they kick the seat from under you and switch to focusing on the downsides of such a lifestyle. Unlike the boring lifestyle porn of Entourage, those films intend to undermine the gangster fantasy they introduced.

GoodFellas excels at its hard right-hand turn into the downsides of its characters' behavior by not stupidly opting for the bad-movie-screenwriting route of having a character--or an on-the-nose pop song--flat out say, "This is bad, mmm-kay" (Scorsese's terrific use of existing songs to comment on a scene, but only "in an oblique way," was partly why existing songs from GoodFellas like "Monkey Man" were all over the playlist for the now-defunct AFOS block "Rock Box"). The pre-MTV Films, pre-DJ Shadow cut of Better Luck excels at that hard right-hand turn as well. The MTV Films cut? Uh, not so much. Lin, perhaps more rattled by Mr. Rosso's outburst at Sundance than he'd let on, tweaked the ending in the MTV Films version so that the characters, including a pre-Fast and the FuriousHan Seoul-Oh, ended up being a little more remorseful about their actions.

Of course Smith wouldn't be aware that a woman edited GoodFellas because he strikes me as an idiot who never reads the credits on the boxes of things. Last time I checked, reading the credits of things is one of the requirements of being a film critic. The outcry over the New York Post article is a good time--hell, it's always a good time--to reassess or pay more attention to longtime Scorsese editor Thelma Schoonmaker's pivotal role in making GoodFellas a classic of adrenalized pacing, rock n' roll filmmaking and moral ambiguity (my favorite line from Schoonmaker about the editing of GoodFellas was her reply to someone's bafflement over how such a demure and unassuming lady could be the cutter of Scorsese's most violent works: "Ah, but they aren't violent until I've edited them").

Scorsese and Schoonmaker's partnership ranks as one of the all-time greatest director/editor partnerships. Without Schoonmaker in the editing suite, I don't think Scorsese would have been able to take four hours' worth of material he shot for The Wolf of Wall Street and whittle all that material down to three hours. Yeah, three hours can be demanding on someone with a weak bladder, but that's why I never buy any beverages at the movie theater or drink anything before the feature presentation.

The outcry over the New York Post article is also a good time to remember that all Rupert Murdoch's right-wing daily is good for is lining a bird cage. One of the 4,080 things I learned from listening to Public Enemy in its prime was to never take anything published by the New York Post seriously. Like Chuck D said, it ain't worth the paper it's printed on.

Too bad the feature presentation wasn't preceded by Bambi vs. Godzilla because that would have fucking ruled.

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.

Jurassic World just experienced the most successful opening weekend in film history, outgrossing even the opening weekend of the original Jurassic Park, a kaiju (Japanese for "strange beast") movie where smaller-sized dinosaurs are the kaiju instead of a 164-foot-tall lizard with atomic breath. But as much as I like both the craftsmanship Steven Spielberg brought to the moments of suspense (and occasionally, levity) in the first installment and Stan Winston and ILM's effective blend of practical FX and CGI in that installment, I find the Jurassic movies to be oddly underwhelming in comparison to Spielberg's masterful work in the original Jaws. As material in between the creature scenes, which are the main reason for flocking to these Jurassic blockbusters, the "Sam Neill learns to get in touch with his paternal side" storyline--a tiresome staple of post-SNL comedy vehicles starring either Billy Crystal, Adam Sandler or more recently, Will Ferrell--is less intriguing than the character interplay between Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw in Jaws.

I lost interest in the Jurassic franchise about halfway through The Lost World: Jurassic Park and never got on board the franchise again (I still haven't seen Jurassic Park III and will most likely wait until Jurassic Not-Yet-5, as I like to call it, comes to Blu-ray). I remember falling asleep in the theater during The Lost World--at some point between Julianne Moore nearly falling to her death while glass slowly breaks beneath her and the lame moment when a raptor gets kicked in the face by the gymnastic moves of Jeff Goldblum's preteen daughter, I dozed off with my eyes open--and I got the sense that Spielberg, whose first shot of Goldblum in The Lost World shows the star yawning in a subway station, was equally disinterested with the material in his own sequel. (Fifteen years later, you could sense the same thing when Christopher Nolan only truly became alive during the stunning plane hijack sequence for The Dark Knight Rises, and for the rest of the project, it felt like the death of Dark Knight star Heath Ledger had sapped Nolan of his enthusiasm and energy.) Spielberg was phoning it in. He, in fact, later admitted in interviews to experiencing a constant feeling of "Is that all there is? It's not enough for me" throughout the filming of The Lost World. However, there is one moment in The Lost World where Spielberg didn't phone it in, and it's that literal cliffhanger scene with a petrified Moore unable to move or sneeze, the only genuinely nerve-wracking scene in The Lost World, as well as the only moment where Spielberg is back to his old enthusiastic and alert self, and it's not even a dinosaur attack.

So the Jurassics have never been my favorite kaiju movies. But Korean director Bong Joon-ho's The Host, a.k.a. Gwoemul (Korean for "monster")? Now that, to me, is the perfect kaiju movie, in which the human side of the movie is, for a change, as satisfying as the monster action and isn't an ordeal to sit through in order to get to the monster action. The Host is an effective mix of monster movie thrills, dysfunctional family comedy and political satire (about the incompetence of both American and Korean institutions) that's reminiscent of the anti-nuke satire in Ishirô Honda's original 1954 version of Godzilla.

Bong wanted to take everyday people like the extremely flawed members of the working-class Park family (in comparison to Sam Neill's sole flaw of being awkward and standoffish around kids, which isn't all that interesting as a character flaw) and place them in a central role that's usually reserved in monster movies for scientific geniuses or muscle-bound heroes, the kinds of characters Bong says he finds to be boring. His risky and unconventional decision resulted in my favorite human protagonists in an earthbound kaiju movie since, well, the trio in Jaws. Like all the films in Edgar Wright's superb Cornetto trilogy, The Host isn't a genre spoof; it's a thriller with genuine stakes that happens to be comedic and is full of characters worth being invested in, so that when one of the protagonists dies or is nearly dead, it's a moment that genuinely stings.

Even the creature in The Host, despite being an efficient and single-minded killing machine, or rather, in the parlance of both Matt Hooper and Jaws trailer announcer Percy Rodrigues, an "eating machine," is imbued with personality too. The film's digital FX may vary in quality, but they're never too cartoonish-looking. The creature's clumsy gait cleverly mirrors the klutziness of Host star Song Kang-ho's anti-hero Park Gang-du. Sure, Gang-du learns to be a better dad just like in that tiresome Jurassic Park/Billy Crystal/Adam Sandler storytelling device that annoys me so much, but The Host handles that device so much better. It also handles humor better than Roland Emmerich's Jurassic Park-ified 1998 reboot of Godzilla--a kaiju movie in the form of a terrible and unfunny '90s Fox sitcom stretched out to over two excruciating hours--did (the terrible '90s Fox sitcomminess of it all is further enhanced by Emmerich's casting of both Maria Pitillo, star of Fox's short-lived Partners, as Matthew Broderick's love interest, and Simpsons veteran Hank Azaria, star of Herman's Head, a.k.a. Inside Out if it were an oversexed '90s Fox office sitcom).

The Host's effectiveness as both a character study and a creature feature is precisely why I've never warmed up to any of the old-school Godzilla movies, except for the intriguing first movie, which I first caught on TCM, luckily without the stupid Raymond Burr-related changes that were made to it by the movie's first American distributor (the horrendous dubbing in the American versions of these films has also made me avoid the Godzilla franchise; except for spaghetti westerns and some of the Studio Ghibli films, I can't stand watching foreign films when they're redubbed by Americans or the British). As a kid, I took one look at 1973's Godzilla vs. Megalon back when it was once the feature presentation on Mystery Science Theater 3000 and thought, "That's the formula for Godzilla? It's a terrible one. Nah, I think I'll skip the other Godzilla flicks."

Godzilla vs. Megalon is one of the least beloved Godzilla installments, partly because Godzilla was basically a guest star in his own movie. It was produced during a time when the Toho Studios franchise was past its prime and had abandoned its nifty roots as an allegory about post-war Japan to strictly cater to the kids in the audience. I know Godzilla vs. Megalon is a lousy way to be introduced to the Godzilla franchise. It would be like if someone who's never seen any of the 007 movies chose A View to a Kill or Die Another Day as their first 007 flick to watch; they won't understand what all the fuss over the other movies is about. But Godzilla vs. Megalon is a good example of how boring and pointless the human characters tend to be in kaiju movies, a problem that doesn't afflict the 1954 Godzilla and is also a problem I was hoping British director Gareth Edwards wouldn't fall prey to when he got the chance to not repeat Emmerich's countless mistakes while reintroducing Godzilla for a second time (not counting the two Americanized and badly butchered Godzillas that starred Perry Mason) to non-Japanese audiences.

Godzilla threatens to unleash his atomic garlic breath on this MUTO.

While there's much to enjoy about Edwards' gritty, Fukushima-inspired 2014 version--like Alison Willmore said, the MUTOs (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms) and the redesigned Godzilla look terrific and are "lumbering and massive with a sense of incredible heft to them, despite being CGI creations"--Edwards, unfortunately, has a problem of focusing his films on white lead characters who aren't as interesting as he thinks they are. It's a problem that goes back to Edwards' prior sci-fi film Monsters, his low-budget 2010 breakthrough. Monsters is a film about Mexico experiencing first contact with giant alien creatures, and it's told not through the eyes of any of its citizens but through the eyes of the most annoying white hipsters since those douches who gentrified the barrio side of Arlen and slipped salmon into Enrique's fish tacos?

As The Daily Dot astutely pointed out, Godzilla suffers from a boring white guy problem--a problem that mars another recent kaiju flick, Pacific Rim--and is part of a long line of Hollywood tentpole blockbusters that opt for the least interesting characters as their leads. Out of a cast that includes the likes of Ken Watanabe, Bryan Cranston, Elizabeth Olsen, David Strathairn and Sally Hawkins as audience surrogates, Edwards chose to center the film around the individual with the least charisma or personality? Yo, Honest Trailers, your "Discount Channing Tatum" line is dead fucking on.

"The funny thing here is that the franchise originated in Japan. I actually haven't seen any of the old movies, but I'm going to assume that they--at least the Japanese ones--don't use Japan and its people as merely the backdrop against which white protagonists can shine and save the day,"noted one of the teen authors of the blog Cool Asian Kids. "And that's essentially what the new film does."

Warner Bros. advertised the movie as Godzilla and his atomic breath vs. Cranston and his atomic toupee--the studio made it look like Cranston would be channeling Dr. Loomis from Halloween--but (spoilers!) that's not the movie we got. Edwards told Willmore in a BuzzFeed interview that he chose to kill off Cranston's nuclear physicist character early on in Godzilla in order to raise the movie's stakes and create the sense that "anything could happen." Sure, Cranston's physicist dad character is kind of a boring white guy too, but kicking his badacondunk out of the movie so early is such a mistake because Cranston is much more alive and present in his scenes than Blando McBombdefuser--who, as Willmore says, "jumps through a series of increasingly improbable plot hoops to stay in the path of the creatures"--is in his.

It's just the wrong character to be spending a huge chunk of the movie with, and it's a shame, because Edwards kicks the movie off so promisingly with one of my favorite opening title sequences in a recent tentpole blockbuster, a cleverly assembled montage of both real and fake archive footage that establishes the history of MUTOs, nicely scored by Alexandre Desplat--who's skillfully following in the footsteps of the old Akira Ifukube score music that both Pharoahe Monch and Tracy Morgan love so much--and surrounded visually by hastily redacted text from fake government files. The Prologue Studios opening titles are one of the 2014 Godzilla's few instances of humor, one of many things Edwards accomplishes better than Emmerich did. The passages that are redacted to isolate the names of the cast and crew are either amusing, freeze-frame-worthy sentences like "The monster communicates through music composed and conducted by Alexandre Desplat" or are full of in-jokes like "Walter Malcolm has claimed that government men dressed in white lab coats routinely appear at site and Bryan Cranston shortly after the event all residents are sworn to silence." Walter is a reference to Breaking Bad, and Malcolm is, of course, a shout-out to Malcolm in the Middle (although shouldn't it say Hal, Cranston's character's name on Malcolm, instead of Malcolm?).

Despite all the sleep-inducing moments involving Discount Channing Tatum, as well as the fact that it's nowhere near the league of The Host, the 2014 Godzilla is superior to Emmerich's previous attempt to bring Godzilla to America and is more effective at building tension and staging monster action. Also, it's not trying to rip off so much of Jurassic Park. Recent Throwback Thursday guest blogger Hardeep Aujla, who hails from Word Is Bond, a U.K.-based hip-hop blog I've contributed pieces to, disagrees. He dislikes the 2014 Godzilla so much that he's skeptical about how Edwards will handle Star Wars in his next directorial effort, Star Wars Anthology: Rogue One. So Hardeep, how would you have improved the 2014 Godzilla if you worked on it? Would you have made the reboot into a boy-and-his-best-friend-who's-a-strange-creature story like the old Godzilla sequels, the Gamera sequels and my favorite of all those stories, The Iron Giant? Or would you have said "Fuck the American audience" and told it from the point of view of Ken Watanabe's scientist character? Or would you have completely gotten rid of any audience surrogate characters and told it from the point of view of Godzilla, which would have probably caused the movie to cost 200 million more American dollars to make but is a kaiju movie that's never been done before?

***

Hardeep Aujla: I think I read that Godzilla's screen-time was only 10 minutes in the whole 130-something minute film. This isn't Jaws, Edwards - less is not more in kaiju films.

As for what I would have done, I love The Iron Giant and that whole story too but I would've gone with your last suggestion, hands down. This is what I always thought AvP should have been. I would have started the film introducing a crack team of badasses equal to Dutch's or Apone's team, but then would've had them torn apart gloriously by the titular creatures (perhaps they stumbled into the vicinity of a one-on-one confrontation). Then the title of the movie comes up accompanied by strong audio tone with the intention of stating "That's fucking right" to the audience and their expectations. I'm thinking a very loud shrill-type noise that starts off monotonous but evolves a couple of seconds later into something with a bit more character before ultimately revealing itself to be the war-cry of either a Predator or an Alien as we cut straight back to the duel (yep, this idea has been rolling around in my head for a while). From there on out we get a pure Aliens versus Predators narrative with no more English spoken.

'Speaking words of wisdom, let them fiiiiiiiiiiight.'

I haven't seen many of the old kaiju movies (the Gamera trilogy from the 90's is superb though), and the ones I did see were a long time ago, but I do remember some very protracted sequences where it's just Godzilla or his kid doing stuff and the audience just follows along. I may be completely fabricating those memories though. Either way, the challenge for Gareth Edwards would have been to make an engaging film like this in the modern era, one that is good enough to stand strongly unaided by human faces and words. There could of course be some human characters (retaining Ken Watanabe who was wasted in the actual film) but they should have minor roles. I can see how this would be tricky for a character like Godzilla who seemingly doesn't have a rich variety of activities to fill a movie with apart from swim, smash and roar, but therein lies the challenge, and I would be a lot more impressed with Gareth Edwards as a filmmaker if he pulled it off, or at least respect his effort if he tried.

None of Alexandre Desplat's score cues from Godzilla are currently in rotation on AFOS, but Desplat's main title theme ought to be.

I'm so glad Song Exploder will never do an episode about the theme from Enterprise.

Hrishikesh Hirway

The one-and-a-half-year-old podcast Song Exploder has a tantalizing premise for a show about the craft of music. Each episode, produced and edited by musician Hrishikesh (pronounced "rih-shee-kaysh") Hirway, who records under the name The One AM Radio, takes a new or recent piece of music from any genre, whether instrumental or with vocals, and explains each of the components that form the composition. As a sometime hip-hop blogger, the Song Exploder installments about tracks by Open Mike Eagle, Ghostface Killah and RJD2 (whom people outside hip-hop only know as "the Mad Men theme guy," but he's more than just "A Beautiful Mine," old white fogeys) definitely captured my interest, but my favorite Song Exploder episodes would have to be any installment that delves into the making of a film or TV score cue, and they're all worth a listen.

Bob's Burgers presently kicks off with one of the most effective mood-setting themes in animation, a ukulele piece accented with xylophone and Casio keyboard samples of drum fills and some of Gene Belcher's favorite sound FX, in much the same fashion as a beef patty getting accented with outré ingredients or toppings by Bob Belcher (an example of one of these outré ingredients is when Bob attempts to win a burger contest by adding Korean black garlic, and an enemy of his amusingly responds to his intro for the garlic burger recipe with "Don't blame Korea for your stupid burger, Bob"). On Song Exploder, Hirway got Bob's Burgers creator Loren Bouchard to go into detail about how he composed the show's opening theme, which he also revealed is actually a longer composition than what we currently hear on the air.

Bouchard said, "This had to be a story of hardship as it pertains to running a restaurant, but it's supposed to be an optimistic show and a nice slice of life with a lot of happiness in it. The ukulele was perfect, so I knew that I wanted to start with that." In more recent seasons, Bob's Burgers has occasionally flirted with slicing out the opening titles--and sadly, the local business name puns during those titles as well--and cutting straight to the first scene of the story, but fortunately, the theme survives in the form of the presence of Bouchard's uke during those episodes.

Other score music-related installments of Song Exploder have delved into Jeff Beal's House of Cardstheme; Brian Reitzell's eerie and complicated sound design for his music on Hannibal, as part of a crossover with Roman Mars' architecture-and-design podcast 99% Invisible; the brief score cue Brian Tyler wrote for the Avengers: Age of Ultron title card; and Jeremy Zuckerman's creation of the very last cue in the final episode of The Legend of Korra ("On a kids' show, showing a lesbian relationship... I kind of wanted the music to reflect that this is a historic moment"), during what has to be Song Exploder's most oddly affecting installment. Zuckerman's masterful Korra cues are a good example of what animator Timothy Reckart once told me about score cues that excel by not overdoing sentimentality: they don't dictate the emotions and instead suggest the depth of those emotions.

For its premiere episode as a new addition to the podcasting network Radiotopia about two weeks ago, Song Exploder chose as a suitably grand first subject the global phenomenon that's spawned everything from billions of YouTube musician covers of its main title theme to really annoying and asinine fan reaction supercuts of narcissistic viewers recording themselves and hamming it up for the camera while they watch beloved characters perish: Game of Thrones. The Ramin Djawadi episode doesn't go into the pressure Djawadi must have been under when he had to replace Stephen Warbeck as the Game of Thrones composer about a few weeks before the premiere of the very first episode. That's a forgotten part of the history of the hit show's music I'd like to hear more about.

But the episode does have Djawadi breaking down each element of his Game of Thrones main title theme (which can be heard during "AFOS Prime" and "Hall H" on AFOS), from the cello to the female choir. The ability to finally get to hear about the origins of this piece of music I've heard trillions of times in many different forms--including the vocal version South Park came up with--is one of the many aural highlights of Song Exploder.

'Wow, I can see Cersei's naked body double from up here,' said the astrolabe.

(Photo source: The Art of VFX)

I wish the miniature model shots of Mister Rogers' neighborhood looked as fucking cool as this.

(Photo source: HitFix)

Mic.com aptly compared each Song Exploder episode to watching somebody take apart a car and put it back together. Hirway's podcast is also the aural equivalent of a chef visiting the table and describing the ingredients of his meal before unveiling it and letting the diners savor it. It's a terrifically edited and very cut-to-the-chase podcast, which explains the 10-to-15-minute length of most episodes. After 15 minutes, any music discussion by anybody--I don't care if you're Sheila E. explaining hi-hat techniques in a Victoria's Secret catalog outfit or in Ava Gardner's femme fatale gown from The Killers--can start to wear thin.

The run time on this screencap is just a small part of its overall #peakcaucasity pic.twitter.com/3UaF2ypNve
— Desus Nice (@desusnice) February 19, 2015

Hirway is clearly aware of the virtues of brevity, hence the thankfully short length of each episode. He speaks only during the podcast's opening, the intro to the score cue or song in its entirety and the podcast's outro. The rest of the time, he gets out of the way, and the musicians behind the track do all the talking. This approach is a nice change of pace from the often tedious navel-gazing of too many podcast hosts, even during some of the comedy podcasts I like. Song Exploder is far from omphaloskeptic. Look it up, fool!

If you prefer your podcasts to be insightful about the creation of art but very succinct--or if you're a film or TV score music fan who's curious about the scoring process but doesn't have time to sit through lengthy discussions of the process, which can be tedious or incomprehensible if you're not versed in music theory--Song Exploder is your jam. Too bad Song Exploder didn't exist when I was a kid. I really wanted to know what was going on inside the head of the genius who wrote "By Mennen!"

James Horner's arpeggios are swirling in the heavens tonight.

"There were so many Horners," said Matt Zoller Seitz to fellow journalist S.I. Rosenbaum during a RogerEbert.com conversation about the work of legendary film composer James Horner, who died at 61 in a single-engine plane crash earlier this week. "There was the shoot 'em up, macho, urban Horner of 48 HRS and Commando and Red Heat, the grand adventure Horner of the Trek films and Aliens and Titanic and Avatar, the caper Horner of Sneakers... He really did have range."

Anyone who's a film music fan has a favorite Horner. Film music heads who are into Horner deep cuts--and are of the opinion that Horner tended to repeat himself, especially in the middle part of his career--will likely say the Horner of Battle Beyond the Stars is their favorite, while more casual film music heads will likely pick the Horner who made teenage girls cry with his score to Titanic. For me, it's either the Horner who made nerds cry with his scores to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek III: The Search for Spock or the Horner who gave the third best performance, right below Denzel Washington and Andre Braugher, in Glory and crafted, with the help of the Boys Choir of Harlem, a powerful and operatic score for that 1989 white-savior-movie-that's-somehow-better-than-the-average-white-savior-movie.

