The following is a repost of my November 20, 2014 discussion of Maltin on Movies and Denzel Washington Is the Greatest Actor of All Time Period.

Midroll Media's Wolfpop is a new sister network to the Earwolf podcast network, and its aim is to bring both plenty of production polish and big names (from the worlds of comedy, publishing and entertainment reporting) to a type of podcast format that's been around since podcasting's not-so-polished-sounding beginnings: pop culture talk. On November 4, Wolfpop--which is being curated by Paul Scheer, star of The League and co-host of his own movie talk podcast, Earwolf's How Did This Get Made?--launched 563,000 different pop culture podcasts. Even though I'm unemployed, I don't have time to listen to all 563,000 of them, but there are two Wolfpop shows that immediately caught my attention because of both the talent involved and the intriguing film-related subjects of their shows.

Maltin on Movies pairs up Leonard Maltin with comedian Baron Vaughn and gives the duo a different film-related topic to discuss each week (for example, episode 2 was about the unexpected rise of the McConaissance). Meanwhile, former Totally Biased host W. Kamau Bell and his fellow Totally Biased staff writer (and old Bay Area roommate) Kevin Avery make a case for why Denzel Washington is the illest on the succinctly titled Denzel Washington Is the Greatest Actor of All Time Period.


Vaughn, Bell and Avery are terrific choices for Wolfpop show hosts. Besides the conversational skills they've honed as hosts of previous podcasts (Vaughn hosted the All Things Comedy network's Deep Shit, while Bell did a podcast with Living Colour's Vernon Reid and had another movie talk podcast with Avery, Siskel & Negro, before they reteamed for the new Wolfpop show), it's also always wonderful to hear comedians of color hosting weekly podcasts. Sure, there's also Aisha Tyler (Girl on Guy), Margaret Cho (Monsters of Talk) and Kumail Nanjiani (The Indoor Kids, The X-Files Files), but, um, that's about it. The L.A. comedy podcast community is so lily-white it pours mayo into its tacos. It's so white it thinks Dilla was that lady who used to always tell jokes about her husband Fang on Carson. It's so white it has sex to Mumford & Sons. It's so white...

As an animation historian and an expert on older periods of film, Maltin is phenomenal. When I was a kid, I loved leafing through Of Mice and Magic, Maltin's thick tome about the history of American animation, so much that I would repeatedly renew it at the public library. But as a reviewer of live-action American films, the former Entertainment Tonight film critic isn't exactly one of my favorites. He gave only two (or two and a half) stars to Taxi Driver, The Long Goodbye, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid and Miller's Crossing, all movies I love. As long as Maltin doesn't talk about either Taxi Driver, The Long Goodbye, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid or Miller's Crossing on this new podcast, Maltin on Movies is worth a listen each week.

Despite some of his tastes in live-action films, Maltin is--like he's always been during his appearances on other podcasts--likable and level-headed in many of the same ways that the late Roger Ebert was. He may not agree with you about an unconventional indie flick you might adore, but at least he's not going to be a dick about it. He's never going to say something racist about your Korean friend like Rex Reed would do, and he's never going to boo you off the stage like Armond White rudely does to actors and directors he incomprehensibly dislikes.

Maltin's friendliness and approachability ("The friendliest film critic I know,"says DVD Savant author Glenn Erickson) must have been why Joe Dante let bygones be bygones after he was disappointed with Maltin's negative review of his first Gremlins movie, and he got Maltin to appear during Gremlins 2: The New Batch in a cameo as himself--delivering that same negative review of Gremlins. It's also why the L.A. comedy community likes to hang out with Maltin. Sarah Silverman memorably got him to pretend to be her date in the audience during her parody of award show acceptance speeches on Comedy Central's Night of Too Many Stars autism telethon ("Richard Roeper cannot hold a candle to you as a film critic or as an oral lover"), and Doug Benson frequently has Maltin on as a guest on Doug Loves Movies, which uses the Leonard Maltin Movie Guide app on Benson's phone to run the show's Leonard Maltin Game.

But does that same congeniality make for lively and entertaining discussions about film like the frequently contentious pairing of Siskel and Ebert did? Not very often. So this is where Baron Vaughn--who's actually as knowledgeable about modern-day cinema as Maltin but isn't quite as familiar with older periods of film like him--comes in. Vaughn's light banter with Maltin and his ability to keep their conversations engaging are why he's an ideal partner for Maltin. They're not contentious like the Sneak Previews and At the Movies hosts used to be, but fortunately, Vaughn and Maltin's congruent opinions about the three films they select for discussion each week (the first film is one they highly recommend, the second film is one they agree is an artistic failure and the third is a lesser-known title that they both wish had received more shine) haven't resulted in boring talk.

For the first time in his long career as a reviewer (and host of various film talk shows where, unlike in podcasts, the conversations have to be much shorter and snappier and completely edited down), Maltin is as interesting a conversationalist as either Siskel or Ebert, thanks to Vaughn. He's brought out some great stories from Maltin, like his recollection of the first time he taped a press-junket interview with the late Robin Williams, a famously energetic and laugh-inducing interviewee, for Entertainment Tonight.




Denzel Washington Is the Greatest is a less serious movie talk show than Maltin on Movies, but it's equally worthwhile. I was a fan of W. Kamau Bell's late, lamented Totally Biased and its progressive brand of humor about race (Totally Biased was as close as we got to a weekly TV version of one of my all-time favorite humor books, ego trip's Big Book of Racism!), so it's comforting to have a piece of that show back, even if it's just in the form of a podcast about Denzel movies starring two of its writers.

"Denzealots" Bell and Kevin Avery intend to analyze a different Denzel movie each week--I can't wait until they reach either Crimson Tide or Malcolm X, which are neck and neck as my favorite Denzel movie--and rate it in terms of "Denzelishness," like how often "Denzel does that thing with his lip." Because Washington has starred in so many movies since his big-screen debut in Carbon Copy, a 1981 comedy where George Segal co-starred as his newly discovered biological father, the size of his filmography is making me wonder if the run of Bell and Avery's new podcast will be as long as the decade-long run that's been estimated for Mission Log, the Roddenberry Entertainment podcast that's been reviewing every single episode of each screen incarnation of Star Trek in chronological order.

(Photo source: Kevin Avery)

Whatever the case, I'm excited about where this Denzel podcast is going to go, especially because Bell says he wants to have guests on the show. I can't think of a more ideal guest than either Slate's Aisha Harris, who wrote a good piece about Washington's recent Liam Neeson-style career turns as a "geriaction" hero; stand-up comic Reggie Reg, who does the best Denzel impression anywhere; or Bronson Pinchot, who once said he hated working with Washington during the filming of Courage Under Fire--and due to Avery's current stint as a writer for the incredible Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, that has me crossing my fingers for Oliver himself to show up one day on Washington Is the Greatest. (That's mainly because Washington played a British military vet in 1988's For Queen & Country, and I want to hear Oliver evaluate Washington's accent in that film.)

Best of all, Bell and Avery's discussions of why black people often leave movie screenings so early (Bell points out that it's most likely because they have to pick up their kids from school) or why Bell considers historical dramas like A Soldier's Story (Avery refers to the 1984 movie as "the thing that red-alerted a lot of black women to Denzel Washington") and Glory to be "black people homework" are imbued with the same insight and hilarious observations about life as a person of color that made Totally Biased such a keeper during its short life span. Here's hoping Wolfpop doesn't front on Washington Is the Greatest and abruptly put an end to it like FXX did to Totally Biased.

Oscar-winning Room star Brie Larson has had a killer year as a dramatic performer, so it's time to revisit my March 5, 2015 discussion of an offbeat cult movie in which Larson got to revisit her little-known past as a teenage pop singer, as well as experience a taste of her future. In this 2010 movie, Larson briefly dabbled in the same kind of pulpy material she'll be tackling soon as the star of the forthcoming tentpole blockbusters Kong: Skull Island and Captain Marvel. This 2010 movie has also been on its director's mind lately. When it aired on Channel 4 in the U.K. last month, the director live-tweeted a bunch of crazy behind-the-scenes details about the movie.

The 2010 coming-of-age flick Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is an interesting anomaly in the work of Edgar Wright, the great British director behind the innovative sitcom Spaced and the irreverent Cornetto trilogy with Spaced stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and The World's End). It's his only adaptation of someone else's creation so far, it doesn't take place in England, neither Pegg nor Frost are in the cast and it was his first studio movie, so that meant he had to deal with the often absurd American test screening process.

I recently listened to Wright discuss gauging audience reactions in his Blu-ray audio commentary for Scott Pilgrim's deleted scenes, which include the film's original ending before it was reshot (should Scott have ended up with Knives Chau or Ramona Flowers?: I think the film should have ended either with Scott being single or Scott, Knives and Ramona becoming a threesome because a fight like the ones they had versus Gideon Graves is bound to make everyone horny). Something during that commentary didn't sit right with me. A brilliant and unique comedic filmmaker like Wright should not have to make decisions based on test screenings, even though he has said he considers it "a good thing to do because you see where the laughs are and where you can change things by half a second to get a bigger laugh."

Aside from comments from test screening audience members to DreamWorks Animation that Hiccup should be left disabled at the end of the first How to Train Your Dragon movie, have those test screenings ever been really useful? If Martin Scorsese tried to win back the 40 GoodFellas test screening audience members who walked out after the movie's first 10 minutes, GoodFellas wouldn't have been the GoodFellas we know and love. Unless I'm mistaken, neither of Wright's Cornetto flicks were tweaked due to test screening reactions (in fact, when Hot Fuzzdid go through the test screening process in America, Wright defied a suggestion to change Hot Fuzz's title). I hear those movies turned out okay.

While Wright has said he's proud of Scott Pilgrim's final cut, that first experience of trying to please studio execs during the making of that movie had to have colored his heartbreaking decision to quit directing his longtime pet project, this summer's adaptation of Marvel's Ant-Man, where Wright was replaced by Bring It On director Peyton Reed. While squabbling with Marvel Studios execs over the direction of Ant-Man, I'm sure Wright was thinking, "How can the same shit happen to the same guy twice?"


It's remarkable that a movie as inventive as Scott Pilgrim survived such a maddening process where the comments from test audiences and studio execs often win out over what the filmmakers want--and did so with all its inventiveness intact. Scott Pilgrim is such a perfect marriage of source material and filmmaker. Bryan Lee O'Malley's original Scott Pilgrim graphic novels feel like a Toronto indie rock scene version of Spaced. Scott and his roommate Wallace are basically Tim and Mike, except Wallace isn't obsessed with joining the military and is aware he's gay. While Spaced imagines that time when you're trying to navigate yourself both professionally and romantically through your 20s as silly fan film-ish versions of either Star Wars, Hong Kong gun fu, a George Romero flick or The A-Team, Scott Pilgrim cleverly envisions relationship drama as both Kung Fu Hustle and an 8-bit Nintendo game.

Wright's film really gets video games like the 8-bit ones I grew up playing. (Speaking of 8-bit, Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich's original score for the film effectively combines 8-bit with orchestra, especially during the "Boss Battle" cue for the climactic moment when Gideon is handed his ass, and it goes completely 8-bit at times, like during that amusing cover of Jerry Goldsmith's Universal logo music at the start of the movie or the source cue Dan the Automator created for Scott and Knives'Ninja Ninja Revolution video game.) Along with Run Lola Run, The Raid: Redemption, Edge of Tomorrow and maybe Dredd, Scott Pilgrim is one of the best video game-style movies not based on an actual game.



Wright's understanding of another kind of visual language, that of comic books like O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim novels--and his ability to figure out which parts of that visual language work on screen and which ones don't--fortunately turn the Scott Pilgrim film into the opposite of Ang Lee's lead-footed overstuffing of 2003's Hulk with screen panels and visible page breaks, or as Stop Smiling magazine's Justin Stewart described the screen panels and page breaks in my favorite takedown of Lee's Hulk, "the cinematic equivalent of Karl Rove dancing." Also, thanks to action filmmaking skills he previously demonstrated in Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and even a few Spaced episodes, Wright makes convincing fight scene combatants out of the least likely actors you'd ever imagine to be in a fight scene, whether it's Michael Cera as Scott, Mae Whitman as Roxy Richter or Jason Schwartzman as Gideon the girlfriend-beating music producer douche (Wright went on to do the same with Nick Frost during his fight scenes in The World's End, transforming him into the most agile rotund action star who's not Sammo Hung).

As believable as Cera is in his fight scenes, he's overshadowed in his own movie (it was supposed to turn the gawky and conservatively dressed teen from Arrested Development and Superbad into a bigger movie star, but nobody outside of Scott Pilgrim novel fans flocked to the movie in the summer of 2010) by funny turns by Ellen Wong as Knives, Kieran Culkin as Wallace and Brandon Routh as dim-witted vegan bassist Todd Ingram, one of the Evil Exes who used to date Ramona (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and are now challenging Scott to a duel. Scott Pilgrim proves that Routh, who brooded through all of his passable impression of Christopher Reeve in Superman Returns, is at his best as a light comedic actor, which is why I'm glad Arrow's current season is having him tap into those comedic gifts again as the Atom (it's refreshing to see a revenge-minded superhero--Ray Palmer's in the game to avenge his wife's murder--who's not brooding all the time).





As Knives, the clingy, too-young-for-Scott schoolgirl who doesn't take being dumped by Scott very well, Wong is a real find, and she deserves to go on to bigger and better things (since Scott Pilgrim, she's been a cast member on both the Canadian-made 2011 Afghanistan medical drama Combat Hospital and The Carrie Diaries). Part of me wishes the Scott Pilgrim graphic novels and movie version were mainly about Knives instead of Scott. It's interesting to read Asian moviegoers' varied reactions to Wong's performance as Knives five years after the movie's release. They were as divided about the Knives character as black moviegoers were divided about Denzel Washington's heel turn in Flight in 2012.

Writers from YOMYOMF would say things like "Ellen Wong alone was worth watching the film. She was freakin' ADORABLE. Dolls should be made of her," and Asian American Scott Pilgrim fans dug Knives so much that they've cosplayed as her. Meanwhile, a discontinued Asian Canadian collective of bloggers that called itself "the invazn"felt that "It's kind of sad to see Asian women be the 'exotic in-between' girlfriends who aren't even real girlfriends, but pure ego boosters for the main character's lack of masculinity" (someone should have told them O'Malley himself is half-Asian and not some white graphic novelist writing from the outside about people of color he's never interacted with), although the blog's reviewer enjoyed seeing Knives take charge towards the end of the movie and battle both Ramona and Gideon.



"I was just super-proud that I had created a plum role for someone like Ellen Wong, who otherwise may never have been in a major movie, just by being born Asian and Canadian," wrote O'Malley in a fascinating 2013 Tumblr post. He admitted in that post that the cast of mostly white characters and a few Asian characters in the original novels reflected an unenlightened attitude towards race he had for the first 20 years of his life, and he ended up being appalled by how white the movie looked. His willingness to admit those things must have taken as much guts as it does for Scott to admit to his exes Knives and Kim Pine (Alison Pill), the snarky and sullen drummer in Scott's band Sex Bob-omb (notice how all the drummers in the movie are female), that he shouldn't have been so careless about how he treated them when he dated them. Scott Pilgrim gets some flack for being an overly noisy and hyperactive movie that doesn't take enough time to breathe and be more naturalistic, but that scene where Kim briefly sets aside her snarky and sullen demeanor and wordlessly accepts Scott's apology is one of several human touches in the movie that make Scott Pilgrim more human than the average video game-inspired movie. It's also an example of how great an actor Pill is (watch her also command the screen in a much more broadly played way during her one scene as a fascist schoolteacher in Snowpiercer).

Scott Pilgrim does so many things well as a video game movie, a comic book adaptation and a coming-of-age farce that it's easy to forget what it also accomplishes as a movie about small-time rock bands. I knew Scott Pilgrim would be a solid battle-of-the-bands movie right when it had characters attempting to talk to each other inside a club, and they couldn't hear each other, a typical aspect of modern-day nightlife Hollywood rarely gets right. The running joke of the unenthusiastic MC who's as excited about introducing musical acts as Robert De Niro is about sitting through a press junket is another funny, straight-out-of-real-life touch during the movie's band scenes, as is the way that Beck, who wrote and recorded Sex Bob-omb's material, purposely downgraded the quality of his own sound to capture what a not-so-great band in the Toronto indie scene would sound like. Scott and his bandmates view the glitzy Clash at Demonhead--led by Scott's hot ex-girlfriend Envy Adams (Brie Larson)--to be evil corporate sellouts, but the ironic truth is Envy and her band don't sound as mediocre as Sex Bob-omb do, as we discover during "Black Sheep," sung quite nicely by Larson very briefly in the film (while it's sung on the Scott Pilgrim ABKCO song album by Metric frontwoman Emily Haines, whose Toronto-based band provided material for The Clash at Demonhead and whose fashions O'Malley used as the basis for Envy's in the novels). I wish the regular release of the ABKCO song album included the Larson version of "Black Sheep" as a bonus track, but fortunately, it can be heard in its entirety as a Blu-ray extra or right below.



You also have to be in lesbians with a movie that riffs on Goldsmith's Universal logo music not once but twice. While rewatching Scott Pilgrim, I completely forgot about Chris Evans cracking his neck to the pounding drums of the Universal logo music and laughed my ass off.

What other movie has done a sight gag like that? It's also a moment where you're so relieved that those meddling kids from the test screening audiences who have attempted to ruin so many perfectly decent movies didn't get to intervene.

I'm too busy working on a manuscript for a prose novel right now to post any new material for the AFOS blog. I've discovered that it takes me an entire week to finish writing each chapter in this manuscript. The novel is currently intended to consist of 31 chapters, so if I continue at this one-chapter-a-week pace without ever stopping, I'll be done with the manuscript by the end of February 2017.

That means I have no time to write any new blog posts for the AFOS blog for the rest of the year. I'm so committed to finishing this thing (and then shopping it around) that I don't allow myself to watch a new episode of Mr. Robot until I'm done writing an entire chapter.

