I've watched Beyoncé's Lemonade visual album only once, when HBO Go had the streaming rights to the visual album for just one day (I'm not a Tidal subscriber, and $9.99 a month is too steep for my blood--lower the price, Hov). Yet the sounds of Lemonade are still reverberating in my head.

The anthemic, Just Blaze-produced "Freedom" contains a typically superb Kendrick Lamar guest verse. "Hold Up," the Jack White contribution "Don't Hurt Yourself" and "Sorry" are a triptych of intriguing songs about coping with infidelity, and Beyoncé's jab at "Becky with the good hair" during "Sorry" makes me wonder if "Becky" isn't one lady but is actually a composite of several. I doubt Beyoncé's husband has had just one side chick since marrying Bey. "Daddy Lessons," a tune that explores both her Texan roots and her relationship with her estranged father (and former manager), is a rarity: a black country song, but this time from a woman instead of Charley Pride, Darius Rucker or Kool Moe Dee. Beyoncé experiments with country, but it's not an epic fail like that time Lil Wayne made a rock album.

I always thought Solange was the more musically interesting Knowles sister, and I still do, but with Lemonade, Beyoncé has really evolved from the "Independent Women"-style anthems and adult contemporary radio-friendly ballads she's known primarily for. I didn't expect something so introspective, confessional and politically charged from Beyoncé, although there have been hints of that introspective direction throughout her last visual album and during, of course, the #BlackLivesMatter-influenced "Formation" single (some say that direction surfaced as early as 2003's Dangerously in Love). Lemonade is basically Beyoncé's Craps (After Hours). In other words, it's the turning point for a new kind of Beyoncé. I believe I have a clip from her new visual album.


Woops, wrong artist.

While hearing the album's Malcolm X sample ("The most disrespected person in America is the black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the black woman") and watching the montage of the grieving mothers of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner and Michael Brown, I knew that Lemonade was bound to be whitesplained by old white people who don't know what the fuck they're talking about, just like when Beyoncé dropped her "Formation" video. Yeah, whenever I want someone to weigh in on modern-day R&B, forget the opinions of Questlove or Nelson George or dream hampton. I want to hear the opinion of the white Republican who combed his hair like Hitler's for several years. He should be the one to tell black and brown artists what they should be singing about. It's just like the whitewashing controversy that's erupted again due to the live-action Ghost in the Shell and Doctor Strange: screw all the intelligent things RunLoveKill creator Jon Tsuei says about why it matters that a Japanese performer should be starring as Motoko Kusanagi in Ghost in the Shell. It's better to listen to Max Landis because we Asians are too dumb to understand how the movie industry works, and we need some white boy who looks like Gary Oldman in The Fifth Element to set us straight.



Beyoncé didn't record Lemonade to appease you, Piers Morgan. She made the album for black women who consider themselves "woke," as well as anyone with an open mind, which is something this Tony Hayward-ish troll clearly lacks. Go back to masturbating to "Rule, Britannia!" or whatever the fuck you do when you vibe out to your kind of music, Piers Morgan.

Every time Piers Morgan talks, I feel like it's an act of war by the United Kingdom & that the U.S. should retaliate.

— Hari Kondabolu (@harikondabolu) April 25, 2016

The highly stylized Lemonade visual album is remarkably shot by the likes of "Formation" video director Melina Matsoukas, Jonas Åkerlund and Kahlil Joseph, whose bizarre, Killer of Sheep-inspired video for Shabazz Palaces'"Belhaven Meridian" is a tremendous little work. But there's one unintentionally funny moment during the visual album that neither Beyoncé nor any music video director, no matter how skilled they are at marshaling so many performers, could control, and it's the visible impatience of a fidgety four-year-old: Beyoncé and Jay Z's daughter Blue Ivy. Matsoukas clearly had a hand in directing the Southern Gothic-ish "Freedom" portion of the visual album and crafting the epic shot of black women of various ages standing under poplar trees. Every woman or girl in that shot (the kid holding Blue Ivy's hand, by the way, is Beasts of the Southern Wild star Quvenzhané Wallis) understands the direction Beyoncé and Matsoukas has given them: they're supposed to stand still and look empowered. All of them understand it, except Blue Ivy, of course, because she's four.

Blue Ivy's not having it. She has the look of a little kid who has no idea that Mommy's filming an ambitious and lyrically deep visual album and just wants to go home and stream Sesame Street.


This is why you never see any little kids during the similarly highly stylized movies of Michael Mann. He would just lose his shit trying to get some little kid to mope and brood handsomely like Wes Studi, Al Pacino and Jamie Foxx do all the time in his movies.

It's not like Blue Ivy can't take direction. Matsoukas got a great little expression out of her during her charismatic cameo in the "Formation" video.


But a shot like the one Beyoncé and Matsoukas were trying to accomplish in the woods is bound to confuse and bore a four-year-old, just like whenever a preschooler is dragged to two hours of church and doesn't understand why nobody's singing about cookies or the alphabet. Who's this Jesus cat? Is he pals with Rosita and Zoe?

Years from now, Blue Ivy is bound to cringe over her fidgety cameo after she fully understands the statements about feminism and racism her mom and Kendrick were trying to make in "Freedom." She'll probably be like, "Mommy, please don't play back the clip where I acted a fool and ruined the shot."

In the meantime though, Lemonade is only one week old, and it's already left quite an impact on music. Lemonade was a popular drink and it still is.

"Party" from Beyoncé's 4 album can be heard during my mix "Mitchell D. Hurwitz Is Koogler!"

From November 20, 2015, here's a repost of my discussion of the 1971 film Le Mans, the subject of Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans, an intriguing 2015 documentary that premiered on Showtime on March 18 and can currently be streamed by Showtime subscribers on Showtime Anytime.

With Le Mans, Steve McQueen, an auto racing enthusiast, set out to make as authentic an auto racing film as possible. The result, which was credited to a director from network TV, frequent '60s Mission: Impossible episode director Lee H. Katzin, was an unconventional, existentialist and documentary-style sports flick that baffled film critics in 1971--they wanted way more melodrama than the scant amount the film preferred to give them--and was ahead of its time. The story of an introverted man who doesn't know how to do anything else, except drive fast, was essentially a Michael Mann movie long before such a thing existed. And what are most Mann movies about? Introverted men who don't know how to do anything else, except break into vaults or track down criminals.

Le Mans isn't the best auto racing film ever made--that spot belongs to the offbeat Talladega Nights ("I like to think of Jesus as a figure skater who wears like a white outfit and he does interpretive ice dances of my life's journey"). But as an auto racing film, Le Mans is more powerful and rewatchable than either the soapy and overstuffed Grand Prix--if John Frankenheimer pared that film down to just the excellently shot racing sequences, it would have been an action masterpiece--or Quentin Tarantino's favorite racing film, the similarly soapy Days of Thunder, Don Simpson's 107-minute love letter to his own coke-fueled self. The power and rewatchability of Le Mans are mostly because of what Le Mans doesn't show and what it doesn't have the characters say.


The subplot about Michael Delaney, McQueen's racer character, and his tentative friendship with the widow (Elga Andersen) of a racing rival who died during one of Delaney's racing accidents barely qualifies as a love story, but the minimal dialogue between McQueen and Andersen and the details their scenes leave out (did Delaney and the widow sleep together in his trailer?) automatically cause their subplot to be far more intriguing as off-the-race-track material than any of the off-the-track Grand Prix scenes that don't feature ahotFrançoiseHardy or an equally hot Jessica Walter. I love how all the exposition in Le Mans is delivered by a barely audible PA announcer and the film--several decades before the invention of the closed captioning option on Blu-rays and DVDs would have made it easier--deliberately makes the audience work hard to understand what the announcer's saying.

I don't even like auto racing, yet Le Mans somehow comes up with many effective ways to make me give a shit about it, whether it's keeping the dialogue to a minimum, staging the racing sequences so that they're not the "disorienting, incoherent blur of mindless action" Nathan Rabin complained about in his Dissolvereassessment of Days of Thunder or capturing remarkable footage of either the actual 24-hour Le Mans race or the onlookers that would be impossible to capture today, perhaps for insurance reasons or simply because it's not 1970. It's hard to dislike a sports flick that comes up with a shot of a spectator like my favorite shot: a young lady is too passed out from drinking to bother to pay attention to Delaney's pit crew springing into action and assisting Delaney out of his Porsche at the end of his latest shift behind the wheel.


Behind the scenes, Le Mans was such a difficult film to make: it started filming without a script; the enigmatic McQueen was at his worst behavior and was at odds with everyone from studio execs to Le Mans' original director, John Sturges, who directed McQueen in The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape; McQueen and his then-wife were cheating on each other; and a stunt driver had to have his leg amputated after an actual car crash on the set. The Le Mans shoot's endless troubles have been the subject of both a 1999 book (Michael Keyser's A French Kiss with Death) and now a documentary, Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans.

The Daily Beastcalls directors Gabriel Clarke and John McKenna's new McQueen doc "a warts-and-all portrait of a man at an unstable time in his life" and is appreciative of how the doc "doesn't look away from the people who were hurt by McQueen's actions." But the Beast isn't as enamored with the doc's overexplanatory nature, in comparison to Le Mans' not-so-explanatory nature ("We don't need to hear someone tell us that McQueen cared about where the camera was, or what shots he was going to be in, because to look at scenes from Le Mans is to immediately understand the artist's curiosity to capture action in images").



The best thing to come out of Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans has taken place outside the movie. That would be the bonus tracks on the Varèse Sarabande release of Jim Copperthwaite's ultra-solemn score to Clarke and McKenna's doc. The bonuses are highlights from Michel Legrand's occasionally treacly but otherwise vibrant and effective jazz score to Le Mans.

In 2007, Legrand's Le Mans score--it's basically Legrand in froufrou Thomas Crown Affair mode--was reissued with additional tracks by Universal France, but Varèse's treatment of the Le Mans cues isn't too shabby either. Fortunately, in this incarnation, the Le Mans cues are without the Le Mans race track sound FX that were edited into the music on the 1971 Columbia Records LP release of the Le Mans soundtrack (and then were mostly omitted by Universal France, to the delight of film score music fans who don't like hearing sound clips from movies during those movies' score albums).






"The Race, Final Laps" was cut out of the 1971 film, but it's the best and most energetic of the cues Legrand wrote for Le Mans and Varèse added to the Man & Le Mans album. It best captures Delaney's intense drive to get his team to the top, even when he himself isn't in first place, as well as the very subject of The Man & Le Mans: McQueen's ambition and desperation to make Le Mans the way he wanted, even at the cost of several friendships, a marriage, a guy's leg and perhaps his own sanity.

Natalie Morales and Natalie Morales, who would both probably have a less aggravating time on social media if one of them just added her middle initial to her name

In 2014, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof made a big deal about removing the "D." from his byline. He explained that "I don't think it buys any clarity. As far as I know there isn't a single other Nicholas Kristof anywhere in the world, so I'm unlikely to be confused with Nicholas G. Kristof or Nicholas S. Kristof III." Kristof then added, "I think in the Internet age, the middle initial conveys a formality that is a bit of a barrier to our audience. It feels a bit ostentatious, even priggish."

Sure, a middle initial is a bit stuffy-looking and Thurston Howell-esque, but while Kristof scrapped his, and another Gray Lady writer, Bruce Feiler, concurred with Kristof and implored John Q. Public to "K.O. the Q.," I went in the opposite direction and chose to add my middle initial right after my first and, so far, only published work of fiction, the short story "Sampler," came out in 2009 within the pages of the New Press graphic novel Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology. I knew, shortly before the short story was published, that the story was going to bring some extra attention to my byline, which it did do briefly in 2009, and that readers would confuse me with other Filipinos or Italians named "Jimmy Aquino," so I took a cue from William H. Macy and Michael J. Fox, who included their middle initials to differentiate themselves from other Screen Actors Guild members with the same names (in the case of the Canadian-born Fox, SAG already had an actor in America named Michael Fox). But it was too late for me to get the New Press to tack on my middle initial, so I slapped it onto my byline everywhere else when the graphic novel came out.

And I'll have to continue to include my middle initial everywhere, even in Twitter header images (but not in conversation because that would be douchey), because "Jimmy Aquino" continues to be a common Filipino name and people occasionally confuse me online with other people with the same name. People (after 2009) who always omit my middle initial whenever you mention me online, you're not fucking helping. I feel like you folks who are weirdly allergic to middle initials think I'm trying to be bougie.

My addition of my middle initial is not a bougie thing like the "J."DonaldDrumpf includes in his name because he's a cartoon character like Wile E. Coyote. I need the middle initial to differentiate myself in Google searches from other folks with the same name. Unlike Kristof, I need it because it does increase clarity.

Adding a middle initial would likely reduce the amount of bizarre tweets that Natalie Morales from The Grinder encounters on Twitter because people over there confuse her all the time with soon-to-be-former Today Show host Natalie Morales. But the Grinder cast member and former Middleman star has actually been having too much fun on Twitter mocking idiots who write mean (or pervy) tweets to her and think she's Natalie Morales from NBC News.

Because a lot of you were asking where my "I'm not on the Today show" tweets have gone, here's today's moron: pic.twitter.com/ykGTqFvEog

— Natalie Morales (@nataliemorales) January 20, 2014

So because too many people never stop to mind their surroundings like Liam Neeson was often fond of saying in Batman Begins and do some research about whoever they're trying to talk to, I also go by my DJing name of DJ AFOS if "Jimmy J. Aquino" is too much of a head-scratcher for their weird-ass brains. But in pieces of long-form writing like my most popular article on Twitter, a piece about Edgar Wright's The World's End, my byline isn't "DJ AFOS" because no one's going to take seriously a film and TV writer when he's named "DJ AFOS."

I once thought about changing my first name to "Carter," as both a reference to my parents naming me after Jimmy Carter (because he was the president when I was born), and a shout-out to Jay Z. At the time, I was going through a phase where Hov was one of my favorite MCs, but that was before he made Kingdom Come and Magna Carta Holy Grail, and, well, I haven't liked Shawn Carter as much since those two albums (and when Carter is the first name of the most boring DC Comics superhero who's not Aquaman, I'll just stick to being Jim for now).

No more Jay Z albums unless it's WTT 2

— Vann R. Newkirk II (@fivefifths) May 4, 2016

So please, don't sleep on my middle initial. Or I will have to change my first name to Carter, and nobody wants that.

Keon Enoy Munedouang (1980-2016)

If you regularly read several blogs written by Asian American authors or you're active in the Asian American blogosphere, you're going to be hearing a lot in the next few days about a reclusive political blogger who wrote under the alias of the Minority Militant. From 2008 to 2010, the Chicago-based Keon Enoy Munedouang, a Laotian American military vet who was found dead last week in Montrose Harbor at the way-too-young age of 35, was one of my favorite Asian American bloggers, whether he was criticizing self-hating Asians who stupidly undergo plastic surgery to look more white, describing right-wing moron Michelle Malkin as a pundit who is "so far right she fell off the edge of a stoop and landed in a pile of jizz after a conservative gangbang convention" or mocking old Vietnamese American Republicans who supported the presidential campaign of Arizona senator John McCain, who had no qualms about continuing to refer to the Vietnamese in public as "gooks" due to the torture he experienced as a Vietnam War P.O.W.

While Phil Yu over at the much more popular blog Angry Asian Man was trying to make "That's racist!" a thing, Keon's favorite catchphrase over at TMM had him consigning the likes of Malkin, or as I like to call her, Uncle Ruckus, and extremely cornyIron Chef America host Mark Dacascos to "the chicken coop." Ken Jeong and former Entourage regular Rex Lee would have wanted to put a foot in Keon's ass for the negative things he wrote on his blog about the comedic (and sometimes controversial in Asian American circles) characters they've played. Jo Koy, a favorite stand-up of Keon's who agreed to a selfie with Keon after one of his shows, clearly didn't know what to make of Keon and ran as far the fuck away from Keon as he could when he requested to do an interview with him for his blog. Keon's drunken appearance at a panel for a 2009 Asian American blogger conference known as BANANA, an embryonic version of the annual L.A. digital media conference that's known today as V3con, alienated some of the other panelists and people in the USC campus audience who weren't familiar with his blog.