The eerily prescientSneakers is one of many movies I just never got around to seeing until more than 20 years after its release. On New Year's Eve 2014, it was one of several titles Netflix streaming was getting rid of from its library after that night, so I couldn't pass up the chance to stream before its expiration this caper movie I--a fan of caper movies--bizarrely overlooked for too long. I instantly fell in love with the score Horner wrote for Sneakers. It's now one of my favorite Horner scores. Like Gimme the Loot composer Nicholas Britell said about the Sneakers score, it's music you wouldn't expect to hear in a hacker movie. "It features unlikely elements--choirs, folk themes, minimalist piano, the saxophone of Branford Marsalis--that lend the film an unusual emotional richness and depth," wrote Britell.

Dig the score cue Horner created for the scene where Robert Redford's crew discovers the codebreaker to end all codebreakers, and Redford and Sidney Poitier both realize it's too much power for anyone to have. I'm not a musicologist--I'd be unable to tell you the difference between an arpeggio and an ostinato--so I have no idea what Horner was doing with the piano during this scene. It sounds like he grabbed a cat that was wandering around the recording studio and let it walk all over the keys. It turned out to be an inventive and effective way to build tension for that scene.

So now I have a new favorite Horner: the Horner who, through his music, could take something as mundane-looking and boring on the screen as typing things into a PC and make it exciting. Horner's work in Sneakers reminds me of Clear and Present Danger, where Horner also worked his magic on a similar moment of computer-related tension. The nerve-wracking Bogota ambush sequence is what everyone remembers about Clear and Present Danger, but an equally memorable sequence--and one that's handled with a bit more humor, especially when Harrison Ford discovers there's no paper in his printer--is Ford's attempt to salvage all evidence of the government conspiracy Henry Czerny helped orchestrate right when Czerny deletes it from what we now call "the cloud." It's the second best action sequence in the movie, even though nobody fires a gun or a missile and nobody dies. Horner had a lot to do with that.

There's an old featurette TCM used to frequently air between movies about how crucial Elmer Bernstein's score was in enhancing The Magnificent Seven. The featurette took a clip where Bernstein's rousing main theme accompanied shots of Yul Brynner and his crew riding on horseback rather lethargically and posited that without Bernstein's theme, the scene was dead. Without Horner's "Deleting the Evidence" cue, which is part of the playlist for the AFOS espionage genre music block "AFOS Incognito," the computer showdown sequence would have been dead too.

Throughout Clear and Present Danger, Horner made use of a shakuhachi, a Japanese flute, to heighten tension. It's kind of an unconventional choice, just like the clumsy kitty cat stepping on the piano keys during Sneakers, because it makes you think, "Did one of those Peruvian pan flute bands that invaded South Park also invade the orchestra?," but it works for the hacking sequence. Horner would get pilloried a lot by film music critics for recycling his own previous motifs when he was alive, but that's not the case here: his score to Clear and Present Danger, a blockbuster that came out two years after Sneakers, sounds much different from his score to Redford's movie, and it echoes the differences in tone between the serious-minded Clear and Present Danger and the much more light-hearted Sneakers.

Today, hacking scenes are such a cliché that I can't watch another hacking scene without thinking of Scandal star Guillermo Diaz making fun of the ways actors pretend to type on laptops by basically channeling the piano-playing sight gags in Tom and Jerry's "The Cat Concerto" and Bugs Bunny's "Rhapsody Rabbit" while he was typing--and doing so with such a straight face--during Jimmy Kimmel Live's transformation of Scandal into a telenovela. But back when these scenes hadn't yet crossed the line into unintentional silliness and very '90s Fisher Stevens entrances, Horner was the master of scoring these scenes, and his skills with those scenes were honed while working on the franchise that made his career: Star Trek. Again, it all goes back to Star Trek. Hell, everything goes back to Star Trek. What David Strathairn and Harrison Ford are doing at their terminals is basically what Kirk and Spock did to trick Khan into lowering his starship's shields in Star Trek II and what Kirk and Scotty similarly pulled off to steal back the Enterprise from Starfleet in Star Trek III. Horner's brilliance with musical texture and enlivening action that has the potential to look as dull as office work was also key to why those moments of starship bridge console trickery are such highlights of those Trek films.

I haven't been interested in a Horner score in ages, but now that his score to the upcoming Chilean miner survival drama The 33 has ended up being one of the last things he composed before his death, I'm curious about his work in The 33 (and in this summer's Antoine Fuqua-directed boxing drama Southpaw). I wouldn't be surprised if Horner was able to take another potentially static-looking scenario like a bunch of miners trapped for two weeks under a collapsed mine and help make that compelling as well. Which Horner are we getting for his last couple of scores?

Selections from Horner's scores to Star Trek II and The Rocketeer can be heard during both "AFOS Prime" and "Hall H" on AFOS, while selections from his score to Clear and Present Danger (and hopefully someday, selections from his score to Sneakers) can be heard during "AFOS Incognito."

A much easier movie title to place on a marquee than The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love

Every Throwback Thursday, I pull out from my desk cabinet--with my eyes closed--a movie ticket stub I didn't throw away, and then I discuss the movie on the ticket and maybe a little bit of its score, which might be now streaming on AFOS. Today, instead of drawing some random ticket, I'm intentionally pulling out the ticket that says "Spy," due to the Melissa McCarthy comedy's box-office success and the excitement over the beginning of the filming of McCarthy's Ghostbusters reboot. This will be the final post here on the AFOS blog before I take a two-or-three-week-long break from the blog in July. The blog--and that goes for the blog's year-long TBT series as well--will resume with new posts in the middle of July.

The least creative thing about writer/director Paul Feig's enjoyably foul-mouthed action comedy Spy is its title. Spy is also the title of a fairly recent Britcom about an MI5 agent and his 10-and-a-half-year-old son. The Feig movie's original title was Susan Cooper. By the end of the movie, Melissa McCarthy and Feig have created such a distinctive and likable new heroine--and managed to give her a satisfying dramatic arc in addition to her comedic antics--that you won't forget the name Susan Cooper, and her name deserves to be part of the branding of the super-spy franchise that will likely arise from Spy, much like how Austin Powers' name is part of the title of every movie of his and Jason Bourne's name is in the title of every Bourne movie, including ones he doesn't even bother to appear in.

But then again, Feig's the kind of director who seems to prefer movie titles that don't take up too much space on a marquee. I Am David, Bridesmaids, The Heat, Spy and Ghostbusters are all titles that are easy work for marquee changers, especially ones who'd get an anxiety attack after finding out they have to put the letters up for Those Daring Young Men in Their Jaunty Jalopies.

Birth.Movies.Death., the new name of Badass Digest, makes me think of some Godfathers song for some reason.

Mondo poster illustrated by The Dude Designs (Photo source: Birth.Movies.Death.)

So had Sky 1 not come out with a show called Spy, I'd be more enamored with the movie's title because it nicely conveys in just three letters that Susan was born to be one. But because Spy is a comedy, the transition from mission control support to CIA field agent for Susan, who's a winning mix of Midwestern politeness and the fearlessness of McCarthy's Boston cop character Shannon Mullins from The Heat, isn't exactly a smooth one. That transition is initially loaded with the usual slapstick McCarthy frequently excels at, as well as the honest and comically appalled reactions many Feig characters have to any kind of mayhem (think the bridesmaids' varied reactions to food poisoning in Bridesmaids or Sandra Bullock amusingly panicking over a knife shoved into her thigh and wanting so badly to break her vow to never curse in The Heat). Spy arose out of Feig's wish to make a spy movie like one of his favorite movies, the 2006 version of Casino Royale, but because these are Feig characters, not Bond movie characters who respond to everything in the most badass and suave (as well as PG-13-friendly and extremely--and implausibly--sanitized) ways, they puke from the sight of accidentally impaling someone they've killed or launch into a barrage of F-bombs when they don't get their way.

But once McCarthy's Bridesmaids co-star Rose Byrne enters the picture and Susan becomes more confident about her field work and is able to infiltrate the Byrne character's enemy organization, thanks to a very particular set of skills (like intuition) that Susan's overconfident colleague/work rival Rick Ford (Jason Statham) is too bullheaded and inept to possess, Spy takes an interesting turn as a spy comedy. It becomes a comedy about an underestimated spy who's good at her job instead of incompetent (Get Smart) or competent but immature (Archer), which also makes it an intriguing companion piece to the Marvel Studios show Agent Carter, another story of a frequently underestimated female spy. But where's the conflict when the central character's a competent spy? Isn't that a comedy killer? When McCarthy has such great--and often improvised--dialogue and trades insults with the consistently funny likes of a perfectly cast (and perfectly big-haired) Byrne as a villainous arms dealer and Statham in what has to be the funniest and greatest role of his career as the hilariously useless Ford, nobody has to worry about the disappearance of humor.

In addition to being an homage to 007 movies (speaking of which, the best moments of Theodore Shapiro's original score are ones that channel lush John Barry and David Arnold travelogue themes like Barry's "Journey to Blofeld's Hideaway" from On Her Majesty's Secret Service and Arnold's "City of Lovers" from Casino Royale), Spy is also a gentle critique of those movies and their limited roles for women before Judi Dench took over as M and supplanted Bernard Lee as the definitive M in the public's eye. In the Roger Moore era of 007, McCarthy would probably be subjected to the same treatment Susan receives when the CIA boss (Allison Janney, a good foil to both McCarthy and Statham) sticks her with frumpy and way-too-conspicuous undercover identities. She'd likely get cast in one of those movies as some buffoonish stranger who makes clumsy advances at Moore's Bond--or that German wife who tries to stuff Bond's face with sausages and beer in Octopussy--instead of getting to play one of the heroes, simply because of the way she looks. In Feig's world of funny women of different shapes and sizes who are at the center of the action, that's not going to fly.

Spy's brazenness as a hard-R action comedy (and it's an occasionally graphic one too, like during the way Silicon Valley star Zach Woods gets written out of the movie) also sheds light on something that's bugged me about the 007 franchise for a while: the Broccoli family's steadfast attitude about those movies remaining family-friendly. The 007 franchise has frequently flirted with getting slapped with an R, whether it's the sex scenes or when Licence to Kill went all Scanners on a bad guy and blew up his head or when Mads Mikkelsen had some fun with Daniel Craig's nads instead of taking a bite out of his flesh in Casino Royale, but those movies would be a lot better if they were R movies, especially in an era when the public embraces Craig's darker take on Bond while action franchises like Terminator have stopped being R franchises and are chasing those dreaded PG-13s (Terminator: Genisys is PG-13, and one of the film's haters is partly blaming the pursuit of that rating for why he dislikes Genisys).

Behind the scenes at some kitchen for some Cooking Channel show

Bond movies were at their weakest when the Broccolis pushed their hardest to make the franchise family-friendly (*cough*the Moore era*cough*) and the intelligence community in those movies became about as dangerous as Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo. It got so bad that Pierce Brosnan appeared to be having more fun playing darker variations on Bond in hard-R movies like The Tailor of Panama and The Matador than actually playing Bond. That's why hearing M finally say "fuck" for the first time ever--in a situation that especially called for it--was such a wonderful and surprising moment during Skyfall.

Meanwhile, in Spy, everybody says "fuck" like in Feig's other hit comedies, and while that has the potential to become tiresome, it never does in Feig's hands. Enjoy the profanity while it lasts, people, because McCarthy and Feig's next film together is Ghostbusters, and I'm sure Sony would be thrilled about an R for Ghostbusters. Feig is the comedic shot in the arm the Ghostbusters franchise needs, especially after 1989's Ghostbusters II pushed too hard to be many things to different people, particularly the preteen fans of The Real Ghostbusters, and the result was a Three Men and a Baby clone rather than a great Ghostbusters follow-up. So Sony ought to let Feig do whatever he wants, and if they don't let him make an R-rated Ghostbusters, I hope they let him make both a family-friendly version and an unrated version because in this era of frequently bleeped-out ghost-hunting TV shows, nobody says "Oh fudge!" when they see a ghost.

The Spy main title theme "Who Can You Trust," an homage to 007 music performed by Ivy Levan and produced by Wet Hot American Summer composers Theodore Shapiro and Craig Wedren, as well as a couple of other selections from Shapiro's Spy score, all can be heard during the AFOS espionage genre music block "AFOS Incognito."

Alamo Drafthouse. Tossing out assholes who deserve to be fucking tossed out of movie theaters since 1997.

Spy wasn't just the last entry in the AFOS blog's ongoing and year-long Throwback Thursday series before I took a three-week-long break from blogging for most of July. The Paul Feig flick is also the final movie I'll be watching inside a theater. I'm disappointed that I'll have to wait to see Ant-Man, Trainwreck, Mission: Impossible--Rogue Nation, Spectre, Ryan Coogler's Creed and possibly The Force Awakens until they hit Blu-ray. After being subjected to yet another theater audience member switching on his or her glowing smartphone screen light in the theater--this happened in the middle of a screening of Spy--I've simply had it. I said to myself, "That's it. I'm not watching another movie in a theater until Alamo Drafthouse actually opens that San Francisco Drafthouse theater they've been talking about opening since the Bush (Sr.) Administration."

It's not like I'm an absolute fascist about it. Unlike that psycho in Florida who shot and killed someone in a theater for texting during a bunch of movie trailers, I'm not distracted by moviegoers who check their texts during the trailers. They're commercials. I don't care. Neither am I distracted by those who use their phones as flashlights to help them see their way out while the closing credits are rolling and I'm waiting for some lame and pointless post-credits scene to arrive.

But when some moron in one of the front rows (and I can see them from afar because ever since college, I always sit in the farthest back row, due to my hatred of having my seat get kicked from behind me by strangers when I was younger) is flicking on his or her phone light during the feature presentation, in the middle of an action sequence, that's when I really get distracted and angry. I never want to be that guy who either tells people to turn off their phones or shushes a noisy talker, which is why I've never done either of those things. But I've always felt like doing so. Rude people in theaters can't be reasoned with, so why bother?

I also never want to be that guy who complains to the theater staff to get them to reprimand some unruly moron, simply because multiplex employees don't do shit. But when that smartphone zombie in one of the front rows flicked on his screen in the middle of one of Melissa McCarthy's Spy action sequences, that was the last straw for me. My tolerance for this nonsense has ended. He switched it on only once during Spy, which actually isn't as awful as the imbecile who brought his tablet to Kingsman: The Secret Service and kept switching it on during the feature presentation (that tablet zombie at the Kingsman screening is reason number 4,081 for why I despise the Silicon Valley tech world, a world I regret having worked for during the '00s). But despite the Spy screening being less aggravating than the Kingsman screening, my tolerance for smartphone or tablet zombies inside theaters is kaput. Why the fuck does this always happen during spy movies?

During the last 1/2 hr of MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: GHOST PROTOCOL, the woman next to me was constantly texting. Still trying to fathom this. 1/2
— Matt Zoller Seitz (@mattzollerseitz) January 3, 2012

I can almost understand a dimwitted or impatient person needing distraction during a very long expository scene, but this? Bizarre. 2/2
— Matt Zoller Seitz (@mattzollerseitz) January 3, 2012

It's not pricey tickets & pre-show ads killing the movie theater experience. It's arrogantly rude viewers and indifferent theater owners.
— Matt Zoller Seitz (@mattzollerseitz) March 23, 2012

Again, this is why I think theaters should hire bouncers. RT @mattzollerseitz: At GHOST PROTOCOL, the woman next to me constantly texted.
— Jimmy J. Aquino (@JimmyJAquino) January 3, 2012

I'll say it and I'll say it again: movie theaters don't need timid or indifferent ushers to handle texters. That squeaky-voiced teen from The Simpsons wouldn't have the ability or the guts to handle them anyway. Movie theaters need bouncers, and not just a regular bouncer: a Samoan bouncer. Samoan bouncers rule.

The Palace: Photographed in Single-Panelvision 70, Chapter 2 by Jimmy J. Aquino

I'm not as violent as a bouncer. But smartphone zombies who check their texts in the movie theater (so that fucking phone light emerges out of nowhere and distracts everyone who's paying attention to the movie) drive me so bonkers--much more so than even people who talk out loud in the theater--that I wish Alamo Drafthouse, the theater chain that has broken the mold and won praise for actually doing something about texters and kicking them out of its theaters, would go the extra mile and not just kick them out. I would like Drafthouse to also take them to a back room and show them the respect and kindness they deserve. Here's an example of that kindness.

It's simple etiquette, man. I know there are moviegoers of color out there who, unlike this moviegoer of color, think it's okay to switch their goddamn flashlight on in the middle of the feature presentation. To them, I would like to say the following: don't you fucking frame this as "Man, enforcing etiquette like that is #peak" (as in Caucasity, for people who don't speak Desus Nice-ese). No, it's not.

I like making fun of moments of Caucasity as much as the next brown man, but someone telling you to shut off your phone in the theater isn't white privilege exerting itself. It's not white man etiquette. It's human etiquette.

#TheConjuring wasn't scary.The #millenials in the audience who couldn't stop texting, talking and taking pics during it were.
— Kristina Wong (@mskristinawong) August 7, 2013

You're not just rudely distracting everyone who paid to watch a movie, whether the movie is good or Michael Bay; they didn't pay to watch you play with your phone. You're also making everything about yourself and diverting everyone's attentions in the theater to you, attention whore. Now that--the petulant "I have the right to keep my phone on whenever I want to!" defense--is acting exactly like the privileged white morons you so despise.

One of those privileged white morons is Madonna. You want to behave just like Madonna? I'm glad to see Lin-Manuel Miranda setting an example for how to handle lousy phone etiquette by banning Madonna from attending his Broadway musical Hamilton after she texted during one of Hamilton's Off-Broadway performances. "That bitch was on her phone. You couldn't miss it from the stage. It was a black void of the audience in front of us and her face there perfectly lit by the light of her iPhone through three-quarters of the show," grumbled Jonathan Groff, Miranda's Hamilton co-star. I'm even more glad to see Patti LuPone verbally and physically getting tough on these tech addicts who come to Broadway performances and show no respect for the actors. LuPone once paused in the middle of one of her Gypsy musical numbers to chew out an audience member who was snapping photos. Then a couple of weeks ago, she stepped out of character again during a performance of Shows for Days to confiscate a phone from a texter who's another one of what LuPone perfectly describes as "self-absorbed and inconsiderate audience members who are controlled by their phones."

You don't fuck with the Cut-Wife. https://t.co/b894RNc1jW
— Alyssa (@apowerfulbeat) July 9, 2015

Now if only those indifferent movie theater owners whom Matt Zoller Seitz complains about in his frequent tweets about lousy theater behavior would be as tough on morons in their theaters as LuPone has been on morons in hers. I like the writing of Anil Dash, but his idiotic defense of texting in theaters is both a lowlight of his writing and reason number 4,082 for why I hate the tech world. I'll always admire Seitz for his impassioned response to Dash's piece.

My response to people who think they have a right to use iPhones during movies. http://t.co/sS0BF6iSKw pic.twitter.com/PoWefI7rKU
— Matt Zoller Seitz (@mattzollerseitz) August 8, 2013

After I threw in the towel after seeing Spy and said, "I give up dealing with this shit," I happened to stumble into a comment about lousy theater behavior that was written a long time ago by one of my AFOS radio station listeners, graphic artist and Drafthouse theater fan Vincent Bernard, over in the comments section of the Drafthouse-owned Birth.Movies.Death., back when it was known as Badass Digest. Vincent's opinion is exactly the same as mine. He said, "When I want to watch a movie, I want to watch a movie. I don't give a flying fuck what anyone else thinks or feels about it. I'm trying to immerse myself in art, not sing Kumbaya around a campfire. I treat film the way I treat all serious art. I certainly don't want to read great literature or view great paintings surrounded by ill-mannered buffoons, so why should film be any different?"

That's precisely how I feel about moviegoing: it gives you the opportunity to immerse yourself in visual art, and you should be able to do that without any distractions or interruptions. I'll still enjoy the ability to be free from any distractions and immerse myself in a movie, which is what the Drafthouse folks--and now over on the stage acting side of showbiz, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Patti "The Cut-Wife" LuPone--are fighting so hard to preserve. I just won't be doing so in a theater anymore, until the day Drafthouse finally opens its Mission District theater. If you can't even manage to immerse yourself for two hours, you have no business being inside a theater. Just leave and take your shitty little screen with you. I hope a car hits you on your way out because you were too stupid to look where you're going, and I hope that car was driven by someone who wasn't paying attention to the wheel because that person was too busy texting.

The Google image search for 'iris out' hilariously turns up nothing but pics of Iris from The Flash.

Back in May, Pitchfork.tv posted a well-made animated short adapted from an anti-PG-13 essay published by the Pitchfork Media-owned film review site The Dissolve, and I wrote, "I'd like to see [Pitchfork.tv animator Mack] Williams do more animated tie-ins with The Dissolve. The site's discussions of Midnight Run with Adam Scott and Running Scared with Paul Scheer are crying out for the animated treatment, as is Noel Murray's essay 'Why great comics don't always make great movies.'" Sadly, there won't be any more animated Pitchfork.tv/Dissolve team-ups because during a three-week break I took from posting AFOS blog material (but I wasn't able to take a complete break from writing that material), The Dissolveclosed up shop after two years of publication, simply because the economics haven't been kind to The Dissolve.