"The Pet" was an unfinished Filipino monster story I've mentioned in great detail on this blog. Filipino monster folklore definitely needs more shine, and I was hoping "The Pet" would help out in bringing some more exposure to Filipino monster stories. It's not the first story I've tried to write and ended up failing to finish due to writer's block.

In high school, I wrote an unfinished novel called Jasper, about a Filipino teen who kills a racist bully and runs away. I never was able to reach the killing-the-bully-and-running-away part of the story, which was disappointing because the greatest thing about fiction writing is that you can murder people who are assholes without getting thrown in jail. Despite the novel being unfinished (and also being rather aimless and not very good by my standards today), I allowed its completed chapters to be used as part of the syllabus in a Filipino American lit course one of my older brother's friends presided over at UC Santa Cruz in 1993. It was interesting to later see the Robert Duvall movie The Apostle echo the plot of Jasper with its story of a preacher who kills his wife's lover and escapes to another town to start over and continue with his preaching.

Then I tried to write a screenplay for a time-travel comedy called Timegroove back when I reluctantly worked in the tech industry, but I was never satisfied with the dialogue. Also, the original Life on Mars was doing wonderful things with the "modern-day cop trapped in the '70s" premise, so why fucking bother? Life on Mars was immensely better than much of what I had in mind for Timegroove.


The Timegroove plot had an Asian American cop chasing an escaped criminal who hijacked an Indian inventor's record player-inspired time machine and hid out in the '70s, and the protagonist had to put up with worse forms of racism than the forms of racism he encountered in the present day. His '70s female love interest was an Asian American undercover cop named Lotus Blossom, whose name was a reference to a really cheesy slow jam of the same name by the band War, and his '70s partner was a black cop named Stroke Johnson.

In the '70s, the protagonist also encountered a younger version of the time machine's inventor and turned to him for help to get back to the present, and the inventor dressed exactly the same as his older self. The Timegroove script never went past the first couple of scenes.

Infernal Affairs, the Hong Kong crime flick that was remade as The Departed, or rather, The De-pah-ted (Photo source: DVD Beaver)

Finally, there was a 2010 webcomic script called The Palace: Continuous Hell. It was about a movie theater worker who, after work, is forced to wait in a never-ending line outside a nightclub, while her theater co-workers go insane as they sit through a staff-only advance screening of a new and totally unnecessary Infernal Affairs sequel from Hong Kong because the movie never actually begins. A lot of modern-day Hong Kong movies kick off with 800 different movie studio logos, but this fictional Infernal Affairs sequel opens with 800,000 of them.

I wrote Continuous Hell before Family Guy, a show I greatly dislike, riffed in 2011 on movies that open with too many production company logos. Continuous Hell had a great webcomic title too: it referenced a line from the original Infernal Affairs ("The worst of the eight hells is called Continuous Hell. It has the meaning of Continuous Suffering"), and I especially like how the words "Continuous Hell" can easily be sung to the tune of "Promiscuous" by Nelly Furtado and Timbaland ("Continuous Hell, whatever you are...").



Unlike the other unfinished stories, I actually completed writing the Continuous Hell script, but I never took the script to the drawing stage because I retired from trying to draw webcomics by then. They're fucking hard to draw.

The likelihood of me finishing my current manuscript is higher than the likelihood of me ever drawing a webcomic again. It's time to finally break the cycle.

The following is a repost of my September 4, 2015 discussion of "The Ricks Must Be Crazy," an episode of Rick and Morty. "The Ricks Must Be Crazy" can be streamed in its entirety on Hulu.

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

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

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



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

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



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

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



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

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



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

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

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


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

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

(Photo source: 20th Century Fox)

The following is a repost of my September 3, 2015 discussion of Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

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

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





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

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


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

Dear Dawn of the Planet of the Apes sequel: MORE MAURICE PLZ. #Maurice

— Aziz Ansari (@azizansari) July 16, 2014

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

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



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

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

(Photo source: 20th Century Fox)

The third season of the CW's The Flash begins tonight, so the following is a repost of my June 5, 2012 discussion of the Young Justice episode "Bloodlines," a story that united four generations of DC Comics speedsters, including Barry Allen and Wally West, two characters who are central to the CW show. "Bloodlines" can be streamed on Netflix.

I remember writer Peter David best for his work on DC's Star Trek comics (a Len Wein-scripted 1987 issue that reunited the Enterprise-A crew with con man Harry Mudd from the '60s show was the first comic I ever bought at an actual comic shop). But superhero comics readers admire David most for his writing on The Incredible Hulk, X-Factor (the X-Men spinoff, not the wack singing contest show), Supergirl and the original Young Justice comic. David gets to revisit the Young Justice characters in "Bloodlines," the third episode he's written for the animated version. The best part of David's run on DC's Star Trek was the humor, and David's sense of humor is a highlight of "Bloodlines," an entertaining fish-out-of-water story about the unexpected arrival of Impulse (Jason Marsden), a speedster from the future who talks as if he has ADHD and who also happens to be Bart Allen, the grandson of Barry Allen (George Eads), the current incarnation of The Flash.

"Tell us something we don't know yet. When do I become leader of the team? When do I join the Justice League? When do I get my own reality series?," inquires Beast Boy (Logan Grove) when he wants proof from Impulse that he's from the future. And I always get a kick out of how this TV-PG-rated cartoon sometimes toys with Cartoon Network's Standards & Practices department, like it does here when Impulse responds to Nightwing's old cop-show trick of getting his interviewee to verify his identity via a glass of water. "Oh, ah, you're trying to get a DNA sample. You need my spit," says Impulse. "Ha! That's such a Dick Grayson thing to do." The way Impulse puts emphasis on the name "Dick" makes his sentence sound as if it's going to be "That's such a dick move."

In "Bloodlines" (which also finds time to resolve the Roy Harper clone's search for the original Roy during its B-story), an adversary wreaks so much havoc on The Flash's home turf of Central City that it requires the attention of four generations of speedsters. Retired-from-superheroing Stanford student Wally West interrupts his regularly scheduled Asian fetish to suit up again as Kid Flash and keep an eye on Impulse as a favor to Nightwing. Another retired speedster, former Flash Jay Garrick (Geoff Pierson), runs the risk of his wife Joan's wrath because he snuck out of the quiet 70th wedding anniversary celebration Barry and his wife Iris (Young Justice writer Nicole Dubuc) threw for them and dusted off his old Mercury-style tin hat to assist the three younger Flashes on the decimated and scorched streets of Central City.


The destruction-causing stranger in a containment suit known as Neutron (James Arnold Taylor) turns out not to be a new supervillain but a brainwashed human pawn in an alien conspiracy who's having trouble controlling his powers. The aliens who unleashed Neutron on Central City are the same aliens who have been experimenting on teen runaways to access their metagenes, the genes that determine which humans are metahumans (the DC universe's equivalent of Marvel's mutants). Neutron's hidden overseers, who abandon their failed experiment with Neutron and flee their hideout before the team of speedsters can find them, speak in Krolotean but are taller than the Krolotean invaders who previously appeared on Young Justice this season and were blown up by The Light in "Alienated." Is this a superior breed of Kroloteans that's in league with both The Light and this season's shadowy new nemesis The Partner?

Impulse knows more than he's been letting on. His time machine's arrival at Mount Justice at about the same time as Neutron's energy-wave attack on Central City is hardly coincidental. In the grim post-apocalyptic scenes that open and close "Bloodlines," an older, prison-garbed Neutron sees Bart off as he readies his time machine for its destination: 40 years before Mount Justice--and the world--were reduced to rubble. Bart's mission is/was to save Neutron's younger self from prison and prevent the world's destruction. We see that Bart's "hyperactive tourist from the future" persona is just an act--a costume like the ones donned by "half the meat at Comic-Con" (they're so quirky because they're actually from the future too, according to one of the funniest lines David gives to Impulse). We also see that Impulse's accomplishments in the past aren't enough to fix the timestream because aside from older Neutron's slight change in appearance, the post-apocalyptic world remains unchanged.

I don't like that Young Justice is adding time travel as another spinning plate to the Ed Sullivan Show spinning plates act that this season has been basically shaping up to be because I'm so jaded from the aimless time-travel storytelling messes I was subjected to during Heroes. That live-action show soured the enjoyment I used to have for time-travel stories. But when time travel is placed into the hands of more capable writers like David and the Young Justice staffers, I doubt I'll find my not-so-TV-PG-rated self to be saying about the writing, "That's such a dick move."

When we last saw Sterling Archer, he was, like William Holden in Sunset Boulevard, face down in a pool and dead from multiple gunshot wounds. But that shocker of a season finale twist ending back in June was made less shocking by both FX's renewal of Archer for three more seasons and Archer creator Adam Reed's confirmation that the 10th season will be the final one for the longest-lasting of all his animated shows. So we're not through yet with the adventures of the world's most immature spy/P.I., and Reed has now come up with a crazy way (but it's typical for this show, which once had a poisoned Archer hallucinating that he was Warren Beatty in Heaven Can Wait) to continue on with those adventures despite killing off the title character.

At a New York Comic Con panel last week, Reed announced that when Archer resumes on FX in 2017, it will reboot itself again like it did in both 2014--when the main characters switched from espionage work to drug dealing (while Cheryl/Carol became a country singer) during the season-long arc known as "Archer Vice"--and March of this year. The seventh and most recent season took place in Hollywood and had Archer, Lana and Ray working as private eyes for Cyril, their now-defunct intelligence agency's former accountant. The eighth season will take place in an alternate timeline in 1947.


In this reality, Archer is a gumshoe instead of a spy, while Lana is a lounge singer Archer will be meeting for the first time, which contrasts with how the show first introduced Lana as Archer's colleague and ex-girlfriend. All the other main characters will have similarly different roles in 1947. Woodhouse is Archer's business partner instead of his butler, and the season will involve Archer's investigation of the murder of Woodhouse. Reed hasn't disclosed yet what the other six main characters' lives will be like in the '40s, but I won't be surprised if Krieger, the gadget expert who's possibly a Nazi, has a fondness for jodhpurs and the ideologies of certain recently fallen fascist leaders.

Archer's reverse time jump after the title character's death at the end of the previous season reminds me of Sledge Hammer!'s crazy approach to picking up from where it left off after the cop genre parody, briefly famous for the catchphrase"Trust me, I know what I'm doing," received a surprise renewal from ABC in 1987. Sledge Hammer! is, by the way, an '80s show that has aged better than Mr. Belvedere and The Cosby Show, a pair of wholesome sitcoms (aside from Belvedere's bizarre and awkwardly executed Very Special Episodes about AIDS, child molestation and date rape and Cosby's now-creepy barbecue sauce episode) that the anarchic and not-so-wholesome Hammer! got embroiled in public feuds with; Hammer! creator/showrunner Alan Spencer found Belvedere to be unfunny and often threw shade at Belvedere, while Hammer! aired against Cosby during its second and final season and got badly whupped in the Nielsen ratings.

Spencer's satirical creation confused both older viewers and Reagan-era network executives who preferred Dynasty-style lifestyle porn (the kind of Reagan-era entertainment John Carpenter cleverly critiqued in 1988's They Live), Cosby-style affluence and drab family sitcoms. Hammer! was ahead of its time: Spencer, a protégé of Mel Brooks, fought against ABC's insistence on a laugh track (and won, although Spencer has said that otherwise, the ABC execs "were brave. They rolled the dice. They trusted you"), and his show was a precursor to much more absurdist but similarly twisted Adult Swim network TV spoofs like Childrens Hospital, NTSF:SD:SUV:: and Eagleheart. Spencer thought Hammer! was going to be axed after the first season, so he concluded the season with David Rasche's reckless title character accidentally detonating a nuclear bomb and obliterating all of San Francisco.


The Hammer! season finale's apocalyptic last shot showed an ashen and completely ravaged San Francisco skyline, while Captain Trunk, Hammer's hapless, long-suffering boss, shouted "Haaaaammerrrrrrrrr!" off-screen. It was a difficult-to-resolve cliffhanger: how would Hammer, unless he was as invincible as Ray Luca was after Crime Story similarly blew up Luca with a nuke, have survived the blast when his hands were wrapped around the nuke?

So what was Spencer's solution after ABC surprised him with a second-season pickup? Instead of continuing the narrative in a post-apocalyptic, Mad Max-style San Francisco, which would have been amazing at the time but really expensive to do for a low-budget show like Hammer!, or doing the soap opera thing of revealing that Hammer had a twin brother who has decided to step into the shoes of his deceased brother, Spencer rewinded to five years before the explosion and tacked on a "Sledge Hammer! (The Early Years)" graphic.

Hammer! began its run with the SFPD forcing Hammer--an anti-social gun nut who talks to his gun and prefers to work alone--to pair up with a new partner, by-the-book Inspector Dori Doreau, whom Hammer never met before (she was also the one character on Hammer! who kept the show grounded in a reality that wasn't as absurdist as Police Squad!'s or Childrens Hospital's, and she was played completely straight by Anne-Marie Martin in a low-key manner reminiscent of both Ryan Phillippe and Powers Boothe in MacGruber--sure, Rasche and Harrison Page played, respectively, Hammer and Trunk straight too, but unlike the other two characters, Doreau rarely cracked wise about the mayhem surrounding her). But at the start of the second season, Spencer contradicted his own continuity and showed that Hammer and Doreau were longtime partners back in 1982. This wasn't an accidental gaffe like Frasier Crane having a dad on Frasier, even though Cheers had established that Frasier's dad was deceased (the Frasier writers did a retcon and had Frasier explain at one point that he was angry with Martin during the years he worked in Boston, so he told his friends his dad was dead). This was Spencer's way of saying, "My show is a spoof in which the lead character gets rebuilt as a RoboCop-style cyborg for one episode and then returns to normal as if the cyborg thing never happened. I don't give a fuck about continuity."

Reed and his producing partner Matt Thompson could be doing the same thing with Archer season 8--flouting continuity and not having to worry about the task of addressing the lead character's death by skipping to the character's adventures from an earlier time period (a time period that, in Archer's case, took place before Archer's birth in 1948)--while the eighth season's official subtitle of "Dreamland" could be a hint that this '40s reality is Archer's dream state after he was shot by femme fatale Veronica Deane. And if it does turn out that all of season 8 is Archer's fantasy while he's in a comatose state, it's a move straight out of the playbook of Magnum, P.I., a show Archer adores, as well as a show that Reed has frequently referenced, whether during moments like a recreation of Magnum's famous "Did you see the sunrise?" scene and Ray's quip about waiting to be rescued by T.C.'s chopper or during FX promos like last season's shot-for-shot recreation of the Magnum opening titles.


Magnum often did gimmicky stories like a parody of Raiders of the Lost Ark, the movie Tom Selleck would have starred in had he not been contractually obligated to Magnum; a "Magnum in a coma" story that, like Archer's recent season finale, killed off Magnum when the cast and crew assumed CBS was going to pull the plug on their show; and a black-and-white Sam Spade homage. But while Magnum experimented with being a '40s private eye mystery for just one episode, Archer will experiment with the '40s setting for an entire season.

Instead of something more along the lines of the one-episode experiments Magnum and Hammer! were fond of doing (Hammer! did one-episode spoofs of Witness, Vertigo, the aforementioned RoboCop and Desperately Seeking Susan, and my personal favorite out of Hammer!'s movie parodies is the Desperately riff because it's a rare showcase for Martin's comedic skills: Doreau experiences a concussion and wakes up thinking she's Hammer), Archer's willingness to both experiment for a time span that's longer than one episode and continually explore new facets of Archer's screwed-up character is largely what keeps the show fresh (the exploration of those new facets is, now that I think about it, similar to Spencer's statement that "The point [of Hammer!'s Witness episode] wasn't parodying Witness, the point was taking the character of Sledge Hammer and putting him in new and interesting situations to see how he reacts"). That willingness makes the start of every new Archer season something to look forward to each year.

At this late point in Archer's life span, you'd expect the jokes to get stale, but Reed and Thompson continually find ways to keep their show from growing tiresome. And if the "Dreamland" arc fails to entertain the most die-hard Archer fans or if it becomes a burden for Reed in the writing department, Reed and Thompson can always blow the show's premise to smithereens again and stick Archer, Lana and the rest in the Pinkerton Detective Agency during the Wild West, which could be interesting--as long as Reed and Thompson don't go all Jon Peters on us and pit the team against a lame-ass giant spider.

(Photo source: FY Springfield)

This week, The Simpsons aired its 600th episode, "Treehouse of Horror XXVII." The following is a repost of my October 30, 2015 discussion of the first Simpsons Halloween episode that wasn't a "Treehouse of Horror" anthology. This 2015 episode is streamable on FXX's Simpsons World app.

The 27th season of The Simpsons marks the first time the show has produced two Halloween episodes in the same season. In addition to the annual "Treehouse of Horror" anthology--where every short story takes place outside the show's continuity, so a character like Bart or Groundskeeper Willy can be killed off in horrible fashion and then be brought back in the next story or later on in the same half-hour--the show has treated us to its first canonical Halloween episode ever, "Halloween of Horror."

Late-period Simpsons can often be so tiresome and stale or so desperate to be trending again (Homer separates from Marge and goes out with guest star Lena Dunham?: I think I'll pass) that I've sometimes gone for months without watching it, so I wasn't prepared for "Halloween of Horror," which is credited solely to staff writer Carolyn Omine, to fire on so many cylinders. It's a better Halloween episode than this week's "Treehouse of Horror XXVI," which isn't an atrocious edition of "Treehouse," but when its most enjoyable segment is the bizarre and grisly couch gag guest-directed by John Kricfalusi (my favorite detail in Kricfalusi's couch gag is Bart's Huckleberry Hound mask appearing in red instead of blue, because the licensed Huckleberry Hound costume Kricfalusi owned as a kid came in an incorrect red instead of blue), that's how disposable a "Treehouse" episode it is. I would have swapped the "Homerzilla" spoof of both the 1954 Godzilla and the 2014 Godzilla (it's kind of weird how the writers didn't have Harry Shearer deliver any jokes about his involvement in the 1998 Godzilla, a movie Shearer probably Lacuna'd from his memories) for the Psycho parody that the "Halloween of Horror" gag writers joke about being featured "next week."


