This is the second of 12 or 13 blog posts that are being posted on a monthly basis from January 2017 until this blog's final post in December 2017.

Once upon a time, I ran an Internet radio station that streamed film and TV score music. I don't really miss running it. The audience for it dwindled over the years, and even though Live365, the Bay Area company that powered the station before the end of the Webcaster Settlement Act led to Live365's demise early last year, is being resuscitated, I don't have any plans to bring back the station.

But I've kept the station alive on Mixcloud, where I've archived a few hours of old station content and posted lots of new one-to-two-hour mixes of music from original scores. The most popular of those mixes has been a mix of Kyle Dixon/Michael Stein score cues from the first season of Netflix's unexpectedly popular Stranger Things. It's called "Where's Barb?"

Late last year, the score albums for the Magnificent Seven remake and the film version of Fences, which both star Denzel Washington, were sent to my inbox, and that made me want to edit together an entire mix of score cues from Denzel movies. Denzel has been one of my favorite actors, ever since he stole the 1989 white savior movie Glory (and won an Oscar for stealing it) in the same way Don Cheadle would later steal Devil in a Blue Dress from Denzel. In Glory, he was basically the Toshiro Mifune character from Seven Samurai: the shit-talking troublemaker and outsider who learns to channel his anger and penchant for self-destruction into a worthy cause and then (SPOILER!) dies a hero.

The late James Horner's score from that 1989 Civil War movie, Terence Blanchard's 1992 Malcolm X score and Hans Zimmer's 1995 Crimson Tide score are a trifecta of Denzel-related instrumental badassery. Put those three scores together in either a mix or an hour of radio programming, and that hour of music is automatically going to sound as rousing and badass as a Denzel speech. Procrastinating on a writing project or that load of laundry? Put on the badass "Fruit of Islam" from Malcolm X's classic hospital march sequence. Immediately after hearing "Fruit of Islam," shit is going to be done. Laundry is going to be washed.

This month is the perfect time to post a mix of score cues from Denzel flicks. Several of Denzel's most highly regarded movies are frequently recommended during Black History Month by the likes of film critics and librarians, and Fences, Denzel's third big-screen directorial effort, is up for a few Oscars this weekend. Viola Davis, who reprised a role she had alongside Denzel in one of the various stage versions of Fences, is the frontrunner for the Best Supporting Actress trophy.



Throughout the Mixcloud mixes, I like to drop audio clips from the movies or TV shows that I've selected for score cue airplay. For this Denzel mix, I could have gone with audio from Denzel speeches as the connective tissue between each Denzel movie score cue, but I decided to go with something even more brash as connective tissue: clips from the very funny Earwolf podcast Denzel Washington Is the Greatest Actor of All Time Period, hosted by stand-ups W. Kamau Bell, the host of the CNN documentary series United Shades of America, and Kevin Avery, a writer for Last Week Tonight.

Bell, Avery and a special guest Denzealot, whether it's another comedian, a black filmmaker or one of Denzel's previous co-stars, dissect the work of their favorite charismatic actor, with lots of humor and occasional jabs at things like Virtuosity (the poorly received 1995 Denzel cyber-thriller that pitted 'Zel against a murderous A.I. played by a pre-L.A. Confidential Russell Crowe) and Denzel's visible discomfort during Much Ado About Nothing's frolicking scenes. Denzel himself is aware of the podcast's existence. But I highly doubt he's ever going to be a guest on this podcast that both celebrates his many triumphs as an actor (as well as a director of both episodic TV and small-scale feature films) and dredges up Virtuosity-esque career missteps, and Denzel's recent Fences press junket comment about not wanting to live in the past confirmed it. The podcast doesn't just live in Denzel's big-screen (and small-screen) past. It raises kids and builds a whole garden of gladioli in his past.

Kevin Avery and W. Kamau Bell, hosts of the Earwolf podcast with the title that's too long to type out

"The Walk," from Devil in a Blue Dress

Perhaps the best thing about Bell and Avery's discussions of Denzel's mostly fascinating filmography (geri-action flicks like 2 Guns, the only Denzel movie that's based on a comic book, are not as fascinating, but hey, if those paycheck movies are the only way for Denzel to expose more people to August Wilson plays, then more power to them) is that they've led to always-welcome-in-the-mostly-white-podcastosphere conversations about inclusion in Hollywood, particularly the push for more diversity in that whiter-than-a-pumpkin-spice-latte town. Bell (who's no stranger to the push for more diversity, after trying to make late-night TV less of a white boys' club while hosting Totally Biased on FX and FXX) and Avery are nicely aware that diversity isn't just a black issue. It's an Asian American issue. It's a disabled artist's issue. I love how the podcast gets Bell's Politically Re-Active co-host, the great Indian American stand-up Hari Kondabolu, to talk about Mira Nair's Mississippi Masala, the 1991 interracial romance movie that paired up Denzel with Sarita Choudhury, or how it gets disability rights activist Alice Wong to weigh in on The Bone Collector, the 1999 serial killer flick that starred Denzel as a quadriplegic cop.

Hip-hop is composed of four elements (graffiti, DJing, rhymes and dancing), and according to Bell and Avery on their podcast, Denzelishness is similarly made up of a few elements: that confident walk Denzel always does; the speeches; that weird thing he does with his lip; the stutter; the cough; the thousand-yard stare; general badassery; and the Glory tear, a.k.a. the single tear on Denzel's face when his character gets whipped in Glory. While picking out clips from Denzel Is the Greatest for the Mixcloud mix and listening to so many conversations in which they evaluate a movie's Denzelishness, I've realized Bell and Avery have overlooked one major element of Denzelishness: the Denzel "Huh?"











During the Detroit Red section of Malcolm X, Denzel said "Huh?" It's one of many tics Denzel deployed to intimidate Roger Guenveur Smith during their scene together. He said it repeatedly when his character knocked the fuck out of Rosario Dawson's side dude in He Got Game.

Then Denzel dropped "Huh?" again during his famous King Kong speech in Training Day, as well as during his Best Actor Oscar acceptance speech for his villainous turn in Training Day. Whoot, there it is again during American Gangster and The Magnificent Seven. Even the Uncle Denzel meme says "Huh?"


Actor Alphonso McAuley, a familiar face from countless commercials and the short-lived Fox sitcom Breaking In, picked up on Denzel's love of the word "Huh?" and posted on his YouTube account a supercut of the Denzel "Huh?" from American Gangster. Then when McAuley later appeared in Melvin Gregg's recent YouTube comedy short, "The Greatest Denzel Scene Ever," a video that imagines four different Denzel characters interacting, McAuley and his fellow Denzel impersonators littered their Denzel impressions with the Denzel "Huh?"

I wonder if New Girl has ever worked Lamorne Morris' Denzel impression into the show. It's been a minute since I've watched New Girl. The last time I watched New Girl was the "Megan Fox moves into the loft and reveals she was Cece's ex-lover" episode. Anyway, Morris' impression during Gregg's video is amazing. He clearly watched American Gangster 158 times. None of the Denzel impressions in Gregg's video are from any of Denzel's action movies (Flight, which is channeled by Giovanni Watson in the video, is not an action movie, but, as I've said before, Paramount marketed it as an actioner, in order to trick Denzel's most conservative fans into watching an addiction drama they'd most likely stay away from). McAuley, Gregg, Morris and Watson may not have realized this while making the video, but the video proves my point that Action Hero Denzel is boring as fuck.





But McAuley and his fellow impressionists are clearly aware that no other performer imbues a tiny and insignificant word like "Huh?" with several different layers of meaning at once (or with so much badassery) like Denzel frequently does. "You feel me?""Why are you wasting my time with this Simple Simon-ass shit?""How does that punch to the throat feel?""Do I need to drive you to the doctor because I got a lot of problems right now, and I ain't adding you to the fucking list, so deal with it on your own?"

Those are things Denzel is somehow able to simultaneously say whenever he blurts out "Huh?" It reminds me of when Michaela Watkins was clearly aware that SNL characters with catchphrases were becoming a corny thing to the audience by the time of her stint on SNL, so to mock that corniness, as well as defy it, she took her snotty celebrity gossip blogger character's misguided-in-the-belief-that-it's-going-to-catch-on catchphrase of "Bitch pleeze!" and remarkably uttered it in a different way every single time within the three minutes she was given on Weekend Update. It also reminds me of when Mark Hamill once explained that every time he has the Joker blurt out a little "Hoo!" at the end of a sentence, the meaning of "Hoo!" changes every time in his head. These are subtleties nobody notices outside of actors, directors and film or TV critics. That's why all these performers, whether it's Morris, Rick Gonzalez, who's clearly doing a Denzel-taunting-Braugher-in-Glory impression each week as Rene the wanna-be vigilante on Arrow, or the hosts of Denzel Is the Greatest, view Denzel as the greatest actor of all time, period. What other movie star with continually solid opening weekends would still be that obsessed with the word "Huh?" and his or her delivery of it?

Okay, maybe Nicolas Cage would be. But he's not a movie star with continually solid opening weekends anymore. Denzel--despite the worrisome threat of a superhero-based economy--amazingly still is.

"Denzel Washington Is Accompanied by the Greatest Film Scores of All Time Period," a two-hour mix of original score cues from Denzel movies, is now part of the AFOS Mixcloud page.

This is the third of 12 or 13 blog posts that are being posted on a monthly basis until this blog's final post in December 2017.

The longest I laughed over one of Joel McHale's quips on E!'s now-defunct pop culture clip show The Soup ("a sort of national archives of idiocy" was how TV Insider astutely described the show, a few months before its cancellation in 2015) was the moment when The Soup played a Today Show clip of Richard Simmons--this was way before he went "missing"--being Richard Simmons while sitting on a couch with a miniskirted Lisa Rinna. The former Days of Our Lives star, who looks a lot different from her pre-Botox days in Salem, covered her crotch when Simmons lifted up her legs because she thought the viewers at home were getting a glimpse of her Salem's Lot (actually, the viewers at home couldn't see shit).



Neither the accidental quasi-upskirt clip nor McHale's scripted response to the clip were what made me laugh for two or three minutes. The muttered aside that the Soup host clearly ad-libbed right after his scripted response was what caused my sides to hurt from laughing for two minutes: "Her lips are full of collagen."

The Soup studio audience laughed over the ad-lib for longer than half a minute as well. On a broadcast network, Standards and Practices would lamely bleep out "lips" and ruin McHale's joke, but because this was basic cable, E! let the randy ad-lib go. It was a rare wise decision by a cable channel known for a million dumb programming decisions that were made fun of by McHale and his fellow joke writers on the regular during The Soup's 11-year run.

I wish I could revisit that improvised Soup moment and a bunch of other lines that were ad-libbed by McHale (in addition to wishing I could revisit the memes that originated from The Soup, like Spaghetti Cat and "Stay out of it, Nick Lachey!"), just like how I can easily stream an entire episode of The Daily Show from any point of history during the Dubya Administration or how I can easily stream not just the classic 2007 Colbert Report interview segment where Jane Fonda took Stephen Colbert by surprise (by sitting on his lap and kissing him to persuade his fake Republican alter ego, also named Stephen Colbert, to remove her name from his "On Notice" board) but the rest of the 2007 Colbert Report episode as well. (Also, a search for almost every discriminatory thing that has come out of Steve King's mouth isn't so difficult, thanks to the Colbert archive.)

Unfortunately, I can't revisit as much Soup content as I'd like to because E!'s online staff never bothered to put up an archive of full Soup episodes like how Comedy Central built exhaustive online archives of full Daily Show and Colbert Report episodes. And that lack of a Soup archive--meanwhile, all 12 interminable seasons of Keeping Up with the Kardashians are up on Hulu--is an even dumber move on E!'s part than building an unwatchable reality show around a tanning salon.

It was a lavalier mic. U can @ikpanderson 4the joke RT @manicsocratic: It's Joel w/the #MicDrop on #BringBackOurGirlspic.twitter.com/gW4ZrvM3Vb

— Joel McHale (@joelmchale) May 17, 2014

Kelly Levy, a longtime Soup producer and the show's former announcer, was the off-screen voice behind the show's pre-taped intro for Chat Stew, a segment that was a brief nod to The Soup's precursor, Talk Soup.

Towards the end of the show's run, Levy finally introduced Chat Stew in front of the camera.

Levy was also known on The Soup for her dead-on Courtney Stodden impression. (.GIF set source: myawesomeblog99)

I like to think some powerful cabal from within Comcast, E!'s parent company, or E! itself is trying to erase all traces of The Soup from the channel's history, like how I believe that an anti-Danielle Fishel cabal from within Disney has conspired to wipe out nearly all online traces of the fashion industry-themed Soup spinoff The Dish, the funniest thing Fishel ever did, so that the Internet will forever know her only as Topanga. On The Dish, which aired on Comcast's now-defunct Style Network, Fishel constantly displayed a skill even McHale was incapable of doing on The Soup--an ability to perfectly mimic many different accents, whether it was Rachel Zoe's vocal-fried Jersey accent or the accent of some Russian choreographer lady from Dancing with the Stars--which is why it was a bit disappointing to see her return to the Topanga role and play mom on the Disney Channel's now-defunct Girl Meets World. A "Good Mom" role like that, as opposed to a Bad Moms role, would never allow her to rock all those accents and be as funny or randy as she got to be on The Dish.

But the truth is that the absence of a massive Soup archive isn't due to resentment from the network brass over the Soup staff's snarky commentary about E!'s own reality show stars. In fact, when Hugh Hefner, the only E! reality show star to ever express unhappiness about being targeted by McHale on The Soup, demanded an apology from The Soup for their jokes about him, the channel--instead of caving in to Hef--backedThe Soup and kept the show from apologizing (which was good because I never got tired of McHale concluding his jabs at Hefner by singing "I'm a boat captain"). The online absence of full episodes of The Soup, which has resulted in so many hilarious Soup moments like "Her lips are full of collagen" being lost to time, is clearly due to the same problem that explains why Comcast's NBCUniversal never put out Soup compilation DVDs a la CBS Paramount's Daily Show and Colbert Report DVDs (this complicated problem has also kept a long-rumored DVD box set for Cheap Seats, the Sklar Brothers' ESPN Classic sports clip show, from surfacing). It's called clip clearance, and it always leads to legal headaches.

E! is a network of notoriously cheap bastards. The network never bothered to build an actual set for McHale, Lou the chihuahua, Spaghetti Cat and Mankini (that was actually a green screen they stood in front of for all 11 years), so why bother to take a machete to the legal thicket of TV and music footage clearance, just for a show that's not being produced anymore? Fortunately, some Soup fan on YouTube has stepped in and is attempting to do what E! should have always done. That fan is assembling a mini-Soup archive out of bootlegs of full episodes to satiate any Soup fan's hunger for full eps. A Russian account under the name of "SuperDimson" has started posting full Soup eps (the account began its unearthing of Soup eps with a bunch of eps that aired in 2007), which is nice because, as much as I love how often McHale mocked the cheesy writing on CSI: Miami, a show McHale once appeared on (at about the same time he was starting to get recognized for hosting The Soup, he guest-starred not as himself, but as a Miami bank manager), I was getting a bit tired of revisiting the same five or six old Soup segments about CSI: Miami over and over on YouTube, just to get a quick Soup fix again.














Just like Jon Stewart towards the end of his run on The Daily Show, McHale, who was juggling The Soup, Community, movie roles and a stand-up act for several years, was similarly starting to look and sound exhausted towards the end of The Soup's run. At one point, I even wanted to see Fishel stepping up to the plate and subbing for McHale for a few weeks. After 11 years, I wouldn't blame McHale for wanting to move on, and who needs new episodes of The Soup anyway, especially when Desus & Mero, a nightly show on Viceland (whereas The Soup was weekly), is currently a sufficient substitute for The Soup?

Desus & Mero has got the same snarky, lo-fi clip show vibe, except there are a lot more WorldStar videos and Cam'ron references, and Desus Nice and The Kid Mero refuse to say any jokes off a teleprompter (whereas McHale had to rely on a teleprompter when he wasn't improvising, which is interesting because he has admitted that his dyslexia made it difficult for him to read off the E! studio's teleprompter). The Soup correctly (and depressingly) predicted that the rise of reality TV stars would bring about the end of the world, and now that a certain reality TV star is bringing about the end of the world, Desus and Mero just seem much more energetic and amped right now about shading and ridiculing Trumputo every weeknight than McHale would have been if E! kept The Soup alive during the Trumputo presidency.

Meanwhile, at the time of this writing, that mini-Soup archive by "SuperDimson" is starting to rescue lost Soup episodes that aired in 2009. I wonder if the archive will ever be able to reach one of my favorite moments in Soup history: a no-longer-online 2015 sketch that mocked people's "Hidden Fences"-style inability to tell Pakistani American comedian Kumail Nanjiani apart from Indian actor Kunal Nayyar by staging a game of "Will the real Kunal Nayyar please stand up?" with Nayyar himself, Maulik Pancholy, Kal Penn and Danny Pudi, McHale's Community co-star.

(Screen shot source: Angry Asian Man)

These guys! Had a blast on @TheSoup w/ @kunalnayyar@kalpenn@dannypudipic.twitter.com/tIO503PyL4

— Maulik Pancholy (@MaulikPancholy) September 26, 2015

.@dannypudi has some similar stories. No joke. https://t.co/Au2Xj6kOk6

— Joel McHale (@joelmchale) April 11, 2015

Now that I think about it, maybe this Russian-based Soup archive is actually a Russian attempt to distract American Soup fans from Putin's conquest of America. Aw fuck-ski.

This is the fourth of 12 or 13 blog posts that are being posted on a monthly basis until this blog's final post in December 2017. Occasionally on Friday, I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. It's the "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week. Stream "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," my one-hour mix of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, right now.



If the last few years saw the rise of the surprise album release--the likes of Beyoncé and Drake have rewritten the rules of the music industry by dropping albums right and left without any warning--then Adult Swim is apparently taking a cue from Queen Bey and Drizzy by trying to bring about the rise of the surprise TV show episode premiere. They did it before when, without much fanfare, they debuted on Instagram the complete "Rixty Minutes" episode of Rick and Morty a few days before its broadcast premiere.

This April Fools Day, Adult Swim did it again. Without posting some sort of press release or promotional tweet in advance, Adult Swim's staff pretended to do their annual April Fools prank (three of those past pranks were simply broadcasts of The Room), but they used the appearance of a prank as a Trojan horse to show all of "The Rickshank Rickdemption"--the Rick and Morty third-season premiere in which an incarcerated Rick comes up with a very sci-fi way to both outsmart an alien interrogator (special guest star Nathan Fillion) and escape from intergalactic prison--in a loop for only a few hours on both the network and its site. Well-played, Adult Swim, well-played.

Adult Swim hasn't even set a date yet for the unveiling of the rest of Rick and Morty's new season. So far, they've said the season will resume some time in the summer, so the most impatient of Rick and Morty fans, who have been waiting since October 2015 for new episodes from Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon, will just have to shut the fuck up like Jemaine Clement whenever he sings about moonmen and wait a little longer.

The April Fools loop was a nice little surprise stunt, but how does the episode--which I was lucky to stream in its entirety after returning home late from a party, right before Adult Swim deleted it from their site--fare as the return of an eagerly awaited animated show that hasn't been first-run in almost two years? "The Rickshank Rickdemption," which is credited to Rick and Morty staff writer Mike McMahan, is a much more focused and tautly written (as well as much more action-heavy) season premiere than last season's "A Rickle in Time," a season opener that Roiland and Harmon were reportedly unhappy with because, according to the duo in Rolling Stone, "We were so close to something amazing and we never really got there from a structural standpoint," and "It went off the deep end conceptually and got really over-complicated." The third-season premiere is satisfying and funny enough to get me to bring back this blog's "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week" feature after a long hiatus.

Reviewing new Rick and Morty episodes is one of the few things I'll miss about writing for this Blogspot blog. By the way, reviewing the show is completely different from recapping it, and I've always found the recapping of TV show episodes to be the dumbest, lowest and least challenging form of long-form writing about TV. Okay, maybe recaps are occasionally helpful in clarifying a confusing plot point or two that might have puzzled you while you watched an elaborately plotted show like Rick and Morty (but only occasionally). Otherwise, they're a pointless waste of space, and that's why I've never done recaps (also, you never see anybody recapping Get Out or, oh, I don't know, Moonlight, and why the fuck would anybody want to do that, so why do the same for a scripted TV show?). So before I begin discussing "The Rickshank Rickdemption," I want to further explain why "Brokedown" and this blog are approaching the end.

A year ago, I would have said this blog is one of the few things that keeps me happy while being unemployed. These days, I've found this blog to be a chore. It continually gets in the way of a novel I've been trying to write as a way to possibly get steady work somewhere again, even after I shortened the blog post schedule from weekly to monthly earlier this year.

Also, nobody reads this blog anymore. Barely anybody responds to it anymore. Meanwhile, my weekday posts over at Accidental Star Trek Cosplay, my Tumblr blog, as well as a blog that, unlike this one, isn't time-consuming at all, frequently receive one to three likes (and occasionally more than three). My Tumblr blog's much more responsive audience is also a lot more diverse than the same two guys who have posted the most comments in this blog's comments section in the last two years.

I'm a bit disappointed to be bowing out of long-form blogging at the end of the year. I feel like I lost in the battle to help keep long-form blogging alive. It's a lost art that's being eclipsed and destroyed by Twitter (as well as, to a lesser extent, by Tumblr and by any site that resorts to vapid listicles and pointless rankings of things as click-baity filler). I resent Twitter for that (oh yeah, and its inability to be tougher on Nazis and Fuckface Von Clownstick, the worst Twitter addict of them all, is an even bigger thing I resent about the site, but the role it played in the rise of Fuckface and his worshipers is a bunch of shit I don't want to get into right now). I also resent Twitter for being an ineffective tool for getting people to check out things I've worked on, so I've completely given up on posting links to this blog on Twitter, while over on Facebook, a site I dislike even more than Twitter, the regularity in which I would post links to this blog on the AFOS Facebook page's timeline has dwindled. I basically said, "Fuck it. People addicted to Twitter or Facebook can go find my shit on their own."

Tumblr is the kind of online community I need right now. It doesn't have comments sections. Tumblr was wise to do away with them. Comments sections are magnets for the worst of humanity. Those forums are outdated, unwieldy-looking, pointless and lame. Sometimes the lamest kinds of comments, other than racist ones from trolls, are either comments where the commenter doesn't engage with the material you wrote and just wants to hear himself talk or comments where you can tell how terrible the commenter's reading comprehension is because he or she reiterates a point you made as if you never said it at all in the post (that's why the only frequent commenter whose comments I enjoy reading below my posts in the last two years is Bryant Burnette, who runs a very good Blogspot blog about the work of Stephen King; I can often tell that Bryant had thoroughly read everything above the blog post labels).

Also, on Tumblr, if someone dislikes a post you did, they don't say something racist to you or threaten to assault you. They simply don't click "Like" on it and move on to the next thing to read. Okay, maybe they might drag you during a post on their Tumblr, but luckily, that has happened to me only once.

Because Accidental Star Trek Cosplay is focused only on, well, accidental Star Trek cosplay, there won't be any room over there for "Brokedown" to continue. I know "Brokedown" was one of the few features on this blog that some readers looked forward to with regularity, but I don't have time anymore to write at length about made-for-TV animation like I used to before. The most disappointing part of having to leave behind "Brokedown" will be not being able to discuss Rick and Morty anymore because I really love the show, and "The Rickshank Rickdemption" is full of many of the things I've enjoyed the most about discussing Rick and his grandson's ultraviolent and wildly funny trips all over the multiverse.

Those things range from the brief and juicy glimpses into various alternate realities (I'm kind of curious about the reality where their Rick has a Jew-fro) to the surprising moments of depth involving Morty and his growing ambivalence about the actions of his misanthropic (and privately self-loathing) scientist grandpa, who's blindly idealized by his mother and his big sister. Morty's a character who started out as a cipher with an uninteresting personality, and he could have turned into an A.J. Soprano-style black hole of one-note teen angst, but he has unexpectedly become, like Dean Venture over on a certain other Adult Swim show, the one character you root for to someday pull himself and his sister Summer away from the destructive influence of their ingenious but fucked-up grandpa and their similarly fucked-up parents.

Two seasons into its run, Rick and Morty has plenty to explore storytelling-wise, thanks mostly to a sci-fi premise that's sustainable for hundreds of episodes (a.k.a. more than 10 seasons), even though in the second season, I started to get a little impatient with the B-stories that centered on Beth and Jerry's crumbling marriage. At its worst, Beth's intense hatred of her husband, whom she finds to be dull and unsatisfying, is to this show what Pierce's uselessness as a member of the study group was to the middle seasons of Community: the only component of the show that, after the first season, hasn't really been treading much new ground.

"The Rickshank Rickdemption" finds a way for the show to write itself out of a potential rut, even while restoring the status quo: Beth's decision to finally divorce Jerry. She makes that choice after Rick's climactic return to the Smiths' house causes Jerry to give her an ultimatum--either he bounces or Rick bounces--and it's the culmination of an elaborate plan hatched by Rick to get back at his son-in-law for trying to kick him out of the household in "The Wedding Squanchers," last season's finale. In that episode, Jerry's observation of Beth's irrational need to keep her dad around in her life--as Dan Harmon once noted in an interview, Beth is so in awe of her dad's talents as the smartest man in the multiverse that she's unable to notice that he was a shitty dad who abandoned her for most of her childhood--was a rare moment where Jerry was actually being smarter than his heart surgeon wife, who thinks of Jerry, a former advertising agent, as intellectually inferior to her.

Divorce is going to suck for Morty and Summer, but the split will hopefully bring some new life to the domestic stories half of Rick and Morty (Harmon fans who are weirdly obsessed with the details of Harmon's personal life--I'm not one of those fans--are bound to be especially interested in how Harmon will work his recent experiences with divorce into Rick and Morty's storylines). Get ready for a lot of shots this season of Jerry's pathetic face pressed up against the Smiths' living room window from outside the house.

Besides, I always thought it was unhealthy for Beth and Jerry to continue being under the same roof. "Meeseeks and Destroy" revealed that Beth and Jerry got married not out of love but because Beth became pregnant with Summer. That early episode was the point in the show's run when I said, "Yeah, this couple stays together for the dumbest reasons. They need to separate or divorce someday."

"The Rickshank Rickdemption" is a rare episode where this domestic side of Rick and Morty is actually more compelling than the sci-fi comedy side, even though that side is highlighted by a return to the Cronenberged reality our Rick and Morty, a.k.a. C-137 Rick and Morty, left behind in "Rick Potion #9," a complicated prison break that really has to be watched twice in order to fully understand it (this is where watching the season premiere on a loop really helped) and a badass, large-scale teleportation scene. The season premiere's sci-fi comedy side is also full of clever and quotable "Rick the asshole handing intellectually inferior assholes their asses on a platter" moments (including a certain moment that has gone viral). But the domestic scenes are what really stand out for me in this episode.

