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

Before Mad Men, Christina Hendricks was best known for appearing on Firefly, the show where white people always curse in Chinese, but none of the writers ever stopped to think, 'Hmm, isn't it fucking weird that none of the cast is actually Chinese?'

A few days ago, I was looking for the YouTube link to that old viral video of a KTLA morning TV interviewer transforming into a total dweeb after Christina Hendricks, star of the recently-concluded-for-good, unlikely-to-do-reunion-movies-guest-starring-the-Harlem-Globetrotters AMC hit Mad Men, mentions how she received news of her first-ever Emmy acting nomination while she was preparing to take a bath. The image of her bathing is all the interviewer can talk about for the rest of the interview. Way to keep it professional, KTLA guy! "He sits there silently for a whole minute, and by the time he gets back into the conversation, he's a stuttering mess. Although to his credit, he still has his pants on," wrote Uproxx in 2010.

This wasn't Conan turning his awkwardness around hot women into the kind of comedy bit Inside Amy Schumer hilariously parodied in its recent sketch about the clichés that always take place during late-night talk show interviews with flirty female guests (I love how Schumer's sketch references that 2009 Conan-era Tonight Show interview where Gwyneth Paltrow's legs somehow got greasier and greasier after each commercial break). This was a journalist who, in front of an all-female news desk, was unable to prevent himself from regressing into a nervous 14-year-old school dance attendee in the middle of one of the least suitable places for doing that, a mostly non-comedic morning news show, with Hendricks throwing in a couple of amusing "Down, boy!"-type responses, like "That [bath story] was like two conversations ago, but thank you for remembering," which were both why the clip went viral. Why do the most awkward and NewsBeFunny YouTube channel-friendly things always happen on morning shows, whether it's The Today Show, The View or Fox& Friends?

Then I finally found the KTLA clip and copied and pasted into TextEdit both the URL and embed code, which is something I always need to do with YouTube videos I might want to include someday in posts such as this. I gave the TextEdit file the name of "Christina Hendricks Handles Brian McFayden's Drooling Like a Trooper."

But as I was typing out the file name, I became unsure about the spelling of "trooper." I kept changing it back and forth between "trooper" and "trouper."

I hear the expression "handling it like a trooper" all the time. But I've never stopped to think, "Where the hell does that expression come from?"

I opened the dictionary in my MacBook. A trooper is either "a state police officer" or "a private soldier in a cavalry, armored or airborne unit." I knew that. I didn't know a trooper can also be "a cavalry horse" or British jibber-jabber for "a ship used for transporting troops." So in the U.K., I guess that means the novel and movie title Starship Troopers sounds to them like Starship Starships. The title Starship Starships would be as absurd as whitewashing the Filipino hero of a sci-fi novel, which Hollywood would never do, right? Oh, wait...

Meanwhile, a trouper is "an actor or other entertainer, typically one with long experience" or "a reliable and uncomplaining person." I always thought it was "handling it like a trooper" because they're handling it like a brave soldier or a slick and smooth member of the '90s R&B group Troop.

I guess "a reliable and uncomplaining person" makes sense too. So which sides have professional writers taken in the war between "trouper" and "trooper"? While mentioning Sopranos star Nancy Marchand back in his Newark Star-Ledger, pre-HitFix days (the year 2000, to be exact), TV critic Alan Sepinwall said, "Marchand, who has cancer, proved herself to be a real trouper." Over at MTV News, where a Nicki Minaj backup dancer who received a snake bite qualifies as news, they said that the bitten dancer "handled it like a trooper." Meanwhile, what do etymologists outside of Dr. Webster, Dr. Merriam, Dr. Wagnalls and Dr. Uptown Funk have to say about all this?

The Grammarphobia Blog says "trouper," which also means "a member of a performing company (theatrical, singing or dancing)," also known as a troupe, has evolved in the 20th century so that the term can be used to refer to "a hard worker, a good sport, a reliable person, a mensch." Their stand on "Trouper or trooper?" is "trouper" over "trooper" because it's been spelled "trouper" since the 19th century, but due to Google searches showing "like a trooper" to be more commonly used than "like a trouper,""trooper" is alright with them too.

I also checked with a site called Daily Writing Tips. The site, which notes that "troop" and "troupe" both originated from the same French word ("troupeau," a variation of "troppus," the Latin word for "flock," according to my MacBook's dictionary), takes the following stand: "If the context has to do with courage, trooper is appropriate. If the context has to do with cooperation, dependability and the show business attitude of 'the show must go on,' then trouper is the word to use."

Joan from Mad Men was both a bit courageous (to be awake and sharp-witted that early in the day) and very unflappable in the face of live-on-L.A.-morning-TV drooling. So either spelling is correct--unless you're in the galaxy where a band of rebels has been fighting an oppressive intergalactic empire for decades and "handling it like a trooper" means you're handling it like a genocidal space Nazi in a shiny white helmet.

Much of The Dark Knight Rises was based on DC's Knightfall crossover event, or as I like to call it, 'the one where DC thought it was wise to give Batman a fucking ugly '90s Image Comics-style makeover.'

Every Throwback Thursday, I randomly pull out from my desk cabinet--with my eyes closed--a movie ticket I saved, and then I discuss the movie on the ticket. This time I've gotten Hardeep Aujla, an editor from a U.K.-based hip-hop blog I've contributed pieces to, Word Is Bond, to come back after his guest TBT post about The Signal and discuss the movie on the ticket I drew.

I've noticed that the strongest Christopher Nolan movies contain the least amount of scenes of male actors crying, while the least satisfying Nolan movies are the ones with the most male cry-face scenes. Following? I haven't watched that one yet. Memento and Insomnia? Barely any male weeping scenes in those standout Nolan thrillers. Batman Begins,The Dark Knightand Inception? Slightly more male blubbering. But it was kept to a minimum--just three or four male crying scenes in the first two Batman films--and in each of those two films, one of those three or four scenes proved how much of an asset Gary Oldman, who's great at crying scenes and didn't overdo it in those films, was to Nolan's Batman trilogy. I can't remember if Hugh Jackman or Christian Bale were ever in need of one of those magician's hankies for more than just a magic trick in The Prestige, but I believe the crying was also kept to a minimum in that one.

As for The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar, Michael Caine had to cry in every single scene of his in The Dark Knight Rises, and he did it in that anguished voice I can't ever hear again without thinking of Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon's hilarious impressions of later-period Caine sounding like he's yodeling during emotional scenes, while 70% of Interstellar's nearly three-hour running time consisted of Matthew McConaughey blubbering exactly like Jon Hamm in the SNL auto-tuned crying sketch. The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar have turned out to be two of Nolan's least satisfying blockbusters, although I'll take The Dark Knight Rises over the Joel Schumacher version of Batman any day. So Mr. Nolan, if you want to win back some of the critics who weren't impressed with Interstellar, maybe you should try relying less on making several of your stars cry-talk like Felicity on Arrow all last season. Meanwhile, Hardeep enjoyed The Dark Knight Rises more than I did. He explains why.--JJA

Batman and Bane face off to see who could sound the most like a goofy monster from The Muppet Show.

The Dark Knight Rises
By Hardeep Aujla

Bob Kane thought the cake-bomb-pondering Batman of the 60's was an enjoyable farce, but that wasn't the character he had in mind when pencilling his way to a 6000% pay-rise in 1939. Such was the success of Batman. But it wasn't all enjoyable for the one-time kid who just wanted to draw goofballs like Popeye when he grew up. If things went south when he slapped the first sketches on DC editor Vince Sullivan's desk, he would have gladly gone back to drawing funnies. "I received more pleasure from drawing them than I ever did from drawing Batman", wrote Kane in his '89 auto-biography Batman and Me. And that's kinda the point of Batman; we're supposed to feel uneasy about being in the company of this character who at first glance looks like he reps the villainous axis. Furthermore, Batman is alluded to be a personal projection of Kane's; it's right there in the bio's title, the coalescence of a beat-down he took as a kid whilst pretending to be Zorro and rum-running-era New York. Roger Ebert found Tim Burton's noir-laden Batman (1989) to be "a depressing experience". Then many viewers deemed Christopher Nolan's recent trilogy, particularly the concluding entry Dark Knight Rises, to be sullen and overwrought, which was vindication in the ears of others who were on board with Bob's (and writer/character flesher-outer Bill Finger's) intimate, dark vision and had waited years to see it return to the screen.

It's as if the Halle Berry Catwoman movie never existed.

Sure, the films might not bring a whole lot of new ideas to the table that the many weekly rags and hardback "graphic novels" have given us over the decades, but if you asked Bob Kane, nothing else ever did after Superman and Batman bookended the continuum of all superhero possibilities. Regardless, it's probably fair to say that Bob and Bill would've approved of Nolan's submersion of Batman back into the dark and his eagerness to use him as a device to speak to audiences on a different level. And I have enjoyed how Nolan speaks about contemporary issues pervading our times in these films.

In The Dark Knight Rises, Selina Kyle, covertly anomalous (or perhaps not entirely given the crowd) during a ballroom thing, whispers to Bruce Wayne, "You'll wonder how you ever lived so large and left so little for the rest of us..." While this does echo contemporary economic injustices and does unsettle Bruce in a similar way it probably unsettles the real-life financial "elite" in the West who are somehow surprised that billions in the East would like the same standard of living as them, this film doesn't have a neo-imperialist agenda just like The Dark Knight didn't have a pro-George Bush agenda, despite how many opinions would have you otherwise believe. Instead we have Bane, whose character is conveyed superbly, overriding the need for facial expressions with a menacing mask and subtly expressive body language, from placing the back of his hand on someone's shoulder to an unflinching walk despite the surprise revelation of the Bat-Glider: small touches that spoke volumes. Bane attacks a city we are shown to be undeserving of pity or protection primarily, again, through the indignation of Selina Kyle, who observes how the rich show no austerity and resorts to cat-burglary out of inevitability in an unjust city: a product of Gotham (a character in its own right in this film) as much as Batman or his supervillains are. Bane's storm on the stock exchange is therefore a not-so-subtle device to this end, and from there on in we get a few big plot holes and, more importantly, a Tale Of Two Cities-style discourse which Nolan openly footnotes the entire film with via a direct quote at the end.

Christopher Nolan kept the IMAX footage to a minimum in the Batman movies because IMAX cameras are so fucking noisy when you switch them on. They're the Sam Kinison of movie cameras.

Fan-made poster

But like he did in The Dark Knight with the ferry climax, Nolan counters villainy with the kind of virtuous responses that all great comic books often do (Raimi also struck gold with the same idea during the train sequence in Spider-Man 2). This time Batman must re-live his genesis following a beat-down of his own that would've had Bob Kane flashing back. Spurred on by the words of his late-father that've echoed throughout the entire trilogy, he rises once again from defeat but this time things are noticeably different. Most striking cinematically is that his final punch-up with Bane is in broad daylight, a departure from pretty much every major fight scene in the series. He no longer relies on the shadows as an accomplice; his mission now is not to strike fear into the enemy but to inspire Gotham's oppressed inhabitants. The classic formalities of narrative dictate that Batman too must perish with the darkness of the city that created him, and his sacrifice at the end achieves this whilst also redeeming him from the long-standing dishonour established at the end of The Dark Knight. In this regard, The Dark Knight Rises has a much more positive and conclusive ending than many attribute it with: a story that shows Bruce Wayne won't always be a victim of both the city and himself, and a story that Bob and Bill, at least, might've taken professional and personal comfort from.

Hardeep Aujla writes and edits album reviews for Word Is Bond in Leicester, England. Selections from Hans Zimmer's Dark Knight Rises score can be heard during the AFOS blocks "AFOS Prime" and "Hall H."

Every Throwback Thursday, I randomly pull out from my desk cabinet--with my eyes closed--a movie ticket stub I saved, and then I discuss the movie on the stub. This time I've gotten Hardeep Aujla, an editor from a U.K.-based hip-hop blog I've contributed pieces to, Word Is Bond, to come back after his guest TBT post aboutThe Dark Knight Risesand discuss the movie on the stub I drew. Spoilers ahead for the movie that was deemed the best horror flick of the 21st century by a Movies, Films and Flix readers' poll this week.

So Scooby-Doo is getting rebooted as a live-action movie. Aw fuck. Now we'll never get that live-action Scooby movie I've always wanted to see, in which all of Scoob's human pals get killed off just like these Mystery Incorporated-ish fuckers.

The Cabin in the Woods
By Hardeep Aujla

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents..."
H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

So when Dana and Marty light a joint together at the end of The Cabin in the Woods, you're certain they're thinking something similar in the wake of the horror they've just learnt about. It's a horror of Lovecraftian makings in both nature (cosmic) and name (The Ancient Ones), but this is just one strain of the genre that Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard overtly draw from in their film. And overt really was the approach here.

Myoo-Myoo fucked over Thor big-time in this movie.

Firstly, it's called The Cabin in the Woods, a by-word for a (not particularly well-respected) sub-genre of rural-America-set horror. The Hills Have Eyes, Just Before Dawn, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, several Friday the 13ths. Whilst the obvious titles had some cultural context, whether subverting the frontiersman mythos or commenting on the family unit to some degree under the garble, many soon honed in on the shock value and distilled it into exploitation, and a formula as easily discernible as a fairy tale or the Hero's journey was derived. You have the standard array of teens in peril - "There must be five" as The Director (Sigourney Weaver) explains, there's an old coot that none of them pay heed to, a book that they absolutely should not read (and also a Lament Configuration they should not fidget with), and a conveniently blocked road or broken bridge to prevent escape. It's all there, and that's fine, these are conventions and fans expect them. But the eagle-eyed will know from the Rubik's Cube symbolism on the poster that this isn't just going to be another "one of those". So how exactly are Whedon and Goddard planning on morphing all of these constructs?

Horror is perhaps the most probing and problematic of film genres, and therefore the most in need of examination. The Cabin in the Woods was always too light-hearted to be a reflective piece on the themes of forerunners like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or The Hills Have Eyes; this was probably never the filmmakers' mission. The slightest idea of any cultural context that could possibly be brought close is some CERN paranoia/anxiety as the film's 2009 production date was hot on the heels of real-life short-sleeves pressing "Go" on the Large Hadron Collider's remote control.

Instead, The Cabin in the Woods seems to be an inside joke (thankfully not in the Troma fashion). There is a play on the archetypes through some sub-textual attire-changes halfway through (except for the pothead who, like all Shakespearean fools, knows the machinations of his existence). Often the satire at these parts isn't very subtle, but that's not to say it isn't any fun. It's not news to anyone's ears when I say Whedon's writing is highly enjoyable, and one of the few examples where a writer's personal voice creeping into the script isn't a bad thing, whether that's Firefly's Book telling Mal that there's a special level of hell for child molesters along with those who speak in theatres or, well, a lot of this film.

Ultimately, it hinges on a huge plot twist, a switch in villainy from the usual mutant product of backwater inbreeding to a secret underground facility run by pencil pushers. Except we're shown the strings behind this trick from the outset. We open on the facility and its workers, we see a bird frazzle on the force-field as the oblivious teens drive up; the twist is over before it's spun (to this effect, the misunderstandings at the centre of Tucker & Dale vs. Evil made for a superior send-up). We know the cabin's events are being authored by Sitterson (Richard Jenkins) and Hadley (Bradley Whitford), close analogies to Whedon and Goddard (but not quite as close to Wes Craven putting himself directly into New Nightmare).

The twist would have surely been better placed when Curt (Chris Hemsworth) flies his bike into the force-field trying to escape, providing a headfuck moment akin to what Rodriguez and Tarantino envisioned when Salma Hayek turns vampiric in the middle of a crime/road movie. It therefore lacks any suspense. But it is fun, and the idea that all preceding "cabin in the woods" films have been following a protocol to sate an unfathomable horror via a real-life Monster in My Pocket© collection is superb. But I can only imagine a more engaging film where the audience is given the same perspective as the teenagers so that after the halfway point we're likewise scrambling for understanding, and when we're sat watching Dana and Marty light a joint at the end, we're correlating the contents just like they are.

Hardeep Aujla writes and edits album reviews for Word Is Bond in Leicester, England. None of composer David Julyan's atmospheric score cues from The Cabin in the Woods are currently in rotation on AFOS, but they ought to be.

Luckily, Hulk doesn't fall 20 feet to the theater floor during this musical.

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

Has Rick and Morty tackled the Rashomon episode yet? I know Rick and Morty has done a bottle episode ("Rixty Minutes"), and this week's Rick and Morty episode, "Total Rickall," is a crazy hybrid of a bottle episode and that Community fan favorite of a clip show parody where none of the clips are actual clips. But even though the Rashomon episode has been done to death on TV, I would like to see Rick and Morty add its own offbeat sci-fi spin to it (but differently from how Star Trek: The Next Generation's "A Matter of Perspective" and the X-Files episodes "Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space'" and "Bad Blood" previously tackled the Rashomon ep) and do a lot with it visually like "Total Rickall" does when it morphs from being a hybrid of a bottle episode and an anti-clip show and takes the shape of a John Carpenter's The Thing-style paranoid thriller where everyone's driven crazy by being unable to tell apart the real from the fake.

In "Total Rickall," alien parasites invade the Smiths' house, pretend to be relatives or family friends and telepathically implant into the Smiths' brains fake memories of wacky adventures with them, hence a bunch of flashbacks to adventures that never actually happened, like that time the family and Cousin Nicky from Brooklyn wound up on board a Nazi sub. I like how the shape-shifting parasites' objective isn't outlined by the parasites in some typical Star Trek alien leader speech. They aren't out to assimilate humanity like the Thing or the Borg (neither do they admit to being lonely and wanting companionship); they're simply on Earth to drive the humans insane (so that they lose control of the planet), and their first step is to infest the Smiths' house and multiply like ants at a picnic--or Tribbles on a starship. And that's where the episode's visual merits come in: thanks to animation, "Total Rickall" is able to take the bottle episode and do things with it a live-action show like Community would have needed extra FX money for or would have been unable to accomplish. The house becomes so overcrowded with parasites disguised as nonexistent characters that Rick pauses to address whatever parallel reality he (correctly) assumes is watching his life as if it's a TV show--a.k.a. breaking the fourth wall--and notes the coolness of standing in the middle of a shot that looks like a Where's Waldo? page.

"Total Rickall" is tons of fun, especially when the parasites, after Rick doesn't fall for their Uncle Steve/Cousin Nicky phase, experiment with a wacky ABC TGIF sitcom character phase and assume the forms of a Mr. Belvedere clone named Mr. Beauregard and a Herman Munster-style ~~Frankenstein~~ Frankenstein's monster (Kevin Michael Richardson). Then when Rick won't fall for the deceptions implanted by Phase 2 of the parasites, the forms the parasites take become even more absurd and desperate. They range from Reverse Giraffe (sixth-season Community star Keith David) to Hamurai (Richardson), a samurai whose armor is covered in ham (if only we all could be a fly on the wall in the writers' room on the day when credited "Total Rickall" writer Mike McMahan and the rest of the writing staff rattled off the names of fake buddies who would pop up in the Smiths' house).