When even the writing staff is starting to express on the show some boredom with the "Treehouse of Horror" format and showrunner Al Jean is admitting that "we've used up 78 horror stories and you can't do them anymore," maybe The Simpsons should just retire "Treehouse of Horror" and do canonical Halloween episodes like "Halloween of Horror" from now on. The "Treehouse" segments haven't been consistently funny in eons. Or maybe the show should start getting guest couch gag directors like Kricfalusi and Bill Plympton to do more than just guest-direct couch gags by having them guest-direct entire episodes as well (or guest-write them like Judd Apatow once did last season). That could provide late-period Simpsons with the creative shot in the arm it often badly needs.

Meanwhile, "Halloween of Horror" is an interesting case where a Lisa episode doesn't suck. I haven't liked a Lisa episode in years. Often on late-period Simpsons, Lisa shows up in one of two modes--either idealized supergenius or self-righteous wet blanket--so it's a relief whenever the show remembers once in a while that Lisa is just a little kid, like in "Lisa on Ice," my favorite classic-era Simpsons story centered on Lisa, and reverts to that mode of Lisa in an episode like "Halloween of Horror." The A-story of this canonical Halloween episode deals with Lisa becoming traumatized by the fake monsters at Krustyland's Halloween Horror Night after Homer takes her and Bart to Halloween Horror Night for the first time. The sight of Lisa being carried around and comforted by Homer and Marge like a baby is such an atypical one. I don't remember ever seeing a Simpsons episode where Lisa looked this small and completely broken.

(Photo source: FY Springfield)

Omine tosses in a trio of masked home invaders (the two most talkative thugs are voiced by Nick Kroll and Workaholics star Blake Anderson) who threaten Homer after he accidentally gets them fired from their jobs at Apu's pop-up Halloween store, so now Lisa isn't the only Simpson who's acting scared. Because "Halloween of Horror" is a canonical and slightly more grounded Simpsons Halloween episode, this home invasion half of the A-story doesn't turn into a typical "Treehouse of Horror" parody of thriller tropes.

Much of it is interestingly played straight, the dumbness of the Kroll and Anderson redneck characters (and the sublime sight gag of Homer and Lisa switching places with each other while screaming) aside. There's some genuine menace to the home invasion half, especially when episode director Mike B. Anderson goes experimental with the animation and channels the opening point-of-view shot from John Carpenter's Halloween during Homer's frantic search for a suddenly absent Lisa.


The animation quality of late-period Simpsons gets criticized by some longtime Simpsons fans for looking too computerized and smooth. Those fans long for the more crude-looking, all-hand-drawn-all-the-time days when Klasky-Csupo, not Film Roman, was handling the show's animation and the family looked a little closer to how they originally looked in the Simpsons shorts Klasky-Csupo produced for The Tracey Ullman Show.

But "Halloween of Horror" is a case where the digitalness works in the story's favor and effectively amplifies the fear experienced by Homer and Lisa, like when Anderson uses digital FX to distort the school locker room hallway when we see it from a traumatized Lisa's point of view.


Homer and Lisa's emotionally resonant arc of helping each other overcome their fears is mainly why the TV crit-erati is taken with "Halloween of Horror." But the little experimental touches Anderson and the other animators brought to the animation also have a lot to do with why "Halloween of Horror" stands out as a late-period Simpsons episode.

Another example is the end-credits reenactment of the opening titles from Carpenter's Halloween, which does a slow and eerie zoom-in on Maggie's face instead of on a jack-o'-lantern.




The musical number during the B-story of "Halloween of Horror" (Marge tries to cheer up Bart, who's disappointed about Homer and Marge removing the house's Halloween decorations to help Lisa feel less frightened, by taking Bart and Maggie out to a Halloween block party) isn't too bad either. "NC-17 Halloween" is a riff on adult Halloween shindigs and the proliferation of "sexy" costumes that Omine and composer Allen Simpson modeled after "Time Warp" from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and the sequence is notable for being occasionally disturbing, but in a different way from the typical kinds of disturbing things that scare Homer and Lisa.

When you're a grown-up, your perceptions of what you find to be scary can change. For instance, monsters (except maybe the kinds imagined by David Cronenberg) have lost the ability to disturb me. What unnerves me more now is the thought of sex between not-so-pretty people like the residents of Springfield. While "NC-17 Halloween" isn't as graphic as the animated character porn artwork that a certain segment of the Simpsons audience likes to draw and post online (they're kind of like the real-life yaoi artists whose fan art of Tweek and Craig chastely in love was put on display by Trey Parker and Matt Stone in this week's South Park episode, "Tweek x Craig," except their art is much more sexually explicit), the musical number implies a couple of genuinely unsettling visuals, like the off-screen bedroom antics of Milhouse's parents on Halloween. My eyes!

"NC-17 Halloween" isn't quite nightmare fuel like an episode of HBO's Real Sex, but it's almost there. It also leads to the episode's most amusing costume: Superintendent Chalmers in Sean Connery's diaper from Zardoz, which is up there with Bart as a Droog in "Treehouse of Horror III." Coming in a close second and third are Agnes Skinner as Amy Winehouse and a fully recovered Lisa as Zombie Frida Kahlo at the end of the episode.



The solidness of "Halloween of Horror," from the visuals (non-Van Houten-related, that is) to the involving story between Homer and Lisa, means that maybe The Simpsons should start a new tradition: an annual Halloween episode that has nothing to do with recreating old anthology shows or staging already-dated parodies of Hollywood blockbusters from two or three years ago. Or maybe the show shouldn't ruin a good thing and just treat this intriguing experiment--which has taken place in season 27, often the point in the life span of a 25-plus-year-old show when it no longer has the energy to be experimental--as a one-off.

There's a reason why "22 Short Films About Springfield" is special. Simpsons did it only once.

Other memorable quotes:

The following is a repost of my October 29, 2015 discussion of The Guest. After I published this post, Dan Stevens, the film's star, was cast as the title character on Fargo showrunner Noah Hawley's much-hypedLegion, an X-Men spinoff that will premiere next year on FX, while Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett, the duo behind The Guest, made a much-maligned Blair Witch Project sequel that was simply titled Blair Witch. The Guest is now streamable on Netflix.

"Mumblegore" filmmaker Adam Wingard has said the concept for his offbeat 2014 action thriller The Guest arose from watching a double feature of The Terminator and John Carpenter's original Halloween. So what would happen if you got your Terminator in my Halloween and you got your Halloween on my Terminator?


Marrying those two classic thrillers (and borrowing Carpenter's favorite typeface for the opening and closing titles, although Wingard would later regret choosing Albertus due to its sudden ubiquity) then led to the You're Next director and his regular collaborator, screenwriter Simon Barrett, taking additional inspiration from the 1987 cult classic The Stepfather for their story of a small-town waitress (Maika Monroe) who notices something's not quite right about her parents' houseguest, a well-mannered stranger (Dan Stevens) claiming to have served in Afghanistan with her dead soldier brother Caleb. Wingard and Barrett also took some inspiration from the various "seemingly nice stranger insinuates himself or herself into a benign household and gradually turns out to be a psycho" thrillers that followed in The Stepfather's wake, like 1992's The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, which turned into the box-office behemoth some Stepfather fans wish the 1987 film had gotten to be.

The duo ended up making a film that's more satisfying and engrossing than any of the gazillion Stepfather clones and Hand That Rocks the Cradle ripoffs that dominated movie houses--and the Lifetime schedule--in the '90s. Even though The Guest is a highly stylized action thriller (dig that pulsating synth score by musician Steve Moore and the well-chosen and hypnotic existing songs by Love and Rockets and Norwegian electro-pop singer Annie) and Stevens does that hyperrealistic action movie thing of nonchalantly unpinning a grenade in each hand at the same time as if he's in a John Woo joint, there's a nice tinge of believability to The Guest that's not found in those '90s killers-living-in-the-house thrillers.









The believability emerges in the form of Anna Peterson, Monroe's character, figuring out way earlier than you'd expect--especially from a thriller like The Guest--that the stranger who identifies himself as David Collins is an imposter. Wingard said, "One of the things that we liked about being able to work in a movie that has some '80s and '90s genre nostalgia to it was, you're able to do the kind of thing where the kids get what's going on but the parents are totally clueless. That was a key factor to those films. That's just a fun dynamic to play with." The intelligence of Anna and her younger brother Luke (Brendan Meyer)--who's somewhat aware that there's something off about David, but he doesn't really care as much as Anna does because he's enjoying how David has taken to helping him fight off bullies at school--sheds light on how distracting it was that the family in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle was badly dumbed down in order for Rebecca De Mornay to get away with her reign of terror.

If you ever rewatch The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, the movie turns into 100 minutes of you muttering, "No family in real life is that dumb!" The family in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle was so clueless and so trusting of the evil nanny that the mentally challenged handyman played by Ernie Hudson ended up looking like a Mensa member compared to everyone in the family.


The tension of "When is someone in this family going to get the hint that this new guy fell out of crazytown?" is nicely done away with in The Guest so that greater--and more interesting--tension can be built from "Will Anna or David gain the upper hand?" and "Where did this psycho come from?"The Guest is at its most effective as a thriller when it conceals the mysterious David's backstory. In fact, Wingard's original cut of The Guest ran much longer because it delved so much into his backstory. Getting rid of all that backstory was a wise decision. The first and second acts of The Guest keep you guessing David's actual identity and why he has infiltrated on Halloween this family that's still grieving over Caleb. Is David a criminal trying to get his hands on a stash of money stored in the Petersons' house? Could he be a cyborg who escaped from the military to hide out among civilians? Or is he an alien who slaughtered all of Caleb's unit in Afghanistan and then took the form of one of Caleb's comrades as part of a plot to lull Earth into an invasion?

Stevens, who's playing against his Downton Abbey romantic lead persona, is great at embodying two sides of David and doing subtle things with his performance-within-a-performance to make the audience say, "What is the story with this guy?" There's the well-mannered and chivalrous side that wins over Anna and Luke's parents, Spencer (Leland Orser) and Laura (Sheila Kelley), and attracts women like Kristen (Tabatha Shaun), Anna's co-worker at the local diner. And then there's David's abnormal side, like when he stares too long and hard at Luke at the dinner table when he first meets Luke, as if he's an alien trying to figure out how to consume ice cream in a cone for the first time, or the way David unsettlingly stares into space when he's by himself. Stevens is reminiscent of a younger Jeff Fahey, and in an alternate-universe version of this story if it were made in 1989 or 1990 by Hemdale, the indie studio that produced the original Terminator, or Cannon Films, whose logo is amusingly channeled by the Snoot Films logo that kicks off The Guest, you could easily picture Fahey starring as David.

(Image source: Keith Calder)

But the real find during The Guest is Monroe, the lead from director David Robert Mitchell's similarly striking horror flick It Follows. She looks like Gwen Stefani without all the weird and off-putting racial baggage. The Guest and It Follows are a fascinating pair of thrillers where Monroe stars as the kind of horror movie character author Carol J. Clover dubbed as "the Final Girl"--the last female standing in a horror flick with a massive body count--and is now the basis for director Todd Strauss-Schulson's meta slasher flick The Final Girls.

In It Follows, Mitchell subverts the Final Girl formula by making the girl who has the most sex in the movie the one who faces off against the killer at the end--instead of pitting a virginal heroine against the killer--and as that atypical Final Girl, Monroe makes for a solid lead who's more frazzled and vulnerable than action-thriller tough because of the incomprehensible nightmare her character is unable to overcome or make sense of for most of the movie. Meanwhile, in this thriller that preceded It Follows, Monroe plays a more traditional--and more strong-willed--Final Girl. But I actually prefer her performance in The Guest because she gets to show a little more range and cut loose for a couple of moments and be genuinely funny, like when Anna, before she takes David along with her to a Halloween party where she temporarily lets go of her suspicions about him, accidentally stumbles into a towel-clad David and becomes flustered by his chiseled bod, but in a believable way rather than an inane and cheesy rom-com kind of way.


There's humor in The Guest, but Wingard and Barrett handle it with subtlety (rather than playing it broadly) and a couple of odd references nobody in Stevens' native country of England or outside America will understand. I'm amused by the weird way the film emphasizes how much of an ordinary American family the Petersons are by naming Caleb's siblings and parents after characters from General Hospital. Anna's name is clearly a nod to heroic secret agent Anna Devane, while Luke gets his name from Luke Spencer and the names of the Peterson parents come from Luke's longtime love Laura. Either Wingard or Barrett is a secret fan of all the drama over in Port Charles.

It's great that the suitably named Anna gets to be smarter than everyone else in the film, but I wish she were smarter in one particular area: being able to notice that Stevens' otherwise perfect Southern accent, like almost all other American accents attempted by British actors who portray Americans, gets all weird when he says the word "anything" and pronounces it as "ennathin." I've always wanted to write that one thriller where someone realizes he or she is being held captive in a fake, the Village from The Prisoner-esque version of America by a British person who's pretending to be American and is actually working for the enemy (or maybe evil aliens) because the way the captor pronounces "anything" gives away that something isn't right about their surroundings.

Then our protagonist shoots his or her captor in the head and says, "That's not how to pronounce 'anything,' bitch."

Last year, George Miller announced his plans to release on Blu-ray a black-and-white cut of Mad Max: Fury Road, but that black-and-white cut never did surface on Blu-ray. Its absence from the bare-bones Fury Road Blu-ray was precisely why I avoided buying that Blu-ray. For once in my life, I made a wise decision, because on December 6, the black-and-white cut will finally arrive on Blu-ray. Marketed by Warner Home Video as the "Black & Chrome Edition," the black-and-white cut is considered by Miller to be the definitive version of Fury Road. The following is a repost of my June 4, 2015 discussion of Fury Road.

The boldest thing about director Destin Cretton's 2013 indie drama Short Term 12 is its lack of on-the-nose exposition and speechifying, which makes it stand apart in a genre where dramas about counselors or social workers who want to protect child abuse victims are frequently on-the-nose about their storytelling and over-explanatory or preachy. "None of the backstories of the film's four main characters... are unveiled in clumsily written infodumps or pointless flashbacks," I said a couple of months ago. "They're unveiled gradually, piece by piece, and at believable moments."

The same goes for Mad Max: Fury Road, Australian director George Miller's incredible and much-talked-about return to the post-apocalyptic action franchise that made his career 36 years ago. Aside from an introductory voiceover that's reminiscent of the recap about the fall of civilization at the start of Miller's earlier action masterpiece The Road Warrior, Aussie ex-cop Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy, ably taking over Mel Gibson's titular role) has even less dialogue in Fury Road than he did in The Road Warrior. He makes Detective Frank Bullitt look like a flibbertigibbet doing an Aaron Sorkin walk-and-talk.



It's remarkable how outside of the introductory voiceover, Fury Road conveys Max's PTSD and his guilt over the lives he was unable to save strictly in visual terms, namely two-second flashbacks to a dead little girl who keeps taunting him (either she's a daughter he raised many years after bikers killed both his toddler son and his wife in the first Mad Max film or a kid he failed to save from a recent massacre). During one of those flashbacks, another apparition appears in Max's mind, and he's the only Aboriginal in the whole goddamn movie. The Nerds of Color blog points out that out of Fury Road's cast, "actress Courtney Eaton is part Maori and Chinese, Zoe Kravitz is African American and Megan Gale is half-Maori. The text of the film does not reveal these to be necessarily conscious choices, meaning these actresses did not need to be persons of color, but here they are." But aside from those three cast members, the movie's ensemble, just like the casts in so many other recent movies about the future, is as white as a Lawrence Welk Show taping.

The Caucasity is a small speed bump in a car chase movie that's a mother lode of great examples of show-don't-tell storytelling, from Max's minimal dialogue to any scene involving war-rig driver Furiosa (Charlize Theron), both the film's real hero--even more so than her adversary-turned-ally Max--and its breakout character (aside from, of course, the bad motherfucker with the flamethrower guitar, a.k.a. the Doof Warrior). Not until Fury Road's third act does the audience realize why Furiosa chose to turn against her despotic, water-hoarding boss Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) and help five of the warlord's female sex slaves--one of whom is pregnant with Joe's child--escape to safety.

Furiosa's doing it out of remorse for being previously complicit in the same exact sex-slavery system that kidnapped her as a child. She was abducted from her home in the region known as the Green Place, along with her mother, and was raised in the Citadel, the mountaintop society ruled by Joe, and she wants to return to her matriarchal tribe in the Green Place and provide Joe's breeders with sanctuary there. But the film never specifies if Furiosa was actually one of Joe's sex slaves before becoming one of his imperators, a.k.a. lieutenants (a character detail that's not stated in the movie is Furiosa's infertility, which explains why she's a rig driver and imperator instead of one of Joe's breeders), and it doesn't have to. Like Chris Klimek said in an NPR piece about Fury Road, "We're not subjected to a cinemas-interruptus monologue where she tells us why [she's helping the women escape]. We get why. Theron's eyes show us why."


The beauty of Theron's lean and mean performance--by the way, when Theron said "guzzoline" instead of "gasoline," that moment, even more so than either the return of Max's old Interceptor or the presence of Junkie XL's suitably chaotic-sounding score, really made me feel like I was home again in the dystopic desert world I grew to enjoy during The Road Warrior--is similar to the beauty of Brie Larson's performance in Short Term 12, where many of the things Larson's equally laconic character doesn't say and is unable to share with other people are more powerful than the things she does say. If Short Term 12 is a triumph of economical storytelling, Fury Road is a fucking 62-foot buzzer-beater of economical storytelling.

"Miller didn't have much money [for 1979's Mad Max], but he made his action look astounding by focusing on clarity,"noted Kevin Lincoln in the Dissolve essay "What modern action films could learn from the original Mad Max." In Fury Road, which was filmed on location in Namibia, Miller has much more money, but his action sequences continue to focus on clarity--instead of opting for something like ultra-fast cuts that end up making everything incomprehensible--and they emphasize old-school stuntwork and old-school practical FX in the age of 007 windsurfing a fake-looking CGI tidal wave and Indiana Jones being chased through an equally fake-looking CGI jungle. Fury Road is 80% practical FX and 20% CGI, and most of that CGI was used not for explosions--or animating Max's leaps and dives in the same way that animation was used to create Spider-Man's movements in live-action Spidey movies--but for removing stunt rigs and creating Furiosa's mechanical left arm.