Rick and Morty's domestic side is thankfully more than just the squabbles between Beth and Jerry. It also includes Summer's ongoing jealousy of the amount of time her brother has gotten to spend all over the multiverse with a grandpa she wants to get to know more. At the start of "The Rickshank Rickdemption," Morty resents Rick for leaving behind his family when they needed him the most. In the most intriguing scene between Morty and Summer since the non-comedic "Nobody exists on purpose" scene in "Rixty Minutes," Morty warns Summer--who's attempting to rescue Rick from prison so that he could use his science to fix the world (which has been taken over by an intergalactic totalitarian regime that tries to pacify the populace with pills, and it's a sucky world that the mediocre Jerry, of course, finds to be appealing)--that their grandpa doesn't care about anybody and he can't be trusted.

Summer seems to have inherited Beth's bizarre idolization of Rick, whereas Morty, who's now so jaded from the amount of chaos Rick has brought into his life, is able to step back and view Rick as a burden. Rick and Morty has been described by some as a darker Back to the Future (but without the time machine, and I wouldn't be surprised if Roiland and Harmon are staying away from time travel stories because they can be such a pain in the ass to plot out). I once said in the first season that it was more like Evil Doctor Who, a comparison I'm starting to see a few other writers make as well. But after "The Rickshank Rickdemption," it's becoming more clear to me now that if you take away the sci-fi tropes, Rick and Morty is basically a darker Auntie Mame. That old movie (based on a novel that was turned into a hit Broadway play) was about a kid who's taken under the wing of an older relative who lives life to the fullest and is a force of nature. Rick lives life to the fullest and is a force of nature too, but unlike Auntie Mame, Roiland and Harmon's show is able to step back, like Morty himself these days, and view its main life-of-the-party figure critically and skeptically.

Sure, the show gets us to root for Rick whenever he does badass things like assassinating a pedophilic alien king who tried to sexually assault Morty, single-handedly ruining the economy or beaming the entire Citadel of Ricks right smack dab into the location of the prison that's run by the Galactic Federation (by the way, making the Federation one of the show's villains instead of the organization that's represented by the heroes is a move straight out of Blake's 7, and I wouldn't be surprised if the name choice was Roiland and Harmon's shout-out to that old show). But the show's writing is also savvy enough to question many of Rick's other actions and raise the possibility that Rick may not even be the hero of this show at the end of the day. It might ultimately be Morty.

In 2014, I said, "I don't want to see Rick, seven or eight years from now, becoming as repetitive and tiresome an asshole genius as Gregory House became about seven seasons into House. I want to see him change a little, just like how the similarly abrasive Jeff Winger did over the course of Community's run.""The Ricks Must Be Crazy" and now "The Rickshank Rickdemption" have made me realize Rick's never going to change. Instead, Morty is the half of the duo who's doing all the changing, evolving and growing.


It has also become clear to me that Rick and Morty is increasingly sympathizing with Morty and Summer (it started out as a bit contemptuous of them, especially Summer and her very teenage shallowness) and implying that if the siblings don't ever get away from Rick, Beth and Jerry, they will turn into their miserable and fucked-up elders. Of course, Morty and Summer haven't realized it yet (in "Rixty Minutes," he was trying to get her to stay with the family instead of running away when she couldn't stand their parents anymore, and now that I think about it, running away may not have been as bad an idea as Morty thought it would be). Distancing themselves from Rick and the rest just might be the best thing they could ever do for themselves.

But all anybody on the Internet wants to talk about when bringing up Rick and Morty's surprise season premiere is that fucking McDonald's Mulan Szechuan Sauce. Never mind that Morty's newfound assertiveness could be the most interesting arc during what Rick warns will be the darkest year ever or that Beth has finally wised up after 16 or 17 years and chosen to divorce Jerry. And never mind that Birdperson is coming back to life as a cyborg or that Rick's mind tricks while trying to keep Nathan Fillion's character from getting his hands on the secrets of his portal gun inside the episode's equivalent of the Matrix are so clever they make the nifty mind tricks inside Legion's astral plane look like trash. They just want McDonald's to bring back that McNuggets Szechuan sauce!


Sure, Rick's joke that his series arc is his quest for the discontinued Mulan Szechuan Sauce from 1998 is the funniest line in "The Rickshank Rickdemption." But goddamn, the meme that Rick and Morty's nerdiest fans have made viral after hearing Rick obsess over that dipping sauce twice in the episode is out of control.

The Mulan Sauce meme has gotten so crazy that Rick and Morty fans are petitioning McDonald's to put it back on the menu when Disney releases that live-action Mulan remake Whale Rider director Niki Caro is currently attached to. Meanwhile, a YouTube chef who doesn't even remember how the sauce tasted (I don't remember how it tasted either) has actually conducted sauce-mixing experiments and taken things a step further than Rick.

Curious about the McDonald's Szechuan Sauce that was mentioned on Rick and Morty? Someone recreated it. https://t.co/FBzyTrfpFf

— Matthew Caverhill 🍴 (@culturekills) April 4, 2017

Look, that sauce might be fucking amazing, but there's this little thing that's bothering me about the meme, and no one else has pointed this out. Whenever 1998's Mulan is brought up around most of us Asian Americans, especially woke Chinese American women, the first thing they think of regarding that animated Disney flick is how special and empowering it was for them to see during the film an Asian heroine who, for once, was neither exoticized and objectified nor dependent on a white man (maybe she, like the Once Upon a Time version of her, isn't even dependent on any man) for sex.

Meanwhile, whenever Mulan is brought up around wypipo, the first thing they think of is a sauce for McNuggets. That is peak caucasity right there. Shout-out to Desus & Mero.



I wonder if those Rick and Morty fans realize that Rick's dependence on an overly sugary sauce for a bunch of meat (as chef Andrew Rea notes in his instructional video about recreating the Szechuan sauce, McDonald's overdoes the sugar content on everything) is the most Trumpian thing he's ever done. Rapey McBigot likes to slather his (stupidly) well-done steaks in overly sugary, steak-flavor-masking ketchup, which is such an overgrown man-child thing to do.

I take it that both Rick and Chicken McBigot aren't exactly fans of the Saturday morning "Don't Drown Your Food" PSA from the '70s. That PSA is partly why whenever I see my parents dumping ketchup all over a delicious omelet they cooked, I say to them, "That's disgusting. The ketchup ruins the flavor."



Enough about strange memes and overbearing sauces. While promoting Rick and Morty, Harmon once said he admired the British for their willingness to do dark-humored stories for kids, particularly the "kids vs. corrupt adults" novels of Roald Dahl (is Harmon aware that Dahl was also a Fuckfaceian anti-Semite?), and that country's taste for those kinds of tales has clearly been an influence on Roiland and Harmon's show. "The Rickshank Rickdemption" amusingly reinforces Rick and Morty's Time Bandits-esque view of adults as the worst, especially when those adults are parents who are unworthy of being idealized or idolized by their kids. Fortunately, that view is far from an overly broad Nickelodeon sitcom take on adults at their worst. It's ironic that an animated show is much less cartoonish about its flawed and mostly unlikable adult characters than most of the live-action '80s and '90s kid sitcoms that used to be produced for Nick.

Right after the speech Rick gives to Morty at the end of "The Rickshank Rickdemption" to assert his role as the new patriarch of the Smith household (that conclusion is, by the way, a nice mirroring of the garage lab scene at the end of the very first episode, except a horrified Morty is trying to crawl away from Rick instead of writhing in pain on the floor because of the side effects of an intelligence-boosting drug Rick gave him), I feel like the increasingly disgruntled Morty should just steal one of Rick's inventions, use it to devise an escape from Rick and Beth and never come back. But we wouldn't have a show anymore if Morty did the logical thing and went off on his own.

"The Rickshank Rickdemption" leaves us with the implication that someday this season or maybe later, either Morty or Summer has got to find a way to break the cycle of misery that they're being dragged into in various ways by their elders. If they don't ever do something drastic about it, it's just going to repeat and repeat like, well, a certain Adult Swim April Fools loop.

I have a theory that the Mission: Impossible movies got better once Tom Cruise stopped being touchy about his short stature and allowed his character to be put in situations that emphasized how short he actually is. (It took this long for Cruise to become slightly less vain, which is so unlike Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. star Clark Gregg, who has awesomely never given a shit about sharing the screen with Marvel Cinematic Universe actresses who tower over him, whether that actress is Gwyneth Paltrow or Mallory Jansen. On the first day on the S.H.I.E.L.D. set, Gregg, a veteran of so many David Mamet projects, must have said something Mametian like "Fuck these fucking apple boxes you want me to stand on.")

That creative resurgence for the Impossible movie franchise (Ghost Protocol and Rogue Nation turned out to be the best Impossible movies since the first one) began right at the start of Ghost Protocol, when Cruise was surrounded by prison thugs who were a foot taller than him, and the creative resurgence continued when Cruise, for the first time ever in the series, sighed and rolled his eyes like a too-old-for-this-shit, Rockford Files-era James Garner while getting knocked on his ass by an even taller enemy agent in Rogue Nation's terrific opera house assassination attempt sequence. That's another thing about the weird late-period resurgence of the Impossible movie franchise (which will come out with a sixth installment next year): the addition of more humor to these movies has resulted in Ethan Hunt becoming a slightly more likable and relatable protagonist, except the humor never feels forced or overly campy.

"Light the Fuse," the opening title theme Michael Giacchino, Ghost Protocol's composer, arranged for the fourth Impossible movie, is a stunning symphonic reinterpretation of Lalo Schifrin's main title theme from the '60s Impossible. The extra spit and polish Giacchino brought to an old (and kind of overplayed) Schifrin tune are why I chose "Light the Fuse" as the very first track for "Incognito I," the first of three mixes of spy movie/TV show score cues I assembled for the AFOS Mixcloud page. The oldest score cue during the three mixes is John Barry's Ipcress File main title theme from 1965, while the newest score cues during the mixes are from the Epix espionage drama Berlin Station and xXx: Return of Xander Cage. Below these three mixes is a repost of my July 30, 2015 discussion of both Giacchino's score from Ghost Protocol and the Ghost Protocol movie itself, a series-revitalizing installment that's on a par with what Fast Five did really late in the game as a creative boost to the Fast and the Furious franchise.







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

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

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

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

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

The danger of mass information (internet) coupled w/ indifferent adults who don't TEACH the youth http://t.co/oYHqIHjc#WhoIsBillyCrystal

— Questlove Gomez (@questlove) February 28, 2012

Tweets that said "#WhoIsBillyCrystal?" remind me of morons who ranted about the #GhostProtocol main titles spoiling the film. (1 of 2)

— JJA (@JimmyJAquino) March 5, 2012

Before Tom Cruise, Mission: Impossible was a thing called a TV show, and it opened w/ spoilers every week, dipshits. #GhostProtocol (2 of 2)

— JJA (@JimmyJAquino) March 5, 2012

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

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


One of the most appealing elements of Ghost Protocol is the sight of Carter and the other agents making mistakes. It freshens up the franchise in the same way that De Palma brought his "all bets are off" stamp to Mission: Impossible by starting his movie out as a traditional Mission: Impossible episode where everything seems to go according to plan and then blindsiding the audience by killing off nearly all the agents the movie introduced only a few minutes before. In Ghost Protocol, Hunt and Pegg's Benji Dunn, left without the backing of the government due to ghost protocol going into effect and the IMF being disavowed and shut down, are forced to deal with gadgets that become unreliable without the resources to fix them, a storytelling thread Shane Black appeared to have borrowed somewhat when he opted for a similar back-to-basics, on-the-lam story for Tony Stark in Iron Man Three.

Before the Kremlin disaster that triggers ghost protocol, Hunt receives his mission instructions from a recording that conks out and fails to self-destruct, so Hunt has to give the old Russian pay phone that was playing the recording a Fonzie-style whack to get the message to self-destruct. Then after the Kremlin disaster, the mask-building gadget the IMF has relied on since Mission: Impossible III breaks down, which deprives the team of the state-of-the-art masks that have become such a staple of the Cruise movies. During the much-talked-about Burj Khalifa climbing sequence where, like in the rest of Ghost Protocol, Cruise's brand of crazy is Jackie Chan crazy (he insisted on doing his own climbing stunts again) as opposed to Scientology crazy, one of Hunt's suction gloves malfunctions and turns into Hunt's worst enemy.



These gags are organic to Ghost Protocol's story in a way that the forced running gags about the Enterprise-A's ineffectiveness as a new ship were not during Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.

The tech mishaps both raise the stakes of Ghost Protocol and act as a clever metaphor for the anxieties the Mission: Impossible producers must be having about maintaining the durability of a movie franchise that's now pushing 20, whereas all those Enterprise-A malfunction gags were there for no reason, other than because '70s Mission: Impossible alum Leonard Nimoy's Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home conquered the box office after adding more humor and both Paramount and William Shatner wanted another Star Trek IV without exactly understanding why the humor in Nimoy's directorial effort worked.


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

Bird's animation background also lends a lot of visual snap to Ghost Protocol's massively scaled set pieces, particularly the sequences in Dubai and the climactic Mumbai parking garage fight between Hunt and Cobalt.



The strong visual sense Bird brought to Ghost Protocol is timeless in ways that the speed-ramping and second-rate CGI throughout Die Another Day, the fourth entry in Pierce Brosnan's run as 007 just like how Ghost Protocol is fourth in Cruise's franchise, are not. Those were a couple of attempts to visually transition 007 into the early '00s, but they ended up instantly dating Die Another Day and giving it a whiff of desperation (Bird's visual sense is also preferable over the fondness for shaky-cam both Abrams, who stayed on as co-producer on both Ghost Protocol and the new Rogue Nation, and his Star Trek and Star Wars cinematographer Dan Mindel brought over to Mission: Impossible III after Abrams made the camera wobble throughout Alias and the first season of Lost).

It's a bit of a shame that Paramount denied Ghost Protocol fans the option on Blu-ray of rewatching Ghost Protocol's IMAX sequences in their original aspect ratio so that they can re-experience the awe of seeing Cruise and the other actors dwarfed by such tall surroundings, like during the Kremlin explosion and the Dubai sandstorm sequence.



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

(.GIF source: karlimeaghan)

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

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




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

Phil Yu of Angry Asian Man

This is the fifth of 12 or 13 all-new blog posts that are being posted on a monthly basis until this blog's final post in December 2017 (the Ghost Protocol repost does not count as all-new).

This will be the final time I acknowledge Asian Pacific American Heritage Month on this blog, a few months before I will stop writing posts over here at the end of this year. So this final APA Heritage Month-related post is about a pioneering blog in the Asian American blogosphere and what has to be one of the blog's most impressive pieces of writing ever. It was impressive because of the minor but still-significant impact the blog post had during the ongoing struggle, especially from the Asian American side of things, to fight for more representation, diversity and inclusiveness in Hollywood and to get Tinseltown to be less ignorant and racist.

I don't visit Angry Asian Man as frequently as I used to (my favorite thing about Angry Asian Man has always been that its posts have introduced me to a lot of good novels by Asian American authors, and they've included Leonard Chang's Allen Choice crime trilogy and Sarah Kuhn's Heroine Complex, a novel I'm currently trying to finish reading while working on my own novel), but once in a while, Phil Yu, Angry Asian Man's founder, posts something enlightening and non-click-baity (and by non-click-baity, I mean a post that's not some viral video of an Asian American kid doing something adorable). By the way, Angry Asian Man has changed a lot since its start in the early 2000s. It began as a blog where Phil, whom I've talked to over e-mail a couple of times and have hung out with once, eloquently criticized the media and celebrities of all races for their racist attitudes towards Asians or their clueless usages of Asian stereotypes. That means Angry Asian Man can also be a depressing and stress-inducing read, especially whenever Phil posts excerpts of news items about hate crimes where the victims are Asian, which is mainly why I don't read it regularly anymore.

My visits to Angry Asian Man are not as frequent as they were in the early-to-mid-2000s also because, even though Phil still finds time to run the site in between speaking engagements and host or guest stints on online talk shows, his personal voice has been less present on the site (it's more present on Twitter and during Sound and Fury, the Angry Asian Man tie-in podcast where he interviews famous Asian Americans). He's been relying on guest writers for tons of content, and he found a clever way to do that on a weekly basis by coming up with a feature called "Angry Readers of the Week," where he lets an Asian American reader, whether that reader is non-famous or famous, give his or her life story via a Proust-type questionnaire.


Guest writers have also grabbed Phil's mic outside of the site's "Angry Readers" feature. One such guest writer wrote quite a corker for Angry Asian Man in October 2016, and that's the "something enlightening and non-click-baity" I'm referring to.

Acclaimed Whale Rider director Niki Caro is currently directing Disney's live-action remake of its own animated 1998 hit, the lighthearted, David Lean-style battle epic Mulan (she promises that her take on Mulan will be "a big, girly martial arts epic. It will be extremely muscular and thrilling and entertaining and moving"). But back when Caro wasn't attached to the remake yet, a spec script Disney bought for the remake (this early draft was credited to Lauren Hynek and Elizabeth Martin) had awkwardly inserted a white savior character/love interest into a Chinese story that never contained any white savior characters.

Mulan didn't need someone to come save her. SHE is the one who saved her friends, her father, and the whole damn country. #MakeMulanRightpic.twitter.com/DJLUqNnzOn

— Kim Horcher (@kimscorcher) October 10, 2016

The leaked spec script angered the 1998 film's fans, especially Asian American fans who, in 1998, felt empowered by both Ming-Na Wen's vocal star turn and the film's story of a female warrior who saves China and defies patriarchy (Mulan is also one of the few animated Disney films to not have its heroine pursuing a romance with the male lead, who, in this case, was a young Chinese army captain voiced by B.D. Wong). Phil gave the floor to one such Asian American Mulan fan, an Angry Asian Man reader who identified herself (or himself?) only as "an Asian American person in the industry," and the anonymous writer, who posted under the nom de plume "ConcernedForMulan," nicely read the live-action project's producers the riot act.

"ConcernedForMulan" slammed the spec script, which rehashed the dumb and tired Hollywood cliché of an Asian woman falling in love with a white male character (even Pacific Rim, a rare film that's beloved by both feminists and fans of giant robots punching stuff, suffers from this cliché too, although Rinko Kikuchi and Charlie Hunnam's characters never kiss or knock boots). Sure, the animated Mulan threw in a wisecracking dragon with the voice of Eddie Murphy to attract kids, but a white merchant/fuckbuddy is even more out-of-place and improbable as a sidekick to Mulan than a dragon who talks like Axel Foley.


The script also took away a huge chunk of the story's heroism from Mulan so that this Poochie the Dog-esque white guy, "a 30-something European trader who initially cares only for the pleasure of women and money" and then experiences a redemption arc, would end up hogging the heroic spotlight. "Instead of seizing the opportunity to highlight a tenacious, complex female warrior, this remake diminishes her agency," wrote "ConcernedForMulan," who also briefly pointed out that the spec script's romantic pairing of a 30-something white guy with a 16-year-old Mulan reeks of pedophilia.

It's the same fucking story Hollywood puts out there after it hijacks a non-white storyline and operates under the misguided delusion that the storyline isn't palatable enough for white folks (or that it won't get enough butts in the seats and make enough money), so it awkwardly squeezes in white audience surrogates to make it more palatable, even though those characters don't make much sense within the storyline. This obsession with pandering to white folks is why we have a real-life murder of black and white Mississippi civil rights activists being investigated by a pair of heroic white FBI agents who never existed during the murder case or why we have whoever the fuck Michael Angarano was playing in that unwatchable Jackie Chan/Jet Li Monkey King flick. And that obsession with pandering almost tainted the forthcoming Mulan remake, if it hadn't been for the intervention of Phil and "ConcernedForMulan."

It's the worst kind of lazy screenwriting, and "ConcernedForMulan" challenged the remake's producers to try harder ("ConcernedForMulan" also challenged the Chinese film industry to try harder; a lot of present-day Hollywood blockbusters, including the new Mulan, have been co-financed or co-produced by Chinese production companies, but these companies have also been throwing Asian American actors under the bus by not helping to give them more lead roles). If you're a moviegoer of color who's had enough of all this whitewashing shit and white savior nonsense just like "ConcernedForMulan" was last year, you often find yourself wanting to grab a screenwriter (or a movie studio exec) by the collar and tell them, "Instead of fabricating white savior characters for the purpose of having them propel the story of a war on a faraway, not-so-white land or the story of a battle against kaiju, why not just simply try making the characters of color as relatable and compelling as the white ones you're so used to writing dialogue for? And if you're not sure if a certain bit of behavior by a character of color would be believable, just ask us. We won't bite. You got it, fuckface?"





Angry Asian Man's angriest posts often go viral on Asian American Twitter or within the Asian American community and its many sub-communities, but the guest piece by "ConcernedForMulan" is a rare Angry Asian Man post that went viral beyond the community and had an actual impact. Disney listened to the anonymous writer's concerns and got rid of the white savior/love interest character, to the relief of "ConcernedForMulan" and Mulan fans everywhere. The studio distanced itself from the Lauren Hynek/Elizabeth Martin draft of the script and announced that it will go forward with a completely different version penned by Jurassic World writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver (which doesn't really fill me with much hope because Jurassic World turned out to be the most inane Jurassic Park installment since The Lost World, but maybe this remake will be Jaffa and Silver's redemption).

It remains to be seen if the post by "ConcernedForMulan" will have an impact on the casting of the titular heroine as well. The identity of the star of the remake hasn't been revealed yet, and "ConcernedForMulan" said an actress who's Asian American just like animated Mulan star Ming-Na Wen would be preferable over a Chinese actress who wasn't raised in America. "Mulan resonated so strongly with American audiences with its all-Asian character lineup and Asian American voice actors," noted "ConcernedForMulan," who added that if the Chinese film industry gets its way, and one of its countrywomen is cast as Mulan, "Mulan's resonance as an Asian-American [sic] retelling is lost."

I have a theory that "ConcernedForMulan" was actually Fresh Off the Boat star Constance Wu, an angrier Asian person than Phil, especially when the subjects of whitewashing, The Great Wall and Ghost in the Shell are brought up to her. The post looks like it was written by Wu, who, in conversations or tweets about the fight for more Asian American representation in Hollywood, is basically her fierce-as-fuck Fresh Off the Boat character Jessica Huang, but without the slight accent and the mom jeans. I sometimes think "ConcernedForMulan," who said "I will pour myself some whiskey and drink to you all tonight" after Disney sent the white savior character away on a Mushu-style rocket, may not have been Wu and was probably Monstress creator/writer Marjorie Liu, but Liu is not really "in the industry," and the sophisticated and scholarly phrases Liu used in her excellent tweets about the spec script's problems are not a match with the less scholarly writing style of "ConcernedForMulan."

Not only are we placed at peripheries of popular entertainment, we must also confront the sexual politics of portrayals of Asian men/women.

— Marjorie Liu (@marjoriemliu) October 10, 2016

It's just as destructive for an Asian American girl to watch Mulan or any film/show & see that sexual political formula of love = whiteness.

— Marjorie Liu (@marjoriemliu) October 10, 2016

American Orientalism affirms the political, social, and cultural superiority of the West relative to Asia and Asian-Americans... (1/2)

— Marjorie Liu (@marjoriemliu) October 10, 2016

Which means in the theatre of Orientalism there is no room for strong, virile, Asian men b/c that would destroy the West's vision of itself.

— Marjorie Liu (@marjoriemliu) October 10, 2016

...while finding himself through this exotic sexual liaison maintains the inevitability of the dominant culture's right to rule... (2/3)

— Marjorie Liu (@marjoriemliu) October 10, 2016

...and you should all read "Romance and the Yellow Peril" and "The China Mystique" for more on these issues, which is how I schooled myself.

— Marjorie Liu (@marjoriemliu) October 10, 2016

Only Phil and his wife know who "ConcernedForMulan" was, and if I ever run into Phil again, I will give him my theories. But no matter who that anonymous Mulan fan was, I think that person's post is Angry Asian Man's finest moment as a blog with an activist bent, and the impact the post had on Disney's decisions regarding the live-action Mulan is a reminder that Angry Asian Man ain't nuthing ta fuck wit. It's also a reminder that sometimes positive things do happen in a time when it often feels like Hollywood just wants to keep oppressing us Asian Americans and erasing us from our own stories, the world feels so divided (and dystopic) and everything that marginalized groups fought to have and keep in the last few years is constantly being threatened.

Thanks to Angry Asian Man and "ConcernedForMulan," we won't have a Mulan remake that would have made you wish for Chris Hansen to show up in China at the end of the movie and say, "White merchant guy, why don't you have a seat?"

Mathilda May does her impression of me halfway through a Blu-ray of an '80s Cannon Films action movie in a scene from the big-budget 1985 Cannon flick Lifeforce.

This is the sixth of 12 or 13 all-new blog posts that are being posted on a monthly basis until this blog's final post in December 2017. It has taken me since January 2016 to finish writing this post about Cannon Films. I don't know why. Writer's block can really fuck you up sometimes. This is why I can't wait to leave this blog behind so that Accidental Star Trek Cosplay will become my only ongoing blog. After December, the only writer's block I'll have to worry about will be the block that keeps trying to prevent me from finishing my novel manuscript.

You've seen MacGruber, right? Now imagine if MacGruber wasn't a comedy. That's basically what an '80s Cannon Films action movie is like.

MacGruber is a Cannon movie played completely straight, except for a couple of big things: the profane update of MacGruber's old theme song (a tune from his days as an SNL character) and the intentionally offbeat dialogue that comes out of the mouths of Val Kilmer, Kristen Wiig and Will Forte, who weepingly delivers the least dignified and most sob-filled monologue in action movie history ("Just join my team. I'll suck your dick!"). Everyone else in MacGruber, whether the actor is Ryan Phillippe or the late Powers Boothe, is interestingly directed by Lonely Island troupe member Jorma Taccone to take the proceedings completely seriously, including even Maya Rudolph, aside from her silly sex noises while her dead character's ghost bangs MacGruber in a cemetary.



Phillippe and Boothe react to MacGruber's pantsless moment of desperation in the military office as if this were Michael Clayton or Spotlight instead of an Inspector Clouseau flick (or any other farce where everyone, including the straight man, gives a big and broad performance). Their underplayed seriousness actually increases the hilarity quotient of MacGruber's abnormal behavior.