The solution to defeating the parasites comes not from Rick but from Morty, when he notices all the fake memories implanted by the parasites are pleasant memories instead of the always painful and unpleasant memories the Smiths have experienced as a family. The real memories include Summer catching Morty masturbating in the kitchen at night (why the kitchen?: the excuse Morty gave for jerking off in the kitchen was that he was thinking about one of Summer's friends, but was it actually because he was masturbating to the lady on the Land O'Lakes box?); Jerry being too scared to protect Beth from a homeless guy who's trying to assault her (it's reminiscent of Jeff leaving his wife Hayley alone with a mugger who's sticking them up on American Dad); and perhaps the most fucked-up memory of them all, a drunk Beth accidentally hitting Summer in the eye with a wine bottle. Morty's pivotal role in getting rid of the parasites is a good example of how Rick and Morty has range in its writing and nicely avoids making only one character the same voice of reason every week by alternating between Summer as the voice of reason one week, Rick as that (stammery) voice the next week and Morty after that.

When the other family members follow Morty's example and no longer become gullible to the parasites' illusions, it's as if McMahan, Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon are commenting on TV from the past: old sitcoms from the '80s and '90s (and in Summer's case, the cartoons she grew up on) may be nice to revisit once in a while, but to live in that world for real--and forever--is its own form of hell (this is why Republicans are so insufferable: they want to keep America similarly frozen in the sanitized, colorless and all-white Father Knows Best/Ozzie and Harriet vision of America in the '50s and '60s). The parasites have basically transformed themselves into old sitcom characters in their attempt to subjugate the Smiths, and the family discovers the way to fight the parasites is to accept their less-than-ideal reality--it's the same kind of road to acceptance the equally miserable characters on Community had to undertake as they learned to make the best of a shitty place like Greendale--and then use that reality to block the illusions. "Total Rickall" is like a battle--for the soul of modern-day TV--between the bland kind of TV that's epitomized by Nick at Nite or Antenna TV reruns (as well as a few present-day multi-cam sitcoms that could easily fit in with the programming on those channels) and the much less idealized TV that Harmon and now Roiland have become known for, and the latter wins.

Structurally, "Total Rickall" is my favorite Rick and Morty episode of the season so far because although Rick and Morty is one of the most inventive and subversive sitcoms around, it can also be blandly conventional in one or two respects, like whenever it deploys the A-story/B-story structure that's prevalent on other sitcoms or half-hour animated shows, and "Total Rickall" actually breaks away from that structure. I've been starting to get tired of Rick and Morty being off on their own adventure while Beth and Jerry have an unrelated subplot of their own (or Rick dealing with Summer while Jerry and Morty are busy with their own shit). Even "Rixty Minutes" wasn't immune from this divide when it separated Rick and Morty from the drama between Beth, Jerry and Summer for most of the story. Involving Beth and Jerry in the same plot with Rick, Morty and Summer is a welcome change of pace.

Speaking of "Rixty Minutes," I prefer "Total Rickall" as a bottle episode over "Rixty Minutes" because the Smiths are doing things that are much more visually busy than sitting around watching TV. Plus it's got a crazy twist, and it's a more surprising twist than Beth and Jerry reconciling after discovering their parallel counterparts would find their way back to each other: the little family friend known as Mr. Poopybutthole--whom the episode tricks us into thinking is a parasite by adding him to the Rick and Morty opening titles a la a pre-Empire-co-creating Danny Strong as dorky Jonathan getting tacked on to the alternate-universe Buffy opening titles at the start of "Superstar"--is actually not a parasite. He's just an off-screen family friend we've never seen before, and when a paranoid Beth shoots Mr. Poopybutthole and is shocked to discover he's bleeding instead of reverting back to a parasite, it's a funny "milquetoast character we didn't expect to get badly wounded" moment that's up there with Forrest MacNeil getting shot by a stranger he tried to goad into a bare-knuckle brawl a few weeks ago on Review and Chad's dad getting stabbed by Charlie Murphy on The Mad Real World.

Beth's shaky grab for the nearest wine bottle she can find--a terrifically animated moment of stress--right after she shoots Mr. Poopybutthole and the incident where she drunkenly gave Summer a black eye both reintroduce Beth's alcoholism, which was hinted at in "Rixty Minutes" and a few other episodes last season. Her alcoholism could potentially be more of a problem than her dad's alcoholism because she's a horse surgeon. What if her impaired judgment during surgery causes a mistake that injures a horse, it throws the rider off the saddle due to the pain it's experiencing and the rider winds up crippled like Christopher Reeve? Or what if some other mistakes due to Beth's impaired judgment lead to malpractice suits that cost Beth her job?

Because Jerry has been unemployed since before the start of the first season, Beth and Summer have been the sole providers for the Smiths. I don't know if Roiland and Harmon would have enough time on the show to turn Beth's alcoholism into a major storyline later this season or next season, but I would be interested in seeing how two unemployed parents would affect the rest of the family, in addition to all the interdimensional mayhem Rick has brought into their lives. Whatever way this drinking problem storyline goes, at least Beth, the Smith family member with the least screen time, is getting some more scenes--and a little more to do than just argue with Jerry. Plus it would allow Sarah Chalke to demonstrate more of her ability to burp on cue. That skill is why Roiland and Harmon hired her in the first place. Or is that a fake memory as well?

Tonz o' gunz, broh. Just like that Gang Starr joint, broh.

Memorable quotes:
* "Get off the high road, Summer! We all got pinkeye because you won't stop texting on the toilet."

* "All I have are pictures of me and my friends from school. [Awkward silence from everyone else.] What? What teenage girl has pictures of her family? It's not like we're Mormon or dying."

* "Shut up, Hamurai! Shut up, Amish Cyborg! What is this? '90s Conan?"

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

I grew up listening repeatedly to A Tribe Called Quest's first three albums on cassette: 1990's playful People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, 1991's more introspective but somehow even more enjoyable The Low End Theory and 1993's celebratory and communal Midnight Marauders, a rare threequel that actually doesn't suck. So while some ATCQ heads might find the 2011 documentary Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest, the first (and so far, only) directorial effort from actor/filmmaker/copy shop employee Michael Rapaport, to be repetitive because "it was all stuff that any Tribe fan either already knew or could pick up from a thousand different bio's on the internet," I marveled at a lot of the footage Rapaport, a Tribe fan himself, was able to gather about the origins of three of my favorite hip-hop albums, as well as the origins of the Native Tongues collective, which consisted of Tribe and several other acts who appeared on classic Tribe joints like "Award Tour" and "Oh My God."

"We don't have to do 'Fuck tha Police.' There's a time and a place for 'Fuck tha Police.' And a group for that. We don't have to do 'Fight the Power.' There's a time and a place and a group for that. We're allowed to be different," says former Native Tongues member Monie Love about the much more whimsical but no less meaningful sounds of Native Tongues artists during the documentary. Besides Tribe and Monie, the revered collective also included the remarkably still-together De La Soul, Queen Latifah, Black Sheep, the Jungle Brothers and Leaders of the New School, whose member Busta Rhymes had a breakout moment that took place not on an LONS track but as a guest MC on Tribe's "Scenario," a classic posse cut Rapaport wasn't able to include in his documentary due to clearance issues. Since "Scenario," Busta has gone on to have an unusual (and tabloid-riddled) solo career, whether he's reuniting with former Tribe frontman/beatmaker Q-Tip on the 2013 track "Thank You" or rapping in the form of either Prince Akeem or liquid metal. The last time we saw Busta, his eyes haven't been looking so good. They've been starting to get rather googly lately.

Viewers who don't know what it's like to go crate digging in a record store might not care for the footage Rapaport and cinematographer Robert Benavides lovingly shot of Q-Tip and former Tribe DJ Ali Shaheed Muhammad browsing for potential beats like kids getting lost in a candy store, but as someone who did an awful lot of crate digging as a college radio DJ, that portion of The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest resonates with me. There's an equally lovely moment where Questlove--whose choice of the letter Q for his moniker was his way of shouting out ATCQ--equates Phife Dawg's "Yo!" at the start of his classic opening verse in "Buggin' Out" with N.W.A. bursting through the Martin Luther King "I have a dream" sign at the start of the "Express Yourself" video.

Despite these great touches, Tip famously distanced himself from the final product after he watched it (he would later backpedal on his negative opinion of the film). He launched a war of words with Rapaport and told him, "All you gotta do is stay white and be privileged" (both Tip and Ali's gripes with the documentary led to Tip calling for other rappers and beatmakers to "tell your own stories" and take more control of images of themselves, which is precisely what Tip and Ali have been doing: about a year before Friday director F. Gary Gray's hugely popular N.W.A. biopic Straight Outta Compton took the summer by storm, Tip announced his plans to co-produce with Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonah Hill a similar TV project about Native Tongues, while Ali launched with music journalist Frannie Kelley the NPR hip-hop musician interview show Microphone Check). But no such anger is evident in Tip's gregarious conversations with the largely off-screen Rapaport about the early days of Tribe, like when Tip recalls how he came across the drum sample for "Can I Kick It?" or when he and Ali visit their old Manhattan high school Murry Bergtraum and Tip demonstrates how effective a classroom desk can be as a percussion instrument.

As for myself when I was in high school, I was such an ATCQ head that when I took drama class and each student was assigned to recite a song or poem without any beats and as if it were a stage monologue, I chose "I Left My Wallet in El Segundo" as my piece of spoken word to perform. So I particularly love the moment in The Travels of ATCQ when Tip does his best Redd Foxx--also peep Tip's dead-on impression of batshit crazy KRS-One--and reveals that the inspiration for "I Left My Wallet in El Segundo," which was made into an above-average music video filmed in guerrilla mode and on location in Las Vegas by future "What They Do" video mastermind Charles Stone III, came from Fred Sanford, a reference I stupidly never noticed until Tip pointed it out. "Son, you gonna sit down and watch a late-night movie with me," says Tip-as-Sanford while discussing the birth of "I Left My Wallet in El Segundo.""It's a good one: Godzilla Ate El Segundo."

Besides verses about wallet misplacement, the Tribe sound and steez were also all about empowerment, black unity, the love of making music as an art form (and subtweeting pop-rappers when they have no artistic integrity or are terrible at making music--or if they're MC Hammer, not even bothering to subtweet them) and perhaps the most relatable subject if you're not black but still a person of color: the love of music as a way to lift yourself out of whatever doldrums you're stuck with as a person of color. I cringe at some of the high-falutin' and vague adjectives either music critics or reviewers of the Rapaport documentary have used to distinguish the Tribe sound from the more popular gangsta rap Straight Outta Compton has brought back into the limelight this summer. The sound of the Queens trio (originally a quartet, before third MC Jarobi White, whom Tip describes in the film as the "spirit" of ATCQ, stepped away from the recording side of things to pursue a culinary career) is always "bohemian." What the fuck does that mean? Or it's always "positive."

Far less vague words like "unique" or "entrancing" would make more sense as descriptions of the Tribe sound. Here are four even better words: "gets your head nodding." That's precisely what Tip and Ali's low-end beats, combined with Phife's witty wordplay and his chemistry on the mic with Tip, did to your head, especially during The Low End Theory and Midnight Marauders. It made it constantly nod, out of both delight over the sonic beauty of the beats perfected by Tip, Ali and engineer Bob Power (or the musicality of Tip and Phife's voices) and approval over Phife's one-liners, and man, "Electric Relaxation" is full of gems from Phife, like "Not to come across as a thug or a hood/But hon, you got the goods like Madelyne Woods" or the simultaneously boastful and self-deprecating "Let me hit it from the back, girl, I won't catch a hernia/Bust off on your couch, now you got Seaman's Furniture."

The first 60 minutes of Rapaport's documentary beautifully get that point across about the group's ability to get your head nodding. Like Questlove says about Tip and Phife's rhymes during the film, "Tip is very smooth. Phife is very hype. The yin and yang of those two, that to me was the perfect marriage."

And like so many marriages, Tip and Phife's had its rough patches. At exactly the one-hour mark, the documentary switches gears and details the sad dissolution of the group, which began to take place during the recording of 1996's Beats, Rhymes and Life and is given amusingly horror-like dissonant score cues by Madlib, who, with some assists from Beastie Boys keyboardist Money Mark, composed the documentary's original score and proves he has a future in scoring horror movies. The film's last half-hour turns into every single melodramatic VH1 Behind the Music documentary you've seen about a dissolving rock band. When Rapaport hastily speeds through the Beats, Rhymes and Life album and the fifth and final Tribe album, 1998's The Love Movement, as if he's going to get Beats, Rhymes and Life/The Love Movement cooties and as if those albums are the Lil Wayne's Rebirth of Native Tongues hip-hop--which they're actually not--you're thinking to yourself, "Yo, Behind the Music announcer who always says, 'And then it all came crashing down,' get your ass out here!"

Tribe's breakup is more complicated than how Rapaport portrays it. Sure, the group's demise was due to the rift between childhood friends Tip and Phife, who's even more of a reluctant star than the reluctant star Tip is portrayed as in both the Rapaport film and Benji B's 2014 BBC Radio 1 production The Story of Q-Tip, a documentary you'll actually prefer over the Rapaport film if the craft of beatmaking is more compelling to you than melodramatic, reality TV-style infighting. The self-described "funky diabetic"--who shunned rapping after briefly pursuing a solo career (a career the documentary oddly neglects to mention) and became a basketball scout--grew tired of Tip's perfectionist ways, what he felt was Tip's insensitive, bullying gym coach-like attitude towards his struggles with diabetes and inexplicable decisions by Tip like the much-maligned prominence of Tip's cousin, then-newcomer Consequence, as a guest MC on the 1996 album (even Consequence himself admits in a deleted scene that being thrust into the spotlight on a Tribe album by Tip like that was baffling to him too). But the circumstances that led to the breakup are actually more than just "lifelong friends who got on each other's nerves." In 1998, Phife grumbled to The Source about the business side of the rap game and said, "As time went on, [the business side] started to slap me in my face. But as far as record labels, or whoever, they're not gonna do us right."

There's a whole thread about the now-defunct Jive Records, Tribe's label, also playing a role in the dissolution that Rapaport's film gives only a cursory mention to and just plain ignores the rest of the time. That's perhaps because Rapaport was trying to appease Sony, Jive's parent company, so that he could get permission to include the De La Soul/ATCQ/Native Tongues posse cut "Buddy," which Sony partially owns and which he almost couldn't get clearance for. There's a more interesting story to be told about the record industry screwing over hip-hop acts, like how both the greed of plaintiffs and lawyers and an elephant in the room called anti-rap racism has caused the art of sampling--something Tip continues to excel at, like during his Black Ivory-sampling 2008 joint "Gettin' Up"--to lose the prominence it once had in hip-hop (no wonder so many hip-hop acts jump ship to indie labels or start self-releasing their work). But The Travels of ATCQ, which has a commercial TV-friendly 100-minute running time and could use a few more minutes of examples of Tip's frequently quoted "Industry rule number 4080/Record company people are shady" line from "Check the Rhime," oddly doesn't seize the opportunity to be the first mainstream hip-hop documentary to elaborate on that story.

One of the best scenes in Beats, Rhymes and Life is Lakers fan Phife explaining why he often wears a Lakers jersey in Knicks-worshiping New York and doesn't give a shit. Phife may be short, but he's got massive balls.

From left to right: former Tribe Called Quest members Phife Dawg, Q-Tip and Jarobi.

The "J Dilla caused Tribe to jump the shark when his musical idol Tip recruited him as a co-producer" opinion that some ATCQ heads have about the Beats, Rhymes and Life album and The Love Movement is equally bananas. The late Dilla isn't to blame for the last two albums not measuring up to the other three. Actually, thanks to the addition of the about-to-be-legendary Detroit producer--fresh off producing several of the best tracks on The Pharcyde's last great album, 1995's Labcabincalifornia--to Tip and Ali's partnership, the production work by the trio that came to be known as the Ummah fortunately didn't turn into a rehash of the boom bap of The Low End Theory and Midnight Marauders. So there are quite a few cuts on the Ummah-era albums (like "Get a Hold") that stand out due to Dilla and were ahead of their time (the beloved beatmaker's role in helping evolve Tribe's sound was omitted from the film because Rapaport said he felt Dilla deserved a separate documentary of his own, but he could have at least kept the segment about everyone's admiration of Dilla, which appears in the Sony Pictures Blu-ray's extended scenes section). The now-veteran musicians' unhappiness with both Jive (the label pissed off Tribe so much the group didn't go back to record one more contractually obligated album for them) and each other was what actually soured the last two albums.

Jive alienated so many artists during its existence, like when they wouldn't allow Big Boi to release guest features his former OutKast partner Andre 3000 recorded for Big's 2010 solo album Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty, and I wouldn't be surprised if "Industry rule number 4080" was Tip's way of biting the hand that fed them as early as The Low End Theory. So whenever Rapaport's interviewees bring up their frustrations with Jive and its then-CEO Barry Weiss, whom Rapaport also interviews, I wish the documentary--which, interestingly, was lucky to snag Tribe manager Chris Lighty, whose discussion of his unintentional role in the demise of Native Tongues shouldn't have been deleted from the film, and Beastie Boys member MCA as interviewees before they died about a year after the film's release--would be a little more journalistic and delve into those frustrations with Jive instead of burying the lede. That's what keeps Rapaport's otherwise satisfying film from reaching the upper echelon of hip-hop documentaries like 1983's Style Wars and even the completely light-hearted Michel Gondry film Dave Chappelle's Block Party. De La Soul member Posdnuos, another interviewee during Rapaport's film, once said he thought an earlier cut of the documentary he got to see was better than the final cut because it "had a little more spice in it." His comments make me curious about material that didn't survive the final cut and didn't even get included in the deleted scenes, perhaps due to either pressure from evil record industry bastards or pressure from Tribe.

Rapaport's film also doesn't bother to take the time to clarify one of the most frequently misheard lyrics of all time, a lyric even I continued to mishear for years: the semi-audible hook during "Electric Relaxation." Is it "Relax yourself, girl, preset plan"? Or is it "Relax yourself, girl, peace out, Premier"? The hook is actually "Relax yourself, girl, please settle down." You had one job, The Travels of ATCQ.

