Robert Wagner: Jim Kelly

Thursday, 13 October 2011

Every day I'm shufflin'

Even though trying to keep track of the nearly 64 hours of music that are stored in A Fistful of Soundtracks' "Assorted Fistful" playlist (plus the two hours of music that make up AFOS' "Rock Box" playlist) can occasionally be a hassle, running AFOS(*) is a pretty simple task. I just hit "Shuffle" and Live365.com does the rest.

(*) It's AFOS. No bloody FOS or FFOS. It's always been AFOS. I've always wanted to shorten it to just AFOS because the acronym AFOS can stand for many different phrases besides A Fistful of Soundtracks, and I once jotted down a list of 12 of them (examples: "Ample Focus on Scores" and my personal favorite, "Asians Fucking Owning Shit"). The current iTunes Radio description of "Fistful of Soundtracks" is nine years old (it's taken from a summary of AFOS that I typed into Live365.com when I first launched AFOS over there in 2002, back when Live365 wouldn't let radio stations have names longer than 22 letters for some stupid reason). iTunes has never bothered to replace the old description with a present-day one.

Sometimes, weird things I have no control over start to happen on AFOS when it's in shuffle mode.

I'm not Jewish, but I'm all for seeing someone make another Hanukkah movie like The Hebrew Hammer and not so much like Adam Sandler's Eight Crazy Nights.

Mel Gibson, who's so famously fond of Jews, gets followed by a Jew.

To anyone who's sick of hearing 'Eye of the Tiger' and didn't like hearing it repeated that day, it wasn't intentional. I apolog... Nah, fuck that. Complaints from AFOS listeners are like the coverage of the Republican presidential candidate race: I don't give a flying fuck.

Yeah, I like "Eye of the Tiger" too, Live365, but I don't like it as much as you do apparently.

Where the Wild Things Are had a deleted scene where two of the island beasts have a three-way with Matt Dillon.

Same thing with the movie Wild Things...

... or the end credits music from Thor.

'Corynorhinus'? Wasn't he one of the Coreys who starred in The Lost Boys?

Two different incarnations of Batman getting streamed back-to-back always amuses me...

Hey, Fox Movie Channel, HBO circa 1982 called. It wants its constant re-airings of Zorro, the Gay Blade back.

... as does Angel, Batman and Zorro getting streamed in the same hour. (Angel is like the Batman of the Whedonverse. Batman was modeled partly after Zorro. Also, in DC's pre-"New 52" continuity--I'm not sure if it's been changed in the current continuity--Bruce Wayne lost his parents to a mugger after they attended a Mark of Zorro screening. If it were a Legend of Zorro screening, all three Waynes would have lost the will to live and killed themselves afterward.)

The chase begins again and again and again...

Live365 occasionally does screwy things to the Bollywood-centric "Chai Noon" block. Das racist!

Shuffle mode sometimes results in nifty unintentional double shots or triple shots like:

Tessa from Suburgatory thinks the playlist is shitty.

Brian Tyler Fast and the Furious sequel theme double shots.

If Coffy and Foxy Brown had to fight each other, who would win? Everybody would win. It'd be one of the sexiest-looking fights ever.

Pam Grier movie theme double shots.

Killing off Jim Kelly in the middle of Enter the Dragon was kind of a mistake because he had the movie's most memorable lines. He could have easily defeated the metal-handed Han by whupping out a giant magnet or something.

Jim Kelly movie theme double shots.

In Justin Lin's Finishing the Game, star Roger Fan slathers so much suntan oil all over his chest that he looks like a shiny Asian Ken doll.

Themes from movies about Bruce Lee movies getting streamed in the same hour.

I like how Ronald D. Moore refused to give Commander Adama a Star Trek-style chair inside the CIC on Galactica because sitting on your ass in front of a TV screen is for the weak! Here. On the street. In competition. A man confronts you...

Battlestar Galactica/Star Trek double shots.

You gotta love a movie that names its villain after film critic Andrew Sarris.

Galaxy Quest/Star Trek double shots.

The Battlestar Galactica series finale was disappointing because it didn't bother to address if Bob Dylan was a Cylon or not.

Trek/Galactica/Galaxy Quest triple shots.

I once heard a female British radio DJ hilariously mispronounce Michael Giacchino's last name as 'gee-uh-chee-no.' 'G, a Chino!' is something a cholo says to another cholo when he spots some poor middle-aged Vietnamese woman that he wants to carjack or mug.

J.J. Abrams/Michael Giacchino collabo triple shots.