Taccone's movie is a terrific parody of the schlocky Cannon house style, from the strange one-liners that sound like they were written by a 57-year-old Israeli movie producer ("Shut your butt!") to the ultraviolent heroes who, in real life, would be locked up in an insane asylum for their psychotic behavior (see MacGruber's "KFBR392" scene). If you took the dour and unintentionally funny 1986 Cannon movie Cobra, which I never watched until I rented it on YouTube a week ago, and you turned it into a comedy about how the behavior of matchstick-chewing supercop Marion Cobretti, the only person in the world who cuts pieces off his slices of pizza with a pair of scissors, actually looks to the world outside the narcissistic-at-the-time brain of Cobra star/screenwriter Sylvester Stallone, it would probably resemble MacGruber.


The first Deadpool flick makes a Cobra reference I wasn't aware of until Outlaw Vern pointed it out (it's the scene when Ryan Reynolds quips about the matchstick between Gina Carano's lips and wonders aloud if she's a Stallone fan). Taccone and Deadpool screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick all clearly watched Cannon movies like Cobra when they were kids, just like how I was subjected to a few Cannon cheapies as an '80s kid.

One of those movies was 1987's Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold, which was one of Cannon's two attempts to update the then-100-year-old Quatermain novels in the wake of Indiana Jones, and I still remember how dreadful the production values in Lost City of Gold were (it should have been called Lost City of Plastic). Currently streamable on Netflix, Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films, an Australian-made 2014 documentary directed by Aussie filmmaker Mark Hartley, is the highly entertaining story of why during the '80s and early '90s, a name like Cannon meant it had to be not-so-good. It's hard to dislike any documentary that devotes five minutes to the lambada movie war of 1990.

Cannon was, of course, embroiled in that vicious war over who could first rush into release a movie about a dirty dancing craze from Brazil that was barely sweeping the nation. Nobody won the war between Warner Bros./Cannon's Lambada and Columbia Pictures/21st Century Film Corporation's The Forbidden Dance. The only winners were quippy film critics who got a kick out of tearing apart terrible movies. For five silly minutes, Electric Boogaloo recounts how obsessed Menahem Golan (pronounced "muh-nawk-um go-lawn"), the aforementioned 50-something Israeli movie producer, was with trying to get The Forbidden Dance completed in time for its spring 1990 release date, while Yoram Globus, one of the producers of Lambada, and his collaborators toiled over their rival project. Golan and Globus were not just former business partners who ran Cannon (into the ground). They also happened to be cousins.

Early '70s Paramount Pictures head honcho Frank Yablans on the difference between Cannon and Miramax in Electric Boogaloo

And that is why we have Sly's crappy Cannon era.

Ghostbusters visual effects mastermind Richard Edlund, discussing the Golan/Globus approach to American film production

Former Cannon music supervisor Richard Kraft on Golan's unreasonable demands

But back when the cousins weren't beefing with each other over who had the superior lambada flick, they were famous in the '80s for their unusual skills as hypemen of their own product (they would lure potential financiers by hastily creating poster art for Cannon movies that didn't exist, as part of what the biz likes to call the "pre-sales" period of a film's development). They were also known for their rather questionable skills as producers of B-movies from various genres.

Under the Golan/Globus regime (the cousins weren't actually the founders of Cannon, which was primarily known for the satirical revenge thriller Joe, a surprise box-office hit in 1970, and the Happy Hooker franchise before Golan and Globus bought the company in 1979), Cannon movies were made fast and cheap, with no regard for quality control and often in the worst working conditions, especially for then-ingénues like Cassandra "Elvira" Peterson and Marina Sirtis, who are both interviewed in Electric Boogaloo. If you thought all those stories Sirtis has recounted about the conversations Star Trek: The Next Generation's male producers would have about her "cosmic cheerleader" character in the first few seasons were bad, wait 'til you hear about the appalling (and Trumpian) ways megalomaniacal director Michael Winner mistreated Sirtis on the sets of Cannon movies.

The Golan/Globus approach to film production was to either continually rip off much superior movies or acquire an aging movie franchise from a more respected production company and then, thanks to the cousins' ineptitude, proceed to strip the franchise of everything that made it beloved in the first place. Co-produced by Brett Ratner (his regular editor Mark Helfrich, who edited the original Predator and every Ratner movie since Money Talks, is one of many interviewees who deliver scathing impressions of Golan's over-enthusiastic and thickly accented voice during the doc), Electric Boogaloo paints a vivid portrait of Golan, the more talkative and outgoing cousin, as an Ed Wood-esque buffoon/tragic figure whose company, after a string of box-office hits starring "the Chucks" (Charles Bronson and Chuck Norris), is brought down by his recklessness with money.

The Fyre Festival of indie movie production companies, Cannon was also brought down by the inability of Golan--who claimed to love American-made escapist movies but was clueless about how to make them work whenever he gave himself the task of directing such a movie--to listen to employees who questioned his artistic decisions, as well as his inability to understand why many creative minds hate rushing through the creative process. "I don't think... that [Golan and Globus] really knew what it was like to love something so much that you were patient and took the time and went through the pain of seeing it through draft after draft after draft, admitting to yourself that it might not be right yet," says interviewee Stephen Tolkin, the screenwriter for the pre-Marvel Studios--and much-maligned--1990 version of Captain America, which was produced by Golan after he left Cannon.

Electric Boogaloo is a cautionary tale about the negative effects of both greed and the need to be first (in the theaters with a Sudden Impact ripoff or a lambada movie, that is), especially when those two things take precedence over the patience and cautiousness that usually go into crafting art or being a storyteller. You wish Sony, the Warner Bros.-run DC Extended Universe and Universal's newly christened (but was actually in existence since 2014) Dark Universe brand would have taken notes from Electric Boogaloo while spending extra millions and rushing like mad to compete with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. They all want a successful shared universe like the Marvel Studios one, but they keep forgetting about the patience and care that went into building the MCU.



Golan's inability to listen explains certain things like the most malnourished-looking Superman sequel ever, the jarring presence of a homoerotic whipping scene in a sword-and-sorcery flick for kids (director Gary Goddard's 1987 live-action He-Man movie Masters of the Universe) and the famously tone-deaf depictions of futuristic American counterculture ("Menahem's idea of the future is 2025 Tel Aviv," snarks one of the interviewees) during the 1980 musical The Apple, which Golan directed. The deceased Golan--who looks like Patton Oswalt if the comedian wore one of Albert Finney's toupees from his '80s movies (in fact, if someone ever makes a Golan biopic, Oswalt ought to play him)--also directed 1987's Over the Top, another Cannon flick in which Sylvester Stallone juggled duties as lead actor and screenwriter.

The big-budget Over the Top, a misfire that failed to do for arm wrestling what Major League and Field of Dreams would later do for Midwestern baseball in 1989, is a good example of what happens when Sly doesn't have a talented and thoughtful director like Ryan Coogler in his corner. Golan was neither talented nor thoughtful. (But Golan occasionally had an eye for talent. More on that later.)


Cannon action movies are not worth celebrating. They're overly jingoistic, poorly written pieces of shit full of the worst racial stereotypes ("[Michael] Winner took pleasure out of presenting this world where these grimy, mostly minority ghetto characters would be summarily executed by more refined, more middle-to-upper-class characters," recalls interviewee Alex Winter, who played a thug in one of Winner's Death Wish sequels for Cannon before he starred in the Bill & Ted movies), and these actioners from much less enlightened times (craptioners?) are basically paeans to boring white guys who will save us all.

Fortunately, Electric Boogaloo tries not to bullshit and pretend that the typical '80s Cannon movie was full of any artistic value. The delight the fast-paced doc takes in both compiling largely unflattering anecdotes about Cannon and chronicling the studio's ubiquity during the '80s is pretty infectious.

Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold star Cassandra Peterson recalls a moment on the set that could only happen on a Cannon movie set.

Breakin'editor Mark Helfrich scratches his head over The Last American Virgin's strange Christmas break montage, which needle-dropped U2's "I Will Follow."

Is Ninja III director Sam Firstenberg aware of the '70s "pinky violence" craze that swept Japan, where the audience was totally into the idea of a female ninja, or is he, like his fellow Israelis from Cannon so often were, on the clueless side?

Olivia d'Abo remembers a key Bo Derek scene from the 1984 Cannon flick Bolero, which co-starred d'Abo.

Cannon movies were among the things I was talked into watching on VHS before I started paying attention to what film critics would write, particularly in alt-weeklies, and before I started to determine my own tastes in films and TV and then think things to myself like "Yo, Johnnie To's a master craftsman" or "Damn, Kathryn Bigelow knows how to make a low-budget B-movie look good." When I was a kid, I just settled for whatever my dad brought home from the video store.

Asian immigrant dads don't read movie reviews. They only pay attention to whatever's cheap. Years before my dad retired and started to develop more discerning tastes in DVDs because he now has a little more time to rent them (he's currently obsessed with the box sets of FX's critically acclaimed The Americans), he used to be the kind of shopper who would see a $5.99 sticker on what he thinks is a three-DVD Bruce Lee box set and then buy it without realizing that those three DVDs star Bruce Li or Breeze Loo, not Bruce Lee. That inability to separate crap from quality was also why quite a few Cannon movies wound up in our family's VCR in the '80s.

@soulquarian14 I rooted for Bolo Yeung in Bloodsport like how Chris Rock rooted for Apollo to win in the first Rocky. http://t.co/8cVHh2uEmj

— JJA (@JimmyJAquino) June 1, 2013

One of those Cannon movies was 1988's Bloodsport, which my siblings and I first saw in the multiplex instead of on VHS. Electric Boogaloo's lone flaw is that it doesn't contain a segment on Jean-Claude Van Damme's first hit as an action movie lead, which took place after Van Damme's crazy-looking attempt at being a camera hog during the first Breakin' movie (one of the few '80s Cannon flicks that have aged well), an uncredited appearance in Missing in Action and a villainous role in the 1986 New World Pictures flick No Retreat, No Surrender.

Electric Boogaloo so frequently pokes fun at Golan's lack of good taste that you wish it would also poke fun at its own failure to clear any clips from Bloodsport, the reason for Electric Boogaloo's jarring lack of a segment about the movie that turned "Kumite! Kumite!" into a classic martial arts flick chant. It's like if someone made a doc about the history of Universal from 1912 to the present, and the doc never showed any clips from Jaws.

The shadowy organization that currently owns the rights to Bloodsport--and must have charged Mark Hartley and the Electric Boogaloo staff an arm and a sweeping leg for Bloodsport clips--is clearly the same stingy-ass cabal that prevented the producers of Lady Bloodfight, a recent all-female take on Bloodsport, from calling their B-movie Lady Bloodsport. But Electric Boogaloo was able to afford clips from Asian Canadian director Albert Pyun's not-as-well-remembered Cyborg, a post-apocalyptic Van Damme flick that Cannon originally intended to be a Masters of the Universe sequel, so it focuses on Cyborg instead for the Van Damme portion of the story of Cannon's rise and fall.

Jean-Claude Van Damme in Breakin'

Golan discovered Van Damme back when the Belgian competitive kickboxer waited tables in L.A., and he was impressed with his ability to lift his leg behind his head. His belief that he could make a movie star out of Van Damme was a rare thing Golan--the same guy who once declared that Brooke Shields will win an Oscar for her performance in the Cannon flick Sahara--was able to get right.

But the movie that succeeded in getting audiences beyond the martial arts nerd crowd to notice Van Damme's fighting skills (it also succeeded in hypnotizing straight women and gay men with Van Damme's uncovered backside) still wasn't immune to the Golanian incompetence that infected the journeyman directors who worked for Golan and Globus. There's so much shitty ADR during Bloodsport. At one point, the child actor who's playing a younger version of the JCVD character is seen wearing a San Francisco Giants cap and a New York Giants shirt at the same time, which only happens in the movies, especially shitty, gaffe-filled Cannon movies. The hilarious Bloodsport episode of How Did This Get Made? points out a few moments of classic Cannon movie racism, whether it's any of the footage of an African fighter who jumps around like a monkey or a scene where JCVD's blond journalist love interest says to a pair of Asian businessmen, "You know, I know you're here for the Kumite. There's no other reason you could be here."

Worst of all, Bloodsport is another one of those really annoying "white savior who turns out to be better than everyone else in a field dominated by people of color" movies. The 1988 flick is also emblematic of the eternal problem of sports movies that are compelling during the moments of competition and not-so-compelling outside of competition (exhibit A: 1966's Grand Prix).

But when I was in grade school, I enjoyed the fuck out of Bloodsport, even though I knew the quality of the acting during any of the film's scenes outside the ring was straight out of an episode of Kids Incorporated. I had a Pinoy classmate at the time who was similarly fascinated with this little Cannon movie we saw separately--his very Pinoy last name was Jenkins--and Jenkins' greatest skill was a dead-on impression of Bolo Yeung silently shaking his fists and mouthing "Yaaaaaassss!" at the spectators.


I like Bloodsport way much less now because President Agent Orange considers it one of his favorite movies. Bloodsport is his idea of cinematic excellence. This Cannon white savior movie and the racist demagogue deserve each other.

President Skroob always comes off as a poor person's idea of what he thinks the rich people whom he idolizes are like, which is a lot like how the typical '80s Cannon movie was a lower-class Israeli boor's vision of what he assumed America must have been like. The disgust I felt when I recently learned about 70-Year-Old King Joffrey's admiration of Bloodsport is reminiscent of when I found out that Ferris Bueller's Day Off is Dan Quayle's favorite movie, and it ruined my prior enjoyment of Bueller.

I think about this, from Mark Singer's 1997 profile, all the time https://t.co/kIAocpGoX6pic.twitter.com/vTDzbzW3q7

— Alison Willmore (@alisonwillmore) December 7, 2016

I thought it was creepy Tr*mp only watches fight scenes in Bloodsport but now I can't stop watching Richard Spencer get clocked.

— Molly Lambert (@mollylambert) January 21, 2017

The brutal fight scenes are the only part of Bloodsport that still holds up. If Bloodsport had confined its setting to the Kumite (while still giving the audience a few moments to breathe between fights, unlike how Fuckface Von Clownstick stupidly prefers the movie to be nothing but ass-whuppings from start to finish, so he fast-forwards through it) and gotten rid of certain moments of filler, like the footage of Forest Whitaker chasing around Van Damme or the montages that ripped off the montages from Rocky IV (a Stallone movie that's really just one long 90-minute montage occasionally interrupted by exposition and Paulie's robot), Bloodsport might have been an '80s action masterpiece.

Instead, Bloodsport is this weird cross between an R-rated Rocky IV and a Mentos ad, and Cannon movies always look exactly like Mentos ads.



Except for a bunch of epic facial expressions during Bloodsport's martial arts sequences, Van Damme comes off as stilted and somnambulant in his first box-office hit ("He was so fuckable! He was so sexy, and every time his eyes just were dead, I was like 'Yes! I love this,'" said comedian Nicole Byer during How Did This Get Made?'s Bloodsport episode). This was decades before Mabrouk El Mechri and Peter Hyams stumbled upon the secret to snapping Van Damme out of somnambulism while directing him in, respectively, 2008's offbeat JCVD, Van Damme's most critically acclaimed movie ever (but JCVD isn't his best movie; Universal Soldier: Regeneration is his best movie), and 2014's Enemies Closer: you just have to give Van Damme a bunch of French dialogue to say. Then that's when Van Damme gives a killer and truly alive performance.

While Electric Boogaloo is forced to basically omit Bloodsport from its narrative (the doc awkwardly flashes just a couple of stills from the 1988 hit before moving on to Cyborg), it doesn't ignore Cannon's brief flirtation with the art house crowd. The studio's unexpected art house phase resulted in idiosyncratic and critically acclaimed works by non-schlocky filmmakers like John Cassavetes and Barbet Schroeder and what has to be the best thing to come out of Cannon in the '80s, director Andrei Konchalovsky's Runaway Train, a riveting thriller that, in 1986, was nominated for three Oscars, including Best Actor (Jon Voight) and Best Supporting Actor (Eric Roberts).

Electric Boogaloo may not be able to convince you to stream any one of the trashy Cannon exploitation flicks that revived Charles Bronson's flagging career or any of the studio's Chuck Norris vehicles, but the doc will definitely get you to seek out (or revisit) Runaway Train, thanks to the aid of enticing clips of Runaway Train's visually striking set pieces and archive footage of a positive review from the late Roger Ebert. The 1985 Konchalovsky film features a love-it-or-hate-it Voight performance that won the actor a Golden Globe (an article by The Parallax Review amusingly describes Voight's Runaway Train performance as "Michael Moriarty doing Hamlet in a dentist's chair" and adds that "It's not a good performance, but it's never boring").

Voight's turn in Runaway Train is the kind of performance where he's brilliant when he's not shouting, like when his character listens to the elaborate hopes and dreams of a young convict who idolizes him, and Voight's pitch-perfect grin is a silent combination of "Motherfucker, you don't know shit" and "I was you once" (and then when it's time for Voight to chew the scenery and get shouty, I don't know, man... Voight's weird voice during those shouting matches brings to mind Ren Hoëk when he delivered the "So we gotta beat it before he lets loose the marmosets on us!" monologue). But whether or not the mush-mouthed acting of Angelina Jolie's Trumputo-worshiping dad grates on the nerves, Runaway Train is a forgotten masterpiece that deserves more shine.

Over at Junta Juleil's Culture Shock, Sean Gill astutely describes Runaway Train as "a brutal meld of Taking of Pelham One Two Three and Bridge on the River Kwai that feels like a shiv to the palm."

Konchalovsky and credited screenwriters Djordje Milicevic, Paul Zindel (the same author behind the junior-high lit class staple The Pigman) and Eddie Bunker (an ex-con-turned-actor who was the inspiration for the underworld fixer character Voight portrayed in Heat) took an unproduced Akira Kurosawa screenplay about a pair of escaped convicts trapped on an out-of-control freight train and somehow managed to keep the screenplay from being tainted by Golan and his cousin's worst excesses as B-movie producers. In the role of the sadistic warden who hunts down the fugitives, John P. Ryan even looks exactly like Toshiro Mifune at his most crazy-eyed at certain points in Runaway Train.

The Konchalovsky film also happens to contain the first screen appearance of badass Machete star Danny Trejo, who was a friend of Bunker's since their days in San Quentin together. Trejo, who was on the Runaway Train set because he was the drug counselor to one of the set's PAs, ended up becoming the boxing coach to Roberts during rehearsals for the film's prison boxing sequence. He earned $320 a day for training Roberts, and that's how you know it was a Cannon movie: because, meanwhile, Steve Railsback's rookie stunt double character received $600 for each of his stunts on the set of the WWI movie in The Stunt Man. The future Desperado scene-stealer impressed Konchalovsky so much that he cast him as the Roberts character's opponent in the ring.

Danny Trejo's screen debut in Runaway Train

Runaway Train is loaded with above-average action (or suspense) sequences both in and out of prison, but unlike Bloodsport or, shit, any other Cannon movie, the film's dialogue rarely sounds like it was rewritten by a 55-year-old sabra. Voight's hardened convict character, the protagonist of Runaway Train, is a deeply broken and badly scarred far cry from Bloodsport/Kickboxer-era JCVD and the Chucks (someday, that would be a nice band name: JCVD and the Chucks). The characters those three action heroes played were one-dimensional protagonists who were glamorized and glorified by Cannon and its stable of journeyman directors like J. Lee Thompson. The Voight character, whose nihilistic actions aboard the train are often opposed and questioned by a sensible railroad worker played by Rebecca De Mornay, doesn't get such glamorous treatment from Konchalovsky, Milicevic, Zindel and Bunker in Runaway Train.

Konchalovsky's film is basically a Kurosawa man-against-the-elements drama that was made by the wrong studio. Runaway Train is the type of existentialist drama you'd expect to open with the Toho logo rather than the Cannon one. Voight delivers to Roberts an intense and self-loathing speech about the realities of life outside the prison yard, and it's the point of the movie when you're like, "This was a Cannon movie?"



Electric Boogaloo, unfortunately, spoils the haunting ending of Runaway Train, but it scores points for trying to spread the word about Konchalovsky's atypical Cannon flick. Not every highlight of the doc is related to either Cannon's sordid reputation, which continues to cause people to underestimate the quality of Runaway Train, or Golan's lack of good taste. My favorite non-Golan-related moment in the doc is simply Richard Chamberlain's dramatic sigh while he tries to be simultaneously tactful and honest about what it was like to co-star with Sharon Stone in King Solomon's Mines and Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold.

Stone was hated by everybody on the Zimbabwe sets of the two Quatermain movies, including the South African crew members. When they heard Stone was about to take a milk bath in the bathtub inside her trailer, the South Africans banded together to take a piss in the tub before she went back to her trailer.


The story of pre-1957 MGM is a story of opulence and good filmmaking craft under the studio system (1957 was, by the way, the year when MGM shut down its prestigious animation department after a 20-year run, as well as the year that then-MGM president Joseph Vogel referred to as "the worst collection of pictures in [MGM's] history"). The story of the Shaw Brothers studio is a story of good filmmaking craft on a low budget.

Chamberlain's exasperated sigh makes me realize the story of Cannon is essentially a story of non-stop exasperated sighs from ordinary professionals who just wanted to get their work done while trying to figure out how to not let their workday be ruined by either a prima donna like Stone, a racist and sexist megalomaniac like Michael Winner, a bunch of budget issues or the man who was the cause of a lot of those budget issues, a spirited but totally inept ideas man who's too stubborn to tell himself, "Yeah, maybe that idea of mine's not such a good idea after all." To the former Cannon employees who were interviewed in Electric Boogaloo (during the doc's closing credits, many of them note that Cannon's mistakes inspired them to not repeat those blunders and to make far better movies), that sort of working environment was the worst. But for the rest of us, it makes for a fascinating and constantly funny doc that's a far more enjoyable movie than 98 percent of the movies its subject prolifically shat out.

This was something that had to have been uttered at some point inside a Cannon Films office or on a Cannon movie set.

It took me a year and a half to write the above blog post. Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films, which doesn't take a year and a half to watch, is still streamable on Netflix.

This is the seventh of 12 or 13 all-new blog posts that are being posted on a monthly basis until this blog's final post in December 2017.

I love the work of Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho. Based on a real-life serial-killer case that remains unsolved, 2003's Memories of Murder, the second feature film from "Director Bong," intriguingly takes the standard "grisly serial-killer case psychologically damages the detectives on the case" thriller and expands its scope so that it morphs into a dark comedy about the ineptitude of institutions like the police, and it's so critical of institutions you'd expect David Simon to have had a hand in writing it. The Host, Bong's 2006 follow-up to Memories of Murder, became South Korea's biggest box-office hit ever by effectively mashing up the monster movie genre with dysfunctional family comedy and trenchant satire about both Korean and American institutions. Mother, Bong's 2009 whodunit about a mentally challenged prime suspect in a small-town murder case, is a worthy addition to the pantheon of twisted movies to watch on Mother's Day like Psycho and Serial Mom. Snowpiercer, a rare dystopian sci-fi flick that takes place in perpetual snowfall rather than being drenched in acid rain or set against orange desert landscapes, is both an inventive take on class warfare and 2014's most mesmerizing blockbuster starring a white guy named Chris.

These are all darkly comic films with a recurring disdain for either broken institutions or corporate malfeasance. So I was prepared to dislike the made-for-Netflix Okja, a globetrotting fantasy film that finds Bong venturing into Free Willy territory for a story about a Korean farm kid's bond with a genetically modified female "superpig"--an empathetic creature that behaves less like a pig and more like a dog/hippo hybrid--she wants to save from the slaughterhouse. Has Bong the sharp satirist gone all soft and cuddly on us?

Nah, not really. For his first family-friendly film since The Host (its R rating in America is, by the way, overblown--the original Gremlins is grislier than The Host--and I think its bittersweet ending had a lot to do with it being slapped with an R), Bong takes on the GMO industry and two-faced corporate culture, and his satirical vision of a feud between animal rights activists and Mirando, a Monsanto-style corporation with a deceptively sunny disposition, is slightly darker than I expected from a film that spends much of the first half-hour in idyllic, nearly dialogue-less rural splendor that's visually inspired by My Neighbor Totoro.

My Neighbor Totoro

Oh yeah, I almost forgot about the amount of F-bombs freely tossed around by Steven Yeun and Daniel Henshall--who play members of a Paul Dano-led "Animal Liberation Front"--as well as by Jake Gyllenhaal and Snowpiercer star (and Okja co-producer) Tilda Swinton, who's given this time by Bong a dual role as a pair of twin sisters who run Mirando (and have differing approaches to handling the corporation's crusade against world hunger). Bong has an awesome interpretation of "family-friendly."

Could you imagine what would have happened if Bong--who decided to go into business with Netflix after wanting to avoid another go-round of the amount of shit he had to put up with while Harvey Weinstein tried to butcher Snowpiercer because Weinstein wanted it to be more "accessible" (the kerfluffle led to a backlash against Weinstein from film geeks, which resulted in spectacular business for Bong's final cut of Snowpiercer on VOD in America)--stupidly kept doing business with Harvey and Bob Weinstein and Okja was a Weinstein Company release instead? I'm cringing right now over the thought of a version of Okja that's recut to conform to whatever The Weinstein Company thinks American audiences prefer about a fantasy film with a 13-year-old female lead, so that it's filled with badly redubbed moments where F-bombs used to be.


Of course, if Okja were a Weinstein Company release, the sinister Swinton characters of Lucy and Nancy Mirando, who want to send the titular superpig to the slaughterhouse, would probably not exist. The twins are clearly Bong's two-hour dig at the Weinstein brothers, who are notorious for sending to the slaughterhouse foreign films they bought for the American market (notice how Mirando has the same first four letters as Miramax, the indie studio the Weinsteins founded and later abandoned), and the Weinsteins almost succeeded in slicing up Snowpiercer as if it were those janky-looking protein blocks Chris Evans, Octavia Spencer and Song Kang-ho had to eat in the future.

Okja the superpig--a convincingly imposing CG creation by the effects wizards at Method Studios, whose most sublime effects moment has Okja slipping on shopping mall floors while she's being chased through the streets of Seoul, a nice visual touch that's reminiscent of the sea creature's clumsy gait in The Host--isn't just a giant-sized stand-in for all the animals the activist crowd has attempted to rescue from cruel treatment or experimentation. She's also a metaphor for Snowpiercer or any other work of art that has gotten entangled in the conflict between art and commerce or has been in danger of being butchered or compromised by corporate masters.