Keon's writing wasn't for everybody. It was highly opinionated and outspoken writing (he once wrote, "I am relentless about racism. I cuss like a foul-mouthed sailor"), and he was much more outspoken than Phil, who--while there's no disputing that Phil's a legend in the Asian American blogosphere who has done a lot of good in terms of Asian American representation, speaking out against Asian-bashing and promoting the work of other Asian American authors--has never really been as enjoyably scathing or as in-depth a writer as Keon (or someone like Emily Yoshida over at The Verge or my current favorite Asian American blogger, playwright Philip W. Chung over at YOMYOMF).

I never got to meet Keon face-to-face. All of our brief conversations took place only in comments sections and via e-mail. But I was a regular part of Keon's blog. I drew and designed the header that appeared every day at the top of his posts, back when I was in the middle of an ultimately unsuccessful phase in which I attempted to become a cartoonist and graphic designer. Keon was my only graphic design client.

The logo Keon commissioned me to draw for his blog

Keon was a fan of the webcomic I drew and posted for a couple of years over on this blog. In fact, he was the only fan of the webcomic. Not even I'm a fan of my own webcomic. In fact, I've been considering deleting almost all of the webcomic's installments from my blog. They're that embarrassing. But Keon was the only person--other than my parents and an online friend of mine, current DC Comics letterer Janice Chiang--who believed in my artwork at the time, and I'll always be grateful for that. While some asshole from the discontinued Asian American Movement blog was bashing some of my Minority Militant artwork over in some now-forgotten comments section somewhere, Keon always stood by my artwork.

I never agreed with Keon's choice for his blog header though. He wanted me to draw him wearing a hoodie emblazoned with "TMM," and out of all the header options I designed for him, he liked the one with him in a hoodie the most, but I never really cared for that one. I made Keon look too much like a Jules Feiffer cartoon. A header he rejected, in which I inserted a photo of a bruised and beaten Uncle Sam, was, to me, much more effective at reflecting the pugnaciousness and candidness of Keon's writing than the header he picked.

An unused header for Keon's blog

We were fans of each other's work. Keon and I had in common an urge to put Southeast Asians at the forefront of Asian American stories instead of the Chinese American or Japanese American characters who always get to be the lead characters in those narratives, whether it was in that webcomic of mine that never really took off or a YouTube anthology show he wanted to produce and write but was never able to get off the ground. He had a lot of ideas for projects that never went anywhere. For instance, he wanted to self-publish a memoir about his time in the Navy. But that book idea, in addition to the YouTube webseries concept, never materialized because, as Byron Wong, an Asian American blogger who's one of many people who are weirdly allergic to my middle initial and was a friend of Keon's ever since their days as regulars at the memorably contentious Asian American online forum Fighting 44s, says during his remembrance of Keon, "TMM had some personal and financial issues during the last few years, but he never stopped working hard at whatever he was doing."

Keon wasn't comfortable with the spotlight, and he wanted his government name kept hidden from the blogosphere, a request I (and several others) went along with. He blotted out his own face in photos of himself and would refer to his girlfriend at the time only as "Lady Militant" on his blog. That unease about the spotlight had to be the reason for Keon's boozy appearance at USC.

Celebrities who hate to plug their TV projects or movies on talk shows often drink or do drugs to calm their nerves before they hit the couch. Harrison Ford is the most famous example of this. On Conan on TBS a few years ago, I couldn't tell if Han Solo smoked a bowl or took some E right before his vaguely hostile conversation with Conan O'Brien, but he was definitely as high as a Corellian kite. Keon was put on blast by many in the Asian American blogosphere for his incoherent behavior at the USC panel, which I didn't attend, but I understood why he was intoxicated like Ford was on Conan: public speaking can be really nerve-wracking, and Keon's way of calming his nerves and medicating that day was to drink. It's not my way of dealing with public speaking--booze is a stupid way to deal with it--but I wasn't surprised to find out that he drank that day.

"The guy from Militant Minority [sic] started off seated at the tables, added a few (mildly cogent) comments here and there, left to refill his drink, came back, moved off the stage to sit in the front row, moved back again to sit next to his friend, and then left the event entirely about an hour into it. Aside from being rude I couldn't help feeling like it was Puck-ish,"wrote Jon Yang, who wasn't referring to Puck from Shakespeare and was referring to Puck from MTV's The Real World.

The negative feedback surrounding this rare public appearance from Keon at BANANA made him feel remorseful about his behavior. I have a feeling that his embarrassment about that day, the arguments Chung says Keon got into with other Asian American bloggers and maybe the hostile comments from racist trolls in the Minority Militant comments sections--unfortunately, any time you're an Asian American blogger speaking out against racist bullshit, haters come out to play-aaaay--all led Keon to set his blog to private and later completely withdraw from the Internet. I hate how the BANANA incident became the one thing Keon was best known for in the Asian American blogosphere, rather than for the tons of enjoyably scathing posts he wrote at TMM, which are all posts that can no longer be glimpsed online due to Keon blocking out his blog, unless you type his old URL into the Wayback Machine and click through archived snapshots of his blog over there.

The Keon at BANANA wasn't the Keon I knew. That was just one small side of him. The Keon I knew was a talented writer who, despite his discomfort with the public and perhaps some mental health issues that I suspect were related to PTSD, was passionate and eloquent about giving two underrepresented groups he belonged to--working-class Southeast Asians and Asian American military vets--a voice and making them feel less alone.

Keon didn't care for both the way the Asian American characters were written as being "dickless" and the way that Clint Eastwood glamorized the racist attitude of his own character in Eastwood's 2008 white savior movie Gran Torino.

I lost touch with Keon. My last e-mail exchange with him was in 2009. "Hope you find a job soon. I'm getting my certification in teaching in March and I hope things will normalize from then on. As of now, I'm living on government loans for school," he wrote to me in that final exchange. I still haven't found that job. As for Keon, I never knew if things normalized for him after he fled the Internet.

Thirty-five is too young an age for someone to die. Military vets experience an unimaginable pain many of us will never fully understand. They've seen terrible things we don't often think about. In Rushmore, Bill Murray referred to it as being "in the shit." Pinoy rapper Bambu is another Asian American military vet who had a rough life both before and in the shit, but he managed to survive that rough life, and he's still alive and kicking, plus he has the support of his domestic partner (rapper Rocky Rivera), their son Kahlil Bayani, other rappers and fans of his music to help him get through the pain he sometimes must be feeling due to his time in the military. I'm saddened by how Keon didn't have the support system Bam is lucky to have.

The circumstances that led to Keon's death are currently unknown. I wish he overcame whatever mental health issues he was going through and became less insecure and less intimidated about continuing to take on the hostile nature of the Internet, because then he wouldn't have shut down his blog. I feel like he never really knew how much his readers enjoyed his writing. When Keon blocked out his blog, which resulted in the disappearance of past posts of his that I liked revisiting, and he turned away from his readers and never looked back, he cut himself off from a support system that might have helped in saving his life.

But I don't blame him for turning away from his readers and never looking back. The way he basically said "Bye, Felicia" to a stress-inducing and often heartless place like the Internet was kind of baller, now that I think about it. But the Asian American blogosphere became a slightly lesser place when he walked away from it. Keon's voice was unique and irreplaceable, but there are a few current Asian American personalities out there whose profane and frank voices are similar to the voice Keon left behind. Hari Kondabolu is my current favorite example of a minority militant. Frankly, I think Hari is way more skilled than Keon was at handling humor in regards to race--and laughing to keep from crying. Celebrity chef and Vice travel show host Eddie Huang may not have been as concerned with politics as Keon was back when Rich Homie Huang used to post his writing at Blogger like Keon did, but the Fresh Off the Boat author has in common with Keon a certain pugnaciousness when it comes to dealing with racist bullshit and the emasculation of Asian men. Yo, Is This Racist? podcast host Andrew Ti cusses way more than Keon did and is even more pop-culturally illiterate than Keon kind of was--I remember being amused and mildly irritated by how Keon would always erroneously refer to stand-up routines as "skits" (uh, they're not skits, they're called stand-up routines)--but whenever I see Ti slapping the shit out of the Republican Party over on Tumblr, I feel like Keon has returned to reopen the chicken coop.


Even though I was, in addition to being its logo designer, a regular reader of TMM, there are several pieces of writing from Keon I actually still haven't read, and that's how prolific and energetic a blogger Keon was from 2008 to 2010. While revisiting his blog via the Wayback Machine a few nights ago, I ran into an interview Keon did with a real-life Asian American male porn star who, surprisingly, is far from the kind of doofus I expected to see during the Q&A and has a lot more to say than "Uh, did somebody order a pizza?" A Q&A with an adult film star is the type of blog post you'd never see over at the more family-friendly Angry Asian Man. It was also a TMM post I never read before. It was as if Keon didn't die and he was back in my life again.

"I get angry when I see Asian males being ridiculed in media, and it bothers me when I see so many Asian women with white guys while we never see it the other way around. It bothers me not because I have anything against interracial dating but because I know it's happening for the wrong stereotypical and racist reasons. The only way anything is going to change is we have to raise awareness of the issues in American media and we have to be willing to support those who are out there fighting for our image," said the porn star, who's known professionally as Hung Lo, to Keon.

After Hung Lo discusses his urge to fight the countless ways Asian men are ridiculed, whether in the adult film industry or outside of it, Keon's reply to Hung Lo beautifully sums up the defiant and humorous--as well as much-missed and irreplaceable--attitude of TMM.

"Are you guys hiring?"

The Star Wars franchise had quite an artistic comeback last winter. Not everyone was over the moon of Yavin about The Force Awakens, but when even my former colleague Richard von Busack--the Metro Newspapers film critic who prefers the Bond movies and Alexander Salkind's Superman movies over the Star Wars franchise as '70s and '80s tentpole entertainment and has found the Star Wars flicks to be too much like bad '70s Sid and Marty Krofft kids' shows--considered parts of The Force Awakens to be genuinely moving and more akin to something like Robin and Marian rather than a Krofft show, you know it's an above-average Star Wars installment.

I found The Force Awakens to be satisfying as well, even though the film totally wasted Gwendoline Christie (Game of Thrones reduced her screen time as Brienne of Tarth last season for this, a role where she never says anything memorable and never takes off her helmet?) and Raid stars Yayan Ruhian and Iko Uwais. You don't hire Mad Dog and Rama to just stand around and become people-shaped snacks for a giant space monster two minutes later. You hire them to smash people's noggins in with their knees and break motherfuckers' legs with their bare hands.

Now it's Star Trek's turn to experience an artistic comeback as a sci-fi multimedia franchise after a major low point, and the timing for its potential comeback is perfect because 2016 marks the 50th anniversary of the original Star Trek's premiere on NBC. I don't know why Paramount doesn't acknowledge 1964 as Star Trek's birth year: that was when Lucille Ball, who was breaking ground as the female head of an indie TV studio, took a chance on Star Trek, and Ball's Desilu studio, writer/producer Gene Roddenberry and director Robert Butler began filming "The Cage," the first of two pilot episodes for Star Trek. So Star Trek is actually 52 years old, but who's counting--aside from Poindexter in a basement somewhere in Yonkers, who claims to be the world's only expert on the exact time and date when Roddenberry first started typing up the "Cage" writer's bible about "Captain Robert M. April"?

Paramount has two major Star Trek projects on the horizon: Justin Lin's Star Trek Beyond in July and an hour-long Star Trek anthology show from Hannibal showrunner Bryan Fuller for the CBS All Access streaming service in 2017. I'm a fan of the episodes Lin directed for Community and the Lin movies Better Luck Tomorrow and Fast Five, so I have some faith that Star Trek Beyond won't be atrocious, especially when--in addition to a director who grew up watching the original Star Trek on KCOP and isn't going to turn Trek into godawful 9/11 truther propaganda--the threequel is co-written by cast member Simon Pegg, whose past writing credits include the terrific Cornetto trilogy. The current J.J. Abrams-produced Trek movies appear to be echoing the path of the Mission: Impossible movies: the first one is a highly entertaining action flick, unless you're a hardcore fan of the source material who can't stand the changes that have been made to the material; the totally dumbed-down second one sucks ass; and the threequel appears to be a soft reboot after nobody--not even a lot of the more casual fans of the franchise--would admit to liking the second one, despite the second one making a shitload of money.

Star Trek Beyond (Photo source: Entertain the Idea)

But I'm more enthusiastic about Trek's return to TV--the medium where Trek can be as cerebral as it wants to be and it doesn't have to dumb itself down in order to satisfy international audiences, who have always been indifferent to Trek movies--because Nicholas Meyer, the director of two of the best Trek flicks, The Wrath of Khan and The Undiscovered Country, is attached to the project. Also, Fuller--who wrote for both Deep Space Nine and Voyager before going on to create several short-lived and weird but enjoyable shows and envisioning, as he was working on those cult favorites, a nicely progressive take on Trek in which Angela Bassett would get to be the captain and Rosario Dawson would be her first officer--is the perfect person to be at the helm.

I like three of the seven Star Wars movies and Genndy Tartakovsky's Star Wars: Clone Wars animated shorts, but my heart belongs to Trek because at its best, Trek has a lot more on its mind than just action sequences and space battles, and it cast Asian actors in major, non-stereotypical roles, long before Star Wars did the same this year when it cast newcomer Kelly Marie Tran in a leading role for the eighth installment. Though I like Trek slightly more than Wars, I don't believe in pitting these two sci-fi franchises--or any other pair of sci-fi franchises--against each other as if they're Drake and Meek Mill, which is why I've rolled my eyes when Scrubs star Donald Faison, a Wars nerd, publicly bashes Trek to create beef between the Wars contingent and the Trek heads, or when Kevin Church, a writer who runs They Boldly Went, a Tumblr about the '60s Trek, uses his Tumblr to bash Doctor Who. A person can like both Wars and Trek at the same time (or Trek and Who at the same time), just like how someone doesn't have to be a Nas person or a Jay Z person. Can't a motherfucker be both? Nas and Hov are about the same quality-wise. They've both had the same amount of above-average material and lousy material. The same is true about Wars and Trek.

That being said, Trek, its first three spinoffs and nine of its first 10 films are also home to some of the ugliest futuristic clothes ever stitched together in Hollywood (the outlier out of the 10 films is First Contact, which marked the first time when, thanks to Deborah Everton, the costume designer for The Craft, Trek's ideas of futuristic attire looked sensible and GQ-ish for a change and they didn't suck). Trek costume designer William Ware Theiss' offbeat work on the '60s show isn't totally ugly. I'm a red-blooded male--I like looking at the female guest stars slinking around in skin-baring costumes created by Theiss. Those costumes are the highlights of Theiss' work. But the uniform tops Theiss designed for Starfleet, especially the male officers, don't look like uniform tops made for a futuristic space Navy. They look more like softball ringer T-shirts. I keep expecting to see Spock run out a bunt. The brightly colored Starfleet uniforms were intended to capitalize on the rise of color TV and showcase NBC's visual advances as the self-proclaimed "Full Color Network," but in 2016, the cartoony and cheap-looking velour shirts just look strange and can occasionally take attention away from the drama during a dead-serious, non-campy and exemplary episode like "Balance of Terror."

At least the '60s uniforms aren't as hideous as costume designer Robert Fletcher's Starfleet uniform redesigns in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Sure, it's great that female officers finally got to wear pants again, 13 years after "The Corbomite Maneuver" threw away their pants and required them to wear only miniskirts, but otherwise, the Star Trek: TMP outfits are the ugliest clothes in all of Trek. Entertainment Weekly's Darren Franich, who's been reassessing each of the Trek movies because of the franchise's 50th anniversary, came up with a great description for the epic fail that was the TMP revamp of both the uniforms and the Enterprise set design color schemes: the beige, gray, light brown and off-white clothes look like furniture, and the furniture looks like clothes.



Gene Roddenberry wanted no traces of militarism in the TMP uniforms, which doesn't make much sense because then they end up not looking like uniforms anymore. The result of Roddenberry's demands was pajamas straight out of a creepy commune instead of a futuristic space Navy.

It's interesting how the worst uniforms in Trek history were followed by the best: for The Wrath of Khan, Fletcher recolored and heavily tweaked his own much-maligned TMP uniforms, and without Roddenberry in charge anymore, he finally made the uniforms actually look like uniforms. The off-duty clothes weren't as good though--those costumes looked as if Botany 500 butt-fucked Space: 1999, especially when Dr. McCoy complemented his beige Roger Moore safari outfit with a Mr. Furley ascot during the Genesis trilogy.