So why can't Tip and Phife just relax themselves and please settle down and record another album together? While, as Rapaport once noted about audience reactions after the documentary screenings, "people have walked away saying, 'I wish they could get along and make more music,'" I'm satisfied with the five Tribe albums we have, plus all those Tip/Busta collabos that I like to pretend are Tribe tracks with Busta as the new Phife. Recording another album that will measure up to those first three isn't easy. Just look at the mixed reviews Beats, Rhymes and Life and The Love Movement received. By 1996, Tip and an increasingly disillusioned Phife were no longer the same artists they were when they burst onto the scene with tunes like "Bonita Applebum"--or in the case of Phife, "Buggin' Out." They can never get back to that happy-go-lucky sound. Why try to go back? Right now, Tip is happy with both his solo career and not having to deal with intrusive and impatient types like the suits from Jive while his perfectionist self gets to spend as much time as he wants fine-tuning every nook and cranny of a project like The Renaissance or The Last Zulu; Phife is happy with his life away from the music industry.

Art isn't easy. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it, and Tip would be finished with The Last Zulu by now.

I don't know why the CW went with CW Seed for the name of its online offshoot. If you're going to name yourself after a Roots track, CW Dynamite would be better.

The best superhero I've seen all summer is #vixen http://t.co/MV9C7fmgAu @megalyn pic.twitter.com/8MMqJKJAKJ
— Chris Rock (@chrisrock) August 25, 2015

In a summer that's consisted of Avengers: Age of Ultron and Ant-Man on the big screen (we'll just forget the whole Fantastic Four fiasco, and, oh, by the way, the only Fantastic Four that matters is these guys), that's huge praise for a superhero webtoon. So is Vixen--which takes place in the Arrow/The Flash/Legends of Tomorrow shared universe and will feature the voices of Arrow stars Stephen Amell and Emily Bett Rickards and Flash stars Grant Gustin and Carlos Valdes in upcoming episodes--as terrific as Rock implies? Animation-wise: yes. Storytelling-wise: it's too early--and too short--to tell. So far, I'm not in love with the presence of the ubiquitousin medias resdevice--an old storytelling favorite of the Arrow writers, who also scripted Vixen--and the clunky-sounding exposition during a diner conversation between aspiring Detroit fashion designer Mari McCabe (Megalyn Echikunwoke), who's about to discover that a family heirloom she's been wearing can grant her the power to mimic the abilities of animals, and her white foster dad Chuck (Neil Flynn, a.k.a. the dad on The Middle) in this first episode.

My least favorite aspect of Greg Weisman and Brandon Vietti's now-defunct DC Animation show Young Justice comes back to haunt this new DC Animation project. Early on in one episode of Young Justice, Miss Martian was seen explaining to a skeptical and typically monosyllabic Superboy why she used her shape-shifting powers to disguise themselves as her uncle J'onn J'onnz and Superman at a press conference that just took place, more for the sake of bringing the audience up to speed than for her ex-boyfriend's sake. "Conner, you know we have to maintain the illusion that Superman, Manhunter and the other Leaguers who went into space are still on Earth. We can't let our enemies know how short-handed the Justice League is right now," she said to Superboy, who, in addition to being miserable about his life as a teenage clone of both Superman and Lex Luthor, has to go to work each day with a pro-torture ex-girlfriend who's fond of speaking in IMDb plot summary-ese.

Arrow veterans Wendy Mericle, Keto Shimizu and Brian Ford Sullivan (all paired up with Lauren Certo, who co-wrote another Arrow-related webseries, the live-action Blood Rush) are a little more skilled at handling exposition than Weisman and Vietti because of the experience they've had writing dialogue for a live-action prime-time show that can't really get away with that type of Saturday morning cartoon exposition too often. So Vixen is slightly more cognizant than Young Justice about how people who know each other well actually talk to each other and is a little less ridiculous and awkward about the exposition--we learn Mari is looking for her birth parents, the difficulties of finding the fashion design job she wants have left her with an understandable temper and she's closer to Patty, an absent and most likely ailing member of Mari's foster family who's presumably Chuck's wife (and will be voiced by Kari Wuhrer), than she is to Chuck--but much of it is still unnatural-sounding expository dialogue. The opening action sequence is much closer to what I want out of an animated sister show to Arrow, The Flash and the forthcoming Legends of Tomorrow, and that would be nicely staged action that's full of visuals an animated show can pull off with more panache than a live-action one, with minimal dialogue during the action. But that rooftop sequence in which Mari outwits the Arrow (Amell) and outraces the Flash (Gustin)--only to accidentally slip and fall--actually goes one better by containing no dialogue at all. It's a wise stylistic choice by both the Arrow writers and miniseries director James Tucker, who previously directed the 2013 DC Animation movie Superman Unbound and showranBatman: The Brave and the Bold, the surprisingly good DC Animation show that proved a light-hearted take on modern-day Batman doesn't have to suck like a Joel Schumacher Batman movie.

The effective animation for Mari's escape from Oliver Queen and Barry Allen, a sequence in which miniseries co-composer Blake Neely gets to restate his main themes from Arrow and The Flash, is mainly what earns the Vixen premiere episode the "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week title. But there are a couple of extra touches that elevate Vixen and will make it worth following on CW Seed in the next few weeks.

The show's dialogue recording team is clearly made up of fans of Fantastic Mr. Fox, which was distinctive for having its vocal cast record their dialogue outside the recording booth and outdoors in order to make their stop-motion-animated movie sound naturalistic. I'm not sure if the Vixen sound team actually did venture outside the booth to record Mari's reverby scene in jail, her diner scene with Chuck and an upcoming S.T.A.R. Labs scene between Barry and Valdes' lab tech character Cisco that was included in the series premiere trailer, but the Fantastic Mr. Fox approach to getting Mari and the other characters to sound like they're actually in reverby and chilly rooms gives this DC Animation project an interestingly grounded feel and makes it a seamless part of the live-action Arrow/Flashverse.

Oh yeah, and there's the simple fact that Mari is the first female superpowered hero of color in the Arrow/Flashverse (Katana, a heroic swordswoman played on Arrow last season by Rila Fukushima, doesn't have any powers). The character is an appealing middle ground between the fantasy-based heroism of the supers on The Flash and the more flawed (and non-superpowered) heroism of the street-level crimefighters on Arrow (the time frame of the miniseries begins with Mari in jail for self-defense, and the episode implies that the man she attacked was such a disgusting perv that she didn't deserve to be put behind bars).

I'm curious to see how Echikunwoke--whom I remember from her eye-candy roles on The 4400 and House of Lies and is an ideal choice to play Mari if she becomes a live-action character--will tackle both voice acting, especially in a setting that's way more family-friendly than House of Lies (but still salty in the dialogue department, in a CW kind of way, of course), and a heroic character who, like Static from DC's Milestone imprint, clearly means a lot to African American DC readers. So far, the premiere episode has shown that Echikunwoke is a great screamer. I never read the Justice League Detroit comics. I don't think Vixen screams like Mel from Doctor Who in those comics.

Looking forward to seeing her fight Kelly Hu with the venomous spurs of a platypus.

I'm also curious to see how Vixen will handle what's essentially a story about a black adoptee raised by white parents (she appears to be embarrassed about it)--and in search of both her heritage and her purpose in life--that happens to be dressed up in superhero genre garb. Will it handle that kind of story with the same kind of aplomb Penny Dreadful has demonstrated as a story about identity that's dressed up as a Gothic horror drama? Or will it drop the ball like 2011's Green Lantern, which Arrow creators and Vixen co-executive producers Marc Guggenheim and Greg Berlanti both co-wrote, and turn into another unimaginative--and emotionally flat--daddy issues-driven origin story?

Chris Rock's praise of this webtoon's premiere episode, as well as Flash cast member Candice Patton's similar endorsement of it--even though she's not in Vixen and she didn't get to reprise her role as Iris West--and black viewers' interest in it on Twitter, all remind me of when I was involved in the creation of a similar female superhero of color for an indie graphic novel about Asian American superheroes. I noticed a glint of excitement in the eyes of both male and female Asian American readers who were fans of that novel back in 2009. It was a glint that said, "I've been hungry for this my whole life."

I'm unable to glimpse that same glint on people from Black Twitter for obvious reasons, but judging from Vixen viewers' #DatTotem hashtag and enthusiastic tweets from the likes of BlackGirlNerds and the hosts of The Fan Bros Show, that glint is definitely there in their writing. Everyone's getting tired of superhero movies starring white guys named Chris. There needs to be more Chrisiquas and Cristinas up in this piece.

Times are changing, and the increasingly inclusive Arrow/Flashverse appears to be responding to the frustrations younger viewers have expressed about the presence of underrepresented groups on the screen, but it's responding in mostly sensible--and now with the arrival of Vixen, fascinating--ways. For instance, on The Flash, the police captain isn't an old, pasty Irish guy like it always used to be on cop shows and superhero shows before the '90s (neither is the captain some African American authority figure with no inner life). He's a younger and openly gay Indian Canadian guy. And now the Arrow/Flashverse is boldly placing a black woman at the center of the action instead of behind the action like spymaster Amanda Waller or on the sidelines like Iris. The five-minute webtoon format may make Vixen seem like a small step towards progress, but this step's a big one.

Oliver Queen, you have failed this action sequence.

Too bad Hanna-Barbera doesn't exist anymore because I'd like to see them totally fuck up Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and turn it into a kids' cartoon called Gripe Ape.

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.

The most astounding thing about director Rupert Wyatt's 2011 surprise hit Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the second and better-received of two different attempts by 20th Century Fox to relaunch its Planet of the Apes franchise from the '60s and '70s, isn't the motion-capture technology the film deployed to bring to life superintelligent simians. It's the film's ability to somehow take otherwise charismatic actors like Brian Cox, Deadbeat star Tyler Labine and David Oyelowo and make them the most boring fucks on Earth.

For instance, the future Martin Luther King plays a villainous businessman here--before seeing Selma, I almost forgot Oyelowo previously appeared in this loose remake of 1972's Conquest of the Planet of the Apes--but he makes way more of an impression as a villain on the animated Star Wars Rebels, even without ever showing his actual face. As the superintelligent chimpanzee Caesar, Andy Serkis, with the help of Weta Digital's motion-capture tech, is the real star of these modern-day Apes movies. After the remarkable and expressive mo-cap acting of Serkis, Karin Konoval, a.k.a. Mrs. Peacock from the ultra-disturbing X-Files episode "Home," and, in 2014's Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Toby Kebbell, there's no way in that place Charlton Heston damned them all to that these Apes movies are going back to burying the actors under rubber John Chambers ape masks.

This is also how former 20th Century Fox studio exec Tom Rothman titles his family photo albums.

I appreciate how both Rise and Dawn are Caesar's story rather than the story of either his human father, Bay Area pharmaceutical scientist Will Rodman (James Franco)--whose search for a cure for Alzheimer's inadvertently triggers the events that will lead to the dominance of apes over humans--or one of Will's relatives. It's preferable over the way the Autobots are relegated to guest stars in their own live-action Transformers movies. But these modern-day Apes prequels, especially Rise, could really use a human ally character with the personality of either Heston's cantankerous Colonel Taylor from the first two Apes installments or Ricardo Montalban's Armando, Caesar's foster dad from the third and fourth Apes installments (as Will's dad, who's suffering from Alzheimer's, John Lithgow gives the best non-simian performance in Rise).

Franco is in visibly bored, "grrrr, where's my paycheck so that I can get some new leather paddles for my next art installation?" mode here. I wish Caesar's favorite parent were played by either Jeff Goldblum, who would have imbued some personality into Will and would have been able to bring a bit more life to Will's compassion for Caesar (but Will's dad would have had to have been played by someone older than Lithgow), or better yet, an actress like Jessica Chastain, because these modern-day Apes movies are too much of a sausage fest (Freida Pinto and, in Dawn, Keri Russell are little more than background extras).

That's one other thing that's missing from Rise and Dawn: a charismatic female presence like Kim Hunter's when she played Dr. Zira, the banana-hating chimp who becomes an ally of Taylor's, in the first three Apes movies. It's too bad Konoval's kindly circus orangutan Maurice, a simian character I like even more than Caesar, isn't female.

Dear Dawn of the Planet of the Apes sequel: MORE MAURICE PLZ. #Maurice
— Aziz Ansari (@azizansari) July 16, 2014

Maurice, who was named after 1968 Apes star Maurice Evans, is a huge part of why Rise is at its best when it moves away from Will and concentrates on the beginnings of Caesar's ape revolt. The dialogue for the scenes between Caesar and his simian followers is delivered in subtitled sign language, and the large amount of subtitled ASL in Rise is something you'd never expect to see in a summer blockbuster. Rise's comfort with silence and minimized dialogue during the ape sanctuary scenes and its confidence in maintaining that silence both make the digitized little girl's voice that translates Amy the gorilla's ASL in 1995's Congo sound all the more stupid.

All the spoken dialogue in the ape sanctuary scenes comes from the apes' mostly sadistic jailers, with the cruelest of them being Dodge Landon, played by Harry Potter villain Tom Felton in a not-very-convincing American accent. I really wish it were William Zabka from the original Karate Kid playing Dodge instead of Felton. It's such a Zabka part. Who wouldn't want to see a 20-something Zabka get smacked around by an angry gorilla?

'Caesar want naked bicyclists to leave city immediately! Caesar no care for human schlongs and derrieres!'

Felton has to deliver the cheesiest line in Rise and the prequel's most blatant callback to the first and best Apes movie: Heston's classic "Take your stinkin' paws off me, you damn dirty ape!" line. It's interesting how the worst line in the movie--a line we really didn't need to hear again because it's all too reminiscent of Tim Burton's misguided 2001 Apes remake--is followed by the movie's most powerful line, a moment that was foreshadowed by Roddy McDowall's Cornelius in the first Apes prequel, 1971's Escape from the Planet of the Apes: Caesar saying his first word, "No!"

Caesar's first word is the moment when Rise changes from a sci-fi prequel that's initially as pointless as The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones to the kind of riveting and worthwhile Apes movie we've always wanted to see but couldn't because of early-'70s 20th Century Fox's shoestring budgets and because of how limited creature FX technology was before the geniuses at Weta Digital got their stinkin' paws on it. I dig the city of San Francisco, but Serkis, Konoval and the other mo-cap performers are so skilled at turning Caesar and his lieutenants into sympathetic figures that I ended up rooting for their characters to wreak havoc on San Francisco. Now if only the movie would show Caesar and his army kicking each and every neighborhood gentrifier out of town.

None of Patrick Doyle's score cues from Rise of the Planet of the Apes are currently in rotation on AFOS, but "Golden Gate Bridge" ought to be.

Rick is about to get a few Colbert Bumps on his head.

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

"The Ricks Must Be Crazy" feels like somebody on the Rick and Morty writing staff had a chip on his shoulder about Tron: Legacy, especially the ways it handled its premise of Jeff Bridges creating an entire universe full of sentient life inside a computer, and he didn't care for what he felt was a simplistic screenplay. Tron: Legacy is a good example of both the story serving the visuals rather than vice versa--however, director Joseph Kosinski's style-over-substance approach still couldn't stop me from watching Tron: Legacy in IMAX 3D twice because, holy fuck, that movie looks mesmerizing in IMAX 3D--and those visuals being made to look so sumptuous that they're able to distract the audience from thinking too long about the story's plot holes or unexplained details. Some of the questions that arose from those unexplained details included "How's it possible for Jeff Bridges and his family to enjoy a meal of lechon if fresh meat is impossible to bring into the Grid?" and "Was there a Filipino chef in Jeff Bridges' family whom we never knew about?"

A lot of why "The Ricks Must Be Crazy" is a highlight of Rick and Morty's second season is due to how much fun Justin Roiland, Dan Harmon and credited episode writer Dan Guterman are clearly having over imagining if Jeff Bridges could leave and re-enter the Grid freely instead of being imprisoned there by his evil doppleganger/digital avatar Clu and what would happen if Jeff Bridges craved power as much as Clu does and he turned out to be an even bigger dick than the marginally flawed, almost Fred MacMurray-like Zen inventor dad we saw in Tron: Legacy. "The Ricks Must Be Crazy" reveals that Rick has created an entire infinite universe inside the battery in his space car, and its inhabitants' only purpose in life is to power Rick's car battery. "That's slavery!," counters an appalled Morty when Rick introduces him to what he calls the microverse.

Instead of the more simplistic scenario of a completely evil duplicate of the universe's creator betraying that creator by enacting ethnic cleansing and plotting to rule the world outside the universe's barriers, one of the microverse's inhabitants, a Frank Grimes-ish scientist named Zeep Xanflorp (special guest star Stephen Colbert, whose Colbert Report writing staff happened to include Guterman), refuses to fall for Rick's white savior act like everyone outside the scientific community in the microverse. Zeep is on to some of Rick's deceptions. Those deceptions range from Rick disguising himself as an antennaed alien savior whenever he visits the microverse to Rick telling the microverse's inhabitants that the middle finger is a peaceful greeting.

Zeep plans to oust Rick from the microverse and free the microverse from servitude, but Zeep's no saint either: he has secretly created his own infinite miniverse in a box to provide the energy for his microverse and make obsolete the technology Rick brought to Zeep's microverse, and he's exploiting the people in that miniverse just like Rick is doing to the people in the microverse. In fact, one of the leading scientists in the miniverse, Kyle (special guest star Nathan Fielder from Comedy Central's Nathan for You), has also secretly built his own teenyverse in a box and...

Whether it's Zeep--or the space car security system Rick programmed to keep Summer safe within the space car when she's not allowed to accompany her grandpa and her brother at a certain point during the trio's night out for ice cream and a PG-13 movie on an alternate Earth--Rick's creations all inherited their creator's dickish and easily bored personality. When Summer expresses her objections to the talking space car (Kari Wahlgren) about the bloodshed and cruelty the space car is willing to resort to in order to protect Summer, the space car responds to her with "My function is to keep Summer safe, not keep Summer being, like, totally stoked about, like, the general vibe and stuff. That's you. That's how you talk." They really are their creator's children.

Tron: Legacy and a much more detestable animal than Tron--all those self-aggrandizing movie star vanity projects in which white stars imagine themselves as saviors of less civilized classrooms or neighborhoods or nations or microverses--aren't the only things that appear to be mocked by "The Ricks Must Be Crazy." The episode also appears to be making fun of the benevolent façade the Silicon Valley tech world likes to put on to distract people from how it reinforces the same old evils and inequities of other industries or business communities like Wall Street (like Tajai from Souls of Mischief once said, "Eventually #Hipsters bathe, shave and become the 'out' republicans [sic] they are"). Doesn't that kind of "we're here to help make your world a better place" façade just remind you a bit of those aliens from the Twilight Zone episode "To Serve Man"? "Gooble boxes," the term the microverse inhabitants adopt for the technology they are unknowingly using to keep themselves subjugated, is clearly the writers' reference to a certain much-criticized corporation with benevolent-looking branding that happens to own the platform that makes this blog post possible. Whattup, Google/NSA.