Although The Dissolve's reviews of new releases were well-written, they weren't the reason why The Dissolve was my favorite destination for discussions of film--other than The Onion Film Standard with Peter K. Rosenthal, of course. In an age when click-bait--particularly superhero movie costume news updates and listicles that are so lazily written and mindless they've caused me to stop writing listicles for good--has dominated film writing and made it less appealing to me, the content that made The Dissolve special and unique was all the articles that clearly weren't generating as many hits as the kind of empty and forgettable click-bait The Dissolve stubbornly refused to succumb to publishing in order to stay alive. I'm talking lengthy but never-boring and never-pretentious articles like the essays about the challenges of adapting graphic novels for the screen or the fascinating changes in recent film score music and the "Movie of the Week" roundtable discussions of older films like Repo Man and John Carpenter's Snake Plissken flicks and more recent cult favorites like Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story and MacGruber, discussions that often made you look at an old film in a new light. The reassessments of Spike Lee's work as a music video director or the reassessments of the filmographies of directors like Frank Tashlin and Ernst Lubitsch were also among the things former Dissolve staffer Scott Tobias and his colleagues "knew few people would read" when Tobias and Keith Phipps discussed the demise of their site, but The Dissolve was admirable for not caring that only a few film geeks would read those pieces.

The Dissolve's articles were often as impeccably edited as the movies the Dissolve writers adored and celebrated in their "Movie of the Week" discussions. Typos or misspellings were such a rarity over at The Dissolve. The only typos I spotted were in articles by--ooh, big surprise--Nathan Rabin, who, as an easily bored and barely awake TV recapper for the Onion-owned A.V. Club, once memorably wrote that Jack Donaghy "sneaks pills into Tracey's [sic] jelly beans and transforms him from a space case to an Adderal [sic] achiever" when Jack was so clearly not drugging Tracy Jordan, so Rabin would repeatedly get mocked for his pills mistake in the A.V. Club's comments section. Ooh, look, here's another one of those Rabin typos now.

Somebody put pills in Nathan Rabin's jelly beans when he wrote that opening sentence.

Typos aside, Rabin's pop-culture writing is actually often worth reading. Like so many of the other former Dissolve writers, Rabin (who perhaps saw the writing on the wall and actually left The Dissolve a couple of months before the site's demise) came from the A.V. Club, which championed and fostered the same kind of smartly written and witty pop-culture writing that was found on The Dissolve and continues to do so, although the A.V. Club, along with Indiewire and Uproxx, has lately become much less of a favorite destination for me because of how often its gazillion ads (fuck you, Flowplayer) cause my browser to freeze up. Meanwhile, The Dissolve refused to clutter its articles with ads, which I assume is what also brought about the end of The Dissolve. But it's better that The Dissolve went out fighting with the integrity in its writing intact instead of dying out as yet another slow and laggy site full of articles that are either littered with or disrupted by ads that slow down my browser and can't be turned off.

If you write or blog about film or pop culture, you might get asked by someone the following: "The Internet's as overwhelming as Comic-Con. There are too many sites to choose from when I want to read stuff on the Internet. How can I tell apart the sites that are worth visiting from the sites that aren't worth visiting?" It's simple. Any publication that frequently makes typos like the following isn't worth the time of day.

If 2010 was the Year We Make Contact, then 2015 is the Year We Can't Spell "Rogue."#RogueOne pic.twitter.com/eSPowTtKJM
— Jimmy J. Aquino (@JimmyJAquino) March 17, 2015

Amazed that a TV critic can neither spell "podcast" nor the names of @JeffBryanDavis, @kumailn and @MitchHurwitz. pic.twitter.com/8iIKSIbOxa
— Jimmy J. Aquino (@JimmyJAquino) August 21, 2014

Neither is any publication that posts "20 Things You Didn't Know About the Catering for Ant-Man."

Remarkably, The Dissolve was neither of those things, although it did publish a listicle, but only occasionally, like when it discussed"The 50 most daring film roles for women since Ripley" or was presumably ordered by Pitchfork to assemble"The movies' 50 greatest pop music moments." Listicles aren't the only form of digital publishing that bores me. Blog posts that are simply hastily written regurgitations of press releases bore me as well. Sure, The Dissolve had a news section that consisted of hastily written regurgitations of press releases too, but otherwise, 90 percent of its content was the thoughtful and lengthy pieces about movies like Heat, a movie I was obsessed with in college, or Midnight Run, a movie I'm still obsessed with and was a favorite subject of the Dissolve writers because of its countless highlights, like Danny Elfman's "Try to Believe" theme, and because, as Noel Murray said, "This is a movie about adults, made for adults."

When I recently watched McCabe and Mrs. Miller for the first time ever (I checked it out from the San Francisco Public Library, a great alternative for whenever Netflix's DVD rental service comes up short), the first place I clicked to after watching the Robert Altman western was The Dissolve because the site had once pickedMcCabe as a "Movie of the Week." I wanted to read what the Dissolve staff had to say at length about Altman's offbeat western about the struggles of independent businesses against Big Business, struggles that were similar to The Dissolve's own financial struggles. Not even the late Altman's McCabe audio commentary was satisfactory enough for me. The "Movie of the Week" section is the thing I'll miss the most about The Dissolve. I'm worried that Pitchfork Media will someday remove all these Dissolve articles from the Web because there are so many other older movies I haven't seen yet and were given the "Movie of the Week" treatment by The Dissolve, and I still want to read what its writers had to say about those movies.

I will admit that one of my recent blog posts was written in the style of a Dissolve piece. That post was "The Game of Thrones'Hardhome' massacre and Mad Max prove that near-silence is golden, so why hasn't anyone stepped up to make the first great modern-day silent action movie?" It's a depressing, "Hardhome"-ish time for film writing: The Dissolve has been shut down, and nobody can make a living from film writing like the late Roger Ebert used to be able to do because the tech world is run by corrupt assholes who don't pay their writers. At the risk of sounding like William Fichtner's "Criminals in this town used to believe in things" line from The Dark Knight, when I was a stringer for a major newspaper in the '90s, I wasn't paid a lot for the movie reviews I wrote, but at least I was actually paid back then. Listicle click-bait like "The 5 Best-Looking Buttcracks in Minions" may have won this round, but let's continue fighting against that type of writing. Let's keep The Dissolve--and what it stood for--alive in our approaches to writing about film or pop culture. It will make the sting of its demise less painful. We can do better than listicles about yellow buttcracks.

Not since Adrien Brody and Gael Garcia Bernal's Gillette ad has a Gillette ad made me stop and say, 'Whoa, didn't expect to see this person peddling razors.'

Finishing The Novel from David Wain on Vimeo.

What separates the makers of They Came Together, Walk Hard, Black Dynamite and MacGruber from the Jason Friedbergs and Aaron Seltzers and Scary Movies of the world is that even when they're taking the piss out of the hoariest Hollywood clichés, they bring to it both a genuine love for whatever genre they're spoofing--Wain and his They Came Together writing partner Michael Showalter have frequently said they're fans of rom-coms despite how brutally they make fun of them--and a sense of style. Those are two things that can't be said about the Friedberg/Seltzer factory and the Scary/Superhero/Date/Epic/Disaster/Haunted Movie template, the epitome of heartless, cynical, lazily written and indifferently produced comedy filmmaking. There's no genuine love for the genres they spoof; it's just a shapeless and pointless jumble of unfunny and already dated references to shit that has very little to do with whatever recent box-office hit they're re-creating, like the Stomp the Yard references and Paula Abdul impressions (Nicole Parker, why?!) during the 300 spoof Meet the Spartans.

Neither is there any panache or style to these ugly-looking Scary/Superhero/Date/Epic/Disaster/Haunted movies that must have cost five cents to shoot, whereas They Came Together, Walk Hard and MacGruber--and over on the small-screen side, any Key & Peele genre parody sketch like the "Sex Detective"parody of Hannibal and other similar criminal profiler shows--are all exquisitely photographed in spite of being saddled with equally low budgets. They Came Together, Walk Hard, MacGruber and Key & Peele are attempting to be visually indistinguishable from the big-budget, handsomely shot dreck they're spoofing. Tom Houghton, They Came Together's cinematographer, looks like he actually gives a fuck. The montage of Paul Rudd's Joel and Amy Poehler's Molly frolicking all over the streets and parks of Brooklyn--which hilariously transforms into a fake DVD featurette about Norah Jones recording the montage music--is so handsomely lit and genuinely pleasant to look at (just like the work of Orange Is the New Black cinematographer Yaron Orbach during the "Gretchen Mol bangs Jesus Christ" segment of The Ten) that it causes sight gags like Joel and Molly's obliviousness to a dead body in a park to pay off more effectively than if they were shot with the customary cruddiness the Friedberg/Seltzer factory brings to its product.

When Esquire staff writer Matt Patches gave Friedberg and Seltzer a chance to defend their much-maligned approach to the spoof movie in a Grantlandprofile of their partnership as "Hollywood's purveyors of not giving a shit," Patches wrote that "The men are only moderately concerned about shelf life; Meet the Spartans contains multiple references to shaved-head, mental-breakdown-era Britney Spears." And there you have the fundamental difference between the writing in Friedberg/Seltzer spoof movies and the writing in Wain spoof movies. Wain's more absurdist movies aren't concerned with playing "Spot the Timely Reference" with the audience, and they're as far away as possible from the laziness of "Say, if we just toss in this scene of a celebrity impersonator dressed up as a currently-in-the-headlines pop star, the test screening audience will automatically eat it up."

Like Wet Hot (which Wain actually doesn't consider to be a spoof movie, even when it parodied '80s training montages and did it brilliantly, a year before South Park did the same thing during "Asspen") and many of the Wain-directed Childrens Hospital episodes before it, They Came Together isn't too specific about the movies or shows it's parodying. Sure, Joel and Molly's mismatched business exec/small business owner romance echoes the plot of You've Got Mail, but it's more of a hodgepodge of all the clichés of every single oil-and-water coupling in a modern rom-com. The film's more concerned with mocking unnoticeable-to-a-casual-moviegoer things like badly done ADR ("Basketball, basketball, basketball...") and that old press junket line "New York is like another character" (which I'm sometimes guilty of saying too) or those clichéd moments we're familiar with from rom-coms but have difficulty remembering word-for-word (or where exactly we saw those moments) because all those rom-coms are so damn interchangeable.

Marvel fans' minds will be blown by the acrobatic sex scene between Ant-Man and Maria Hill.

One of those clichés is the way almost every heart-to-heart conversation between the lead character and a wise family member in rom-coms ends with that lead running off and then pivoting back to earnestly say thanks to the wacky sibling or grandma (the amusingly prolonged "thanks"-off between Rudd and Max Greenfield, who plays Joel's ne'er-do-well younger brother, at the end of one particular heart-to-heart conversation is classic Wain absurdism). Wain's approach to the spoof movie is, as a result, timeless and more likely to hold up to repeat viewings than bald Britney sight gags. Why do you think Wet Hot is more beloved now than when it quietly tanked at the box office back in 2001? Wet Hot's cult popularity and lasting appeal are partly due to both Wain's timeless approach and his preference for absurdist gags over "Hmm, which box-office hits and showbiz headlines from last month can we shoehorn into our next movie?"

In fact, They Came Together's two funniest moments have nothing to do with rom-coms and have everything to do with Wain and Showalter just being their usual absurdist selves and entertainingly playing around with language, whether it's to make fun of how bizarre many phone conversations sound in real life when the person on the other end of the line isn't audible or to make fun of how clunky and silly a lot of overly expositional dialogue sounds in any kind of movie, rom-com or non-rom-com. The scene that made me laugh the loudest again during the second time I watched They Came Together was not its most talked-about scene, the bar scene that's like an updated version of the old "Pete and Repeat went to the store" joke, but the brief gag where Joel's assistant (Noureen DeWulf from the 2007 sports movie spoof The Comebacks) shares on the phone saucy and intimate bedroom details with what we assume to be her BFF and instead it turns out to be her dad. I also love how Molly's sister and housemate (Childrens Hospital regular Zandy Hartig, Wain's wife) feels the need to explain to Molly who Molly's ex-husband (an uncharacteristically goofy Michael Shannon) is even though she lives under the same roof with Molly.

Is it me or is it really weird that Molly's love interest is Ant-Man, while her exes are General Zod and Bruce Wayne's murdered dad?

Some of these gags, particularly the intentionally clunky-sounding lines of exposition, are pretty subtle and can be easy to miss in an initial viewing because of how dead-on they are about by-the-numbers Hollywood dialogue, just like how when I first saw Black Dynamite, I didn't notice how one of the actors was making fun of flubbed line readings--a staple of '70s blaxploitation flicks that were so amateurishly made that nobody would notice those flubs and fix them in post--by saying aloud the stage directions along with his dialogue ("Sarcastically, I'm in charge"). Speaking of not noticing jokes, test screening audiences were confused by They Came Together. They didn't understand it was a rom-com spoof, so Wain and Showalter tacked on as a framing device a bunch of additional scenes with Joel and Molly recalling how they met while out on a double date with a younger couple (Bill Hader and Ellie Kemper), in order to remind audiences that they're watching a spoof. In an insightful They Came Together panel discussion moderated by Jeff Goldsmith for his filmmaking podcast The Q&A, Showalter defended the last-minute addition of the framing device and said, "We want people to get the joke. We don't want people to see this and feel alienated by it, which is what happened with Wet Hot. We didn't want people to hate that movie. We like that some people love it, but I personally don't like the fact that a lot of people hate it. I want everyone to get it."

During that same panel discussion, Showalter mentions that he and Wain considered opting for a "Lost Ending of It's a Wonderful Life"-style concept of "This Rudd and Poehler movie was too good to be released and we found it" as the framing device, which I think would have worked better as a framing device than Hader constantly interjecting commentary about the ridiculousness of the rom-com tropes that brought Joel and Molly together. I'm of two minds about the double date scenes. The need to explain that everything's a joke causes They Came Together to pale slightly to Wet Hot as a Wain movie, but at the same time, without the double date scenes, we wouldn't have gotten Hader's funny delivery of "You can have the pussy, just save me the hole" and this split-second, freeze-frame-worthy sight gag of Rudd pretending to drink wine before the camera cuts away:

He looks like he's making one of those faces Chevy Chase used to make behind Jane Curtin's back during Weekend Update.

Can we talk for a second about how much Rudd and Poehler elevate They Came Together? I don't care for the rom-com genre, but Rudd and Poehler's comedic skills and their ability to play things completely straight even during the most nonsensical moments are a huge part of why They Came Together is one of the few rom-coms I'll admit to liking. The two stars are, just like everyone else in the film's cast (hell, that goes for everyone else in the casts of Wain's other films as well), enjoyably game for anything, like Rudd's unapologetically tasteless moment with The Hunger Games: Catching Fire's Lynn Cohen as Joel's bubby, which has to tie with his mirror scene in Wanderlust as his craziest moment in a Wain movie. I originally thought the scene where Joel gets turned on by his bubby after she gives him love advice--and she then hops into his arms--was intended to be a riff on a really sappy and mediocre rom-com I watched on an airplane in 1992, I Don't Buy Kisses Anymore, an indie that paired up Jason Alexander (as a Jewish mama's boy who wants to lose weight) with Nia Peeples (as a really hot Italian American musician who, like all of Alexander's love interests on Seinfeld, is way out of the schlub's league). I later found out the scene is actually a riff on Crossing Delancey, forever ruining Crossing Delancey for fans of that 1988 rom-com by adding incest.

They Came Together can currently be streamed on Netflix, but the downside of They Came Together as a streaming title is that viewers are deprived of the opportunity to enjoy what has to be one of my favorite DVD/Blu-ray extras, a video recording of Rudd, Poehler and some of their future They Came Together co-stars participating in a 2012 SF Sketchfest live-read of an early draft of the They Came Together script, which Wain originally intended to make for Universal as his follow-up to Wet Hot (when They Came Together fell apart at Universal, Wain, Showalter and Michael Ian Black concentrated on bringing to life the underappreciated Stella TV show). The video and audio quality for that 103-minute extra on the They Came Together Blu-ray is subpar, but the live-read is worthwhile for both glimpsing the differences (and similarities) between the early draft and the final result and checking out the actors' reactions to the script as they're reading it for the first time.

They stuck Christopher Meloni way in the back because he really did shit his pants during the table read. He's so Method.

The participants of the star-studded table read of the They Came Together script at the 2012 SF Sketchfest. Back row, from left to right: Phil LaMarr, Michael Showalter, Erinn Hayes, Michael Ian Black, Christopher Meloni, Paul Rudd, David Wain, Ken Marino and Beth Dover. Front row, from left to right: Marguerite Moreau, Zandy Hartig, Rachael Harris, Joe Lo Truglio and Amy Poehler.

You get to see Wain's Wanderlust writing partner Ken Marino--who steals, no pun intended, They Came Together's basketball court scene with just his repetitive delivery of "Swish!" and is also Wain, Showalter and Black's old castmate from The State--shaking his head in silent disbelief over the weirdness of the script. You also find out which lines from the script cause Rudd to laugh so hard he winds up in tears during the live-read. One of those lines is "Oh God, Bubby, I wanna fuck you so bad."

This is why I like Rudd. He now goes down in history as the first Marvel Cinematic Universe star to have ever said, "Oh God, Bubby, I wanna fuck you so bad."

None of the original songs from They Came Together are currently in rotation on AFOS, but Craig Wedren and Pink Ape's catchy "Say You Love Me" ought to be. Wedren, a childhood friend of Wain's who has scored so many of Wain's projects, including "Finishing the Novel" and Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp, talks about how simpatico his musical and comedic instincts are with Wain's while plugging the score he wrote with Matt Novack for They Came Together in a lengthy but clickworthy emPOWERme.tv interview.

Here's a missed opportunity: Peele playing Donald Sterling, and doing so in another one of those awesome stringy-haired wigs the show's brilliant makeup team would create for both Key and Peele.

Since 2009, the AFOS blog's "Shows I Miss" series has looked back at highly entertaining TV shows that were gone too soon and were too clever to last on commercial TV, from 2003's Keen Eddie to last year's Selfie. Comedy Central's hilarious Key & Peele is the first "Shows I Miss" entry in which the show closed up shop not because of the network but because the stars (who, in Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele's case, also doubled as the lead writers) wanted to move on: over the weekend, Key confirmed that the show's current season, which wrapped up filming last November, is also its last in an exclusive interview with The Wrap, and Peele did the same thing on Twitter.

It's not surprising that Key and Peele are eager to move on and concentrate on film projects like Keanu, which will star the duo and will be directed by Peter Atencio (the same director who brought so much cinematic flair to Key & Peele's sketches in the first four seasons and helped change the perception that sketch comedy should be cheap-looking and visually uninteresting). Last year, Peele toldL.A. Weekly, "If our show is to have any kind of legacy, it should be that it didn't go on too long."

Last Friday's series finale announcement is the biggest thing that separates Key & Peele from the sketch comedy show it's often (and sometimes rather unfairly) compared to, the groundbreaking, no-holds-barred Chappelle's Show. Unlike Dave Chappelle, whose "I'm going out for a pack of cigarettes"-style departure from his own hit show was one of the most bizarre exits from a TV show ever, Key and Peele get to end their hit show on their own terms.

If you don't remember the whole controversy over the demise of Chappelle's Show, Chappelle became so upset over seeing white fans of the show laugh at his sketches for the wrong reasons that he didn't come back to finish work on what became known as "the lost episodes." I have a theory for Chappelle's meltdown and subsequent escape from Comedy Central to South Africa: they were actually a cover for himself to go off the grid and do secret agent work nobody--not even his former writing partner Neal Brennan or his family in Ohio--knows about. Chappelle's a secret agent when he's not doing stand-up, which explains why he now has the physique of a black Daniel Craig.

Chappelle's Show became unwatchable without Chappelle's approval on the final cut (one of the lost episodes was a non-comedic, town hall meeting-style--and rather pointless--episode about whether or not Chappelle's opinion that the "Stereotype Pixies" sketch, which triggered his exit, was reinforcing racial stereotypes was right: re-fucking-ally?). Meanwhile, Key & Peele's final season is, fortunately, far from an abomination like that aborted third season of Chappelle's Show was. Some Key & Peele fans might not agree--particularly those who miss the segments where Key and Peele would interact with a studio audience and have also grown tired of the antics of some of the show's few recurring characters, like Peele's Meegan, the petulant millennial afflicted with both vocal fry and lousy movie theater behavior--but Key & Peele is still one of the most consistently funny sketch comedy shows on the air. Last week's ChildFund International commercial parody with Peele as a social worker loosely based on the bearded ChildFund guy, asking viewers to donate fake beards to Third World kids, and the latest Meegan and Andre sketch (is it me or did Peele model Meegan's voice after Mindy Kaling, the current boss of Key and Peele's old MADtv pal Ike Barinholtz?) were both absolute riots.

To the viewers who say they miss Key & Peele's studio audience segments, you do know those segments were sort of a compromise between the show's crew and Comedy Central, right? A behind-the-scenes battle that not many of those Key & Peele viewers seem to be aware of is the battle over the inclusion of studio audience laughter in every sketch: the network insisted on a laugh track, while Key, Peele and Atencio didn't want laughter. In 2013, Atencio discussed on Tumblr his past disagreements with the network over the laughter and said, "Our feeling was that because the sketches had a filmic quality to them, the laughter was distracting, and in a way cheapened the effort we had put into making the sketches work as individual short films." He added, "A lot of our sketches rely on setting up a believable world in often very serious genres and then subverting them, and so having that laughter cut in during an action movie or sci-fi style opening was like pouring ice-water on the viewer."