There's a purity to Fury Road's action sequences that's as appealing and intriguing as the purity in both the film's dialogue (part of me wishes Miller made Fury Road into a silent movie like Buster Keaton's The General, which he's cited as an influence on his "western on wheels" and has already been mashed up with one of Junkie XL's Fury Road score cues by some genius over on Vimeo) and the characters' motivations. So it bugs me when I stumble into a criticism about the purity of those motivations, like Leonard Maltin's complaints that "I didn't care about any of the characters" and "They are so sketchily drawn." Are you basically saying, Mr. Maltin, that Fury Road could have used more exposition to get you inside the characters' heads? Because Fury Road really doesn't need more. Just like Short Term 12, it's a film about survivors of abuse and PTSD sufferers learning to overcome their difficulties with both communication and trusting others--or turning those difficulties into their strengths--to fight their adversaries together and regain their agency. There's no time for speechifying or letting everyone know at length how they feel. They've got a Green Place they need to drive to.

Selections from Junkie XL's Fury Road score can be heard during my mix "One Punch at a Time."

Protesters in Seattle on the day after Election Day (Photo source:The Atlantic)

Protesters in San Francisco on the night after Election Day

Since August, I've been working on a manuscript for a sci-fi comedy novel that I first outlined in 2012. I've described it elsewhere as a cross between The Big O and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, without giving too much of it away because it's a work-in-progress, and this work-in-progress has taken up so much of my time that it's been difficult to write new posts for this Blogspot blog. It's all I can talk about to anybody. My brief mentions of the manuscript always seem to put people on Facebook to sleep (except one person who has similar interests in comedic sci-fi), and their lack of interest has become one of 4,080 reasons why I hate Facebook.

The manuscript is why this blog has consisted of nothing but reposts of previously published shit in the last few months. I've got nothing. I'm all out of new content for this blog. Meanwhile, I'm having a ball running Accidental Star Trek Cosplay over on Tumblr, because 1) ASTC isn't as time-consuming as a.k.a. DJ AFOS has always been and 2) ASTC gets more responses from readers. Both the new Tumblr and the manuscript are why I've been considering putting an end to this blog in the future and writing a farewell-to-Blogspot post.

The Black Lives Matter movement and the scientific community figure prominently in my prose novel. They're two things the future-dictator-whose-name-I-will-not-say-properly-because-I-dislike-the-fuck-out-of-him doesn't care for, along with any person of color who disagrees with his policies; immigrants; Muslims; women's rights; Jews; China; universal health care; gun control; journalists who actually do their jobs; the concept of paying your own employees; the concept of having a sense of humor about yourself; the environment; and women older than 16. Whether or not he was going to win the election, the novel, which has a title I won't reveal to people outside of my friends until I finish the manuscript some time next year, was always going to take place in a contentious big-city milieu that's been affected by the damage Fuckface Von Clownstick's rhetoric has done to both race relations and the lives of scientists who are being harassed by the same brainless constituency that put Fuckface Von Clownstick in the White House (right-wingers' bullying of scientists was the recent subject of a frustrating-to-listen-to but eye-opening Science Fridayinstallment I highly recommend).

And whether or not he was going to win, the novel was always never going to mention Fuckface Von Clownstick or make any references to him. Yesterday, I was briefly tempted to start mentioning him in the manuscript. But it's better if I never do. The major antagonists in the first half of the novel are not Fuckface Von Clownstick and his cronies in the business and political worlds; they're the anonymous idiots who worship him from afar and are given the okay by their fascist, misogynist and xenophobic idol to make life miserable for people of color and any sensible person with a brain who criticizes their leader. Fuck supervillains who want to blow up Gotham City or Star City. Fuck foreign terrorists from spy movies and counter-terrorism shows like 24 and Homeland. The trolls and white nationalists who helped bring Fuckface Von Clownstick to power and weirdly despise science or any other form of intellectualism are more terrifying to me than either of those kinds of antagonists, especially when incidents of racially motivated bullying have increased since Election Day (for a few examples, see New York Daily Newswriter Shaun King's Twitter feed or don't, because reading things on Twitter causes stress). Their behavior causes the apocalyptic trouble that occurs in the novel's second half and then continues in possible future novels.



Remember Stephen King's The Mist? Everyone's familiar with the extremely bleak movie version that starred Thomas Jane and Andre Braugher, but I was a fan of The Mist back when it was just a King novella and a radio drama full of weird and lamely written product placements for shit like Ragú and Skippy Super Chunk. Mrs. Carmody, who was portrayed by Marcia Gay Harden in the movie, always left way more of an impression on me as an antagonist than the Lovecraftian kaiju in King's story because I've never encountered Lovecraftian kaiju, but I have encountered Carmody-ian religious zealots. Well, my novel takes place in a city that ends up going through the same kinds of shit that were experienced by the New England town of Podunkaville or whatever-it-was-called in The Mist, except there's a lot more humor, Mrs. Carmody is the cause of all the horrible shit outdoors instead of the military (or as Stranger Things likes to call the military during its season 1 riff on The Mist, Firestarter and It, the Department of Energy), and there are not one but two Mrs. Carmodys, who were both supporters of Fuckface Von Clownstick, but I imply in the manuscript that they supported him instead of outright stating that they did.

Just like everyone else who didn't vote for Fuckface Von Clownstick, I didn't exactly sleep well on Election Night. My frustrations about feeling powerless after trying to help prevent (via mail-in ballot before Halloween) President Luthor's conquest of Washington turned into a day-long depression that made it difficult for me to get back to writing the manuscript because of how closely the material in the manuscript is related to Drumpf's depressing-ass America. (Because I was too bummed out on the day after Election Day to start writing the manuscript's next chapter, I instead got caught up on season 1 of Donald Glover's Atlanta.) But now that depression has turned into anger.

The people who are either bumping YG and Nipsey Hussle's "FDT," which ought to be the national anthem for the future nation of California, or taking part in #NotMyPresident protests, especially high-schoolers who are organizing campus walkouts all across America--as well as Sam Bee and Politically Re-Active hosts W. Kamau Bell and Hari Kondabolu--are all beautifully articulating my anger right now. Seeing tweets and pics from the anti-Babadook protesters is making me feel a little better. And the protests are exactly the kind of creative fuel I need to get back into writing and to take an already angry novel and make it even angrier. Now it's going to be a fucking scorcher.

The following is a repost of a November 19, 2015 discussion of Source Code written by guest blogger Hardeep Aujla of Word Is Bond. Duncan Jones, the director of Source Code, most recently brought us the much-maligned movie version of Warcraft. Source Code spoilers ahead.

Source Code
By Hardeep Aujla

Despite its inevitability and necessity, humans are pretty good at moving the goal posts on death. We used to say someone was dead when the heart stopped beating, then we figured out how to restart it. Some said death occurred when we stopped breathing, and then the ventilator was invented. For Beleaguered Castle, the military science unit in Duncan Jones and Ben Ripley's Source Code, technology has allowed them to go one step further.


That is, Captain Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) is all but brainwaves after his body perished in a helicopter crash over Kandahar, and he now sits on a hard drive ready to boot up as needs arise. Needs like a bomb blowing up morning train commuters: the first in a suspected wave of terrorist attacks on the city of Chicago. The wreckage has however left a lingering fallout of electronic brain activity from the victims, explained by Dr. Rutledge (Jeffrey Wright) as akin to the dimming glow of a lightbulb after being switched off. We're told this holds 8 minutes worth of information into the past from the point the explosion occurred. Upload Stevens' brainwaves into the cloud via the experimental Source Code technology and he gets to "replay" those 8 minutes occurring a millimetre away in the 4th spatial dimension, identify the bomber, and relay this back to Beleaguered Castle in the "real world" to prevent further attacks.

In Ebert's review of the film, he makes reference to an old Victorian-era detective's myth about the image of the killer being imprinted on the retina of the dead. I see Source Code as more EVP (electronic voice phenomenon), like the Native American spirits in Poltergeist. Similar to that film, and Tobe Hooper's other comment on bulldozing over the past and thinking it won't bite you in the ass, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Source Code does deal with overlooking the past, but does so on an immediate rather than a generational scale. In the wake of tragedy, Dr. Rutledge has developed the means with which to learn and develop with the Source Code technology, a sentiment that is echoed by the Radioactive Boy Scout-inspired villain: "We have a chance to start over in the rubble - but first there has to be rubble." But we're told the Source Code technology is not a simulation. If it were purely computational it could presumably be hacked for the answers. What Stevens instead experiences is an alternate reality that must be experienced via a synaptic soulmate, Sean Fentress (Frédérick De Grandpré). Think Quantum Leap; you inevitably will when the reveal is made. The filmmakers surely had it in mind, getting Scott Bakula in an uncredited role as the voice of Stevens' father on the other end of a phone, complete with an "Oh boy..."



The bulk of the film becomes a trial-and-error back-and-forth between 8 minute shifts in the alternate reality and his existence in the core reality (all without using the excuse "Well, I can't be in two places at once!"), which is interestingly conveyed as a strangely geometrical, claustrophobic cockpit that we're told is a manifestation of his to cope with the limbo he effectively inhabits. The bomber eventually gets caught and the Source Code technology is hailed a success. Rutledge now foresees Stevens as regular agent in anti-terrorism missions; he is technically immortal after-all, at least in principle, sure statistically he will eventually decease if the hard drive corrupts or someone accidentally drags his folder into the Recycle Bin. But Stevens declines, he's served his time. His only wish is to go back into the alternate reality once more to save the people on the train, despite the fact that they're all irreversibly dead in the core reality - a fact that is lost on Stevens who rightfully acknowledges that the alternative narratives of reality are more than a means to an end and are as valid as any other - and then for the plug to be pulled on him. This happens and then my problem with the film occurs: he still exists. He skips off Bogarting Fentress' life and woman. They start babbling nonsense: "Do you believe in fate?", "This feels like exactly where we're supposed to be..." Get outta here, Hollywood. A better ending would've been where he terminates in the alternate reality, and additionally we never actually see his physical corpse in the core reality - just because it's more for the imagination. Or where he accepts Rutledge's offer and becomes a Quantum Leaping agent who can never leap home. Maybe that's just me. I've always preferred the Sci-Fi stories where man doesn't get away entirely, if at all, from manipulating science, and a Newtonian right-hook which shows time doesn't give a fuck about you would've made a fitting ending for me. But it's still a great Sci-Fi film, and a Black List screenplay that I'm glad saw the light of day.


Hardeep Aujla frequently contemplates the contradictions of Interstellar's tesseract plotline over in Leicester, England.

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock

I have a couple of confessions to make. I run a Tumblr about accidental Star Trek cosplay, but as an adult, I've never cosplayed as anybody, and I don't plan to ever do so. It's just not for me, even though I admire the artistry that goes into a lot of professional cosplayers' recreations of their favorite fictional characters. Also, I do love Star Trek for its progressiveness and the banter between the actors, particularly the original cast members, and I'm enough of a fan that I could rattle off some of the names of authors who received credit for writing the '60s episodes, even though Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry heavily rewrote their shit ("The Enemy Within"?: I Am Legend author Richard Matheson; the episode with Andrea the sexy android?: that was a Robert Bloch joint), but I haven't watched every single thing with Star Trek's name on it.

As a kid, I knew that the third season of the original Star Trek was mostly trash (the budget was clearly slashed, and the actors were told to compensate for the budget cuts by constantly acting as if they were starring in what we now call a telenovela), so I've avoided watching most of that final season. I skipped most of the sixth and seventh seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation when they first aired on syndicated TV, and I did the same with most of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's first season, so there's a whole bunch of Next Generation and DS9 episodes I have yet to catch for the first time. I got bored with Star Trek: Voyager and quit after the first season, although I would occasionally check out a later Voyager episode like "Memorial."

The sci-fi franchise, which celebrated its 50th anniversary earlier this year, has produced so many hours of episodic TV and spawned so many feature films that I now see how it would be intimidating, especially for anybody whose familiarity with Star Trek is limited to the 2009 J.J. Abrams movie, to decide which episodes of the '60s version (or any of its spinoffs) to stream if you want to further understand what all the fuss over Star Trek is about. I just realized how daunting it would be for a newbie to step into that shared universe when I recently told a Harry Potter fan who happens to be the wife of a friend at my apartment building that I found Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone to be a tedious movie when I watched it on DVD in 2002, and it put me off Harry Potter for good.

The friend's wife said she felt the same way about the subject of my Tumblr, Star Trek. So she proposed a deal: she would finally watch a Star Trek episode or movie if I put aside my disdain for the first Potter movie and agreed to watch the rest of the Potter movie franchise. I said, "It's a deal!" The only problem is that I have a novel manuscript that's kind of in the way, so how the fuck can I find the time to watch all eight hours and 17 minutes of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets?

But there are long periods between manuscript chapters where I'm trying to figure out how to plot the next chapter, so that gives me enough time to do non-Potter-related things like thinking about which Star Trek episodes and movies I would recommend to newbies whose experiences with Star Trek mirror those of the couple at my apartment building (the wife's never seen a single hour of Star Trek, while the husband's familiar with only The Next Generation). To many TV nerds, Star Trek and its spinoffs are comfort food, and in a fearful and anxiety-ridden time when President Skroob transitions into the White House and represents everything Star Trek decries (it's not surprising that so many actors and staff members from various incarnations of Star Trek came out against Skroob), lots of left-leaning TV nerds are going to be Netflixing or Amazoning a reassuring piece of entertainment like Star Trek. But what about those viewers who know nothing about Star Trek? How should they stream the franchise for the first time?

"The Naked Time"

Well, they should experience the franchise in three levels: 101, Intermediate and finally, if they're willing to watch a few Star Trek deep cuts or check out highlights of the franchise's most flawed spinoffs, Advanced. The 101 level consists mostly of essential episodes of the '60s show because it's the most accessible and least complicated of all the Star Trek TV shows. It came from an era when episodic TV avoided serialization, unless the show was Lost in Space, Batman, Peyton Place or Rocky and Bullwinkle, and continuity was rarely acknowledged by the writers, so any strange new world the Enterprise explored one week would be forgotten about in the next episode and never referred to again. So that means if you were in charge of programming for a local TV station and the original Star Trek was part of your station's weekday schedule, you could air the episodes in any order you want ("Monday: a Potbellied Kirk episode from 1968! Tuesday: the Skinny Kirk episode 'The Enemy Within'!"), and nobody would notice, except Star Trek fans, of course.

Some of the writers who worked on the '60s Star Trek previously wrote for The Twilight Zone, and Roddenberry's creation was an attempt to take the socially conscious and often eerie storytelling of The Twilight Zone and graft it onto a sci-fi adventure setting that was frequently described at the time as "Wagon Train in space." The attempt to do that wasn't exactly an enormous hit with NBC viewers from 1966 to 1969 (but a small and loyal group of younger viewers, especially ones from the counterculture, loved the show, and that group grew immensely after the show entered syndication). The original Star Trek was dismissed by out-of-touch TV critics as an impenetrable oddity when it first aired, but you look at it today on Netflix and wonder, "What was so fucking impenetrable about it?" That's why it's the first thing I'd recommend to newbies.

Then when those newbies are ready to jump to Intermediate, they get to see Star Trek adapting to changing trends in episodic TV (the popularity of Hill Street Blues-style serialization; lead characters who don't always make the right call and must deal with the repercussions for longer than just a week; non-stereotypical portrayals of same-sex relationships) and, as a result, surpassing the quality of the storytelling on the '60s show, without having to spend seven years to witness Star Trek's evolution as a franchise on TV. Main characters on DS9 (and occasionally, The Next Generation) were seen making tough decisions that led to outcomes that haunted them for weeks or years, and this was a corrective to what David Gerrold, the writer of 1967's "The Trouble with Tribbles," cited as a major flaw of the '60s Star Trek in the 1995 book Harlan Ellison's The City on the Edge of Forever: The Original Teleplay That Became the Classic Star Trek Episode.

"Star Trek is the McDonald's of science fiction; it's fastfood storytelling. Every problem is like every other problem. They all get solved in an hour. Nobody ever gets hurt, and nobody needs to care. You give up an hour of your time and you don't really have to get involved. It's all plastic," wrote Gerrold.

At the Intermediate level, newbies will realize that Star Trek works best as an hour-long serialized drama that allows the characters to breathe (and carefully builds their arcs and conflicts so that they pay off effectively like they did on DS9), rather than as a two-hour blockbuster like Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home or Star Trek Beyond, despite how entertaining The Voyage Home and Beyond often are. This is why next year's debut of the CBS All Access show Star Trek: Discovery is so eagerly anticipated, despite the worrisome departure of Hannibal mastermind Bryan Fuller, a former DS9 and Voyager staff writer who initially guided Discovery through its inception and was the perfect showrunner to spearhead a Star Trek TV project.

Judging from how Fuller outlined the premise for Discovery before he stepped down as showrunner, it looks like Star Trek will finally be returning to its roots as a cerebral and progressive-minded sci-fi drama, after 22 years of the franchise dumbing itself down on the big screen to attract the international action movie market. Longtime Star Trek stans who hate the three Chris Pine/Zachary Quinto movies keep forgetting that the dumbening of Star Trek on the big screen started not with Abrams but with the lethargic and unimaginative fight scenes in the desert in 1994's Star Trek: Generations (sure, 1989's Star Trek V: The Final Frontier was dumb too, but at least it had characters quoting Herman Melville John Masefield).

But in the age of The People v. O.J. Simpson, Mr. Robot and Transparent, what will this new Star Trek on CBS All Access be like? Will it soar like DS9 often did or will it crash like an Enterprise shuttlecraft low on fuel?