A certain segment of the TV critic community is understandably tired of narratives about middle-aged or old white anti-heroes. But when a Rick and Morty episode like "The Ricks Must Be Crazy" mines so much darkly comedic gold out of the behavior of Rick and his creations (behavior that Morty and Summer find to be appalling and sociopathic, but Rick's pragmatic way of handling things ends up being the most sane way to respond to a much more insane multiverse) and is visually and narratively inventive (and also perfectly casts a former Comedy Central prankster and a current Comedy Central prankster as pranksters on an epic scale), I say, "Bring on the anti-hero narrative again." Shit, Rick may not even be totally white--his last name is Sanchez and he's probably a white-looking half-Latino like Louis C.K.

It's a relief to see Rick and Morty reverting back to exploring moral quandaries like it has done in such episodes as "Mortynight Run," especially after the previous week's slight misfire, "Get Schwifty," which felt more like a South Park episode than a Rick and Morty episode. It was as if Trey Parker and Matt Stone guest-wrote Rick and Morty and were in the mood to insert another round of their usual barbs about either non-Lorde pop music (although the "Get Schwifty" original songs performed by Roiland and series composer Ryan Elder are amusing, "Love Power" from The Producers-ish spoofs of lyrics from either twerking anthems or EDM) or reality TV. Humor about reality TV stars like Ice-T--a favorite celebrity impression of Harmon's during Harmontown--isn't really Rick and Morty's strong suit. Also, Rick is a less interesting character when he has to play the Doctor and save Earth from disaster (in this case, the trigger-happy judges of an intergalactic reality TV pop music songwriting contest) instead of being the cause of mayhem.

It's hard not to dislike a piece of TV that takes a bit of that mayhem and uses it to briefly riff on Turbo Teen, a short-lived '80s Saturday morning cartoon about a teen who transforms into a Pontiac Trans Am whenever he perspires or eats a spicy burrito. "The Ricks Must Be Crazy" also reveals that Rick implanted Morty with a subdermal chip that can trigger dormant nanobots in Morty's bloodstream to restructure his anatomy and turn him into a getaway car during emergency situations. The nanobots fail to get going--until the show's funniest post-credits tag ever, nicely presented without any dialogue. I wish I could say Turbo Teen was really a joke Robert Smigel and J.J. Sedelmaier came up with, but nope, it's what passed for Saturday car chase action fare when I was a kid. You take one look at Brett Matthews' knuckles morphing into tires, and you're like, "Wow, the things Ruby-Spears employees used to come up with after doing trail-of-tears-length lines of coke."

Other memorable quotes:
* Rick: "I guided your entire civilization! Your people have a holiday named Ricksgiving! They teach kids about me in school!"
Zeep: "I dropped out of school. It's not a place for smart people."
Morty: "Ohhhhhhh snap!"

* Rick: "Would it be possible for us to get some kind of tour of your miniverse from the inside?"
Zeep: "This isn't a fucking chocolate factory. I don't have time!"

* Zeep: "That's what you used my universe for?! To run your car?!"
Rick: "Yeah, but don't flatter yourself! There's always AAA, you fucking cocksucker!"

* Zeep: "I crafted the guy that created the planet you're standing on!"
Rick: "Yeah, and I made the stars that became the carbon in your mother's ovaries!"

* Morty: "This is Ku'ala, the spirit tree! For generations, it has guided the... [Takes Rick aside.] You have to get us the fuck outta here! These people are backward savages! They eat every third baby because they think it makes fruit grow bigger! Everyone's gross and they all smell like piss all the time! I-I-I miss my family! I miss my laptop! I masturbate [sic] into an extra curvy piece of driftwood the other day!"

* Rick: "Don't blame my ship!"
Summer: "It melted a child! It killed itself!"
Rick: "My ship doesn't do anything unless it's told to do something! I don't even wanna hear it, Summer... Your boobs are all hanging about, and you ruined ice cream with your boobs out!"

'Good morning, sunshine! Hope you're not seasick. How do you like my badly redubbed voice?'

Jason and the Argonauts (Photo source: DVD Beaver)

I had no idea the Oakland film score album label Intrada is actually 30 years old until reading about the label's 30th anniversary reception, which took place at L.A.'s Walt Disney Concert Hall over Labor Day Weekend. Besides being one of my favorite score album labels--selections from four of Intrada's expanded score album reissues are currently in rotation on AFOS--Intrada is one of the most professional score album labels/businesses when it comes to either handling production mistakes (when the label realized an expanded reissue of Alan Silvestri's Judge Dredd score contained a previously released re-recording of Jerry Goldsmith's beloved Dredd trailer music rather than the original recording as listed, it immediately stopped shipping copies and went back to correct the error) or simply being a music retail store.

Intrada is also a store that specializes in soundtrack albums. In fact, before Intrada started venturing into producing and releasing score albums in 1985 (its first release was the Basil Poledouris score from the original Red Dawn), it originated as a brick-and-mortar soundtrack store on Vallejo Street in San Francisco. When Amazon ran out of physical copies of Daniel Pemberton's excellent score to the new Man from U.N.C.L.E. two weeks ago, and I needed a physical copy of the U.N.C.L.E. score album for AFOS airplay (my laptop hard drive never has enough space to carry full albums in digital form), the first store I clicked to was Intrada. That's simply because of the Intrada online store's reliability in the past (whereas I had a lousy experience with some other soundtrack label/store, and unless I've thrown shade at it before, that store shall remain nameless). In just a few days rather than one week or more recently, three weeks, there it was in my mailbox, ready to be U.N.C.O.R.K.E.D.

What do you say, me, you and your Varese box packs go somewhere private where we can discuss soundtracks? Like, Intrada discs, Beck, Christophe. 'Legend replacement score'? Take that off.

Intrada's beginnings as a brick-and-mortar record shop in San Francisco (Photo source: Max Bellochio)

Timothy Dalton has got his sights on you, even though he's just a CD cover.

(Photo source: Bellochio)

Earlier this year, I vowed to never write a listicle again because 1) listicles at their worst are such lazy and vacuous writing; 2) the only list I want to read from anybody these days is the list of groceries I just scrawled down and stuffed into my shirt pocket a few minutes ago; 3) every time I see an article hed that consists of a numeral followed by a plural noun followed by "That You Didn't Know Were This," I feel like elbowing a millennial hed writer in the face; and 4) if your film music blog or pop culture site has posted tons of listicles where the hed begins with a numeral, and it continues to subject people to such lists, your blog or site sucks. So without ever succumbing to the listicle format, I will cite my favorite Intrada releases, just in time for the label's 30th anniversary. It's an intrada to Intrada, if you will. The first of these favorite Intrada releases of mine is the first Intrada release I ever snapped up for AFOS airplay, and this was back when AFOS was a college radio show and it wasn't an Internet radio station yet. Tombstone composer Bruce Broughton's 1998 re-recording of Bernard Herrmann's grand-sounding score from 1963's Jason and the Argonauts is no longer part of AFOS rotation due to station hard drive space, but if I did restore it to rotation, it would be the only film score re-recording that's part of any of the AFOS playlists.

I usually don't care for film score re-recordings because a lot of them don't sound like the film scores as I remember them--they sometimes don't even bother to replicate the same tempo--but Broughton's 1999 Jason and the Argonauts album is one of the better ones. Broughton and the Sinfonia of London's faithful and sonically pleasing reconstruction of Herrmann's score gives his Argonauts score the proper album release it never had. For many score album collectors, the 1999 Argonauts album is one of the first things that come to mind in regards to how Intrada label head Douglass Fake "pioneered re-recordings of scores unavailable on CD," as Film Score Monthly soundtrack CD artwork designer Joe Sikoryak once wrote on FSM's message boards.

Tombstone is the epic story of the brutal war between frozen pizza brands.

Jerry Fielding's Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia score album and the expanded score reissues for The Wind and the Lion (a rare collaboration between Goldsmith and director John Milius) and Kurt Russell's 1993 Wyatt Earp western Tombstone are three other Intrada releases that used to be part of AFOS rotation but currently aren't, and those three scores are indispensable parts of the action flicks they were written for. But of those three albums, the expanded Tombstone album is the most special for containing unused versions of Broughton's score cues and even Goldsmith's studio logo music for Cinergi (the '90s production company behind Tombstone), a logo jingle that could take on "Looking at Heaven," Broughton's imposing and swaggering Tombstone end title theme, in a duel of "¿Cuyos cuernos son más machos? ¿Bruno Broughton o Geraldo Goldsmith?"

The Intrada releases that do currently have selections that are part of AFOS rotation are, like the expanded Tombstone album, good examples of the high quality Intrada demonstrates in both extra content and packaging. The label's expanded reissues of the late James Horner's score from Clear and Present Danger--the score where a shakuhachi, a Japanese flute, became an effective way to make a suddenly empty printer paper tray sound like the end of the world--and Craig Safan's spirited Last Starfighter score are huge improvements over previous editions, as are the label's expanded reissues of the late Leonard Rosenman's score from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and Cliff Eidelman's score from Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. It's fitting that Intrada wound up reissuing these Trek movie scores because of the label office's Bay Area location and Trek's use of San Francisco as a central Earthbound setting. Intrada's series of Trek score reissues from IV to VI continues the series of Trek score reissues that FSM began with Horner's scores to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek III: The Search for Spock and uses the same artwork and remastering crew members from the FSM editions (Sikoryak, reissue producer Lukas Kendall and digital mastering engineer Mike Matessino). The reissues carry comprehensive track-by-track liner notes and give Trek heads the option of enjoying both the albums as they first heard them on vinyl (or cassette) when they were younger and the score cues in their original and complete form.

The bonus tracks on the expanded Trek IV and Trek VI albums are as golden as the fleece from Jason and the Argonauts. Though Wrath of Khan is the perfect Trek film (sorry, Star Trek: The Motion Picture defenders, but a three-way between a robot lady, a NASA satellite and a child-molesting star of 7th Heaven isn't as affecting an ending as you think it is), it contains some last-minute reshoots, particularly a final shot of Spock's casket on the Genesis planet that Wrath of Khan producer Harve Bennett added to soften the blow of Spock's death after some negative test screening reactions, and Horner had to insert some new music in order to accommodate the reshot footage. FSM's Wrath of Khan score reissue includes as a bonus track the version of the end title cue before Bennett asked Horner to squeeze in additional music, and the original version gives us a glimpse into an intriguing alternate reality where Spock never came back and nobody kept trying to remake Wrath of Khan by half-assedly killing off major characters during starship battle scenes. Intrada's Trek score reissues are filled with equally fascinating extras. Rosenman's mostly light-hearted Trek IV score is the most divisive of the scores from the first six Trek movies, and one of my favorite parts of Rosenman's score is a cue that didn't make the final cut. It's Rosenman's update of the late Alexander Courage's opening title theme from the '60s Trek, a cue that was intended to accompany the film's opening titles and was meant to, as described by the Trek IV screenplay, announce that "We're in for a classic, good old Star Trek time."

But when the late Leonard Nimoy, who directed Trek IV, heard the new arrangement of Courage's full theme, he thought the cue failed to properly introduce Trek IV as a jubilant and tonally lighter change of pace in the big-screen adventures of Kirk and his crew, so he asked Rosenman to take the cue he already completed for Trek IV's end titles, which was full of the sense of fun and adventure Nimoy wanted for the opening titles, and reshape that for the opening. Intrada's expanded Trek IV album saves Rosenman's unused arrangement like it's an endangered whale, and that's the version of the Trek IV main title theme that's currently in rotation on the AFOS blocks "Hall H" and "AFOS Prime."

One other bonus track that makes Intrada's Trek IV score reissue worthwhile is the complete version of the previously unreleased "I Hate You," the source cue during Kirk and Spock's encounter on a San Francisco bus with an '80s punk played by Kirk Thatcher, Nimoy's assistant and an associate producer on the sequel (his name is a familiar one if you read the puppeteer credits at the end of Muppet projects). The source cue Thatcher wrote and recorded for his scene is basically a typical '80s sitcom version of punk rock, even after Thatcher objected to all the songs MCA Records, the label that first released the Trek IV score album, recommended for the boombox in his scene because he didn't think they were punk enough--which makes me wonder if MCA absent-mindedly forgot to suggest to the Trek IV filmmakers a bunch of cuts off its terrific Repo Man soundtrack (a classic punk album that also contains selections that are in rotation on "AFOS Prime"). Although that punk rock scene is the most sitcommy and Republican-dolt-reacting-to-10-year-old-changes-in-music-ish moment in Trek IV, the presence of "I Hate You" on the expanded album reminds you how funny Thatcher actually is in his mute bit part.

As interesting as those two Trek IV bonus tracks are, even they're outgunned and outwarped in terms of specialness by the two most noteworthy bonus tracks on Intrada's Trek VI score reissue: two versions of the exhilarating Trek VI trailer music, which marked the first time a Trek movie had original music written for its advertising campaign by the movie's composer, who was Cliff Eidelman in this case. Back in fall 1991, Eidelman's trailer music tantalizingly hinted at the more serious and dramatic direction Wrath of Khan director Nicholas Meyer wanted for both the 1991 sequel and Eidelman's score (Meyer envisioned quoting Holst's The Planets throughout the sequel, but The Planets was too expensive for his blood, so he settled for a Planets-style score), and it did so in only less than two and a half minutes.

Fully loaded score album reissues and lavishly produced re-recordings are among Intrada's finest moments as a label (the same goes for Varèse Sarabande). But when Intrada presents a previously unreleased film or TV score in its entirety for the first time, more than 25 years after the film or show debuted, that's special too, especially when that world premiere release allows listeners to pay closer attention to subtleties in the music that could easily be overlooked due to action sequence sound FX or other circumstances.

Intrada recently reissued the Secret of NIMH score. The Sonic Images label once sent me a soundtrack for The Secret of NIMH 2, which is Exhibit A in 'Why the fuck did they make a sequel? I'd rather chew glass than watch the sequel.' Exhibit B is The Sting II.

(Photo source: designWELL)

Director Peter Hyams' 1977 NASA conspiracy thriller Capricorn One is one of the weirdest conspiracy thrillers from the '70s: O.J. Simpson plays one of the good guys; Telly Savalas shows up for a comedic cameo where he's basically playing Ernest Borgnine; Sam Waterston tells a lengthy joke to himself that turns into a monologue that's as crazy as the one his actress daughter Katherine delivers completely nude 37 years later during Inherent Vice; the reporter characters, who are often either expendable or simply evil in other films, actually get to live through the whole film and triumph; and the film is more concerned with pleasing the audience than with becoming as bleak as The Parallax View or Chinatown. It's a crowd-pleasing and enthralling conspiracy thriller in a lot of the same weird ways that the late Tony Scott's Enemy of the State is a crowd-pleasing and enthralling conspiracy thriller (speaking of Enemy of the State, what's with all the shots of people's pets, and why is the scene where Frasier regular Dan Butler barely says a word to Jon Voight and looks like he's about to jump out of his seat and fuck Voight up in front of the NSA my favorite scene in that flick?). Capricorn One wouldn't have held up as a thriller without either Hyams' action filmmaking skills, particularly during a still-remarkable-looking helicopter chase Hyams wisely left unscored, or Jerry Goldsmith's thunderous and menacing score, which was only available in the form of a less avant-garde-sounding Warner Bros. Records re-recording before Intrada got its hands on the score recording sessions and released in 2005 the score cues as they were featured in the film.

"The actual soundtrack has more to say [than the re-recording]. It still leaps out of the starting gate but then heads off to explore. It's more complex," wrote Douglass Fake in the liner notes of the Capricorn One score album, which went out of print and was recently reissued by Intrada with remastered sound. The album allows Capricorn One fans to discern those aural complexities, particularly in the film version of the end title theme, which is currently in rotation on "AFOS Prime."

Instead of the triumphant composition Goldsmith chose as the final track in his Capricorn One re-recording, Fake restores to the conclusion the end titles' restatement of the menacing motif Goldsmith created for the helicopters that chase the terrified astronauts who refuse to play ball and pretend their faked mission to Mars was real, a cue that's "neither triumphant nor in major" and is, as Fake adds, "powerful and thought provoking." My first encounter with that helicopter theme wasn't in Capricorn One itself. The helicopter theme was a fixture of '90s KMEL afternoon drive-time host Rick Chase's show, and whenever I'd hear that instrumental bed during Chase's show, I'd be like, "I wanna see the movie that instrumental's from because the movie's probably bonkers." When I did finally watch Capricorn One, I was right about its bonkersness.

We have Intrada to thank for allowing the audience to enjoy all these exemplary scores in their purest form and in the best possible audio quality. Listening to these scores in that caliber of audio quality and in their entirety really makes you feel like you're either an Argonaut, an Earp, a heroic Starfleet officer or a crusading reporter. Here's to 30 more years of bonus surprises and passionate reassessments of old but outstanding scores from Intrada.

Selections from Intrada's releases of the scores from Clear and Present Danger, The Last Starfighter, Star Trek IV, Star Trek VI, Capricorn One and Marvel's The Avengers can currently be heard on AFOS.

Invasion of the Gorilla Wolf Motherfuckers is how I would have titled this movie, just so I could hear Leonard Maltin say the word 'motherfuckers' on some uncensored movie talk podcast.

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

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

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

Moses prepares to go all Ghost Dog on an alien dog.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AFOS has a Tumblr--an infrequently updated one, to be more accurate. I joined Tumblr in 2012 mostly to see if I could attract Tumblr users to either AFOS or the AFOS blog.

Since 2012, I've discovered that I don't care much for Tumblr as a platform or a place to compose original content (also after 2012, it was bought by Yahoo). If you want to write a long-form post on Tumblr or get that post to look exactly like how you want it to look, you can't rely on Tumblr for any of that. Any attempt to code on Tumblr a piece of writing of any size ought to be accompanied by nothing but Price Is Right failure horns.

How the fuck did Dan Harmon manage to accomplish paragraph breaks in the long-form posts he used to write on Tumblr? Over on that platform, a simple, normal-looking paragraph break is damn near impossible to code into existence. Tumblr makes it so impossible for you to create paragraph breaks because they want to make your writing look like that of a rambling and mentally unstable 14-year-old who doesn't know what a paragraph break is.

I like my paragraph breaks, Tumblr. Fuck you. I like being able to pause between ideas while reading through something and mentally catch a breath. If you can't give me that, Tumblr, catch a fade.

I looked around the Internet to see if I was alone in finding Tumblr to be the shittiest platform for composing long-form writing, and I stumbled into a 2014 listicle by a blogger named Liz Galvao. Yes, I know I've said I despise the listicle format so much that if I ever run into any hed that begins with a numeral, I refuse to read anything below that hed. But it was a critique of Tumblr's many fails as a platform, which became so frustrating for Galvao that she switched from Tumblr to WordPress for composing posts ("Most of the templates don't even let you pick your own font! This is supposed to be MY space on the Internet as a writer, and I can't even pick the font? That's fucked"), and I couldn't resist reading through her rant.