Key, Peele and Atencio had to continually persuade the network that a laugh track would get in the way of, as Atencio pointed out, "the dialogue, music, and sound-effects, all of which play a role in the comedy in most of our scenes." They ultimately won the battle and came up with a way to include audience laughter without having it intrude on the sketches: laughter would be present only during Key and Peele's hosting segments in front of a live studio audience. But the show actually got even better when it completely did away with the studio audience segments and replaced them with True Detective-style fake road trip scenes between Key and Peele as themselves (ad-libbing to each other just like in the studio audience segments), and it became clear that what Key, Peele and Atencio really wanted to do with the show this whole time was to channel the laugh track-less vibe of sketch comedy movies like Monty Python's The Meaning of Life and the John Landis flicks Kentucky Fried Movie and Amazon Women on the Moon.

To me, Key, Peele and Atencio's preference for the absence of often annoying audience laughter is as great a legacy as the show's smartly written satire about racially motivated police harassment of black men and other racial issues (like the "Negrotown" musical number, which bashes everything from racist bankers to cultural appropriation) or the unique--and unapologetically nerdy--comedic voice of two biracial comedians. Key & Peele's experiment of abolishing laugh tracks from filmed sketch comedy has caused other Comedy Central sketch shows like Kroll Show and Inside Amy Schumer to follow suit, which is a thing of beauty. I hate laugh tracks. Why do I need to be told when to laugh? They never made sense when Scooby, Shaggy, Fred, Daphne and Velma were getting chased around by ghosts to the sound of canned laughter, and they never made sense now.

Another one of Key & Peele's charms was that it wasn't trying to be Chappelle's Show (speaking of which, here's why some of us former Chappelle's Show viewers are still a little frustrated with Chappelle's abrupt exit: his departure was responsible for the increased presence of the unfunny and racistMind of Mencia on Comedy Central's schedule, as well as the network's annoying attempts to market the neo-conservative Mind as the next Chappelle's Show). I like the film writing of Kartina Richardson, but her complaints during Key & Peele's first season that Key and Peele are "black folk who want to move past race" and that the show's writing is tepid in comparison to Chappelle's no-holds-barred material and it "makes fun of blacks in a way white liberals will allow themselves to enjoy, under the guise of 'talking about race'" were really weird complaints, especially when race is frequently on the minds of both Peele, who's been working on a script for a horror flick he wants to make about "the fears of being a black man today," and Key (Richardson's negative review of Key & Peele is over at Salon, but I don't want to link to Salon because that site is as slow and laggy as Wendell trudging through a brony convention). In those earlier seasons, Key & Peele was interesting precisely because it wasn't another Chappelle's Show: the obsessions of Key, Peele and Atencio ("Labyrinth. That's my world. NeverEnding Story. Willow," said Peele to White Teeth author Zadie Smith in the New Yorker) are mostly different from those of Chappelle and Neal Brennan's. But Key & Peele eventually did dive into the kind of edgier material about race that Richardson felt the show lacked--like "Negrotown" and the Trayvon Martin-related sketch that opened "Les Mis," the show's third-season premiere--and it ended up excelling at that kind of material.

There is one area where Key & Peele definitely surpassed Chappelle's Show (besides the five seasons Key & Peele will now have amassed), and that would be the fact that it got a few non-black comedians of color some extra screen time on largely vanilla Comedy Central. For instance, Filipino American improv comic Eugene Cordero appeared a few times on Key & Peele, which is better than Chappelle's Show's weird casting of either extremely wooden Asian non-actors or what I assume to be relatives of Chappelle's Asian wife as Asian characters and SNL's continuing practice of casting white actors as Asians. You bet your ass it's offensive and lame whenever the white comedians on SNL play Asians, even without yellowface or brownface makeup. Occasionally, Key has played South Asian characters on the show--like that Indian pediatrician in the unsettling "Make-a-Wish" Halloween sketch with Lauren Lapkus--even though he's neither South nor Asian, but he's actually convincing and non-offensive as an Indian guy (perhaps the reason why Key doesn't sound like Hari Kondabolu's priceless description of Apu as "a white guy doing an impression of a white guy making fun of my father" is due to help from his wife, a dialect coach).

Key & Peele did a few other things better than SNL, like any of Key & Peele's sketches about Barack Obama, which wouldn't have existed had Lorne Michaels chosen Peele to bring his impression of the President to SNL (Peele once said, "I had some good friends over there, and a great meeting with Lorne and they asked me to do it, but I couldn't go for contractual reasons. I was on MADtv... It was a whole fiasco. It was such a shame, SNL is one of my favorite shows of all time"). The sketches with Peele as Obama and Key as his "anger translator" Luther may be viral sensations, but my favorite Key & Peele Obama sketch is "Obama: The College Years," mainly because of the way it makes fun of terrible, subtle-as-an-anvil dialogue in historical dramas like that cheesy line Joely Richardson had to say in The Patriot (Mel Gibson: "May I sit with you?" Richardson: "It's a free country. Or at least it will be").

The little visual touches Atencio came up with for the degraded early '80s videotape look of the fake footage of young Obama are a good example of Atencio's visual flair. That flair and Peele's nerdy love of horror movies were integral to another highlight of Key & Peele's run: the show's ability to pull off horror genre parody sketches that were genuinely unnerving in addition to being funny. The aforementioned "Make-a-Wish" sketch is especially unnerving. It features a creepy performance by Peele as an evil kid whose dying wishes are more elaborate than "I wish I could be Batman." Peele seems to be particularly obsessed with Thomas Harris adaptations like Manhunter, The Silence of the Lambs and the Hannibal TV show, which explains why the Harris Cannibalistic Universe inspired not one but two sketches: "Hall of Mirrors," featuring Peele as a serial killer who's got Francis Dolarhyde's cleft lip, Ted Levine's voice and Joe Isuzu's inability to lie effectively, and "Sex Detective," which has Peele playing a brooding, Will Graham-like criminal profiler in a dead-on spoof of the masturbatory overtones of loner detectives like the occasionally Graham-like Fox Mulder, whose love of beating the meat was hinted at on The X-Files (extra points for the casting of former Criminal Minds star Paget Brewster as another detective).

"Sex Detective" is so dead-on that it's forever ruined the HCU for me. Thanks to "Sex Detective,"Hannibal's pilot episode remains the only Hannibal episode I've watched because I know I won't be able to watch the rest of Hannibal without thinking of Peele's MacGruber-ish moans from "Sex Detective" and chuckling. That's how terrific a Key & Peele genre spoof like "Sex Detective" is: it has the power to ruin whole genres, just like how Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story was so brutal in skewering musician biopic clichés that it caused me to be unable to take any musician biopic seriously anymore.

This is basically Jordan Peele as Hugh Dancy as a constipated male fashion model.

The intensity of Key & Peele's horror sketches, whether that sketch is "Make-a-Wish," the explanation for Steve Urkel's dominance on Family Matters or either of the Thomas Harris spoofs, sheds light on one last standout thing about Key & Peele: the two stars are excellent actors in addition to being great comedic minds (Zadie Smith points out that "If the depth Key brings to comic moments is unexpected, the bigger surprise is that he's doing comedy at all: he intended to be a classical actor"). So many of last week's negative reviews about the Adam Sandler blockbuster Pixels have noted that Sandler sleepwalks through the movie. In other words, the energy level Sandler once had in his earliest comedic vehicles--and in more challenging and risky movies like Punch-Drunk Love, in which Sandler movie fan Paul Thomas Anderson got a career-best performance out of Sandler--is completely gone. On Key & Peele, neither Key nor Peele could ever be guilty of such a thing. They acted their asses off in every sketch, and that sort of commitment to whatever material comes their way is something studio comedy filmmaking could really use right now. Comedy Central's latest loss is now studio comedy filmmaking's gain.

I'd be up for Mission Im-Pawnee-ble: Knope Protocol becoming an actual movie. It would be the dopest fucking movie based on a binder since The Trapper Keeper Movie.

Usually on Throwback Thursday, I pull out from my desk cabinet--with my eyes closed--a movie ticket stub I didn't throw away, and then I discuss the movie on the ticket and maybe a little bit of its score, which might be now streaming on AFOS. Today, instead of drawing some random ticket, I'm going to focus today's TBT piece on Mission: Impossible--Ghost Protocol, due to this week's release of Rogue Nation, the latest Mission: Impossible installment.

I wasn't alive when the original Mission: Impossible first aired on CBS, and I didn't watch any of the Mission: Impossible reruns until I saw FX's badly butchered versions of them back when the future home of Vic Mackey and SAMCRO started out as a low-rent Nick at Nite, so I don't have an attachment to Jim Phelps like I do to other characters from shows I'm much more fond of, like, say, Yemana from Barney Miller or anybody from the Greendale gang who's not Pierce. When Brian De Palma's 1996 Mission: Impossible reboot picked Jon Voight to take over the Peter Graves role of Phelps, the cool-headed (and rather bland) leader of the Impossible Missions Force and the hero of both the '60s and '80s versions of the show, and the movie reimagined Phelps as a traitor who had his fellow IMF agents killed, I didn't hiss "Blasphemy!" at the screen or angrily storm out of the theater in the middle of the feature presentation like Graves' old Mission: Impossible co-star Greg Morris did when he watched De Palma's movie. I actually dug the shocking plot twist.

Action film reviewer Outlaw Vern perfectly described why the twist remains an intriguing one in his recent reassessment of De Palma's Mission: Impossible. A master of paranoid thrillers who proved to be the perfect filmmaker to revive and re-energize Mission: Impossible for these post-Cold War times, De Palma "doesn't look fawningly at the cloak and dagger Cold War fun of the ['60s] series... Using the original show's hero as the villain is not only a surprising plot twist, it's a statement." Vern added, "Back then spy shit was fun and glamorous, now we're more aware of the messes it causes, and the consequences of training people with deadly skills and then running out of things for them to do. The guy that was the hero back then is now willing to betray everyone because he's not getting paid enough. Times are tough."

While I found the first Mission: Impossible movie that Tom Cruise both starred in and co-produced to be genuinely thrilling and clever--the beauty of that classic Langley break-in sequence is mostly due to its use of silence, which was De Palma's way of critiquing the noisy storytelling of most summer blockbusters--the villainization of Phelps, which actually made Phelps slightly more interesting as a character, wasn't what bugged me about the movie. What bugged me was Cruise's de-emphasis on teamwork in the movie's third act so that his Ethan Hunt character saved the day on his own and everyone else on Hunt's makeshift team was ancillary. The emphasis on a team of specialists from different fields was what made both the '60s and '80s incarnations of Mission: Impossible stand out from other spy shows, besides the enticing concept of what was essentially a one-hour heist movie every week. If you're going to revive Mission: Impossible on the big screen, it ought to be the espionage equivalent of Seven Samurai or Ocean's Eleven like the old show was, or else why call it Mission: Impossible? Without an ensemble, it's nothing more than 007 as a two-hour shampoo commercial--which was basically what John Woo's abysmal Mission: Impossible II was.

The J.J. Abrams-directed Mission: Impossible III attempted to be more of an ensemble piece than Mission: Impossible Woo, but in the end, the threequel turned into yet another Cruise-saves-the-day-alone installment. It was also too much of a remake of Alias, with Cruise in the role of Sydney Bristow, Simon Pegg in the role of Marshall Flinkman and yet another guest appearance by the old Alias storytelling device of in medias res. Meanwhile, the grifter show Hustle and the caper show Leverage (as well as way before Hustle or Leverage and in the interval between the first and second Mission: Impossible movies, a lesser-known vigilante/private eye show called Vengeance Unlimited, in which Michael Madsen subjected the tormentors of his clients to mind games that owed a lot to the mind games of the small-screen IMF) were doing a better job of channeling the old Mission: Impossible than the actual Mission: Impossible movies themselves--until Mission: Impossible--Ghost Protocol came along in 2011.

Written by former Alias writer/producers Josh Appelbaum and André Nemec, Ghost Protocol recycles the premise of Hunt being falsely accused of wrongdoings and going on the run (this time to Dubai and Mumbai) while trying to clear his name, which is starting to get old after two of the three previous movies featured the same thing. By now, Hunt ought to be asking himself, "How can the same shit happen to the same guy thrice?" However, the fourth installment is the closest the Cruise movies have gotten to capturing the ensemble spirit of the old show. It's clear from the start of Ghost Protocol that animator Brad Bird, directing his first live-action film, is an even bigger fan of the old show than either Cruise or Abrams have claimed to be, because Bird reverts to the show's practice of spoiling clips from the mission to come during the opening titles to get viewers excited and pumped (a practice later emulated by '60s Mission: Impossible alums Martin Landau and Barbara Bain's sci-fi show Space: 1999 and the Battlestar Galactica reboot). The only other Mission: Impossible movie to do that was the first one. You can tell someone's a millennial or teen who never watched both the old show and the 1996 movie whenever they tweet (or post in a comments section) a complaint about Ghost Protocol's opening titles containing too many spoilers.

Check out Burj Khalifa. No, Burj Khalifa isn't the guy who did 'We Dem Boyz.'

I like to pretend Bird took Cruise aside and persuaded him to give his ego a rest to bring back the ensemble spirit of the show Bird grew up watching. The result is the most generosity we've seen from Cruise as a star and co-producer in the entire franchise (in fact, the film was originally intended to be a passing of the torch from Hunt, who was semi-retired in Mission: Impossible III, to Jeremy Renner's new character William Brandt). It explains why Jane Carter (Paula Patton), instead of Hunt, becomes the first Mission: Impossible character to light the fuse on-screen for the opening titles since Phelps in the '80s Mission: Impossible opening titles, and why the climax ends not with Hunt stopping the villainous Cobalt (Michael Nyqvist) by himself but with the teammates, despite being separated from each other, combining their efforts to stop the Swedish terrorist and his nuclear threat. Critics like to complain about how boring Ghost Protocol gets whenever it pauses from the action to dip into the angst of both Carter, who wants revenge for the killing of her lover and teammate Hanaway (Josh Holloway), and Brandt, who feels guilty for failing to protect Hunt's wife Julia (Michelle Monaghan, briefly reprising her Mission: Impossible III role to help wrap up a character arc that clearly turned into Cruise's way of coming to terms with the dissolution of his then-marriage to Katie Holmes), but thanks to Bird's skills with pacing, it's not boring. It makes Carter and Brandt more fully realized characters than Jonathan Rhys-Meyers and Maggie Q's forgettable (aside from Maggie Q's sultry entrance in a red evening gown) IMF agent characters in Mission: Impossible III.

As Ghost Protocol's female lead, Carter is an improvement over the damsel-in-distress roles written for the female leads in the second and third Mission: Impossible installments, which isn't surprising when Bird's the director, because of the assertiveness and agency he and his animators brought to Elastigirl in The Incredibles and Colette in Ratatouille. Carter's thirst for revenge also feels like Bird's comment on what went wrong with Mission: Impossible II and what caused Mission: Impossible III to take a turn for the generic in its third act. When Carter defies Hunt's orders to keep alive Sabine Moreau (Léa Seydoux), the assassin who killed Hanaway, for intel purposes and kills her instead, her act jeopardizes the mission. It's as if Bird's saying, "When you take teamwork out of the equation and have the characters act on their own, it's no longer the Mission: Impossible I used to enjoy on TV."

This is what we all imagined Paula Patton to be doing when she kicked Robin Thicke out of the house.

One of the most appealing elements of Ghost Protocol is the sight of Carter and the other agents making mistakes. It freshens up the franchise in the same way that De Palma brought his "all bets are off" stamp to Mission: Impossible by starting his movie out as a traditional Mission: Impossible episode where everything seems to go according to plan and then blindsiding the audience by killing off nearly all the agents the movie introduced only a few minutes before. In Ghost Protocol, Hunt and Pegg's Benji Dunn, left without the backing of the government due to ghost protocol going into effect and the IMF being disavowed and shut down, are forced to deal with gadgets that become unreliable without the resources to fix them, a storytelling thread Shane Black appeared to have borrowed somewhat when he opted for a similar back-to-basics, on-the-lam story for Tony Stark in Iron Man Three. Before the Kremlin disaster that triggers ghost protocol, Hunt receives his mission instructions from a recording that conks out and fails to self-destruct, so Hunt has to give the old Russian pay phone that was playing the recording a Fonzie-style whack to get the message to self-destruct. Then after the Kremlin disaster, the mask-building gadget the IMF has relied on since Mission: Impossible III breaks down, which deprives the team of the state-of-the-art masks that have become such a staple of the Cruise movies. During the much-talked-about Burj Khalifa climbing sequence where, like in the rest of Ghost Protocol, Cruise's brand of crazy is Jackie Chan crazy (he insisted on doing his own climbing stunts again) as opposed to Scientology crazy, one of Hunt's suction gloves malfunctions and turns into Hunt's worst enemy.

These gags are organic to Ghost Protocol's story in a way that the forced running gags about the Enterprise-A's ineffectiveness as a new ship were not during Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. The tech mishaps both raise the stakes of Ghost Protocol and act as a clever metaphor for the anxieties the Mission: Impossible producers must be having about maintaining the durability of a movie franchise that's now pushing 20, whereas all those Enterprise-A malfunction gags were there for no reason, other than because '70s Mission: Impossible alum Leonard Nimoy's Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home conquered the box office after adding more humor and both Paramount and William Shatner wanted another Star Trek IV without exactly understanding why the humor in Nimoy's directorial effort worked.

In fact, Ghost Protocol does several other things better than other movies do, whether that movie is Star Trek V or Hudson Hawk. Benji's playing of "Ain't That a Kick in the Head" to time Hunt's prison break at the start of Ghost Protocol appears to have been lifted from Bruce Willis and Danny Aiello's use of pop standards to time their heists in Hudson Hawk, but according to sci-fi author Christopher L. Bennett, a Mission: Impossible geek, it echoes "the use of carnival music to time a prison break in season 1's 'Old Man Out.'" Bird's background in animated storytelling explains why he's better at writing and directing humor than Shatner and maybe Michael Lehmann (I'm aware that Hudson Hawk has become as much of a cult favorite as Lehmann's earlier flick, the classic anti-John Hughes teen movie Heathers, in the decades since its disastrous release, but all I've watched of Lehmann's Hudson Hawk is the "Swinging on a Star" heist scene).

Matt Helm may be too drunk to fuck, but he's not too drunk to make a cameo in Ghost Protocol.

Bird's animation background also lends a lot of visual snap to Ghost Protocol's massively scaled set pieces, particularly the sequences in Dubai and the climactic Mumbai parking garage fight between Hunt and Cobalt. The strong visual sense Bird brought to Ghost Protocol is timeless in ways that the speed-ramping and second-rate CGI throughout Die Another Day, the fourth entry in Pierce Brosnan's run as 007 just like how Ghost Protocol is fourth in Cruise's franchise, are not. Those were a couple of attempts to visually transition 007 into the early '00s, but they ended up instantly dating Die Another Day and giving it a whiff of desperation (Bird's visual sense is also preferable over the fondness for shaky-cam both Abrams, who stayed on as co-producer on both Ghost Protocol and the new Rogue Nation, and his Star Trek and Star Wars cinematographer Dan Mindel brought over to Mission: Impossible III after Abrams made the camera wobble throughout Alias and the first season of Lost). It's a bit of a shame that Paramount denied Ghost Protocol fans the option on Blu-ray of rewatching Ghost Protocol's IMAX sequences in their original aspect ratio so that they can re-experience the awe of seeing Cruise and the other actors dwarfed by such tall surroundings, like during the Kremlin explosion and the Dubai sandstorm sequence.

The lack of an IMAX viewing option also kind of waters down the great visual joke of Bird and cinematographer Robert Elswit framing Cruise in certain shots so that he looks like little Remy scampering through the kitchen and the streets of Paris during Ratatouille. Both that 2007 Pixar flick and The Incredibles concluded with inventive title sequences that were worth staying in the theater for a few more minutes to enjoy, but the opening title sequence Kyle Cooper's Prologue Films company created for Ghost Protocol is easily the most entertaining title sequence in a Bird movie, especially when it's in full IMAX, which adds more frustration to the Ghost Protocol Blu-ray's lack of an IMAX option. The old imagery of the Mission: Impossible fuse passing through sneak peeks at future scenes nicely receives a more immersive, 3-D-inspired spin from Prologue, which follows the fuse as it zooms and plummets like a roller coaster through those yet-to-come scenes, shot from angles that are completely different from how we later see them in full.

Ghost Protocol's opening title sequence is a great marriage of visuals and music. Mission: Impossible III composer Michael Giacchino's reunion with Bird, whom he wrote outstanding score music for during The Incredibles and Ratatouille, seemed to have amped up Giacchino during Ghost Protocol, because he came up with my favorite modern arrangement of Lalo Schifrin's Mission: Impossible opening title theme, outshining even Danny Elfman's loving reinterpretations of the theme in the first movie. I love how the rhythm of Giacchino's "Light the Fuse" responds to the clips of Benji's modification of a hotel room number, the Hunt/Brandt gun snatch scene and the Indian dancers during the opening titles. But the best element of Giacchino's Ghost Protocol revamp of the Schifrin theme has to be his rearrangement of the strings. In a 2011 interview, Giacchino said, "Traditionally in that [Schifrin] tune the strings are used in a very specific way. You have the low strings doing the obvious 'Bom, Bom, Bom-Bom,' and then you have the upper strings following along with the woodwinds playing the melody... One of the things I wanted to do was not necessarily have the strings play any of the melody, just give us the energy behind the melody. That's why they are just going 'Bop-pa-pa, Bop-pa-pa...'" Giacchino also came up with my favorite movie theme written for a skyscraper, the epic "A Man, a Plan, a Code, Dubai" cue that introduces Burj Khalifa.