Star Trek 101

Star Trek (1966-1969) (Three seasons on Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime; six feature films from 1979 to 1991 and three additional feature films from 2009 to 2016 on Amazon Prime, Blu-ray and DVD)

1) "The City on the Edge of Forever" (1967)
2) "The Enterprise Incident" (1968)
3) "Amok Time" (1967)
4) "All Our Yesterdays" (1969)

If it's tortured romance you want, these four episodes have it in spades. "The City on the Edge of Forever" is about Captain Kirk's romance with a woman from the year 1930, while "The Enterprise Incident,""Amok Time" and "All Our Yesterdays" are all why Star Trek's most popular character is Spock, an alien from Vulcan, a planet where everyone is raised to worship logic and control their emotions, a.k.a. the things that result in so many tortured romances.

"All Our Yesterdays" (Photo source: Trekcore)

Both "Amok Time" and "All Our Yesterdays," the "Mariette Hartley in a skimpy loincloth" episode, placed Spock in romantic situations that challenged his preference for logic. That inner conflict, portrayed so well by the late Leonard Nimoy, was why many female Star Trek viewers became taken with Spock. One of those female viewers was Angelina Jolie. When she was interviewed by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show in 1999, Jolie memorably told Stewart that she always wanted to bang Spock ("He was so repressed, and you just wanted to make him scream").

Spock's popularity famously angered the '60s show's lead actor, William Shatner, who, during the '60s, became jealous of all the fan mail that was sent to Nimoy and his Spock character. "Amok Time" is the most entertaining of these four tortured-romance episodes, mostly due to the fight scenes between Spock and Kirk, who's forced by Spock's love interest to fight his second-in-command to the death. During "Amok Time," you keep wondering how much of the fighting between Shatner and Nimoy was real and genuine 100% beef.

"Amok Time"

Though "Amok Time" is my favorite out of the four episodes, I wouldn't watch "Amok Time" first because it's a "Spock loses control of his emotions" story. His erratic behavior in "Amok Time" won't make much sense if you're not familiar with Spock's more normal and emotionless self in both "The Enterprise Incident," an espionage story, and "The City on the Edge of Forever," a time travel story.

Credited solely to controversial author Harlan Ellison, whose early drafts differed massively from the version that aired in 1967 and was heavily rewritten without credit by the show's staffers, "The City on the Edge of Forever" is the '60s Star Trek's most popular episode because the story's ethical dilemma creates so much drama: Kirk becomes torn between saving the life of Edith Keeler, an idealistic social worker played by guest star Joan Collins, and letting her die in order to save the future. It's a difficult decision for Kirk to make. Shit, it would be a difficult decision for anybody.

"The Trouble with Tribbles"

"Forever" is definitely a standout episode, but the '60s show's avoidance of continuity between episodes (for example, con artist Harry Mudd was the only character who got a sequel episode during the show's run) diminishes the power of that story's conclusion. If the '60s Star Trek were made for TV today, the events of "Forever" would have deeply affected Kirk for the rest of the show's run, and exploring the repercussions of "Forever" would have been a much better move than how the '60s show handled those repercussions.

"This is the difference between Harlan Ellison's view of writing and Gene Roddenberry's... Roddenberry's view of the job seemed to be much less ambitious: get the Captain laid and clean up the mess before the last commercial. Nobody gets permanently hurt. Our people are the best and the brightest; our people are perfect; they don't have problems. Everything is wonderful," complained David Gerrold about the show's inability to follow up on "Forever" in The Original Teleplay That Became the Classic Star Trek Episode.

"The Trouble with Tribbles" (1967)

Gerrold's "The Trouble with Tribbles" is the second most popular '60s Star Trek episode because of all the comedic situations involving a bunch of non-verbal alien furballs known as Tribbles. Lieutenant Uhura becomes fond of a Tribble and starts to keep that Tribble as a pet, but the pet won't stop multiplying. In 1984, Joe Dante and Steven Spielberg did the horror-comedy version of "The Trouble with Tribbles." It was called Gremlins.

"The Doomsday Machine" (1967)

If neither romance nor campy sci-fi is your cup of tea, "The Doomsday Machine" is the best place to start. My favorite of several '60s Star Trek episodes that emphasized action over social commentary or romance has to be "The Doomsday Machine." It takes a simple and straightforward premise (the Enterprise crew must figure out how to take down a cylindrical giant robot that was programmed by an unknown alien race to destroy any ship or planet in its path) and wrings lots of effective moments of suspense out of it.


Guest star William Windom entertainingly chews the scenery as Commodore Decker, whose obsession with revenge against the titular machine endangers the Enterprise, while Nimoy awesomely never raises his voice during a bunch of crowd-pleasing scenes in which Spock clashes with Decker over his questionable tactics and ends up being the bigger man by never losing his cool. In my favorite unintentionally funny moment of the episode, Shatner, the show's most frequent scenery-chewer, visibly becomes so jealous of the amount of scenery Windom's chewing during Decker's big emotional breakdown scene that he tries to outact Windom, and you feel like saying to the screen, "Sorry, B, but Windom's bodying this scene. Stand down, Shatner."

In 2006, CBS, which currently owns the rights to every single TV incarnation of Star Trek, painstakingly redid the '60s show's visual effects to help upgrade the look of the reruns for HDTV. That remastered version of the '60s show is the version that's currently up on Netflix, my favorite platform for streaming any Star Trek episodes. "The Doomsday Machine" benefits the most from the updated visual effects, which corrected a previously distracting visual effects blooper regarding the size of a shuttlecraft. Unlike the pointless visual changes during Star Wars: Special Edition, the tweaks don't take too much attention away from the story we know and love, and they actually enhance the tension during the action sequences (my favorite new visual touch is a tiny asteroid that collides into the saucer section of a damaged ship and breaks apart into several pieces).

"The Doomsday Machine" is also a classic "Kirk cheats death" story. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is about an older Kirk coming to grips with the fact that his ability to cheat death in situations like the one at the end of "The Doomsday Machine" has its limitations. Speaking of Khan...

1) "Space Seed" (1967)
2) Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)
3) Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984)
4) Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)

"Space Seed," which pits Kirk against Khan, a genetically engineered 20th-century dictator nicely played by guest star Ricardo Montalban, became one of Star Trek's most popular episodes because its story was continued 15 years later in director Nicholas Meyer's The Wrath of Khan, the most beloved of all Star Trek movies. The Wrath of Khan cannot be watched without seeing "Space Seed" first. I love The Wrath of Khan because it's basically a submarine movie in space.


The Wrath of Khan, The Search for Spock and The Voyage Home all form a trilogy just like Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi did. Unfortunately, The Search for Spock is kind of boring if you're not a longtime Star Trek fan, and you have to watch The Search for Spock in order to fully understand the events and character arcs that take place during The Voyage Home. But The Search for Spock gave longtime cast members George Takei and Nichelle Nichols a chance to shine as supporting actors in ways that hadn't been seen since the classic 1967 episode "Mirror, Mirror," and the 1984 movie contains a badass heist sequence in which Kirk and his crew disobey Starfleet Command and steal back their old ship, one of my favorite sequences in a Star Trek movie.

The Voyage Home is not-so-boring. It's a really funny, Back to the Future-style comedy about Kirk and his colleagues, who are now criminals on the run, time-traveling back to San Francisco in 1986 to save Earth's future and then attempting to adjust to the weirdness of San Francisco in 1986.

"The Corbomite Maneuver" (1966)

This is the first and the best of several Star Trek stories that are about a seemingly intimidating alien who has never encountered humans before, so the alien tests the mettle of Kirk and the Enterprise crew, and then the alien ultimately turns out not to be such a hostile threat after all. "The Corbomite Maneuver" best sums up the optimism of the '60s show and the first three seasons of The Next Generation. The ending is cheesy and weird, but it's a good example of why the '60s show is so charming and so frequently parodied.

"Balance of Terror" (1966)

Prior to The Wrath of Khan, the gripping "Balance of Terror," which marked the first appearance of the Romulan Empire, did the "submarine movie in space" thing on an even smaller budget than The Wrath of Khan's famously low budget. It threw in a subplot about knee-jerk racism that, unfortunately, remains timely, and it contains the first of many terrific guest appearances by the late Mark Lenard, who played Kirk's nameless Romulan counterpart and then appeared in a different role as Sarek, Spock's ambassador father, in the '60s show's second season. Lenard reprised the role of Sarek on the animated Star Trek and in three feature films, as well as two episodes of The Next Generation.

1) Star Trek (2009)
2) Star Trek Beyond (2016)

The energetic and fast-moving 2009 reboot placed younger actors in the roles of Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Uhura, Scotty, Sulu and Chekov. There's a Harry Potter-ish feel to the 2009 movie because much of its first half focuses on Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Uhura when they were cadets. The reboot was the shot in the arm the Star Trek feature films needed at the time, whether tonally, aesthetically or musically, after a couple of sluggish entries starring the Next Generation cast. Lost score composer Michael Giacchino took the late Alexander Courage's cheesy opening title theme from the '60s show (a.k.a. all that South Seas-sounding music that comes after the classic eight-note fanfare Courage also composed) and crafted the best version of that theme ever.


Star Trek Into Darkness is terrible. It adds nothing new to the Star Trek mythos. It's a pointless rehash of both the 2009 movie and The Wrath of Khan. J.J. Abrams and his Bad Robot production company, who were perhaps afraid that casting an actor of color as a revamped Khan would reinforce the stereotyping of brown actors as terrorists, went for the much dumber option of casting a white-as-fuck actor as Khan. Skip Into Darkness and go straight to Star Trek Beyond, which is notable for being the first Star Trek movie directed by a person of color (Fast Five director Justin Lin, who previously directed John Cho, the current portrayer of Sulu, in 2002's Better Luck Tomorrow). The 2009 movie's memorable Beastie Boys joyride scene receives a rousing and extremely satisfying callback in Beyond. The Beastie Boys stuff is the reason why the 2009 movie and Beyond are inseparable, viewing-wise.

Intermediate Star Trek

Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994) (Seven seasons on Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime; four feature films from 1994 to 2002 on Amazon Prime, Blu-ray and DVD)

EITHER "The Inner Light" (1992) OR "The Measure of a Man" (1989)

In "The Inner Light," Captain Picard gets zapped by a space probe, and while he's unconscious, he experiences another man's entire lifetime in less than a day. "The Measure of a Man" is a courtroom drama that raises the question "Should Lieutenant Commander Data be entitled to the same civil rights as a human's even though he's a machine?"

These two episodes best represent The Next Generation's approach to Star Trek: the '60s Star Trek stuffed its stories about space exploration and ethical dilemmas with lots of monster attacks, starship battles and poorly choreographed fight scenes, while The Next Generation tended to be less action-packed, mostly due to Picard's more diplomatic view of space exploration. The Next Generation focused more on lofty and cerebral stories like "The Measure of a Man" and "The Inner Light," in which Picard, an absolute workaholic, realizes that there's more to life than just a career in Starfleet.

"Mr. Worf, fire." ("The Best of Both Worlds, Part I")

1) "The Best of Both Worlds, Part I" (1990)
2) "The Best of Both Worlds, Part II" (1990)
3) "Family" (1990)
4) Star Trek: First Contact (1996)

First Contact is a zombie movie in space. It's one of the most popular Star Trek movies, but it can't be watched without seeing the three-part "Best of Both Worlds" arc beforehand because the movie is a continuation of "The Best of Both Worlds." In the first half of the action-packed "Best of Both Worlds" two-parter, Picard is captured by a race of hostile machines known as the Borg, who brainwash him and turn him against the Enterprise and the rest of Starfleet.

The Borg first appeared in the 1989 Next Generation episode "Q Who." On the '60s show, neither the Klingons nor the Doomsday Machine were as dangerous a threat as the Borg were during "The Best of Both Worlds." The Borg's attacks on Starfleet after their "assimilation" of Picard were a turning point for The Next Generation, and they brought a sense of menace to Star Trek that hadn't been seen since Khan's actions in The Wrath of Khan. Their reign of destruction during the two-parter was so massive that characters over on DS9 and Voyager continued to be affected by it.

An epilogue to the two-parter, "Family" was, for a couple of years, Star Trek's most daring episode ever because it was a story about an off-duty Picard experiencing PTSD right after his ordeal with the Borg. PTSD was something none of the heroes of Star Trek were ever seen dealing with on screen, prior to "Family."

"Tapestry" (1993)

Outside of the final Next Generation episode, "All Good Things...," this is my favorite of all the Next Generation stories about Picard and an omnipotent prankster named Q, who started out as an enemy of Picard's and later became an unlikely friend and ally. Picard wakes up in the afterlife after suffering a heart attack and gets a visit from Q, who grants Picard his wish to go back in time and undo one of his biggest mistakes: the night when he got stabbed through the chest in a bar fight. John de Lancie took a character who began as a limp rehash of the antagonist from the 1967 Star Trek episode "The Squire of Gothos" and brought dimension to him (de Lancie's chemistry with Patrick Stewart during Q's scenes with Picard also helped).


Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991)

The Undiscovered Country--which chronicles the beginning of The Next Generation's unexpected alliance between the United Federation of Planets and the Klingon Empire, a longtime Federation adversary--is the final story of Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Uhura, Scotty, Sulu and Chekov as colleagues together. It's an excellent and classy farewell to those seven characters from the '60s show. The film's final line does a better job of passing the torch to The Next Generation than Star Trek: Generations does in any of its mostly abysmal 118 minutes.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993-1999) (Seven seasons on Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime)

The heavily serialized DS9 took Star Trek to another level. It mixed complex and nuanced social commentary about war and its many consequences with exciting space battle sequences. Also, Hawk from Spenser: For Hire is the fucking captain. In other words, it's my kind of show. The Next Generation can sometimes be a little too stuffed-shirt-ish for my tastes, and DS9 figured out how to continue the cerebral spirit of The Next Generation without being a rehash of The Next Generation and without being such a stuffed fucking shirt.

A key Garak scene from "In the Pale Moonlight"

DS9 doesn't really get cracking until "Duet," a powerful episode about the interrogation of a war criminal. The Star Wars franchise so wishes it could be this nuanced about the subject of war.

Due to DS9's serialized nature, especially after season 1, it's kind of difficult to jump into DS9 at any random point in the show's run. Sure, you could start with the pilot episode, "Emissary." While it's an adequate introduction to Commander (later Captain) Sisko, the titular space station and the war between the Bajorans and the Cardassians, "Emissary" is, like all other Star Trek pilot episodes, a bit lead-footed in its approach to exposition. If you don't like clunky pilot episodes, I'd recommend starting with either "Duet," which is actually the 18th episode, or the third episode, "Past Prologue," which introduces Garak, a seemingly benign Cardassian tailor who used to work in intelligence and hasn't completely let go of his old life as a spy. Garak quickly becomes one of DS9's most compelling characters even though he's not a series regular.

Despite its often somber subject matter (if you're a woke person of color, the outstanding "Far Beyond the Stars," a story about racial inequality in the '50s, will both break your heart and empower you) and ambitious storytelling, DS9 was actually better at handling humor than the other Star Trek TV shows, including even the '60s version. I have a soft spot for "Our Man Bashir," a spoof of '60s spy movies and a clever story in which we get to see Garak, a spy in the mold of the deglamorized protagonists from John le Carré espionage stories, reacting to various tropes from the type of escapist spy genre fare le Carré shied away from (spoiler: Garak does some complaining). But I've never really been interested in any of the comedic DS9 episodes that centered on Ferengi culture.

Advanced Star Trek

Star Trek: The Animated Series (1973-1974) (Two seasons on Netflix and Amazon Prime)

The animated series is really slow-paced and poorly animated. It's for Star Trek completists only. Produced for NBC's Saturday morning block by Filmation, the famously cheap Reseda animation studio best known for He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, the half-hour show had every original cast member reprising their role from the '60s version (except Walter Koenig, whose Chekov character was omitted from the cast due to budget cuts, but he accepted the opportunity to script an episode). They recorded their dialogue separately, in different parts all over the country.

On Archer, producers Adam Reed and Matt Thompson are somehow able to build an energetic and spontaneous-feeling show out of their voice actors' performances, despite the actors never being together in the same booth. But on the animated Star Trek, the separation of the actors resulted in a stiff delivery that added to the animated version's weirdly austere tone, and that solemnity was repeated in 1979's similarly austere Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Only James Doohan, Nichelle Nichols, George Takei and Majel Barrett, who all got to play multiple roles on the animated show, seemed to be enjoying themselves. (Aw man, imagine what Andrea Romano, the legendary voice director for Batman: The Animated Series, The Boondocks and The Legend of Korra, would have done with this show.)


The animated version also retained a lot of the '60s show's writers. They were more crucial to the effectiveness of the original Star Trek than creator Gene Roddenberry, who left the '60s show after the second season (as an ideas man, Roddenberry was terrific, but let's face it, he was never really an outstanding writer). Their intelligent approach to sci-fi shines through in much of the animated version's way-more-contemplative-than-expected-for-a-Saturday-morning-cartoon writing. The only animated episode I'd recommend to newbies is "Yesteryear," an atypical episode in which the cast members recorded their dialogue together in the same studio. It was written by D.C. Fontana, a female story editor who rewrote much of "The City on the Edge of Forever" and scripted such original series highlights as "Journey to Babel" and "The Enterprise Incident."

If you ever had to deal with a pet that got injured and had to be taken to a veterinarian, "Yesteryear" will resonate with you. It's a surprisingly affecting story about Spock's lonely childhood on planet Vulcan due to his half-human, half-Vulcan heritage, so he had only one friend when he was a boy: his pet grizzly bear. "Yesteryear" is essentially a Spock origin story.


Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001) (Seven seasons on Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime)

Voyager largely avoided serialization, did a few two-parters and channeled the planet-of-the-week storytelling of both the '60s Star Trek and The Next Generation. It's basically Next Generation lite. Voyager also hasn't aged well, although not as badly as a misogynist '60s Star Trek episode like "Turnabout Intruder." It contains way too much off-putting technobabble, or rather, Treknobabble, which was something the DS9 writing staff fortunately preferred to keep to a minimum.