The creative freedom Bong was permitted from Netflix resulted in a kid-and-a-pet flick that's like no other. Donnie Kwak, the Ringer writer and former producer of Complex's Desus vs. Mero, the precursor to Desus and Mero's current (and hilarious) late-night show on Viceland, has pointed out how Okja, Bong's third film with both Korean and English dialogue, is remarkable for featuring "what might be the most realistic Korean-American character in film history": Yeun's activist character. The character is known primarily as "K" and does the translating for Mija (Ahn Seo-hyun), Okja's owner, when she crosses paths with K's ALF organization after her attempt to rescue her pet in Seoul goes viral and attracts the attention of ALF. "K is a resoundingly faithful depiction of a real Korean-American person," wrote Kwak, whose insightful Ringer piece praises how Yeun, whom Bong had in mind for the role while he wrote the screenplay, subtly captures "the weight of the hyphen separating his Korean-American identity" and the sense of displacement K and many other Korean Americans (the hyphen is extraneous, in my opinion) feel as people veering back and forth between American and Korean cultures. In a year that has so far subjected Asian Americans to the whitewashing of Japan's Ghost in the Shell franchise and unwatchable white savior drivel like the Netflix misfire Iron Fist, that's something. And there are enjoyable little jokes other American studios would have requested Bong to not do, like when he ordered the English subtitle for one of K's Korean lines to be translated as "Mija! Try learning English. It opens new doors," even though K is actually saying, "Mija! Also, my name is Koo Soon-bum," a gag only Korean-speaking viewers will notice.

"'Koo Soon-bum' is sort of like a white man saying his name is 'Buford Attaway,'" wrote Vulture staff writer E. Alex Jung, who added that when he interviewed Yeun, the former Walking Dead cast member told him that "When [K] says 'Koo Soon-bum,' it's funny to you if you're Korean, because that's a dumb name. There's no way to translate that. That's like, the comedy drop-off, the chasm between countries."


But the best moments of humor in Okja are ones that are able to cross language barriers, particularly the little ways Mirando's Korean employees in the corporation's Seoul offices express disdain for these interloping corporate overlords from America, whether it's the way one of the high heels of a bored Mirando receptionist (Bongryun Lee) lazily dangles from her foot while she's waiting for calls or the clearly stoned line delivery of Kim (Woo Shik Choi), a Mirando truck driver whose dissatisfaction with his job is beautifully spelled out in his funny delayed reactions to his bosses rather than in unnecessary exposition. "He's this young kid who's probably really highly educated and therefore he speaks English, and yet he can only get a job doing part-time truck driving for a company," said Okja co-producer Dooho Choi (no relation to Choi) about Kim's off-screen backstory in Kwak's Ringer piece.

The performances by Choi, Yeun, Ahn and Yoon Je-moon as a Korean Mirando employee who wants to keep Okja away from Mija are understated in comparison to the broadly drawn villains played by Swinton and Gyllenhaal, who, outside of Bubble Boy (remember that?), Nightcrawler and that SNL episode where he sang "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going" in drag, has never played a cartoonish caricature like "Dr. Johnny," a washed-up animal show host, before. Dr. Johnny, the public face of Mirando, cares little about the welfare of animals and is the film's answer to the question "What if the deceased Steve Irwin were American and coked-up all the time?" But Steve Irwin is the furthest thing from your mind during Gyllenhaal's scenery-chewing performance (whereas Swinton, despite her continuing fondness for wigs and non-British accents, is actually restrained by comparison, as are Paul Dano, Lily Collins as an American member of ALF and Giancarlo Esposito as Lucy's right-hand man). It's a head-scratcher of an acting turn that constantly makes you think, "Why is Gyllenhaal speaking like Marvin Tikvah from MADtv?"



Kwak wrote that he thinks Okja's lone weakness is the way that it feels like two different movies are competing for attention at the same time--an understated movie that's more in line with Bong's movies prior to Snowpiercer versus a more broadly played and completely over-the-top one during Okja's scenes in New York--but that odd, Ugly Betty-ish dichotomy has actually always been part of Bong's approach to storytelling. Bong loves tonal shifts that confuse most of the audience--the most memorable example, as well as the ultimate test to see if someone is ready for Bong's offbeat films or not, is the gym scene in The Host, where a painful moment of grief morphs into slapstick, and it somehow works--and I get a little tired of critics who dismiss Bong's tonal shifts as sloppy filmmaking. And, again, in a year of Iron Fist and the Pat Boone-ization of Ghost in the Shell, there's something that's necessary and comforting about Okja's over-the-top scenes in New York.

The corporate overlord scenes have a white leading man like Gyllenhaal playing, in a movie with a predominantly Asian cast, the same kind of unflattering and over-the-top caricature that was written for either Gedde Watanabe in any '80s and '90s American movie or all those Japanese actors in Lost in Translation, the xenophobic piece of shit that film critic Inkoo Kang (after having to recently revisit it due to the accolades Lost in Translation director Sofia Coppola received at Cannes this year) nicely tore apart because "Not a single Japanese person is relatable as a fellow human being" and it's marred by "the dismissal of contemporary Japanese culture as imitative and clueless." Bong has always been as tough on America as he is on broken institutions in Korea--a Ferdy on Films piece on The Host points out how Bong "takes every opportunity to make Americans look like idiots and bullies"--and the flamboyant-looking villainy of the Mirando sisters and Dr. Johnny is the latest example of that. For an Asian American viewer like me, the sight of Swinton and Gyllenhaal playing villainous American caricatures in an Asian film is amusing on many levels: it's like watching a form of movie jail where Swinton, who drew anger from Asian Americans for trying to defend her role as a whitewashed Ancient One in Doctor Strange, and Gyllenhaal, who starred as the title character in the whitewashed movie version of Prince of Persia, are being punished for their offenses. It's highly unlikely that Bong said to most of Okja's American and British cast members something along the lines of "You know all those one-note, nuance-free acting roles they always stick Asians in outside our continent? Now it's your turn to play those parts in our movies," but I wish he did.


But you know what's the funniest thing about all that scenery-chewing Gyllenhaal does and all the wigs, braces and thick sunglasses Swinton buries herself under during Okja? They're not the things everybody will remember most about Okja. What everybody will be talking about instead (other than the visual effects, of course) is now-13-year-old Ahn Seo-hyun's understated performance as Mija.

When Mija leaves her grandfather's farm to protect Okja from the clutches of Mirando, Ahn and her stunt double run and jump through the streets of Seoul and New York during unexpected chase sequences that are as dazzling (and shot with Bong's usual preference for not-so-Michael-Bay-ish clarity) as the set pieces in The Host and Snowpiercer. Any time somebody cobbles together the film's footage of Mija hopping around and clinging to the sides of trucks to stay by Okja's side--which is what Netflix's trailer for Okja does--it hilariously results in this socially conscious (and initially sweet-natured and placid) fantasy film looking like The Bourne Supremacy.


As film reviewer Kristy Puchko notes over at Pajiba, Ahn's disinterest in being charming or easily accessible "makes Mija a standout female character in American cinema," and Ahn wins over the audience "because she gives no fucks, rejecting adult bullshit and slapping down promotional signs with all the fury you'd expect from a child robbed of her pet/best friend." Her performance helps shut down a concern like "Has Bong the sharp satirist gone all soft and cuddly on us?"Okja is, fortunately, proof that Bong's not here to be either soft, cuddly or--and this is perhaps worse--generic in ways the Weinsteins would have wanted.

Okja and a surprising amount of Bong films--includingBarking Dogs Never Bite, Bong's 2000 debut film and an interesting rough draft for the much more confident satirical material that was to follow, although Memories of Murder and Snowpiercer are, unfortunately, not presently part of the library--are currently streamable on Netflix.

Baby Driver

This is the eighth of 12 or 13 all-new blog posts that are being posted on a monthly basis until this blog's final post in December 2017.

Named after a Simon & Garfunkel tune that's like a turtlenecked-and-khaki-pantsed precursor to Prince's "Little Red Corvette" ("I hit the road and I'm gone"), Baby Driver is Edgar Wright's wonderful antidote to superhero movie fatigue (the recent thrills of Wonder Woman aside), as well as a subtle rebuke to the often-afraid-of-idiosyncrasy superhero movie studio system that chewed the idiosyncratic Wright up and spat him out (back in 2014). Wright's caper flick is the inventively told, occasionally Kid Koala-scored story of a 20-something getaway driver known simply as Baby, whose method of drowning out the tinnitus he's suffered from since childhood is to continually play the likes of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and Bob & Earl in his omnipresent iPod earbuds, even during high-speed car chases. While mowing through truffle parmesan butter popcorn at a Baby Driver screening at the Alamo Drafthouse, I realized Wright basically made a movie about me.

Sure, I'm not a getaway driver and I can't parkour my way out of a tight spot like Baby astoundingly can at one point during Baby Driver, but at all hours in my apartment building, I always wear headphones full of music from my phone or my Mac, not to drown out tinnitus, but to drown out annoying footstep noises from my apartment's paper-thin ceiling. Atop the ceiling, it always sounds like two elephants fucking.

Baby Driver

Part of the challenge of writing these blog posts in the past nine years--and now, in addition to the posts, a prose novel manuscript--has been trying to concentrate while all these infuriating noises from my ceiling ensue. If it weren't for my headphones drowning those noises out, I don't think I could ever get any shit done in my apartment, and I don't think I could ever sleep at night either (for that, I switch off the music and put on in my headphones a copy of one of those eight-hour YouTube audio clips of starship white noise from Star Trek: The Next Generation, and then I'm out cold like Riker after having to listen to Data's poetry slam).

The music I hear while being perpetually clad in headphones largely consists of mixes like these:











Baby uses his favorite tunes to also time both his passengers' heists (kind of like what Bruce Willis and Danny Aiello did during their heists in Hudson Hawk) and his own escapes, whereas I can't be constantly clicking to one song after another like Baby doesn't mind doing. It simply interrupts my creative flow. Lengthy mixes like the above live sets by the likes of Qbert and Cosmo Baker spare me the trouble of having to constantly stop typing just to open another song on QuickTime (my favorite audio player on my Mac) after one song's over.

Then whenever such a 45-to-90 minute mix concludes, I sometimes open the FM radio app on my phone to check if any terrestrial radio stations are playing anything worthwhile so that I can continue shielding my ears from the upstairs elephant booty call or some five-year-old kid's upstairs reenactment of "Near and Far!" from Sesame Street. In all these hours I've spent with headphones on while writing, I've discovered through the FM radio app that a lot of present-day Bay Area terrestrial radio is pretty fucking dire.

Unless I'm mistaken, no Bay Area stations do "No Repeat Thursdays" anymore. A lot of repetition goes on in their playlists. It's as if the music of a current favorite R&B producer of mine, the prolific Dev Hynes, doesn't exist. The late Prince left behind a massive catalog of music, but in the Bay Area, you wouldn't know how massive it is because only three Prince tunes get airplay on the airwaves in the Bay these days: "I Would Die 4 U" and the shortened versions of "When Doves Cry" and "Purple Rain." That's it. The classic rock station KUFX (which confusingly brands itself as KFOX) is so white that the only Prince joint it plays is "Stand Back" by Stevie Nicks (Prince was an uncredited keyboardist on "Stand Back").

The only times when Bay Area terrestrial radio truly comes alive are the mix shows, where Asian American mixers get to be the star of the show by killing it on the turntables, and the monotony and repetitiveness of the normal playlists get temporarily shaken up by either mash-ups, remixes or the original (and more soulfully sung) Spanish versions of certain current pop songs. Also during these mix shows, you get to hear something from Prince that has nothing to do with either martyrdom, doves or rain.

In fact, I've got it all down to a science: I switch on Bay Area terrestrial radio only at noon, when DJ Rick Lee "The Dragon" takes over the ones and twos on KMEL; 5pm, when DJ Mind Motion does the same during Chuy Gomez's shift on Hot 105.7; 7:50pm, when Wild 94.9's DJ Patrix starts mixing and bantering with the enjoyably self-deprecating Gabby Diaz, perhaps my current favorite Bay Area nighttime radio host because of how often (during Patrix's mixes) she makes fun of her own accidental brain farts, her pasty legs and her mustache (her brief mentions of her off-the-air attempts to have her mustache removed always crack me up because my mom has a mustache too, but unlike Gabby, my mom refuses to have her upper lip waxed); and Saturday nights at midnight, when Cutso, TRUTHLiVE and various special guest mixers take the reins on Wild 94.9 for Rebel Pop Radio.

DJ Patrix and Gabby Diaz

Oh, and the way-too-commercial-heavy Bolly 92.3 might occasionally play something dope like "Nashe Si Chadh Gayi," which comes from the Paris-based 2016 Indian movie Befikre and interestingly alternates between Hindi and French lyrics. And the commercial-free KDFC might occasionally play a film score cue or a full orchestra's re-recording of a beloved movie theme. And Chuy Gomez or Q102.1 might play during their respective Sunday oldies shows an underplayed gem that makes you wish the South Bay had a terrestrial station that's more along the lines of KDAY. Oh, and I can't forget how much I like to listen to Dubs games in my headphones. But otherwise, Bay Area terrestrial radio is dire.

And had I continued hosting my old college radio program A Fistful of Soundtracks on Bay Area terrestrial radio (more specifically, Central Coast terrestrial radio) instead of taking it to Internet radio (which I did a year before leaving college radio, in fact) and expanding it into a 24-hour Live365 station of the same name that lasted 13 years (until Live365 folded), I don't think AFOS would have lasted as long. (By the way, from here on out, every time AFOS is in italics, I'm referring to the hour-long program that originated on college radio in 1997 as a two-hour one, became exclusive to the Internet in 2003 and ended in 2008. Every time AFOS is not in italics, I'm referring to the 24-hour station of the same name, which stopped streaming in 2016. I was so fucking stupid in 2003. I should have renamed the hour-long program that year so that all this confusion wouldn't occur.)

If I stayed in college radio past 2002, I likely would have gotten tired of hosting and producing AFOS after about a few months. On my own as a Live365 broadcaster, that same type of creative burnout didn't develop until about five years after I relaunched the college radio program on the Web. I also doubt I would have had the many kinds of loyal listeners I befriended during the AFOS channel's 13 years and have continued to occasionally encounter for the first time online, even long after the channel's demise.

When AFOS was on terrestrial radio, doing that program on my campus radio station wasn't really a natural fit for me. I like being a misfit, but I also like to feel like I belong somewhere. (Does that even make any sense?) I rarely felt like I belonged at that station, and I would occasionally receive from the station absurd notes about my program like this:


That was one reason why I bounced and made the move to Internet radio: on my own, I would no longer have to receive notes from higher-ups like that stern warning to DJs about playing half-hour cassette recordings of Ted Koppel (when your station has a crazy person who plays audio from Nightline for a half an hour and never does anything fun with it like taking the voices of Koppel and his interviewees and doing Qbert-style or Kid Koala-style scratching with those voices, that's one of the universe's ways of telling you it's time to bounce), and I would no longer have to do pledge drives either because I hated doing pledge drives (plus college radio DJs never get paid, which doesn't make a lick of sense). Another reason was because I had a feeling that the Internet, where anything has a niche, was where AFOS would be able to find a lot more fans who would understand what I was trying to do with my program, which was to give the underappreciated art of film and TV score music some shine and sometimes deliver behind-the-scenes details (or brutally honest commentary) about an original score or the project it was written for.

I knew that on the Internet, there would be a lot less people like either 1) the local callers who would ask me if I could play some pop song that was never written for a movie (although requests like that, as well as the occasional complaint from some dumb asshole that I talk too much in between the music, would continue to haunt my inbox from 2002 to 2006) or 2) my older brother. He insisted that I stop pre-recording my program or do any fancy editing beforehand and just do the program completely live, exactly like how all other college radio DJs do their programs, which I refused to do because it wasn't the kind of program I wanted to host. What I preferred to host was a program that sounded much more polished yet wasn't so fucking posh. He was--and is annoyingly still--incapable of understanding that film and TV score music is not like most other genres of music on the radio. It can be a tricky genre of music to handle on the radio for so many reasons, and scripting and pre-recording the program helped make it all much less tricky.

Outside of classical music, score music is the only genre where the pronunciations of the names of composers and performers are so damn difficult. Because it's primarily instrumental, it's also the only genre where a bit of context to set the stage for a composition's non-verbal and unconventional nature is absolutely necessary, whether that context is in the form of a simple intro that IDs the origin of the score cue you're about to hear or, in the cases of the new hour-long mixes I currently post on Mixcloud, a soundbite from the source of the composition. Without that context, you're completely lost and confused about what you're hearing, unless you're familiar with the movie or TV show the cue comes from. Because there are often no lyrics, score music is the only genre in which the Googling of lyrics posted on Genius will not help you ID a tune you're not familiar with.

And I've found that any subject that's related to film or TV comes attached with a lot of elaborate facts to share and substantial trivia that's more than just "Hey, Gal Gadot and the little girl who played her younger self back on Themyscira share the same birthday!" or "Michael J. Fox is allergic to carrots!" The elaborate reasons for why Bernard Herrmann and Alfred Hitchcock's longtime working relationship fell apart are kind of difficult to ad-lib off the top of your head. Sure, Greg Proops, a veteran improv comic and stand-up, can easily ad-lib that Herrmann/Hitchcock story off the top of his head if he ever felt like doing so during The Smartest Man in the World and Greg Proops Film Club. But I'm not Greg Proops.

My older brother would often say to me, "You should try to host your show without relying on those scripts you're always typing out for the show." My reaction to that in my head was always "My brother's knowledgeable about everything else, but in the radio show hosting department, my brother doesn't know shit." During the kind of film-related program I wanted to do, you can't just fucking wing it. You need a script to guide you through the complicated pronunciations and historical facts. I offer as evidence the amount of context and info Karina Longworth delivers during her impeccably edited Hollywood history podcast You Must Remember This. It's simply difficult to ad-lib much of that.

Sure, I had loyal listeners during the college radio years who understood, a little better than my brother did, what I was trying to do with my pre-recorded program, but they were never as passionate about the program (or as knowledgeable about score music) as a lot of the Internet radio incarnation's listeners later were. This is how passionate some of those folks were: they would either send me AFOS fan art or recreate playlists I assembled (and they even gave those playlists their own key art), track by track, so that they could revisit them any time they want, because both my program's airplay of music that's not podsafe and the headaches that would have developed from having to deal with expensive music licensing fees had kept me from turning AFOS into a podcast and allowing listeners to download AFOS episodes.

When New York-based AFOS listener Vincent Bernard, a graphic designer like so many other AFOS listeners (I feel like 98 percent of them were graphic designers), wasn't able to listen to the 2003 AFOS episode "Sleazy Listening" on demand like he wanted to, he simply recreated the episode's playlist on a mix CD and then came up with cover artwork for it.

The listeners were from all over the place and beyond America too, thanks to iTunes adding the AFOS channel to its radio dial in 2003, a year after my move to Live365. The size of my audience during the college radio years never went beyond the Central Coast.

See why I didn't stick to terrestrial radio? I'm not even sure if certain episodes I received praise for from fans of the program, particularly "Kiss Kiss Ban Ban," a 2006 AFOS episode that looked at why a bunch of original songs got dumped from the movies they were written for, would have been possible had I stayed within the confines of terrestrial radio. I feel like sticking around in that kind of radio would have infected and destroyed my creative side. Maybe the blandness of non-mix-show terrestrial radio would have been infectious.






"Kiss Kiss Ban Ban" is a new addition to my Mixcloud page, where listeners who miss the AFOS channel can revisit a few other old AFOS episodes and hear them for the first time in stereo, as well as any time they want to, which they weren't able to do when AFOS was powered by Live365 (however, none of the content I'm posting can be downloaded from Mixcloud, and also, I don't have any plans to add episodes of Morning Becomes Dyspeptic, the channel's 15-minute clip show of stand-up comedy album excerpts, to the AFOS archive). The message in that last screen shot of praise for "Kiss Kiss Ban Ban" above isn't listener e-mail from 2006. It's a DM from last month, sent by Paul Panfalone, a graphic designer and photographer from Columbus, Ohio who interestingly does handsomely photographed dioramas of G.I. Joe action figures and had recently let me know that he's been an AFOS fan ever since he first listened to my station while in college.

The Mixcloud page reignited Paul's enthusiasm for AFOS, as well as the enthusiasm a couple of other fans had for the channel as well. (AFOS has also been on Nancy Holder's mind lately. Holder--the prolific author of the Wonder Woman movie novelization, countless short horror stories and tons of YA novels--says her favorite thing to listen to while writing novels is film score albums, and she used to frequently e-mail me with requests for movie themes to play on AFOS.) At about the same time as the Mixcloud page gaining a few new listeners like Paul, I found out that Live365, which closed up shop early on in 2016, is back in the Internet radio game.



Last year, Billboard posted a piece on a possible relaunch of Live365, and I doubted that resurrection would ever happen. Now it has happened. Seeing Live365 in business again is like hearing that an ex-girlfriend is single again, so you think about inviting her to get a coffee (and just a coffee and nothing more), but then you remember that you've moved on from that relationship (it's not really worth it to try to rekindle it), and you mutter to yourself, "Nah, I'm good."

I like where I'm at with Mixcloud right now. In fact, I currently prefer it over Live365 as a broadcasting platform. Mixcloud didn't exist in 2002. Live365 was the best of the broadcasting options I considered at the time as I was preparing to leave terrestrial radio.

I always got along well with Live365, although I had one beef with them. When I first joined Live365, the company didn't allow me to type out the station's name in full because my station name's amount of letters went past Live365's weird limits at the time for the amounts of letters in their webcasters' station names, so I was forced to chop out the "A" from A Fistful of Soundtracks at the station's Live365 homepage.

When Live365 later relaxed its rule about letters, which finally allowed me to type the station's name out in full, iTunes Radio never bothered to update its outdated listing of my station, so a lot of iTunes Radio listeners forever erroneously called it "Fistful of Soundtracks." It was never "Fistful of Soundtracks" or as some would like to spell it, "Fist Full of Soundtracks" or "Fistful of Sountracks." (Have you seen that movie called The Soun of Music? Julie Andrews souns wonderful in it.) The official name was always either A Fistful of Soundtracks or simply AFOS in later years. (That was one reason why I was itching to change the station's name in 2008.) It's not "Slickback." It's "A Pimp Named Slickback."

Even though Live365 has returned (but will it last as long as its previous incarnation did?) and is hopefully not weirdly strict about letters this time, I'm not relaunching AFOS as a Live365 channel any time soon. First of all, posting content on Mixcloud is free. Being a Live365 webcaster is not free. Second of all, you know the enthusiasm I once had for both hosting/producing an hour-long score music radio program and running a 24-hour Internet station that functioned as the home for that program? It disappeared in 2008.

After hosting and producing 99 episodes of the program, I ran out of things to say on the air about film and TV score music and felt that 100 was a good place to stop. There was also no future in trying to make a profit from Internet radio. I only kept the station going for seven more years because, even though the station's audience had dwindled and the ease of accessing music whenever you want on YouTube or Spotify was making Internet radio look increasingly outdated and obsolete, I knew there were two or three listeners out there who remained attached to the station, even after iTunes dumped AFOS from its radio dial in 2012. Mixes in the style of something like Las Vegas DJ Dave Fogg's 2012 "Cineman" mix (the presence of John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 theme and Glass Candy's "Digital Versicolor" automatically makes Fogg's playlist a worthwhile one) are how I prefer to present selections from film and TV score albums these days.





I like not having to flick on my mic and speak during these mixes. I've had laryngitis since 2008.

I'm kidding about the larynx. Though I still enjoy listening to film and TV score music (however, score music is actually only about nine or 10 percent of the music I regularly listen to) and I don't mind taking any questions from any former listeners who were fond of the exclusive-to-the-Internet program I hosted from 2003 to 2008 (that was basically six seasons, but there definitely won't be a movie) and I often like seeing AFOS get mentioned on social media (just don't leave out the middle initial in my name because there are hundreds of folks with the same name), I don't want to be known as "the A Fistful of Soundtracks guy" forever. I have other things I want to do. I'm more than just a score music radio show host.

The running of a 24-hour Internet radio station? I simply got bored with it just like how I got bored with being part of terrestrial radio. You'll understand the urge to amscray and make the move to Internet radio if you ever skim through non-mix-show Bay Area terrestrial radio these days. Its monotony and repetitiveness will depress you and make you want to hit the road, like Baby Driver, and be gone.

This is the ninth of 13 all-new blog posts that are being posted until this blog's final post in December 2017. Occasionally on Friday, I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. The "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week hasn't been a weekly feature for a long time, but sometimes, I'll catch a really good piece of animated TV shortly after its original airdate, and I'll feel like devoting some paragraphs to it despite my lateness to the party. Hence the rare "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of Last Week. This is the 134th edition of "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week! Stream "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," my one-hour mix of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, right now.



The Monday after it premiered, I streamed on the Adult Swim site "Pickle Rick"--Rick and Morty's most violent episode so far, as well as the show's most damning indictment of Rick and his treatment of his family, as he mutates himself into a pickle/human hybrid as an excuse to avoid going along with Beth, Summer and Morty to see a family therapist (special guest voice Susan Sarandon)--but I wasn't able to write about "Pickle Rick" until now. I was busy resuming work on my prose novel manuscript and trying to finish marathoning Fargo's third season on FXNow right before FX deleted the entire season from FXNow.

Movie Pilot did such an astute review of "Pickle Rick" (it's entitled "'Pickle Rick' Proved Beyond a Squanch of a Doubt That Rick Is the Real Villain of Rick and Morty") that I'm not going to discuss and briefly summarize (instead of pointlessly recap scene-for-scene) "Pickle Rick" in a fashion similar to the Movie Pilot piece, which is the same kind of non-recappy approach I've done with previous Rick and Morty episodes. I'm just going to raise a couple of points I haven't seen in other reviews of "Pickle Rick."

Danny Trejo is an underrated voice actor. I had no idea Trejo voiced Jaguar, the racially ambiguous assassin Pickle Rick battles and then conspires with to get himself back home, until the end credits. I thought it was Clancy Brown the whole time. That's how effective Trejo is as a voice actor. Trejo really whitened up his voice in "Pickle Rick." He did an even better job as Enrique, Hank's not-too-bright co-worker, in my favorite later-season King of the Hill episode, "Lady and Gentrification," because he convincingly voiced a meek and non-confrontational character who's the complete opposite of all the ass-kickers he played in movies like Desperado, the Machete flicks and even A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas, an atypical Trejo movie where Elias Koteas, not Trejo, is the one who's doing all the on-screen carnage. Speaking of King of the Hill, I'm not so excited over the rumors about Mike Judge reuniting with the King of the Hill crew to make new episodes. It's just wrong for King of the Hill to resume without the late Brittany Murphy. If King of the Hill is going to come back to TV now, it ought to kill off Luanne, Murphy's character, off-screen. And no, not even a terrific and versatile voice actor like Pamela Adlon, who juggled several roles on King of the Hill, including Bobby, would be a satisfactory enough replacement for Murphy as Luanne.