"The Plot," the march theme Schifrin first created for the Mission: Impossible pilot episode to represent the professionalism of the IMF agents while under enormous pressure, resurfaces in Giacchino's Ghost Protocol score, and its return appearance lends credence to my theory that the more a Mission: Impossible movie uses "The Plot," the more enjoyable the installment. Elfman included "The Plot" in his score for the first movie. Giacchino previously referenced "The Plot" in his Mission: Impossible III score. Rogue Nation composer Joe Kraemer, who regularly collaborates with Rogue Nation director Christopher McQuarrie, makes use of "The Plot" even more than Giacchino does, which is a sign that Rogue Nation might not be terrible. Meanwhile, Hans Zimmer never featured "The Plot" in his Mission: Impossible II score. Mammoth box-office grosses aside, we know how that sequel turned out.

But even if Giacchino didn't use "The Plot" at all, Ghost Protocol would still tower over the second and third Mission: Impossible movies like the Burj Khalifa looming over Dubai, simply because of Bird's ability to find the perfect balance of spectacle, suspense and humor while fully restoring the most missed element of the old Mission: Impossible: the teamwork. Sure, Ghost Protocol lacks a villain as intimidating and perfectly realized as the late Philip Seymour Hoffman was in Mission: Impossible III. Nyqvist is too much of a non-entity as Cobalt. Despite having such minimal dialogue, Seydoux makes so much of an impression as an adversary--with her sexy pouts and Beyoncé hair--that I wish Ghost Protocol contained a Ra's Al Ghul-style twist where Cobalt turned out to be a decoy for the real mastermind behind the nuclear threat, Sabine, which would have given the Blue Is the Warmest Color star more screen time. But otherwise, Bird understands that Mission: Impossible stories work best as what the A.V. Club's A.A. Dowd describes as "tributes to process, when they're observing the detail-oriented business of breaking into an impregnable fortress or pulling a technology-abetted heist." It would be a crime if the franchise were to disavow any knowledge of that.

Selections from Giacchino's Ghost Protocol score are in rotation during both "AFOS Prime" and "AFOS Incognito."

Maybe Elliot is the figment of Christian Slater's imagination because being a showkiller for such a long time made Slater lose his mind.

I still remember the date: June 18, 1990. Star Trek had killed off major, non-redshirt crew member characters before (Spock at the end of The Wrath of Khan and Tasha Yar on The Next Generation). But on that date, The Next Generation looked like it was about to go a step further and actually write its captain off the show. What the hell was going on? Was Patrick Stewart's contract not renewed? Did he piss off the Next Generation showrunner? Did he piss off someone from the Minoxidil Mafia?

June 18, 1990 was when The Next Generation finally stepped out of the shadow of the original Star Trek and proved at the end of "The Best of Both Worlds, Part I" that it was going to take certain chances with its storytelling--or rather, boldly go where no Star Trek incarnation had gone before. Sure, The Next Generation had done a few excellent episodes before--"A Matter of Honor," a standout hour where Riker temporarily serves on a Klingon ship, immediately comes to mind--but "The Best of Both Worlds, Part I" upped the ante with an especially tense hour full of possible changes to the show's status quo and moments of Starfleet being under attack in ways that hadn't been seen since Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.

On the old Star Trek, the Enterprise's most powerful antagonists, whether it was a starship-devouring machine or an actual god, would always be defeated or outwitted by the Enterprise crew in less than an hour. But the Borg, which the Enterprise-D first encountered a year before in "Q Who," were so powerful and unstoppable during "The Best of Both Worlds, Part I" that they clearly weren't going to be put down at the end of act five, especially after they transformed Captain Picard into one of them and assimilated his skills as a commander and his knowledge of Starfleet so that they could now attack the fleet's weaknesses. And it all ended with the most memorable final line in a Star Trek story--Riker saying, "Mr. Worf, fire"--until Picard's "Five-card stud, nothing wild... and the sky's the limit" line at the end of The Next Generation's final episode, that is.

It was one hell of a way to start the summer. I really thought "The Best of Both Worlds" was going to resume the following September with Picard floating around in a white robe and playing a golden Vulcan harp. A few discussions of the impact of "The Best of Both Worlds" have tended to say, "This was before the Internet, so over the summer, Next Generation viewers shared their excitement over the cliffhanger in the most old-fashioned ways: over the watercooler, phone chats, the convention at the Ramada, telegrams, carrier pigeons..." But because these are Star Trek fans we're talking about here, many of them have always been computer-savvy, and the ones who were the most computer-savvy were actually ahead of everyone else communication-wise in 1990 when they speculated over Picard's fate on things called BBSes. Remember those?

Once in a while, a really juicy mystery comes along in the summer and rocks the pop culture world. In 1990, it was "Is Riker going to kill Picard?" In 2010, it was "Is Leonardo DiCaprio still in the dream world? Because that damn top wouldn't stop spinning!" Summer's supposed to be the time for dumb blockbusters and breezy escapism, not thought-provoking and dystopian narratives. So thanks a lot, Mr. Robot, for ruining the summer with your hacktivist leanings, your mistrust of corporations, your frustrations with economic inequality, your moral ambiguity, your clever use of (often moody) music, your unreliable narrator who can't tell apart reality from his imagination and your handful of nifty mysteries that are the next "Is Leo still asleep?"

Mr. Robot is the story of Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek), a morphine-addicted, anti-social Manhattan cybersecurity expert whose skills as a vigilante hacker attract the attention of the titular anarchist (Christian Slater), who recruits Elliot to help him and a band of hackers known as "fsociety" take down corporate America, particularly a conglomerate called E Corp. I can't think of another previous hour-long drama that debuted in the summer and was as stylish or as eerie or as playful about its storytelling as Mr. Robot. People who were born before the Vietnam War--that's all this blog's fucking readership seems to be made up of--will probably say to me, "There was The Prisoner. That premiered in the summer." First of all, stop flaunting your age and all the things you've gotten to watch and read. Second of all, I'm much younger than you. Am I supposed to care that The Prisoner was a summer replacement for Jackie Gleason's variety show? (Really? That's like if Red Skelton temporarily lent his time slot to Superjail.) I first encountered The Prisoner in the same way everyone else has: Netflix and not at all in the summer. I'm supposed to be impressed that you watched The Prisoner before everyone else was watching it? Give it a rest, alright, hipster?

Netflix's DVD rental service allowed me to marathon The Prisoner over the course of only three weeks one winter, while people who first caught The Prisoner on CBS in 1968 had to experience it from June to September. Now I know how they must have felt when they stumbled into this show that came out of nowhere and tried to figure out what exactly was going on while they were sweating buckets. I assume the two or three viewers who watched The Prisoner that summer exchanged theories about Number One's identity via Western Union.

The fsociety hackers' latest computer prank is recoloring all the blue skies on USA original shows so that they're charcoal.

Created and showrun by Sam Esmail and renewed for a second season, Mr. Robot came out of nowhere as well and has turned into USA's most talked-about original show since the earlier days of its "blue skies" template, which made hit shows out of breezy high concepts like a San Francisco ex-cop with OCD (Monk) and a spy who gets burned by his agency and finds work in Miami as a modern-day, pre-Denzel Equalizer (Burn Notice). So USA's association with the dark Mr. Robot is a bit of a surprise because of its reputation as the "blue skies" network, but it's not like USA hasn't tried to cloudy up the blue skies aesthetic before. Suits takes place in a frequently chilly-looking Manhattan (it's actually Toronto, which explains the chilly look) where ruthless litigators blurt out "shit" every other minute because USA won't let them say "fuck." But aside from lousy weather conditions, numerous S-bombs, law firm power struggles and angsty sex with Meghan Markle in the file room, that show is really just lifestyle porn like USA's Hamptons concierge doctor show Royal Pains--or Entourage or long before that, Dynasty.

Meanwhile, Mr. Robot is USA fare at its cloudiest. Elliot's social anxiety disorder and depression aren't played for Monk-style laughs. He has noble intentions about wanting to protect the few people he can relate to, whether it's his co-worker and childhood friend Angela (Portia Doubleday) or his therapist (Gloria Reuben), but he goes about them in creepy, invasive and online stalker-y ways. Sociopathic E Corp vice president Tyrell Wellick (Martin Wallström), one of Elliot's antagonists, beats up homeless people to blow off steam and will do anything to get his hands on the position of E Corp CTO, whether it's gay sex or busting in on the wife (Michele Hicks) of a CTO candidate (Brian Stokes Mitchell) while she's on the toilet and propositioning her. The show gets to say "fuck" (even though, like the S-bombs during daytime repeats of Suits, the F-bombs are censored by USA). The characters are into much harder drugs than the weed Suits hero Mike Ross preferred in the first season. Mr. Robot is escapist in the same way Breaking Bad was escapist--in other words, not very much, unless you're the kind of viewer who rooted for Heisenberg to conquer the meth trade and liked to frequently call Skyler a "cunt" for getting in Heisenberg's way, which would make you certifiable.

You lost. And let me tell you what you didn't win: a 20-volume set of the Encyclopedia International, a case of Turtle Wax and a year's supply of Rice-a-Roni, the San Francisco Treat!

"It's easy to think that Mr. Robot is Pump Up the Volume's outlaw DJ Hard Harry, released from jail 25 years later and realizing that using ham radio to bring down corrupt school administrators isn't enough any more. That's not a knock on Slater, whose performance here traffics in his signature sharky charisma without overdoing it. It's just that the show's revolutionary spirit is essentially as juvenile as Hard Harry's," wrote Dennis Perkins at the A.V. Club. Perkins' mixed review of the Mr. Robot pilot proves why judging a TV show based solely on its premiere episode is now such a mistake in the age of slow-building storytelling on hour-long dramas that aren't procedurals. That pilot was a little too Dexter-y for my tastes, from the method in which Elliot collects as trophies a digital memento of each of his targets (a quirk that hasn't really appeared again on the show) to the choice of a pedophile as the first scumbag we see Elliot take down, a simple way to get the audience to immediately side with the main character's brand of justice (in Mr. Robot's pilot, the pedo's a coffee shop chain owner who's a child pornographer, while in Dexter's pilot, he's a pastor who killed the kids he abused). Unlike Pump Up the Volume, Mr. Robot has veered away from the romanticizing of Elliot and his point of view that took place in the pilot and is evolving into an even murkier and not-at-all-juvenile show, although Elliot's gripes about society are perfectly valid.

The show has interestingly started to morally complicate Elliot's crusade in ways that Dexter ended up rejecting (it gave up on challenging viewers to question the titular serial killer's vigilantism and basically admitted "He's the hero we need"), as well as add grim consequences to that crusade. After joining forces with fsociety, Elliot's targets have started to include ordinary working folk in addition to pedos and unapologetic criminals, and in "ep1.43xpl0its.wmv," fsociety's heist movie-style plan to infiltrate the Steel Mountain facility requires Elliot to trace the online footprint of a schlubby Steel Mountain tour guide and use the info he picked up to talk this man into giving him access to the facility's climate control system. The minute I noticed that the schlub was that poor gay guy Briscoe and Logan were unable to save from getting shanked in prison at the end of the classic 1994 Law & Order episode "Mayhem," I knew Elliot was going to psychologically destroy him (and feel awful about it) and that it was going to be difficult to watch. I wonder if Elliot is headed towards a Walter White-style heel turn and will lose his soul while trying to protect others. At the rate fsociety is going in its takedown of the corporate world, it's as if Elliot is one Lily of the Valley plant away from poisoning an innocent little kid.

So how dirty will Elliot's hands get as fsociety's plan moves forward--and how will he recover from the grief he's experiencing after a recent target of his, drug dealer Fernando Vera (Elliot Villar), retaliated against Elliot by killing his neighbor and fuckbuddy Shayla (Frankie Shaw)? The last two Mr. Robot episodes have piled those questions onto the mystery that's placed Mr. Robot at the center of "Is Leo still dreaming?"-type discussions or debates on the Internet since its premiere: How much of the show is real and how much of it is a figment of Elliot's imagination? Every time any character outside of Elliot--including any news anchor on TV--refers to E Corp as "Evil Corp," we know we're watching Elliot's imagination. But is Mr. Robot a Tyler Durden-style part of his imagination too? None of the other fsociety hackers were seen talking to Mr. Robot--until the day he was seen chewing out Darlene (Carly Chaikin) for failing to recruit to his cause another group of hackers, the Dark Army. If the outgoing and fatherly Mr. Robot is both a part of Elliot's split personality and a manifestation of his dead father, was Darlene actually apologizing to Elliot for her screw-up? Or could Darlene be in Elliot's head too? So that could mean we're not just getting Fight Club vibes from Mr. Robot: there's also the possibility that Elliot has multiple personalities and each member of fsociety is a personality of Elliot's--shades of the 2003 James Mangold thriller Identity.

Some of these "Here's what may be real and here's what may be not" theories are making my head hurt, and it all could have been frustrating and difficult to sit through had Mr. Robot been extremely dour or lacking in style and wit. I love how the show opted for Len's "Steal My Sunshine" instead of Katrina and the Waves' overplayed "Walking on Sunshine" during Elliot's "I'm gonna be more normal now" voiceover. That moment of humor in the second episode was when Mr. Robot won me over. For other Mr. Robot viewers who have also found the occasional humor to be a welcome relief from the darkness, the humorous moment that won them over might have been the scene where Elliot's new fsociety friends are watching on TV the 1995 Angelina Jolie movie Hackers and ripping apart the movie's clichéd depiction of hacking. Fortunately, the humor on Mr. Robot--which is also embodied by the show's episode titling system, where every episode title is made to look like a torrent file name--is never too broadly played like the humor on Dexter sometimes was.

The original score music by Mac Quayle, who worked with Cliff Martinez on the scores to Drive and Only God Forgives, nicely heightens the suspense on Mr. Robot and channels Martinez scores like his scores for The Knick, as well as the work of Tangerine Dream, whose classic "Love on a Real Train" theme from Risky Business (now in rotation on "AFOS Prime") makes an appearance at the end of "ep1.43xpl0its.wmv." The combination of Quayle's music and the heavy use of negative space in the show's cinematography, especially in last week's "eps1.5br4ve-trave1er.asf," makes for one really distinctive vibe and look on the current USA lineup.

The heavy use of negative space is an effective way to illustrate Elliot's paranoia and discontent, but this off-kilter approach to cinematography isn't new to TV. The now-defunct White Collar, another USA show that, like Mr. Robot, was filmed on location in New York, frequently surrounded its actors with tons of negative space, and so did Luther, a gorgeously shot crime show that had a split personality like the one Elliot appears to be afflicted with: the show where Idris Elba interacted with comely nemesis-turned-BFF Ruth Wilson was more intriguing and alive than the show where Elba was busting much more run-of-the-mill psychos (that's why the first season, where's it's all Wilson all the time, is Luther's best).

(Photo source: Luther Caps)

The Luther producers leave that much extra space above the actors' heads so that viewers at home can add sizable-enough comedic speech bubbles above their heads in screen caps on Photoshop.

(Photo source: Luther Caps)

'Please Mr. Gat, get me outta this bloody plothole-filled episode.'

(Photo source: Luther Caps)

So not everything about Mr. Robot is original. The fact that nobody (except Elliot and Darlene) acknowledges Mr. Robot's presence in the room is, like I've said before, Durden-ish, as is fsociety's plan to liberate regular working people from all their debts. But Esmail makes these elements seem fresh, and he's found a terrific actor to make us relate to this material. Even before the popularity of this show brought an end to Slater's longtime reputation as a showkiller, you could sense Slater's delight in the offbeat material Esmail wrote for him and Malek (the casting of Hard Harry as the angel--or is he the devil?--on Elliot's shoulder is inspired casting), but Slater's neither the real star of Mr. Robot nor the performer who makes us relate to the material. That would be Malek, whom I remember best for the great little bits of minimalist and underplayed comedy he brought to his role in Short Term 12 as an awkward new staffer at a group foster home. On Mr. Robot, he brings that same kind of minimalism to the introverted and low-energy Elliot, but it's never a flat or one-note performance.

A lot of Malek's energy as Elliot takes place in his eyes rather than in his monotone voice or his buried-under-a-hoodie body (a hoodie that Malek has interestingly referred to as "an urban combat uniform" for Elliot), and that draws us in to Elliot and lets us see what this person who's a closed book is thinking when he's not narrating. Mr. Robot has been frequently compared to Taxi Driver, and outside of Malek's voiceovers, that's the most Travis Bickle-y part of his performance as Elliot: whatever's going on with his eyes. Some of Taxi Driver's most memorable shots were the close-ups on Robert De Niro's nervous and crazy eyes. Martin Scorsese and cinematographer Michael Chapman were clearly mesmerized by De Niro's eye acting. So you might not like Elliot because he reminds you too much of Travis or all the things you hate about real-life hackers and online misanthropes, but Malek is integral to why you can't take your eyes off Mr. Robot: Malek's not like any other lead on a USA original show right now, and the show's not like any other piece of summertime entertainment right now. Mr. Robot, fire.

Even when he was part of the Mickey Mouse Club, he wouldn't eat his Mickey Mouse Magic Crunch.

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.

Getaway drivers are like the bass players of heist-movie crews: nobody gives two shits about them. Adapted from the 2005 James Sallis novel of the same name by screenwriter Hossein Amini, director Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive is a heist flick that takes a different turn and gives getaway drivers their due by telling everything from the point of view of the wheelman. The film's two heist sequences literally leave out all the lock-picking bits and all the breaking-into-the-vault bits, and as a bit of a sly joke that's reminiscent of Andy Kaufman standing around on stage and waiting for his cue to lip-sync the "Here I come to save the day!" part of the Mighty Mouse theme, the heist sequences just show Ryan Gosling waiting in the car and considering his next move in case the heist goes wrong. Refn is so skilled at building tension in Drive that these sequences are still gripping even without ever setting foot inside the electronics warehouse that's broken into or the pawn shop that gets held up.

Drive is also Gosling and Refn's twisted version of a superhero movie (regarding the subject of superhero movies, Gosling joked, "All the good ones were taken, so I made up my own"). It's done not like a quippy Marvel Cinematic Universe blockbuster or a shouty Zack Snyder speed-ramp fest but in the nearly silent, actions-speak-louder-than-words style of older action flicks Refn and the Drive producers (and I) love, whether it's Michael Mann's Thief, Peter Yates'Bullitt, John Boorman's Point Blank or Walter Hill's The Driver (Hill's movie is the only one I haven't seen out of those four older actioners).

The superhero Gosling plays is a garage mechanic and Hollywood stunt driver who's never referred to by name in the movie, not even by Shannon (Bryan Cranston, who guest-starred in a standout 1998 X-Files episode that's also called "Drive"), his boss at the garage and father figure. The Gosling character is listed in the end credits as simply "Driver," a shout-out to the way Hill's movie identifies Ryan O'Neal's character as just "The Driver." The mechanic's superpower is his badass stunt driving skills, which he puts to use at night in his side gig as a getaway wheelman. In case we miss Refn's interpretation of Driver (no relation to Adam or Minnie?) as a superhero, the scorpion emblem on the back of Driver's white satin jacket is designed to look like Spider-Man's, and the theme music for the love story between Driver and his neighbor Irene (Carey Mulligan) is "A Real Hero" by the Toronto duo Electric Youth and French producer/remixer College.

There's one other superpower I almost forgot: Driver's prowess with a hammer or knife (or a gun, even though like O'Neal, he prefers not to carry one) whenever either his life is threatened--both Driver and Shannon frequently get into business with dangerous people--or the lives of Shannon, Irene and her six-year-old son Benicio (Kaden Leos) are threatened. You don't want to be on the other end of a fight with Driver whenever he's wielding a hammer or knife. And that's where the twisted part of this Refn take on a superhero movie comes in: Driver also happens to be a sociopath who's capable of terrifying, childlike and almost-got-slapped-with-an-NC-17-rating violence when you least expect it. Refn and cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel, who regularly handles the cinematography for Bryan Singer's directorial efforts (like the bizarrely orange-hued pilot episode Singer directed for House), both shoot Driver's nighttime retribution against an L.A. crime boss named Nino (Ron Perlman) like a horror movie sequence, right down to the creepy, Michael Myers-style stuntman mask Driver chooses to don for his pursuit of Nino.

Amini and Refn also upend one other aspect of superhero movies: the romance (SPOILER). Many of them end with the superhero (unless he's a bizarre monkish type like the Tobey Maguire version of Peter Parker, who doesn't have time for sex even though Kirsten Dunst, Mageina Tovah, Elizabeth Banks and Bryce Dallas Howard all throw themselves at him) getting the girl, while Drive ends with Driver forcing himself to leave behind Irene and Benicio because it's the only way he can protect them from any remaining associates or underlings of Jewish gangster Bernie Rose (a cast-against-type and convincingly intimidating Albert Brooks). Driver's chaste romance with Irene--who's still on good terms with her husband and Benicio's father, Standard Gabriel (Oscar Isaac), an ex-con who happens to be returning home from prison right when Driver's starting to bond with Irene--is more interestingly played and more maturely handled than most romances in actual superhero movies. That's because it's depicted with minimal dialogue and expressed mainly through glances between Gosling and Mulligan.

"He sees her in a grocery store. Cut to the parking lot... Cut to them in the elevator. He's helping her carry her bags upstairs. Cut to them in her apartment. She's giving him some water, and an entire movie is happening between them, and we don't need to hear the fuckin' dialogue! It's all in their looks, it's all in the shots. It's just absolutely beautiful," said A History of Violence screenwriter Josh Olson during his Trailers from Hell discussion of Drive and its refreshing lack of unnecessary exposition.

The idea to discard most of the dialogue that was written for their scenes together came from both Gosling and Mulligan. It was a bold and terrific choice. Moviegoers who either giggled over Driver's laconicism (I'd hate to see them watch Steve McQueen in Bullitt because they'll probably end up fracturing a rib) as if they were watching that old and bizarre clip of Gosling singing some Jodeci on The Mickey Mouse Club or complained that "Gosling doesn't talk enough in this movie!" clearly want everything spoon-fed to them (Drive received a C- from moviegoers at CinemaScore in 2011). I know I keep quoting my favorite line from Road House, but it's very apt here: they're too stupid to have a good time.