(Photo source: Bones, buckle up!)

The off-duty (or civilian) outfits continued to uglify when Star Trek: The Next Generation came along, and Theiss returned to Trek to stick Wesley Crusher in drippy Cosby sweaters no ordinary teen would ever be caught dead in. Wesley's duds are the kind of futuristic fashion that's about as hip as the music of black Republican rapper Aspiring Mogul--or as hip as that time when Rick Berman, perhaps influenced by Armageddon and its Diane Warren-penned Aerosmith theme, thought it would be a good idea to modernize the music of Trek during the Enterprise opening titles by rehashing Rod Stewart's sappy, Diane Warren-penned theme from Patch Adams. Theiss also gave Starfleet a fashion makeover that hearkened back to the comic strip colors of the '60s, but instead of velour softball tees, he outfitted the officers this time in spandex bobsled jumpsuits. Costume designer Robert Blackman later had to revamp the Next Generation uniforms and replace the tight-fitting spandex suits with two-piece wool costumes in order to put an end to some back problems Patrick Stewart developed from looking like an Albanian bobsledder at the Winter Olympics. Blackman's modifications to the Theiss design were also intended to make the uniforms look more noble and heroic, and if a cast member's waistline started to expand due to either pregnancy or too many plates of gagh from the craft services table in between takes, a two-piece wool outfit would be able to make it look somewhat flattering, unlike Buddy Love's favorite fabric.

Despite their cheesiness, the Theiss uniforms aren't so awful-looking that they completely ruin the storytelling during Trek, and it's easy to see why Trek fans--particularly those who, unlike me, don't care that psychedelic-era Kirk and Spock look like softball jocks instead of space Navy men--are in love with the Theiss uniforms, whether those unis are from the original Trek or The Next Generation: the simplicity of the Theiss designs makes the costumes easy to recreate when they cosplay as their favorite characters. Just grab a black undershirt and a bright yellow sweatshirt, and you're automatically Kirk or Sulu, ready to face the universe or whatever photon torpedoes the Klingons hurl at you.

Anyone can easily look like they serve in Starfleet, so that's why I'm amused and, like Spock would say, fascinated by online photos of people who dress like characters from one of my favorite sci-fi franchises without realizing they look like them. Ever since I stumbled into a 2009 photo of a passenger in a Hong Kong train who looked like he was promoting the release of J.J. Abrams' first Trek movie, I've been collecting pics of accidental Trek cosplay.



Trek's 50th anniversary means it's the perfect time for me to take those pics of accidental Trek cosplay that I've found and compile them on Tumblr, as well as track down a few new ones to add to my new Tumblr, which I'm calling Accidental Star Trek Cosplay. Preppies and grandmas aren't the only folks who dress like they're being chased around space by Borg cubes. A lot of news anchors and meteorologists appear to be into accidental Trek cosplay as well.

Hmm, I wonder why no one's accidentally cosplaying as the characters during their TMP phase. I guess puke-colored unitards that look like furniture are passé this century.


While Accidental Star Trek Cosplay warps into the fashion frontier during the 50th anniversary, here's an oldie but goodie from June 20, 2014, in which I looked at a fan-made movie trailer that's not exactly an Honest Trailer for the horribly dressed TMP, but like what Jamie Lee Curtis did to a dorky-looking black dress with nothing more than her bare hands in True Lies, it stylishly trims the tedious 1979 movie down to just a few of its best parts.

A fan-made Star Trek: The Motion Picture trailer from 2013 does a better job of selling Robert Wise's mixed bag of a film than the original 1979 trailers did

(Photo source: My Star Trek Scrapbook)

Mission Log is an excellent Star Trek podcast I've previously written about here and more recently here. Hosts Ken Ray and John Champion have undertaken an ambitious mission: to analyze every single episode of Star Trek and its TV and movie spinoffs, from 1965 to 2005 (I'm not sure if they'll reach 2009 and 2013, but I already know bits and pieces of what Ray thinks of 2013, and I assume a lot of it is going to be him saying, "Orciiiiiiii!").

The two Star Trek fans want to find out which older Trek episodes stand the test of time, especially in the age of both the antihero on cable and more sophisticated sci-fi shows like former Deep Space Nine writer Ronald D. Moore's Battlestar Galactica, former DS9 writer Ira Steven Behr's much-missed creation Alphas and the current BBC America hit Orphan Black. Anyone who either currently writes for TV or is, like me, considering transitioning to that kind of career ought to listen to Mission Log. The audience gets to learn a lot from Ray and Champion about the things episodic TV from any era does effectively and the things episodic TV--especially TV in the '60s, long before the game-changing, novelistic Hill Street Blues or Game of Thrones--didn't do so effectively. For instance, if the '60s Trek were made for TV today, Edith Keeler's death at the end of "The City on the Edge of Forever" would have deeply affected Kirk's character for the rest of the series, and exploring his grief and guilt over Edith's death would have been a much better move than how the '60s Trek handled her death afterward, and that was to oddly brush Edith aside and completely forget about her as if she were yet another dead Cartwright bride.

Ray and Champion have reached the '80s Trek feature films by this point, and after they did their analysis of Robert Wise's Star Trek: The Motion Picture last week (Ray doesn't think the 1979 film stands the test of time, while Champion thinks it still does), a Mission Log listener from Norcross, Georgia named Alex Bales posted on the podcast's Facebook wall a fan-made TMP trailer he produced. Unless it's made by the people behind the Screen Junkies channel's Honest Trailers series or Ivan Guerrero, I don't care for fan-made movie trailers, but Bales' trailer is a rare fan-made trailer I actually like--and even more so than the 1979 film itself.



TMP is a mixed bag of a film. It's a rehash of concepts from both the 1967 Trek episode "The Changeling" and 2001: A Space Odyssey that were better executed in those '60s productions. TMP ripped off 2001's "evolution into a superior life form" finale (the film even recruited 2001 visual FX genius Douglas Trumbull, who was also involved with Close Encounters, a smash hit that, along with the success of Star Wars, spurred Paramount to rush a Trek feature film into production). I get that Wise and Gene Roddenberry wanted to make the last great old-fashioned space epic (TMP was one of the last Hollywood epics that opened with an overture before flashing the studio logo), and while I kind of appreciate how TMP chose to emulate the contemplative and moody 2001 instead of the then-frequently duplicated Star Wars, plopping crowd-pleasing heroes like Kirk and Spock and quippy secondary characters like McCoy and Scotty into the clinical tone of 2001 is like asking Kendrick Lamar to rhyme over polka music. It's not going to work.

We want to see Kirk, Spock and McCoy wittily sniping at each other and debating over serious ethical dilemmas or fighting their way out of trouble like they frequently did on the '60s show (and would later frequently do in Nicholas Meyer's superior Trek films). We don't want to see them gawking silently for 15 minutes at pothead-friendly laser light show FX. Even Wise's previous '70s sci-fi procedural, the equally clinically toned but much superior Andromeda Strain, had more humor and personality than this film, McCoy snarking about Spock being "warm and sociable as ever" aside.

Scottish Daily Dot writer Gavia Baker-Whitelaw runs Hello, Tailor!, a blog that analyzes costume design in geek-friendly movies ranging from TMP to the Marvel Cinematic Universe blockbusters, and in a biting Hello, Tailor! critique of TMP costume designer Robert Fletcher's ugly Starfleet uniform redesigns that's a must-read, she summed up TMP best. She called it "a three-hour screensaver interspersed with shots of William Shatner emoting into the middle distance."

Watching Bales' well-edited fan-made trailer made me notice that Paramount and whatever trailer house it hired in 1979 had no idea how to work around the weak material of this three-hour screensaver and market the film effectively, as evidenced in its Orson Welles-narrated teaser trailer and final trailer. Sure, the film wasn't finished and Jerry Goldsmith's incredible score--the strongest element of TMP--hadn't been recorded yet when the trailer house worked on the teaser, so they didn't have much footage to choose from. But aside from that still-amazing-looking model of the refitted Enterprise in drydock, they chose the least interesting footage--and the least enticing score music, some atonal, THX Deep Note-style synth piece.



Good God, Lemon, the Irwin Allen disaster flick music and the synth church organ cue in the final trailer are even worse than the THX Flat Note. And the announcer who's not Charles Foster Kane is the worst announcer in an illustrious history of Trek trailer and promo announcers that's included Welles, Hal Douglas, Christopher Plummer, Ernie "The Loooove Boat" Anderson, Don LaFontaine and Phil Terrence. The announcer in the final trailer has all the gravitas of Derek from Teenagers from Outer Space. I think maybe it is actually Derek from Teenagers from Outer Space.



It's too bad Goldsmith's score wasn't completed at the time because that would have helped the dully narrated final trailer immensely, like how "Leaving Drydock" and "Ilia's Theme" added so much awe to TMP's Welles-narrated TV spots, which were a vast improvement over the two trailers (and were remastered in 2012 by TMP"Director's Edition" visual FX supervisor Daren R. Dochterman, which explains why these TV spots from 1979 look as good as Betsy Russell and Marisa Tomei). Despite the appropriate gravitas of Welles during the teaser, neither trailer would make me want to watch the film, whereas Bales' trailer does.







What Bales gets right that the 1979 trailer house behind the two trailers didn't is emotionally involving the viewers. He accomplishes that by 1) using "What Do You See?," a powerful--without being overbearing--John Murphy score cue from a sci-fi film I haven't seen yet (and I'm kicking myself for not having seen it), Danny Boyle's Sunshine; 2) choosing the perfect clips to go with the Murphy score cue; and 3) focusing on the best and most dramatically satisfying part of TMP's otherwise derivative and uninvolving story (and it's dramatically satisfying only during the "Director's Edition" that was assembled for DVD in 2001 and, unfortunately, hasn't been remastered for Blu-ray). That part would have to be Spock's lifelong inner conflict over his biracial heritage and his search for some sort of meaning in his life, which mirrors the V'Ger entity's search for its creator (Spock's arc also contains my favorite sequence in the film and the one lengthy V'Ger FX sequence that works, the genuinely gripping "Spock walk" sequence). Bales' trailer embodies the emotional depth that Baker-Whitelaw said was what "made the original Star Trek series so compelling" and was too absent for her tastes during TMP.

Is it me or does late '70s movie trailer making just really suck, 1979 Alien teaser trailers aside? The cluelessness of Paramount and TMP's trailer house reminds me of Warner Bros. Family Entertainment's cluelessness when they had to market Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, an above-average 1993 animated film that was understandably difficult to market because it was too adult for kids and too kiddie for adults who were immune to the pleasures of Batman: The Animated Series. But instead of rolling up their sleeves and pulling a Don Draper/Peggy Olson all-nighter to tackle this marketing dilemma, WBFE's ad department came up with the laziest written copy for a Batman movie marketing campaign ever: "America's most exciting and legendary motion picture hero comes to the screen like you've never seen him before, in an all-new, larger-than-life feature film." Why so tedious?

(Photo source: The Propstop)

Though he first posted the fan-made trailer in 2013, Bales looks as if he took a cue from last month's "9 (Short) Storytelling Tips from a Master of Movie Trailers." To get some advice on how to be effective at modern movie trailer making, Co.Create turned to John Long, co-founder of Buddha Jones, the trailer house behind Muppets Most Wanted's Golden Trailer Award-winning "Across the Internet" TV spot, the first TV spot for a movie that's actually made me laugh out loud in ages. One of Long's tips is "you have to hook people immediately whether it's a great piece of dialogue between characters, an unexpected jolt of some kind or a wonderful piece of music. Then, you need to escalate." That's exactly what Bales does: hooking the viewer with both Spock's "Why am I here?" line and "What Do You See?" and then escalating. The result is a trailer that makes TMP appear to be a better film than the three-hour screensaver it actually is.

The cast and crew of Bob's Burgers celebrated the show's 100th episode with a cake that was cut by the perfect person to be seen handling such a ceremony: samurai movie fan Louise Belcher, a.k.a. Kristen Schaal. (Photo source:The Hollywood Reporter)

The complete fifth season of Bob's Burgers--a show that wrapped up its sixth season on Fox earlier this week with the airing of its 100th episode, a story that entertainingly revisits what has to be the core of Bob's Burgers, Bob's love for his family, in spite of how they frequently get in the way of his attempts at notoriety as a chef--finally became streamable on Netflix on April 1. From December 5, 2014, here's a repost of my discussion of one of my favorite fifth-season Bob's Burgers episodes, "Best Burger," an episode that centers on both the aforementioned core of Bob's Burgers and the making of one of Bob's titular burgers. Speaking of the art of making burgers, at about the same time as Netflix's addition of the fifth season, Universe Publishing finally released The Bob's Burgers Burger Book: Real Recipes for Joke Burgers, a cookbook by Cole Bowden, a chef and Bob's Burgers fan I mentioned in my "Best Burger" discussion. The new book is co-written by Bob's Burgers creator Loren Bouchard and is a compilation of recipes Bowden posted on his blog The Bob's Burger Experiment.

Of all the fictional restaurants I wish would exist, I would probably most want to sample a burger made by the titular restaurant on Bob's Burgers--nominated this week, by the way, for two Annie Animation Awards, including Best Series--because of the creativity Bob brings to the Burgers of the Day that he lists on his restaurant chalkboard. I'd be most interested in the Roquefort Files Burger--awesome pun--or the Bruschetta-bout It Burger, a rare burger that actually wasn't on Bob's chalkboard.

I'm not the only one who wishes Bob's Burgers were a real restaurant: several viewers have become inspired by the show and have posted their attempts to make the show's gourmet burgers, with the most notable example being Cole Bowden of The Bob's Burger Experiment. In "Best Burger," Bob introduces the Bet It All on Black Garlic Burger while competing in a local food festival's burger-tasting contest--by the way, Bowden posted that he's now working on the recipe for that one--and even though I'm not exactly a fan of garlic (and no, I'm not a vampire), I'm dying to try the black garlic burger, based on how much enjoyment the animators clearly had in animating and at one point, slo-moing the scenes where Bob and Linda prepare the meal on-stage.


This Bob's Burgers episode is a good example of how we long for not just the Belchers' restaurant to be real--we also want the food community within the show's unnamed East Coast seaside town to exist as well. In the funniest sequence during "Best Burger," Gene--whose ADHD can be detrimental to others like his dad, especially when he has to win a burger contest he drunkenly signed up for--attempts to make up for all his preceding screw-ups in "Best Burger" by delivering to Bob the missing bulb of black garlic he needs for his contest entry, and he's forced to ignore one food festival temptation after another in order to make it to Bob on time. An agonized Gene must race past free cupcake-flavored ice cream served on a waffle, as well as 10-for-$1 pizza tacos, "robot cake" and the ultimate culinary temptation, a hot fudge car wash, which sounds like an Urban Dictionary sex act. Fuck Brigadoon. Any food community that's got a hot fudge car wash is a more enticing spot than Brigadoon.

Written by Mike Benner, "Best Burger" is a solid Bob/Gene story and acts as sort of a companion piece to both "Beefsquatch," in which Bob seethed over an ape-masked Gene taking attention away from his cooking segments on TV, and "O.T. the Outside Toilet," which entertainingly intertwined sweetness with absurdity when Bob related to Gene the difficulty of looking after either a kid or a pet ("When you were a baby and I was watching you, you ate a fern, and you could have died, but you didn't"). Gene's most endearing quality is his attachment to his Casio keyboard and its wacky sound FX, something series creator Loren Bouchard lifted from his own childhood. That's probably about it in terms of endearing qualities for Gene. He's often the show's most obnoxious character--his shoutiness and attention-seeking childishness both sort of make me understand why some Bob's Burgers haters can't get past his (or Louise's) shoutiness to fully embrace the show--but "Best Burger" gives the character a chance to redeem himself via the aforementioned race against both time and hot fudge car washes.

However, this Gene episode is stolen by Kumail Nanjiani as affable Pakistani celebrity chef Skip Marooch and Thomas Lennon at his Ryan Seacrest-iest as smooth-talking local TV personality Chuck Charles, who emcees the contest and is still bitter over losing his morning talk show due to the Belchers' on-air antics in "Beefsquatch." He keeps blaming Bob for getting him fired and forgets that Linda's boob flash on live TV (in order to stop Bob and Gene from fighting) was what actually got him fired. I suspect Chuck doesn't blame Linda because he got to see her tits.