The Next Generation introduced two Spock-like characters (Data and Worf) to compensate for Spock's absence and continue the beloved Vulcan hero's tradition of commenting on the human race's quirks and being all like "What is the deal with humanity?"Voyager came up with three Spock figures: the sarcastic hologram known only as the Doctor, who becomes the ship's doctor after the first one dies in the first episode; Tuvok the Vulcan; and the very attractive Seven of Nine, a human-turned-Borg who learns to become human again. When you have three Spock figures, plus Captain Janeway, Chakotay and Ensign Harry Kim, delivering the same kind of prim and proper dialogue, it can get repetitive and grating.

But if you want optimistic sci-fi from a feminist point of view, which is something that doesn't happen enough on screen, Voyager is up your alley. My favorite Voyager episode, "Bride of Chaotica!" by celebrated writer Bryan Fuller, has Janeway trying to save the ship from a malfunctioning holodeck program based on a campy '40s sci-fi serial, so she goes undercover as a '40s sci-fi villainess. "Bride of Chaotica!" was, at the time, a rare showcase for Kate Mulgrew's skills with light comedy, which she later got to regularly display on more recent shows like NTSF:SD:SUV:: and Orange Is the New Black. Voyager also happens to contain my favorite main title theme written for a Star Trek TV show, which ended up being the last TV theme composed by the late, great Jerry Goldsmith.



Star Trek: Enterprise (2001-2005) (Four seasons on Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime)

A prequel to the '60s show, Enterprise is, like The Animated Series, also only for Star Trek completists. I like to call it Star Trek for George W. Bush Supporters, mainly because of Captain Archer's Dubya-like demeanor, a terrible theme song that sounds like walk-on music for a hype man at the Republican National Convention and, of course, the fact that Enterprise had the least diverse cast out of all the Star Trek spinoffs.

The only consistently good season of Enterprise was the fourth and final one. "In a Mirror, Darkly,""Demons" and "Terra Prime" were the biggest highlights of that final season. Together, "Demons" and "Terra Prime" formed a surprisingly poignant two-part storyline about the subject of discrimination against interracial couples.

Selections from Michael Giacchino's Star Trek Beyond score can be heard at the beginning of a special presentation of "Bad Things Come in Threes (Alright, Maybe Not Always)," a 2007 episode of my defunct Internet radio program A Fistful of Soundtracks.

It feels like the end times right now. Yay!

So here's a repost of an August 20, 2015 discussion of a cleverly scripted 2012 cult favorite about the end times, which was contributed by guest blogger Hardeep Aujla of Word Is Bond. Spoilers ahead.


The Cabin in the Woods
By Hardeep Aujla

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

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


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

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



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

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







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

Hardeep Aujla gives the sounds of Damu the Fudgemunk and Klaus Layer some shine over in Leicester, England.

Last week, Uproxx posted a lengthy and enjoyable interview with longtime writing partners Al Jean and Mike Reiss about their short-lived but well-remembered creation, the '90s animated show The Critic. The show centered around Jay Sherman, a persnickety film critic nobody likes, except for Marty, Jay's 13-year-old son, and Margo, Jay's teenage foster sister, who both look up to Jay, and Jeremy Hawke, an easygoing Aussie B-movie star who considers Jay his best friend ever since he was the only critic who didn't trash his first movie. In the Uproxx article, Jean and Reiss recalled the main reason why The Critic lasted from only 1993 to 1995 (the new Fox network president at the time hated it) and the challenges of attempting to give Jay and the other Critic characters the same kind of revival Family Guy and Futurama experienced after they were cancelled by Fox too (three of The Critic's regular voice actors are no longer alive, and Reiss also points out that "Siskel and Ebert are dead and those kinds of shows don't exist anymore. Movie critics used to be all over TV and they used to wield great influence and they just don't"). So from March 18, 2008, here's a post about The Critic, originally posted under the title "'Now who wants to boogie with Baby '37?'"

This weekend, I was surprised to find an eight-hour ReelzChannel marathon of the short-lived animated series The Critic, James L. Brooks' second foray into animation after the success of The Simpsons. Created by Simpsons writers Al Jean and Mike Reiss, The Critic aired on ABC during its first season (1993-94) and then for its second and final season (1994-95), it went to die on Fox (where the show's "Hey! We're on Fox" gags were amusing, while on a non-Fox channel in reruns years later, uh... not so much). The show, which comes complete with Simpsonian catchphrases that never took off ("It stinks!,""Hotchie motchie!,"the Chuck McCann-referencing "Hi guy!"), later enjoyed a cultish afterlife in webisode form and on both DVD and Comedy Central's animation lineup.


The ReelzChannel marathon reminded me how funny The Critic could be, though the rest of America didn't agree, including TV critics who found it difficult to warm up to the show like they had with The Simpsons. Even Matt Groening, Jean and Reiss' on-and-off-and-on-again boss, had gripes about The Critic. (The Simpsons creator opposed Brooks' idea of a Simpsons/Critic crossover show and took his name off the credits of that episode. Some of Groening's gripes are understandable. The crossover added more continuity errors to a series that was already drowning in them--in the Critic universe, the Simpsons characters were established as fictional.)

The titular loser is Jay Sherman (Jon Lovitz), the miserable host of a Manhattan-based movie review show that's constantly being tinkered with by cable network CEO Duke Phillips (Charles Napier), a Ted Turner-like chicken and waffle house magnate. While getting reacquainted with The Critic, I was struck by how the love/hate relationship between Jay and his intrusive boss seems to have been carried over in the dynamic between Liz the principled comedy writer and Jack the well-meaning but meddlesome network exec on 30 Rock (and like Duke, Jack thinks his favorite employee is gay). The big difference between Jay/Duke and Liz/Jack is that most of Jack's ideas have actually helped Liz's program The Girlie Show (Jack's hiring of movie star Tracy Jordan boosts the ratings of the rebranded TGS), while none of Duke's ideas have ever worked (one of my favorite Critic episodes involves Duke's insistence on pairing Jay with sidekicks, which range from a grizzly bear to a sassy black kid named "Lil' Shabazz").

Though it was given great time slots by both networks (ABC paired it with Home Improvement, while on Fox, it followed The Simpsons), why wasn't The Critic able to attract viewers like The Simpsons and King of the Hill did? There's a theory in a post by Jaime J. Weinman that could explain The Critic's inability to find an audience. He thinks 30 Rock is a ratings underperformer because it suffers from the same flaw that he says is also plaguing How I Met Your Mother: the central character, the one figure that the audience is supposed to identify with, is the show's weak link. (Weinman feels Liz and Ted, the "I" in How I Met Your Mother, lack presence as central characters--they're constantly overshadowed by the other characters on their respective shows--and the less patient viewers have abandoned these shows because they can't find any characteristics in the leads that they could relate to.) While I don't consider the characters of Liz or Ted to be the weak links (for me, the weak link on these ratings-addled cult shows has often been the stuntcasting), I could see why Jay's irritable film critic persona could be off-putting to viewers because you know how much America loves film critics.


I also think The Critic failed to connect with viewers because of its offbeat cosmopolitan setting, which, for me, was one of the show's charms. The setting was reflected in everything from Hans Zimmer's sprightly, "Rhapsody in Blue"-inspired main title theme (an early taste of what was to come in his surprisingly enjoyable Simpsons Movie score) to the character design, a shout-out to the drawing styles of New York cartoonists like Al Hirschfeld and the New Yorker illustrators. Viewers tend to embrace animated sitcoms set in suburban neighborhoods (The Simpsons, King of the Hill, South Park, Family Guy) and avoid cartoons set in the city (The Critic, Futurama, The PJs), perhaps because the characters on these city shows have been too abrasive for their tastes, and Jay was no exception.

Here's another Weinman theory: viewers avoid darker-toned sitcoms (The Honeymooners and Brooks' own Taxi were ratings flops during their initial runs). The Critic was far from dark, but my God, Jay the adopted, divorced and luckless schlub suffered through life more often than Charlie Brown--even though he seemed to get as much tail as George Costanza.


Too bad viewers bolted because they couldn't stomach seeing those brash qualities in a prime-time cartoon. They missed out on other great elements of The Critic, like any gag involving the show's funniest character, Jay's WASPy adoptive father Franklin (Gerrit Graham), a former New York governor whose main vice while in office seemed to be cocktails rather than whores. Had The Critic continued for more than 23 episodes, I would have loved to have seen what else the writers had in store for the insane and eternally tipsy Franklin, who, like Ralph Wiggum on The Simpsons and Tracy on 30 Rock, lives in "a different and more wonderful universe than everyone around him," as the A.V. Club's Nathan Rabin once wrote about Ralph and Franklin. A couple of the secondary settings in Jay's fully realized universe could have functioned well as separate shows of their own, like the mansion where Jay's adoptive family lives or his son Marty's U.N. private school, where the kid from Easter Island can't catch a break and the African headmaster creepily laughs at his own jokes.

There was clearly more to the show than just the movie/TV/pop culture parody gags, some of which haven't aged well, while others are amazingly dead-on, like a sequence involving a musical version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame--this was two years before Disney released its animated song-and-dance version of Hunchback. (Speaking of which, the random movie/TV spoofs make more sense in the showbiz setting of The Critic than they do in the non-showbiz setting of Family Guy. My favorite Critic parody is a 007-style depiction of Fifth President James Monroe, who spits game at a damsel in distress with a Connery-esque "Welcome to the Era of Good Feelingsch.")

Hee Haw: The Next Generation, another standout parody during The Critic

Critics who couldn't warm up to The Critic because they felt it lacked the heart of the earlier seasons of The Simpsons must have missed the poignant "Every Doris Has Her Day," the most Brooksian of all the Critic episodes (Brooks is credited with providing many of The Simpsons' more emotional moments). In that episode, Jay discovers a kindred spirit in his previously unfriendly, chain-smoking makeup artist Doris (the late Doris Grau, who also voiced Lunch Lady Doris on The Simpsons) and begins to think she's his birth mother. But to Jay's disappointment, DNA results prove otherwise. Now that's one juicy thread the Critic writers could have pursued if Fox hadn't killed the series: would Jay ever find his birth parents?

The series could have lasted longer had it been produced for a cable channel like IFC, which would have understood The Critic because IFC's specialty is original programming that satirizes showbiz (Greg the Bunny, The Minor Accomplishments of Jackie Woodman), and its audience consists primarily of Jay Sherman types. The Critic just had the misfortune of airing on a network that found it too crass and a network that found it too tame.

And that stinks.

Ken Levine, the former Cheers and Frasier writer who was also an announcer for the Mariners and the Padres, once wrote that he does a blog about comedy writing, showbiz, the radio industry and baseball because he thinks of his blog as the writing equivalent of a stretching exercise. He added, "I don't want to write all day and you sure don't want to read all day. But it keeps my mind active... Still, it is time consuming, and I'll be honest, there are times it's a burden. Coming up with interesting enough topics is sometimes very difficult. I can''t [sic] tee off on 2 BROKE GIRLSevery day."

Levine wrote those sentences in 2014, when his still-active blog reached the nine-year mark. I've been doing this blog for nine years now (mainly as a way to tell the world, "I'm unemployed and I may not be active on social media because it has all the pleasantness of a Springfield tire yard, but I still fucking exist, dammit"), and I, like Levine, used to view the blog as the writing equivalent of a stretching exercise, but, well, now it has become a burden. It's not as enjoyable as it used to be. The stretching is starting to make me sore. The blog is taking too much time away from a book I'm trying to write (while constantly suffering from writer's block). There have been a lot of "AFOS Blog Rewind" reposts this year because I wanted to adhere to a weekly posting schedule during 2016, but there are weeks where I simply don't have jack shit to say.


Sure, I could easily rattle off in one day a bunch of posts that simply say "Look at this funny video!" or "Peep this link," but I'm not going to do that shit. This blog stopped doing click-bait ages ago. So I've decided that in 2017, the blog will switch to a monthly schedule and then come to a close at the end of the year.

Too many blogs I've liked have been abandoned by their authors, and those blogs never leave a farewell message or tell their readers, "Yo, I'm doing this other thing over at this other link now," or "I have this new project now. You might have heard of it. It's called parenting." Whenever I leave a project behind, whether it's a YouTube channel that never became as popular as I would have liked, my first Tumblr or an Internet radio station, I always leave some sort of farewell message.

So this blog will have a final post, and all the previous posts will stay up. I'd rather be like the defunct Grantland, whose articles are still online for former Grantland readers to revisit, than the late Keon Enoy Munedouang, who set his Minority Militant blog to private (an action that basically deleted it from existence), as if he were a Laotian Yeezy (someone, by the way, should explain to Ye that deleting something you tweeted or recorded never works because the Internet, like the North, remembers, and it has found a few ways to save your deleted tweet or that piece of new music you immediately deaded). Semi-deleting it made it kind of difficult for former Minority Militant readers to access Keon's earlier writing.

Lack of readership has also been a factor in cutting back on this blog. Earlier this year, I started a second Tumblr, even though I hated Tumblr because its coding interface was terrible and clunky (it still is) and my first Tumblr failed to attract readers to the radio station. For a while, I thought about dabbling into the world of fashion blogs, but instead of becoming another typical Asian American fashion blogger, I wanted to do a parody of fashion blogs. Accidental Star Trek Cosplay grew from that parody concept. I didn't expect Accidental Star Trek Cosplay to gain as much followers as it did (it has twice the followers my first Tumblr has). So that has made me like Tumblr a little more (also, unlike Twitter and Facebook, Tumblr hasn't been ruined by white supremacists). And because the Accidental Star Trek Cosplay readers are more responsive than the readers over here (as well as because ASTC isn't as time-consuming as this blog has been), Tumblr is where I've spent more of my time blogging.


I constantly worry about running out of photos to post over at ASTC, but as long as meteorologists continue to dress like any of the yeomen from the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, I won't run low on content to post. Because ASTC isn't the primary blog on my Tumblr account, any new ASTC posts aren't automatically reposted on my Twitter feed or my primary Facebook timeline, and I've become cool with that. In fact, excluding ASTC from my Twitter feed and my two Facebook timelines has resulted in me feeling a little liberated, because trying to get people on Twitter and Facebook to read the stuff I've written for this Blogspot blog can be exhausting. I've never really had the stomach for self-promotion. When I'm starting to worry about not getting any likes for a lengthy article that took me weeks to write, that's my cue to simply bounce and shut down my MacBook. I don't need to seek the approval of social media anymore. Social media can go fuck itself.

Heavily trimming the amount of Blogspot posts next year to one post per month will do a lot to ease the burden of self-promotion. Best of all, it will take the pressure off trying to post something substantial every week. I believe I have footage of myself trying to come up with new material for this blog on most weeks.




I was originally going to do a farewell-to-Blogspot post at the start of 2017, but I decided to move it to the end of 2017 because I actually have a few more posts I want to write for this blog, even though I constantly suffer from writer's block. There's an article about Electric Boogaloo, the 2015 documentary about the craziness of Cannon Films, that I started writing last January, and only 20 percent of it is finished, but I want to post it here some time next year. I also want to write about the way that Atlanta is like 30 Rock in slo-mo (it's easy to forget that one of Donald Glover's earlier jobs was writing for 30 Rock) and why it's disappointing that E! never built a Soup archive that's equivalent to the way that viewers can easily stream an entire old episode of The Daily Show from 2002 or 2008 over at Comedy Central's archives.

The frequency of activity over here may be massively downsized next year, but unlike the late, great Alan Rickman, I'm not all out of ideas. In the meantime, move, snitch. Get out the way. I'm trying to write a book.

After directing Selma, the 2014 movie that won a Best Original Song Oscar for the Common/John Legend track "Glory," Ava DuVernay has, in addition to being the first filmmaker to ever inspire a Barbie doll based on her likeness, racked up an intriguing bunch of directorial credits. She directed the 2016 Netflix documentary filmThe 13thand the first two episodes of the OWN dramaQueen Sugar(a show she also wrote for during its first season), and she signed up to direct the forthcoming Disney adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time, a classic sci-fi novel I remember reading as homework in grade school (here's how long ago it was when I read Wrinkle: the cover artwork on my copy was the version that had the disembodied head of a Darkseid lookalike encased in a crystal ball). The following is a repost of a February 5, 2015 discussion of DuVernay's breakout film in the mainstream. Selma, a historical film about civil rights activism, will continue being timely, especially in a year that will inevitably see an increase in activism against both America's next president (God, those last three words sound like the title of the world's shittiest reality show, which is fitting because reality TV-loving idiots are among the ones who put him and the likes of Omarosa in office) and his inflammatory rhetoric.

The Selma Oscar snubs have disappointed all of us moviegoers who were mesmerized by director Ava DuVernay's third feature film, a historical drama about the civil rights movement's push to get the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, via civil disobedience and legal strategizing. But Larry Wilmore, currently the only African American host on late-night TV and hardly a stranger to the struggles of bringing more diversity to Hollywood (he was the creator and original showrunner of The Bernie Mac Show and he helped showrun the first few episodes of Black-ish this season), said something enlightening about the Selma snubs, and it's helped me feel a little less disappointed about those oversights. The host of Comedy Central's solidly funny Nightly Showsaid to the Hollywood Reporter that awards at the end of the day don't really mean as much as making sure a black female director like DuVernay gets a shot at making a movie ("That, to me, is more important; the other stuff is gravy," said Wilmore).


Wilmore added that awards aren't even as important as the fact that a black female producer, Shonda Rhimes, the Scandal creator/showrunner and How to Get Away with Murder producer (but not HTGAWM's creator, an important distinction that an actual writer from the supposedly observant New York Timesfailed to even notice), basically now has a night of network TV programming all to herself, something unprecedented in network TV history. He hasn't let the snubs bother him because he's not surprised by them ("It's hard to get me outraged over stuff that happens all the time").