Driver is so terse and so uninterested in talking about his past that the only line of dialogue about his past comes from Shannon when he recalls to Irene the day Driver came to his garage looking for work (whereas by the end of that great diner scene between James Caan and Tuesday Weld in Thief--which is full of exposition, but it's delivered naturally and realistically and in the manner of a typical diner conversation--we know every little bit of the Caan character's incarcerated past and what makes him tick). Both Driver's terseness and the lack of information about his past before the garage have caused Drive and its enigmatic main character to be open to interpretation, which is part of what makes this movie continue to be fascinating. Moviegoers like Olson believe Driver is somewhere on the autism spectrum, while an actual psychologist who preferred to remain anonymous and was asked by a movie blog in 2011 to profile Driver's behavior concluded that he's more like someone with obsessive compulsive personality disorder (which isn't the same as OCD) than an autistic savant. That psych profile also theorized that Driver was raised on a farm (!).

My interpretation of Driver is that he did time when he was younger, and Shannon took him in right after he got out of prison (I don't view him as someone who grew up on a farm). It's a backstory Gosling tells primarily through his eyes and body language, just like what Charlize Theron does with her character Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road. For instance, look at how Driver silently reacts to the presence of Standard, whose past decision-making hasn't exactly been the best and whose sizing-up of Driver when he first encounters him in their apartment building's hallway is fraught with unspoken hostility towards "Mom's new friend." Driver gives a look in that hallway scene (and in a later scene where Standard tells him he's into the mob for some money) that says, "Bad decision-makers like Standard were all over the yard."

I contemplated Olson's reading of Drive as a story about an autistic wheelman and thought it made some sense for a few weeks. But then after rewatching Drive in its entirety, I realized his reading doesn't quite fit, despite Driver's savant-style memorization of the streets and freeways of L.A. for his gig as a wheelman. I don't think Driver's on the spectrum. He's simply a criminal who, like Neil McCauley from Heat, taught himself not to waste his words and to keep himself as quiet and invisible as possible to avoid attracting the attention of either the prison guards, the cops or his enemies.

Even though Driver often looks like he'd rather be behind the wheel of a muscle car or under some vehicle's hood than face-to-face with any of the hotheaded crooks who enlist his services, he's able to maintain eye contact with people whose company he likes, and he can read social cues. He's capable of understanding or expressing humor, especially when he's around Benicio (who's like a less chatty version of the kid in Shane), but he approaches humor stoically, of course. His interactions with Benicio and the only two scenes in the movie where he shows fear in his voice--that would be the scene where he expresses to Irene his remorse for failing to protect Standard even though he tried his best to help him and the scene where he gets mad at Shannon for accidentally putting Irene in danger and pleads with him to leave L.A. to stay alive--all prove he's not on the spectrum. As for Léon, the Manhattan hitman who drinks nothing but milk, wears Urkel pants that are four sizes too short, relates to his houseplant better than he relates to other people and doesn't recommend to a 12-year-old girl who makes a pass at him that she ought to look for boys closer to her age...

Refn never mentioned Léon: The Professional, which I actually watched for the first time last week, as one of his influences during interviews about Drive, but I like to pretend Refn also viewed Drive as a variation on Léon that doesn't contain all that bothersome and creepy material about a 12-year-old girl's sexuality and chooses to split the Natalie Portman character into two different characters: a six-year-old kid and his mom, a more age-appropriate female for the lead to experience romantic tension with. Or maybe Refn just viewed Drive as a metaphor for Christianity's encroachment on the Norse religions, like action film reviewer Outlaw Vern once joked. Whatever the reading, Drive is one of those movies that will be subjected for years to many different interpretations/theories ("He has Asperger's!""Nah, he's actually an alien from a planet that won't eat cereal!") or film studies essays about its efficient script or stylized visual approach (meanwhile, mainstream Hollywood has started imitating Drive: Jack Reacher has taken the Lee Child novel series and coated it in a Drive-like stylized sheen, while the vicious side of Driver clearly influenced Antoine Fuqua's remake of The Equalizer, which originally had Refn attached to it as director).

I wouldn't be surprised if Drive someday winds up as the subject of an essay for a film studies course about Jews on screen, due to a part of Drive that's not as open to interpretation as other parts of the movie. That would be the uneasy alliance between Bernie, whose line about his Hollywood past as a Golan-Globus-ish producer of '80s B-movies is straight out of The Limey ("One critic called them European. I thought they were shit"), and Nino, whose resentment over demanding respect from his anti-Semitic Italian superiors and never getting it brings about everyone's downfall, including Driver's. Their alliance reflects tensions within the Jewish community over how Jewish modern-day Jews prefer to be, with Nino being the self-hating Jew in this situation (what's the Yiddish name for "Tom"?). I particularly like how instead of on-the-nose, They Came Together-style exposition, food is used in one of their earlier scenes together to illustrate the contrasting ways Bernie and Nino view their Jewish heritage: Bernie's preference for Chinese food gives away that he's Jewish to the core, while Nino's choice of a pizzeria as a front for his business illustrates that he's a Jew who thinks he's Italian. At one point, Bernie says all we need to know about his disdain for Nino when he addresses him by his real name: Izzy.

Drive is also bound to be subjected to many experiments with its music, like last year's BBC Three rescoring of Drive, which was music-supervised by Radio 1's Zane Lowe. He got artists like Banks and Laura Mvula to record new original tracks for Drive, and the results were negatively received, although Refn gave the rescore his approval. I haven't watched the rescored version in its entirety, but after watching just two of the new songs get grafted onto the movie (one of them, "Get Away" by Chvrches, is actually pretty solid, but I would have placed it in a different scene, like one that's unscored and could use a source cue), it proves how irreplaceable both the pulsating and well-chosen existing songs and Cliff Martinez's perfectly realized original score are.

Fans of Gosling or Drive who went over the top on Twitter and tweeted angry reactions to the rescore, I'll let you in on a little secret: you can always go back to the original version of Drive. It's not as if Lowe destroyed all copies of the original version--like what George Lucas was rumored to have done to the negatives of the pre-Special Edition cuts of the first three Star Wars movies--and replaced them with his rescore. But the fans who posted melodramatic tweets in response to BBC Three's rescore acted as if that had happened. The Drive that you know and love isn't going away any time soon. Electric Youth will still be there, serenading a pleasant afternoon drive along the L.A. River with their ode to "a real human being and a real hero." And a real badass with a hammer.

Selections from the Drive score are in rotation during "AFOS Prime" on AFOS.

Weed Lord. Isn't that the name of Doug Benson's all-time favorite biopic?

(Photo source: Entropy)

I think beaches are overrated, and so are swimming pools and waterslide parks. Look, I'm no neckbeard who hates to go outside, but at around college, I outgrew the beaches, pools and waterslide parks I used to spend time in as a kid during some summers and just completely lost interest in the concept of them as enjoyable places to be.

That South Parkepisode where Cartman gets frustrated about first-graders continually pissing in the pool triggered my latent germophobia about pool water, and then decades later, an episode of Ben Schwartz's Disney/Titmouse cartoon Randy Cunningham: 9th Grade Ninja that used kids' leftover snot from waterslide parks as a plot device (don't ask) confirmed my growing suspicions about the grubbiness of waterslide parks. When you're a kid, you're unconcerned about such things. When you're an adult, splashing around in water for hours to keep the heat from killing you loses all its appeal after you discover better and cleanlier ways to keep the heat from murdering you, like a cold beer or an iced tea. Even California-loving Best Coast frontwoman Bethany Cosentino has said she gets creeped out by the idea of swimming in the ocean. I believe I have a clip of her thinking about having to do that.

Hello there, Dubsmash. And so long, Dubsmash. Whenever The Today Show starts acknowledging the existence of an app or meme, its 15 minutes of coolness are immediately over.

So I may not care anymore for beaches and pools, but I'm always running into escapist literature that's ideal for beachside or poolside reading. One of my favorite recent trade paperback collections of a comic book storyline is especially ideal for beachside or poolside reading--or summertime reading anywhere--because of its summertime setting. I highly recommend it also because it's simply an entertaining arc from a superhero comic that's special for not being a typical superhero comic and for being tailor-made for comics readers like myself who find most superhero comics to be either puerile or unreadable due to overly complicated backstories or convoluted and clumsily written tie-ins to unwieldy crossover events.

The only word Pizza Dog understands in this conversation is 'cat.'

(Photo source: Errant Critic)

You don't need to have read prior TPB collections of issues of writer Matt Fraction's excellent (and recently concluded) Marvel Now! title Hawkeye to get into Hawkeye: L.A. Woman, although the prior issues are all worth reading, especially Hawkeye #11, an inventively told detective story written from the point of view of a dog and cleverly illustrated by David Aja (with minimal and mostly garbled dialogue by Fraction). The 2014 TPB, the third collection of Fraction's Hawkeye comics, collects Hawkeye Annual #1 (the only issue in the collection illustrated by Javier Pulido, whose minimalist artwork I enjoyed during the Vertigo title Human Target) and issues 14, 16, 18 and 20. All you need to know about Fraction's incarnation of Hawkeye prior to L.A. Woman is that there are two non-superpowered archers who share the mantle of Hawkeye: one of them is recently divorced Avengers member Clint Barton (who, in the Avengers movies, is happily married to a civilian played by Linda Cardellini and raising kids with her out in the Midwest), and the other is the much younger Kate Bishop, a Young Avengers member who may be much better at this hero thing than her mentor Clint. The series alternates between Clint and Kate as the protagonist and follows what both of them are up to when they're not Avengers, and those adventures range from espionage-related peril to slightly more mundane matters like Clint trying to get his apartment building's broken satellite dish to work during a holiday season that's disrupted by tracksuited Russian thugs whose every other word is "bro."

The Russians' addiction to "bro" and the reduction of dialogue in issue 11 so that it's down to only a few words the one-eyed, pizza-loving dog known as Pizza Dog understands (like "collar" and "ex-wife") are hallmarks of the offbeat sense of humor of Fraction, who envisioned Clint as "the Marvel Universe's Jim Rockford" in his update of Hawkeye (the decision to alternate Clint's stories with Kate's is reminiscent of the two-or-more-stars-sharing-the-same-title-role format of another James Garner show, Maverick). Like The Rockford Files, Hawkeye is distinguished by both tongue-in-cheek humor and a bemused hero who'd rather be enjoying a rooftop barbecue with his neighbors (or a show on his DVR he's been itching to catch up on) than stopping trouble, but he always winds up helping out the downtrodden anyway. The Fraction series' parallels to The Rockford Files are particularly visible during the L.A. arc, in which Kate tires of Clint's uncaring attitude and self-destructive streak, packs up everything that belongs to her, like that purple Emma Peeler catsuit made famous by the non-Marvel Avengers (as well as one thing that doesn't belong to her, Pizza Dog), and escapes from New York to L.A., where she starts a private investigation business from her laptop and housesits for the summer a beachside trailer that looks exactly like the Malibu trailer Rockford called home on the show.

Jim doesn't look too thrilled about some TV show from the future that his 1976 TV set is somehow able to broadcast. The show is called Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

That's not all that's borrowed from The Rockford Files. Fraction takes two of Rockfish's occasional sidekicks--Gandolph "Gandy" Fitch, an ex-con who was played on the show by Isaac Hayes, and Marcus "Gabby" Hayes, a private eye who was played by a toupeed Louis Gossett Jr. (and was also a precursor to Tom Selleck's Lance White, a sharp-dressed rival of Rockford's)--and turns them into a newly married gay couple who lives near Kate and tags along with her on her cases. Gandy is renamed Finch, while Marcus gets to keep his name but loses the rug. Finch and Marcus help out Kate as she makes mistakes as a detective along the way but eventually blossoms into both this weird cross between Katniss and Rockfish and a self-sufficient person with a life away from the two father figures who have alienated her (Clint and her actual father, an oily businessman named Derek). Kate's youth and inexperience as a gumshoe might remind Rockford Files fans of another occasional sidekick of Jim's: Richie Brockelman, played by Dennis Dugan, who went on to direct all those terrible Adam Sandler movies that sound like fake Hollywood turkeys David Chase would have made up in one of his Rockford Files scripts that poked fun at SoCal living or how much SoCal pizza sucks ("This ain't a pizza. It's a grilled cheese sandwich").

L.A. Woman also reminds me of the high-quality writing of both Veronica Mars and Terriers, two SoCal P.I. shows that are worthier successors to The Rockford Files than any past or even future attempts to revive Rockford without Garner, whether it's David Shore's unseen and rumored-to-have-been-terrible Rockford reboot pilot with Dermot Mulroney, which failed to get picked up by NBC a few years ago, or the Rockford movie project Vince Vaughn wants to star in and produce. The late Garner's classic show was a once-in-a-lifetime, lightning-in-a-bottle thing that was so infused with Garner's distinctive personality and the late Stephen J. Cannell's equally distinctive creative voice, which is why I'm always skeptical of Universal's attempts to recapture that lightning. When not even the creator of House can get it to work, that's how difficult it is to revive Rockford.

If Clint or Kate traveled back in time and landed in a Roger Moore 007 movie, introducing a Flash drive to Q Branch would be like introducing fire to mankind.

Initially, I was mildly skeptical of the idea of Vaughn playing one of my favorite TV characters. But now I'm way more skeptical. I just can't buy Vaughn anymore as the everyman that Garner was (it would be like getting The Hard Way/The Specialist-era James Woods to play Rockford). Also, ever since Vaughn has become more upfront about his political views, I've been concerned about a Republican who worships guns and has equally strange and bothersome views about race playing a far-from-conservative hero who didn't care for guns (but wasn't afraid to use one) and whose attitudes towards race mirrored those of Garner's in real life, because he's likely going to alter the reluctant-about-guns aspect of the character so that it would be more aligned with his politics. If he does that, then the character's not Rockford anymore. He might as well be Mike Hammer. Now if Vaughn were playing Mike Hammer, that would be a more interesting and perhaps more worthwhile movie.

So now that True Detective's second season has emerged as an unwatchable disaster and is far from the career boost Vaughn must have expected, this Rockford movie project--which, when we last heard about it, was being given a rewrite by 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi screenwriter Chuck Hogan--is threatening to become more of a reality. If this fucking reboot ever gets made, I wouldn't be surprised if L.A. Woman turns out to be--just like Veronica Mars and Terriers before it--the better Rockford update. Kate may be female and extraordinary with a bow and arrow, but she's already more convincing in the role of an everyman detective than Vaughn will ever be, due to the relatability and humanity both Fraction and a terrific guest artist, Annie Wu, a Venture Bros. storyboarder and the current artist on DC's reimagining of Black Canary as a goth-y rock musician, bring to the character of Kate.

She's all lost in the supermarket. She can no longer shop happily.

L.A. Woman is such a loving ode to the '70s SoCal P.I. genre that even Elliott Gould's Philip Marlowe from another great '70s SoCal P.I. genre piece, the Robert Altman version of The Long Goodbye, shows up in the form of a new mentor for Kate, an obscure '70s Marvel reporter character named Harold H. Harold. Like Gould in that classic movie, Harold, reimagined by Fraction and Wu as a rumpled P.I. who resembles Gould, is seen shopping for cat food in the supermarket. L.A. Woman is essentially a regular P.I. story about both the alluring and corrupt sides of L.A. that happens to have a masked supervillain as one of the bad guys: Kate's nemesis Whitney Frost, a criminal mastermind who goes by the name of Madame Masque.

Frost's recently announced first appearance in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as an adversary in the upcoming second season of Agent Carter makes L.A. Woman worth picking up for Agent Carter fans who have never read Fraction's Hawkeye and may want to familiarize themselves with Madame Masque, who will be reimagined as a '40s Hollywood actress on the Marvel Studios show. Just like how Agent Carter is a spy show that pits its non-superpowered protagonists against larger-than-life villains straight out of a superhero show and is extremely accessible for people who don't like the superhero genre, Hawkeye, especially during Kate's L.A. arc, is a crime comic where the only superhero comic-ish things about it are the presence of Madame Masque (at one point in the arc, Kate wonders, "What if Madame Masque is the reason why everything in L.A. sucks?") and the occasional cameos by Spider-Man and Wolverine.

With Hawkeye, Fraction wanted to reinvent the superhero comic--and largely succeeded by not approaching it as one. Hawkeye arose from Fraction's frustrations with the inaccessible storylines of most present-day superhero comics. "I think we as an industry fell into this pattern of not caring about new readers anymore," said the Casanova and Sex Criminals creator to the L.A. Times in 2013. "There's a way that you can do it that isn't the clumsy, awkward way that it used to be done where characters refer to themselves in the third person, thinking back on who they are and how they came to be. You don't have to write every comic as if it's the first comic someone's ever read, but you do have to write as though you would like new people to read your comic--which is kind of what Hawkeye is all about."

Glad that Matt Fraction didn't turn to the over-fucking-used 'I Love L.A.' for the title of this Hawkeye arc. And it was a good Doors song instead of an incesty one.

(Photo source: Annie Wu)

The series also arose from Fraction's changing views on heroism and his boredom with dourness in superhero comics, which made him long for what he's described as "the Stephen J. Cannell-ness of it all." Fraction was interested in presenting a counterpoint to Batman. "The older you get, the more you live in the world, it's impossible not to look at Batman through class and race," said Fraction to Paste last year. "Batman is a rich white billionaire who beats up poor brown people and the mentally ill. That's weird, right? Kinda weird. A billionaire, punching poor people. But the idea of a guy who came from nothing and stayed just a couple steps away from it, but can't not help you move a couch, that's interesting."

L.A. Woman is a great example of the down-to-earth hero who "can't not help you move a couch," embodied by Kate in this particular arc. She's also a hero whose adventures benefit from a killer soundtrack that's not of the typical John Williams kind. In the letters section of Hawkeye, series artist David Aja would provide a soundtrack for readers to listen to while reading Hawkeye. For example, two of the musical selections Aja listed for Hawkeye's Christmas issue were cues from Sergei Prokofiev's rousing score to the 1938 Sergei Eisenstein epic Alexander Nevsky. For the arc where Clint's ex-wife Mockingbird, Spider-Woman, Black Widow and Kate have to pull Clint out of trouble when he gets himself entangled in the latest predicament of his current girlfriend, a hot, Bridget Regan-ish thief named Cherry, Aja curated a mix of Frank Zappa, surf-rock and fusion tunes like Lalo Schifrin's 1976 disco instrumental "Black Widow" (intended to accompany Black Widow's Grand Central Terminal pursuit of Cherry), Schifrin and Dizzy Gillespie's 1977 collabo "Unicorn" (intended for Kate's badass fight with a pair of Russian thugs) and Herbie Hancock's 1976 jam "Spider" (chosen for the pages where Clint gets slapped around by a plainclothes Jessica Drew, a.k.a. Spider-Woman). As for the classic Pizza Dog issue, Aja's soundtrack consists mainly of jazz to enhance the detective story vibe for Pizza Dog's hunt for a murderer.

Disappointingly, the TPB editions of Hawkeye omit the playlist info. I have no idea what sort of tunes were intended as the soundtrack for the L.A. arc, but I discovered that re-reading the L.A. Woman TPB with tons of La Luz tracks in my headphones works like gangbusters. Or maybe it should be La Luz tracks together with one of Best Coast's love letters to California needle-dropped for the moment when Kate adjusts to SoCal life. There's a propulsiveness to the all-female Seattle band's surf-rock sound that makes their tunes the perfect soundtrack for Kate's arrow-slinging adventures in L.A. and the vibrant visuals of both Wu, who cites Edgar Wright and Nicolas Winding Refn as among her storytelling influences, and colorist Matt Hollingsworth, who brings a consistency to the palette of the arc, despite the many differences in penciling styles between Wu and the more minimalist Javier Pulido.

One of the few complaints from readers about Fraction's Hawkeye was that the wait between issues would frequently take too long for them. The advantage of reading comics in TPB form, which is how I mainly read comics these days, is that TPB readers like myself don't have to worry about waiting. I don't know what it was like for Hawkeye readers to sit and wait for months for the L.A. Woman issues to come out when they were first released. But that would have definitely messed around with the momentum of the arc and prevented me from enjoying the arc in the manner I got to first enjoy it and the manner I recommend to anyone: as light summertime reading, like so many other well-crafted crime novels I've read in the past, whether they're graphic novels or prose novels. The craftiness of L.A. Woman and other equally satisfying crime novels just like it outdoes wading in snot and chlorine any day of the week.

Jack Sheldon's rendition of "The Long Goodbye" from the Altman film of the same name, a film L.A. Woman pays tribute to, is in rotation during "AFOS Prime" on AFOS.

Collateral refers to both Jamie Foxx's character and all the casualties caused by Tom Cruise, including that poor sandwich Jamie Foxx brought with him to work.

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.

You know you're watching a Michael Mann movie when the drug trade isn't referred to as the drug trade but as "the exotic substances business." In the 2004 thriller Collateral, Mann is, as usual, simultaneously in love with words and so critical of other directors' overuse of them that he shows how satisfying and gripping cinema can be when it's not so over-reliant on words. Unnecessary exposition is a disease that's so awful to experience while watching films or TV that it needs its own telethon. Like how the Jerry Lewis Telethon used to show every year that same moldy clip of Buddy Hackett weeping over the suffering Jerry's Kids experience due to muscular dystrophy, I'd like to see Bobby Moynihan or Broad City star John Gemberling plead weepingly to viewers to give a few dollars to help out the Nolan brothers and cure Jonathan of his tendency outside of Person of Interest to make characters over-explain themselves.