Trejo is always weirdly guest-starring in TV show episodes that make me emotional for some reason. "Lady and Gentrification" is a rare King of the Hill episode that angers me because of the things Enrique, his daughter Inez and their family are forced to experience due to the gentrification of Arlen (caused by Peggy, of course), even though a certain quotable grievance of Enrique's is played for laughs ("They put salmon in the fish tacos, Hank!"). The unexpected friendship between Hank and Inez, whom Hank has been asked by Enrique to give a speech for at her quinceañera even though Hank barely knows her, causes "Lady and Gentrification" to also be oddly affecting. Hank is understandably uncomfortable about being around Inez at first because the thought of a middle-aged man spending extra time talking to a teenage girl is never not creepy, but the friendship becomes kind of affecting when you realize Hank, after years of struggling to understand Bobby ("That boy ain't right") and not exactly getting along with the niece-in-law whom he and Peggy have to look after, has finally met a kid whom he could actually get along with. Trejo's guest shot on Monk had the same effect on me as Hank's quasi-parental bond with a surprisingly non-sullen Inez did in "Lady and Gentrification": his hardened lifer character's gradual sympathy for both his cellmate Monk, whom he doesn't get along with at first, and Monk's search for the murderer of his wife Trudy in "Mr. Monk Goes to Jail" is oddly affecting too, and I wished Monk brought back Trejo's character for another episode. In the Monk series finale about the revelation of Trudy's killer, Monk should have sent Trejo to kill Craig T. Nelson.

In the case of "Pickle Rick," the episode's final scene before the end credits was what made me emotional, but not emotional as in somewhat moved, like when I saw "Lady and Gentrification" or "Mr. Monk Goes to Jail." The final scene in Beth's car made me frustrated, as in "Goddammit, Morty, be more aggressive about this shit that's been eating you up inside."

That final scene--Morty tells Beth he likes their therapist's advice, but Beth (who hates how Dr. Wong astutely pointed out how unhealthy it is for her to keep enabling the selfish behavior of a parent who abandoned her as a kid) ignores her son, and he abandons the discussion--was more difficult to watch than any of the constant carnage in the "Pickle Rick" action scenes. Movie Pilot's reviewer nicely points out how Rick does not come off well in "Pickle Rick." Meanwhile, Polygon's reviewer interestingly thinks Rick and Beth are headed towards both redemption (but at a slow pace) and having a healthier parent/child relationship. That's not what I got out of the episode's conclusion.

Beth and her dad--when he's not badassly killing cockroaches, sewer rats and assassins, that is--are at their worst in "Pickle Rick." The episode illustrates that despite their intellects, Rick and Beth are incapable of growth as adults, and the breakthrough the Polygon reviewer thinks Rick and Beth are experiencing due to their first (and most likely only) visit to Dr. Wong isn't happening any time soon. Beth's petulant-looking disdain for therapy, which comes off as something she picked up from Rick simply because "my cool dad makes clapping back at shrinks look so cool," makes her look as dumb as any Scientologist who blindly parrots their cult's stance against therapy, while Rick's view of therapy is slightly more nuanced: he clearly knows that Dr. Wong is right about the negative effects his behavior has on his family, but he just won't openly say so because he never wants to look wrong in front of anybody. (The show has presented many times before what Rick's like when he's alone and not being macho: he's much more aware of his shortcomings when he's not acting out the persona he's constructed for himself as the multiverse's toughest genius/granddad.)

This goes back to my discussion of "The Rickshank Rickdemption," the third-season premiere from way back in April. I correctly predicted back then that Beth and Jerry's separation--orchestrated by Rick to get back at Jerry (who had a backbone for once when he pointed out to Beth, Summer and Morty the irrationality of doing what Rick wants, even though it ends up ruining their lives)--would take its toll on Morty and his sister, who, as "Pickle Rick" reveals, have acted out their discomfort with the separation by, respectively, peeing in the classroom and sniffing pottery enamel, a pair of actions that caused Morty and Summer's school to send the family to Dr. Wong. "Pickle Rick" further backs up my belief from the "Rickshank Rickdemption" discussion that Morty and Summer have got to get the fuck away from Rick and Beth.

I previously said, "'The Rickshank Rickdemption' leaves us with the implication that someday this season or maybe later, either Morty or Summer has got to find a way to break the cycle of misery that they're being dragged into in various ways by their elders." Morty had a perfect opportunity to break that cycle by encouraging his mom to continue seeing Dr. Wong, but after Beth ignores him, he stupidly allows that opportunity to slip away, and so he sits back and watches Beth and Rick once again do what they always do: resort to drinking to deal with life, instead of drinking in moderation.

Letting an opportunity like that slip away is something that rarely happens at the end of an animated comedy, but it happens so often in real life. That's why it's an infuriating scene! I don't see Rick and Beth's post-therapy trip to the bar as a lovely bonding moment for Rick and Beth like the Polygon writer does. I see the trip to the bar as a total dodge and another excuse for Rick and Beth to bury their problems in booze and not get those problems fixed.

"Pickle Rick" is not just a sharply funny and outstanding glimpse into the foolish sides of Rick and Beth. It also happens to be the second Rick and Morty episode solely credited to a female writer (as well as what I'm going to assume is the first-ever Rick and Morty episode credited to a writer of color): Jessica Gao, best known for writing for Silicon Valley, a show I've never watched (unless it's a caper flick about a crew of Asian American thieves stealing shit from a Silicon Valley techbro who wronged them, I'm not really interested in watching any movie or show about a part of Northern California I reluctantly had a past with). But I've seen Gao speak at length as part of an Asian American TV writer's panel in L.A., and I'm a fan of several of her tweets. I don't know which parts of "Pickle Rick" are actually Gao's writing (like with most other half-hour comedies, some of the jokes or wisecracks in each episode of Rick and Morty are contributions from uncredited staff writers like co-creator Justin Roiland). I'm just going to assume Gao, due to her past ties to both Annoying Orange, a show about fruit stand items that can talk, and Robot Chicken, was behind all the talking pickle material and all the ultraviolent action cliché parody scenes, while much of Dr. Wong's dialogue must have come from Dan Harmon.





Rick and Morty hasn't exactly been known for its diversity in the writers' room, but that's changing this season with the addition of Gao and three other female writers to Roiland and Harmon's staff to transform the staff into 50 percent women, 50 percent men. It's a nice sign of progress on an Adult Swim show that the rest of the network, which has been criticized for its lack of female showrunners, has yet to emulate, aside from the Robot Chicken writers' room (the same room where Rachel Bloom once worked).

The hiring of Gao, Jane Becker and the writing duo of Sarah Carbiener and Erica Rosbe is also terrific for the future of Rick and Morty. This show's lone weak spot has most often been the one-note writing for Beth, which is something even Carbiener indicates in the Hollywood Reporter when she says to THR that "now that there are women in the room we can vet [Summer and Beth's stories] and make them better." I don't want to say Beth's previously repetitive subplots are the kind of problem that can only be solved by female writers, but a feminine perspective would help to bring a bit more nuance and color to her subplots. Thanks to both the input of the new female writers and the migration of Jerry from Beth's house to a fleabag motel surrounded by hookers, I'm relieved that the third season has been, so far, not another season of "Beth yells at Jerry again and complains some more about being a horse surgeon."

Not everyone is as enthusiastic about the third season. Carbiener scripted with Rosbe this week's Jerry-less "Vindicators 3: The Return of Worldender." (By the way, "Vindicators 3" is a bottle episode that basically traps Rick inside a Marvel Studios movie and lets him wreak havoc on the members of a seemingly upright but privately dysfunctional superteam led by Gillian Jacobs, who's perfectly cast as an alien heroine who's like a mash-up of Starfire, Star Sapphire and Captain Marvel, and her vocal performance in "Vindicators 3" is making me long for an alternate reality where Jacobs beat out Brie Larson for the role of Captain Marvel. If you're getting tired of some of the MCU's clichés like I am, "Vindicators 3" is the episode for you.) And in the Hollywood Reporter piece about the new staff writers, Carbiener recalls that about more than six months before the premiere of the third season, "There was a Reddit post that called us the social justice warriors that Dan had to hire that ruined season three."

Wait a minute, they actually said that about the female writers, before they even saw any of the episodes that were scripted by those writers? Those fans from Reddit can go fuck themselves.

An inane negative review of "Pickle Rick" I refuse to link to complains that Beth and Jerry's separation and its aftermath are dragging the show down. Fans like that impatient reviewer and the Reddit fuckboys are missing the point of Rick and Morty. (They're just like those irate male Doctor Who fans whose objections to the casting of actress Jodie Whittaker as the next Doctor signify how much they've failed to notice the progressive ethos of a show they claim to love.) Rick and Morty has always been a show that's mainly about how one man's ways of handling his thirst for adventure and his inability to re-examine his ego are alienating his grandson and tearing apart his family instead of keeping the fam together.

The domestic side of Rick and Morty, even though it hasn't always been perfectly executed, is what primarily distinguishes the show from other sci-fi sitcoms. Without that domestic side, Rick and Morty would be nothing more than "Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon do their version of Futurama." Sure, it would still be a good show, but it wouldn't be as brilliant or bold as the dysfunctional character study Rick and Morty has morphed into, like a madman transforming into a pickle, during a standout half-hour like "Pickle Rick."

This is the 10th of 13 or 14 all-new blog posts that are being posted until this blog's final post in December 2017.

Game of Thrones, the most popular TV show in the world right now, is a show I've been ride-or-die for since the eerie White Walker attack that opened its 2011 pilot episode. It's a rare small-screen soap opera in which the action filmmaking on display during certain set pieces--marshaled by directors like Miguel Sapochnik and Breaking Bad veteran Michelle MacLaren, a.k.a. the original director of Wonder Woman before she quit over creative differences with Warner Bros.--is intriguingly on a par with the work of master craftsmen in the action genre like the "Johns": the late John Frankenheimer, John Woo and Johnnie To, Woo's much more grounded (as in there are no fucking doves in his movies) but similarly skilled Hong Kong compatriot.

There has never been a soap that has continually killed it in the action sequence department quite like Game of Thrones has. On The Soup in 2012, Joel McHale memorably ridiculed the horrendous, '60s Star Trek-style action choreography during a General Hospital clip of a stiffly performed marina shootout between a bunch of gunmen and Michael Easton, whose heroic General Hospital cop character happened to be named McBain, just like Rainier Wolfcastle's ultraviolent alter ego. That tepid-looking General Hospital shootout was how soaps, whether they were daytime sudsers or the tart-tongued and campy nighttime sudsers GoT has channeled during the scenes in King's Landing or Dorne, used to always handle elaborate action sequences--before GoT came along.



But there are times during GoT's run where I've felt like quitting the show. Ramsay Bolton's torture of Theon Greyjoy (and, later on in the show's run, Sansa Stark) was such an interminable and repetitive storyline I kept wondering when Kim Bauer was going to show up and stumble into the Dreadfort and somehow infect the IQs of everybody else in the castle with her dumbness. And GoT has attracted some criticism for being yet another fantasy genre franchise with a not-so-diverse cast and crew. That lack of diversity behind the scenes was never more evident than in the dumbest and most tone-deaf-about-race moment in the show's history: the white savior imagery of crowds of mostly dark-skinned slaves worshiping blond Daenerys Targaryen when she frees them at the end of the 2013 episode "Mhysa."

I hate that crowdsurfing scene so much that the replacement of the slaves' exclamations of "Mhysa!" with exclamations of "Pizza!" makes the scene much easier to stomach.



The white savior scene from "Mhysa" makes you understand the frustrations of black viewers like #OscarsSoWhite campaign creator April Reign, who's leading a #NoConfederate campaign to protest GoT showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss and the currently-in-development HBO show the duo created and is planning to executive-produce, Confederate, a sci-fi drama about an alternate-history South that seceded from America and kept slavery alive. ("[GoT] has received sustained criticism not only for its gratuitous depiction of rape, but also the lack of diversity both with respect to actors and actresses, and those who work behind the camera. It is unfathomable that we are asked to believe in a time when dragons exist, but there are no people of color with significant roles," says Reign, who's skeptical about how the GoT showrunners will handle Confederate's subject matter.) Benioff and Weiss failed to see how uncomfortable the "Mhysa" white savior scene makes viewers of color feel, so what makes them qualified to tackle a difficult subject like the subjugation of black folks?

Troubling moments like the white savior scene sometimes frustrate me to the point where I'm close to giving up on GoT. And then just when I think I'm out, GoT pulls me back in with sequences like this:



Or this:



Or this:





Or this:


Or this:


Or this:






Or catty exchanges like this one, a scene that made me understand a little better why women and gay men became fans of Dynasty back in the '80s:



Or Peter Dinklage's sublime delivery of lines like this:


Or getting my favorite character on the show--Lady Olenna, the Queen of No Fucks to Give--and Brienne of Tarth to share a scene together so that a legendary action heroine from the '60s, who was somebody I grew up watching on cable in the '90s, could verbally high-five an action heroine from today:



Diana Rigg's brief scene with Gwendoline Christie warms the heart of any fan of Rigg's portrayal of Emma Peel on The Avengers. But there's nothing heartwarming about the growing romantic bond between Jon Snow and his new dragonglass mining benefactor Dany as GoT's seventh and penultimate season winds down. That's just disgusting. The Dragon Queen's your aunt, Jon!

Yet people on social media and elsewhere are thirsty for it.

FUCK INCEST IM SHIPPING DANY AND JON SNOW

FORGIVE ME YGRITTE

— ━ ϟ T A R K (@HayrahQuinn) August 22, 2017

People: But Jon and Dany are related.
Me:...
#GameOfThronespic.twitter.com/aM6pZ7Rt7K

— Kimberly (@candypie22) August 21, 2017

Me: incest is wrong
Also me: when are Dany and Jon going to get together #GameOfThronespic.twitter.com/BlIjKifMlQ

— Anna Vu (@realannavu) August 21, 2017

I didn't know I was a basic piece of trash until I so badly wanted Dany and Jon to kiss. MY HEART IS WEAK. #GameOfThrones

— Lilly Singh (@IISuperwomanII) August 21, 2017

A white supremacist is president of the United States, and TV viewers are actually cheering for incestuous lovemaking to take place on a nighttime soap. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you 2017.

I want Henry Louis Gates Jr. from Finding Your Roots to arrive by boat or dragon on this show and put a stop to this. Hit 'em with the genealogy charts, Professor! Sneak a ton of anti-aphrodisiac beans into Jon's dinner before "the Dragon and the Wolf" bone down! Do anything to intervene!


Estelle Tang from Elle and Megan Farokhmanesh from The Verge are right about this. "The Dany and Jon Thing on Game of Thrones Is So Gross" and, yes, "Game of Thrones' Jon and Daenerys romance is weak as hell."

Sure, Kit Harington and Emilia Clarke have tons of chemistry off-screen, but it hasn't translated into their scenes together. Compare their scenes to the scenes between Jon and Rose Leslie as Ygritte, the Wildling warrior Jon romanced back when he infiltrated her army.

Jon and Ygritte's love story was a carefully built storyline that was given time to breathe and grow--the genuine sparks between Harington and Leslie, who became a couple in real life, helped a lot too--whereas this sudden love connection between Jon and this new ally he's known for only four episodes is, like a few other storylines during GoT's abbreviated seventh season, badly rushed. That's what Farokhmanesh means when she says it's weak as hell. And any romantic pairing where it's two ultra-serious people (the King of the North and the Queen of Dragons)--instead of an ultra-serious person interacting with a jokester like Ygritte (a live-life-to-the-fullest type who got the perpetually brooding Jon to lighten up)--always makes for boring TV.





Jon and Dany's incestuous attraction to each other, especially in "Beyond the Wall," the seventh season's penultimate episode, is meth-hillbilly-level gross. Yet it hasn't caused me to consider quitting the show like I did during "Mhysa" or the endless sadism of a one-dimensional villain like Ramsay (he was never as compelling a villain as Joffrey or his stage mom Cersei). Though I hate seeing nephew and aunt (by the way, she just lost one of her dragons, so she's definitely not thinking straight) stare longingly at each other, I'm curious about how it will connect to the way this show will end.

I believe that the addition of Jon and Dany, a.k.a. Ice and Fire, to the show's list of incestuous pairings like Jaime and Cersei Lannister is a hint that GoT will end on a downbeat note about how everything's corrupt, nothing will ever change, history repeats itself and incest is often to blame for it all. That point is nothing new to prestige dramas on TV, but it's unusual to see in a medieval fantasy featuring mostly noble knights and badass dragons, which is why so many viewers were shook after watching moments like Joffrey's decapitation of Ned Stark or the Red Wedding. They weren't prepared for the level of cruelty and brutality GoT (and its source material, George R.R. Martin's series of Song of Ice and Fire novels) brought to the kind of genre where the Starks, the family most of the show's viewers identified with in the first season, would usually be the clan that always emerges victorious and with their heads still intact--if they were being written by creators or writers who weren't as pragmatic or cynical about the way the world works as Martin has been in his Ice and Fire novels, that is.

The surviving Stark kids seem to think they're avoiding the mistakes Ned made when he was alive, but at the moment, Sansa and Arya are at odds with each other (or maybe they're pretending to argue, and it's all part of a Stark family plot against Littlefinger). Bran is too far up his own asshole to be useful or helpful to anybody. Jon may be a brave soldier, but he remains a terrible tactician, even after Melisandre brought him back from the dead.

This fucking family of Andy Sipowiczes (just like Sipowicz, nothing but terrible shit happens to the Starks on this show) is one of several examples of GoT's recurring point that simply saying you're a good person and claiming to know what's right or sticking to all of your principles are not enough to help you survive a harsh world like Westeros. It cost Ned his head, while over in House Targaryen, Dany, whose dialogue about doing what's right and breaking the wheel and taking the Iron Throne has probably been turned into a drinking game somewhere by now, is heading in a different direction and becoming the type of ruthless (and fond-of-incest) despot she's always claimed to be fighting against. (Last year, a Vox writer posted"Why I think Game of Thrones will make Daenerys the villain, not the hero.") Judging from the way things are right now on the show, I feel like GoT will not end in triumph and will ultimately be a tragedy like the Godfather movies or two of the most depressing westerns ever made, 1968's The Great Silence and 1980's Heaven's Gate. Like Anna Silman said in "I'm Rooting for the Lannisters," this is a show that's always been proud of its perversity. A bleak final episode would be the ultimate perverse twist.

Whether or not Jon's half-Targaryen lineage will be revealed to Jon and Dany, incest will ruin the two leaders' alliance. The White Walkers and their newly zombified dragon get to conquer the world, and winter will be forever, partly because the King of the North couldn't keep his head in the game and couldn't keep it in his pants.

We're basically seeing Ygritte's old catchphrase of "You know nothing, Jon Snow" culminating in the most dark and dis...taste...ful outcome imaginable. Professor Gates, where the fuck are you?

This is the 11th of 13 or 14 all-new blog posts that are being posted on a monthly basis until this blog's final post in December 2017.

WARNING: Spoilers for Spider-Man: Homecoming ahead.

In this summer's Marvel Cinematic Universe smash hit Spider-Man: Homecoming--the most satisfying Spidey movie since Sam Raimi's pre-MCU Spider-Man 2--15-year-old Peter Parker struggles to balance superheroing with his obligations to his Queens high school's academic decathlon team. Spidey, for a change, isn't being portrayed by some 31-year-old whom you can tell has to similarly struggle a bit to recapture the nervous energy of being a teen, like an alien visitor trying to understand the thrusts that take place during human lovemaking.

At the time of the filming of Homecoming in Atlanta, British actor Tom Holland wasn't old enough in America to drink! Casting such a young actor as Spidey was a brilliant move. Remember how Daniel Craig silenced the haters from the 007 fanboy contingent ("Craig's too blond!""Craig's too short!""Craig doesn't know how to drive stick!""Craig's ears stick out too much!") and amazed everybody as a younger-than-usual Bond in Casino Royale? That's how I feel about Holland as a younger-than-usual Spidey right now.

Holland's my favorite live-action Spidey since Shinji Tôdô and his stunt double Hirofumi Koga (they were Japanese Spider-Man, for the folks at home who think a kaiju is a Jewish member of Cobra Kai). In last year's Captain America: Civil War and now this movie, Holland finally found the key to playing Spidey (as in a version of Spidey that's attempting to be the closest on the screen to how he usually is in comic-book form): he's essentially both Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse at the same time.

Lean too much towards Bugs, and you get Drake Bell's annoying and overly cocky version of the web-slinger on the animated Ultimate Spider-Man. Make him too much like Mickey, and you get either the Tobey Maguire version or the Andrew Garfield version. Maguire and Garfield were solid when they portrayed Peter without the red-and-blue suit (over at The Ringer, Micah Peters nicely explains why Maguire perfectly nailed Peter's feelings of powerlessness in Spider-Man 2), but in the suit, Maguire's Spidey was too humorless for my tastes, while Garfield just didn't sound all that convincing to me when he tried to embody the jokester side of Spidey.

Holland is also a Spidey who interestingly never gets visibly touchy about sharing the screen (or red carpet) with female co-stars who tower over him. I believe I have a clip:


Whoops, wrong Spidey. Anyway, you know why Gwyneth Paltrow was barefoot during all of her scenes with Robert Downey Jr., Holland's Homecoming co-star, in the first Avengers movie? It wasn't just because of Avengers director Joss Whedon's creepy foot fetish. It was also because Paltrow towers over Downey in real life, and when David Letterman interviewed the Iron Man star on CBS in 2008, Downey made fun of his own average height and implied that he wasn't comfortable being dwarfed by his female co-star, which explains all those scenes where Downey and Paltrow are of equal height (thanks to lifts in Downey's shoes) or, in the case of The Avengers, all those scenes where Paltrow ditches the heels. Whereas none of that weird shit happens when Holland's playing Spidey.

Peter's not supposed to be the most imposing superhero around (sure, he has super-strength, but he relies more often on his intellect and spidery agility to stay alive or overcome a crisis), and Holland gets that. In the red-and-blue suit, Holland's not so insecure and vain about closely resembling the undersized Spidey drawn by Mark Bagley in the acclaimed Ultimate Spider-Man comic, which, in 2000, reimagined Peter as a 15-year-old who's new to the superhero game, much like what Homecoming is doing with Peter now.

One of Peter's decathlon teammates--and taller female friends--in Homecoming is Michelle, a disinterested (in everything from superheroes to school) oddball who's comfortable in her own skin and prefers to read W. Somerset Maugham novels in the middle of P.E. classes. She's winningly played by pop singer and Disney Channel sitcom star Zendaya, and she's also close in spirit to the Zendaya who winningly dragged E! show host Giuliana Rancic in public back in 2015, after Rancic uttered on the air a racist comment about how Zendaya's natural hair on the Oscar red carpet made her look like she smells of patchouli oil and weed.


Even Entertainment Weekly essayist Darren Franich, who found Homecoming to be exceedingly corporate and too devoid of the idiosyncratic touches Raimi brought to his Spidey movies (including even the clunky hot mess that was Spider-Man 3), couldn't find a lot of negative things to say about Zendaya's performance as Michelle. Homecoming director Jon Watts, the same filmmaker behind the Sundance 2015 critics' darling Cop Car, has often compared Zendaya's memorable and standoffish character to the Ally Sheedy character in The Breakfast Club and Linda Cardellini's role as Lindsay Weir on Freaks and Geeks (the same show where Homecoming co-screenwriter John Francis Daley got his start as an actor).

Okay, but which version of Lindsay? You have to be specific. She wasn't the same person through the show's entire run like how the Sheedy character was one type of person in The Breakfast Club--before she allowed Molly Ringwald's character to give her a makeover, that is. (And that makeover, which scrubbed away everything that made Sheedy's nonconformist character unique and enjoyable to watch, was Reaganite director John Hughes' most Reagan-ish, pro-conformity moment as a filmmaker, as well as the second most hateable moment in a Hughes movie, right below any racist scene featuring Long Duk Dong. The makeover is so awful that, according to Franich in his critique of Homecoming, "when we watched it in my high school, our teacher literally fast-forwarded through it.")

Freaks and Geeks was mainly about how high school becomes the first major testing ground for the identities we forge as adults, so that Judd Apatow joint followed Lindsay as she, like most of the other Freaks and Geeks characters, tried on several different phases and quickly discarded most of them: wanna-be burnout who's so afraid to smoke her new clique's weed that she never fucks with weed; neighborhood bully; cold-hearted mathlete; wanna-be burnout who experiments with weed but winds up becoming even more afraid of it, etc. Judging from Zendaya's low-key and sleepy-eyed performance in Homecoming, it looks like Zendaya was enamored with Lindsay's nutty and very short-lived stoner phase.

The reason for Michelle's often sleepy eyes is left unexplained since Homecoming is yet another squeaky-clean, family-friendly Marvel Studios movie (an MCU flick distributed by Sony this time out instead of Disney, to be more accurate), but the fact that she's not a slovenly dresser is a hint that she doesn't toke. She's the kind of character Bill Murray used to play so effectively in hits like Tootsie and Ghostbusters--a character who reacts to the out-of-the-ordinary events surrounding him with indifference, jadedness and quips instead of awe--except this Murray type has been deposited into a superhero movie and is played by a biracial girl.



Michelle is a small role for Zendaya, but she makes the most of her limited screen time, and it's a surprising performance because it's full of subtlety. Prior to Homecoming, Zendaya wasn't known for being a subtle actor.

Zendaya was a typical child or teen actor in those interchangeable Disney Channel sitcoms that adults have to grudgingly sit through for three minutes while waiting for Gravity Falls to start. Those actors are prone to lots of overly broad acting and are directed to shout every other line to the rafters as if they're Shatner in that mostly shitty third and final season of Star Trek.

Don't know what direction they give kids in Disney sitcoms, but to direct adults to behave that way you'd say "act like you're on cocaine"

— Andy Richter (@AndyRichter) February 25, 2014

Even Zendaya herself is embarrassed about some of her own earlier work.


I would love to see how Michelle would react to that "fucking ray of sunshine" from Zendaya's earlier Disney Channel days.

Michelle is also at the center of one of Homecoming's major reveals. By the end of the film, the standoffish student has grown closer to her decathlon teammates and become their new leader, so she allows them to start calling her by her common nickname: MJ, the same nickname given to fun-loving supermodel/actress Mary Jane Watson, Peter's longtime girlfriend (and, for a couple of decades, wife) from the comics.