To recap those snubs, DuVernay didn't receive a Best Director nomination even though her film landed a Best Picture nod. She could have been the first black woman nominated for Best Director. The Academy also overlooked Selma star David Oyelowo's breakout performance--in America, that is, because elsewhere, particularly in the U.K., the British Nigerian actor is a familiar face to TV viewers over there--as Martin Luther King, a rare great turn by a British actor where he's not mangling an American accent for once. I'll always love Amy Poehler for making fun of British actors' often forced-sounding attempts at American accents in her 2015 Golden Globes monologue with Tina Fey. Oyelowo (pronounced "oh-YELL-oh-woe") does it well in Selma. Daniel Craig does not. Idris Elba can do it. Lennie James cannot, unless it's a Southern accent like his current one on The Walking Dead. David Harewood can do it. Philip Glenister cannot, and it's why parts of ITV's Demons were an unintentional laugh riot. Marianne Jean-Baptiste can do it. Saffron Burrows was so terrible at it that Boston Legal had to retcon her lawyer character and change her to a British ex-brothel madam pretending to be American. Damian Lewis can do it. Oyelowo's Selma co-star Tom Wilkinson, who portrays President Lyndon B. Johnson in Selma, often cannot, but he's such a great actor that his dodgy and cartoonish Mafioso accent in Batman Begins fails to ruin his imposingness during the 2005 blockbuster's best scene, his "this is a world you'll never understand" monologue.

Another frustrating but not as frequently discussed Selma Oscar snub is the lack of a nomination for another black member of Selma's crew, cinematographer Bradford Young. He did excellent work lighting King's church speeches, the harrowing "Bloody Sunday" sequence and a key jail cell scene where a perturbed King asks fellow activist Ralph Abernathy (Colman Domingo) whether being able to sit at the same lunch counter with white people is worth it when the system continually keeps the marginalized from being able to afford to eat there.

Cinematographer Bradford Young and Ava DuVernay on the set of Selma

Something else has kept me from being enraged about the Selma snubs: the simple fact that I don't give a shit about the Oscars, an inane popularity contest that's frequently been on the wrong side of film history. When Do the Right Thing was the best American film released in 1989, what did the Academy give the Best Picture trophy to? The "safer choice" of the astoundingly tone-deaf and stereotypical Driving Miss Daisy. And of those two 1989 films about race relations, which one continues to be discussed in think pieces or oral history pieces and dissected in film school courses? Definitely not "Yes, Miss Daisy." And don't get me worked up over Dances with Wolves winning Best Picture over GoodFellas the following year. Sure, we should all be grateful for how Dances with Wolves gave a breakthrough role to the great Native Canadian actor Graham Greene and a bunch of substantial roles to Indian actors, but it's also a frustrating white savior movie, something Selma is not.

It's not going to matter to me which film will win Best Picture on February 22 because Selma has accomplished something greater than that trophy, and that's simply being a rare feature film about the modern civil rights movement that's told from the point of view of the oppressed for a change. DuVernay has defied the common foolishness of inserting a white savior character into a story about the plight of people of color, whether that story is Cry Freedom or Alan Parker's Mississippi Burning, to make it more "palatable" to white audiences. In fact, the original version of Selma's screenplay by screenwriter Paul Webb, who retained sole credit for the screenplay despite DuVernay's many changes to it, positioned President Johnson as the white savior figure and placed more emphasis on the interactions between King and LBJ. But when DuVernay climbed on board the project (Lee Daniels was originally supposed to direct Selma, but he chose to direct The Butler instead), she wisely refocused the screenplay on King and his colleagues, including black women in the movement like King's wife Coretta Scott King (Carmen Ejogo), Annie Lee Cooper (Oprah Winfrey, whom Oyelowo brought onto the project) and Diane Nash (Tessa Thompson from Dear White People).


As an Asian American viewer, the four words I immediately think of whenever I encounter "white savior genre" are Come See the Paradise. That's the 1990 Oscar-bait flick that's better remembered these days for spawning ubiquitous '90s trailer music than for its story of World War II Japanese American internment camp inmates told through the eyes of Dennis Quaid as Tamlyn Tomita's white husband (Come See the Paradise also happened to be Parker's follow-up to Mississippi Burning; like Jerry Seinfeld used to say in that ear-piercing whine of his, what is the deal with this Parker guy?). Almost every white savior genre movie goes like this:

Hi.

I'm white.

My best friend is not white.

Some people are being mean to my best friend for being different.

That makes me very sad.

Here are 95 minutes about why I'm very sad.

Also, see all the things I will do to make the bad people be nice to my best friend.

The genre is stupid, infantile, offensive and always worthy of ridicule. As far back as 1990, In Living Color was skewering anti-apartheid white savior movies with a great fake trailer for a tearjerker about the suffering of a wealthy white South African lady who loses her black housekeeper to apartheid and cries and pleads by letter for her return and then cries again. Even Avatar, the sci-fi action flick where Antony StarrChris HemsworthJai Courtney Sam Worthington becomes enlightened by a race of mistreated aliens, suffers from white savior syndrome. Selma basically says "fuck off" to that type of film, a genre that's rarely questioned or criticized by white Hollywood, and that's probably a reason why neither the 94 percent white, 77 percent male Academy nor the LBJ defenders who aren't former LBJ press secretary Bill Moyers really care for Selma.

The LBJ defenders who were more extreme in their beef with Selma than Moyers (he appreciates the film despite his problems with how it portrays his former boss) proceeded to mastermind a smear campaign that succeeded in ruining the film's Oscar chances. Their accusations that Selma distorts LBJ into a villain are silly. The film humanizes him by showing his flawed ways of thinking and how he ultimately changed his mind about hesitating over voting rights legislation, just like how it takes King, a figure who's either been sanitized, reduced to a catchphrase ("I have a dream") or exploited by both Madison Avenue and right-wing TV hosts whose ideologies he would have opposed, and explores his doubts and insecurities as a leader (like in the jail cell scene) and depicts his generational conflict with younger activists. King's infidelity in his marriage is even addressed, something the last major film about King, director Clark Johnson's equally effective 2001 HBO film Boycott, didn't do (Boycott also happened to feature Ejogo in the same role of Coretta, who was younger and less jaded about both her marriage and activism in general in Johnson's film because it took place in 1955).

The Boondocks was right about Cuba Gooding Jr. someday doing an MLK movie during its most popular episode, "The Return of the King" (it was wrong about Cuba playing MLK though).

Selma rarely turns into the kind of stiff and formulaic Oscar-bait The Boondocks made fun of nine years ago when it actually predicted Cuba Gooding Jr.'s appearance in an MLK movie--in Selma, Gooding has a cameo as an attorney--and briefly mocked how often Hollywood mishandles historical figures like King. Part of Selma's verisimilitude is due to the way DuVernay follows various figures in King's cause and not just King himself to show how much the cause became bigger than him.

The DuVernay film's ensemble feel on a low budget is reminiscent of A Night to Remember, the documentary-like, British-made 1958 Titanic movie that's far better than the James Cameron version. Selma glimpses the movement's impact on the likes of young protester Jimmie Lee Jackson (Keith Stanfield) and his family; John Lewis (Stephan James, whose resemblance to Lewis is uncanny), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee member who later became both a Congressman and a historical graphic novel author; and even some of the white activists or ministers who joined King's marches.


DuVernay avoided creating composite characters--the usual practice of an Oscar-bait biopic--and wanted to include as many different real-life figures as possible. There is one moment though, when Selma sets itself up for the kind of parody The Boondocksused to often excel at in its first three seasons: the bizarre sight of Oprah punching a cop, although Annie Lee Cooper actually did punch that cop. I imagine this is where Oprah intervened and said, "I'm the producer. I wanna be the one to play Annie and punch a cop." While it's a rousing scene taken from history, it's also the one distracting moment in the film that borders on "John Wayne crashing Christ's crucifixion" campiness.

Otherwise, like Boycott or any other historical drama that doesn't feel like a stiff and formulaic biopic, Selma takes subjects like King's struggles with voting rights legislation and the scourge of police brutality and finds ways to make them resonate in a current climate of ignorance towards voting rights and outrage over police brutality. One of those ways is Common and John Legend's Golden Globe-winning end title theme "Glory."


In that track, Common, who portrays James Bevel in the film, links the activism in Selma and Montgomery to the activism in Ferguson and echoes the film's communal focus when he raps, "No one can win the war individually" ("Glory" is also a unique track in hip-hop: like The Physics'"These Moments" in 2011 and Jay Electronica's "Better in Tune with the Infinite" last year, almost all of "Glory" contains no percussion, perhaps to mirror the film's subject of non-violent activism). DuVernay herself best explained Selma's contemporary-minded and non-stodgy approach to historical drama when she said, "Oh gosh, I'm completely allergic to historical dramas. Particularly those around the civil-rights movement. It's not my favorite thing to watch. So often they feel like medicine... I really wanted it to be nuanced and feel urgent, and to have some life to it."

Oscar trophies are nothing when compared to a simple accomplishment like that.

Selma is now streamable on Hulu.

Morricone Youth, clad in Michael Myers masks while covering the Halloween theme

In 2015, the Jersey Journal interviewed guitarist Devon E. Levins, the founder of the New York band Morricone Youth, about Morricone Youth's live rescore of George Romero's Night of the Living Dead. Since 1999, the band has specialized in rock-style covers of '60s and '70s film and TV score compositions by the likes of Ennio Morricone (whom the band was named after), Lalo Schifrin and Henry Mancini. In recent years, they've also been performing live rescores of silent movies and the occasional post-silent-era work that opted for pre-existing library music cues instead of spending extra cash on recruiting a composer to write and record an original score. One such post-silent-era work was the famously ultra-low-budget Night of the Living Dead.


Yeah, that's not the kind of goblin Levins was referring to, Jersey Journal.

Devon E. Levins (far right), performing with one of his other bands, Creedle

Levins meant Goblin, the Italian rock band that's best known for its largely synthy yet somehow timeless-sounding original scores for Dario Argento thrillers and Zombi, the European recut of Dawn of the Dead, Romero's 1978 sequel to Night of the Living Dead (some of Goblin's Zombi cues popped up in the original version of Dawn as well). One of the merits of Morricone Youth's rescore of Night--which Morricone Youth released as an EP in September after a year of performing it live, in addition to releasing an EP of their rescore of the technically impressive (but also massively racist) 1926 German animated movie The Adventures of Prince Achmed--is the way that the band's Goblin-style rescore strengthens the connective tissue between the first two Dead installments and makes the first Dead flick feel closer to the partially Goblin-scored 1978 sequel, sonically speaking.

In the Jersey Journal article, Levins is right about the old-timey and forced nature of the library music cues during Night. Except for the eerie library track Romero needle-dropped for the 1968 film's bleak ending, all those stock cues are tonally at odds with the gritty, documentary-style visual approach to horror Romero introduced with his film, an approach that mirrored the unsettling clips of hate crimes, race riots and Vietnam War combat that were emerging on news broadcasts at the time (some critics at the time found this kind of grittiness in Night to be too intense and despair-inducing for their tastes). Sure, Night is a seminal zombie genre classic that mostly holds up, but certain things have dated the film badly, like the library tracks that are straight out of 1959 (in fact, a lot of those cues previously appeared in one such 1959 B-movie, the one-time MST3K target Teenagers from Outer Space) and the fact that Romero was still trying to figure out how his zombies should react to either pain or being snuffed out before they get the chance to enjoy Sizzler's new all-you-can-grab-from-somebody's-entrails buffet. The most unintentionally funny moment of Night is an extra who does a facepalm when his zombie character is shot down, an un-zombie-like bit of behavior:



Anyway, the Morricone Youth rescore finally makes Night sound more like a 1968 film--a film that was a precursor to the intensity of Taxi Driver and the bleakness of both Chinatown and Night Moves in the following decade--than a 1959 one. Although Levins is right about the Goblin-esque elements of his band's rescore, it's also a lot twangier than how Goblin wrote its film scores, and the twangy approach actually places certain cues like "At the Gravesite" closer in spirit to late '60s spaghetti western scores by the likes of Riz Ortolani (1967's Day of Anger) and Stelvio Cipriani (1967's The Stranger Returns) than the '70s and '80s Goblin sound that was featured in Dawn.

Goblin wasn't formed until 1972, so the most Goblin-esque parts of the rescore imagine how Goblin might have sounded in 1968. The rescore often syncs up better with the action than the recycled score cues from Hideous Sun Demon and the Capitol Hi-"Q" stock music library do.







The Night rescore EP is an intriguing experiment for those of us who never liked the music during Night. Both the Night and Prince Achmed EPs are currently being marketed by Morricone Youth as ideal Christmas presents for vinyl (or digital) soundtrack album collectors. The band's Prince Achmed rescore isn't half-bad either. It's a suitably groovy musical reinterpretation of an animated Lotte Reiniger film that still dazzles visually (Prince Achmed has an oddly psychedelic look, and I wouldn't be surprised if Reiniger's film inspired Maurice Binder while he designed the Thunderball opening titles), unless the film's caricatures of Chinese and African people (not surprising because this is '20s Germany that we're talking about here) are too much of an offensive distraction for you (they're often a distraction for me).

I'm particularly fond of "Maidens"--it's like if Morphine scored a silent movie--and the sitar riffs of "Peri Banu."





According to Morricone Youth's site, the Night and Prince Achmed EPs are the first in a planned series of 15 vinyl and digital releases of rescores the band has performed live during screenings of silent-era works and midnight movies. For those who are intrigued by rescores, especially in this current age of remix culture, the two EPs are worth a listen. Now someone needs to go imagine what it would have sounded like if Morricone scored Scarface instead of Giorgio Moroder or if Alexandre Desplat of The Grand Budapest Hotel fame remained attached to Rogue One instead of getting replaced by Michael Giacchino. I'm curious about the alternate timeline where K-2SO was scored exactly like one of the countless privileged white snobs in Wes Anderson movies.

Peter Capaldi, the current star of Doctor Who, returns as the Doctor this holiday season in "The Return of Doctor Mysterio."

The following is a repost of my November 26, 2013 discussion of "The Day of the Doctor." The latest of the BBC's annual Doctor Who Christmas specials premieres this Christmas Day.

So some British show celebrated the 50th anniversary of its premiere over the weekend. Inspector Spacetime didn't just prove that it hasn't shown any signs of aging even though it's a show that's so old Larry King discovered his first liver spot on the day it premiered. It also proved that even when the budget is at its lowest, the zippers on the Ocean Demon monster suits are at their most visible and the corridors that the Inspector and Constable Reggie are often seen running through are at their creakiest, it can still entertain, as long as there's plenty of charisma from whoever's portraying the Inspector and his associate and the storytelling is as impeccable as the Inspector's taste in bowler hats.

These days, Inspector Spacetime, or as it's known to people outside the Community universe, Doctor Who, looks much more spiffy and baller than it used to, and the interior of the time machine our favorite anti-authoritarian time traveler rides around in no longer looks like it's going to tip over if someone sneezed at the roundel-covered wall.


The premise remains the same: an eccentric alien hops around space and time to protect the universe and a little planet he's come to love called Earth, and thanks to his bizarre alien physiology (he has two hearts instead of one), he regenerates into a completely different person whenever he dies. But now there's more of a focus on the humans he's befriended and how he's affected their lives, as well as a focus on the angst that makes him tick: guilt over the toughest decision he's ever made. That would be causing the destruction of his own native planet Gallifrey--he's responsible for killing off his own people, the Time Lords--to put an end to the off-screen Time War between them and the Daleks, one of the Doctor's biggest adversaries.

The PTSD from the Time War was added to the character by former showrunner Russell T. Davies, who revived Doctor Who 16 years after its cancellation by the BBC and modernized the show in ways that enhanced and improved it (the less said about Davies' love for farty alien jokes, the better), and not just in visual terms. Towards the end of Sylvester McCoy's late '80s run as the seventh Doctor, the show started to hint that the Doctor was less than saintly and could be as devious and shady as his enemies. Sure, in the past, he's been a cantankerous old man (the first Doctor) and an arrogant asshole (the sixth Doctor). But unless I'm mistaken because I haven't watched all the pre-Davies episodes, the show rarely raised questions about some of the Doctor's actions (I haven't seen all of them because--and longtime Doctor Who heads might disagree with me--I've found some of them to be too slow-paced for my tastes, even when I first caught some of the immensely popular Tom Baker episodes on PBS, and since all of them were shot on videotape, except one of my favorite old-school Doctor Who episodes, the shot-entirely-on-film "Spearhead from Space," they look like moldy '70s and '80s episodes of General Hospital).

Doctor Who was cancelled before it could further explore the dark side of McCoy's Doctor, but when Davies brought the show back and introduced the backstory of the Time War (which took place off-camera during the interval between the 1996 Doctor Who TV-movie starring Paul McGann and the show's 2005 return), he picked up on that dark side. He and several other writers, including current showrunner Steven Moffat, made the character of the Doctor more relatable, imperfect and human, even when the Davies seasons reimagined him as a cross between a thinking person's superhero, a god with a mischievous streak and a rock star who's charming to both women and gay guys (Billie Piper's lovestruck Rose Tyler was clearly a surrogate--some haters will say she was a Mary Sue--for the openly gay Davies; some probably consider John Barrowman's Captain Jack Harkness to be more of a surrogate, but Captain Jack is the dashing gay action hero Davies wishes he could be but isn't).


"The Day of the Doctor," last Saturday night's satisfying 50th anniversary episode, revisits the previously unseen tough decision that's haunted the Doctor since the first season of the Davies/Moffat era and finally gives us glimpses of that much-discussed Time War. To the show's fans, Moffat has been as polarizing a showrunner as Davies was in the last few episodes of his reign--Moffat haters think Moffat's writing on Doctor Who is overly convoluted, repetitive, misogynist and possibly racist and they're not so fond of his rather dickish response to their opinion that the Doctor doesn't have to always regenerate into a white guy--but Moffat has excelled at making us feel the giddiness the Doctor experiences whenever he achieves the impossible, whether it's during the climax of "The Doctor Dances" or during Matt Smith's current run as the 11th Doctor (which will come to a close in next month's Christmas episode, in which the 11th Doctor dies and regenerates into a profanity-free Peter Capaldi).