"In-post editing is SUPER limited on Tumblr. I can't italicize a word in the title of a post, for example, which drove me crazy every time I wrote about a TV show. I can't change the size or color of a word in the body of a text post, something that should be incredibly easy to do with basic HTML," wrote Galvao.

Meanwhile, all those things can be achieved on either WordPress, the service Word Is Bond contributors like myself and Hardeep Aujla use for composing Word Is Bond posts, or Blogger, which is why I've stuck to Blogger for composing long-form writing. All Tumblr is good for is reblogging .GIFs. Tumblr, you're as reliable as a Yahoo content editor who can't tell Damon Wayans Sr. and Damon Wayans Jr. apart. Tumblr and Yahoo, you deserve each other.

Yahoo clearly flunked Wayans Family Tree 101.

The pilot episode of The Muppets hints that the chicken-loving Gonzo still has a crush on Miss Piggy. What is it with Gonzo and farm animals, man? He makes Gene Wilder look like a Mormon.

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 the Muppets' return to the big screen after a 12-year absence, due to next Tuesday's premiere of The Muppets on ABC.

Network TV appears to be in such a sorry state this fall--original content on either streaming services or cable is where it's at these days--that the only new network comedy I'm looking forward to is ABC's The Muppets, which is being billed as "a more adult Muppet Show" (wait a minute, we've already had a more adult Muppet Show: it was called The Larry Sanders Show). As much as I love the film that was both the first Muppet feature film I ever saw and my unlikely gateway into the caper genre, the Jim Henson-directed, partially Jay Tarses-scripted Great Muppet Caper--it's my favorite of the Muppet feature films and a film subsequent Muppet films haven't surpassed, not even 2011's well-received The Muppets--TV, the medium the Muppets were created for, is where they work best and are at their funniest. I'm talking episodic TV, not movie-of-the-week TV, which was where Kermit the Frog and company spent most of the 2000s (and disappointed the franchise's most die-hard fans by starring in TV-movies like the poorly received Muppets' Wizard of Oz). Like the A.V. Club's resident Muppets fan, Erik Adams, said last year, a new take on The Muppet Show would give the Muppets' writers and puppeteers the proper space to stretch their ambitions and allow the franchise's gargantuan cast of characters to shine again in a format that's not as cramped as a two-hour movie.

But I have one huge reservation about this new weekly Muppet comedy from showrunners Bill Prady, the Big Bang Theory co-creator who got his start working for the late Henson, and Bob Kushell, and that would be the show's rehash of the confessional/mockumentary format that was popularized by The Office, Parks and Recreation and Modern Family. It's such a tired format these days that even Modern Family is starting to find ways to break away from the format, like when it told an entire story using nothing but Skype chats last season. No matter how many times Gonzo points out the tiredness of the confessional gimmick, I really wish the Prady/Kushell show would phase out the confessionals because much of the Muppet characters' appeal is due to their timelessness, and the confessionals scream out 2005.

Timelessness is also integral to why Flight of the Conchords episode director James Bobin's 2011 big-screen reboot works so well, despite occasional missteps like the film's ill-advised needle drop of Starship's 1985 radio hit "We Built This City," an anthem about maintaining the "purity" of rock n' roll that neither rocks nor rolls. Although I'm not a fan of musicals, I would rather hear another musical number written by Flight of the Conchords star Bret McKenzie--who won a Best Original Song Oscar for penning the film's clever and very Conchords-ish number "Man or Muppet"--than have to endure "We Built This City" again.

References to anger management classes and the crassness of reality TV (and terrible Starship songs) aside, Bobin's The Muppets could have come out of 1981 or 1991. There was a lot of grumbling to the press from Muppet project veterans like the retired Frank Oz about Bobin's movie before its release. They felt (no pun intended) the screenplay by lead actor Jason Segel and his writing partner Nicholas Stoller disrespected the Muppet characters by having them tell fart jokes or experience Martin-and-Lewis-ish bitter feuds--the film's story has Segel's character and his Muppet Show-loving little brother Walter, a new Muppet character voiced by Peter Linz, helping Kermit (Steve Whitmire, whose most sublime bit of Muppet acting in the film has to be the distraught expression his hand gives to Kermit's face when he finds out Miss Piggy kidnapped Jack Black) to get the other stars of The Muppet Show back together after years of estrangement and unfulfilling jobs away from the limelight.

A bit of the old guard's skepticism about Segel and Stoller's screenplay is understandable because, conceptually, their screenplay is on the creaky side. Much of it is a rehash of the "Muppets put on a show to stop a greedy developer from tearing down their theater" story from 2002's made-for-TV It's a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie, which starred Joan Cusack as the greedy developer instead of Chris Cooper, who, despite being trained to rap by McKenzie for a brief number where his villain character raps about himself, should never ever rap on screen again.

But otherwise, Segel, Stoller and Bobin take that "Muppets reunite to put on a show" premise and make it a timeless and effective way to reintroduce the Muppets and get a new generation of viewers to understand why the Muppets' irreverence and warmth were a big deal to those of us who grew up watching The Great Muppet Caper repeatedly or enjoying The Muppet Show and either its shtick involving Animal (the description of Animal's untold backstory in ego trip's Big Book of Racism! is hilarious: "Drunk, inarticulate and wilder than Tijuana on a Jerry Springer celebrity spring break--naturally, he's Mexican") or its various musical numbers. One of those numbers was the show's cover of Piero Umiliani's "Mah Na Mah Na," a nonsense song that resurfaces in the Segel/Stoller/Bobin movie's end credits and is notorious for originating not as a Muppet Show number but as an original song during the 1968 Italian softcore porno Svezia, inferno e paradiso (Swedish: Heaven and Hell).

How else should the Segel/Stoller/Bobin movie have reintroduced the Muppets? Put them through another half-baked parody like a Wizard of Oz remake? The "Muppets never grow apart or do fart jokes" complaints strike me as very "Gene Roddenberry won't allow the Enterprise-D officers to get into conflicts with each other"-ish. The skeptical Muppet veterans were wrong about Segel, Stoller and Bobin being too crass and cynical in their approach to bringing back the Muppets. In fact, I think Segel, Stoller and Bobin were so reverent at times about honoring the most beloved of Muppet movies, 1979's sweet-natured Muppet Movie, and pleasing the old guard (plus the Disney execs) that their movie doesn't have enough terrific little "whoa, how did that get snuck into a family film?" gags like Janice's random aside in The Great Muppet Caper about her past ("And I said, 'Look, Mother, it's my life, okeeey? So if I want to live on a beach and walk around naked...' Oh").

Fortunately, Segel, Stoller and Bobin didn't do away with the self-aware dialogue that's classic Muppets ("Didn't you see our first movie? We drive") or the occasional jokes only a few adults in the audience will understand, like the Muppets showing up on the cover of Ebony on a wall in Kermit's mansion or Rashida Jones threatening Kermit with "I will rerun Benson if I have to." I'm sure that line led to a lot of kids in the audience saying, "Mommy, who's Benson?" Segel, Stoller and Bobin also came up with the first moment in a Muppet movie that genuinely moved me and nearly made me tear up:

Whoops, not that scene. This scene:

The Muppets is noteworthy for being the first Muppet movie to take The Muppet Show and all its episodes and make them a pivotal part of the storyline. While Kermit's discovery of the crowds of fans waiting outside the Muppet Theater nearly made me tear up, some Muppet Show fans have said the film's archival audio clip of Kermit introducing guest star Bob Hope was the part of the film that first made them emotional.

That's how beloved The Muppet Show is as a variety show (variety is, by the way, a long-dead-in-America genre Neil Patrick Harris is attempting to bring back to American network TV this fall with NBC's Best Time Ever, which is loosely based on Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway from the U.K.), and the show receives a satisfying tribute in the form of The Muppets, the most enjoyable comedy movie about a variety show since 1982's My Favorite Year, director Richard Benjamin's thinly veiled movie about the making of Your Show of Shows. The Muppet Show was such a huge part of my childhood that words like "Time once again for Veterinarian's Hospital, the continuing story of a quack who has gone to the dogs" are easier for me to remember than any of the lyrics of "The Star-Spangled Banner."

Elizabeth Montgomery once starred as Lizzie Borden in a TV-movie that was made for people who wish Bewitched could have used a little more scenes of ax murders.

Christina Ricci in Lizzie Borden Took an Ax

I've stayed away from Asian Twitter ever since two different camps within Asian Twitter came to blows over #CancelColbert--the dumbest-looking campaign against a fictional TV character since Dan Quayle's outrage over Murphy Brown's choice to become a single mom--and all that arguing between Asian Americans over #CancelColbert made me want to stick my head in the oven, so I've spent most of my lurking time on Twitter over on Black Twitter. Does the fourth half of that last sentence make any sense? Shit, it probably doesn't.

Black Twitter is sometimes a more enjoyable place to be than any other part of Twitter, mainly because of Desus Nice's consistently funny tweets about either hip-hop, sports, white people's bullshit or an America where "President Trump starts WW3 with Mexico and China." Desus has parlayed his 140-characters-and-less wit into both a career of writing for comedy shows on MTV2 and a popular, now-defunct comedic webseries with "all-caps rap reviewer" The Kid Mero that returned to the Internet earlier this month in the form of the newly launched podcast Bodega Boys. Emmy night and the following day are interesting examples of the differences in trending topics between Black Twitter and White Twitter, or as I like to call it, Facebook.

So Black Twitter has been all about the new Drake/Future mixtape, the enthusiasm over Uzo Aduba, Regina King and Viola Davis all winning Emmys for acting and black viewers' frustrations over a Twitter rant about Davis' candid and rousing Emmy acceptance speech that was posted and quickly deleted by a drunken white actress from General Hospital. Black Twitter shouldn't be surprised that the lady from General Hospital would post racist opinions about Davis' Emmy win for her role on How to Get Away with Murder: she's a Cassadine. Of course she would say such things.

How do I know all this shit about the Cassadines? I used to watch General Hospital in between UC Santa Cruz classes. I lived in a nice off-campus apartment building where none of the neighbors on my floor were weed dealers or were into sharing their weed, so I never really was heavily into weed like most other UCSC students. That also meant that when I wanted a good laugh at about 2pm before I'd slink back to class or the campus paper, I was too lazy to go score some weed downtown. Instead I would get a couple of good laughs at 2pm by just switching on General Hospital to chuckle over either three things: the show's G-rated and overly romanticized portrayal of the Mafia, two or three years before The Sopranos premiered and its popularity caused General Hospital to be completely changed into Sopranos lite; the fact that every outdoor conversation at night would take place on the same exact foggy Port Charles dock set; or one of Anthony Geary's genuinely funny and often unscripted one-liners during the feud between the evil Cassadines and the slightly less evil Spencers. That's how I know who the Cassadines are.

Anyway, while those are the trending topics on Black Twitter, White Twitter is preoccupied with much weirder things: viral footage of a subway rat carrying a slice of pizza (apparently he's got a few ninja turtles he needs to feed), gossip over David Cameron once inserting his dick into a dead pig as if he were in an episode of Black Mirror and a photo of Christina Ricci dressed up as Morticia Addams, the mother of Wednesday, the character Ricci charmingly brought to life in the two Addams Family movies. Yeah, that's white people in a nutshell.

Wait a minute. [KRS-One voice.] Rewind. Someone posted a pic of Ricci as Morticia? Has that person been reading my mind lately and glimpsing a hot fantasy I once had about present-day Ricci in a Morticia outfit? I'm no Goth, but I would love to see Ricci play Morticia in an Addams Family reboot. Also, why is the Photoshopping job on that Tumblr pic kind of shitty, and why does it remind me of Lena Headey's face getting poorly grafted onto her body double during Cersei's walk of shame? How's it possible that there are people who were actually convinced the photo is real?

Thanks, Tumblr, for making Christina Ricci look like a long-necked ambassador from the Jedi Council.

(Photo source: Mystical Enchantment)

She's thinking about tying up and torturing the writers behind the first season of Smash.

Shame! Ding! Shame! Ding! Shame! Ding! Shame! On whoever did the shitty CGI for this! Ding!

(Photo source: Uproxx)

Ricci most recently starred as Lizzie Borden in both a Lifetime movie and a short-lived Lifetime show. An ideal future role for her would have to be Morticia or a grown-up Wednesday. The Addams Family, the show that was based on the only New Yorker cartoons that are worth a damn, has already been rebooted three different times in live action and once in animation (as well as turned into a Broadway musical starring Bebe Neuwirth as Morticia and Nathan Lane as Gomez). I hate most reboots, and the unwatchability and suckitude of the last two live-action Addams projects are a good reason why I dislike most of them (the Addamses are too big to be in something as small as a chintzy direct-to-video movie). But it's not surprising why a certain segment of Hollywood keeps wanting to resuscitate the Addams fam.

The Charles Addams characters' brand of dark humor--they're misfits mocking the lily-white and squeaky-clean suburbia of '50s and '60s sitcoms like The Donna Reed Show and then later on during the era of the Barry Sonnenfeld movies, America as envisioned by those who worshiped the Bush Sr. Administration--is timeless and always appealing, especially to misfits and outcasts who don't care for how dull, unpleasant and, well, hateful that kind of suburbia or America can be. At a time when a hatemonger like Donald Trump is trying to stoke the racist anger of that kind of America, maybe we need the Addamses on the screen again to take that America down and shoot arrows at it a la Wednesday and Pugsley during that Thanksgiving play they rewrote in Addams Family Values.

All an Addams reboot needs besides Ricci are a director who's incredibly focused--and doesn't let the art direction become the only good thing about the movie but still manages to infuse a strong visual sense--and a writer who's as sharp as Paul Rudnick, a script doctor on the first Addams Family flick and the sole credited writer of Addams Family Values, the sequel that was a perfect marriage of quip writer and teen performer delivering those quips (Rudnick/Ricci). Shit, on second thought, they should just bring Rudnick back, unless he'd rather stick to ghostwriting the film reviews of Libby Gelman-Waxner.

Somewhere, Azrael Abyss is creaming his pants right now.

(Photo source: Go Fug Yourself)

Azrael Abyss is also now working at a Home Depot in Peoria.

(Photo source: Go Fug Yourself)

I want more than just Ricci channeling Morticia on the red carpet, man. I'd like another Rudnick-penned Addams movie, and I'd like her to be an Addams again. Ricci may have scared away Lifetime viewers while wielding Lizzie Borden's ax, but as an Addams wielding an ax, she'd definitely get our attention again.

Marc Shaiman's "The Tango," the instrumental highlight of Addams Family Values, isn't currently in rotation on AFOS (it was removed from rotation in 2012 due to limited station hard drive space), but it ought to be.

Netflix is debuting new episodes of Mr. Peabody and Sherman next month. That show better fucking explain why a superintelligent dog who built a time machine has never bothered to use the machine to alter the physiology of dogs so that he doesn't need to walk on four legs anymore.

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 stub and maybe a little bit of its score, which might be now streaming on AFOS. This week, instead of drawing some random stub, I'm going to completely break protocol and focus on a first-run movie I didn't see in the theater. I caught this movie instead on Netflix, and it's a good one. This week marked the season premiere ofFresh Off the Boat, the single-camera sitcom that made waves last season as the first genuine hit show on network TV to center on an Asian American family--and also has been consistently funny to boot--so I'm discussing an equally intriguing sci-fi film from earlier this year that's also told from an Asian American point of view.

On the surface, America in the year 2041 looks enticing early on during Advantageous, indie director Jennifer Phang's second feature-length film. Nobody in the future seems to complain anymore that "We were promised spacecars" because the unnamed city Advantageous takes place in appears to be surrounded by such spacecars. The city's sleek architecture gleams prettily in this low-budget film's surprisingly convincing matte paintings. It's like a city where all the skyscrapers were aesthetically inspired by the gleaming, bean-shaped Cloud Gate, that giant Chicago sculpture I remember so well from Source Code and one of the musical numbers during Dhoom: 3. Best of all, small mom-and-pop restaurants that tout their hormone-free fried chicken have managed to survive gentrification.

But as the film digs deeper into 2041 America, it becomes clear how really fucked-up the future is underneath all that surface prettiness. The spacecars aren't actually spacecars: they're surveillance drones deployed by both the police and tech firms like the Center for Advanced Health and Living, whose name sounds like a shady Scientology subsidiary. Domestic terrorism has become so commonplace that barely anybody bats an eye at a terrorist attack or objects to the loss of their personal freedoms due to the increase in drone tech. "The 2033 bubble" has apparently led to an end to the middle class. The unemployment rate for women has skyrocketed, resulting in an increase in homeless women on the streets. A radio news report that could easily be missed underneath the dialogue during first viewing depressingly rattles off stats about "the recent rise in child prostitution in our country." Education has become unaffordable.

When single mother Gwen Koh (Jacqueline Kim), the Center for Advanced Health and Living's spokeswoman, becomes one of the unemployed after losing her job due to the corporation's plans to replace her with a younger spokeswoman, she chooses an unusual last resort for ensuring that her 13-year-old daughter Jules (Samantha Kim, no relation) stays in the country's super-expensive private school system, a broken system that ends up being the only way to protect Jules from a bleak future of hooking on the streets. Gwen agrees to earn a living as a guinea pig for the Center's newest product: a risky alternative to cosmetic surgery that allows people to transfer their minds into younger bodies.

Advantageous, which is like the best Black Mirror story Charlie Brooker hasn't written, originated as a 2011 short film Phang and Jacqueline Kim co-wrote as part of the FutureStates series of shorts for PBS. The scenes from that 2011 version resurface in the feature-length version and are surrounded by newly shot material featuring Jennifer Ehle as a sinister Center executive and, in an atypically non-comedic and surprisingly effective role, Ken Jeong, who co-produced the 2015 version (James Urbaniak, who's so sublime at playing manipulative and evil assholes on comedy shows like The Venture Bros. and Review, gets to demonstrate some non-comedic chops in Advantageous as well). The biggest and most satisfying difference between the 2011 short and the 2015 film is the film's lack of an opening crawl establishing all of the above details about the dystopian future.

'This Gillette razor is making you verrry sleepy.'

Omitting the crawl that opened the short causes the feature-length Advantageous to be ballsier storytelling-wise than even the director's cut of Blade Runner, which was never shorn of its explanatory crawl about replicants in the future despite completely removing Harrison Ford's clunkily delivered, "Grrr, can't wait to be done with recording this shit in the booth 'cuz I gotta go meet my weed connect"-ish voiceover narration. Phang wisely trusts the viewers to figure out piece by piece--and on their own, without much expository dialogue to hold their hands (other than the aforementioned fake news soundbites)--the future's worst aspects and its gender or racial inequities, as well as its strange customs. There's a great little scene where Gwen wants some time to herself to consider the "consciousness transplant," so she checks into a hotel that specializes in letting its guests go off the grid and be rid of all of their devices, as well as be rid of drone surveillance. In 2015, we have the freedom to go off the grid and take as long a break from social media or technological distractions as we want to, while in the fucked-up future Advantageous depicts, people have to pay to do that. But the most beautiful thing about that hotel scene is the lack of awkward exposition from the concierge like "Welcome to the Bedford, the hotel that grants you privacy from surveillance." It's world-building at its finest.