Chuck's appeared twice before on Bob's Burgers, but in the scenes where Chuck doesn't even bother to hide his disdain for Bob and barely listens to anything he says, Lennon--even more so than in his other guest shots as Chuck--really nails the smugness of these local news personalities who think they're hot shit in their mid-sized TV markets and who care more about how they look on camera than about doing any actual research or being a competent journalist. We've most recently seen that type of not-very-bright local news personality in the viral clip of an awkward Denver morning show interview with Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader (who, interestingly, reprises his role as Wonder Wharf worker--and now pedicab driver--Mickey in "Best Burger"). While promoting the release of their Sundance hit The Skeleton Twins from a press junket room in another city, the two SNL alums collapsed into laughter because their interviewer referred to what he mistakenly thought was a nude scene Wiig did in The Skeleton Twins, which led to the interviewer admitting that he never saw the film. Way to do your research, Denver.

Bound-to-be-viral local TV fails that bring to mind Wiig and Hader's incompetent interviewer are a form of shtick Bob's Burgers does well, in addition to the usual puns and accidental double entendres. "Best Burger" is full of moments about how sexual a lot of descriptions of either the act of eating food or the act of cooking often sound. One of my favorite of these double entendres is Chuck ending the contest with "Time's up! Hands off your meat, chefs." But what I like most about "Best Burger" is the little win Bob gets despite losing the contest. Think of it as the antithesis of "Family Fracas," which many Bob's Burgers fans hated because of how badly Bob got screwed over by his enemies in that episode. An even more affecting moment than Bob trying to tell Gene that "I love you and I love who you are" (which, of course, gets interrupted by Gene's ADHD) is Skip standing in line with a bunch of other curious foodies outside Bob's Burgers and wanting to try out Bob's black garlic burger, even though his Pomegranate and Green Chili Chutney Burger defeated Bob's burger in the contest.

It's affecting because Bob doesn't get to win so often on the show, not even during a competition that's totally in his wheelhouse, like the burger contest, and the sight of this competitor--who's also a chef he respects--suddenly wanting to sample one of his creations is somehow a greater victory than any trophy he could receive, whether it's the contest's burger-shaped trophy or outside the universe of the show, the two Annie Awards that Bob's Burgers is now up for. Sometimes, a trophy is just a trophy.


Other memorable quotes:
* Skip, referring to his grandmother: "She always told me, 'Put spice on everything!' She also said, 'I hate Mondays.' But she never got credit for that."
Chuck: "[Laughs with Skip.] I would love to meet her."
Skip: "Aw... too late."
Chuck: "Ooh."

* Bob: "It's made with black garlic. Uh, it's a fermented garlic. It comes from Korea."
Chuck: "Don't blame Korea for your stupid burger, Bob. Not fair to them or burgers."
Bob: "Uh, I'm not blaming them--"
Chuck: "The Stupid Black Garlic Burger! Put it up on screen."

* "A no is just a yes upside down."

* "Never trust a boy with a skateboard. They're too fast."


* "This has exquisite mouth feel." The animation for the burger judge's tongue as he wraps that tongue around the words "mouth feel" is hilariously creepy. Mike Benner tweeted that the creepy judge was voiced by Andy Daly. The star of the very funny Comedy Central show Review with Forrest MacNeil also voiced the Belcher kid-hating specialty food store owner, whose bulb of black garlic gets stolen by Louise to replace the one Gene accidentally smushed. (By the way, if you haven't watched the first season of Review yet, stream it immediately. Review is as addictive as the coke Daly's title character gets himself hooked on in the first episode.)

* Bob: "You want to try my burger?"
Skip: "Yeah, I smelt it, and now I want you to dealt it, into my mouth."

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. Stream "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," my one-hour mix of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, right now.



So when Archer's seventh season opened with a dead Archer lying in the pool a laSunset Boulevard, I was expecting the spy-turned-P.I.'s demise to turn out to be a fakeout. Then when Archer's deranged co-worker Krieger was later seen putting the finishing touches on his robot doubles of all the Figgis Agency employees, I suspected the Archerbot would be the corpse in that pool. "Deadly Velvet: Part II"--the conclusion of an ambitious season that took a few more chances storytelling-wise than even the similarly ambitious "Archer Vice" arc did and was largely successful--totally proved me wrong. I didn't expect Archer creator Adam Reed to go through with it and actually kill off the title character instead of placing the Archerbot in the pool and letting the real Archer go scot-free.

Reed's commitment to not scamming the audience (I'm relieved that he didn't go for the sucker's move of saying the body belonged to a clone or an imposter wearing Archer's face) is admirable. But we all know that in a spy-fi universe where mortally wounded men live on as cyborgs and Nazi scientists get married to sentient holograms, Archer's death won't hold, unless FX cancels the show. Right now, the low-rated Archer's future on FX looks kind of iffy because the network hasn't renewed it yet. But if FX does renew the show, our favorite immature P.I. with a weird love for Shazam! (the '70s TV show, not the app) will be back to pulling voicemail pranks and pestering Cyril in no time.

So killing off Archer like that is kind of pointless, especially in an increasingly repetitive year of TV that's been overloaded with character deaths and death fakeouts to keep shows from losing their buzz on social media, and if an eighth season does take place, his murder at the hands of femme fatale Veronica Deane would lose much of its impact because there's no way the show would go on without H. Jon Benjamin and with Malory and A.J. being the only Archers around. But Archer's death gives Jessica Walter's character more to do than just deliver her usual pithy insults--so she does care about her son, even though it never appears to be that way--and it results in Walter becoming the MVP of the finale. Walter also gets the finale's biggest laugh when her pop-culturally illiterate character--whose cluelessness about the obscure pop culture (or literary) references her son, Pam, Cheryl and Krieger are so fond of dropping on the regular appears to have been lifted from Walter's real-life cluelessness about such references--hears the term "Turing test" for the first time and wonders if the term comes from "Star War." And I especially like how Archer's sexual attraction to the 50-year-old movie star, which contains disgusting Freudian overtones, literally became the death of him. His infatuation with Veronica didn't just destroy his relationship with Lana. It also ended his life. The show's character designers (including Chi Duong, whose Archer character designs can be glimpsed on her Tumblr, which she named Mochi Baby) further added to the grossness of Archer's Freudian infatuation by interestingly making Veronica closely resemble Walter when she starred in Grand Prix.



The villains on Archer have ranged from forgettable to perfectly cast (like when Timothy Olyphant was the highlight of an Archer episode that some have viewed as homophobic or when Jon Hamm guest-starred in the role of Captain Murphy, an old character from Reed and Matt Thompson's Sealab 2021). Those characters have never really been the highlights of Archer, but thanks to both the season-long insurance scam that she orchestrated behind the scenes and the consequences of that scam, Veronica marks the first time that an Archer villain has been truly formidable and intriguing. Plus Reed and Thompson recruited a superb performer to voice Veronica and bring her to noirish life this season: Mary McDonald-Lewis. Her name won't mean much to viewers who pay very little attention to cartoon voice actors, but to us '80s kids who grew up watching G.I. Joe, she's like an old friend. McDonald-Lewis was the voice of G.I. Joe heroine Lady Jaye. So Archer was killed by Lady Jaye.

And maybe FX as well--if it goes all Red Wedding on us like ABC and Fox did this spring.

(Photo source: RogerEbert.com)

I was too young to catch the late Muhammad Ali in his prime as a boxer and civil rights activist. So it wasn't until the 1996 release of When We Were Kings, Leon Gast and Taylor Hackford's Oscar-winning documentary about the lead-up to Ali's 1974 victory over George Foreman at the Rumble in the Jungle in Zaire, when I started to understand why from the '60s to the early '80s, the world was captivated by this former athlete whom teenage In Living Color viewers like myself knew only as a lethargic roach spray pitchman.

The nicely edited doc caused me to be won over by both Ali's sense of humor--which remained a part of his personality even during his weakened state due to Parkinson's disease, like when he pretended to doze off in the middle of David Frost's 2002 interview with him--and his activism, particularly the brave stand he took against the Vietnam War, which cost him his heavyweight title and his boxing license. He once amazingly said, "Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No, I'm not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over."



Also noteworthy for featuring "Rumble in the Jungle," a catchy original theme song that united the Fugees, Busta Rhymes and A Tribe Called Quest, one of whose members was another beloved African American figure who died this year, Phife Dawg (2016 can go fuck itself), the stirring When We Were Kings remains one of my favorite movies from the '90s. But When We Were Kings suffers from something San Francisco Bay Guardian columnist Johnny Ray Huston criticized Gast and Hackford for at the time of the doc's release--Huston was the only writer I saw point this out back then--and that flaw is devoting too much of its running time to George Plimpton and Norman Mailer doing what's known today as whitesplaining both Ali and a moment of worldwide black pride like the Rumble in the Jungle. Huston's attitude was like "Who gives a fuck what these old white men think, especially when a black perspective would be the perfect one to recall these moments?" He had a point there.

Gast's fascinating archival footage of the G.O.A.T. in his prime more beautifully conveys the speed, grace and brash personality of Ali than any of the talking-head segments Hackford shot in the '90s with Mailer, whose cringeworthy black guy voice while impersonating the boxing legend keeps reminding me of Wyatt Cenac's anecdote about how an improv session between him, another black comic and the late Robin Williams went from awesome to mildly uncomfortable when Williams started trotting out his clichéd black guy voice in front of them. Moments of interminable whitesplaining aside, When We Were Kings is a rare doc that deserves to be seen at least once in a theater with an audience, just to hear how other viewers react to Ali's one-liners, the trash-talking mind games he subjected his rivals to outside the ring and his rapport with his youngest fans.


While other heavyweight boxers at the time tended to be either glum or inarticulate, Ali knew how to charm a crowd. He was the ultimate boxer-as-rock-star. The 1997 theater audience I saw When We Were Kings with wound up cheering for Ali or enjoying his spontaneous antics as if it were 1974 again. That's how charismatic he was. The crowd gets turnt up even when it's just archival footage of him interacting with the press.

"I couldn't stand the Michael Mann film Ali starring Will Smith... The film's great flaw is the fact that no one can really play Muhammad Ali except for Muhammad Ali,"wroteNation sports columnist Dave Zirin in 2013. "That is why Muhammad Ali has always been served better by documentaries than dramatic films."

(.GIF source: Muhammad Ali - The Greatest)

And that is why after Ali's death from respiratory problems last Friday, I marathoned for the rest of the weekend a bunch of docs about Ali instead of watching either Mann's beautifully shot but hugely flawed (and stolen by Jamie Foxx as Drew "Bundini" Brown) biopic on HBO Go or 1977's The Greatest, a much less beautifully shot and much more stilted biopic where Ali stars as himself, but, as Zirin noted, "it was a disaster precisely because the wicked improvisation that marked both his style of speech and boxing were [sic] thuddingly absent." Ali's passing makes you eager to revisit the real, unscripted Ali on film, not the Hollywood versions of Ali like Smith's faithful and respectful but also overly mopey (which isn't really Smith's fault--the mopiness is due to Mann's propensity for brooding and largely humorless male lead characters, outside of Dennis Farina on Crime Story and Al Pacino in Heat) recreation of Ali.

My marathoning of all these Ali docs I highly recommend has made me realize there will probably never be another sports figure as simultaneously entertaining and humane as the Greatest was (although he wasn't so humane towards the late Joe Frazier, calling him an Uncle Tom despite the fact that Frazier actually vouched for the reinstatement of Ali's boxing license, but we'll just consider that a rare slip-up by Ali). In the world of hoops, current Oakland hero Steph Curry could be another Ali, but it's too early to tell. And for a while, to us Filipino Americans, it looked like Manny Pacquiao was going to be our humble Pinoy superhero who would make us even more proud to be Filipino because of his heroism in the ring, but then Pacquiao had to open his mouth about same-sex marriage, and he went from being a kindly Ali type to the embarrassing drunk uncle at the merienda table who should really shut the fuck up about politics.


The boxing world, which is currently being eclipsed in popularity by MMA fighting (another sport that, like boxing, has just lost one of its black fighters: Kimbo Slice, the guy whom Tracy Morgan memorably said should be President Obama's Secretary of Defense on Late Night with Conan O'Brien), needs more humane Ali types and less ignorant types like Pacquiao. That's why Ali's passing is a huge loss for boxing. It's also a huge loss for Islam. It loses one of its most eloquent voices in terms of speaking out against the stereotyping of Muslims as terrorists, which has intensified again ever since Donald Drumpf started persecuting them as part of his Penguin-running-for-mayor-ish presidential campaign.

Ali's earlier allegiance to the Nation of Islam (an offshoot of traditional Islam) and the way that Ali's anti-war activism stemmed from his faith are deftly explored in director Bill Siegel's 2013 doc The Trials of Muhammad Ali, which is now streaming on Hulu. Zirin is right about the Siegel doc's ability to communicate with nuance Ali's journey of rebellion against racism and war. This is the film to see if you've always been curious about Ali's activist side, the allure Ali saw in the Nation of Islam (it provided the former Cassius Clay with a way to become empowered as a black man, right when he was starting to question both Eurocentricism and mainstream America's bizarre preferences for white over black in everything from Christianity to nursery rhymes) and the career sacrifices Ali made due to opting to be a conscientious objector.



Despite his ability to pulverize contenders in the ring, Ali was a pacifist who resisted the draft because the Vietnam War went against everything Islam had taught him about relating to others who weren't his boxing rivals. Even as early as the late '60s, Ali was fighting against Islamophobic misconceptions of Muslims as hateful, as seen in the Siegel doc's eye-opening archival clip of Ali responding to a white college student who believed black Muslims killed Malcolm X after he left the Nation of Islam. He said to the student, "Anybody that'd assassinate anybody or anybody that carry [sic] weapons are not Muslims."

Ali had to say basically the same thing during a telethon for 9/11 victims, in order to help put a stop to post-9/11 Islamophobia and persuade an angered and revenge-seeking America that the extremists who commit acts of terror in the name of Islam do not represent the majority of his religion's followers. It's depressing how three decades after Ali defended his religion on campus, nothing changed in regards to Islamophobia, and two years after The Trials of Muhammad Ali's premiere, Ali stood up against Drumpf's irrational proposal to ban Muslim immigration to America in the wake of the Paris and San Bernardino attacks (while also calling for his fellow Muslims to stand up against extremist Muslims) during one of his last bits of activism.



The Trials of Muhammad Ali is much more serious in tone than When We Were Kings. It doesn't open with Ali being his usual gregarious self and instead begins with interview footage of Ali being silently upset while he listens to talk-show host David Susskind insulting him and dismissing his stand against the war as disgraceful and un-American. But the Siegel doc pulls off "serious Ali" better than the 2001 Mann biopic does and contains one amusing moment: a clip of Ali's forgotten venture into musical theater during the years when showbiz and the college lecture circuit were his primary sources of income instead of the sport that temporarily exiled him.

The clip of Ali performing a show tune isn't "Golden Throats" terrible because there was always a certain musicality to Ali's style of speech, so it's not surprising that he would be able to carry a tune. But it's "Golden Throats" surreal.


Speaking of the forgotten, it's easy to forget that Ali, the father of nine children, was once somebody's child, and the biggest things I wasn't aware of until watching The Trials of Muhammad Ali were his Christian parents' dissatisfaction with both his conversion to Islam and his name changes (he was temporarily known as "Cassius X" before the Nation of Islam renamed him Ali) and his mother's worry for Ali's safety when a fire broke out in Ali's apartment after Malcolm X's assassination. Another thing I wasn't aware of was that part of his activism was shaped by a woman: Khalilah Camacho Ali, his first wife, who recalls in the doc what she said to Ali when he considered signing up to serve just like Joe Louis before him because Louis saw barely any combat and got to continue to box while serving. She told her husband, "You have to understand that once you sign your name to that army, then you are their slave forever. So just say, 'Hell no, you ain't gonna go.' Rhyme it. Do what you do best. Those people over there in Vietnam did not lynch you, did not break up your family. Those Vietnamese people are your brothers."