Collateral is fascinating for the way Mann came up with extremely detailed backstories--whether it's for sociopathic contract killer Vincent (Tom Cruise), Max Durocher (Jamie Foxx), the mild-mannered L.A. cabbie who becomes Vincent's chauffeur, hostage and reluctant accomplice, or the powerful "off-shore narco-trafficking cartel" that employs Vincent and is run by capos like Felix Reyes-Torrena (Javier Bardem)--and then threw almost all of that information out of the movie, perhaps as a challenge to himself to keep his movie from drowning in unnatural-sounding, on-the-nose dialogue. Whenever he'd discuss that approach of making the storytelling as efficient as possible in Collateral, Mann would describe it as chopping off the first and second acts of a movie so that it's only the third act. But those elaborate backstories are all there in the eyes and body language of Cruise and Foxx, and sometimes you can miss those nuances Cruise and Foxx bring to their performances, like when Vincent appears to be nauseated about killing a federal prosecution witness (Barry Shabaka Henley) whose love of the music of jazz legends like Miles Davis (he's seen performing Davis'"Spanish Key") was similar to Vincent's or when Vincent briefly panics in the middle of a scuffle during a Koreatown nightclub shootout. Mann pointed out in his Collateral audio commentary that during the scuffle, Vincent is briefly reverting to his 11-year-old self and re-experiencing the fear he felt when he was being bullied, a childhood fear Vincent never once mentions in the film, and Collateral is all the more better for not having Cruise unconvincingly deliver pages and pages of dialogue about a childhood trauma that keeps him sharp (*SNAP!*), on the edge (*SNAP!*), where he's gotta be.

The three months of weapons and combat training Cruise agreed to undertake for his Collateral role is a great example of why Cruise is batshit, but that craziness is also what makes him fascinating to watch as a man of action in this film, Mission: Impossible--Ghost Protocol and now Mission: Impossible--Rogue Nation. He can be obnoxious as either a romantic lead (if there were a drinking game for whenever he touches the face of his leading lady, we'd all be dead from alcohol poisoning), a talk show guest with a psychotic-sounding, unsettling laugh or a Scientology mouthpiece, but in an actioner like Collateral, he's a remarkable actor and not at all obnoxious. Cruise's physicality and his ease in a business suit with performing marksman stances that may look unconventional on film but are commonplace to expert marksmen--especially during the K-town club sequence--would have made him perfect as the similarly dressed Christopher Chance in a more faithful live-action version of the Peter Milligan/Cliff Chiang/Javier Pulido incarnation of Human Target (which the short-lived and much more family-friendly Fox show of the same name was loosely based on).

If Felix wanted to kill all the grand-jury witnesses without attracting too much attention, he could have just sent each of them a delivery of undercooked tacos.

(Photo source: DVD Beaver)

Cruise's weapons training really paid off, and he's convincing as a military-trained assassin in Collateral, but then Bardem shows up for his cameo and radiates so much power and quiet menace without ever getting out of his seat that part of me wishes Bardem played Vincent instead of Cruise. Bardem is a huge part of why the scene where Max attempts to trick Felix into thinking he's Vincent in order to recover Vincent's lost intel is my favorite scene in Collateral. Cruise isn't even in this Mexican nightclub scene at all. Once Vincent sets foot in Max's cab, Collateral is non-stop tension, but the tension is at its thickest in the scene between Felix and Max because Max is out of his cab and therefore, out of his element, and impersonating Vincent to prevent him from killing his mother Ida (Irma P. Hall)--a woman Max can barely even tolerate--is somehow an even bigger test for Max than all the other tests Vincent previously put him through. Now Max has to do some acting with a gun to his head, which basically describes every single audition in Hollywood.

Bardem and Foxx play the tension so beautifully (the scene also allows Foxx to tap into some of his skills as a comedic performer, but because this is a Mann thriller and not In Living Color or Horrible Bosses, Foxx doesn't play the humorous side of the scene too broadly). You don't know if or when Felix is going to explode, and you don't know if Max is going to get out of Felix's club alive either. Bardem's smooth dance back and forth between benevolence ("Do you know who they like even better than Santa Claus? His helper. Pedro el Negro. Black Peter...") and pent-up anger ("How do you think jolly old Santa Claus would feel if one day Pedro came into his office and said, 'I lost the list'? How fucking furious do you think he will get?") is a bit more interesting than Cruise's all-intense-all-the-time approach. Oh well, at least Bardem got a chance to basically play Vincent three years later in No Country for Old Men. I think he even won an Oscar for it.

This is as close as Tom Cruise will ever get to making a classroom genre movie.

(Photo source: DVD Beaver)

Collateral is the closest the ultra-somber Mann has ever gotten--and will probably ever get--in his film directing career to making a comedy. There are several funny moments in Collateral, whether it's Vincent coaching Meek Max on how to tell his pushy dispatcher to fuck off; the Richard T. Jones cop character's unconvinced reaction to Max's lie about hitting a deer on Slauson Avenue ("A South Central deer?"); the hunter (Mark Ruffalo's Detective Fanning) and the prey (Vincent) not knowing they're in the same elevator; or Max-as-Vincent being unable to resist still being Max the business-minded cabbie when he offers Felix's "Hermès/Façonnable ass" a discount (it's also a clever way for Max to stick it to Vincent and deprive him of some cash). But Mann wisely chooses to play those moments as deadpan and as truthfully and honestly as possible. Even some of Al Pacino's shoutiest or chattiest scenes during Heat aren't quite as humorous as those moments during Collateral. In fact, Mann studied Billy Wilder comedies to nail the right tone and delivery for Vincent's sarcasm.

Jason Statham's cameo in Collateral's first scene as a delivery man who's most likely his Frank Martin character from The Transporter is the first sign that Mann and his actors aren't out to brood about corporate malfeasance, racism or society's encroachment on individualism for two hours and are out to simply entertain and bring summertime moviegoers to the edges of their seats (DreamWorks released Collateral in August). Collateral is to Mann's big-screen filmography what Inside Man is to Spike Lee's: it's his most escapist and most popcorn piece of work. I love how the most comedic scene in Collateral is Max's reluctant introduction of a bizarrely polite and formal Vincent to Ida in her hospital room and how Foxx is the least comedic performer in that scene. Both the hospital room scene and the Bardem/Foxx exchange catapult Collateral into being my favorite of Foxx's serious movies. In another bit of unmentioned backstory Mann revealed in his commentrak, Ida is a Livia Soprano-style cold fish who's alienated all her sons so much that all of them except Max have moved out of L.A. just to get away from her. Ida, who knows nothing about Vincent's killings, appears to like Vincent more than any of her sons. She and the similarly cold-blooded Vincent, whose mother died when he was young (that's why he bristles at Max's reluctance to visit Ida, whom Max unhappily visits every night), were made for each other as mom and son. It's Mann channeling Hitchcock at his most darkly comic.

One of the film's other twisted jokes is that Max's own prudishness, partly instilled by Ida, has stifled and crippled Max so badly (he keeps telling customers about his dream of starting his own limo business but can't admit that he's too scared to act on it) that a sociopath--and not a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, an unorthodox classroom teacher or some little orphan--ends up being the one to snap Max out of it and teach him to grab life by the balls by taking more risks and improvising. Some black Collateral fans interestingly view Mann's movie as an allegory of black liberation and the struggles against white privilege (how fitting that this allegory takes place in racially mixed L.A., a city the privileged and wealthy Vincent despises for being too sprawling and disconnected), with the working-class Max's conflict with Vincent functioning as the modern-day equivalent of a slave learning to outwit the overseer and Vincent's demise signaling the end of white privilege. But I don't think Mann and screenwriter Stuart Beattie are that savvy enough to have considered that kind of interpretation for Collateral (Beattie based his script on a cab ride he took, and the ride made him wonder, "What would happen if this cabbie picked up a homicidal maniac and ended up trusting this maniac?"). I see Collateral as more like Mann and Beattie's way of playing around with a couple of formulas: the aforementioned "stuffy character who's taught by another character to loosen up" movie (I bet Collateral was pitched at an early '00s DreamWorks pitch meeting as "The Last Detail if Jack Nicholson killed people") and the tiresome "Magical Negro" drama (like DreamWorks' earlier release The Legend of Bagger Vance, which starred Mann's Ali lead Will Smith). While considering Foxx for the role that Adam Sandler once expressed interest in playing, I could see Mann thinking, in his usual wordy way of speaking, "Maybe it would be more stimulating to the amygdala if we reverse the 'Magic Negro' narrative and make the African American male the one who's beaten down by life and is too ossified to better appreciate it, and a Caucasian hitman ends up being his preceptor."

Collateral really soars during its character study half, due to the chemistry between the African American male formerly known as Wanda and his preceptor. It's a good thing the digital video cinematography by Paul Cameron, who left the project a few weeks into filming due to creative differences with Mann, and his replacement Dion Beebe is intriguing and striking from start to finish. There are so many nifty visual things going on with the high-def cameras' ability to capture little subtleties in the colors of the L.A. night sky and the shimmering city lights (like Darren Franich said in his lengthy 2014 EW.com essay about Collateral, "You're constantly aware that those lights represent real people--and that those real people don't notice the horrors being perpetrated by Vincent") that those things are able to distract you from how conventional the third act is compared to the rest of Collateral--a movie Mann thought of as a two-hour third act!--when you think about it afterward.

Check it out. It's a more fascinating parallel universe where Fish Mooney is much prettier and she chose to be a federal attorney instead of a crime boss.

(Photo source: EW)

The movie ditches the character study stuff and goes into full-on "don't open that door, girl!" thriller mode to place Annie (Jada Pinkett Smith), Max's previous customer and the federal prosecutor who wants to shut down Felix's cartel, in danger and in Vincent's crosshairs. The music becomes conventional too: all those bluesy instrumentals Mann originally had in mind for Thief (before he opted for Tangerine Dream) and all those pulsating source cues by the likes of Groove Armada and Paul Oakenfold give way to James Newton Howard in symphonic and percussion-heavy thriller mode a la The Fugitive. Vincent completely shuts off the internal conflict over killing people he's been starting to experience--a little too abruptly for some film critics' tastes--and becomes the Terminator. Sure, film critics, Collateral is a more arresting thriller when Vincent's in conflicted mode, but on second thought, what else is he going to do? Not finish the job? Like Vincent Hanna and Neil McCauley when they briefly bond during Heat over their existential worries about a life without their jobs, killing is all Vincent knows how to do, and if he's going to die doing the thing he does best, that's fine by him. He's a typical professional in a Mann movie.

Two big legacies emerged from Collateral. Cruise proved he can really pull off playing a villain whose only purpose for living is killing, but only when a director like Mann challenges Cruise to step out of his comfort zone and gets him to do some acting instead of "ACTING!"--which is what his previous turn as a villain was like in Interview with the Vampire. The other big legacy is the movie's innovations in digital video cinematography in order to capture nighttime footage--or things like the SoCal palm trees behind Vincent and Max--that couldn't have been achieved with regular film cameras.

"Here, while the [Collateral] digital photography seems fresh and oftentimes comes across as electrically alive, it still looks pretty crummy,"wrote either Rodrigo Perez or Jessica Kiang or that Playlistguy who got arrested for pimping an underage girl (like Matt Zoller Seitz implied, The Playlist's decision to not conclude each capsule review in its Mann movie retrospective with a byline causes its otherwise solid retrospective to be kind of a muddled drag). Eh, it was 2004. Get off the movie's 2004 ass. That's such a reductive way of talking about Collateral's impact on cinematography. Before Collateral, Mann experimented with digital video in Ali and on Robbery Homicide Division, the short-lived CBS procedural he produced, but Collateral is where he, with the help of Cameron and Beebe, finally figured out how to keep digital video from looking as crummy as it often did on Robbery Homicide Division (the only post-Collateral Mann movie I've seen is Public Enemies, and I don't think Dante Spinotti's HD cinematography in that 2009 movie looks as impressive as Collateral's still does). A bunch of mainstream films (some shitty, mostly good) followed in Collateral's footsteps and chose to shoot completely in digital, and like Beebe said to American Cinematographer 10 years after Collateral's release, thanks to his movie, filmmakers at night can go out into a street and shoot under streetlights instead of having to light entire city blocks (according to Mann, that standard way of lighting movie sets at night would have ruined the realistic lighting he wanted for Collateral's street scenes).

If this were John Woo holding the camera, he'd be trying to imagine how many doves he can squeeze into this shot.

Michael Mann

Also, whatever crumminess there is in some of Collateral's HD cinematography actually adds an element of "Hmm, which of the 15% of Collateral that Mann shot on film am I watching now?" to the movie in repeat viewings (while Franich is fascinated in repeat viewings by how "Mann shoots Collateral on video and doesn't try to hide it"). If you watch enough early '00s indie movies that were shot in HD, you start to be able to distinguish digital grain from film grain, as well as notice how early '00s digital video has weird smear effects whenever someone's in motion, so a second or third viewing of Collateral turns into a diverting game of "Which scene was not shot in HD?" (Answers: Debi Mazar's scene; the late afternoon scene of Max speaking in Spanish to the gas station clerk; the shots of Max cleaning his cab and he and the other cabbies preparing to drive out of their garage; the jazz club scene; Bardem's scene; and all the shots of Vincent and Max inside the K-town club except for when Vincent kills his assigned Korean target.)

The visuals Mann and Beebe were able to achieve with HD cinematography also really emphasize how much Mann is a cinematic Edward Hopper, fixated on lives in perpetual limbo, much like Hopper was in his paintings. Franich concludes his essay with an astute interpretation of Collateral as a story about L.A. as a purgatory for Max, who's been driving in circles for the past 12 years. But Franich likes to pretend that after Vincent's death inside a sort of limbo--a subway train that looks like it won't ever stop running--and the last shot of a newly confident Max and an exhausted Annie heading out together into both the morning and an uncertain but hopeful future, Max is doomed to relive the same hellish evening with Vincent for the rest of his life a la Groundhog Day. Nah, that shit's too depressing. Max just learned to break out of the limbo he imposed upon himself, and the reward he gets is a time loop? Sure, it's in keeping with how Mann stories frequently end tragically, ever since Thief and all those Miami Vice episodes with downbeat conclusions and that gut-punch of an "Executive Producer Michael Mann" credit defiantly saying each week, "You expecting a freeze-framed high-five between Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas, motherfucker?" But let Max win this one. The ~~motherfucker~~ motherhater earned it.

The role of Charles Grodin is now played by a sentient fart cloud.

Occasionally on Friday, I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. The "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week is no longer a weekly feature, but sometimes, I'll catch a really good piece of animated TV one week or a few weeks after its original airdate, and I'll feel like devoting some paragraphs to it despite my lateness to the party. Hence the "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of Last 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.

In a Rolling Stoneprofile about the creative challenges Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon have faced while trying to equal the brilliant first season of their irreverent and renewed-this-week-for-a-third-season Adult Swim hit Rick and Morty, Harmon said, "Most second albums suck." Uh, Elvis Costello's This Year's Model, Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, the Beastie Boys'Paul's Boutique, De La Soul Is Dead, A Tribe Called Quest's The Low End Theory, OutKast's ATLiens, D'Angelo's Voodoo and Kendrick Lamar's good kid, m.A.A.d. city would like a word with you, Harmon.

But yeah, otherwise, I see Harmon's point as he and Roiland admitted "A Rickle in Time"--Rick and Morty's complicatedly written second-season premiere about the side effects Rick and his grandkids Morty and Summer experience due to Rick's time-freezing device from "Ricksy Business"--is not as satisfying as they wish it could be. Harmon said, "It went off the deep end conceptually and got really over-complicated." I actually like "A Rickle in Time" a little more than Roiland and Harmon do, but the new season's second episode, "Mortynight Run," is where the season really starts cooking.

"Mortynight Run" taps into the thing that surprised me the most about Rick and Morty's first season and made the show stand out from other Adult Swim fare, outside of The Venture Bros.: its downbeat side (and more of that downbeat side surfaces in this week's Rick and Morty episode, "Auto Erotic Assimilation"). I hate to refer to a line from a movie I despise, but Gandalf's line to Bilbo about returning home a different person in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey really applies to Morty. His adventures with his scientist grandpa have made him a better person, and those adventures have allowed the learning disability-afflicted kid to prove to Rick that he's not as dumb as Rick thinks he is. But those adventures have also made Morty better understand his grandpa's misanthropic and nihilistic worldview, and like in "Meeseeks and Destroy" and "Rick Potion #9," we see how much Morty's gradual understanding of why Rick has that worldview wrecks Morty inside in "Mortynight Run." In only less than a half-hour, the episode ends up doing a better job than those interminable Hobbit movies of showing how these exhausting adventures affect the traveler who won't be the same.

Sure, "Mortynight Run" is hilarious. Special guest star Jemaine Clement gets to both sing and make fun of his own association with musical numbers. "Goodbye Moonmen," written by Harmon and credited "Mortynight Run" writer David Phillips and composed by series composer Ryan Elder, is the cleverest David Bowie parody since, well, Clement's Bowie tribute on Flight of the Conchords. Special guest star Andy Daly takes a stock hitman character and imbues him with amusingly incongruous chipperness in the mold of his Forrest MacNeil character from Comedy Central's Review. The Jerryboree--a day care center where the Ricks from various universes drop off the Jerrys of their universes when they don't have time to put up with the Jerrys' shit--is great "let's beat up on Jerry again" material, but it's also an intriguing subplot about Jerry's realization that his ordinariness isn't as awful as others think. I especially love how a maudlin VR game called Roy--the player determines the decisions of an ordinary guy in scenarios that are like a cross between a David Anspaugh sports movie and the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Inner Light"--is the biggest arcade sensation in outer space instead of a first-person shooter ("You beat cancer and then you went back to work at the carpet store? Boo!").

But what makes "Mortynight Run" especially stand out is the way it treats the moment when Morty--after defying Rick and protecting the life of Clement's character, a benevolent and frequently singing gaseous being, from assassins and cops because he believes all life forms are precious no matter what their flaws are--discovers the being (Rick calls him "Fart") intends to wipe out all life, so Morty makes a difficult decision that was foreshadowed by the scene of him playing Roy at the Dave & Busters-ish Blips and Chitz. "Mortynight Run" doesn't play Morty's moment of anguish for laughs.

On Community, Harmon couldn't have characters actually kill people--hence all those bloodless paintball episodes--but on the much more fantastical and bleak Rick and Morty, Harmon can. Through Morty's dilemma regarding Fart, Phillips, Harmon and Roiland treat the consequences of causing many lives to end because of foolishly sticking to a belief that it's all for the best--and the first time Morty kills somebody in front of him--with the proper weight they deserve. "Mortynight Run" is a good example of what Voxdescribes as Rick and Morty's "exploration of morality that manages to avoid simplistic fables with pat lessons," as well as the implication during that exploration that "Rick's cynicism is well-founded--and that following Morty's well-intentioned instincts can lead to calamity."

While Bob's Burgers channeled the ambience of Midnight Run in its tribute to that 1988 film (for example, that episode's score music paid tribute to Danny Elfman's score from the film), "Mortynight Run" chooses to pay tribute to the non-comedic side of Midnight Run--one of Harmon's favorite films--without ever quoting a single line from it (the only blatant references to Midnight Run are the scene where all the Jerrys are enjoying a copy of Midnight Run with director's commentary, an extra that, sadly, by the way, doesn't exist in real life, and the moments of Rick, Morty and Fart evading the cops like De Niro and Grodin). Midnight Run is one of my favorite films too. On some days, it skyrockets to being my absolute favorite. GoodFellas may be a more challenging and brutal crime comedy, and Do the Right Thing may be more meaningful because it has something important and complex to say about community and injustice, but at the end of the day, I just want to be entertained by a well-made escapist work that doesn't make me say, "Well, that plot point was dumb"--or "Great, another Asian Stepin Fetchit with a cartoonish accent who helps make it fucking difficult for so many of us to get dates or actual jobs." And Midnight Run is exactly that.

Midnight Run also pulls off shifts in tone from comedic to dramatic more seamlessly than most big-screen comedies--and almost every small-screen comedy from the '80s--where the cast and crew attempt to do the same kind of tonal shifts. Harmon seems to have absorbed Midnight Run's lessons on how to skillfully juggle humor and seriousness during his work on both Community and Rick and Morty, and the De Niro/Grodin film's skillful juggling act receives a proper tribute in "Mortynight Run." The quality of episodes like "Mortynight Run" is why Rick and Morty is now receiving slightly similar tributes from the Internet as well. The Internet's way of paying tribute to Rick and Morty is to recut the dialogue of alcoholic Rick to the rhythm of unapologetic teetotaler Kendrick Lamar's "King Kunta." It makes no damn sense. But it's also brilliant, much like Rick and Morty itself.

Jon Stewart has visibly aged so much since the year 1999 that he now looks like he could be the granddad of Howard, the dorky announcer from his '90s MTV talk show days.

After I watch any movie, whether on Netflix or in the theater, I like to read the reviews it received or the think pieces it spawned, if it's a movie that has left or is leaving an impact on the zeitgeist. Since its release, Avengers: Age of Ultron has been the subject of many think pieces about either robot sci-fi; the ways innocent bystanders are portrayed in superhero movies; the fear that the Marvel Cinematic Universe will lead to the infantilization of cinema; the lack of female leads in MCU movies (which shows how badly the MCU--the film division, that is, not the TV division behind Agent Carter and A.K.A. Jessica Jones, both projects anchored by female leads and spearheaded by female showrunners--is lagging behind the progressiveness and diversity of current Marvel superheroine comic books like Ms. Marvel, the Marvel Now! revamp of X-Men, the gender-swapped Thor, Spider-Gwen, Silk and A-Force); feminism on social media; or the fact that people on social media really need to take a breath and siddown, relax, have a sandwich, drink a glass of milk, do some fuckin' thing, will ya?

