Murray Gold's Doctor Who: Series 5 score album lands in the "Assorted Fistful" block on A Fistful of Soundtracks

I enjoyed Steven Moffat's fifth-season revamp of Doctor Who and composer Murray Gold's new themes for the show, so I'm adding several standout Gold cues from the fifth-season score album to "Assorted Fistful" rotation. The two-disc album from Silva Screen came out in November in the U.K. and finally hit our shores just recently.

Gold's rousing "I Am The Doctor" theme for The 11th Doctor (Matt Smith, who's been a terrific Doctor, despite the Tucker Carlson bow tie) is my favorite theme he's written for any of The Doctor's post-Paul McGann incarnations so far. When I first heard it during the "Eleventh Hour" season premiere, I thought to myself, "Okay, I gotta cop that CD." I like how Gold takes the percussion during the "I Am The Doctor" motif and makes it simulate a ticking clock, like in the "Amy in the TARDIS" cue that concludes "The Eleventh Hour" as The Doctor activates the new TARDIS for the first time.

"I Am The Doctor" and "Amy in the TARDIS" are part of the "Assorted" playlist, along with the season finale cue "The Sad Man with a Box," which includes some nifty electronic effects that represent the "timey-wimey stuff" that goes down during the finale. When I first heard the CD sound as if it were being played back in reverse and then paused, I got worried and thought my CD was skipping, but then I remembered it was an electronic effect from the scene where River Song (Alex Kingston) gets trapped in a time loop.

I'm looking forward to season 6 (finally, an episode shot on location in America, with actual American actors for a change, instead of British actors mangling American accents!), and I'm wondering what Gold has up his sleeve for the theme that will represent "the silence that will fall" in the new season. I'm thinking Gold will take the Pootie Tang approach (no music).

Stuff White People Like But This Brown Man Can't Stand #1: The vampire genre

I've got four words for the vampire genre: less bussing, more dusting.

I'm so tired of the popularity of navel-gazing vampire genre franchises like Twilight, The Vampire Diaries and True Blood, which earns some points for being like an anti-Twilight because of its unabashed naughtiness, but I lost interest in the show after its first season because British-born Stephen Moyer's attempt at a Southern accent is terrible, the black characters are the racial equivalent of the overdone "gay best friend" trend, as a Newsweek writer astutely notes in "I Won't Be Seduced by True Blood," and thirdly, the show is too soapy for my tastes.

The only bloodsucker genre pieces I ever liked were the sharply written first few seasons of the Buffy TV series, its underrated Angel spinoff (the student outdid the master during the latter's underwhelming last two seasons on UPN) and John Carpenter's Vampires, which isn't one of Carpenter's best flicks, but it's redeemed by Sheryl Lee's nude scene, some amusing genre-mocking dialogue from snarky, homophobic antihero James Woods ("It's not like they're a bunch of fucking fags hopping around in rented formal wear and seducing everybody in sight with cheesy Eurotrash accents, alright? Forget whatever you've seen in the movies.") and a largely unromantic portrayal of vampires.

Otherwise, if I want to watch a 200-year-old pedophile slobber over a hot chick, I'll rent a Woody Allen movie.

About a Pinoy (Part 1)

Throughout this year, I'm posting older material--like non-Blogspot posts, unpublished writing I've kept buried in my computer and transcripts of interviews from A Fistful of Soundtracks' terrestrial radio years.

Below is Part 1 of a bio I wrote about myself back in June for my user profile at a Wetpaint.com wiki community that the Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology editors launched as a place for the book's contributors to see each other's scripts and character sketches.

On the profile page, the user had to finish sentences like "I joined this wiki because..." and "My superpower is..." The ability to assume many different accents is indeed a superpower (it trumps the lamest powers on Heroes, like the ability to melt toasters). A convincing British accent can get you some tail.

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Hello, my name is Jimmy Aquino.

MORE ABOUT ME...

I joined this wiki because: I got kicked out of the Hannah Montana wiki for scalping tickets.

The best word to describe me is: lazian

Interests: scriptwriting

Favorite movies: GoodFellas, Once Upon a Time in the West, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, Election (1999), Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, The President's Last Bang, Dog Day Afternoon, Do the Right Thing, Three Kings, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Trek II, Midnight Run, Cheung fo (The Mission), Anatomy of a Murder, Chan Is Missing, Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, The Incredibles, Blazing Saddles, Raising Arizona, Repo Man

Favorite TV shows: The Wire, The Larry Sanders Show, 30 Rock, The Venture Bros., The Soup, Flight of the Conchords, Human Giant, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Keen Eddie, Freaks and Geeks, The Shield, Veronica Mars, Lost, Battlestar Galactica

My hero(es): anyone who supports Asian American comics

My superpower is: the ability to assume many different accents. I can sound like a British actor doing a lousy American accent. They're all over prime-time now. They think they can nail our American accents like Damian Lewis and Hugh Laurie can, but the truth is they're bloody awful. Actually it's not hard to imitate these outsourced actors. Instead of "been," say "bean" and instead of "Los Angeles," say "Los Ange-leez."

If I could live anywhere, it would be: New York City. This reluctant Californian is sick and tired of Cali and wants to move to NYC, where grabbing some Slyders or an egg cream isn't so difficult.

My dream job(s): Writing graphic novels. The creator-owned material of writers like Brian K. Vaughan, Ed Brubaker, Greg Rucka and Gene Yang brought me back to reading comics after I lost interest in them a few years before. Those guys are incredible writers. Then I told myself, "I wanna do what they're doing. I don't care how little it pays."

What else you should know about me:

-I started out in journalism.

-I chose "SamplerCreator" as my account name because on other sites, every time I try to use my own name as my account name, it's already taken. "Jim Aquino" is the Filipino equivalent of "John Smith."

-I like chicks who hate Sex and the City as much as I do.

-My favorite Chinese food is pizza.

-I ghost-wrote most of the rhymes on Nick Cannon's rap album.

-I orchestrated the merger between UNICEF and Smith & Wesson.

-I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.

-Other true or fake facts about me can be found at jim.aquino.com or afistfulofsoundtracks.blogspot.com.

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To be continued in Part 2.