Mary Jane is a superhero love interest who, like most other superhero love interests, has gone through so many different visual incarnations in the comics. There's what I like to call Classic MJ, the MJ in long red hair with bangs who was immortalized by her very first line to Peter in the '60s comics: "Face it, tiger. You just hit the jackpot!" Classic MJ is my favorite visual incarnation of MJ. And then in the late '80s and early '90s, which was the period when I started reading Spidey comics after I was first exposed to Spidey via animated shows like Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, Amazing Spider-Man artist Todd McFarlane and his successor Erik Larsen introduced their really big-haired, hypersexualized takes on MJ, which haven't aged so well visually like Classic MJ has and are part of what I like to refer to as the era of Jersey Mob Housewife MJ. Homecoming's name reveal--plus a subtle glimmer of romantic interest in Peter at the end of Michelle's final scene (while Holland and Zendaya have become a couple in real life)--establishes Michelle (whose last name is Jones) as the new MJ figure in this MCU relaunch of Spidey, although Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige has frequently clarified that the new MJ is only an homage to all prior incarnations of MJ and not the same MJ Kirsten Dunst portrayed in the three Raimi movies.

Mary Jane's first appearance in 1966, drawn by John Romita Sr., who modeled her after Ann-Margret

Illustrated by Adam Hughes

The Spectacular Spider-Man

Illustrated by Steve Rude

Illustrated by Takeshi Miyazawa

King Size Spider-Man Special #1 (2008), illustrated by Colleen Coover

Mary Jane (first and third panels) in Invincible Iron Man

I was afraid Homecoming's MJ reveal was going to be a repeat of the "Trust us, Benedict Cumberbatch will be starring as John Harrison, not Khan"/"Okay, we was just playing, he's really Khan" bullshit of Star Trek Into Darkness and the Broccoli family's similarly lame attempts to deny that they cast Christoph Waltz as Blofeld in Spectre. Fortunately, Marvel Studios handled it a little better than Bad Robot and the Broccolis did with their respective attempts at obfuscation, while Darren Franich and Vox critic Todd VanDerWerff believe Homecoming totally botched the MJ reveal (Franich also feels that the reveal is too much like Ally Sheedy's Breakfast Club makeover; he predicts that after Homecoming, Michelle won't be as interesting a character anymore, as these movies try to remold her into another typical superhero movie love interest and then set up her and Peter as the endgame couple). Unlike Bad Robot and Eon, the Marvel Studios folks weren't caught in a lie. They were right the whole time when they insisted to the press that Zendaya won't be playing Mary Jane.

But the "She's Michelle, not Mary Jane" development is also a disappointing twist, especially after Bruno Mars dropped a few weeks ago the racy music video he co-directed with "Uptown Funk" video director Cameron Duddy for his catchy, '80s R&B-style bedroom jam "Versace on the Floor." Zendaya, a Bruno fan who had a hand in the "Versace on the Floor" video's grown-and-sexy-hotel concept, appears in the video in a custom-made Versace chainmail minidress (a skirt that--spoiler alert--ends up on the floor) and what appears to be a lace front wig with bangs, and she ends up looking much more like Classic MJ than anyone else who's portrayed MJ in animation or live action. Not even the Dunst version of MJ looks all that much like Classic MJ.

zendaya was serving a comic book mj look in the versace on the floor video and it breaks my heart that her mj line was "just an homage"😓

— serena (@PAPERTOWNED) August 21, 2017

Okay, Zendaya's portrayal of a girl who gets an O just from hearing the sound of the voice of the also-Versace-clad Bruno from next door is not exactly Hayley Kiyoko from the Disney Channel's Lemonade Mouth getting butt-nekkid with a white girl and a horribly fetishized Lawrence on Insecure this season, but it's still pretty racy for a Disney Channel star. The grown-and-sexy vibe Zendaya's going for here is also a bit on the dull side at first, compared to her colorful turn in Homecoming.

But the "Versace on the Floor" video becomes more fun when you start to imagine it as a steamy Spider-Verse fan film about Classic MJ being a supermodel and dancing by herself in a glam hotel room while she has the hots for her Filipino neighbor--kind of like how, in the McFarlane and Larsen eras, Jersey Mob Housewife MJ was often shown doing modeling gigs or portraying bombshells on daytime soaps. And had Zendaya gotten to play Mary Jane in Homecoming and future MCU movies instead of an homage to her (we don't know if Michelle's going to become a supermodel like Mary Jane, but I doubt it), the video proves that the statuesque Zendaya would have nailed the supermodel side of Mary Jane so well in those future movies.

Versace, Versace, Versace, Versace, Versace, Versace

Word to New York 'cause the Dyckman and Heights girls are callin' mepapi

I'm all on the low, take a famous girl out where there're no paparazzi/I'm tryna give Halle Berry a baby and no one can stop me

Also, at the end of the video, when the Versace's finally on the floor, it's accidentally reminiscent of a key sexually charged moment from the McFarlane era of MJ. Jersey Mob Housewife MJ tries to cheer up her depressed husband by dropping WilliWear on the floor.

Or was it Vera on the floor?



Over at Inverse, Caitlin Busch raises a good point when she says, "Thank goodness Zendaya isn't actually Mary Jane--because Michelle is already better, and she's the character they need to make a third Spider-Man film series work," and "Zendaya's MJ--messy, snarky, eagle-eyed, and happy to throw a casual middle finger Peter's way every once in a while--is already giving Peter a run for his money. She's going to be a better MJ than Mary Jane Watson ever was in the original Spider-Man films and most of the comics (the classic ones, anyway)." But Bruno and Zendaya's video is making me repeat that old Marvel catchphrase "What if..." and it's making me kind of wish that Zendaya was actually playing Mary Jane. So why isn't she? Was Marvel Studios afraid that casting a non-white actress as the MJ we're more familiar with was going to lead to an outcry from white Spidey fans, just like the uproar from white Thor readers over Idris Elba being cast as Heimdall at the time of the making of the first Thor flick (or the white rage over Chronicle director Josh Trank choosing Chronicle star Michael B. Jordan to portray Johnny Storm in 2015's non-MCU Fantastic Four megaflop)?

Look, Marvel Studios has made a lot of effective storytelling choices in its film and TV projects--the MCU is the gold standard when it comes to building shared cinematic universes--and I especially enjoyed the long-overdue introduction of a Filipino American guy to the MCU fold in Homecoming (Jacob Batalon as Peter's best friend Ned, another Homecoming scene-stealer). But the studio has also chickened out (and has been afraid to defy the Marvel publishing division's most conservative white fans, the same kind of cruel fans who cyberbullied Marvel editor Heather Antos--after she innocuously tweeted a pic of her "Marvel milkshake crew"--and shouldn't be given the time of day anyway) so many times.


Marvel Studios' track record is marred by a certain kind of corporate timidity Darren Franich complains about in his aforementioned essay, which he entitled "The illusion of change in Spider-Man: Homecoming." (In the essay, Franich argues that this timidity has its roots in Stan Lee and his skeptical-sounding dialogue, in '60s Spidey comics, about the effectiveness of political activism, despite his support of the civil rights movement in op-eds.) The studio failed to seize the opportunity to make the first female superhero movie in the era of shared-universe-franchises and then be a few steps ahead of the DC Extended Universe over at Warner Bros., which, instead, beat Marvel Studios to the punch and made the wildly successful Wonder Woman. Its obsession with sticking to certain tentpole franchise filmmaking formulas famously alienated Edgar Wright and (to a lesser extent) Ava DuVernay. It whitewashed certain roles that could have been juicy showcases for Asian actors (the casting of Randall Park as Agent Jimmy Woo, a Marvel character who's been around since the '50s, in next year's Ant-Man and the Wasp might be the studio's way of apologizing for that).

Also, almost all of the studio's film and TV projects are weirdly frozen in the '70s and '80s, racial politics-wise (while the Marvel publishing division is trying to lead the way in diversity and representation in its titles and is being more progressive in its writing, whether through creative decisions like the introduction of an Asian American Hulk--and the addition of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Roxane Gay as writers for the Black Panther titles, after criticisms erupted over how the publishing division keeps trying to lure black readers but never seems to hire black writers--or through the rollout of POC-driven or female-driven titles like the smash hit Ms. Marvel, Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, America and The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl). Instead of Marvel Television's Netflix/MCU shows taking a cue from recent Asian American Marvel comics writers like Greg Pak or Marjorie Liu and critiquing or changing the Asian stereotypes and white savior tropes that were part of the '70s and '80s source material, those shows stupidly reinforce those same stereotypes and tropes.


And now this "She's Michelle, not Mary Jane" thing? If it's true that the creation of Michelle took place because Marvel Studios didn't want to be faced with another "White folks angry about Driis playing Heimdall"-esque headline all over nerd news sites or because some high-powered exec was uncomfortable with allowing Mary Jane to be non-white, it's, disappointingly, another chapter in How to Dodge Progress the Marvel Way.

Dumbfoundead in Bad Rap

This is the 12th of 14 or 15 all-new blog posts that are being posted on a monthly basis until this blog's final post in December 2017.

Back in 2011, I typed out an outline for a graphic novel or screenplay I wanted to someday write about the Minneapolis rock music scene in 1985, and the story was to be told from the point of view of a female Filipino American Prince fan who leads a band of otherwise all-male musicians called the Beautifully Complex Women. In the outline, I explained that a rumor spreads around Minneapolis that Prince, the city's favorite son, is looking for a new act to sign to his Paisley Park label, and the Beautifully Complex Women and a whole bunch of other local bands vie, often over-aggressively, for the attention of the unseen Purple One.

I called the script idea The Beautifully Complex Women. It was going to be my way of exploring why it's so difficult for Asian American artists--whether they're the power pop band Moonpools & Caterpillars in the '90s or the Philly rap group Mountain Brothers in the early 2000s--to find mainstream success in the recording industry:


Bad Rap, African American filmmaker Salima Koroma's 2016 documentary about the various hardships Asian American rappers have to deal with in the industry, covers all those above questions and more in a lean, efficient and enjoyably provocative manner that makes me say, "Wow, I think I'll let this 1985 Minneapolis battle-of-the-bands script idea remain a script idea." Her film turned out to be better than my script idea.

Koroma's documentary was the 2016 film I most eagerly wanted to watch last year, even more so than a tentpole blockbuster like Captain America: Civil War or a critics' darling like Moonlight. (Sorry, Barry Jenkins.) Now Bad Rap is streamable on Netflix after a run on the festival circuit, and, man, the doc was worth the wait.

Bad Rap producer Jaeki Cho and director Salima Koroma

Bad Rap, which was crowdfunded on Indiegogo, took Koroma and Korean American producer Jaeki Cho--the (now-former) manager of one of the film's four main subjects--three and a half years to make. The doc follows four Asian American spitters who either have often toured together or have done guest features on each other's tracks.

The amiable and quick-witted Jonathan Park, who's now in his thirties, was an L.A. skater kid who, as a teen, stumbled into the battle rap scene--the Detroit version of the battle rap scene was famously depicted in 8 Mile--and fell in love with the art form, or as I like to call battle rap, "Don Rickles insult humor by people who, unlike Rickles, have rhythm." Park, a.k.a. Dumbfoundead, is a hero in L.A.'s Koreatown (judging from his music videos and YouTube shorts, he is to K-town what De Niro is to New York: the unofficial mayor) and in battle rap circles, but he's unknown elsewhere. Bad Rap reveals--and I wasn't previously aware of this--that Drake is a fan of Dumbfoundead's battle raps, which makes me like Drake even more than I already do.

Drizzy in Bad Rap

Dumbfoundead vs. Tantrum

If, unlike the 6 God, you've never heard any of Dumbfoundead's freestyles before, the best place to start is the enjoyable Dumbfoundead half--and just his half of it because the other half is skippable and so one-note--of the classic Dumbfoundead vs. Tantrum battle, a viral video that's featured in Bad Rap. Koroma's doc finds Dumbfoundead at a point in his recording career when he's feeling burnt out creatively, and he's becoming frustrated by two different kinds of difficulties: the difficulty of the battle rapper trying to write music under a more conventional pop music structure and the difficulty of an Asian American indie artist trying to make it in hip-hop. So to recharge himself, Dumbfoundead gets back into battle rapping after a five-year absence, and Bad Rap follows him as he tries to regain his creative spark.

Meanwhile, New York native Rekstizzy, a younger Korean spitter whom Dumbfoundead admires, is unapologetic about embracing shock value in his music videos and is aggressive about sticking a fork in the stereotype of the emasculated Asian male and calling it done. He's fond of saying "Me being a rapper is offensive to people" every time he defends either his preference for a career in hip-hop (instead of opting to do the clichéd Asian American thing of pursuing either medicine, law, accounting or classical music) or his strange artistic choices. (Koroma's doc ignores the existence of Rekstizzy's now-defunct Gumship, his attempt at running an Asian American pop culture news site during the time Bad Rap was filmed. A self-proclaimed "Asian Men's Guide to Lifestyle and Entertainment," Gumship was a bizarre cross between Maxim and Justin Lin's YOMYOMF.)

Awkwafina, another New York native and the doc's lone female subject, wants to make Asian Americans--who are so underrepresented or poorly depicted in pop culture--proud via her irreverent music. "Visibility is 100 percent the most important thing for Asian Americans, for all minorities right now," says the rapper from Queens in a clip of her speaking at a Greene Space panel that centered on Fresh Off the Boat's historic first season.

A capture of Awkwafina, Timothy DeLaGhetto and the elderly DJ Chizz from Awkwafina's YouTube talk show Tawk

The Chinese American MC's cocky--or rather, cawky--and slightly dorky persona is a welcome contrast from the image of the submissive and hypersexualized Asian woman in songs like Day Above Ground's much-maligned 2013 single "Asian Girlz." At the time of its controversial release, Awkwafina nicely roasted Day Above Ground's stereotype-filled piece of shit by referring to it on Twitter as "this new... video by LFO."

Awkwafina is most likely the only Asian American rapper in the film your Teen Vogue-reading female or gay co-worker who thinks Too $hort is the name of a Fast and the Furious sequel will be able to recognize. That's mostly due to viral sensations like her video for "My Vag," a female response to Mickey Avalon's "My Dick" that ended up being a better tune than "My Dick."


"Her nonchalance is her swag," says Lyricks, Bad Rap's fourth subject/main interviewee, about Awkwafina. The Arlington, Virginia-based Lyricks is the only one of the four main interviewees I'm unfamiliar with. The most earnest rapper of the four, Lyricks has an interesting conflict--a deeply religious Korean, Lyricks is torn between his attachment to Christianity and his enjoyment of some of the vices that are inseparable from a hip-hop lifestyle--that the film doesn't really delve into as often as I would have liked.

"They want you to be that karate-kicking, orange Civic-driving, SAT-taking dude. And like, a lot of us aren't like that. I'm American at heart, you know? That's why I'm fighting for hip-hop. Because I am American. I'm going against the grain. I'm going where I'm not accepted. And what's more American than that?" --Asian American rapper Decipher, who grew up listening to the Wu-Tang Clan and recorded the 2011 track "Angry Asian Man," from Bad Rap

Much of Bad Rap is about how Dumbfoundead, Rekstizzy, Awkwafina and Lyricks are as American as apple pie, and yet, the people who hold all the power in hip-hop, whether they're white record label execs or black tastemakers, continue to either treat Asian American artists as outsiders or completely otherize them in various ways, like that lame industry excuse of "It's difficult as fuck to market you" or the corniness of "Learn Chinese" by Chinese American battle rapper Jin. That Wyclef Jean-produced 2003 single was supposed to launch Jin--a hero to Dumbfoundead, Rekstizzy, Awkwafina and Lyricks because of the clever bars he came up with while he competed in rap battles on BET's 106 & Park--like a rocket into the mainstream but ended up pleasing nobody. (Jin, who expresses some regret in Bad Rap over recording "Learn Chinese," should have been aware back in 2003 that a producer who took part in the racist Chinese restaurant skit during the Fugees'The Score is going to be allergic to nuanced portrayals of Asians.)

All four rappers are not signed to any major labels (they, like Oddisee, prefer to stay indie, although Dumbfoundead would like it if some major labels would pay attention to him) and are East Asian, and that relates to one misgiving I had about Bad Rap, ever since I first read about the film when Koroma, Jaeki Cho, Dumbfoundead, Rekstizzy, Awkwafina and Lyricks made the press rounds together last year. The film implies that longtime tensions between African Americans--including black purists who are fiercely protective of an art form that was started by black folks and are skeptical about any non-whites who participate in this art form because they have to constantly put up with one of white America's favorite pastimes, cultural appropriation--and East Asians are partly to blame for Asian American rappers not being taken seriously (outside the context of Bad Rap, these tensions became heightened during last year's NYPD/Peter Liang scandal). But I wish Koroma and Cho had expanded the doc's scope a bit and brought their cameras over to the Bay Area, where the camaraderie within the HBK Gang--a hip-hop collective that's full of black and Filipino artists from Richmond, Fairfield and Pinole and was the subject of lengthy profiles within the pages of Spin and The Fader at the time of the filming of Bad Rap--is the opposite of the tensions between black folks and Asians.

A few seconds with the HBK Gang on-screen--like how the members of Far East Movement, the Asian American pop-rap group best known for the radio hit "Like a G6," get to give their two cents about battle rappers for a few seconds in Bad Rap--could have shown that there's a different side to the interactions between blacks and Asians in the industry, and that there are examples of Asian artists not being treated as outsiders. Filipino American rapper P-Lo--who currently has a Bay Area radio hit in the form of "Put Me on Somethin'," a catchy collabo with Bay Area legend E-40 that's blowing up right in time for Filipino American History Month--comes from the HBK Gang.


Although Thai American YouTube comedian Timothy DeLaGhetto, who raps under the name Traphik and is a Wild 'n Out cast member, briefly appears in the doc as an interviewee (as well as in clips of either Awkwafina's non-musical on-screen work or Dumbfoundead's return to battle rapping), Bad Rap suffers a bit from the lack of a point of view from a Southeast Asian MC, and any time we Southeast Asians are downplayed in an epic and wide-ranging Asian American narrative like Bad Rap's three-year time span, it reinforces the misconception that the Asian American diaspora is only an East Asian one. (Actually, I'm way more offended, by the way, by an A&R guy from Atlantic Records being selected by the filmmakers as one of several high-powered recording industry representatives they bring in to candidly evaluate the music of Dumbfoundead, Rekstizzy, Awkwafina and Lyricks during Bad Rap. Atlantic is the same label that continually fucked over Lupe Fiasco and recently handed a record deal to the white "Cash Me Outside" girl. Fuck anything anyone from Atlantic says.)

Fortunately, Bad Rap doesn't ignore the accomplishments of Filipino beatmakers within the industry and includes footage of DJ Qbert's wizardry on the turntables from his days as a member of the Invisibl Skratch Piklz. Because without the footage of an Asian American hip-hop historian pointing out to an off-screen Koroma how Filipinos were pioneers, whether on the mic or in the lab, early on in the history of Asian Americans in hip-hop, the first few minutes of Bad Rap would have been trash.

Bad Rap's Filipino hip-hop pioneers segment

Bad Rap's clips of legendary Pinoy turntablists

And that kind of omission would have been so disappointing, especially since Bad Rap triumphs in a whole lot of other areas. For example, Koroma is astoundingly somehow able to take a battle rapper competition--the King of the Dot battle rap league's Blackout 5, sponsored by Drake's OVO Sound label in the Canadian rapper's home turf of "the 6," a.k.a. Toronto--and make the 2015 competition one of the most nerve-wracking sequences of any movie from 2016, this side of Green Room.

With the help of some canny editing and the wise decision of not getting a composer to do a bunch of on-the-nose, reality TV-style score cues to tell you how to feel, Koroma effectively makes you feel every ounce of Dumbfoundead's isolation at the competition (the only other Asian rapper on-stage during Blackout 5 is Traphik) and his nervousness about getting back into verbal fighting shape after a long time away from battling.

"Those [battle] rappers are vicious. They'll pick apart any racial attribute to get an edge in the battle." --Kev Nish of Far East Movement, from Bad Rap

Adding to the nerve-wracking feel of Bad Rap's Toronto sequence is footage of a cringeworthy Blackout 5 press conference where Dumbfoundead has to deal with a bunch of journalists who stupidly think that just because the battle rappers they're grilling get to toss the most offensive racial jokes at each other in battles, that gives them permission to be racist to those battlers in a press room setting. The press conference footage intriguingly shatters two different notions: the notion that hip-hop, a culture that a lot of mistreated people of color find to be an empowering one for them, is always inclusive--it sometimes isn't, especially to Asian Americans and anyone who's a woman (and Awkwafina happens to be both)--and the notion that Canada, the country almost every American liberal thinks about fleeing to every time a far-right Republican ballbag wins the presidential election, isn't racist. Canadians can be as racist as a MAGA cap-wearing Trumputo supporter too, and the black and white hip-hop journalists who act unprofessionally towards Dumbfoundead and attempt to make him feel unwelcome at the KOTD/OVO event in Bad Rap are an example of that.

One off-screen journalist even fucks up the delivery of his racist and hacky joke about Dumbfoundead's Asianness by referring to David Carradine from the Kung Fu TV series as "James Carradine." It's like listening to an uneducated and racist YouTube comments section emerge in sentient form. The situation gets so tense and uncomfortable that Drake has to step in and politely (and very tersely) get the dumbfucks from the press to back off from trying to roast a mildly irritated Dumbfoundead because of his race.


At Blackout 5, Dumbfoundead faces off against Wild 'n Out cast member Conceited, who rose to fame in the battle rap world while Dumbfoundead had his hiatus. During the Toronto sequence, it's nice, for a change, to be able to see a Dumbfoundead freestyle in longer intervals and without the blurry image quality and second-rate audio quality of Bad Rap's viral clips of Dumbfoundead's previous battles (the KOTD channel's professional cinematographer has a lot to do with that).

In "the ring," the black Wild 'n Out regular pretends to mistake his fellow Wild 'n Out comedian Traphik for Dumbfoundead and launches into a barrage of tasteless Asian jokes that can be difficult to listen to, especially if you're an Asian who's not familiar with the battle rap world (the kind of world, by the way, that, in addition to all the racial jokes, can get really homophobic and transphobic in its humor too). But to Dumbfoundead, they're jokes he's accustomed to hearing all the time in battles, and he doesn't get upset about them. (In the battle rap world, expressing that you're genuinely upset about them is like a sign of weakness.) In the L.A. Times last year, Dumbfoundead pointed out that there are good Asian jokes and there are bad ones, and outside the battle rap world, Chris Rock's controversial Oscar joke about Asian child labor was, to Dumbfoundead, "kinda wack, and super stereotypical" and was not a funny and tasteful joke. "I notice that when I battle rap I hear the best of the best Asian jokes," said Dumbfoundead to the Times.

That's why it's uncomfortable to watch the late Don Rickles targeting Asian folks in the audience during his stand-up act. Never in those ancient Rickles clips (or, shit, any other clip of a hacky '80s stand-up doing lots of Asian-bashing) is there an Asian target who turns around and gets to clap back like how, during the most crowd-pleasing moment of Bad Rap, Dumbfoundead overcomes his insecurities and just satisfyingly rips apart Conceited verbally after all the racially charged insults Conceited subjects him to on-stage. In a move that's atypical for a battler, never once does Dumbfoundead take his clever insults--I'm especially fond of Dumbfoundead dragging Wild 'n Out and referring to Conceited as "Lil' Romeo"--to a racial slur-filled place.






8 Mile may be the definitive movie about battle rap in the eyes of people who put together all those listicles about hip-hop in movies, but in just one sequence with Dumbfoundead at Blackout 5, Bad Rap winds up being a slightly more intriguing and accurate movie about what it's like inside the mind of a battle rapper than Eminem's hit movie. (Sorry, Curtis Hanson.) Also, it doesn't have Mekhi Phifer in fake dreads that look as convincing as Jerry Jones taking a knee.

The ample amount of screen time Dumbfoundead has in Bad Rap is evidence that Koroma finds Dumbfoundead to be the most compelling of her four subjects, and every Asian American rapper Koroma interviews, from Awkwafina to Traphik, is similarly awed by Dumbfoundead. They have nothing but praise for Dumbfoundead's indie hustle and his skills at insult humor and wordplay during rap battles. Bad Rap makes a convincing argument that the charismatic Dumbfoundead deserves to be as big a star as his admirer Drake or Kendrick Lamar. But the doc also suggests that sometimes Dumbfoundead himself gets in his own way and could be to blame for why he's not the bigger star he wants to be.

If Rekstizzy is the crass and loud skirt-chaser/party animal of the quartet in Bad Rap, Dumbfoundead comes across as a more gentlemanly ladies' man and a more relaxed party animal. But to Dumbfoundead's supermarket worker mother, who shows up to hassle her son in Korean during his entertaining 2013 video for "Huell Howser," his tribute to the deceased Southern California travelogue show host, that relaxed manner of his is too much of an interference in his work as a musician.


Bad Rap presents two different examples of Asian immigrant parents. Lyricks' dry-cleaner mother is the type of parent who doesn't understand her son's music and his decision to pursue a career that doesn't pay as handsomely as medicine or law but has learned to accept those things--for now. (At one point in the film, Lyricks is reminded in Korean by his mom that "You made a promise with Mom that you're going to do something you love until you're 25. After that, you said you're going to do what Mom wants you to do.") Meanwhile, Dumbfoundead's mom is the parent who's completely supportive of her son's choice to be a creative instead of a doctor or lawyer but thinks he should be more disciplined about his art.

"If a person wants to be successful, he has to give up something," says Dumbfoundead's mom in Korean to the filmmakers while her son stands near her and solemnly listens to her addressing the camera. "He's my son, and I think he's doing a lot to get his work done. But honestly, I don't think he's making that sacrifice... Those that are in Koreatown are very into hanging out and drinking. They always call him and want him to come out, and I don't think he's able to control that."

The nuanced opinion of Dumbfoundead's mom is an interesting departure from the more cartoonish, all-angry-about-their-kids'-preference-for-showbiz-all-the-time parents in all those semi-autobiographical indie movies from Asian American filmmakers about the immigrant families that raised them, whether it's American Chai or The Debut. (Sorry, Gene Cajayon.) But the star of Bad Rap's segment with Dumbfoundead and his mom has to be her multi-colored nails, and those assorted nail colors prove she's where Dumbfoundead inherited some of his quirkiness and sense of humor from.


Something in his mom's words must have struck a nerve in Dumbfoundead and convinced him to work harder because after the end of the filming of Bad Rap, he added screen acting to his work (he's currently starring as--what else?--a battle rapper in Bodied, Korean American music video director Joseph Kahn's latest feature film, while Awkwafina is also shifting to movie roles like her role as one of the all-female thieves in the upcoming Ocean's Eight), and shortly after Bad Rap's Tribeca Film Festival premiere, he dropped my favorite single of his to date. It's even better than his 2011 track "Are We There Yet." (Sorry, "Are We There Yet.") In fact, Koroma is so fond of Dumbfoundead's poignant and contemplative 2011 tune--"'Are We There Yet' was and is the spirit of what the film is," said Koroma to Vice--that she chose it to conclude her film before the start of its end credits.