Age of Ultron's connection to the last two items is due to female Marvel geeks' Twitter rants about their frustrations with the film and Age of Ultron director Joss Whedon's departure from Twitter after he encountered so much Twitter vitriol from a not-so-civil segment of those female geeks. I planned to watch this blockbuster that caused these lapsed Whedon fans to Hulk out on Twitter--and broke Whedon's spirit "a little bit" while he worked on it--about three or four weeks after its crowded opening weekend, which is when the crowds for these tentpole blockbusters usually dwindle completely, as does the possibility of having your morning or afternoon movie screening be ruined by an imbecile who brings his tablet to the theater and keeps switching on his tablet during the feature presentation (that, by the way, happened during Kingsman: The Secret Service). Trying not to click to any of the Age of Ultron think pieces during those three weeks before I saw the movie was quite a challenge. I was interested in what the writers of these pieces were talking about, but at the same time, these pieces gave away much of the movie, and I hadn't watched it yet. So it was a relief to finally be able to read them after watching Age of Ultron.

For Age of Ultron and other summer blockbusters, YOMYOMF likes to take several of their writers and have them give roundtable discussions of those blockbusters. I'm often interested in what YOMYOMF has to say in these discussions, even if it results in an inane moment like one of their writers giving director Bong Joon-ho's terrific Snowpiercer--a Chris Evans-led comic book adaptation that, as a movie, is superior to even any of the MCU comic book adaptations that either feature Evans or don't--only one out of four stars (actually, YOMYOMF uses bananas instead of stars for their movie rating system). So I went over to YOMYOMF's discussion of Age of Ultron, and the most interesting part of the discussion has to be the spelling of "take over the reins" as "take over the reigns." Yeah, that's not how you spell it.

It's a common mistake. "Reigns" and "reins" are both homonyms related to control and dominance, so they can be easily mixed up. I don't want to single out YOMYOMF because everyone does it. Even newspapers like the New York Observer misspell "reins" as "reigns" too, like when the Observer brought up South African stand-up comic Trevor Noah's controversial--and, of course, just like in the case of Age of Ultron, led-to-an-outcry-on-Twitter--promotion from Daily Show correspondent to Daily Show host.

It should be "Mr. Noah will officially take the reins on September 28," not "Mr. Noah will officially take the reigns on September 28." The reign of "reigns" over "reins" continues elsewhere.

No Room for Democracy: The Triumph of Ego Over Common Sense by Richard M. Rosenbaum and ‎Henry Kissinger

'Psst, Wiiiilbur, I am really the Devil! Tonight, bring me the body of that nosy neeeeigh-bor of yours, and you will rule beside me in the kingdom of hell!'

Like Ann Peebles said, I can't stand the "reigns" against my window. Here's how I differentiate "reigns" from "reins" and avoid misspelling one or the other: yes, both words are related to control and dominance, but "reign," when used as a noun, means the time period when someone--or a team like the Golden State Warriors--is in charge or is dominant. "Rein," as a noun, means either a restraint, as in Tobey Maguire pulling on Seabiscuit's reins to slow the horse down, or a metaphorical steering wheel ("Mr. Noah will officially take the reins").

In verb form, to "reign" means to rule as a king or to conquer like one ("Marvel may currently reign supreme at the box office"), and to "rein" means to restrain, but unlike "reign,""rein" must always be accompanied by "in" or "back" (two such sentences are two of the above sentences with circled typos, which should be spelled as "It reined in character development!" and "The Wild Wild Westreined itself in with Season 3"). Another difference between "reign" and "rein" when they're verbs is that "reign" is an intransitive verb, which means it doesn't take an object, while "rein" is more often a transitive verb, which means it needs an object ("character development,""itself"). Here's a fun way to remember how to differentiate "reign" from "rein": "reign" is the verb that prefers to be alone at the top, while "rein" is the verb that doesn't like being alone. It's the Al Green of verbs.

Now that they've stopped making Hawkeye so boring and have given him more juicy dialogue, this team needs a new boring character with no useful talents. Where's Rick Jones when you need him?

So on August 6, Jon Stewart will cause Daily Show fans' living rooms to get dusty when he vamooses his exhausted dad-bod out of Comedy Central and hands over the reins of his show to Noah, not the "reigns." Meanwhile, at the end of Age of Ultron, Danny Elfman temporarily takes over the musical reins from the film's other composer, Brian Tyler, and restates for the last time in the film his "New Avengers" theme, a straight-out-of-vintage-Elfman-circa-1990 update of Alan Silvestri's main theme from the first Avengers. Also at the end of Age of Ultron, Joss lets the Russo brothers take the reins of the Avengers movie franchise and is now probably giggling to himself the following: "They are gonna be so exhausted halfway through the making of Infinity War Part I."

No Rolling Stones tracks during this one!

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.

When many film directors reach their 60s or 70s and continue to direct, they tend to lose their spark. They're simply no longer the inventive or energetic filmmakers we used to know from their earlier work. Even the most beloved late-night hosts get this way too. In a rare 2012 interview, David Letterman, who retired from the late-night airwaves last night, admitted that one of the differences between the two groundbreaking and anarchic talk shows he hosted during his suit-and-sneakers whippersnapper days on NBC and the slightly less adventurousLate Show on CBS was simply that "I'm 65; I don't have the energy I had when I was 35."

As for directors as they age, they become either more hackneyed and sentimental or more out-of-touch and complacent--so their later films suffer as a result, and for fans of the original Star Wars trilogy, the worst example of this was the pointless and woodenly acted (except for in the case of Ewan McGregor) Star Wars prequels George Lucas directed after a 22-year hiatus from the director's chair. As the now-defunct Stylus magazine points out in a depressing 2007 overview of bold '70s filmmakers who had trouble sustaining their hot streak after their first few films, "Boldness and originality becomes [sic] harder to achieve as time moves on and business interests close in."

Another example of a distinctive director losing his spark is the late Billy Wilder. Although Wilder remained his usual sharp-witted self in interviews (man, I really ought to check out Cameron Crowe's Conversations with Wilder from the public library one of these days), his movies towards the end of his career aren't as fondly remembered as earlier Wilder masterpieces like Double Indemnity or Some Like It Hot. You don't exactly see cineastes jumping for joy over Buddy Buddy.

But there are a couple of recent exceptions to the theory that as filmmakers get older, they lose their edge. George Miller, who's now 70, was in his late 60s when he shot this summer's incredible Mad Max: Fury Road, and Martin Scorsese was 70 when he directed The Wolf of Wall Street, my favorite of the five films Scorsese has made with Leonardo DiCaprio so far.

'Must... insert... Rolling Stones track during husband-taunting scene,' thinks Scorsese to himself.

Scorsese's invaluable and longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker--who, together with Scorsese, remarkably whittled down four hours' worth of largely improvised material between DiCaprio and the rest of The Wolf of Wall Street's ensemble cast to 179 minutes--once said to Variety, "Marty's movies are so unusual. He doesn't repeat himself, so [the studios] don't know what to expect." Eh, actually, Scorsese's repeated himself--existing song-wise, that is. His umpteenth use of the Rolling Stones'"Gimme Shelter" in The Departed was a sign of a filmmaker who needed to take a break for a while from hitting repeat on Let It Bleed tracks on his iPod.

But otherwise, Schoonmaker's right. Scorsese's films have never had a problem of being interchangeable (he revisits motifs and themes like greed, media attention, addiction or religious guilt but is somehow able to do so without becoming repetitive and derivative), whereas many of his filmmaking peers have ended up making the same film three or four times--another example of when directors show their age. "Gangs of New York is so different from The Aviator, which was so different from The Departed or Age of Innocence or Kundun," said Schoonmaker to HitFix. And after Scorsese directed 2011's Hugo, he followed up his first family film--as well as one of his least controversial works, unless you're a stickler for accuracy in terms of how the Eiffel Tower gets depicted on film--with perhaps his most sexually explicit film to date, The Wolf of Wall Street.

Favorite movie newspaper or magazine headline: 'Boy Trapped In Refrigerator Eats Own Foot' from Airplane!

Adapted from the memoirs of former stockbroker and former cokehead Jordan Belfort by screenwriter Terence Winter (who created and showran Boardwalk Empire, which Scorsese co-produced), the 2013 Scorsese flick reunited the New York filmmaker with an old pal: controversy. Many haters of the film felt it glorified the scummy and misogynist behavior of Belfort the white-collar criminal and his cronies at the Wall Street firm Stratton Oakmont. Other haters--particularly audience members who are about as old as Scorsese or older than him--found the amount of debauchery on display in the film to be excessive. They wished The Wolf of Wall Street contained less debauchery, even after Scorsese already kept the film from getting stamped with a financially risky NC-17 by making a few additional edits, like turning to Rob Legato, the Hugo visual FX wizard whom I'll always remember for giving away on Reading Rainbow the FX magicians' secret of how he filmed the Star Trek: The Next Generation transporter beam FX (hint: glitter stirred in a glass of water), and his team to digitally insert an Eyes Wide Shut-style chair as a visual barricade for a gay orgy scene.

But the excessiveness makes perfect sense in The Wolf of Wall Street: it's a film about hedonistic Wall Street culture and all its emptiness (as well as its enticing qualities), and it would have been inane to depict that culture in a watered-down, Hallmark Channel-friendly way. In the GQ blog post "Olds Heckle The Wolf of Wall Street for Being Too Awesome," Scott Christian nicely criticized the olds and their disgust with Scorsese's focus this time on sex--instead of the usual GoodFellas-style violence he's most known for--when he said, "He's not some pervy old man, he's actually trying to show us how fractured and ugly these characters are... What is shocking is that people are so outraged by a bit of T&A but not by violence. Of course, that's nothing new."

The Wolf of Wall Street is neither a pervy old man's movie nor the shrill cinematic equivalent of an old man shouting at millennials to get off his lawn, which was basically what Aaron Sorkin's The Newsroom was. Scorsese said repeatedly in interviews that he made The Wolf of Wall Street as an expression of his own frustration with how materialism has become a religion in the last 35 years--no wonder Scorsese staged Belfort's office pep talks to his employees as if they're revival meetings--but Scorsese has done something clever with that frustration. The easy way to approach anger over economic inequality and the swindling of ordinary working folk is to turn it into a solemn movie about the Way America Ought to Be, But America's Too Broken and We'll Never Be Able to Fix It. The problem with that kind of movie is that it's been done to death, and it's boring as hell.

Fortunately, Scorsese doesn't do things the easy way. That's why we still love him, even after he stumbles and makes an intermittently interesting misfire like Gangs of New York or an unwatchable film like New York, New York (I still haven't watched that one). In The Wolf of Wall Street, he's as adventurous a filmmaker as he was when he made The King of Comedy or GoodFellas. Instead of the solemn post-Occupy movie about economic inequality we all expected, Scorsese did something more challenging and strange: he made a frat-house comedy out of it, with Kyle Chandler as the stuffy dean, except he's an FBI agent, and because Chandler's playing this Fed with the same subtle touches he brought to Coach Taylor on Friday Night Lights, there isn't a single ounce of mustache-twirling, shaking-a-fist-at-the-heavens-over-his-infuriating-adversary cartoonishness in his performance. My favorite sequence in The Wolf of Wall Street--right above even the quaalude-related slapstick with DiCaprio and Jonah Hill or Scorsese's trademark hyperkinetic moments like his dazzling use of Jimmy Castor's "Hey Leroy, Your Mama's Callin' You"--is Chandler's eight-minute conversation on a boat with DiCaprio, where Scorsese takes a breather from the hyperkinetic antics and beautifully builds tension as these two alpha males size each other up and gradually square off.

"But Belfort's a bad guy! He even views himself as a Bond villain! What's so funny about all the suffering the working class experienced due to his crimes? It's wrong! By laughing with the film, you're all joining in on endorsing Belfort's brand of evil!," said everyone who forgot that Scorsese thrives on both moral ambiguity and narratives--like The Wolf of Wall Street's--that don't punish repellent characters whom many in the audience want to see punished. This is the same director who ended Taxi Driver with Travis Bickle's bloodbath turning him into a media darling and then ended the eerily prescient King of Comedy with the repellent Rupert Pupkin becoming a media darling as well.

A lesser filmmaker would rain down judgment on Travis like the rain Travis envisions himself washing all the scum off the streets with, or he'd make Rupert and Belfort--a real-life figure, unlike Travis or Rupert, by the way, and he even has a cameo at the end of The Wolf of Wall Street--experience a personality change and become remorseful after their short prison time. But not Scorsese. He wants to sit back, let the audience judge Travis/Rupert/Jordan for themselves and see what happens. If many in the audience squirm over their behavior and the repercussions, that's great. If others view them as their hero or spirit animal--like how several Homer Simpsons out there cheered The Wolf of Wall Street on as if it's School of Hard Knockers, featuring Jonah Hill as Nerdlinger and a full-frontal Margot Robbie, to the dismay of those who completely sympathize with Belfort's victims--that's great too. It's weird but great. As for a man named John Hinckley...

Michael Kang, the Asian American indie filmmaker behind the great coming-of-age comedy The Motel and the not-as-great but equally intriguing crime thriller West 32nd, once argued that Scorsese is actually far too judgmental about Belfort and the Stratton crew in The Wolf of Wall Street, and he let his anger over their (and others') pursuit of materialism distance himself too much from them, so the result is all these characters Kang finds to be one-note. "One piece of the puzzle that is so important to GoodFellas' success was completely absent from Wolf of Wall Street. That element is a soul," wrote Kang. He added, "In Wolf of Wall Street, there is not a single scene that matches the nuance of emotional depth that GoodFellas has." It's an interesting argument, but I'd like to know what Kang thinks of The King of Comedy--which he briefly cited as an almost-as-great-as-GoodFellas Scorsese/De Niro flick in the blog post--because the soullessness he found to be flawed about The Wolf of Wall Street is all over The King of Comedy as well, and like in the 2013 film, that soullessness is there for a reason.

Oh, the heart attack Mad Max would have if he found out a black guy is now playing his favorite white TV hero.

Rupert is a soulless character who's all artifice. He's a crazed fan who, off-screen and long before the start of the movie, completely remade himself into the image of a typical guest comedian on The Jerry Langford Show. Rupert never shuts off that persona and is always on, even when he's alone in his basement, pretending to chill with Liza Minnelli and Jerry, and that 24/7 soullessness is precisely what's, to borrow the words of the GQ blog post about the olds, fractured and ugly about that character. He looks like Vicki from Small Wonder, Data from Star Trek or Cameron from Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles whenever they would imitate emotional human behavior, and their imitations would be totally off-putting and creepy. Rewatch The King of Comedy one of these days, and you'll find yourself thinking that someone should run a Turing test on Rupert.

Belfort is a soulless Scorsese character in the mold of Rupert. He remakes himself into the image of Matthew McConaughey's Mark Hanna and adopts Hanna's humming and chest-beating ritual (Belfort turns Hanna's ritual, known as "The Money Chant" in the music credits section at the end of The Wolf of Wall Street, into his Wall Street firm's battle cry), but unlike The King of Comedy, we get to see the moments when Belfort transforms into Hanna. DiCaprio excellently shows the wheels turning in this younger Belfort's head as he absorbs broker advice from Hanna, who's basically the snake in the garden who tempts Adam, and non-verbally decides that he will become this snake. You can see the soul disappearing from Belfort in that power lunch scene (a later scene with Spike Jonze as a Long Island broker--he's the one who inspires Belfort to scam working-class schmucks out of their money--completes his transformation). We've all been there--we've all sized up an older and more experienced figure who's giving us unusual advice and we're wondering if he or she is for real--and it's the most relatable moment in the movie, before the chaos, the loud alpha-male posturing, the debauchery, the lavishness, the bling, the quaalude trips and the soullessness all take over. That's one moment of emotional depth and nuance Kang thinks is missing from The Wolf of Wall Street.

Another bit of emotional depth and nuance is embodied by Joanna Lumley as Emma, the British aunt of Belfort's second wife Naomi. The brilliance of Lumley's way-too-brief performance as Aunt Emma--who finds herself flirting with her niece's new husband (DiCaprio reportedly got nervous over his kissing scene with Lumley and went through 27 takes to get it right) and agrees to help him launder his money--is the sublime way she plays Aunt Emma's mostly non-verbal sizing-up of Belfort. Lumley's eyes say a lot: "I knew a lot of Jordans in the '60s. I was Jordan." When Aunt Emma hints at her '60s party girl past and, with a knowing look, points out to Belfort his sweatiness from his cocaine use, it's oddly affecting (as is the pitch-perfect way Allen Toussaint's funky but reverential 1971 take on Vince Guaraldi's "Cast Your Fate to the Wind" accompanies the film's pensive final shot). Getting Lumley to play Aunt Emma is clever casting too. Lumley's most famous character is a female Belfort: Patsy on Absolutely Fabulous. I wouldn't be surprised if Aunt Emma in the '60s looked an awful lot like Patsy in the '60s.

In addition to these great scenes between DiCaprio and the likes of Hill, Chandler, McConaughey, Lumley and J.C. MacKenzie as a federal prosecutor who's unamused by Belfort's antics ("You, sir, are what's known as a Grenada"), there are a couple of scenes with lesser-known actors that stand out as well in The Wolf of Wall Street. One performer became an instant quasi-star in one scene, while another has the makings of becoming a terrific character actor Scorsese ought to hire again.

The expressions on the extras in response to Jonah Hill's prosthetic penis in this scene were unscripted. In the scene, he looks like the Masturbating Bear if he were played by Ted McGinley with a sweater tied around his neck.

He's definitely puddin' in Harley's hands now.

I never expected Australian performer Margot Robbie to be the one out of the three unknown female cast members on Pan Am to turn into a big-screen leading lady (alright, I'm guilty of watching that Mad Men ripoff, simply because all the female flight attendants on that show were hot). I expected Karine Vanasse to be the one. But then Scorsese gives Robbie the "From now on, it's gonna be nothing but short, short skirts around the house" scene to run the field with, and by the end of what she does with her character Naomi's sultry match of wits with her philandering husband, you're thinking, "Yeah, she's a star," much like how Melanie Griffith's delivery of "I have a head for business and a bod for sin" turned her from a temptress in thrillers ranging from Night Moves to Something Wild into a temporary A-list movie star. I wouldn't be surprised if that scene--not to mention her ability to bury her Aussie accent under a convincing Noo Yawk one--was what landed Robbie the role of Harley Quinn in director David Ayer's currently-in-the-works adaptation of Suicide Squad.

Meanwhile, Asian American stereotyping is so bad that when someone like Kenneth Choi plays, for a change, a dumb Asian American guy without a fobby accent, it's progress. On Suburgatory, it was such a relief to see Rex Lee portraying a high school guidance counselor who's as dumb as everyone else in Chatswin, instead of seeing Lee play the same old generic Asian egghead or overachiever. Choi, who's best known for playing one of the Howling Commandos in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and will be seen next season as Judge Ito on FX's American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson, has much less screen time in The Wolf of Wall Street than Lee did during Suburgatory's first two seasons, yet he manages to steal a couple of moments as gluttonous Stratton broker Chester Ming, and you can sense the delight Choi's having in getting to play a dem-dese-dose lowlife in a Scorsese flick. More Asian American characters like these, please.

All these performances wouldn't have been possible without a ringmaster who's still got it, who's still brimming with ideas and passionate about filmmaking and who still wants to provoke thought in the audience without spoon-feeding them, even after 69 (get your mind out of the gutter). Scorsese claimed he only has a couple more movies left in him after the enjoyably depraved circus that is The Wolf of Wall Street. The day Scorsese folds his tent--by the way, his currently-in-the-works follow-up to The Wolf of Wall Street is the Jesuits-in-Japan historical drama Silence, yet another Scorsese project that's the complete tonal opposite of the Scorsese film that preceded it--is going to be a tough one for film lovers everywhere.

Yes, Virginia, there is a better version of Supercop, superior to the one where Tom Jones got flung onto the soundtrack like a pair of panties at his face

The Game of Thrones "Hardhome" massacre and Mad Max prove that near-silence is golden, so why hasn't anyone stepped up to make the first great modern-day silent action movie?

Throwback Thursday: Bridesmaids

If you think GoodFellas and The Wolf of Wall Street are inspirational stories of triumph, you need professional fucking help--and a lobotomy from Thelma Schoonmaker

Throwback Thursday: Godzilla (2014)

Anatomy of a melody: Hrishikesh Hirway's Song Exploder podcast entertainingly breaks down the components of a TV score cue or pop song

The late James Horner was the master of suspenseful '90s hacking scene music during Sneakers and Clear and Present Danger

Throwback Thursday: Spy (2015)

Why I now refuse to see another movie in a theater (until that much-delayed Alamo Drafthouse finally opens in San Francisco, that is)

The Dissolve has sadly but elegantly irised out (so you win again, terribly written pop-culture news sites that are full of typos and annoying listicles)

Throwback Thursday: They Came Together

Shows I Miss (Already): Key & Peele

Throwback Thursday: Mission: Impossible--Ghost Protocol

"Is Christian Slater real?": Mr. Robot brings us a new summertime mystery as intriguing as "Is Picard going to be killed?" and "Is DiCaprio still in a dream?"

Throwback Thursday: Drive (2011)

Hawkeye: L.A. Woman makes any attempt at a Rockford Files remake, including Vince Vaughn's planned Rockford movie, pointless

Throwback Thursday: Collateral

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of Last Week: Rick and Morty, "Mortynight Run"

Trevor Noah is taking the reins of The Daily Show, not the "reigns"

Throwback Thursday: The Wolf of Wall Street