Ali's decision to refuse to serve inspired other athletes to take similarly risky stands, despite the animosity they knew they would face. John Carlos, one of two San Jose State University-educated Olympians who became legendary on the medal stand at the 1968 Summer Olympics for raising their fists as a Black Power statement against racism and injustice, appears as an interviewee during The Trials of Muhammad Ali and expresses his deep admiration for Ali. In fact, one of the demands that were part of Carlos and Tommie Smith's message to the world from Mexico City was for Ali to be given back his heavyweight title.

(.GIF source: David Brothers)

While The Trials of Muhammad Ali centers on Ali's greatness as the athlete-as-activist, two solid HBO docs about Ali's intense rivalry with Joe Frazier raise the point that Ali had his flaws. Both narrated by Liev Schreiber, 2000's Ali-Frazier I: One Nation... Divisible and 2009's Thrilla in Manila present an Ali whose taunting of Frazier took a cruel turn, especially when it resulted in a young Marvis Frazier, Smokin' Joe's boxer son, being bullied at school. While Ali was the darling of both left-leaning people of color and the counterculture, white conservatives who opposed Ali sided with the not-so-militant Frazier and viewed him as their champ, so Ali denounced Frazier as a Tom and a tool of the white man. What makes Ali's hatred of Frazier especially puzzling is that his former friend helped Ali regain his license and even lent him money.

HBO Go doesn't carry either the Peabody-winning Ali-Frazier I or the British-made Thrilla in Manila (which is good because HBO Go buffers way too much whenever I stream Game of Thrones or Veep over there), but boxing fans on YouTube have posted the HBO docs in their entirety. If it becomes difficult to distinguish between Ali-Frazier I and Thrilla in Manila, just remember that Ali-Frazier I, which weirdly doesn't contain a directorial credit, is the one that suffers from a really cheesy original score by Copper composer Brian Keane, while Thrilla in Manila, which contains much less chintzy-sounding music, goes in harder on Ali and often comes off as pro-Frazier.





If The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story caused many viewers to think, "Man, I feel really awful about all the misogynist shit Marcia Clark experienced as a female prosecutor," then Thrilla in Manila will similarly make you sympathize with Frazier and understand his anger about Ali painting him as a Tom. Thrilla in Manila director John Dower wanted to throw a few left hooks at the most beloved boxer of all time via his doc, so in addition to covering the negative effects of Ali's taunts, the film briefly brings up Ali's philandering. But Thrilla in Manila bears one major flaw. It doesn't interview enough people from Ali's camp who would have spoken up for Ali, whose Parkinson's made it difficult for him to do interviews (other than the 2002 conversation with David Frost), and it chooses a rather terrible representative of his camp: Dr. Ferdie Pacheco, Ali's former physician and cornerman, who was played by Paul Rodriguez in the Mann biopic and had split from Ali's camp when Ali refused to listen to Pacheco's suggestion that he retire in 1977.

During Thrilla in Manila, Pacheco comes off as a huge troll in a lot of the same ways that Piers Morgan is a troll whenever he stupidly bashes Ali or any other figure who's revered by African Americans. Pacheco is an ignorant asshole who constantly argues with the interviewer and refers to Ali's comparisons of Frazier to a gorilla as "brilliant," which results in the best present-day moment of the doc. That would be when black reporter Sunni Khalid finds out from the interviewer about Pacheco's amusement over Ali's gorilla jokes, and Khalid, who's so angry he doesn't give a shit about getting Pacheco's first name wrong, puts Pacheco--this doc's equivalent of the Jim Breuer fanboy character who, during Chris Rock's Roll with the New album, makes the big mistake of uttering the N-word while approaching Rock about how much he loves his "Niggers vs. Black People" routine--in his place. Khalid says, "Those [gorilla lines] are fighting words. This is the worst invective, and for Freddie [sic] Pacheco to say that about Joe Frazier shows how dumb Freddie [sic] Pacheco is about matters of race within the black race."


Despite how much sympathy Thrilla in Manila has for Frazier's plight (his life after boxing was an impoverished one, due mostly to gambling addiction, and his home was a room above the struggling Philly gym he ran and had to close in 2008), Frazier doesn't come off well either in Thrilla in Manila, particularly when the still-bitter-at-the-time-of-filming Philadelphian mentions that he wished for Ali to catch on fire and burn while carrying the torch at the 1996 Summer Olympics. While Ali apologized to Marvis for his cruel treatment of his father, it wasn't satisfactory enough for Frazier, who wanted Ali to apologize directly to him, and Thrilla in Manila ends on a bleak note of Frazier waiting for Ali's apology.

That apology arrives (as photographic evidence) in British filmmaker Clare Lewins' 2014 doc I Am Ali, which is now streaming on Netflix. I Am Ali has a couple of interesting gimmicks: it opts for a non-linear approach, soundtracked partly by Thomas Newman score cues from Road to Perdition, Phenomenon, Meet Joe Black and The Help (Lewins, a fan of Newman's film scores, asked Newman to score her doc, and although he was unable to score it, he nicely presented her with a discount on any past score cues of his that she wanted to use), and the project grew out of audiotapes Ali made of his conversations with his children, recordings that are prominently featured in the film.

The Lewins doc was made with the cooperation and input of Ali's daughters (boxer daughter Laila Ali, whose career choice was met with some disapproval from her father, was conspicuously not involved), and it strikes a balance between the loving portrayals of Ali that color When We Were Kings and The Trials of Muhammad Ali and the more critical views of Ali that are glimpsed in Ali-Frazier I and Thrilla in Manila. So I Am Ali devotes some time as well to the difficulties the Frazier family experienced due to Ali's taunts, but it also reveals that Ali finally apologized to Frazier face-to-face. A photo of Ali and Frazier together in a truce before Frazier's death provides the Ali/Frazier narrative with the relieving coda Thrilla in Manila doesn't have.


Like director Pete McCormack's 2009 doc Facing Ali, a film told from the points of view of Ali's boxing opponents, I Am Ali compensates for the lack of modern-day footage of Ali, due to his difficulties with speaking, by bringing lots of style and panache to the filmmaking. My favorite segment in I Am Ali deals with an arbiter of said style, Esquire magazine, and brings out Esquire photographer Carl Fischer to recall his 1968 photo shoot with Ali, who was photographed with fake arrows piercing his body.

The shoot for the provocative cover went smoothly, although, according to Fischer, "the arrows turned out to be a major headache" and "Ali had to stand very still for a long time." In I Am Ali, Fischer fondly remembers Ali's sense of humor during the shoot and remains fascinated by a moment when Ali pointed to each fake arrow wound and attributed that wound to an authority figure who stripped him of his title.


Also streamable on Netflix is the 2009 ESPN 30 for 30 doc Muhammad and Larry, a largely downbeat snapshot of Ali's decline as a boxer due to early Parkinson's. Shot by the late Albert Maysles (of Gimme Shelter and Grey Gardens fame), Muhammad and Larry's archival footage of a slower and less spry Ali while he trains to fight Larry Holmes and then finally goes toe-to-toe with him in 1980 can sometimes be more difficult to watch than even the later footage of the retired Ali after the Parkinson's had advanced. But flashes of Ali's old charm remain in the footage of Ali outside the ring, like when the Maysles doc shows him entertaining his fans with magic tricks. Neither his braggadocio about his manliness nor his mature handling of serious matters like the conflict in Vietnam could bury his boyish enthusiasm for magic and illusions.

The most surprising part of Muhammad and Larry is the second man in the film's title. I was too young to pay attention to boxing when Holmes was the champ, so I've known Holmes only from Eddie Murphy's still-funny impression of Holmes as both an uneducated dullard in TV ads ("I get the sem-say-shim that I am running through the woods--butt-nekkid--and little children is sprinklin' cool water on my butt") and an athlete who lacks sportsmanship ("Well, I'd just like to thay fuck you, and, um, and fuck him, and fuck the judges, and since we on HBO, y'all can suck my motherfuckin' dick!"). A more sensitive and compassionate Holmes emerges from the doc (he's also far from a philanderer: unlike Ali, who had four wives and fathered two children out of wedlock, present-day Holmes is still married to the same wife who appears with their baby in the archival footage). Holmes gets no pleasure from defeating Ali and even tears up over the dwindling agility of his once-swift opponent.

Many more docs have been made about Ali, but a marathon of When We Were Kings, The Trials of Muhammad Ali, Ali-Frazier I, Thrilla in Manila, I Am Ali and Muhammad and Larry is the perfect way to experience a well-rounded portrait of this complicated and charismatic sports figure. These six films are a powerful example of the importance of docs as both an art form and a method of journalism that keeps alive for future generations a beloved historical figure who no longer exists. They manage to capture Ali's spontaneous essence, warts and all, in ways that dramatic films can't, no matter how hard they try.

Last Saturday's terrible massacre at an Orlando gay nightclub, the worst mass shooting on American soil, led to a range of mournful responses from late-night TV hosts the following Sunday and Monday nights. But two of those segments stood out because of one host's genuine anger over lax gun laws and the other host's emphasis on the troubling fact that this massacre was a hate crime targeted at the LGBT community in the middle of Pride month (and at a time when the community has won several legal battles against anti-gay conservatives over civil rights), a fact that homophobic conservatives try to ignore in various ways, like the way one of those right-wing morons said to the press that the massacre isn't a hate crime. Wait, what? It isn't a hate crime? Of course it's a hate crime, fucknuts. Saying it's not would be like saying, "You know that Texas chainsaw massacre? Pfft. I saw the aftermath. It was nothing. It was just a Texas paper cut."

Samantha Bee was often a terrific Daily Show correspondent (like in the remote where she mischievously tricked pro-lifers at the Republican National Convention into saying the word "choice"), but it wasn't until she performed a hilarious one-woman version of the Fox News bloviation fest The Five that I realized she could carry an entire show on her own. And that show has turned out to be a doozy: the weekly Full Frontal with Samantha Bee on TBS. Right now, Bee is, out of all the ex-Daily Show correspondents who are anchoring either their own half-hour current-events shows or the actual Daily Show itself, the one who's most deftly enacting her former Daily Show boss' memorable final-show message to everyone who's wary of bullshit, whether that steaming pile comes from the news media or from either the right or even (on occasion) the left: "The best defense against bullshit is vigilance, so if you smell something, say something." She doesn't care how angry she gets in her scathing takedowns of either misogynists, the anti-feminism crowd or the right, and it's a beautiful thing ("I don't fucking care if you like it," Amy Poehler's famous reply to Jimmy Fallon's mock-squeamish objection over some abrasive thing she ad-libbed in the SNL writer's room, comes to mind).

Sure, John Oliver and Larry Wilmore, two other ex-Daily Show correspondents, have gotten angry too in their caustic delivery during their respective late-night shows, but Bee's anger is different. It's more physical. It was a brilliant move for Bee to go without an anchor desk on Full Frontal. She's a performer with a boxer-like energy (and controlled fury). You can see it in the way her legs danced like Muhammad Ali's as the camera zoomed away after she finished the taping of one recent segment (it's no wonder an A.V. Club commenter has quipped, "Float like a butterfly, sting like Samantha Bee"). A desk would have been too constricting for her, and it certainly would have gotten in the way of what has to be Bee's angriest Full Frontal segment to date. I'm talking about her powerful--and nicely left unbleeped on Full Frontal's official YouTube channel (but bleeped on TBS because, contrary to what my post title implies, TBS isn't exactly ready yet to let Roger Smith say an uncensored "Aw fuck")--response to both the Orlando massacre and the Florida gun law bullshit that led to not just that tragedy, but another Orlando shooting death earlier in the same weekend, the death of former Voice finalist Christina Grimmie.



Bee perfectly expressed the frustrations those of us viewers are feeling over both the NRA's stubbornness in the gun control debate and the right's copy-and-paste response to every mass shooting, a.k.a. "thoughts and prayers." And best of all, she doesn't forget that this is a comedy show, despite how depressing the subject matter gets (and her humorous spin on this depressing subject matter has continued off-screen, in the form of live-tweets during Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy's 15-hour filibuster for gun control). But instead of making light of this tragedy, Bee focused her barbs on the Orlando terrorist's shitty mirror selfies, Marco Rubio's inane "Unfortunately, today it was Orlando's turn" statement and Florida Governor Rick Scott's ineptitude. It's the only one of the late-night responses to Orlando that I've seen criticize the governor for the blood-soaked weekend that occurred on his watch. Lea Palmieri over at Decider is right: "For the only late night host that doesn't possess male genitalia, it's a little bit surprising that Samantha Bee is the only one with some balls."

But calmness can also be just as effective as Bee-style fury during a late-night comedy show's analytical critique of the circumstances that led to a mass shooting, as evidenced by Late Night with Seth Meyers' solid "A Closer Look"segments all this week--part of an ongoing feud (since 2011) between the level-headed Meyers and Republican frontrunner and professional Oompa Loompa cosplayer Donald Trump--and Wilmore's take on Orlando at the start of the first post-Orlando edition of The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, the current home of Jordan Carlos' side-splittingly funny Dennis Rodman impression. That June 13 Nightly Show episode is noteworthy and remarkable for pointing out 1) the massacre's viciousness as both an anti-LGBT hate crime and, as Nightly Show staff writer Robin Thede noted in the episode's panel segment, an incident with a predominantly Latino body count and 2) the massacre's similarities to racist violence against black churchgoers.


Like Miles Surrey over at Micsaid, it's a waste of time to be pitting Jon Stewart's former correspondents against each other and whining about how late-night TV has been a not-so-incendiary, dumbed-down and "Lip Sync Battle"-heavy slog ever since an understandably worn-out Stewart and his angry and biting perspective on current events left The Daily Show and the less favorably received Trevor Noah took the Daily Showreins right in the middle of the news media's obsession with giant-sized genital wart Donald Trump. Stewart's departure has actually resulted in one good thing: a slightly more diverse (although it's still not diverse enough) late-night landscape than the one that catapulted him to comedy-world hero status. As much as I enjoyed the Stewart era of TDS (by the way, I'm such an O.G. TDS viewer that I remember quite well the pre-Stewart days of Craig Kilborn, Beth Littleford's Barbara Walters parody, the "5 Questions" clip of the head-crushing scene from Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky and Kilborn's extremely mean end-of-the-show joke about Geraldo Rivera being "a Puerto Rican and a Jew, so he was circumcised with a shiv"), the Stewart era, if it had dragged on past 2015, probably wouldn't have led to Bee and Wilmore going off and fully blossoming like they have lately on their respective solo shows.

Had Stewart pulled a Leno and continued on with hosting TDS during the madness of the mass shootings of the last 10 months and the rise of the candidate with the hairdo of a '70s game show host and the racial tolerance of an aunt who tightens her grip on her purse whenever she has to share an elevator with "a black," Donald Trump (two subjects that would have caused Stewart to look even more haggard and old on nightly TV than before), I don't think the Bee diatribe about gun laws we needed to hear or Wilmore's gently funny but no less insightful Orlando segments would have taken place. The Bee and Nightly Show responses to Orlando are proof that late-night TV isn't intellectually dead yet, and they're two wonderfully cathartic bits of topical comedy we've badly needed in order to get through a dumpster fire of a week.

The following is a repost of my June 8, 2015 discussion of one of my favorite threequels of all time, Police Story 3, a.k.a. Supercop.

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

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

The franchise made its return in 2013 with the non-comedic Police Story 2013, which has nothing to do continuity-wise with the previous adventures of Hong Kong police inspector Chan Ka-kui (Chan's playing a completely different character, just like in 2004's New Police Story). A massive hit in mainland China, the mainland-made Police Story 2013 debuted in American theaters and on digital platforms just last week--to mostly negative reviews--under the title Police Story: Lockdown.

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


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

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

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

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

I don't care for variety shows, except for Muppet Show clips (or the occasional Carol Burnett Show sketch clip) and sometimes SNL, which, if you think about it, is really just a '70s-style variety show, but without a scantily clad resident dance troupe, and that makes you wonder about an SNL in a parallel universe where, since 1975, a goateed Lorne Michaels implemented a group of Fly Girls on his show, and all those Fly Girls are white. Variety shows are such an outdated and creaky form of TV. I always feel like I need to be 78 years old and fond of prune juice in order to enjoy a variety show from start to finish.