"Safe" is Dumbfoundead's anthemic and witty response to a year that saw several Asian American celebrities speaking out about both the need for more Asian American representation and their frustrations with the blinding whiteness of the people in power in Hollywood, which has led to continual whitewashing (and wack Asian jokes during the Oscars). Dumbfounded added to the conversation his two cents in an amusing and visually inventive way: through the magic of CGI, "Safe" video director Jay Ahn and visual effects supervisor Alex Oh inserted Dumbfoundead's face into everything from The Great Gatsby to the Brady Bunch opening titles.

The "Safe" video is one of Dumbfoundead's biggest viral hits, eclipsed only by his videos for a collabo with a pre-Dre-era Anderson .Paak called "Cellphone,""Are We There Yet" and his remix of Aloe Blacc's "I Need a Dollar." The 2016 video is Dumbfoundead's way of saying, "If Hollywood's not going to give us juicy or non-stereotypical roles that are just like the roles white folks always get to play, then fuck it. I'll put myself in all their roles on my own."


I wouldn't be surprised if "Safe" caused Koroma and Jaeki Cho to think to themselves, "Damn, maybe we should have held back the release of Bad Rap so that we could have added 'Safe' to the end credits." The placement of that 2016 Dumbfoundead joint in the end credits would have resulted in a credits sequence as rousing as that time the Malcolm X end credits were accompanied by the anthemic "Revolution," an Arrested Development track I always thought was a more impressive tune than "Tennessee." (Sorry, "Tennessee.")

Bad Rap is precisely about the same things that are on Dumbfoundead's mind in "Safe." As Dumbfounded says during the track, "What you talkin''bout there ain't no space, guess I gotta go and make more space," and since the heated conversation about representation, whitewashing and erasure shows no signs of ending, Bad Rap will continue to be a timely film, long past its mid-2010s time frame.


In the push to "make more space," Dumbfoundead and Awkwafina (and after the film's time frame, Lyricks) wound up with joints that became viral hits, but not even a viral hit is enough for them. Throughout Bad Rap, the four rappers express how thirsty they are for a commercial radio hit along the lines of something like 2010's "Like a G6" or, to give a much more recent example, "Put Me on Somethin'."

Early on in the film's time frame, Rekstizzy hasn't been as lucky as his fellow Asian rappers from L.A. and Queens, so he talks Cho, who's his manager, and his music video collaborators into getting involved in an over-the-top video concept that he thinks is so innovative it will attract lots of eyeballs to his summertime single "God Bless America." Without a narrator who would have been unnecessary for the doc's easy-to-follow character arcs, Bad Rap raises--in addition to questions about the racism of the recording industry--the question "At what point does the ambition to create a much-needed radio or viral hit go too far?"

"Like you said, motherfuckers is gon' check us just because we rap. You don't think motherfuckers gonna check us for fucking spraying ketchup on a black girl's ass, dude?" --Jaeki Cho to his client Rekstizzy in Bad Rap

Rekstizzy's strange stubbornness about sticking to his vision of a July 4 barbecue where black dancers are being treated like burger patties while they twerk is the Bad Rap equivalent of the This Is Spinal Tap scene where Nigel Tufnel hears the word "sexist" in regards to his band's album cover artwork of a submissive naked woman on a leash and his response is "What's wrong with bein' sexy?" The video concept leads to a pair of provocative and long-overdue conversations I've never really seen in a doc about hip-hop before: Cho, who's worried about the optics of a Korean man doing such a crass thing to a black woman's body, argues twice with Rekstizzy about his idea and pushes him to "think about some of the repercussions that might happen."

Rekstizzy in Bad Rap

I'm astounded by how Koroma, a black woman, remained as objective as possible while capturing footage of the dancers at the "God Bless America" video shoot and didn't take five to go strangle Rekstizzy à la Burt vs. Chester and Chuck vs. Bob at the family portrait shoot at the end of the opening titles of Soap. "Dude, you really think [the people that are going to get involved are] gonna think this is something innovative? Seriously?," says an exasperated Cho, who becomes the quasi-hero of Bad Rap's video shoot storyline, to Rekstizzy. You can tell how young Rekstizzy is compared to Dumbfoundead and Awkwafina because the concept he calls "innovative" has been around since the early years of MTV, in the much less condiment-strewn form of wet-lensed ass shots during racy '80s videos by the likes of Rod Stewart and any white motherfucker who looks like David Lee Roth.

Cho has a brief cameo in Rekstizzy's final product--unsurprisingly, the video itself is not excerpted in the film--but he's conveniently not part of any shots of condiments all over twerkers' booties. The "God Bless America" video shoot storyline is wrapped up at the very end of Bad Rap by the film's most amusing non-Dumbfoundead-related punchline: Cho no longer manages Rekstizzy.

From left to right: Dumbfoundead, Awkwafina, Lyricks, Salima Koroma, Jaeki Cho and Rekstizzy

For a film that juggles the weighty topic of the exploitation of the bodies of women of color in pop music with equally weighty topics like cultural appropriation, stereotyping, assimilation and Asian Americans' struggles to be taken seriously as artists and creatives, the 80-minute Bad Rap is, fortunately, neither an overstuffed and unwieldy mess nor an undernourished exploration of those topics. "I hope that this [film] starts a conversation and maybe then another film can come in and talk about the political aspects and the historical aspects," said Koroma to Fast Company. Her conversation-starter of a film is so good it even stopped somebody from totally botching a story about Prince and the Revolution wannabes in 1985. (Sorry, '80s Minneapolis period piece script. Your time will come someday, fam.)

A new addition to Netflix, Bad Rap is now streamable on the same streaming service that brought you the racist-as-fuck Iron Fist and the whitewashed live-action version of Death Note.

This is the 13th of 15 all-new blog posts that are being posted on a monthly basis until this blog's final post in December 2017. I know I said "monthly basis" all through 2017, and instead, there ended up being two posts this October and three back in August, but I guess I discovered that in August and now October, I found plenty of shit I wanted to write about before I call it quits. "I Can't Believe I've Never Seen It Till Now!" is a series of posts in which I reveal that I never watched a certain popular or really old movie until very recently, and that's largely because I'm Filipino, we're always late to the party and that's how we do.

Director Nobuhiko Obayashi's 1977 Japanese box-office hit House is the kind of film that, had it been made in 2017, would have ended up being the subject of various audience reaction videos by YouTubers who want to show how confused and bewildered the audience members look while trying to process the extremely weird shit they're watching. Not to be confused with the 1985 American horror comedy of the same name and the long-running Hugh Laurie vehicle of the same name, Obayashi's J-horror oddity was largely unknown in America until 2010, when Janus Films introduced the Toho Studios flick in theaters to American film geeks and the Criterion Collection released it on Blu-ray. Both a Phil Chung blog post for YOMYOMF (his post is basically "I don't know what the fuck I saw, but I loved it!") and a Trailers from Hell commentary track for the film's 1977 trailer made me want to see House.



House is definitely the most unconventional haunted-house movie I've ever seen. I was expecting a Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky-type bloodbath with a bit of a Battle Royale-style attitude about not giving a fuck about brutally killing off so many innocent-looking Japanese teens.

What I got instead was something stranger than Riki-Oh. I believe I have a clip of myself reacting to every scene in House:


It's that weird and nonsensical. It's not even all that scary as a horror flick, and it doesn't really become genuinely eerie until the very last scene. But what other horror flick has come up with imagery like a girl being eaten by a piano and getting mildly aroused by becoming dinner for that demonically possessed piano while she dies? Not even David Lynch could come up with something as nutso.

House's premise is on the conventional side: a teenage schoolgirl named Oshare (Kimiko Ikegami)--or as the English subtitles call her, "Gorgeous," while "Oshare" actually means "stylishness"--takes along with her six of her classmates to summer vacation at a seemingly benign country home occupied by her wheelchair-confined aunt (Yōko Minamida), and the kindly aunt's house appears to have a mind of its own. It's what Obayashi--a TV commercial director before he made House--and screenwriter Chiho Katsura did with the premise that's totally unconventional.






All the scenes before the girls' arrival at the country house are shot like a slapsticky anime sitcom instead of leaning towards the more grounded kind of light-hearted normalcy that precedes the mayhem during something like The Cabin in the Woods or Poltergeist (for the scenes of the girls traveling by train and bus, Obayashi opted for intentionally cheesy-looking matte paintings that enhance the cartooniness of the film's first half). And then as the film gets darker and gorier and the body count piles up--at one point, post-Hiroshima trauma even plays a part in the haunted house's backstory, and more on that subject later--the frivolous original score by the J-pop band Godiego (pronounced "go-die-go") weirdly remains frivolous, while House goes crazy with low-tech collage effects that call attention to how goofy-looking and low-budget they are (Obayashi wanted it to look as if a little kid worked on those effects), rather than opting for the more elegant Toho Studios equivalent of Industrial Light and Magic.

Instead of a bunch of angsty teens, House's cast of schoolgirl characters is more akin to the characters in Police Academy and Revenge of the Nerds, or as I like to call that badly aging frat movie, Rapey Smurfs. Each of the six other girls is defined by one cartoonish trait: Fantasy (Kumiko Oba) daydreams all the time; Mac (Mieko Sato) likes to eat; Melody (Eriko Tanaka) likes to play piano; Prof (Ai Matsubara) is a bespectacled bookworm; Sweet (Masayo Miyako) likes to clean; Kung Fu (Miki Jinbo) is fond of demonstrating martial arts moves in her underwear. My favorite of the girls is Kung Fu because she's the only character who takes some action and tries to fight off the supernatural being that dominates the house and also because she's always accompanied by instrumental theme music that, once you hear it, will never ever leave your brain. Kung Fu's theme amusingly sounds like an endless loop of the opening notes of Keith Sweat's "I'll Give All My Love to You" if those notes were being played in reverse.




As the above Trailers from Hell commentrak points out, Obayashi turned to his 11-year-old daughter Chigumi Obayashi for ideas about the being's attacks on the girls in the titular house. That explains a lot about the simplicity of characters like Kung Fu, the film's jaunty tone and a bunch of nightmare scenarios that are barely nightmarish but must have been unsettling to Obayashi's then-11-year-old daughter and her classmates.

I usually avoid like the plague any live-action movie where the directors weirdly turned to their preteen kids for ideas. (It's like how I hate it when film reviewers include the opinions of their preteen kids in their reviews, as if anybody gives a shit about the opinions of some kid who has no idea who Kurosawa is and thinks Fellini is a type of pasta.) The poorly received Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D--Robert Rodriguez's vehicle for a pre-Twilight Taylor Lautner and a kids' superhero movie that was thought up by the filmmaker's then-seven-year-old son--is the first such movie that comes to mind. But House is likely the only case where a kid's ideas actually improved the movie and made it one of a kind.

Miki Jinbo, a.k.a. Kung Fu, and House director Nobuhiko Obayashi

Like most of the other actresses in House, which was Obayashi's first feature film, Jinbo was a model who appeared in Obayashi's TV ads and had no prior screen acting experience before starring in the film.

So many random things take place during House, and they give off the vibe of a kid being given free rein over a horror movie and not caring that the things she likes ("Ponies! Sundaes!") and has slipped into the screenplay are elements that don't quite fit in a horror flick, like how Gorgeous' widowed father (Saho Sasazawa) randomly has the off-screen job of a film composer instead of a typical teen horror movie dad job like law enforcement or farming. It results in my favorite line of the movie: the newly remarried film composer dad, who returns home to Gorgeous after scoring a film in Italy, brags that "Leone said my music was better than Morricone's." You know right away that this movie's a comedy when a character claims to have been told that he's a better composer than the musical genius behind "The Ecstasy of Gold."

Despite Obayashi's preteen daughter's role as House's "story scenarist,"House isn't a movie little kids should be watching (they would get impatient with the movie anyway). To keep House from turning into a banal family film along the lines of Sharkboy and Lavagirl, Obayashi threw in nudity involving models-turned-actresses who are clearly a few years too old to be cast as teens and occasional bawdy moments that reinforce the film's comedic tone, like this homoerotic invitation to Fantasy from Gorgeous, who's too innocent to notice how homoerotic she sounds:


Unlike Ringu and Ju-on (The Grudge), you could not remake House in America. I really want House to stay under-the-radar in America and remain a best-kept secret among Criterion Collection nerds so that some whitewasher from Hollywood will never get his grubby hands on the property. When certain parts of white America were unable to understand why a white actress being cast as Major Kusanagi in the live-action Ghost in the Shell is so frustrating to us Asian Americans, RunLoveKill comic creator Jon Tsuei nicely schooled those stupid motherfuckers about how the Pat Boone-ization of Ghost in the Shell fucks up the whole point of the story: Japan's clinginess to technology and the nation's obsession with remaining the world's top technological superpower after the damage Hiroshima and Nagasaki did to the nation.

In other words, Ghost in the Shell is a very Japanese story, and the same is true of House. It's too personal of a film (and so reflective of the idiosyncrasies of its director and his daughter) to be turned into some generic American horror cash cow for Paramount or Ghost House Pictures (a.k.a. the Grudge and 30 Days of Night folks). Obayashi survived Hiroshima as a kid, and his first-hand experience with that tragedy seeped into House.

On second viewing, it becomes more clear that House is a comment on the nationwide PTSD of a certain generation of Japanese citizens after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a group of people represented in the film by the nameless aunt, whose grief over the war-related loss of her fiancé attracted an evil spirit that took over both her body and her house. The titular supernatural menace symbolizes the anger and grief of a generation that had nuclear bombs dropped on them, and the anger and grief are still so raw and strong that they will continue to haunt future generations in Japan and maybe even result in the deaths of a few people from those generations, just like how the evil spirit picks off Gorgeous' friends one by one. It's an interesting statement that can easily be missed while the film throws at you comedic images like pianos that eat people and severed heads that bite people in the biscuits.


I really don't care for Game of Thrones viewer reaction videos--most of those recorded reactions are about as genuine as an expression of remorse from Harvey Weinstein--or for any of those pointless YouTube videos where white people or little kids are fed examples of foreign cuisine for the first time and it turns into an uncomfortable-to-watch display of ethnic food shaming. But House is a rare case where I'm really curious about how people would react when they're first subjected to that dead girl's disembodied head taking a bite out of her friend's ass or any of the psychedelic strangeness Obayashi brought into a haunted-house movie that sometimes feels like a 90-minute Mr. Sparkle ad.

If you're a fan of House--whose House? Toho's House!--you might even be compelled to record the reactions of a significant other who's never seen the movie before and is watching it for the first time. (If your significant other walks off and is unable to finish the movie just because it's too weird, dump that person. Immediately.) I've never watched the original Amityville Horror with James Brolin and Margot Kidder--the type of pop-culture footnote in which the classic Eddie Murphy stand-up routine that mocked it is better remembered today than the movie itself--and I never will, because I know that shit's never going to be as entertaining a haunted-house movie as House.

This is the last all-new blog post before this blog's absolute final post in December 2017.

Fuck all these (predominantly white) superheroes fighting motion-capture-enhanced (and often boring) supervillains on the big screen. The movies I'm way more eager to see are documentaries about ordinary Asian Americans fighting stereotypes. It's a fight I've been a part of in some capacity. Nearly everything I do (even something as insignificant as writing a barely-being-read-by-anybody post for this insignificant and soon-to-go-completely-inactive blog) is some sort of clapback against Asian stereotypes, which have been a pain in my ass since junior high. Filmmaker Salima Koroma's Bad Rap, a doc about Asian American rappers, was the movie I wanted to see the most last year, and now The Problem with Apu, a 49-minute doc directed by Michael Melamedoff and hosted and produced by comedian and Politically Re-Active podcast co-host Hari Kondabolu, is the 2017 film that, despite its skimpy length and non-theatrical status, I've been anticipating the most, much more so than Wonder Woman, Thor: Ragnarok and even Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

The Problem with Apu chronicles the Indian American comedian's love/hate relationship with a little-known Tracey Ullman Show spinoff called The Simpsons. Kondabolu's a Simpsons fan who loves everything about the animated franchise that was brought to life by Matt Groening, James L. Brooks and the late Sam Simon, except for one character. That would be Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, the Indian convenience store owner who, since the show's premiere in 1990 (not counting a 1989 Christmas special that was actually the eighth episode in the first season's production order, "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire"), has been voiced by a white guy, longtime Simpsons voice actor Hank Azaria. The character is, as Kondabolu describes him in the doc, "servile, devious and goofy." Apu's shtick on the show is, as Kondabolu memorably said in an extremely funny 2012 Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell segment about his delight over the rise of Indian American representation on TV, basically "a white guy doing an impression of a white guy making fun of my father!"


The most interesting tidbit about Kondabolu's Totally Biased rant about Apu, which went viral and ended up being shown in high school and college classrooms, is that Kondabolu was initially reluctant to write and perform the segment because he was so tired of complaining about Apu. I like how Bell--the now-defunct FX late night show's titular host and Kondabolu's boss in the Totally Biased writers' room--had to talk Kondabolu into doing it, as if Kondabolu were Logan being dragged out of his dead-end limo driver job to unsheathe his adamantium claws one last time and protect some runaway mutant kid.

Just like how people who have food-shamed me (for the Filipino meals either I like or my Filipino parents made for me) or would tell me dumb shit like "Why are you talking about race so much? You're the racist!" are the bane of my existence, Apu is the bane of Kondabolu's existence. Ever since The Simpsons became a smash hit, he's been called "Apu" or subjected to the character's "Thank you, come again!" catchphrase by bullies and, in his adult life, hecklers at comedy clubs. In The Problem with Apu, Kondabolu interviews other Indian American comedians or actors--they range from Aziz Ansari to the non-comedic Sakina Jaffrey, who started out in clichéd roles as "weeping, ethnic moms of potential rapists and murderers" and has become known lately for her non-stereotypical roles on House of Cards, Mr. Robot and Timeless--and he discovers that being lumped in with Apu is, sadly, a common experience for them too.

Hasan Minhaj, Hari Kondabolu and Sheetal Sheth raise their hands to point out if someone else has ever referred to them as "Apu" in The Problem with Apu.

While Kondabolu loves The Simpsons despite Apu, Kal Penn from the Harold and Kumar movies (and currently, ABC's Designated Survivor), whom Kondabolu also interviews in the doc, interestingly hates The Simpsons solely because of Apu. In fact, Penn's vocal disdain for Apu back when he starred in the Harold and Kumar flicks was, long before Kondabolu's Totally Biased rant in 2012, the moment that made me begin to dislike both Apu and the Simpsons writers' refusal to acknowledge how racist and outdated their Apu shtick is.

The Problem with Apu weirdly doesn't mention that one of the most crowd-pleasing and enjoyable moments of Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle has Kumar retorting "Thank you, come again!" while he steals a truck from a pack of racist white bullies who previously hassled an Indian liquor store owner with the same line. I wouldn't be surprised if the reclamation of that Apu line that so haunted Penn for years--whether as an Indian American outside of showbiz or as a struggling actor--was actually Penn's idea and his form of retaliation against The Simpsons.


We've all been guilty of doing that Apu voice--or, as Jaffrey calls the Apu voice in the doc, the act of "patanking," a term that sounds like an Urban Dictionary sex act where someone does oral sex that sounds kind of like Mandy Patinkin whenever he sings a show tune--and that includes Kondabolu himself, who, in interviews, has expressed his regret over imitating his parents Hank Azaria style during the earlier years of his stand-up act, and non-Indian people of color too. In drama class in high school, my classmates and I had to do an improv game called "Dubbing," and when it was my turn to grab the mic and redub someone else's voice on the theater stage for an improvised convenience store scene, I redubbed a black classmate so that he sounded like Apu. My one public moment of patanking is one of many examples of why I wish I could retcon 99 percent of my time in high school.

When you're a teenager, you're not aware at all how offensive Apu is to Indian Americans. You don't question enough the frequently problematic shit you're subjected to from the screen. That's mostly because Kondabolu wasn't around back then to entertainingly flame examples of minstrelsy like Apu and change people's minds like my own stupid teenage mind. Kondabolu was just an 11-year-old kid when I was taking drama class in high school.


The Problem with Apu is airing on the odd and unexpected platform of truTV, a channel that started out as Court TV and weirdly morphed into the Turner networks' answer to Comedy Central. (Oh yeah, and I almost forgot that the Turner folks rebranded TBS into their Comedy Central long before they did the same to truTV. But present-day TBS, with its reruns of lowbrow Seth MacFarlane cartoons uneasily sharing space with Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, is more like Comedy Central in the mid-'90s, back when CC was thirsty to be taken more seriously by TV critics, so it started spending more cash on original programming, yet it wasn't above recycling Benny Hill Show reruns). The only people who are aware of truTV's existence are comedy nerds and reality TV junkies who are carryovers from truTV's years of branding itself as a home for reality programming, and only comedy nerds are going to see The Problem with Apu.

I really want more than just comedy nerds to see this doc. It deserves a bigger platform. And, of course, it ought to be shown in high school and college classrooms just like Kondabolu's Totally Biased rant was. Still, I'm satisfied that truTV was willing to take a chance on this doc ("I think that some people were just afraid of pissing Fox off, and truTV wasn't," said Kondabolu to the A.V. Club) and that this project Kondabolu has been talking about for such a long time on his Twitter feed (a couple of years, to be exact) is finally getting out there to viewers.

Whoopi Goldberg adds an Apu action figure to her house's collection of racist "Negrobilia" in The Problem with Apu.

I want this doc to be able to stop some Simpsons-watching kid somewhere from becoming another me who does the Apu voice just to score some cheap laughs. Apu is a relic of a different and much less enlightened time, back when there were no Indian American writers or comedians who were around on TV to react against a lazily written Indian stereotype like there are today, in this present era of streaming service hits from Indian American stars/showrunners like Ansari's Master of None and Mindy Kaling's recently concluded Hulu show The Mindy Project. He's a privileged white person's idea of an Indian immigrant, with none of the nuance an Ansari or a Kaling would have brought to such a character (sure, Azaria or the Simpsons writers often try to hype up Apu's reputation in Springfield as one of its kindest and most decent citizens, but that's like if someone from Bonanza stepped on out in the early '70s and said, "Hop Sing's a nice guy! Orientals should be proud, goshdarn it!"). The Problem with Apu entertainingly also looks at what led to the creation of Apu (the doc reveals that--and despite being a fan of The Simpsons'first eight seasons, I never knew this--Simpsons staff writer Mike Reiss told the rest of the Simpsons crew not to make a convenience store clerk character Indian in a first-season Simpsons script because he felt it was clichéd, but then Azaria defied Reiss by ad-libbing an Indian accent at the script's table read, to the delight of the other staff writers, and so Apu was born) and why the show's mostly white writers have insisted on keeping Apu as a presence on the show, despite so many criticisms from the likes of Kondabolu, who, throughout the doc, attempts to get a bizarrely reclusive Azaria to talk in front of the camera about Apu.

This rather short doc--Azaria's refusal to be interviewed and the participation of only one Simpsons veteran, comedian Dana Gould, who no longer writes for the show, are the reasons why it's so damn short--about The Simpsons' biggest flaw turns into both a thoughtful and passionate call for the need for more people of color to write for the screen and an intriguing statement about immigrant children's love/hate relationship with this racist country their parents are weirdly more enamored with than their kids are, despite how badly the country treats those parents. The doc is also funny as fuck. The Problem with Apu has resulted in the most press Kondabolu has received in his comedy career, and I hope the doc leads to bigger things for him. I first became a fan of Kondabolu's comedy stylings when I saw some of his visual essays on YouTube, a couple of years before he landed the Totally Biased correspondent gig. And he's amazing on Twitter, whether he's slamming gentrification, Trumputo supporters, Lena Dunham, right-wing Indian American politician Bobby Jindal or, as Desus and Mero amusingly like to call racist or lily-white behavior that's done by ignorant white people, "Yakubian shit."

Dear Hipster, You're offended I asked for ketchup for my frites? I'm offended that you call them "Frites"& not "French fries."

— Hari Kondabolu (@harikondabolu) April 12, 2014

Day 3 of #Bonnaroo& only 4 white people wearing headdresses. Hopefully, they commit to their outfit & are unjustifiably killed.

— Hari Kondabolu (@harikondabolu) June 10, 2017

A preacher with a "you deserve to be raped" sign was hit over the head by a lady with a baseball bat. Ironically, this proves there is a God

— Hari Kondabolu (@harikondabolu) June 10, 2017

Sometimes I want Jesus to come back just to see white faces shriek at their brown messiah.

— Hari Kondabolu (@harikondabolu) June 26, 2017

My mother was a medical doctor in India & knows 3 languages, but she has an accent...SO PEOPLE SPEAK SLOWLY

— Hari Kondabolu (@harikondabolu) July 2, 2013

Asking me "Why do you have to make everything about race?" is like asking me "Why do you have to use your eyes & ears all the time?"

— Hari Kondabolu (@harikondabolu) December 22, 2013

FELLOW DESIS: List the racist things people have called you. Here's a few of mine: Apu, Slumdog, Cabbie, Paki, Gandhi, Sandnig... #DesiPain

— Hari Kondabolu (@harikondabolu) January 29, 2014

It's #SoWhiteOutside that the snow called me "reverse racist" for shoveling it.

— Hari Kondabolu (@harikondabolu) February 13, 2014

"I miss the days when the people we talked about couldn't talk back." -WHAT IT MEANS WHEN PEOPLE COMPLAIN ABOUT POLITICAL CORRECTNESS

— Hari Kondabolu (@harikondabolu) May 26, 2017

This tweet by Lena Dunham of "Girls" makes it clear that SHE DOESN'T HAVE MUSLIM FRIENDS WHO WEAR VEILS pic.twitter.com/ZK33Ry2M

— Hari Kondabolu (@harikondabolu) August 12, 2012

This is the essence of nepotism & cronyism & favoritism. The world should not be divided into “my clique” & everyone else. This is not high school. https://t.co/NvGKoSiNIv

— Hari Kondabolu (@harikondabolu) November 18, 2017

Bobby Jindal said "the confederate flag is a symbol of my heritage." Apparently, his mouth has seceded from his brain.

— Hari Kondabolu (@harikondabolu) July 8, 2015

.@BobbyJindal has ended his campaign for President. He will return to his role as "minority best friend/ house pet."

— Hari Kondabolu (@harikondabolu) November 17, 2015

Bobby Jindal is so white, Nikki Haley calls him a "sell-out."