Another thing that makes the feature-length Advantageous superior to the 22-minute version is how the added material with Jeong (and an unseen Jeanne Sakata as Gwen's deeply religious mom) causes Gwen's desperation to make more sense and be more believable, even while Phang does subtle things with the dialogue and the editing to make the future slightly difficult to understand and more like a puzzle, narratively speaking. Phang's puzzle-like storytelling approach is reminiscent of one of my favorite Steven Soderbergh movies, The Limey, and it made me wonder at times if the entire movie was actually a flashback inside Gwen's head, just like how The Limey interestingly implies that Terence Stamp is playing back the entire movie in his head on his flight home to England. Even composer Timo Chen's Advantageous score is as similarly ethereal as Cliff Martinez's score to The Limey, and on his YouTube account, Chen details the unconventional ways he performed his effective score, like the sliding of a toothbrush across piano strings or the use of a sex toy as a plectrum.

As Chen says, Phang's puzzle-like approach inspired him "to develop new tools to play [instruments] in different ways." That phrase could also describe how a new and much-needed voice in sci-fi like Phang's takes a familiar, Children of Men-style dystopia and plays that dystopia in a different way by filtering it through her rarely acknowledged--and rarely visible on the screen--perspective: the perspective of women of color who are clearly fed up with classism, ageism, sexism and racism. Advantageous is an angry political work, but it's also hopeful about social change and fortunately, not completely humorless. Instead of Jeong supplying the film's humor, its humor emerges in the way Gwen and her co-workers sound exactly like Hollywood types when they discuss their work, like when Urbaniak's character says to Gwen, "We're obligated to go a different direction for the face of the Center."

Kim--whom Star Trek heads will remember as Sulu's grown-up daughter in Star Trek: Generations and who gets to show far more range in Asian American indie projects like Advantageous rather than in something like Generations--clearly took her experiences of hearing the drivel of Hollywood casting directors who babble in coded language about race and worked those experiences into the film's script. So Advantageous also becomes a satirical comment on Hollywood's treatment of Asian women and its tendency to either whitewash characters who were Asian females in the source material (like when Arrow changed the DC Comics character Sin from an Asian girl to a white one) or cast in leading roles Asian performers who look "less Asian" and are closer to Hollywood's beauty standards.

If Gwen 2.0 found a job at Dunder Mifflin, Michael Scott would probably greet her with 'Was your dad a G.I.?'

Gwen is so brainwashed from her days of working at the Center that when she chooses her new body, it turns out to be, of course, a racially ambiguous one. Gwen 2.0 (Freya Adams) may look as outwardly pretty as the city she's been raising Jules in, but just like the city, the new Gwen's concealing an enormous amount of pain and unease. In a manner that brings to mind how the late Roddy Piper so gruffly and amusingly tried to get anyone in L.A. who hadn't joined the alien invaders--as well as the Reagan-era theater audience--to listen to him about the world around them during John Carpenter's classic dystopian satire They Live, Advantageous dares us to stop taking a blind eye to that same kind of pain and unease that exists outside the screen (and on the streets of present-day cities or in the power structures within our own Center-like workplaces) and take a closer look.

Advantageous is now streaming exclusively on Netflix.

How Lea Seydoux can walk like that inside a wobbly train car without tripping in her heels is a bigger fucking mystery than who Franz Oberhauser really is.

Léa Seydoux in Spectre

I'm more of a fan of the music of 007 than the actual 007 movies themselves (although I'm fond of From Russia with Love, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, The Living Daylights and the 2006 Casino Royale, and I like a lot of what Sam Mendes and Penny Dreadful showrunner John Logan--as well as regular Coen Brothers cinematographer Roger Deakins--brought to the table in Skyfall). It's a franchise that's committed more misses than hits in its 53-year history, artistically speaking, and I understand why Andrew Ti from Yo, Is This Racist? despises the 007 movies a lot more than I do. "He's like the literal personification of imperialism,"grumbles Ti about a franchise that's either ridiculed and emasculated Asian men (Licence to Kill) or killed off the ones who, for a change, aren't villains like half-Pinoy ex-wrestler Dave Bautista's Spectre henchman character Mr. Hinx (A View to a Kill). I'm sure Ti would also be thrilled about the time Bond told a black sidekick to fetch him his shoes.

That's why--despite how well Daniel Craig plays Bond as a broken man and how interestingly the underrated Timothy Dalton similarly portrayed the Ian Fleming character as a damaged soul (particularly when he's seen still mourning his murdered wife Tracy in Licence to Kill)--I've never viewed this personification of imperialism as a hero I'd root for and completely identify with. I may ogle the Bond women and admire the artistry of some of the Bond action sequences, but I've never felt like these action movies were being made for me--in the same way that Justin Lin was making Fast Five and Furious 6 specifically for me and creating the first non-stereotypical, post-Sulu Asian American cinematic action hero in the form of Sung Kang's Han, a character Lin so regretted killing off in The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift that he ballsily rewound the Fast and the Furious series timeline just so he could include Han in the action again.

I've seen all the 007 movies except Moonraker (Buffy once warned me against renting it), and the best and most fascinating thing about these movies that are still being run with a tight fist by the same family that started them (the story of the Broccoli family business, by the way, is another fascinating tale in itself) is often the score music. "It's mean stuff. It's not pretty or sanitised. It sounds tough. That's why [John Barry's] work has been sampled so much by hip-hop artists - those sinister horn stabs, especially,"wrote superproducer Mark Ronson about the aural template that was established in the '60s by the late Barry and later recreated by Barry fan David Arnold in five consecutive 007 movies and regular Mendes composer Thomas Newman in Skyfall and now Spectre. Even when the movie's terrible, either Barry or Arnold would bring an unmistakable pulse to the original music. Unfortunately, that pulse is missing from "Writing's on the Wall," the newly released Spectre theme performed by British singer/songwriter Sam Smith and written by the blue-eyed soul artist (in what he claims to be only 20 minutes of songwriting) and Jimmy Napes, who both penned "Stay with Me," the 2014 Smith pop hit that bizarrely sounds like the love child of Tom Petty's "I Won't Back Down" and the theme from I'll Fly Away.

I'm not going to be like a lot of haters of the Spectre theme on social media and dismiss the theme with an extremist, Blaine and Antoine-style "Hated it!" (although some of those anti-"Writing's on the Wall" tweets are amusing, particularly one woman's description of the tune as "a drunk elephant tried to do karaoke to an Adele song whilst singing like James Blunt"), because the theme is actually an okay 007 ballad in the mold of Louis Armstrong's "We Have All the Time in the World" from On Her Majesty's Secret Service's dating montage and the Pretenders'"If There Was a Man" at the end of The Living Daylights, which were both produced by Barry. In fact, the best aspect of "Writing's on the Wall" is its Barry-style dramatic orchestrations, particularly before Smith's trademark falsetto comes in and warbles typical 007 song lyrics like "I'm prepared for this/I never shoot to miss." The first 15 seconds are classic 007 travelogue music.

But as an opening title theme for a 007 movie, "Writing's on the Wall" leans a little too adult contemporary for my tastes. "I wanted a touch of vulnerability from Bond, where you see into his heart a little bit,"said Smith to NPR about lyrics like the rather adult contemporary-ish "How do I live, how do I breathe?/When you're not here I'm suffocating." RogerEbert.com writer Odie "Odienator" Henderson would complain on his blog about Adele's beloved and pitch-perfect "Skyfall" being too slow and putting him to sleep. Henderson doesn't understand that "Skyfall" is supposed to have a funereal tone because the song is actually about the death of M and is written from her point of view. That's why it would have been stupid to open Skyfall with a "View to a Kill"-style dance floor banger, whereas "Writing's on the Wall" is the kind of somnambulant tune Henderson misguidedly thought "Skyfall" was.

Wow, that Guillermo is one hell of a stage designer in addition to being a security guard and talk show sidekick.

"Where's the intrigue? Where's the danger?," wonders Idolator in its pan of "Writing's on the Wall." After those terrific first 15 seconds, the song never really builds towards anything memorable or punchy. What particularly makes "Writing's on the Wall" disappointing is that it reteamed Smith and Napes with the U.K. garage act Disclosure, a.k.a. brothers Guy and Howard Lawrence, but it has little of the spark of earlier Smith/Napes/Disclosure tracks. I had no idea Disclosure had a hand in producing the Spectre theme until I saw several pop music blogs take note of Disclosure's involvement, right after I downloaded the "Writing's on the Wall" single from Amazon and then listened to it and thought I had teleported into the "Brian McKnight helps Martin propose to Gina in the park" episode of Martin instead of an action thriller.

"The reason we got involved afterwards was to try and add a bit of post production and they just wanted it to sound a little more spacey and add something behind it that wasn't just a straight-up orchestra,"said the duo to the U.K.'s Capital FM radio network. While trying to lend a hand to something that they've said is "a lot more along the 'Goldfinger' lines," Disclosure, an act I enjoy for never being too saccharine in their music, sacrificed too much of what makes them great and took a turn towards the saccharine. k.d. lang and Garbage previously proved in Tomorrow Never Dies' Arnold-produced "Surrender" and the Arnold-produced opening title theme for The World Is Not Enough, respectively, that you can bring your own stamp to a traditional-sounding 007 tune and honor the 007 sound without sacrificing too much of your musical identity. I know I keep using the word "pulse" to refer to what "Writing's on the Wall" lacks, but that's the best word I can come up with to describe the thing that's absent from the Spectre theme and had permeated the previous Smith/Napes/Disclosure collabos "Latch" and "Together," which features some unknown nobody named Nile Rodgers.

Where's some of the sinewy garage sound that also distinguishes Disclosure's work with other acts like AlunaGeorge, as well as their work on their own (my personal favorite Disclosure banger, by the way, is "When a Fire Starts to Burn")?

Now imagine some of the sounds from the above Disclosure tunes, particularly the J Dilla-influenced "Willing & Able" and the Napes-penned "Masterpiece," enlivening "Writing's on the Wall" instead of being shut out of it. Maybe it would piss off a few Bond fanboys who live in a bizarre bubble and refuse to engage with pop music beyond 1970, but I don't care (this is why I'm leery of involving myself in conversations with a lot of film score fans: based on experience, they tend to show off their racist colors the minute they start attacking hip-hop and end up sounding exactly like Bill O'Reilly).

So "Writing's on the Wall" is a bit of a letdown as an opening title theme, but don't fret, 007 fans with editing skills and a lot of time on your hands. After Spectre hits Blu-ray, you can always take the Spectre opening titles and insert into them either newcomer Ivy Levan's "Who Can You Trust" from Spy or Siouxsie Sioux's "Love Crime" from Hannibal's recent series finale, two original songs that better capture the spirit of a classic 007 opening title theme than "Writing's on the Wall."

Who expected a Paul Feig comedy--especially when that comedy's a feminist response to 007 and is, at times, like the Roxanne Shante to 007's UTFO--to open with a 007-inspired theme that's more impressive and has more drive than the official one the Broccolis would drop later in the same year? Musician Craig Wedren, who co-produced "Who Can You Trust" with Spy score composer Theodore Shapiro, possesses an incredible knowledge of all sorts of genres--or, in the case of his scoring work on Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp, all sorts of artists--and one of those genres is escapist spy movie music.

I especially like how Wedren and Shapiro didn't approach "Who Can You Trust" as a parody and pretended their epic-sounding tune was a theme--in the mold of "Surrender" and Tina Turner's "GoldenEye"--that was recorded for a Pierce Brosnan-era 007 movie but got lost on the way to the Broccolis' mailbox. The sound of the shortened version of "Who Can You Trust" that opens Spy might not be compatible with Mendes' current gritty tone for the 007 movies, but Wedren and Shapiro's lyrics could fit in with the little that we currently know about Spectre's storyline (the "Writing's on the Wall" lyrics tell us very little about that storyline and seem to focus on either Bond's romance with Léa Seydoux's character or his romance with Monica Bellucci's character), if someone ever decides to mash up "Who Can You Trust" with the Spectre opening titles someday.

The heart is a hunter
And hard as a stone
Cold blood in the chamber
Bullets hung bold

Into the night you will fall
Where there's no wrong or right
Rough justice for all

Love is powering lust
You may find my smile deceitful
But after it all
Who else can you trust?
Who else can you trust?

An original song that's more congruent with the tone of Mendes' 007 movies is the striking "Love Crime," which Sioux and Hannibal score composer Brian Reitzell wrote and recorded for Reitzell's show and was chosen to accompany Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter plummeting off a cliff together at the end of Hannibal's final episode back in August. This isn't a song I'd expect Reitzell to compose for Hannibal because his score music from that show (some of which is in rotation on AFOS) is so atonal. It's a tune I'd expect to hear during a Craig-era 007 movie. But Reitzell wanted to change up his sound for the final moment in the series. He wrote, "I wanted [the Hannibal fans, a.k.a. the Fannibals] to have a souvenir. I wanted them to have a song. I wanted them to have a melody, because I've not been able to really do that with this show."

This also isn't the first time Sioux has written and performed an original song that could easily fit in with the 007 sound. Siouxsie and the Banshees contributed "Face to Face" to Batman Returns, and it's easily the best original song to come out of any of the Batman movies (live-action or animated), due to its entrancing and sensuous 007 vibe and the ways it engages with Danny Elfman's Batman Returns score.

"Face to Face" interpolates the themes Elfman wrote for Batman and Catwoman in a playful manner that's missing from "Writing's on the Wall," which never once interpolates Barry and Monty Norman's "James Bond Theme" like previous 007 opening title themes--particularly "Skyfall"--have done. The feline-sounding string arrangement from Elfman's Catwoman theme first appears at 1:04 during "Face to Face." The first full statement of Elfman's Batman theme appears at 2:13. I love the way "Face to Face" dances around the Batman theme and then finally gives the theme its full statement at 2:13.

Both the Batman Returns song and now "Love Crime" make me wonder if Sioux is a 007 music fan with a secret wish to perform a theme for the franchise, but she knows the Top 40 radio-minded Broccolis will never let artists like her get their Gothy and lacey mitts on a 007 theme, so she's made up her own 007 tunes in the form of "Face to Face" and "Love Crime." The lyrics in "Love Crime" are meant to represent what Hannibal showrunner Bryan Fuller views as the love story between Dr. Lecter and Graham, but they could also apply to Bond's self-described hobby of "resurrection" in Skyfall and maybe his determination to figure out his place in the world, a motive Craig hinted at while trying not to give too much away about Spectre during a recent Esquire interview.

Oh, the skies, tumbling from your eyes
So sublime, the chase to end all time
Seasons call and fall, from grace and uniform
Anatomical, metaphysical

Oh, the dye, a blood red setting sun
Rushing through my veins
Burning up my skin

I will survive, live and thrive
Win this deadly game
Love crime, love crime
Love crime
I will survive, live and thrive
I will survive, I will

THE AMAZING SIOUXSIE SIOUX SINGS FOR # HANNIBAL http://t.co/QMq1KaXEgN THANKS AGAIN @JSALKE& @StuartMurphy100 FOR MAKING THIS HAPPEN!
— Bryan Fuller (@BryanFuller) August 29, 2015

They're such great 007-style lyrics. "[Sioux] wrote those lyrics without seeing any picture, just because she was a fan of the show," said Reitzell. But perhaps the most intriguing fact about "Love Crime" is that Fuller's take on the Thomas Harris characters entertained Sioux so much that it pulled her out of an eight-year retirement from recording music.

That sort of passion about literary characters who have been reinterpreted over and over on screen--and have commanded such a loyal audience in their latest screen incarnation--is something "Writing's on the Wall" could use a little more of. Rarely during "Writing's on the Wall" do I get the sense that Smith and Napes understand that the intrigue, danger and vivacity of the world of Bond are why we're still drawn to his world, even though some of us kind of hate his imperialist guts.

Selections from the scores to From Russia with Love, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Diamonds Are Forever, A View to a Kill, The Living Daylights, Tomorrow Never Dies, the 2006 Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace and Skyfall are in rotation during "AFOS Prime" and the espionage genre music block "AFOS Incognito," midnight from Monday to Thursday on AFOS. "Who Can You Trust" from Spy is also part of "AFOS Incognito."

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

Today's edition of Throwback Thursday is a repost of a TBT piece from March 12, 2015.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The trailer for the Facebook movie should have just been footage of some right-wing lunatic reading his rambling and racist status update about Obamacare because that's how I would have known the movie's about Facebook.

Examples of the not-so-shitty work of Mark Woollen's trailer house (Photo source:New Yorkmagazine)

Movie trailers are a form of advertising I first became fascinated with in 2005, when I started experimenting with using '70s movie radio spots as interstitials to introduce the next piece of music on AFOS. For example, if the next tune on AFOS was the Love Unlimited Orchestra's "Theme from Together Brothers," it was going to be preceded by an actual Together Brothers radio spot from 1974.

A few months later, playing around with those old radio spots made me realize the audio from the spooky Batman Begins bat noises TV spot worked fantastically as a similar intro for any Batman Begins score track on the stream. This saved me the trouble of opening GoldWave and recording an intro to ID the composer and score album for every single track on the four different playlists AFOS consisted of at the time (today, AFOS consists of 56 different playlists).

From then on, I scoured the Interweb tubes for every single trailer or TV spot for a movie or TV show I could get my hands on and then re-edit into interstitials (and I continue to scour for trailer audio, as well as shorten them for radio because a lot of trailers contain huge chunks of wordless visual action or vague-sounding dialogue that would make no sense on radio). I wound up getting a few thumbs up in listener e-mails and on Twitter for this trailer-audio-as-interstitials approach. Someone tweeted that AFOS has a DJ Food vibe because of it. It was better than the occasional harsh criticisms I used to receive about the sound of my voice on AFOS.

Check out A Fistful of Soundtracks on tunein. Its got a DJ-Food feeling to it.
— CharlesHBissonnette (@CharlesHBissonn) October 18, 2013

Fistful of Soundtracks on itunes radio - Starts each track with a sampled quote, superb.
— Liam OC (@LiamOC) May 12, 2009

By 2006, I had listened to so much trailer audio that I stopped dismissing trailers as annoying commercials that would always get in the way of my enjoyment of the feature presentation, whether I'm watching that feature in the theater or on disc, and I started to respect the art of producing and editing these trailers. I've become a fan of the Buddha Jones trailer house's laugh-out-loud funny trailer campaigns for 2011's The Muppets and Muppets Most Wanted, and I've grown to admire Hollywood trailer producer Mark Woollen and his eponymous trailer house's inventive work on the campaigns for films like Little Children, In the Loop and Gone Girl.