When the Miami-based Sábado Gigante said "¡Adiós!" after 53 years of old-fashioned TV, it was a sign that even non-English-speaking variety shows are doomed. Yet that hasn't stopped NBC from pushing for the variety show to come back to American TV, first with the now-defunct Best Time Ever with Neil Patrick Harris and now with the summertime replacement show Maya & Marty. The Tuesday night show pairs up two great comedians from completely different eras of SNL: Martin Short--whose best shtick, prior to his one season on Dick Ebersol-era SNL, took place on SCTV, the classic sketch show that constantly ripped apart the cheesiness of variety shows, whether it was through Short's Jackie Rogers Jr. character or Eugene Levy as Gene Shalit incongruously doing musical numbers with Catherine O'Hara as Rona Barrett and Joe Flaherty as Gene Siskel--and '00s SNL regular Maya Rudolph, a Prince song-covering, TCM-watching pre-'90s-showbiz nerd type who genuinely enjoys the cheesiness of variety shows (Maya & Marty is her second attempt at a variety show, after the one-off Maya Rudolph Show special). Despite that pairing, which sounds nice on paper, Maya & Marty does not look enticing to me, except for one element, and it's the only part of Maya & Marty I've been watching online: the return of celebrity interviewer Jiminy Glick.

Way before Ali G trolled politicians, Zach Galifianakis embodied fake awkwardness between two ferns, Eric Andre caused a genuinely uncomfortable Lauren Conrad to walk out on him and Stephen Colbert pretended to know nothing about hip-hop while interviewing an in-on-the-joke Eminem, there was Glick, Short's funniest character and an interestingly late addition to Short's repertoire. Glick and his weird, Merv Griffin-ish voice didn't appear first on either SCTV or mid-'80s SNL and instead emerged from a much later and completely forgotten venue: Short's 1999 daytime talk show. I tuned in to The Martin Short Show for only one reason: to see Short badly interview the likes of Ted Danson and a Dharma & Greg-era Jenna Elfman as Glick. It was far more entertaining than Short doing polite interviews for real as his normal self.

Clearly modeled physically after the rotund physique of Miami celebrity interviewer Raúl De Molina, "El Gordo" in the Univision chat show duo known as El Gordo y la Flaca, the donut-loving Glick commits as many sins as possible as an interviewer. He doesn't do any research about his interviewee beforehand, he has a short attention span, he constantly brings up things that have nothing to do with the interviewee (his sons Morgan, Mason, Matthew and Modine somehow always wind up being mentioned in conversations, as does his past as a personal assistant to the likes of Charles Bronson and Telly Savalas) and he always interrupts the interview to take phone calls from his off-screen wife Dixie (played by the late Jan Hooks when Short starred as Glick on Comedy Central's Primetime Glick and in 2004's Jiminy Glick in Lalawood).







Often referred to by Short as his take on "morons with power," Glick is a brilliant mockery of both the vapidness of a lot of press-junket interviews and the tendency for local news personalities from mid-sized TV markets to care more about either their wardrobe, their hair or in the case of Glick, their hotel snacks than about doing any non-IMDb research or being a competent interviewer. I'm a fan of Glick, not just because of Short's improv skills, but also because I've been there, man. I'm talking about the "being interviewed by a person who's weirdly distracted while giving the interview" part.

I'm not going to name names. During the recording of the interview, the interviewer was disengaged (most likely due to a hangover), as well as vaguely pissed off about my affiliation with a subject I had to do all the fucking work to get the interviewer to mention. I don't even remember the questions the person asked me because those questions were as stimulating as watching paint dry. All I remember are two things: 1) the passive-aggressive interviewer sat in the weirdest position, not because that person's body was a difficult-to-navigate mess like Glick's body whenever he has trouble getting himself to sit down properly but because that interviewer was trying to play mind games and condescendingly assert authority (think Andy Kaufman's old talk show parody where he sat in a desk that was eight feet higher than his interviewee's couch), and 2) the experience made me realize this is why interviewees have assistants. They're there to protect them from half-assed or rude interviewers.



As Glick, Short does a much more funny version of the bizarre interview experience I went through for a few minutes (the interviewer wasn't doing a bit and was genuinely uninterested in this interview I was actually invited by that same person to do). I'm not a celebrity, but I can relate to the confusion many celebs feel as they figure out how to react to Short's unscripted shtick as Glick (some of them simply collapse into laughter). And on Maya & Marty, Glick is still hilarious, whether he's reducing Larry David to laughter with his assessments of David's cantankerous Curb Your Enthusiasm persona or claiming that he recently lost weight to Kevin Hart, who amusingly replies to Glick with "And I've found it."

The Glick segments from Maya & Marty prove that Glick works best as a side character, and all you need to do is stuff Glick and a celeb in a cramped hotel room and hilarious improv will always ensue. But when you take Glick out of those cramped hotel rooms (or in the cases of Glick's interviews with Conan O'Brien and Ray Romano, the empty sets of their respective TV shows) and make Glick the center of either a Fernwood 2 Night-ish talk show with a band and a studio audience (Primetime Glick) or a feature film (Glick in Lalawood), he's not as funny. In other words, the sight of Short simply using his imagination and ad-libbing off the top of his head a bunch of crazy details about Glick's past (and present) as a piece of gum on the bottom of Hollywood's shoe is more entertaining comedically than the sight of Short's corpulent alter ego in scripted situations where he's outside the press junket and is smack dab in the middle of that outer milieu as that gum on the shoe.





Part of the enjoyment of Short's shtick as Glick also weirdly comes from stumbling into comments from people who aren't familiar with the character and think the appalled or frustrated reactions from Glick's interviewees are real like Lauren Conrad's was on The Eric Andre Show. It's called improv, Einstein. Just like when Eminem's dumbest fans didn't understand that Colbert was faking his rudeness to Em, Drake's dumbest fans don't understand that Drake was in on the joke when Glick grilled him on Maya & Marty.

Drizzy also happens to be the only rapper with an improv comedy background. Sure, he's no Amy Poehler, but the skills that were on clumsy display during that teenage Aubrey Graham improv video that went viral have grown a bit since that pre-Degrassi video, and he put those skills to good use in the kind of role he wanted to play while dealing with Glick.


Drake simply wanted to play the more serious straight man to Glick and express total confusion over the way Glick is barely the controlla of the interview, and sometimes, as evidenced by Ryan Phillippe's unexpectedly effective non-comedic performance in MacGruber, that's better than trying to upstage somebody like Short. Drake the type of dude who'd prefer to not respond to a veteran improviser with a Michael Scott-style gun.

Goddamn, people, we've been through this before with Ice Cube.


People who don't understand that rappers or musicians are in on the joke when Glick chats with them are like people on Facebook who see a Facebook friend's repost of an Onion headline and think the headline is real. They're the same kind of morons Short is taking dead aim at whenever he puts on all that makeup as the moron with power named Glick, the improv comedy gift that, thanks to Maya & Marty, keeps on giving.

Shortly after the conclusion of Archer's seventh season, a largely satisfying season that rebooted Adam Reed's profane spy spoof as a private eye genre spoof, FX announced last month that it has renewed Archer for three more seasons. From January 23, 2013, here's a repost of my discussion of one of Archer's best episodes from its days as a spy show (as well as the days when the name ISIS didn't have depressing connotations like it does today). This episode, like all other episodes from Archer's first six seasons, can currently be streamed on Netflix and Hulu.

"Fugue and Riffs" is another sharply written Archer story involving ISIS agent Sterling Archer's ongoing conflict with his mother/boss Malory (Jessica Walter), and it contains a brilliant crossover with lead voice actor H. Jon Benjamin's other current cartoon, more semi-nudity from Lana Kane (Aisha Tyler) and esoteric references that are funny simply because they're so damn esoteric (British spy hero Thomas Elphinstone Hambledon! Manning Coles, the duo that created Hambledon! The star of Shazam!Émile Zola!). You won't see Spidey cracking a joke that's a nod to Zola's "J'accuse" letter during Ultimate Spider-Man, that's for damn sure.


The season premiere opens with Archer tending the grill at the exact same titular restaurant from Bob's Burgers, Benjamin's other show, while surrounded by the Belcher kids and Linda (John Roberts, the only Bob's Burgers voice actor reprising his role), who gets to berate Archer with one of the various insulting nicknames that have become one of the Adam Reed cartoon's trademarks ("Well, excuse me, Ike Turner!"). Instead of appearing in their more familiar character designs from Bob's Burgers, Tina, Gene, Louise and Linda are awesomely redesigned to blend in with Archer's '60s comic book aesthetic.

I like how the cold open strings us along into thinking Archer is undercover as a burger joint owner as part of some ISIS op, until it becomes clear that it's no op and he has no memory of his life as an ISIS agent, although a few pieces of that life remain. They include fighting skills, which Archer puts to use during a badass and extremely gory restaurant confrontation with KGB assassins straight out of A History of Violence, his literary tastes (he dubs the restaurant's newest burger "a Thomas Elphinstone Hambledurger with Manning Coleslaw") and his metrosexual side ("What I am gonna do is find out who this Archer jerk is... I'm also probably gonna do a spa weekend").

It turns out that two months ago, Archer developed amnesia due to a moment of extreme stress and ran away to a new life as a seaside fry cook named Bob. He married Linda and apparently became her second husband, which makes me wonder what happened to the original Bob in this universe (Alex, I'm gonna go with "What is dead?," and because much of this show's humor thrives on kinky or freaky behavior, I wouldn't be surprised if Linda has been remolding Archer Vertigo style to look more like Bob). Both ISIS and the KGB are after Archer for different reasons: Malory assigns Lana, Cyril (Chris Parnell) and Ray (Reed) to stage a fake run-in with the KGB in front of Archer to try to jog his memory and get him back to the agency, while bionic villain Barry Dylan (Dave Willis) sends more KGB assassins to eliminate Archer.






Part of the fun of "Fugue and Riffs" is trying to figure out the stressful moment that triggered Archer's amnesia. We're given a clue early on when Malory complains that her son hates seeing her be happy, and when the catalyst is revealed at the end to be neither a bomb explosion nor a Bourne Identity-style, ISIS-sanctioned attempt on his life, but something far less action-y--Malory's wedding to Ron Cadillac, the most successful Cadillac dealer in the Tri-State Area--it makes perfect sense within the neurotic, wracked-by-mommy-issues world of Archer.

In a great bit of stunt-casting, the show has recruited Ron Leibman from The Hot Rock and Friends, as well as Walter's real-life husband, to voice Malory's new hubby, who's won over everyone at ISIS during Archer's two-month absence and whose presence this season is bound to reignite an old thread from a couple of seasons ago: Archer's search for his biological father. (Archer reportedly begins to form a bond with Ron in the new season's fourth episode. I can't wait to see if Reed, who's obsessed with the movies of one-time Archer guest star Burt Reynolds, will toss into that episode a reference to The Hot Rock or Leibman's other '70s crime-genre cult favorite, The Super Cops.) The rest of the fun of "Fugue and Riffs" involves being reacquainted with the elements that make Archer such an entertaining adult cartoon, from the batshit crazy behavior of Dr. Krieger (Lucky Yates) and office subordinates Pam (Amber Nash) and Cheryl/Carol (Judy Greer) to the self-satisfaction Archer gets from anything he does or says, particularly his esoteric jokes, as if he's a boy who just discovered cursing.





Archer may be a competent, book-smart, sharply dressed and jet-setting spy with a sex life many of us Archer viewers would kill for, but deep down, he's really just a kid who never grew up and knows only how to be a narcissistic asshole, thanks to screwed-up parenting from an asshole of a parent. "Fugue and Riffs" reinforces Archer's childishness when he woo-hoos like a kid over the Molotov cocktails he and Lana lob at the assassins, or when one of Lana's attempts to get him to remember ISIS tanks and causes him to go off on a tangent about his love for Shazam!, which sometimes crossed over with the superheroine show The Secrets of Isis in the '70s--a nod to how this episode crosses over with Bob's Burgers.

No wonder Archer identifies so much with Shazam, née Captain Marvel, even in his fugue state. Shazam is a boy in a grown man's body, just like Archer.

For a couple of years, whenever moments of appalling racism would dominate the news cycle for an entire week, I'd think to myself either "I can't wait to hear what Totally Biased has to say" or "What would be Jon Stewart's exasperated but largely funny response to all this, and could he please not sing again like he tried to do at the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear?"

Well, Totally Biased doesn't exist anymore (although a couple of weeks ago, Totally Biased alums W. Kamau Bell and Hari Kondabolu started joining forces again for a new podcast, Politically Re-Active, so Kamau has now hosted so many different 30-to-120-minute shows in the podcastosphere that he makes Guy Smiley look like a lazy douche), and Stewart left The Daily Show in the hands of Trevor Noah. So these days, it's "I can't wait to hear what Larry Wilmore has to say" or sometimes "How will Noah's non-American and more global perspective handle this one?"


I'm still trying to make sense of a bizarre and dismal week where two black men lost their lives due to police brutality within days of each other and then a peaceful #BlackLivesMatter protest in response to Alton Sterling and Philando Castile's police-related deaths ended with five cops being gunned down by a sniper. Fortunately, Wilmore and The Nightly Show didn't take the week off despite the July 4 holiday weekend cutting into the program's nightly schedule, and they were around to help us make sense of this latest round of race-related (and gun-related) tragedies.

While Wilmore admits to sometimes feeling as puzzled as the rest of us over how to make sense of it all (he has frequently said that he's still trying to figure out how to properly address such serious tragedies during a comedy show), he's certain about one thing: white conservatives need to shut the fuck up about matters of race they will never be able to understand and will never experience due to white privilege and simple ignorance.


This is why I like The Nightly Show: only The Nightly Show would rip apart right-wing talking points using CGI tumbleweeds straight out of Rango.

There's a frequent saying in hip-hop and R&B: "Don't get it twisted." Racists are the ones who get it twisted all the time. Their use of the phrase "#AllLivesMatter" to diminish or mock the efforts of the #BlackLivesMatter movement is the 2016 equivalent of the right either whining about "reverse racism" (God, that moronic phrase makes me want to go back in time and leave flaming bags of shit on the doorsteps of high school and college classmates who were staunch Republicans and were fond of using that phrase) or trying to mindfuck the public into thinking affirmative action should be eliminated because "Race relations are better now!," as part of the affirmative action debate I witnessed in college back in the '90s.

"#AllLivesMatter" isn't just "reverse racism" all over again or "I don't see race"--that silly phrase Stephen Colbert, the previous holder of The Nightly Show's Comedy Central time slot, was fond of repeating back when he used to satirize right-wingers by pretending to be one for an entire half-hour--all over again. It's also George Wallace all over again. During Politically Re-Active's premiere episode, UC Berkeley professor Ian Haney-López astutely points out to Bell and Kondabolu the way that racists like to distort and twist around the opinions of people of color who challenge them by saying those people of color are racist, an insidious type of mind game I've been sometimes subjected to during occasions where I've pointed out or criticized moments of racism. Haney-López says this frustrating phenomenon of civil rights activists being denounced as racist by the right is a continuation of the vitriol of George Wallace the pro-segregation white politician (and a historical figure Gary Sinise loved portraying on cable TV so much that he weirdly did it twice for John Frankenheimer), not George Wallace the frequently funny black comedian.

The movement is called #BlackLivesMatter because #StopKillingBlackPeople wasn't as catchy.

— Hari Kondabolu (@harikondabolu) July 11, 2016

And white people who aren't "woke" and that 4,000-year-old black vampire on Fox News--nope, not Blacula or Blade but the black vampire who goes by the name of Stacey Dash--aren't the only ones who spout ignorant shit about #BlackLivesMatter. A certain worrisome faction of Asian Americans who represent the latest in a history of anti-black racism within Asian American subcommunities recently made themselves known during their support of Peter Liang, an Asian American NYPD officer who killed Akai Gurley, an unarmed black man. Jenn Fang from the Asian American/Canadian politics blog Reappropriate eloquently criticizes this faction's treatment of African Americans in what has to be my favorite response to various forms of anti-#BlackLivesMatter sentiments last week, other than Wilmore's first discussion of the nationwide outrage over Sterling's death: the insightful Reappropriate post entitled "I'm Not Here for the Asian Americans Who Won't Get Behind #BlackLivesMatter." She goes in hard on other Asian Americans who don't realize how racist or anti-black they sound when they discuss racial justice.