— Hari Kondabolu (@harikondabolu) June 24, 2015

The Problem with Apu is as sharp and funny as Kondabolu's tweets often are. He's precisely the kind of provocative and progressive Asian American stand-up I wanted to be, back when I considered dabbling into stand-up, but then I wisely backed off from it because I know that if I ever had to deal with a racist heckler like Kondabolu does in the 2015 comedy club clip that opens The Problem with Apu, my way of dealing with that heckler would likely end with that guy being stabbed multiple times and me being in jail.

I'm just like this guy when it comes to the racism that's been normalized by Trumputo's America:


Kondabolu handles racist hecklers a lot more calmly than I would have. Like many other stand-ups of color (or female stand-ups who have to deal with lewd or misogynist hecklers), he does it the professional way, and that is to turn around and roast them with a vengeance from the stage.

And I don't know how Kondabolu's able to similarly prevent himself from losing his shit and punching somebody when Simpsons fans attack him for making a doc that's critical about some of the writing on The Simpsons, before they even bothered to watch the doc on truTV.

My documentary about Apu is in line with the spirit of The Simpsons. The Simpsons critiques pop culture with humor & thoughtfulness. What’s more of a Simpsons move than doing the same about The Simpsons?

— Hari Kondabolu (@harikondabolu) November 12, 2017

Or me depicting every white guy as a whiny little baby who calls everyone who disagrees with him a “snowflake” because he can’t argue something intelligently point by point, especially since he hasn’t seen the thing he hates to begin with. https://t.co/xXOgA9wGBh

— Hari Kondabolu (@harikondabolu) November 11, 2017

WHITE DUDE: Everything is politically correct! You can’t say anything you want anymore without someone complaining.
ME: I’m making a movie about Apu from The Simpsons.
WHITE DUDE: You snowflake! Way to be politically correct! Everyone just says whatever stupid shit they want now.

— Hari Kondabolu (@harikondabolu) November 11, 2017

Man, people are more pissed about me making #TheProblemWithApu than I have ever been about Apu. And the documentary hasn’t even come out yet!

— Hari Kondabolu (@harikondabolu) November 13, 2017

To all the people who are calling my #TheProblemWithApu documentary “Politically Correct” & calling me a SJW: NO ONE IS MAKING YOU WATCH IT, YOU SNOWFLAKES. YOU CAN’T MAKE ANYTHING WITHOUT TROLL SNOWFLAKES CRYING ABOUT IT. THIS IS AMERICA, YOU DON’T LIKE HOW IT WORKS...GET OUT!

— Hari Kondabolu (@harikondabolu) November 12, 2017

The tweets from Simpsons stans who can't handle Kondabolu's criticisms about Apu are another problem that's worthy of its own 49-to-60-minute doc. It ought to be called The Problem with Apu Defenders (or Defenders of Any Animated Franchise Who Are as Thin-Skinned and Fascist as Trumputo). We saw this problem a couple of months ago when the toxic side of Rick and Morty fandom soured many viewers' enjoyment of the third season of Rick and Morty, whether that toxic side was in the form of Reddit trolls who doxxed and harassed the show's new female staff writers simply because they don't think women are funny or the form of irate fans who flocked to McDonald's for a Rick and Morty-inspired Szechuan sauce giveaway that went awry and then stupidly unleashed their rage on McDonald's employees who didn't deserve that kind of treatment. There's even a recent A.V. Club article where the writer discusses why he's hesitant about getting into anime because many anime fans are part of the scummy 4Chan crowd, the same cesspool from which Nazi troll Milo Yiannopoulos, who himself is an anime fan, crawled out. And now a certain segment of Simpsons nerds is being hostile to Kondabolu and is unable to understand that Kondabolu is voicing his criticisms because he loves The Simpsons and he wants it to be better, just like how criticizing America doesn't mean you hate the country, and you're doing so because, like Tom Tomorrow once said, you want America to live up to its potential and be a better place than it is. Those Simpsons fanboys are proving once again that animation fans on the Internet are the worst, and they're turning out to be a lot more conservative and right-wing than I expected to see from a fanbase for a largely left-leaning animated show.

The best way to get through an animated franchise like Rick and Morty or The Simpsons without letting your enjoyment of it be ruined by the behavior of its most right-wing or racist fans is to not engage those fans and simply put them on mute. Those right-wing fans need to go walk in traffic. They're basically old men who are afraid of change and progress, and they're way too attached to the mentality of "Nobody should be exempt from being made fun of. Also, Apu should remain the same because everybody on The Simpsons is a stereotype!" That "Nobody is exempt from being made fun of because I'm an equal opportunity offender, and if you're too sensitive to handle being the butt of a joke, get out" argument in the comedy world in 2017 is bullshit. It's trash. It's cowardice. It's an excuse for lazy-as-fuck comedy writing and an excuse for white men to use comedy to throw their limp dicks around and continue to discriminate against (or shut out and alienate from the comedy world) members of oppressed groups or anyone who isn't a white male. Even Tina Fey, whose writing I used to enjoy before her work on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt made it clear that she has a blind spot when it comes to handling race, is fond of backing that bullshit argument. Comedy is more effective when it's punching up instead of punching down, and The Problem with Apu offers the suggestion that if the Simpsons writers aren't going to ever consider the idea of punching up when it comes to humor involving South Asians, maybe it's time for The Simpsons to die like the racist grandfather it so resembles lately.

Sakina Jaffrey in The Problem with Apu

In 2016, The Simpsons attempted to address Indian American viewers' resentment of Apu during "Much Apu About Something," an episode credited to writer Michael Price, the creator of the Netflix animated series F Is for Family. The episode guest-starred Pitch Perfect's Utkarsh Ambudkar--who said in 2013 to Huffington Post writer Mallika Rao, another woman Kondabolu interviews during the doc, that he hates Apu and the racial slurs that resulted from the character's presence on The Simpsons because "It totally fucked with my childhood"--as the voice of Jay, Apu's accentless nephew and the show's first-ever Indian American character. Jay takes over Apu's Kwik-E-Mart and clashes with his uncle when he attempts to modernize the Kwik-E-Mart and attract the health food demographic. At one point, Jay lashes out at Apu and says to him, "You're a stereotype, man!"

Vox TV critic Todd VanDerWerff praised"Much Apu About Something" for expressing some self-awareness about Apu's outdatedness as a depiction of Indians, but in The Problem with Apu, Ambudkar feels differently about the final result when Kondabolu interviews him about his Simpsons guest shot. He basically says The Simpsons had an opportunity to change things about its depiction of South Asians and bring more nuance to the stereotype he hated since childhood, but the show blew it. In the end, Jay leaves Springfield, the status quo is restored and, as Ambudkar says to Kondabolu with a bit of weariness, "The Simpsons wins."

Utkarsh Ambudkar in The Problem with Apu

Apu and his fully assimilated nephew Jay (voiced by Ambudkar) in "Much Apu About Something"

So if inserting a scene where somebody calls Apu a stereotype to his face isn't satisfying enough, what should The Simpsons do with Apu? The Problem with Apu doesn't really find a solution, other than "Maybe it's time for the show itself to die" (I always thought Apu should be quietly retired, like how after Phil Hartman's death, his Troy McClure and Lionel Hutz characters were written out of the show without any fanfare or explanation for their disappearances). But while promoting his doc, Kondabolu has said killing off Apu (like how the show killed off Maude Flanders back in the 11th season) would be a terrible and lazy solution, and he would rather see the show give a lot more screen time to any of the eight children Apu and his wife Manjula are raising off-screen. "I hope they create something with him, whether he's owning other businesses, or his kids get to talk so you can hear an Indian American voice appear regularly on the show," said Kondabolu to GQ.

This explains a lot of shit.

That's not going to happen, as long as Al Jean, who's been the Simpsons showrunner since the 13th season (the show is currently in the middle of season 29), is still in charge. Under Jean's watch, The Simpsons has become stagnant and stale--it's gotten to the point where the couch gag is often more satisfying than the episode that follows--and it lost its longtime composer Alf Clausen. For fans of Clausen's inventive scoring work on The Simpsons, the show's firing of Clausen earlier this season is as big a loss as Harry Shearer's exit would have been had Fox not met Shearer's salary demands in 2015. Sure, there have been occasional half-hours where The Simpsons regains much of its pre-ninth-season creative spark, like 2015's "Halloween of Horror," a rare Halloween episode that broke away from the show's traditional "Treehouse of Horror" format and was scripted by one of its few female staff writers, Carolyn Omine (I hope her experience as a female Simpsons writer has been a lot different from that of "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire" writer Mimi Pond, whose discussion of the misogyny of first-and-second-season Simpsons co-showrunner Sam Simon, who "didn't want any women around because he was going through a divorce," went viral earlier this year). But otherwise, The Simpsons is not the sharply written show it used to be. And if it's having a hard time trying to retain the satirical energy it once had and attempting to keep up with the acclaim that's been surrounding The Simpsons' much younger--and more diverse-in-the-writers'-room--Fox Animation Domination schedule neighbor Bob's Burgers, it's certainly not going to consider bringing any changes to its handling of the show's only few Indian characters, not when Jean is still controlling things.

In order for changes to take place, like the things Kondabolu has in mind for the Nahasapeemapetilons, The Simpsons needs to have new blood in the showrunning department. And that new person needs to hire more writers of color. It's as simple as that. (Rashida Jones and her regular writing partner Will McCormack, who, together, walked away from a writing gig for Toy Story 4 after what they described as "creative and, more importantly, philosophical differences," best summed up the current state of the world of writing for animation when they put Pixar and its work environment on blast, possibly for refusing to listen to the Angie Tribeca star's input on the Toy Story 4 screenplay, in a press statement yesterday. The duo said, "Women and people of color do not have an equal creative voice.")

And who should one of those new writers of color for The Simpsons be? It ought to be Kondabolu. The man who famously wanted to kick the shit out of Hank Azaria for doing an impression of a white guy making fun of his father would now get to boss Azaria around and tell him what to say. And it definitely won't be "Thank you, come again!"

An animated graphic from The Problem with Apu

The Problem with Apu currently airs on truTV and its mobile app. Next time here on a.k.a. DJ AFOS, I finally walk away from this blog after 10 years of typing out a bunch of shit nobody ever fully reads. I explicitly said right from the start of a 2009 blog post that I interviewed Gerald Fried on the radio in 1999, and yet this motherfucker says the interview took place in 2009. Again, nobody ever fully reads my shit.

Too many blogs I've enjoyed reading have been abandoned by authors who abruptly quit posting new content, and too many of those blogs have never even bothered to say farewell to their readers. That's not going to happen here.

I decided in 2016 to quit posting new content for this Blogspot blog, which started out as a tie-in to a radio station I used to run, at the end of 2017. I'm throwing in the towel after 10 years of both writing blog posts barely anybody reads (except for a couple of posts that were read by more than a few after they were retweeted by Edgar Wright and Paul Feig) and getting erroneously referred to as "DK AFOS" or "Jimmy Aquino" without the crucial middle initial in my name by other blogs. The urge to throw in the towel is mostly due to wanting to concentrate on both a prose novel manuscript and Accidental Star Trek Cosplay--a far less time-consuming Tumblr blog with a list of followers that continues to grow (its amount of followers greatly outnumbers the number of people who follow my Twitter feed and the number of people who have hit "Like" on the AFOS Facebook page)--and I made this decision a year before I would stop posting new content, so that I could give myself some extra time to compose a proper farewell.

And the farewell message is this: nobody reads this fucking blog anymore. Thanks for nothing, fuckfaces.

I've had it with promoting my writing on Twitter & FB. It's like being a 4-yr.-old at a party, going "Mommy! Mommy!"https://t.co/E06OLvXFUj

— JJA (@JimmyJAquino) December 17, 2016

The art of long-form blogging is no longer as enjoyable as it used to be. It's an art that's dying out. Godawful Twitter, equally godawful Facebook and the "pivot to video" trend in digital media are choking the life out of it.

Though it's in its death throes, long-form blogging has continued to be responsible for some outstanding writing. One of my favorite article headlines of 2017--and right now, I can't think of another headline that better sums up 2017--came out of the world of long-form blogging:


But otherwise, it's a dying art. And it's an art whose terminology nobody ever uses correctly. I've lost count of the amount of times someone has written to me, "I saw your blog about that movie," or "I saw your blog about the new Rick and Morty," and I want so badly to correct them and say, "What you mean to say is that you saw my blog post about the movie," but I don't want to sound like a Ted Mosby-ish douche.

The tiny audience I used to have over here has completely vanished. So why fucking bother anymore? I don't know if it's because of people's short attention spans these days and because each generation of readers has a shorter attention span than the last (it reminds me of one of my favorite Elvis Costello verses: "A teenage girl is crying because she don't look like a million dollars/So help her if you can/Because she don't seem to have the attention span"), but I think I'll blame the vanishing readership on that.

Also, the writer's blocks I sometimes would suffer from while trying to write posts during the blog's first few years have actually worsened in the last couple of years. Insert "Don Music banging his head on the keyboard" .GIF here.

Lately, my way of dealing with writer's block is to go play around in Audacity (an audio file editor) and attempt to crossfade with each other a pair of songs that have little in common with each other, aside from a similar bass line or rhythm. Fucking around in Audacity to cope with writer's block has resulted in a couple of full-bodied mixes of mine like these two:





The fact that I found myself doing the Audacity crossfading exercise nine times--for what ended up being the above N.E.R.D mix--shows you how awful my writer's blocks can get. And it's not just the constant writer's blocks that have taken the fun out of long-form blogging. Constantly having to remove from the posts a bunch of videos that were removed from YouTube or a bunch of links that went dead (or sometimes having to update the dead link so that it goes instead to a snapshot I took of the content back when it did exist) has taken the fun out of running a blog as well (your post just looks stupid if it contains a URL that leads to nowhere). Links go dead all the time. That's the nature of the beast called the Internet.

But I dislike how links go dead all the time, especially when a shit-ton of good writing, which these URLs all over my blog used to be able to link to, disappears from the Interwebs, like My Year of Bonds, a no-longer-online series of essays about 007 flicks I enjoyed reading. Anyway, people still read blog posts I wrote two or more years ago as if they're new to them, and there will continue to be people out there who will check out the posts over here long after this final one today. I may not be posting any new content over here anymore, but I still will be checking for dead links and removing them from my posts, even though I find it to be a grueling task.

One other problem has made long-form blogging less enjoyable. On Twitter, if my opinion changes about something, I can easily delete the tweet that contains that outdated opinion of mine, because nobody reads my tweets and nobody cares. But over here on Blogspot, if my opinions change about a TV show I praised at length in a post that went mildly viral on social media--which was what happened when I discussed Louie (several years before Louie was forever ruined by both the Louis C.K. sexual misconduct scandal and C.K.'s confession that all the rumors of him being a sexual predator who forces female colleagues to watch him masturbate were true) or when I discussed Daredevil's first season--it would be stupid for me to delete the post, even though some of my opinions in that post are different now. (Daredevil season 1 is, by the way, a season I like a lot less now than I did when I wrote about it. The second half of that inaugural season, which, in that post, I said was slightly weaker than the first half, is a lot weaker in my opinion now, just like the second halves of all other first seasons of Netflix/Marvel shows I've watched. That's why I've never caught Daredevil's complete second season.) I can't go back and delete the post, mainly because, unlike my invisible tweets, a few people liked the post on social media and responded favorably to it or had some interesting comments to say about it (in other words, somebody cares). And like I said, I really hate clicking on a link that turns out to be dead, so it would be dumb if I contributed to that problem too.

None of the few remaining readers of this Blogspot blog have made the jump to Accidental Star Trek Cosplay or are even aware that Accidental Star Trek Cosplay, which has a much larger readership than this blog's, is what I've been up to more often these days online. If you're one of these Tumblrphobic people, fuck you for not being ride-or-die and not willing to try something new. Accidental Star Trek Cosplay is much more of a blast for me these days anyway.

















I have nothing else to say. Bye, Felicia Blogspot.

So much shit has happened since the time I wrote my final blog post here in 2017. A pandemic that's killed so many. The current and upsetting rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans. An unfortunate wave of anti-Black police violence. The worst American president in my lifetime. (His final three years in Washington were responsible for tons of terrible shit, including the mishandling of the pandemic, the aforementioned rise in anti-Asian hate crimes, concentration camps full of immigrant kids, and a white supremacist insurrection at the Capitol.) The climate crisis. My mother's stroke symptoms. (Her condition led to me gradually moving back to my parents' house to help my father take care of her, as well as to stay safe from the dual dangers of COVID and MAGAt dumbfucks who want to kill me because they think I'm Chinese. I still haven't even finished the process of moving yet, mostly due to a wintertime lockdown in the Bay Area.)

And yet in the midst of those messy three years full of countless (and sometimes stress-inducing) distractions, I was somehow able to write and publish my first book.

The new book is why I've briefly returned to this blog, despite saying farewell to the blog in 2017, to promote it. (Even though I don't write posts anymore for this blog, I still come back to Blogspot from time to time to remove from my blog any dead links or dead embeds for videos that were deleted from YouTube.) If You Haven't Seen It, It's New to You: The Movies and TV Shows Some of Us Regretted Not Catching Until Later ($14.99 in B&W paperback form or $9.99 in e-book form and available only on Amazon) came about because, after I was fired from a coding job I grew to hate, I was unable to find another job for eight years, so I gave up on the job search and kept myself busy by writing content for both this Blogspot blog and the Tumblr blog Accidental Star Trek Cosplay (a blog I continue to update and post content for because it has always been a much less time-consuming and stress-inducing blog, and it also has way more readers than this one did). But I got sick and tired of writing long-form blog posts and online articles for free, so in 2017, I quit this Blogspot blog and vowed to myself that I would never again write for free anything that's long-form. (This long-form post to plug If You Haven't Seen It, It's New to You is an exception.) I wasn't ready to start a Patreon or a Ko-fi to earn some money, so I decided instead to write and self-publish a book. (I was also tired of getting rejected every time I pitched a short story idea to an editor or tried to get a writing job. That's why I've gone the self-publishing route.) At first, the book was supposed to be a comedic sci-fi novel, but then a little something called writer's block got in the way.

After three failed attempts at writing novels, I chose to do a non-fiction book instead. I began working in May 2018 on the book that evolved into If You Haven't Seen It, It's New to You. I took a few of my blog posts about watching older movies for the first time and did updated or expanded versions of those posts while surrounding them with tons of completely new material. The new stuff in If You Haven't Seen It, It's New to You includes essays on Lawrence of Arabia, Playtime, Blue Thunder, Near Dark, The Heroic Trio, MTV's Daria, Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy movies, and Schitt's Creek.

Here's me in 2009, signing copies of a book I contributed material to, but I developed mixed emotions about the book 10 years after its publication. Sunny Kim was totally right about her frustrations with the book and its colorism, and that's all I'm going to say here about that book. The one great thing about the book though was that it led to me becoming friends with Janice Chiang, a former Marvel Comics letterer whose work I liked when I was a kid who read issues of Alpha Flight and The Transformers.

If You Haven't Seen It, It's New to You took me two years to write and self-proofread. From November 2019 to October 2020, I was either proofreading the book by myself or making lots of minor tweaks to the book's longest chapters, like a chapter in which I discussed watching seven of the eight Harry Potter movies for the first time. (Yeah, that became a particularly interesting chapter to rewrite during J.K. Rowling's transphobic meltdown.) November 2019 to October 2020 will go down as a really unusual year for me (just as how it was an unusual year for everyone who survived it): In addition to finishing work on my first book, I was dealing with life during COVID while acting as a caregiver to a parent and learning more about how my deep hatred of certain sounds like leaf blower noises is the neurological condition known as misophonia.

Despite having a lot on my plate in 2020, If You Haven't Seen It, It's New to You is finally out, and it's the type of book a Filipino American film nerd like myself has always wanted to see out there: a book written from a point of view that just does not get a lot of representation in journalism or publishing simply because there aren't a ton of Filipino American writers who write about film or TV. I was a fan of the YouTube channel National Film Society, which Patrick Epino and Stephen Dypiangco founded to give voice to Filipino American film nerds like themselves (the channel went inactive for a couple of years, but it came back in 2018 without Stephen as a co-host), and I always thought Patrick and Stephen should have put out a book about film. I would have bought such a book in a heartbeat.

This is a peek at If You Haven't Seen It, It's New to You's chapter on The Spook Who Sat by the Door, one of the late Nipsey Hussle's favorite flicks, as well as a forgotten film about Black liberation that became especially resonant in 2020.

So why should you buy If You Haven't Seen It, It's New to You, even though the "I was late to the party regarding this popular movie or TV show, and here's what I think of what I finally watched..." thing has been done to death by film discussion podcasts and pop culture blogs? First of all, the book gives a spotlight to the same type of underrepresented voice that makes National Film Society's videos stand out on YouTube. Second, despite the book's length (462 pages), it's irreverent and full of humor, and during a time when COVID has confined you to staying home and watching lots of streaming services with so much fucking content, you need a guide like my book to simplify your search for content and direct you to movies and shows you missed out on before COVID and now have probably become curious about while in lockdown.

Another thing that makes this collection of essays stand out is the fact that it contains recipes for movie and TV-related meals and cocktails. Before COVID, I was becoming fascinated with movie-inspired cuisine and themed meals that are meant to be enjoyed while watching a movie, whether they were items on the menus at Alamo Drafthouse and Nitehawk Cinemas or the chimichangas I bought for myself and then ate while watching a DVD of Deadpool 2 I rented from DVD.com. Nowadays, of course, I don't think I'll be going back to the movie theater any time soon, especially when the pandemic is still killing people (I discuss at length my refusal to set foot in a theater again in the book), but the sidebars for several of the chapters in If You Haven't Seen It, It's New to You reflect my pre-COVID enjoyment of movie-inspired cuisine. One of the chapters is on the 1980 cult classic Used Cars, which I never watched until 2015, and, to me, the perfect snack for a rewatch of Used Cars is lemon bars, so the Used Cars chapter is accompanied by a sidebar on how to make lemon bars.


Another chapter is on Invader Zim, a show I never watched until 2019, and it's accompanied by a recipe for, of course, GIR the robot's favorite snack: taquitos.


Like I say in the book's introduction, these sidebars are intended to get you out of your chair or couch and into the kitchen.

Writing If You Haven't Seen It, It's New to You was an easy but rather long process. And now I'm finding out that publicizing the book on my own is much more challenging and frustrating than writing it. I produced a bunch of book trailers to promote If You Haven't Seen It, It's New to You, but nobody paid attention to them.









None of my Twitter followers gave a fuck about my new book in October. Fuck 'em. So I gave up on trying to promote my book on Twitter, and I went over to a site I like even less than Twitter and hadn't visited in two years: Facebook. Mentioning my book to a few people on Facebook sort of worked. Almost all the people who bought If You Haven't Seen It, It's New to You so far are Facebook friends.

I got The Solute, a film discussion site I like way more than Letterboxd and Film Twitter, to post a full excerpt from my book. I've also been trying to get podcast hosts to interview me. Only one podcast host has been eager to have me as a guest on his show. At the time of this writing, my one guest shot on a podcast right after the release of If You Haven't Seen It, It's New to You hasn't been recorded yet, but I'm really looking forward to it because it'll be the first podcast I've been a guest on since 2010, and unlike all of the previous podcasts where I was a guest, it's a podcast I genuinely like and have listened to more than 10 times.

So there you have it: If You Haven't Seen It, It's New to You was what I was up to creatively after I quit this Blogspot blog. The $14.99 B&W paperback edition is the edition I want everyone to get. It has a lot less typos than the e-book edition does. The paperback edition was originally supposed to be in color, but Kindle Direct Publishing wouldn't let me lower the full-color edition's price, and they wouldn't let me delete the full-color edition from Amazon either. So that's why there's a $55.99 full-color paperback edition of If You Haven't Seen It, It's New to You on Amazon.

I'm currently in the middle of trying to write my second self-published book. It'll be much jokier than If You Haven't Seen It, It's New to You, and it'll be a parody of inexpensive coffee-table movie books made by TCM and Entertainment Weekly. It's currently titled The Most Poorly Researched Book About Movies Ever.

Trying to begin work on The Most Poorly Researched Book About Movies Ever has been tougher than when I began work on If You Haven't Seen It, It's New to You back in 2018, with very little distractions around me that year. I wrote most of If You Haven't Seen It, It's New to You in an apartment where I lived alone with my headphones always on to keep me from getting bothered by misophonia triggers (I don't want to live there anymore because the building and the neighborhood are full of too many misophonia triggers), before my mom had her strokes. But with The Most Poorly Researched Book About Movies Ever, I started writing it in a house where there's a lot more commotion, even when I have my headphones on to block out my parents' neighborhood's frequent leaf blower noises (my dad is trying to sell his house and move himself and my mom to a smaller house that would be more wheelchair-friendly for her, so there's been so much cleaning and rearranging for realtors going on), plus my mom requires constant care from both my dad and I. So because of those things, it's been harder to get into a rhythm with this second book. But the stuff I've written so far for The Most Poorly Researched Book About Movies Ever's manuscript has turned out well. To me, it has a lot of potential as a humor book.

In the meantime, I won't be coming back to this Blogspot blog to post any new content after this post (however, I'll continue to re-edit old posts to get rid of any dead links), but I can still be found at Accidental Star Trek Cosplay over on Tumblr.



In 2019, Adam Chau, a fellow Southeast Asian American blogger, pointed out over on his blog Slantyapolis that when Asian American bloggers quit their blogs and delete all of their prior content, a lot of valuable Asian American content is eradicated, and all those deletions end up contradicting the purpose for why many of those deleted posts were written in the first place, which was "Stop ignoring or dehumanizing us because we're human beings too, goddammit!" I understand why those bloggers would choose to delete everything: Many of their opinions in those posts have changed or they said things about other marginalized groups (like maybe trans people) that they wouldn't say today. I know I've deleted a few a.k.a. DJ AFOS posts where my opinion about something is not the same opinion I have about it now.

But even though all of my Blogspot blog's most frequent readers stopped reading it and went away by around 2016, and I stopped writing posts here in 2017, I've chosen not to delete the blog completely because some of my posts here are still being read by newcomers. For instance, a bunch of Hannibal fans suddenly became ecstatic on Twitter last year about a 2015 post I did on Hannibal's score music. So don't worry, Adam, this now-defunct blog won't be deleted. Well, except the really dumb posts I don't like anymore.

Anyway, I'm also on Goodreads. My Mixcloud and HearThis pages are still up. I haven't updated the Mixcloud and HearThis pages in a while because I was busy with If You Haven't Seen It, It's New to You, but if you miss the online radio station that this Blogspot blog acted as a tie-in to from 2007 to 2015, the audio content on those pages should satisfy you.

What the fuck are you doing? Go get If You Haven't Seen It, It's New to Younow!