"Mark has the difficult task and very rare talent of finding a film's DNA in 120 seconds. Once he finds it, he translates it not by revealing its story but by expressing, in a clear but mysterious way, the film's emotional essence," said Alejandro González Iñárritu to New York magazine about Woollen, who crafted the trailers and TV spots for Iñárritu's Best Picture Oscar winner Birdman. Woollen has been pushing for stylish trailers that move away from extremely on-the-nose and frequently parodied trailer styles like the tired comedy trailer template The Simpsons once made fun of in its fake trailers for an Ed O'Neill sports comedy called Soccer Mummy and a Going Ape/Dunston Checks In-ish piece of shit called Editor-in-Chimp.

This is Ed O'Neill's worst screen credit, until that whole season of the new Dragnet he barely fucking appeared in.

The New York Post is, in fact, run by a chimp, which explains a lot of its content.

Some of my all-time favorite trailers, like the ones for Albert Brooks'Real Life and the 2002 documentary Comedian, don't even include any footage from the film and are amusing short films by themselves. I also started to respect the art of narrating trailers. I had listened to so much trailer audio by 2006 that I started to be able to identify the names of the voices behind the voiceovers. Before 2006, I used to often get Hal Douglas, the announcer who appeared as himself in the Comedian trailer, mixed up with Don LaFontaine, because their authoritative voices sometimes sounded the same. After 2006, I was able to tell them apart, and I can now do the same with any announcer who's become more prominent in the trailer voiceover biz since the deaths of LaFontaine and later, Douglas ("Yo, that's Ashton Smith in that TV spot. And that's definitely Keith David. Or is that Dorian Harewood, the voice of NBC? Nah, that's definitely David").

So when Childrens Hospital regular Lake Bell starred in and directed In a World..., an indie comedy about a post-LaFontaine trailer voiceover industry (as well as the Bell character's frustrations over that industry being such a sausage fest), I felt like she made that movie just for me. The movie's opening montage of archival footage of LaFontaine at work was excellent as an opening title sequence, and I especially enjoyed how a lot of In a World... took place in recording studios, a world I'm familiar with from my days of either being involved with college radio or recording content for AFOS inside a cozy and loungey studio.

It's also great whenever any publication takes an In a World...-like look at the trailer biz and discusses at length the unknown history of cutting together trailers or, in the case of the A.V. Club, the stylistic choices that go into making a standout trailer (one "AVQ&A" panelist says, "While I appreciate the art of a tasteful teaser, sometimes I just want to be told exactly what the hell is going on," while another panelist says, "My answer happens to be the opposite... I like a trailer that doesn't tell me anything about what's going on"). The A.V. Club's September 25 Q&A with its own staff writers about "What makes a great trailer?" inspired the bloggers over at The Solute--a film discussion blog founded by film lovers who became online friends in the surprisingly calm and civil comments section of Pitchfork Media's much-missed The Dissolve--to discuss examples of terrible trailers for good movies.

The Solute post scores points for not overlooking the most notorious recent example of coming attractions that are so atrociously made that they're incongruous with the word "attraction" and they wind up diminishing the attractiveness of whatever film they're hyping. That example would have to be the shitty trailers that caused the surprisingly enjoyable Edge of Tomorrow to get squished at the box office as if it were Tom Cruise's body getting run over by an Army truck. (By the way, The Solute has been a good substitute for The Dissolve, but someone should remind them that if they want to continue to honor The Dissolve and intelligently fill the void Pitchfork's film discussion site left behind after its demise, they ought to avoid posting click-baity heds like "Five Not-So-Great Trailers for Great Movies."The Dissolve stood out partly because its writers didn't care for hackneyed-sounding listicle heds, and whenever they occasionally did post a listicle, they didn't package it under a hed like that.)

But the king of terrible trailers for good or great movies has to be the American trailer for the Samuel Goldwyn Company release of Henry V, Kenneth Branagh's 1989 big-screen directorial debut. In 1989, the most talked-about trailer campaign belonged to Batman, not just because the footage presented a dark Batman who had never been depicted on screen before, but also because of the extremely minimalist approach of the Tim Burton film's 1988 teaser trailer: no voiceover narration, no music (Woollen's Little Children trailer became notable for also containing no music) and not even an appearance by either the title of the film or its about-to-be-ubiquitous, Anton Furst-designed logo at the end of the trailer. The minimalist approach was due to Warner Bros.' eagerness to rush a teaser trailer into theaters to intensify the buzz for Batman. It's funny how the Batman teaser's lack of narration ended up influencing a lot of trailers today when it was really a result of the trailer house not having enough time to record narration for the teaser. A similar minimalist approach also distinguished another trailer from 1989: the original U.K. trailer for Henry V, which opted for no narration and simply relied on Shakespeare's dialogue and Patrick Doyle's epic score from the film to sell the drama and gritty war-movie feel of Branagh's first Shakespeare adaptation for the screen.

Doyle's very first film score kicked off a long-lasting cinematic partnership with Branagh (before Henry V, Doyle had scored Branagh's 1987 stage production of Twelfth Night) that continued recently with Doyle's score for Branagh's version of Cinderella earlier this year. The Henry V score remains my favorite work of Doyle's. That's why selections from the Henry V score are in rotation on AFOS. "One of Pat's great gifts is for melody, and I wanted every tune to make an impact. The great set pieces needed underscoring as powerful and immediate as the words themselves," wrote Branagh in the Henry V score album liner notes.

Henry V's 14-minute St. Crispin's Day speech score cue, which Doyle has covered on piano in his recent Varèse Sarabande release The Music of Patrick Doyle: Solo Piano, is the Branagh film's most memorable example of underscoring that's as powerful and immediate as the words themselves. The Crispin's Day cue also became a staple of trailers or TV broadcast promos for feel-good movies in the '90s. But the Henry V cues that actually better sum up for me the drive and pulse of Branagh's film (recently reissued on Blu-ray by Shout! Factory) are "Opening title--'O! for a Muse of fire,'" which was used in most of the British trailer, and "'Once more unto the breach,'" which is in rotation on AFOS. So how did the trailer house that produced the American trailer for Henry V manage to fuck it all up? It stupidly didn't use "'O!' for a Muse of fire,'""'Once more unto the breach'" or any other cue from Doyle's exceptional score. The chintzy synth music in Henry V's American trailer is, to borrow a line from Henry V, like a foul and ugly witch limping so tediously away. Cue Jean-Ralphio.

Why the fuck does the American trailer music sound like walk-in music at a 1988 Christian leadership retreat? The music that was chosen by the American trailer house is so atrocious and shoddy-sounding I actually removed as much as I could of it from the intro that transitions into either "'Once more unto the breach'" or "'Non nobis, Domine'" whenever they get streamed by AFOS. Also, the music, which doesn't sound like anything Doyle would ever compose, fails to convey that this is the kind of non-stodgy and visually interesting Shakespeare movie that's capable of a remarkable shot like the epic tracking shot Branagh came up with to powerfully illustrate the costs of war. To its credit, the American trailer doesn't omit Shakespeare's dialogue to make Henry V more palatable to American moviegoers who either are unfamiliar with the play or doze off whenever they hear Shakespeare. But unfortunately, it tacks on an announcer who delivers some of the most drab-sounding late '80s/early '90s trailer copy this side of the 1993 Batman: Mask of the Phantasmtrailer ("It was one of history's greatest adventures, led by a soldier who wouldn't retreat").

Combined with that feel-good music that creates the notion that this movie is boring homework, the addition of a cheesy announcer totally kills the mood and the aura of political intrigue that were more effectively indicated by the film's British trailer, a trailer that, stylistically, is much closer to the largely voiceover-less, Woollen-style trailers that are being made today. Henry V's American trailer is exhibit A in how not to shape a trailer out of historical material that can be difficult to market to a non-art-house American crowd, as well as how not to make a trailer, period. "The Samuel Goldwyn Company presents a bold new film by Kenneth Branagh"? Nah, B, it should be "The Samuel Goldwyn Company misrepresents a bold new film by Kenneth Branagh."

Selections from the 1989 Henry V score are in rotation during "AFOS Prime."

This beats that time I went to see Eek! the Cat on Ice.

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 stub and maybe a little bit of its score, which might be now streaming on AFOS. This Sunday will be the 30th anniversary of the wide release of Better Off Dead, which began on October 11, 1985, so today, instead of drawing some random stub, I'm intentionally pulling out the stub that says "Better Off Dead 30th Anniversary Live Read."

David Wain's They Came Together is a hilarious rom-com spoof I recommend to anyone who longs for a spoof movie that actually doesn't suck. The most worthwhile of its Blu-ray extras is the complete footage of the 2012 live read of the They Came Together screenplay at SF Sketchfest in San Francisco, back when the film was just a project Wain and co-writer Michael Showalter had trouble getting off the ground at Universal, and their silly screenplay, a vicious skewering of--as well as an affectionate homage to--rom-coms, sat quietly in a cabinet until the day Wain, Showalter and their friends from the alt-comedy world unleashed it on stage.

A lot of the gags from the 2012 draft of the screenplay actually made it into the final cut, so the only major differences between the live read and the movie are the absence of a framing device, a few different bits of casting (for instance, Wet Hot American Summer star Marguerite Moreau doesn't appear in They Came Together, but she had a role in the live read) and the sight of actors like Paul Rudd constantly laughing while playing their roles. They were cracking up because they were encountering Wain and Showalter's odd lines--particularly "Oh God, Bubby, I wanna fuck you so bad"--for the very first time, as they were reading them on stage (this was also why They Came Together cast member Bill Hader kept cracking up as Stefon on Weekend Update: then-SNL writer John Mulaney always replaced portions of Hader's cue cards with newly written lines Hader had never seen before).

Despite the shitty video quality of the Sketchfest live read footage, I was so entertained by that They Came Together live read that it caused my largely agoraphobic ass to travel up to Sketchfest for the very first time in its 14-year history and watch a similar live read at the Marines Memorial Theatre. This time it wasn't an unproduced screenplay that was being read by actors on stage--it was the screenplay for Better Off Dead, my favorite '80s teen flick.

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of his film, writer/director Savage Steve Holland got a few original cast members--Curtis Armstrong, Diane Franklin, Amanda Wyss and Kim Darby--to reprise their roles during the live read at the Marines. Napoleon Dynamite star Jon Heder and Kevin Pollak took over the roles that previously belonged to John Cusack and David Ogden Stiers, respectively, and a bunch of Sketchfest regulars like Paul F. Tompkins, Steve Agee and festival co-founder Janet "Korra" Varney filled in for other roles from the film as well.

Why is Better Off Dead--Holland's semi-autobiographical story of a teenage cartoonist with an overactive imagination who attempts to kill himself after he's dumped by his girlfriend Beth (Wyss), but he keeps failing at every suicide attempt--both my favorite '80s teen flick and the one I've watched more times than any other? It's due to the surrealism of it all.

During a classroom scene, the hair on the heads of all the students is seen standing up when their ears are subjected to the sound of chalk screeching down a blackboard. Mute supergenius Badger (Scooter Stevens), the little brother of Cusack's Lane Myer, orders a book about how to attract trashy women and then is later seen arm-in-arm with a bunch of them. Ultra-dorky Ricky Smith (Dan Schneider, who later made a fortune as a producer of Nickelodeon sitcoms, which are also where Holland has spent most of his directorial career after co-creating the '90s Saturday morning cartoon Eek! the Cat) makes a grand entrance to the sound of lightning at a school dance. Lane becomes the Bugs Bunny-ish target of a psychotic paperboy (Demian Slade) who won't leave without the two dollars Lane owes him for his delivery. Those are just some of the many examples of how Better Off Dead is a live-action cartoon, in the same way that Raising Arizona is basically the Coen Brothers bringing to life a Road Runner short--or the same way that many Joe Dante movies are influenced by the Warner Bros. animated shorts Dante adores.

But the uniqueness of Better Off Dead as a live-action cartoon is due to Holland working with traditional '80s teen flick tropes--whether it's a scene at a typically boring and unfulfilling after-school job or a romance with the girl next door (who, in this case, is French)--and taking them in as surreal a direction as he can go. The movie even contains animated interludes that bring to mind Woody Allen's brief transformation of Annie Hall into Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (in fact, Wyss once described Holland's work as "like a punk Woody Allen"). It would be inane to react to Better Off Dead with "Badger can't pick up women like that in real life! That's impossible!" Either you sit back and roll with the cartoonishness--and let it reduce you to laughter--or just watch something else. You prefer your movies to be completely laughless and devoid of either larger-than-life storytelling or inventiveness, right? I have the item just for you. It's called the entire filmography of Kirk Cameron.

Holland's film also chooses to take the pain of teenage heartbreak and emphasize the absurdity of that pain rather than go all emo on us and wallow in the pain. Whenever your love life doesn't go the way you want it to, doesn't it feel like the whole world's having a laugh at your expense? No other movie has captured that strange feeling quite like Better Off Dead has. Even something as innocuous as a Flintstones rerun becomes threatening and somehow annoying when you're deep in misery after getting rejected, and in Better Off Dead, that's exactly what happens when Barney Rubble suddenly addresses Lane from the TV screen and asks Lane if he can date Beth too.

Sketchfest's Better Off Dead live read didn't quite nail the surrealism that makes Holland's film unique--it's impossible to do so in a live read--but seeing Armstrong, Franklin, Wyss and Darby reprise their roles and hearing Franklin speak in her French exchange student character's accent again on stage both made the live read the type of enjoyable extra Better Off Dead has always deserved on disc and has never gotten since both its DVD and Blu-ray editions have been disappointingly light on extras. You know how Anton Ego immediately flashes back to being a boy comforted by his mom's home cooking after he takes his first bite of ratatouille? When Franklin finally spoke up at the live read for the first time as Monique in that accent (if you forgot, Monique doesn't speak during the movie's first half), I similarly flashed back to being a little kid watching Better Off Dead for the first of many times on cable in the '80s and thinking, "Who's this French actress? She's funny."

I wasn't aware of the existence of Franklin's prior movies, the R-rated Last American Virgin and the equally R-rated Amityville II: The Possession, at the time because I wasn't allowed to watch those kinds of movies on my own at that age, so I always thought Franklin was French. When I later saw her play Corey Parker's thoroughly American stepmom in Holland's How I Got Into College in 1989, I was surprised to find out she's actually American. That's how effectively Franklin embodied this French character. In fact, I Was There Too host Matt Gourley thought Franklin, whom he recently interviewed about her role in Better Off Dead and how much she loved playing Monique, was French in real life too.

"[Wyss] did her character reading exactly like she did in the film," said Franklin to Gourley about her enjoyment of the Sketchfest live read. "I was closing my eyes thinking, 'Oh my gosh, I'm watching the film.'"

I thought the same thing too while I was at the live read. Even E.G. Daily's "One Way Love (Better Off Dead)," Van Halen's "Everybody Wants Some!!," Rupert Hine's original songs from the film and my favorite Howard Jones track (simply because it appears in Better Off Dead), "Like to Get to Know You Well," all popped up in the speakers at the Marines at the same exact points they did during the film to make me feel like I was back inside the crazy universe of the film again.

Wow, my pictures of the live read came out beautifully.

The few, the proud, the Marines.

Terribly photographed by Jimmy J. Aquino.

Oh yeah, audience members weren't allowed to snap pictures during the live read, so the only pics I could take were ones after the performance. If you squint, you can actually see Kim Darby still in her seat at stage right.

Meanwhile, none of the live read performers are the size of a gnat in Entertainment Weekly's photo gallery of the live read.

The entire cast of the 2015 SF Sketchfest's Better Off Dead live read (Photo source: EW.com)

Savage Steve Holland, Curtis Armstrong and Kim Darby

Armstrong, Darby, Amanda Wyss and Diane Franklin

Franklin and Jon Heder

Heder, Kevin Pollak and Paul F. Tompkins

Steve Agee and Janet Varney

Cole Stratton, Paul Brittain and Annie Savage

The audience at the Marines

The cast of the 30th anniversary Live Read of #BetterOffDead on stage and signing each others' posters. #sfsketchfest pic.twitter.com/45oJBThULq
— SF Sketchfest (@SFSketchfest) February 9, 2015

Although I haven't seen One Crazy Summer, the 1986 Cusack/Holland movie where Cusack and Holland reportedly didn't get along while filming it because Cusack was bizarrely angry with Holland about how Better Off Dead turned out, I've always preferred Holland's teen comedies over the late John Hughes' teen comedies. What I'm saying is fuck John Hughes. He was racist towards Asians in Sixteen Candles, he was racist towards black folks in Weird Science and he thought Ally Sheedy was prettier after a makeover wiped away all traces of her personality at the end of The Breakfast Club. When not even Sheedy herself agrees with that makeover, that's how fucked-up most of your teen movies were, Hughes.

Tichina Arnold's How I Got Into College subplot as a hard-working black student hoping to get accepted by the school of her dreams doesn't make me cringe like how Weird Science's black blues club scene makes me cringe, and Yuji Okumoto's Japanese drag racer character who speaks like Howard Cosell never makes me cringe during Better Off Dead like how Gedde Watanabe's Long Duk Dong character makes me cringe throughout Sixteen Candles (that's also partly because I grew up overhearing Cosell on Wide World of Sports, so I have a fondness for Cosell impressions, especially stand-up comic Barry Sobel's old impression of Cosell at the World Series, during the night Cosell couldn't stop bringing up Houston Astros outfielder Buck Jackson and the death of his mother). In a film where everyone in the cast, including Cusack, has a weird role, I've always been relieved that the weird role that went to the Asian guy was a Cosell soundalike (Rich Little dubbed in all of Okumoto's dialogue) instead of a totally offensive role like Long Duk Dong. The worst thing about the '80s is the racism of that decade, and Holland's lack of that shit is why, in addition to the surrealist humor, Better Off Dead continues to hold up 30 years after its release--even during a live read with only some of the original cast.

Look, it's that baby sun from Teletubbies, 40 years and six kids later.

About your script that starts with a weird moment, then takes us to "x [time unit]s earlier:" Take yourself to before you wrote it and stop.
— Dan Harmon (@danharmon) July 20, 2014

You can keep tweeting examples of good shows and movies that use that technique but "knock it off" is not going to stop being strong advice.
— Dan Harmon (@danharmon) July 20, 2014

The tired device known as in medias res, a staple of Alias and Arrow or any network TV pilot of the last 10 years, gets another tongue-lashing from Harmon, this time in the form of Morty. Rick and Morty are trapped on an Amish-like cat people planet where the laws appear to have been modeled after the totalitarian society in The Purge ("That movie sucked," says Summer in a line that was perhaps contributed by Ridley, who reportedly found the concept of a Purge-inspired story to be hacky). Carjacked by a teen named Arthrisha (Baby Daddy star Chelsea Kane, an old castmate of Roiland's from his Disney/Fish Hooks days who clearly relishes being allowed to curse on this show), Rick and Morty are forced to seek refuge from the temporarily trigger-happy participants of the nighttime "Festival" by hiding out in the home of an old lighthouse keeper who refuses to participate in any of the purging. The kindly lighthouse keeper tells Rick and Morty, "I will let you use my lighthouse for shelter and beacon-sending on the condition that you listen to my tale." But instead of regaling Morty with a captivating story about an adventure on the sea, his tale turns out to be a clichéd rom-com screenplay he's been writing. The moment he read aloud to Morty the words "TITLE: THREE WEEKS EARLIER," I knew where the scene was headed and laughed my head off.