"To those who rallied to free Peter Liang on the grounds that you were moved to fight for 'two victims' in 'one tragedy': Where were you when Freddie Grey's [sic] killers went free? Where are you now in the fight for justice for Alton Sterling and Philando Castile and all the other Black men and women whose name [sic] have become hashtags?," wrote Fang. "If you are the sort of person who only shows up to defend Asian American lives in the Black Lives Matter fight, then Black lives do not matter to you."

(.GIF source: Mic)

"Sit down" is the same exact thing that ought to be said to the sort of person who only shows up to defend Asian American lives during #BlackLivesMatter.

Mr. Robot creator/showrunner Sam Esmail and his actors picked up the Golden Globe for Best Drama Series earlier this year.

The second season of Mr. Robot begins this Wednesday on the USA network, three days after the network surprised the Internet by pulling a Beyoncé and posting the entire first half of Mr. Robot's two-part season premiere on Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube and usanetwork.com for only approximately an hour and 50 minutes. After that nearly two-hour period, USA deleted the episode from the four platforms--an enigmatic and cold-hearted move straight out of the titular hacktivist's playbook. So from August 5, 2015, here's a repost of my discussion of the first six episodes of Mr. Robot's compelling first season.

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

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

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

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

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


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

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


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

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


"It's easy to think that Mr. Robot is Pump Up the Volume's outlaw DJ Hard Harry, released from jail 25 years later and realizing that using ham radio to bring down corrupt school administrators isn't enough any more. That's not a knock on Slater, whose performance here traffics in his signature sharky charisma without overdoing it. It's just that the show's revolutionary spirit is essentially as juvenile as Hard Harry's," wrote Dennis Perkins at the A.V. Club. Perkins' mixed review of the Mr. Robot pilot proves why judging a TV show based solely on its premiere episode is now such a mistake in the age of slow-building storytelling on hour-long dramas that aren't procedurals.

That pilot was a little too Dexter-y for my tastes, from the method in which Elliot collects as trophies a digital memento of each of his targets (a quirk that hasn't really appeared again on the show) to the choice of a pedophile as the first scumbag we see Elliot take down, a simple way to get the audience to immediately side with the main character's brand of justice (in Mr. Robot's pilot, the pedo's a coffee shop chain owner who's a child pornographer, while in Dexter's pilot, he's a pastor who killed the kids he abused). Unlike Pump Up the Volume, Mr. Robot has veered away from the romanticizing of Elliot and his point of view that took place in the pilot and is evolving into an even murkier and not-at-all-juvenile show, although Elliot's gripes about society are perfectly valid.



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

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

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






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

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



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

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

Selections from Mac Quayle's first-season Mr. Robot score album and the film scores that influenced Quayle during season 1 can be heard during my mix "My Perfect Maze."

Like I've said before, whenever there's a news story that involves race, I've lately found myself saying, "I can't wait to hear what Larry Wilmore has to say." The controversy over Melania Trump's 2016 Republican National Convention speech sounding exactly like Michelle Obama's 2008 Democratic National Convention speech may not be tied to a thornier current subject like racially motivated bullying or police reform, but her act of plagiarism is yet another example of a white woman stealing from a black woman, so I was wondering when The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore would distinguish itself from other late-night comedy shows and point out how the former supermodel's RNC speech reeks of cultural appropriation. The Nightly Showdid not disappoint.

"Trump should have come out and said, 'We made Michelle's speech great again! That was the greatest plagiarized speech evah! It was yooge!,'" joked Nightly Show head writer Robin Thede during the show's July 19 panel segment, which centered on the panelists' bafflement over how the campaign of Donald Trump, the candidate with the Freddy Lippincottleman hairdo and all the charm and intellect of a crumpled Kleenex full of dried splooge, has reached new lows as an underhanded presidential campaign. Wilmore added that Drumpf should further hype up his wife's speech, which she claimed to have written plagiarized by herself, with "The blacks did [this speech], but we made it great!" Thede and Wilmore's fellow panelist, Nightly Show executive producer Rory Albanese, amusingly compared Mrs. Trump to hot girls in high school who copy answers from nerds or shoplift and never get in trouble for it, but the plagiarism reminded me way more of the following moment from a hard-hitting documentary about cultural appropriation:



An even funnier riff on this Toro from Slovenia stealing from a Clover and calling it something different took place over on a live telecast of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert earlier this week (Colbert has never really done live episodes before, other than whenever The Colbert Report would go live on election nights, so this RNC week of live shows is nicely bringing back both an edge and a sense of experimentation that have been largely missing from Colbert's CBS show). I never noticed Broadway star Laura Benanti bears an uncanny resemblance to Trump's supermodel wife until she portrayed Melania in Colbert's July 19 cold open (she looks so much like her that I first thought that was the real Melania in the cold open's YouTube thumbnail), and as Melania, she responded to the allegations of plagiarism--by plagiarizing everything from Charles Dickens to the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme.

Before her RNC speech, Melania has been such a mystery to the public that barely anybody (outside of either SNL viewers who are familiar with Cecily Strong's Melania impression or Trump supporters) knows how her voice sounds. I never knew what her voice was like. I was expecting her to have a Harvey Fierstein rasp like Dr. Mrs. the Monarch on The Venture Bros. Benanti didn't know how Melania spoke either, and as she noted in a Vulture interview shortly after her hilarious impression went viral, the Late Show staff gave her only several hours before airtime to study Melania's Slovenian accent and prepare ("Monday night was the first night I really heard her talk").





The most interesting thing about Benanti's Melania impression--other than the "Blue Steel" expressions, Benanti's observation that "Even though there was a microphone, [Melania] was shouting" and the fact that Benanti is more attractive than the plagiarist she's impersonating (beauty and brains will always be superior to beauty)--is that this isn't the first wife of an evil prick Benanti has portrayed this year. Between Melania and Benanti's dual role as the hologram of Alura, Kara's dead Kryptonian mother, and Astra, Alura's evil twin sister, during the first season of Supergirl (actually, Astra started out as a villain, but she gradually found herself opposing her much more evil husband Non), it appears as if Benanti is turning into the go-to woman for otherworldly wives of power-hungry douchenozzles.

Like Tina Fey's Sarah Palin and Jay Pharoah's Ben Carson before her, Benanti's Melania impression is the type of impression you want to see more of because it's so amusingly dead-on, but you're also so worried about the actual political ascent of the cringe-inducing public figure they're mocking that there's a queasiness in the pit of your stomach that keeps you from fully enjoying the impression. This country is fucking doomed if a racist and extremely thin-skinned old fuck who should never be allowed near the nuclear button (that is if his tiny hands can reach it) and a woman who lifts an entire paragraph from the First Lady as if the dog ate her homework both end up moving to the White House.

I'm bored. I'm the chairman of the bored. I'm a lengthy monologue. I'm living like a dog. I'm bored. I bore myself to sleep at night. I bore myself in broad daylight 'cause I'm bored. Just another slimy bore.

I'm free to bore my well-bought friends and spend my cash until the end 'cause I'm bored. I'm bored. I'm the chairman of the bored.


I'm sick. I'm sick of all my kicks. I'm sick of all the stiffs. I'm sick of all the dips. I'm bored. I bore myself to sleep at night. I bore myself in broad daylight 'cause I'm bored. I'm bored. Just another dirty bore. Alright, dollface, come on and bore me.

I am sick. I am sick of all my kicks. I am sick of all the stiffs. I'm sick of all the dips. I'm sick. I'm sick when I go to sleep at night. I'm still sick in the broad daylight 'cause I'm bored. I'm bored. I'm the chairman of the bored.

The following is a repost of my October 1, 2014 discussion of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, particularly "Def Poet's Society."

I've been sent music journalist Brian Coleman's second Check the Technique book to review for Word Is Bond, and the new volume, part of Coleman's series of books of exhaustive interviews with rappers and beatmakers about classic albums they recorded, contains behind-the-scenes stories I've always wanted to read about Black Sheep's A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing and Raekwon's Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... One chapter I didn't expect to enjoy was the chapter about DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince's rise from a sensation in Philly to national chart-toppers, thanks to 1988's He's the DJ, I'm the Rapper, the first double album in hip-hop history.

The chapter notes that He's the DJ, I'm the Rapper's double-LP format stemmed from the duo's original conception of the project as a scratch album to showcase Jazzy Jeff's turntablist skills. In the late '80s, a scratch album was unheard of, but today, they're a commonplace thing in hip-hop. For example, DJ Qbert recently dropped simultaneously on iTunes a scratch album and a more accessible-sounding album loaded with guest features by rappers, and those two recent Qbert releases were sort of like if He's the DJ, I'm the Rapper got split into two separate albums instead of being the mammoth two-headed beast we know of today.

That story of He's the DJ, I'm the Rapper's evolution from a DJ-only album to a showcase for both the skills of Jazzy Jeff the beatmaker and Will Smith the storyteller is an interesting read. So are the recollections of the trouble the duo got into with New Line Cinema over "A Nightmare on My Street," their proto-horrorcore track about the '80s and '90s New Line cash cow Freddy Krueger, and Jazzy Jeff's tidbit about him and Smith turning down the script for House Party (Coleman was unable to interview Smith, presumably because Smith's too busy being one of the biggest movie stars in the world).



He's the DJ, I'm the Rapper is best known for introducing the massive 1988 hit "Parents Just Don't Understand" (which isn't my favorite track on the album; that would be the Bob James-sampling "Here We Go Again"). The album doesn't contain the duo's much more frequently quoted theme from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air because, of course, the hit sitcom--which based its "inner-city kid in a mansion" premise on pop music industry bigwig Benny Medina's life as an extra member of the household of his mentor Berry Gordy--didn't exist yet, and its premiere on NBC was only two years away.

It's great that He's the DJ, I'm the Rapper has gotten the oral history treatment. But I wish The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air received the oral history treatment somewhere else as well, even though the famously bitter and still-disgruntled Janet Hubert, who wrote a tell-all book about how much she hated working with Smith on The Fresh Prince, would probably refuse to participate and then write another tell-all book about how much she hated seeing an oral history about The Fresh Prince.


The show never got much shine from TV critics when it first aired, and it still doesn't--today's critics remain more taken with Seinfeld, Friends and Roseanne as '90s live-action sitcoms. Sure, The Fresh Prince's storylines weren't exactly groundbreaking and formula-defying like Seinfeld's, and Roseanne did a better job at seriousness--when The Fresh Prince tried to get serious with an occasional Very Special Episode, the results would often be preachy and only occasionally effective and genuinely wrenching--but I find myself rewatching The Fresh Prince more often than Seinfeld. Okay, it kind of went off the rails after Hubert was fired and the producers pulled a Darrin on us with a new Aunt Viv, but otherwise, The Fresh Prince is a funnier show than Seinfeld. There, somebody had to say it.

I'll always admire Seinfeld for its disregard for Full House hugs and other equally cuddly Miller-Boyett clichés, as well as finally giving Julia Louis-Dreyfus--who, before Seinfeld, had a less-than-great stint on SNL and was the highlight of Fresh Prince co-creator Andy Borowitz's otherwise bland day care sitcom Day by Day--a shitload of material that was worthy of her comedic talents (Elaine's my favorite Seinfeld character who isn't Bookman the library cop; Bookman is, of course, the greatest character Seinfeld came up with). But Seinfeld is also a very white show with several unfunny and stereotypical moments involving characters of color (and I'm getting less enamored with the show when its star/co-creator, who really should have kept his mouth shut when he was recently asked about the subject of the push for more diversity in comedy, instead chose to respond to the subject with "Who cares?"). The Fresh Prince doesn't have that race problem. Seinfeld would never have done an episode like "Def Poet's Society," where white privilege gets mocked instead of celebrated and reinforced. That brief mockery of white privilege and, of course, the frequently quoted moments of both classic and not-so-classic poetry are why "Def Poet's Society," which was written during the show's first season by John Bowman (a white veteran of SNL and In Living Color who later co-created Martin), remains my favorite Fresh Prince episode, as well as one of my favorite episodes of any '90s sitcom.


Like I said before, The Fresh Prince's storylines weren't exactly original. The "making up a fake poet or musician in order to get into a girl's pants" storyline is as old as "locked in the bank vault with Mr. Mooney." But what "Def Poet's Society" does with it is hysterical. There's the very name of Will's fake street poet Raphael De La Ghetto, network TV's first and only gag about the odd-sounding band name of De La Soul, as well as the inspiration for an Asian American YouTube star to dub himself Timothy DeLaGhetto.

There's the sight of Jazzy Jeff, who, like Smith, had no previous sitcom acting experience but wasn't exactly as charismatic as Smith, taking his lack of range and--just like in all his other appearances on the show--somehow building out of that lack of range a genuinely funny take on the sitcom staple of the lazy and weird best friend character. What about Buddy from Charles in Charge? Nah, Jazz was funnier.

There's British actor Joseph Marcell's lousy impression of an African American street poet when Will talks Geoffrey the butler into donning an Afro and a dashiki to bring to life the reclusive Raphael De La Ghetto (a name that's so great I have to say it in full every time).



My favorite part of Marcell's scenes as Raphael De La Ghetto--other than "Cannon to the right of them, cannon to the left of them!"--is a moment that goes unnoticed by the studio audience, and it's when he's unable to keep his fake American accent from slipping when he says "Mask your fears."

Finally, there's Smith himself, no longer nervously mouthing the lines of his co-stars like he did in the Fresh Prince pilot (at the end of the poetry club night scene, he's mouthing Jazz's poem, but that's part of the episode's script this time). He's already the confident and charismatic lead who would continue to help anchor, along with the late, great James Avery as Uncle Phil, The Fresh Prince for five more seasons.



But in recent years, the funniest part of "Def Poet's Society" for me has ended up being neither Jazz nor Geoffrey nor Will. It's any time that Mr. Fellows (Jonathan Emerson), Will and Carlton's English teacher, claims he knows the work of Raphael De La Ghetto or makes that hilarious post-poetry-reading O-face over what he thinks is the brilliance of Raphael De La Ghetto's prose.

Mr. Fellows is every single culture vulture I ran into at UC Santa Cruz. He's every white person in the audience who stupidly applauded both Warren Beatty's shitty rapping and Amiri Baraka's cringeworthy line "You got to be a spirit!" back when I saw Beatty's white savior film Bulworth in Santa Cruz in 1998. He's also every single douche in Williamsburg or Silverlake who claims he was into this band or that band before everybody else.


Like when Tajai from Souls of Mischief tweeted that "Eventually #Hipsters bathe, shave and become the 'out' republicans they are," eerily about a year before the Republican Party's hipster ad, leave it to hip-hop to speak the truth about the fraudulences of hipsters. In the case of The Fresh Prince's classic "Def Poet's Society" episode, it did so long before the present-day form of hipsters existed.

Now that's worthy of an exhaustive oral history.

(Photo source: FY Springfield)

The following is a repost of my November 14, 2014 discussion of the Simpsons/Futurama crossover. Futurama is back in the limelight again, after Dan Lanigan, a reality TV producer, posted on July 18 a trailer forFan-O-Rama, an ambitious live-action Futurama fan film he co-wrote and directed. The Simpsons/Futurama crossover is streamable on FXX's Simpsons World app.

"Meanwhile,"Futurama's this-time-for-real-it's-the-end series finale, was one of the classiest exits a long-running show has made. "Simpsorama," the Simpsons/Futurama crossover that brings back the Planet Express crew for one more on-screen adventure (while they've experienced an afterlife in print as stars of their own Bongo Comics titles), feels kind of unnecessary as an extra farewell to the Matt Groening/David X. Cohen creation on-screen. (This crossover might not even be the last farewell, if the rumors that Fox is now considering reviving Futurama for a fourth incarnation are true.) Let's put it this way: "Meanwhile" was Star Trek VI. "Simpsorama" is all the scenes with either Kirk, Scotty or Chekov during Star Trek: Generations.

But the scenes with Kirk, Scotty or Chekov were good, even though the material for Scotty and Chekov was a slightly clunky rewrite of material originally written for Spock and McCoy (the rest of Star Trek: Generations--except for the opening titles with the floating Dom Pérignon bottle and the surprisingly effective dramatic scene between Picard and Data on the Stellar Cartography deck--was atrocious). Though "Simpsorama," which was penned by J. Stewart Burns (the writer of my favorite 2010s Simpsons episode so far, "Holidays of Future Passed"), pales in comparison to "Meanwhile" or Futurama at its peak, I actually enjoyed it.