Hans Zimmer and Johnny Marr's cover of that Boy George song 'Time (Clock of the Heart)' was the best part of the Inception soundtrack.

Christopher Nolan/Hans Zimmer collabo double shots.

Michael Giacchino comes up with the most amusing names for his end credits cues, although I would have titled it 'Up Your End Credits' to piss off Disney.

End credits music quadruple shots.

All that's missing is music from Run, Ronnie, Run. On second thought, maybe acknowledging that movie's existence isn't a good idea.

"Movies with Run in the title" double shots.

During The Long Goodbye, Arnold Schwarzenegger shows up looking very dignified and California governor-like in a goofy pornstache.

"Unexpectedly gory L.A. movies" double shots.

With his rolled-up blazer sleeves, Spike Spiegel may be the only bounty hunter on TV and film who dresses like a shitty '80s stand-up comic.

Live365 once caused a weird pattern in which a theme from a Spike Lee Joint ended up getting followed by a Cowboy Bebop track--twice in a row. I hope someone on Deviantart was listening to AFOS during that hour and thought about drawing a Spike Lee/Spike Spiegel mash-up someday. Make it happen, Internet!

Did NBC cancel Poker After Dark? If they did, that's too bad because if you had trouble sleeping late at night, Poker After Dark was a show you could always rely on to help you fall asleep because it was so fucking boring.

Wilfred the Matt Damon-loving dog must have tried to sabotage Live365 during this hour.

Tuesday, 15 March 2011

Coffey is the color

Here we see Dennis Coffey playing 'Scorpio' for an audience made up of the not-in-the-picture Oscar the Grouch and his homeless buddies.

To promote the upcoming self-titled album by legendary and frequently sampled Motown guitarist Dennis Coffey, Strut Records recently dropped a fantastic 45-minute mix of old Coffey tunes, hip-hop tracks that sampled Coffey's work and new material from the April 26 release. The instrumental jam "7th Galaxy," a new joint from Coffey's Strut album, starts at 04:55 in the "Constellations" mix, which was assembled by DJ House Shoes. "7th Galaxy" needs to turn up as chase music in a TV show or movie pronto.

The mix includes one of my all-time favorite movie themes, Coffey's Black Belt Jones theme, and another blaxploitation soundtrack tune that features Coffey's guitar work, Edwin Starr's "Easin' In" from Hell Up in Harlem. I was first exposed to "Easin' In" via "Nickel Bags" by Digable Planets, while LL Cool J's "Jingling Baby" introduced me to the Black Belt Jones theme.

I once saw a TCM featurette that pointed out that the Magnificent Seven montage of Yul Brynner and his crew journeying on horseback to the Mexican villagers looked really lethargic and unexciting without Elmer Bernstein's energetic main theme. The Black Belt Jones opening title sequence takes place in the dullest of settings, an L.A. parking lot--not exactly the most dynamic location to showcase the martial arts skills of ~~Bushido Brown~~ Jim Kelly. I guess director Robert Clouse had much less dough to work with than he did on his previous movie with Kelly, the Hong Kong-based Enter the Dragon. Like Bernstein's theme during the Magnificent Seven montage, Coffey's funky theme helps distract you from how shabby the opening title sequence looks despite the fisticuffs (ComicsAlliance editor Chris Sims noted on his Invincible Super-Blog that even the fisticuffs look compromised too: "It may SEEM like Black Belt Jones is moving slow, and that the guys he's fighting are drunk, but I assure you that's not the case. In order to get an 'R' rating they actually had to slow the film down because audiences in the Seventies could not handle that much brutal action.").

Man, they come right out of a comic book.

(Photo source: Cinema is Dope/Museum of Cinema)

YouTube comments sections are too often full of inane or racist junk, but there was one comment below the video of the Black Belt Jones opening credits that amused me and caused me to do something I've never done before in a YouTube comments section, and that's click on "thumbs up":

"Obama should enter Congress with this theme and kick some Republican butt."

Word.

There are so many hot beats in Strut's Coffey mix, which concludes with "All Your Goodies Are Gone," a terrific blue-eyed soul collabo with Mayer Hawthorne from the new album, a release that Strut hopes will introduce Coffey to a new generation of beatheads. I particularly enjoyed the mix's juxtapositions of "Jingling Baby" with the Black Belt Jones breakbeat and "Easin' In" with "Nickel Bags."

Constellations - The A to Z of Dennis Coffey: A Mix By House Shoes by Strut

[Via Potholes in My Blog]