"I'm not a huge fan, personally, of the whole 'three weeks earlier' teaser thing," says Morty as he gives a critique to the lighthouse keeper about his screenplay. "I feel like, you know, we should start our stories where they begin, not start them where they get interesting."

I'm with you on that, Harmon, er, I mean, Morty.

Jesus, Dutch Wagenbach, take it fucking easy. It's just a cat.

Morty's argument with the old man over screenwriting and bad manners triggers a rage that Morty, who's initially appalled by the ways of the purge planet, is in denial about. Once that murderous rage is unleashed, Morty, like any other hormonal teenager, is unable to shut it off, and that leads to the show's most enjoyable use of an existing song this season, Tony! Toni! Toné!'s 1990 new jack hit "Feels Good."

I'm not so fond of the clunky way "Feels Good" has been looped and re-edited by the show's music editor (it's been shorn of the classic sample of a girl's orgasmic moans from "When Boys Talk" by Indeep of "Last Night a D.J. Saved My Life!" fame). But I love how the episode first uses "Feels Good" non-diegetically and then changes it to diegetic after Rick--who sedates the mech-suited Morty with electric shocks because even he's had enough of Morty's killing spree--hands over Morty's mech suit to Arthrisha to allow her to go after the rich assholes who have created the Festival just to get the planet's lower-class citizens to kill each other off.

rick & morty just broke out tony toni tone's "feels good". GOAT show.
— Desus Nice (@desusnice) September 28, 2015

In "Look Who's Purging Now," Morty becomes even more of a monster than Rick at his most cold-blooded. It's a really dark way to close out this season's arc of Morty becoming desensitized to the madness around him--is this also how Evil Morty originated in that other dimension we haven't heard from since "Close Rick-Counters of the Rick Kind"?--but when you look back at the many different kinds of mayhem Morty has encountered since the very first episode, his repressed rage makes a lot of sense.

But as IGN points out in its review of "Look Who's Purging Now," a tiny light emerges at the end of this darkness, and it comes from a surprising source: Rick. "Several times in the past we've seen Rick show a genuine affection for Morty and even go out of his way to spare his grandson from emotional suffering. That trend repeated here as Rick led Morty to believe that the boy's murderous behavior was the result of a drugged candy bar rather than latent emotional trauma and teenage hormones," said IGN. Rick's act of deception to make Morty feel better is an interesting way to foreshadow the sacrifice Rick makes at the end of "The Wedding Squanchers."

Had Rick and Morty not been renewed by Adult Swim for a third season (and had Mr. Poopybutthole--fully recovered from the gun wounds Beth gave him at the end of "Total Rickall"--not shown up after the end credits to break the fourth wall and acknowledge both the renewal and his excitement over how Rick will get out of his latest predicament), "The Wedding Squanchers" could have functioned as a perfect series finale. Rick's decision to abandon Morty, Summer, Beth and even his least favorite family member, Jerry--while at the same time, protecting them from the interdimensional mayhem he's brought into their lives by allowing himself to get caught by the intergalactic government that wants him captured, to the tune of Nine Inch Nails' original 1995 version of "Hurt"--is a downbeat way to end things. But it would have been an intriguing and fitting coda for a flawed and privately troubled character like Rick.

I've always wondered how Rick and Morty will end its run, and since this show is darker than Harmon's previous show Community and it puts its characters through the kinds of horrors that would mentally and emotionally shatter the likes of Jeff, Annie and Troy, I have a feeling Rick and Morty isn't going to end on a completely sunny note like Community did earlier this year (#AndAMovie). "The Wedding Squanchers," which is credited solely to staff writer Tom Kauffman, gives us a glimpse of how Rick and Morty would have ended had this been the darkest timeline--in this timeline, Rick and Morty wasn't so popular and Adult Swim didn't believe in the show at all--as well as a glimpse of how the show will probably conclude its run years from now. The anarchic kind of life Rick has led is bound to not end with him being victorious.

I said earlier that I can't get enough of this show. But I'm also starting to grow weary of the show's "Beth has another quarrel with Jerry" B-stories, even though they're part of a formula that, for the most part, has worked and is a storytelling template Harmon said he enjoys working from and he considers sustainable for hundreds of episodes. "We can have Rick and Morty go on these adventures together as grandfather and grandson,"said Harmon to Alan Sepinwall last season about what he and Roiland agreed upon when they first formed the show's storytelling structure. "And then we can intercut it with these Charlie Kaufman, Woody Allen-esque petty domestic squabbles that are happening. That will be the formula of the show."

After Rick forced his unhappily married daughter and her pathetic and still-unemployed husband to see an alien marriage counselor in "Big Trouble in Little Sanchez," I've started to think, "Beth and Jerry have been like this for, what, over 15 years now? They fight and make up and fight again and make up again and so on. Why doesn't she just leave Jerry?" It's the same kind of criticism some Community fans used to have about the study group's interactions with Pierce before Chevy Chase quit the show and Harmon killed off his character: why does the group still keep Pierce around even though he's been nothing but selfish and mean?

Sure, it'd be boring if Beth and Jerry got along all the time, but I also want a little more variation in the ways their rocky marriage plays out, like maybe a B-story where they don't speak to each other at all and take their aggressions out on each other silently. One of the reasons why "The Wedding Squanchers" succeeds as a finale--and this is where it's a more satisfying finale than last season's "Ricksy Business," in which Jerry dragged a surly Beth along with him on a weekend trip to a cheesy reenactment of James Cameron's Titanic--is the seamless way it integrates Beth and Jerry's problems with each other into the A-story and doesn't seal them off in some lesser and repetitive subplot. In fact, some of the best line deliveries during "The Wedding Squanchers" belong to Sarah Chalke when her character reacts exasperatedly to Jerry's embarrassing behavior while they're guests at the wedding of Birdperson and his human girlfriend Tammy (Cassie Steele) on the planet Squanch.

If this were a destination wedding, I wonder how much Birdperson and Tammy would be squanching all the guests, expenses-wise.

"The Wedding Squanchers" is actually a story about Beth and Rick rather than Morty and Rick. Another thing that makes this one of the most worthwhile episodes of the season is that it finally delves into a backstory Harmon has mentioned at length to Sepinwall but hasn't addressed on the show: Beth's bizarre worship of her dad, even though he was absent for most of her life and has never really been that great of a dad, which Jerry points out to Beth in a rare moment where he's not talking nonsense. Jerry's discussion of Rick's self-centeredness ends up shaking an eavesdropping Rick to the core (and Rick's not the only one who's showing a different side of himself, which is another thing that makes this finale worthwhile).

"Kids can sometimes idolize their worst parent and blame their supportive parent for chasing off the dad with the guts to leave," explained Harmon to Sepinwall about this elaborate backstory he kept off-screen at the time of the interview. "And [Beth] fetishizes exceptionality. She believes that Rick, as crazy as he is, is the better of her two parents even though she was raised by her mother and she blames her mother's unremarkability on her father's departure and will do anything to keep her father back in her life. And if Morty needs to risk his life traipsing across the galaxy with her insane alcoholic father, it's better than Morty growing up in safety and ending up like her mother or her husband Jerry who she considers to be unremarkable and unredemptive and therefore undeserving of her affections."

I was hoping Roiland and Harmon would address in the finale some more of the drinking problem Beth has inherited from Rick, but this first-time exploration of her bizarre need to have more time with her dad and keep him from leaving again is even better. Beth's scenes in "The Wedding Squanchers" also cause the occasionally frustrating thread of her attachment to Jerry (despite how often she bickers with him) to make a little more sense. Perhaps she hasn't split yet because she doesn't want to become another deadbeat parent like Rick and end up breaking the hearts of Summer and Morty like Rick did to her heart when she was a kid. Part of me wishes this show would be a bit clearer about this side of Beth and that she'd get more screen time, which is funny because Harmon has said she's one of his favorite characters to write for on the show. On second thought, maybe Harmon has kept Beth on the sidelines because he's so concerned about getting her character right and doesn't want to totally fuck it up.

You haven't fucked anything up yet, Harmon. Roiland and Harmon's already interesting show is just starting to get even more interesting.

Rick's gonna love being a prison telemarketer.

Other memorable quotes:
* "The trick to cereal is keeping 70 percent of it above the milk."
Beth: "Jerry, get a job."

* Rick: "Oh shit! It looks like an egg-vite from Birdperson. Must be time for his annual Oscar party. And by the way, our TV signals take light years to reach his planet. Nobody tell him that Braveheart wins."

* Jerry to Beth: "I was transported here against my will in a meatball, alright? So take your attitude to the men's section of Kmart'cause you need to cut me some slack... s."

* Tammy: "[Whistle noise] That's his last name."
Summer: "Are you hyphenating it?"

This is also what Colin Mochrie's speech notes will look like at his son's wedding reception.

* Rick: "Take it easy. This is a blessing in disguise. Fuck Earth. You realize our planet's name means dirt, right?"

* Alien news anchor: "The plucky little ball of water and dirt, which is where it gets its name, is dominated by seven billion primate-descended natives who love to eat spaghetti and pray to kangaroos."

* Rick, getting back at Jerry one last time while turning himself in before his arrest: "I'm Jerry Smith, and I loooove sucking biiiig, sweaty cocks and licking disgusting, furry testicle sacks."

Mr. Poopybutthole would be one hell of a name for a substitute teacher.

* Mr. Poopybutthole: "Tune in to Rick and Morty season 3 in like a year and a half--or longer--to see how we unravel this mess! Ooh wee!"

The problem with the title Kung Fu Killer is that you don't know if it means he's a killer who uses kung fu or if he's trying to put an end to kung fu as if it's a grizzly bear that killed his dad.

Today's edition of Throwback Thursday is a repost of a TBT piece from May 7, 2015.

As a streaming service, Netflix has both merits and drawbacks. Let's get the drawbacks out of the way first: some of the widescreen movies the studios hand over to Netflix's streaming library aren't in their original aspect ratios, so customers are subjected to poorly cropped and confusing-looking versions of those movies (the version of Step Brothers I watched on Netflix Instant in 2009 was one such poorly cropped version). And whenever Netflix loses the streaming rights to a title it's licensed to carry for a limited time, procrastinators like me often find ourselves scrambling to watch that title a couple of hours before it vanishes from the site.

They're annoying drawbacks. But they're outnumbered by merits like Netflix's terrific HD quality; no ad breaks; content that never freezes like it often does on a DVD or Blu-ray rental that's not in the best shape; and easy access to so many foreign films, which wouldn't have been possible in the VHS days when barely any home video companies cared about fully satisfying or catering to niche markets and the only way to experience a classic Jackie Chan actioner from Hong Kong was to grudgingly accept whatever Miramax or New Line Cinema gave you, and that would always be a butchered and badly dubbed version.

Donnie Yen channels Harrison Ford in Air Force One and tells Wang Baoqiang to get off his boat.

Those foreign films that are easy to access through Netflix's streaming library include the oeuvre of Hong Kong action star Donnie Yen. With the exception of the Miramax-butchered version of Iron Monkey that currently exists on Netflix, many of Yen's films are on Netflix in their original and untouched form, thanks to niche companies like Well Go USA, the way-more-hands-off-than-the-Weinsteins distributor of Yen's Ip Man films and the most recent Yen actioner to hit American theaters, the 2014 serial killer procedural Kung Fu Jungle, which reteamed Yen with his Bodyguards and Assassins director Teddy Chen. On Netflix, it's easy to get to know the charismatic (and unlike Chuck "1,000 Years of Darkness" Norris and Steven Seagal, able-to-act-during-non-fight-scenes) performer whom Deadspin"Netflix Action Movie Canon" columnist Tom Breihan calls"Hong Kong's greatest action star right now."

Breihan also refers to Yen as "one of the great movie-fight visionaries working today" due to his preference for making fight scenes look more visceral and tough, not to mention coherent--unlike the incomprehensible work of too many non-Asian directors who attempt to tackle elaborate action sequences--and never bringing in stunt doubles to replace the stars (who have done so much fight training that they don't need to be replaced), which lends authenticity to even the most improbable-looking moment of wirework. As Breihan says, Yen's preference for visceral fight scenes has elevated the movie-fight game (Tony Jaa's Thai actioners and director Gareth Evans'Raid movies are other similar examples where that game has been raised), and it "elevates something like 2007's Flash Point past standard Hong Kong cops-and-mobsters fare, turning it into something truly special."

The fight scenes in the Chen-directed Kung Fu Jungle don't break new ground like the climactic Flash Point brawl between Yen and Collin Chou did when it incorporated MMA fighting moves that were new to Hong Kong action cinema at the time, but they're still thrilling to watch, thanks to Yen, who directed the fight scenes in Kung Fu Jungle, and his fellow fight choreographers, who all won Best Action Choreography at the Hong Kong Film Awards a few weeks ago for their work in Kung Fu Jungle. The film pits both Yen, who stars as Hahou Mo, a former martial arts instructor for the police who's doing time for manslaughter, and Charlie Yeung, who plays a female Hong Kong police inspector, against a serial killer who could only exist in movies: a martial arts expert who learns to master other martial arts experts' skills and then uses their skills against them so that taking their lives will result in him being the greatest fighter in Hong Kong.

Yen may be playing the hero in Kung Fu Jungle, but the performer who gets to really shine in Kung Fu Jungle--even more so than Yen--is Wang Baoqiang, whose serial killer character Fung Yu-Sau is able to vanquish his targets despite being born with a club foot. He's the club-footed ass-kicker Damon Wayans--who was born with a club foot and turned his tough, orthopedic shoe-wearing past into both material for his stand-up act and a Kids' WB animated show about his childhood--must have always dreamed of becoming.

Wang Baoqiang channels Harrison Ford in Patriot Games and gets himself involved in a clumsily tacked-on motorboat chase.

I don't know if a club-footed serial killer antagonist with kung fu skills would have saved Dexter as it degenerated after its first two seasons into an often poorly written slog and a right-wing vigilante fantasy that became far too worshipful of Dexter, but such an antagonist would have definitely made post-season 2 Dexter less of a slog to sit through. The most preposterous aspects of the titular killer and the stupidity of the cops pursuing the killer are also a lot less grating and noticeable as convenient plot holes in a fast-moving two-hour action flick than as plot holes on an eight-season, 96-episode drama where said plot holes are recycled so often that the show turns into a wheel-spinning mess (I blame network interference and showrunner musical chairs for that show's decline, or rather, treadmill fall into lumberjack-y absurdity).

As Fung Yu-Sau, Wang actually does more fighting in Kung Fu Jungle than Yen does. Yen's in his 50s now, and while he's still in prime physical shape, like during a prison brawl where Hahou takes down 17 other inmates all by himself or Hahou's climactic fight with Fung Yu-Sau in the middle of a busy highway, Kung Fu Jungle is basically Yen's acknowledgement that this will be the last time he'll make as intense and brutal an action flick as this one or Flash Point.

Actually, Yen's not completely saying farewell to action: his next few films will include Ip Man 3 with Mike Tyson (I take it this one's a remake of Rocky III, and Tyson's supposed to be playing Clubber Lang, like how Ip Man 2 was a remake of Rocky IV featuring Sammo Hung as Apollo and the late Darren Shahlavi as Drago) and Netflix's upcoming Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon sequel. But for this quasi-swan song, Yen passes the hyperkinetic-martial-arts-cinema torch to Wang, and--slight spoiler--in another act of stepping aside, Yen generously gives the film's final heroic action-movie moment to Yeung's cop character.

Charlie Yeung's frequently incompetent police department in Kung Fu Killer makes Miami Metro from Dexter look like a tight ship.

As part of its victory-lap feel, Kung Fu Jungle is populated with cameos from legendary Hong Kong figures like Golden Harvest studio founder Raymond Chow and so many of Yen's martial arts cinema colleagues. For instance, Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky star and Ip Man series regular Fan Siu-Wong appears as one of Fung Yu-Sau's targets, a Hong Kong stuntman Fung Yu-Sau challenges on an empty movie set to a weapons duel that's nearly as entertaining as similar fight scenes on fictional movie sets in Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.

The only major change Well Go USA made to Kung Fu Jungle was retitling it Kung Fu Killer, which makes little sense because the title change causes Yen's movie to get easily confused with another movie of the same name, a poorly received 2008 American TV-movie that reunited David Carradine with his Kill Bill henchwoman Daryl Hannah. However, Well Go USA forgot to scrub away the movie's original title from the on-screen text during the lengthy dedication to martial arts cinema colleagues at the end. Whichever way you prefer to call the Yen actioner, the film is worth a look when it inevitably hits Netflix's streaming library--and hits Netflix hard like Fung Yu-Sau's orthopedic shoe to the face.

Kung Fu Killer is--surprise!--now streaming on Netflix. In between the time I wrote the above piece and now, Yen was interestingly cast inRogue One: A Star Wars Story or whatever Lucasfilm is calling the Gareth Edwards blockbuster this week.

Is Christina Hendricks a "trouper" or "trooper"?

Throwback Thursday: The Dark Knight Rises (with guest blogger Hardeep Aujla from Word Is Bond)

Throwback Thursday: The Cabin in the Woods (with guest blogger Hardeep Aujla from Word Is Bond)

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Rick and Morty, "Total Rickall"

Throwback Thursday: Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Vixen, "Episode 1"

Throwback Thursday: Rise of the Planet of the Apes

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Rick and Morty, "The Ricks Must Be Crazy"

The forbidden dance is Intrada: The Bay Area film score album label turns 30

Throwback Thursday: Attack the Block

If you want to try coding a blog post on Tumblr, you'd have a much easier time opening an umbrella up your own ass

Throwback Thursday: The Muppets (2011)

That viral pic from Tumblr of Christina Ricci as Morticia Addams isn't real, but it proves why Morticia is the part she was born to play, baby

Throwback Thursday: Advantageous

The original songs from Spy and the Hannibal finale are better Bond themes than Sam Smith's actual Bond theme for Spectre

Throwback Thursdeath: What We Do in the Shadows

What makes a shitty trailer? (Horrible music and comatose-sounding announcer copy)

Throwback Thursdead: Better Off Dead 30th Anniversary Live Read

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week and Last Week: Rick and Morty, "The Wedding Squanchers" and "Look Who's Purging Now"

Throwback Thursdeath: Kung Fu Killer (2014)