It's a far more satisfying crossover than the terrible Family Guy/Simpsons crossover (and it's non-canonical too, Simpsons fans who despise Futurama and Futurama fans who despise "Simpsorama," in case both of you camps forgot that the appearance of Kang and Kodos, the human-devouring aliens from the non-canonical "Treehouse of Horror" episodes, automatically makes "Simpsorama" a non-canonical Simpsons story). Homer (Dan Castellaneta) and Bender (John DiMaggio)--who's been sent by Professor Farnsworth (Billy West) to 21st-century Springfield to kill Homer but gets distracted from his mission because he and Homer have a lot in common--are a funnier pair than Homer and Peter Griffin, mainly because the two kindred spirits don't get into a tedious chicken fight. An even better comedic combo is Lisa (Yeardley Smith), Professor Frink (Hank Azaria) and Professor Farnsworth in the same room. The sight of an old genius like Farnsworth reverting to a jealous child over "the annoying girl" and her precociousness is a highlight of the crossover. His disdain for Lisa is so thick you could build a Parthenon with it.

Only one joke in the crossover made my eyes roll, and its wretchedness is typical of so many similar bits of fan service in post-season 8Simpsons episodes. That would be the umpteenth reappearance of Seymour, the dead dog Fry (also West) was briefly reunited with in one of Futurama's most popular episodes, the heart-wrenching "Jurassic Bark" (and again in 2013's "Game of Tones," in which a dream-state version of Seymour, who was voiced by Seth MacFarlane, got to say one line to Fry: "Philip, have you lost weight?"). Seymour's first reappearance in the 2007 made-for-video feature film Bender's Big Score bugged me--as does his cameo in "Simpsorama"--because the film's retconning of "Jurassic Bark" felt like the Futurama writers were saying that they were ashamed of the episode's sad ending. They received hate mail from some viewers at the time of the airing of "Jurassic Bark" for ending that episode on a downbeat note, and I wish I could tell the writers, "Who gives a fuck what those viewers think? That ending was perfect." To borrow a catchphrase from a certain cantankerous Simpsons character, worst concession to irate viewers ever.

(.GIF source: FY Springfield)

Memorable quotes:
* Mayor Quimby (Castellaneta), referring to Lisa's jazz concert in the park getting disrupted by stormy weather: "Even God hates jazz."

* Homer: "Oh... my... God... He's telling the truth. I have to take you to our civic leaders." Cut to Homer and Bender at Moe's.

* Homer: "Hey, uh, what's the robot version of bromance?"
Bender: "Ro-mance."
Homer: "You future guys have a word for everything... pal."

* Marge (Julie Kavner), thinking to herself: "Oh, don't mention her eye. Don't mention her eye."
Leela (Katey Sagal), thinking to herself: "Don't mention her hair. Don't mention her hair."


* Marge: "Can you please just get us out of this lousy future?"
Farnsworth: "Actually, of all probable futures, this is the worst."
Marge: "It is, 'cause my baby's not in it."
Farnsworth: "Motherly love--why did we outlaw that?"

* Farnsworth: "The only way to handle the creatures is to do what we do to each year's Super Bowl losers: shoot them into space."

* Omicronian emperor Lrrr (Maurice LaMarche) to Kang (Harry Shearer) and Kodos (Castellaneta), regarding his upset wife Ndnd (Tress MacNeille): "Uh, perhaps the one of you that is female should go console her."Both Kang and Kodos go console Ndnd, which has to be the funniest button on a concluding Simpsons scene in years.

This famously angry person on Twitter should never be allowed near either Twitter or the nuclear codes.

The following is a repost of my May 30, 2014 discussion of the director's cut of Margaret.

Because so many film critics have been in awe of it as if it's that secret Wu-Tang album with the guest feature by Cher, I recently borrowed from a library in San Francisco the three-hour extended cut of playwright/filmmaker Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret. It was filmed back in 2005--which is so long ago that John Gallagher Jr. (from Short Term 12 and HBO's The Newsroom) looks like an eight-year-old boy in the film--but it wasn't released until 2011 in a slightly shorter cut due to legal squabbling.


As former RogerEbert.com editor Jim Emerson astutely noted in 2012, "Sure, [Margaret's] focus is entirely on a certain demographic slice of human beings--mostly middle- to upper-class, educated, New York-dwelling, Judeo-Christian-atheist white people--but these people are alive and ragged and messy in ways few movie characters are allowed to be."

The best performance in Margaret comes from neither the frequently shouty Anna Paquin nor her co-star J. Smith-Cameron, Lonergan's wife. It comes from Jeannie Berlin, who nicely underplays her role as the brash best friend of a pedestrian (Allison Janney) who was killed in a tragic Manhattan bus accident caused by the bus driver (Mark Ruffalo), because he was distracted by a high-schooler (Paquin) who was trying to ask him for directions while he was driving.

In the film Margaret, that bus accident wouldn't have happened if Anna Paquin just Googled "cowboy hats in nyc."pic.twitter.com/2HZfoJKSMb

— Jimmy J. Aquino (@JimmyJAquino) May 29, 2014

Aside from suffering from sore buttocks while watching it, most of the viewers who don't like Margaret can't stand Paquin's character Lisa because she's one of the most unlikable teenage lead characters in recent memory. But that's precisely what Paquin and Lonergan were shooting for: to make it difficult for viewers to root for or side with Lisa as she tries to process her guilt and pain over this pedestrian who died in her arms by launching a crusade that she manipulates to shift complete blame from her to the not-very-bright bus driver who ran over the pedestrian.

(Plus anyone who remembers being a teen should be well aware that teens tend to react histrionically to anything, and Lonergan and the shouty Paquin capture this to a tee.)


The film isn't just about the PTSD of many post-9/11 New Yorkers. It's also about the mindset of a certain kind of teen or college student who claims to be taking some sort of stand like fighting against the oppression of people of color, but she's really making everything all about herself. And throughout Margaret, all I could think was "So this is what Suey Park must be like when she's not on Twitter."

Suey Park and her acolytes' #CancelColbert campaign against a fake racist was the dumbest-looking campaign against a fictional character since Dan Quayle's outrage over Murphy Brown. The ways that Park handled intelligent and rational criticisms of her anti-Colbert Report hashtag, as well as her decision to ally herself with Uncle Ruckus, a.k.a. Michelle Malkin, during #CancelColbert, tarnished all the admirable previous work this hashtag activist had done in addressing issues that are far more deserving of attention, like the treatment of Asian American women and sites like the Huffington Post that exploit writers by not paying them. (#CancelColbert is also yet another hashtag that's tarnished Twitter and helped kill the fun out of that site, proving once again that nuance is the enemy of Twitter, and Twitter is the enemy of nuance, to borrow thewords of Hari Kondabolu.)

Dear rest of the world, I swear the face of Asian American activism does not just look like #CancelColbert and that a lot of us know satire.

— Kristina Wong (@mskristinawong) March 28, 2014

#CancelColbert is probably the most fun topic the writing room @ColbertReport has ever had to work with. Good satire can never be cancelled.

— Kristina Wong (@mskristinawong) March 28, 2014

Can the #CancelColbert HT die out by noon so we can go back to dealing with actual problems? #cancelracism#cancelsexism#cancelpoverty

— Kristina Wong (@mskristinawong) March 28, 2014

@jezebelmel@suey_park If enjoying satire that ridicules racism makes me "stupid" then I'm happily the dumbest gal on earth. #CancelColbert

— Kristina Wong (@mskristinawong) March 28, 2014

@Hodge_Cameron@jezebelmel@suey_park Anyhow, how about that Washington football team? Anyone remember them before this #CancelCobert thing

— Kristina Wong (@mskristinawong) March 28, 2014

By the way as an Official Spokesman for the Asian Community wearing my (conical) Asian Hat -- the #CancelColbert thing is pretty dumb

— Arthur Chu (@arthur_affect) March 28, 2014

Everyone jumping on #CancelColbert is exactly the people I expected. Hashtag activism is stupid.

— T.K. of AAK! (@AskAKorean) March 28, 2014

@josungkim the real shit that Asian Ams do take from the media.

— T.K. of AAK! (@AskAKorean) March 29, 2014

@AskAKorean Kind of reminds me of hard-line Korean politicians. Any sign of wanting to make peace w/ the other side and you're the enemy.

— refresh_daemon (@refresh_daemon) March 29, 2014

It's very troubling to watch someone declare that they are an "authentic" representative and then denounce those who disagree with them.

— Jamelle Bouie (@jbouie) March 29, 2014

Both the fact that #CancelColbert took attention away from the issue that The Colbert Report satirized on its March 26 show (the exploitation of Native Americans) and Park's immature and bizarre responses to any form of rational criticism showed a lot about Park's youth and inexperience. It's much like how the Paquin character's youth and lack of self-awareness of her privileged life (her divorced parents are a wealthy TV ad director who lives far away in California and a self-absorbed New York stage actress, portrayed respectively by Mr. and Mrs. Lonergan) play a huge part in how poorly she handles her crusade.

As part of this crusade, Lisa gets in touch with the deceased's best friend and talks her into pursuing a civil suit against the bus driver's employers to seek justice and get the driver fired. One reason why Berlin's performance as Emily is such a standout is because Emily, who gradually sees the manipulative and self-serving Lisa for what she really is, gets to give the extremely slappable Lisa the kind of verbal smackdown that most of the other female characters in the film are too timid to give her.


Maybe it's because I'm still amazed by the bone-dislocating prison yard fight scene in The Raid 2 and I wish that scene showed up in every movie, no matter what genre (think of all the unwatchable tearjerkers that could be improved by inserting that shot of Iko Uwais breaking the inmate's leg with his bare hands), but Margaret could have used at least one brutal slapping scene. Emily's terrific smackdown of Lisa to her tear-stained face ("This isn't an opera! And we are not all supporting characters to the drama of your amazing life!") is as close to a "Sidney Poitier slapping the white off the racist landowner during In the Heat of the Night"-style slap as the film gets. The middle-aged Berlin character's calm and snarky demeanor in the face of Lisa's adolescent histrionics is proof that if you want to win an ideological argument--or a freestyle rap battle--you should always be the calmer one.

The following is a repost of my July 10, 2012 discussion of "Isolated," an episode of Disney XD's short-lived Tron: Uprising. I hate the listicle structure, and his piece could have easily gone without that structure, but over at Blastr, Ernie Estrella nicely discussed why the animated Uprising did a much better job at world-building than the live-action Tron movies did.

Green Lantern: The Animated Series and Transformers Prime have been more satisfying than their much-maligned live-action counterparts, and Tron: Uprising has joined them as another example of an animated show that's superior to its live-action counterpart, thanks to its best episode yet, "Isolated." The story puts the spotlight on the animated Tron: Legacy prequel's most compelling creation so far: Paige, a lieutenant in evil General Tesler's army whom Tesler has assigned the task of hunting down Beck, a.k.a. the masked Renegade.

The straight-arrow Beck's evolution from mechanic to hero has been a less interesting arc than Paige's desperate bid for her ruthless general's respect, which has put her in competition with Tesler's supercilious right-hand man Pavel (Paul Reubens) ("Isolated"'s "previously on" segment amusingly counterpoints narrator Tricia Helfer's recap--"Tesler rewards Paige's hard work with praise"--with a montage of clips of Tesler and Pavel both belittling Paige). "Isolated" reveals why Paige chose to work for Tesler and ties her backstory to Quorra (Olivia Wilde, reprising the most interesting character from Tron: Legacy).

Emmanuelle Chriqui voiced Paige during Tron: Uprising's one-season run.

Trapped on a slowly disintegrating island with Beck and forced to work with her enemy (and if Tron: Uprising lasts past a season, inevitable love interest) to find a way out before the rock sinks into the sea, Paige flashes back to her time as a hospital medic. Back then, Paige dabbled in composing instrumental music, even though as another character told her, she's not "programmed" to be a musician.

Her instrument reminds me of the Tenori-on used by electro artist Little Boots in the viral video for her track "Stuck on Repeat":



(Someone on the Tron-Sector fansite forums noted that Paige's instrument is a variation on the Tonematrix, a sweet music-making tool that will prevent you from getting anything else done for a couple of hours.)

Paige was once encouraged to pursue music by Quorra, whom she briefly befriended when Quorra brought in to the medical center Ada (Meagan Holder), a friend of Quorra's who was injured while escaping the genocidal purge of the ISOs that was ordered by Grid dictator Clu. Introduced in Tron: Legacy, the ISOs were a race of advanced beings who were unique in The Grid for not being programs and were an accidental but miraculous creation by software genius Kevin Flynn.

Clu, Flynn's evil clone, resented his creator's attachment to the ISOs and considered their humanity an imperfection, so he derezzed all of them, except for a few ISOs who managed to survive Clu's attacks, including Ada and Quorra, who, to evade capture, hid ISO markings on her skin from the medics. Paige's greatest quality as a soldier--her loyalty to whoever is her superior--is also the reason for her tragic flaw: her inability to question anything that appears to be wrong, whether it's whatever lie Tesler tells her or the lies about the "crooked and dangerous" nature of the ISOs that Clu's forces have spread across The Grid.

Paige too easily accepted as truths those lies about the ISOs, so when she spotted Quorra's markings, she considered snitching on Quorra's whereabouts to the authorities. However, Paige didn't go through with the snitching. Her medical center co-workers did. Later, when Paige awoke from being knocked out by Quorra during her escape from Tesler's guards (she believes that Paige betrayed her, so I'm betting Wilde will resurface later in the season for Quorra's inevitable battle against Paige), she discovered her medical center staff was massacred.

The aftermath of the attack was where Paige first encountered Tesler, who told her that her co-workers were derezzed by Quorra and Ada and offered her a spot in his army as a way to seek her revenge. Paige doesn't know that Tesler lied to her and was the one who derezzed her co-workers right after they reported Quorra and Ada to him (he deemed any program who came into contact with ISOs to be too "contanimated" by them).


Wilde's guest shot is a treat for those of us who enjoyed her performance in Tron: Legacy. Quorra's love for the works of Jules Verne, her curiosity about the world outside The Grid and her wish to see an actual sunrise helped keep the film from becoming a way-too-chilly-and-dull sci-fi actioner, and even though those character touches bordered on Manic Pixie Dream Girl Syndrome, Wilde did a nice job bringing to life those aspects of her character. In "Isolated," Paige's music brings out in Quorra the same kind of curiosity she expressed about Verne and the Flynn family's non-digital world.

An even more surprising credit in "Isolated" than Wilde's name belongs to André Bormanis, who scripted the episode and whose name is familiar to those of us who pay attention to the credits of sci-fi/fantasy shows--he's a veteran of Legend of the Seeker and the Star Trek spinoffs. That era of Trek when Bormanis served as a writer and science consultant can be a chore to watch because of the later spinoffs' overreliance on the same kind of impenetrable technobabble that makes the first Tron film a chore to watch too.

Bormanis takes a crucial and less irritating element of the writing on those Trek shows since the '60s--incorporating past and present real-world issues into the Trek heroes' missions--and brings it to "Isolated." The racially tinged treatment of the ISOs parallels both the harsh treatment of illegal immigrants in Arizona and the persecution of Jews, right down to the ISOs' markings (although those are birthmarks instead of prisoner number tattoos imprinted by their captors).


If you derezzed the virtual setting of The Grid and the terms "program,""ISO" and "derezzed," the flashback portion of "Isolated" could easily be a story about a medic in a Nazi-occupied part of Europe who discovers the patient he's befriended is a Jewish refugee and is faced with the dilemma of turning the refugee in to the authorities. The episode's final scene poignantly shows Paige clinging to one of the few remnants of both her old life and her humanity, as she secretly reactivates the old melody that used to automatically play on her instrument. All this is pretty weighty stuff for a Disney XD show.

Both "Isolated" and last week's episode, "Identity," which deepened the previously boring character of Tron himself ("Tron isn't a character, he's an impossibly virtuous program,"complained the A.V. Club about the 1982 movie's screenplay in 2010), have shown how far the Tron franchise has come from the flat writing and convoluted, barely-comprehensible-when-you-were-a-kid gibberish about programs and their "users" that characterized the first movie. Tron is evolving into a more relatable and mature--as well as far less technobabble-plagued and far less alienating--franchise. It's like the live-action Star Wars franchise in reverse.