The quintessential moment of Moffat's take on the Doctor as "the mad man with a box" is that funny and clever scene in "A Christmas Carol" where the Doctor demonstrates to Michael Gambon's skeptical, Scrooge-like miser character that he's going to change his past and make himself appear on screen in the childhood home movie Gambon's watching, right after he leaves the room--and a few seconds later, thanks to the magic of the TARDIS, there he is, up on screen with Gambon's younger self. The Doctor is always rewriting history, and in "The Day of the Doctor," with the help of his current sidekick Clara Oswald (Jenna Coleman); his most recent self (David Tennant); the War Doctor (John Hurt), the "forgotten" past incarnation who obliterated both his own race and the Daleks; and a mysterious figure only the War Doctor can see and who looks an awful lot like Rose (the three Doctors wind up meeting each other for reasons too convoluted to explain here), the Doctor figures out how to rewrite history to fix his biggest mistake. It's a moment as exhilarating as that home movie scene in "A Christmas Carol."

That climactic moment in "The Day of the Doctor" exemplifies why Doctor Who remains appealing to viewers all over the world (and why the BBC, which is now remorseful about the 1989 cancellation, has gone all-out for the franchise's 50th anniversary by bringing "The Day of the Doctor" to theaters in 3-D and producing An Adventure in Space and Time, a TV-movie that flashes back to Doctor Who's unusual and humble beginnings as TV that originally wasn't designed to scare or thrill kids but to educate them). The three Doctors' solution is--to borrow the words of longtime fan Craig Ferguson when he sang about why he loves the show--the ultimate triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism.



The AFOS blog will resume in January 2017 under a new monthly schedule.

This is the first of 12 or 13 blog posts that will be posted on a monthly basis from now until this blog's final post in December 2017.

I was skeptical about Donald Glover's Atlanta when FX first announced in 2014 that it picked up Glover's creation, his first TV series since his departure from Community, the offbeat cult favorite where he continually killed it each week as Troy Barnes, a high-school football star trying (and failing) to suppress his nerdy side (like that time when Troy, in what has to be my favorite acting moment from Glover on Community, was so excited to be in the presence of his childhood hero LeVar Burton that he turned catatonic). A half-hour comedy about a trap rapper and his manager cousin trying to get by in the rap game? Disquieting visions of "Entourage for the Atlanta trap scene" danced in my head when FX first hyped Atlanta. The world doesn't need another half-hour piece of boring lifestyle porn where the lead characters constantly bang anything that breathes in the most opulent of settings and the storyline with the biggest stakes would be "Is Vince Paper Boi doing or not doing the movieA3C?"

Another disquieting vision I had was that Atlanta was going to be a weekly half-hour ad for Glover's musical career as Childish Gambino. Glover is a good example of an actor/rapper whose beats, frequently provided by Community and Creed score composer Ludwig Göransson, are solid, but his bars leave a lot to be desired. I was never a fan of Gambino's corny verses about his Asian fetish.

Gotta have fetishized at least 3 asian chicks before u can really appreciate Childish Gambino's music

— Desus Nice (@desusnice) October 31, 2013

I caught up on Atlanta season 1 on FX on demand, about a few weeks after the season concluded, during a couple of breaks between chapters for a manuscript I've been working on since August (chapters that I, by the way, ended up having to delete from the manuscript because I found myself thinking, "This material isn't gonna work as a YA novel anymore. A Jim Rockford-type Pinoy should be the audience surrogate, not a precocious Richie Brockelman-type Pinoy," so I got rid of all the teenage characters). Atlanta, which took home the Best Comedy Series and Best Actor in a Comedy trophies at the Golden Globes earlier this month, exceeded my expectations. As a half-hour single-camera comedy about the rap game, thankfully, it's more Taxi than Entourage.

Sure, Atlanta is frequently funny (three words: secret revolving wall), but Glover and his writing staff's brand of humor is tinged with Taxi-style melancholy, particularly about how working-class adult life often feels like you're running in circles. That melancholy reflects Glover's belief, as he once said during a 2016 Television Critics Association press tour panel, that "you watch Master of None and it's a very optimistic look at millennialism, [but] I'm pessimistic about it. I feel like we kind of fucked up."


There's nothing lifestyle-porny about Atlanta. Neither are there any moments of blatant product placement for Awaken, My Love!, the surprise Gambino album Glover dropped one month after the Atlanta season finale, save for a cameo by the Awaken, My Love! cover artwork on a bookshelf in the "Juneteenth" episode. The non-rap Awaken, My Love! is also the first-ever Gambino release I've genuinely liked from start to finish, aside from whatever the fuck Bino was doing with his voice during "California."

The show is an exploration of, as Joshua Rivera put it in GQ, "the stress and pain of being broke," particularly when that broke-ass person is both a creative and a POC, like Earn Marks, Glover's Ivy League dropout character, and, to a lesser extent, his cousin Alfred (Brian Tyree Henry), a.k.a. the trap rapper known as Paper Boi (not to be confused with Paperboy, who recorded the 1992 one-hit wonder "Ditty"), who's more economically stable than Earn, thanks to income from drug dealing, but he's not exactly on the level of Future/Gucci Mane-type wealth yet. "Ballin," singer/songwriter Bibi Bourelly's current ode to finding ways to "treat yo'self" when your savings account is empty, could be an unofficial theme song for the daily hustle of either Earn, who becomes Alfred's manager, or teaching assistant Van (Zazie Beetz), Earn's ex and the mother of his baby daughter (I wouldn't be surprised if Bourelly's extremely relatable song surfaces on Atlanta during its second season, which is currently scheduled to air in 2018, partly due to Glover's upcoming gig as young Lando Calrissian).



Atlanta's lived-in portrayal of the hip-hop capital of the Dirty South emphasizes both the beauty and the shabbier side of the ATL at the same time. It's closer in tone and atmosphere to the ordinary, sun-kissed North Carolina town from David Gordon Green's 2000 indie flick George Washington than either the opulence of Empire or the "devastating,""crime-infested" hellholes President Fuckface Von Clownstick portrays predominantly black neighborhoods as, every time he and his toadies condescend to black America.

As part of this lived-in portrayal of black millennials in Atlanta, the show presents images that are rarely seen on a half-hour comedy, let alone scripted TV. Examples include the sight of Van in bed with a headscarf on instead of rocking immaculate-looking, made-for-TV black lady hair during bedtime and, in what has to be the weirdest image for me, Darius (Lakeith Stanfield), Alfred's constantly-thinking-outside-the-box best friend (and partner in pushing weight), stanning for the downbeat, anti-war (and three-hour-plus) Steve McQueen flick The Sand Pebbles instead of a more action-heavy McQueen flick like Bullitt. It makes me wonder about Darius' tastes in Keanu Reeves movies. Instead of watching Keanu armbarring motherfuckers and pumping them full of lead in John Wick, I bet Darius would prefer to watch Keanu in Little Buddha.


This is where Glover's decision to surround himself with writers and directors of color who had never done episodic TV before really pays off. Had Atlanta's writing staff been predominantly white like so many black sitcom writing staffs used to be (a largely vanilla writers' room was the same reason why the '90s Margaret Cho vehicle All-American Girl sucked so much), you wouldn't be reading about black viewers praising Atlanta for showing Van going to bed in a headscarf and removing her braids in the morning. Also, the dialogue between Van and Earn and the interplay between Earn, Alfred and Darius would be so goddamn trite, as in the "being able to anticipate when a punchline goes here and when a black slang term the white writer from Harvard just learned about five minutes ago goes there" kind of trite you're subjected to whenever you pay attention to the quip delivery rhythms of something like 2 Broke Girls, the annoyingly retrograde show that constantly causes Asian-bashing so-called comedians to cream their cargo shorts.

"It wasn't a conscious decision, really,"said Glover about his all-black and all-new-to-TV writing staff in a Wired profile. "I knew I wanted people with similar experiences who understood the language and the mindset of the characters and their environment."

The only veteran writer on Atlanta's writing staff is Glover himself, while on the directing side for the first season, Glover frequently turned to Hiro Murai, whose prior directorial credits are all music videos, including a bunch of Gambino videos and the video for Flying Lotus and Kendrick Lamar's "Never Catch Me," my personal favorite Murai video. Murai carried over from his music video work a knack for deadpan surrealism. Many of those surreal touches (two words: invisible car), combined with the ways that Glover, his younger brother Stephen Glover, a.k.a. Steve G. Lover, and the other young writers veer away from predictable single-camera comedy storytelling rhythms (dig how they're allergic to cutaway gags), are key to why Atlanta is so refreshing and effective as a half-hour comedy.

All the stories of Steve pulling from the unlikeliest of writing influences ("There's this movie called The Counselor that we talked about a lot,"said Steve to Vulture about the tone he was trying to nail for the amusing Black Justin Bieber episode, which he wrote) and Glover defying things like FX's suggestion that he should give his writing staff a formal office (the office setting he chose instead was a laid-back house in the Hollywood Hills; part of me wishes that Glover would tell the press that he chose the men's room at Arnold's) have reminded me of what Kool Keith said to journalist Brian Coleman in Check the Technique Volume 2: More Liner Notes for Hip-Hop Junkies. When he recalled to Coleman the experiences of recording Dr. Octagonecologyst with producer Dan the Automator, Kool Keith said, "It was like we was at a house party and we was making a punch out of lemonade, Pepsi and Welch's grape soda. We was putting everything inside the container: apples, greens, peanuts, cabbage. We blended it all together and we knew people were going to bug out when they tasted it." I wouldn't be surprised if the Atlanta crew's approach to the show is similar to Dr. Octagon's.

The Atlanta crew has also accomplished something I, as a hip-hop head, especially appreciate: they've resisted the narrative of making Paper Boi out to be a musical genius who deserves to conquer the local trap scene and do guest features with the Migos and Future because lyrics-wise, he's got the biggest bozack. It's a narrative that's simply tired. A lot of shows and movies about people who make art tend to suffer from what I call "Studio 60 Syndrome."

@culturekills I wish @TheAVClub mentioned Studio 60's Gilbert and Sullivan parody, the pinnacle of edgy Friday-night sketch comedy on NBS.

— 😑 (@JimmyJAquino) May 24, 2012

@JimmyJAquino That fake cold open is just so bad. Surprisingly enough, it was the very thing I thought of when that article came up.

— Matthew Caverhill 🍴 (@culturekills) May 24, 2012

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is, of course, the famously misguided 2006 Aaron Sorkin drama series that was basically about the making of SNL, and Sorkin constantly believed that the sketch comics from his alternate-universe SNL were curing cancer with their comedy. So many of Sorkin's characters during Studio 60 would bring up how brilliant, edgy, uproarious and life-changing the Studio 60 sketches were. But then when you finally saw those sketches in their entirety, like a Gilbert and Sullivan-style cold open that makes the Sunset Strip studio audience wile out, you'd be like, "That's it? That's all? That shit wouldn't even cause a regular viewer of The Amanda Show to smile, dawg."

Part of Sorkin's problem with the underwhelming fake sketches on Studio 60 was that Sorkin's ideas about sketch comedy were 28 years behind the TV comedy zeitgeist at the time. When he wrote Studio 60, the live sketches portion of SNL was no longer the countercultural comedy powerhouse it used to be. SNL was in a weird and shaky transitional period at the time: Tina Fey, SNL's most acclaimed head writer ever, left the show and was busy with both writing and starring in 30 Rock, and the only part of post-Fey SNL that was making as much of a countercultural impact as the live sketches used to do in the show's classic years was the pre-recorded Digital Shorts by Andy Samberg and the Lonely Island (also, this was years before Fey would return to Studio 8H and make the live sketches temporarily relevant again with her Sarah Palin impression).

Lonely Island viral videos aside, SNL wasn't the satirical franchise everyone was laughing about and being dazzled by in 2006. That spot belonged to The Daily Show, which was at the height of its anti-Bush Administration satire, and had Sorkin made his fictional show-within-the-show a Daily Show counterpart instead of an SNL counterpart, Sorkin's notion that Matthew Perry, Bradley Whitford, Sarah Paulson, D.L. Hughley and Nate Corddry were contributing to social change would have made a lot more sense (Studio 60 is so inessential I can't even remember the names of the characters who were played by Perry, Whitford, Paulson, Hughley and Corddry).

Studio 60 wasn't the first show or movie to feature characters who talk and talk and talk about how this fictional writer or that fictional performer is a genius (that A.V. Club article I referred to on Twitter in 2012 also goes off on the Brady Bunch kids' unconvincing singing career and the Janet Jackson character in Poetic Justice, as well as more recent shows like Californication, Smash and, of course, Entourage). But it's the most off-the-rails example of a screenwriter or showrunner's overinflated perceptions of his or her artistic characters' talents.

Glover used to write for 30 Rock, the show where folks who, unlike Sorkin, actually worked for SNL--for example, Fey and writer Robert Carlock--would often poke holes in Sorkin's over-exaggeration of SNL's relevancy as an anti-establishment voice by making most of Tracy Jordan and Jenna Maroney's sketches genuinely lame. The fake sketch where Tracy played a chef who vomits during his cooking show was every single old SNL sketch that would resort to fake puke as a visual punchline whenever the writers ran out of ideas. The intentional crappiness of Tracy and Jenna's fake sketches was Fey's way of basically saying, "You know a lot of those sketches we used to rush into dress in the hours leading up to 11:30? They don't hold up today. We often relied on puke and sloppy makeout scenes. I'm not sure which sketch comedy show Sorkin was watching." The main thing Glover clearly took along with him from his years with 30 Rock and brought over to Atlanta was, fortunately, not 30 Rock's sped-up, rat-a-tat-tat gag delivery rhythms, which Atlanta has wisely avoided while almost every single-camera network comedy has co-opted them. What I feel like Glover absorbed the most from 30 Rock was to never pretend that what his artistic characters are doing with their art is important with a capital I.

The Atlanta writers' avoidance of Studio 60 Syndrome--sure, Alfred runs into fans of his breakout single throughout the first season, but the show never unconvincingly crams down your throat a bunch of exposition about the brilliance of Paper Boi's sound--resulted in a lot of sublime acting moments from Brian Tyree Henry during the season. Henry's portrayal of Alfred is a rarity: it's one of scripted TV's few portrayals of a fictional rapper who's neither a gangsta rapper nor some weirdly sanitized version of a conscious rapper who occasionally does "The Ghetto"-type tracks about inner-city life (*cough*Lucious Lyon*cough*).

Race-baiting Fox News and its audience of 91-year-olds think all rappers are gangsta rappers.

Jesus Christ, Fox News. For the 1,588th time, Common is not a gangsta rapper. http://wapo.st/ktCdiK (1 of 2)

— 😑 (@JimmyJAquino) May 14, 2011

Fox News going after Common is like if someone from the right-wing's anti-heavy metal movement in the '80s went after Bon Jovi. (2 of 2)

— 😑 (@JimmyJAquino) May 14, 2011

Meanwhile, Empire tries to pass off Lucious as a brilliant, insightful and extremely ambitious lyricist who changed hip-hop long ago. That kind of impact on hip-hop may be feasible in the show's telenovela-style universe, but in our universe, Lucious' drab-sounding delivery wouldn't be able to push more than 10 copies from the trunk of a hooptie (Terrence Howard is more to blame for that than Timbaland, who produces Empire's original songs). A lot of MCs aren't in the game to change the world or conquer it. Neither are they often the villainous nihilists Fox News, the uptight right and the respectability politics crowd make them out to be.

A lot of them are E-40 types who just want to have fun or record music that knocks. If they become interested in social commentary and deeper lyrics, that occurs later in their careers. Henry plays Alfred as a guy who got into the game just to have fun and spark a blunt or two while cutting a mixtape or a single that he hopes will get everyone in the club turnt up--his ambitions don't seem to be more than that--but he's already becoming ambivalent about the level of ATL fame he's attained and the crazies and parasites his fame attracts. The lightly comedic, almost James Garner-like frustration that constantly plays out on Henry's face is an interesting far cry from the one-note "Yo, E, who'da thought we'd make it outta Queens? Isn't all this bling wonderful?" bullshit of Entourage.




Henry manages to pull off Paper Boi's ambivalence with very little dialogue and a lot of sublime eye acting. His side-eye game is on fleek. You see that ambivalence when a black police officer awkwardly wants to snap a bunch of selfies with Alfred while he visits a jailed Earn, and Alfred just wants to be treated like a regular human being who simply wants to see his relative instead of being treated like a superstar or, at worst, like a criminal. Or when Alfred realizes the ridiculousness of tiny Paper Boi fans who are way too young to be exposed to the lyrics of trap anthems. Or when, in my favorite lengthy example of Henry's side-eye game, Alfred can't stand being forced to play nice with an insufferable and douchey celebrity like Black Bieber.

Thanks to Henry's non-verbal acting, you also get the impression that even Alfred himself doesn't think his "Paper Boi" single is a masterpiece, and he's surprised by its popularity. Produced by a beatmaker named Chemist and written and performed off-screen by Steve G. Lover ("We didn't want to have to force Brian to rap,"said Steve to The Fader), the brief excerpts from "Paper Boi" are definitely catchy, so it's plausible that "Paper Boi" would become an Atlanta radio hit, but the show also doesn't try to pretend that "Paper Boi" is as life-changing as a Shins song.



In regards to the sounds of the fake breakout track he wrote for Paper Boi, Steve said to The Fader, "When we first started the show... we didn't want to make it where it's so good that it becomes a major point of the story... It strikes a balance, where the audience is like 'this is good, but it doesn't feel cheesy, and it doesn't feel like it's trying too hard, either.' It's because it was written by a person who's a rapper who understands that it's about having fun--this is a fun song."Studio 60 Syndrome is all about unconvincingly establishing the high quality of the content some fictional creative puts out. In the 1997 indie flick Henry Fool, the story of an obscene poem that both angers and satisfies the public and becomes the 1997 version of viral, director Hal Hartley cleverly kept himself from becoming another perpetrator of Studio 60 Syndrome by never showing the poem at all (Hartley didn't need to show it; the camera's tight focus on the readers' varied reactions effectively conveyed the poem's divisiveness).

On Atlanta, Steve similarly saves himself and the show from Studio 60 Syndrome by establishing that in Atlanta's universe, the "Paper Boi" single has nothing more on its mind than Migos-type pleasure.


Now that's more real than a 2006 Sunset Strip crowd enthusiastically reacting to warmed-over Gilbert and Sullivan as if it's George Carlin's "Seven Dirty Words" routine.