I used to occasionally make Coca-Cola floats (Coke topped with scoops of vanilla ice cream) for myself as a kid, so when AMC Theatres added $6 Coke floats to their concession stands this summer, I couldn't pass it up and had to get myself one at a screening of actor-turned-documentarian Michael Rapaport's Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest.
A drink I was nostalgic for was perfect for a pretty good (although some have found it to be problematic) rapumentary where I experienced a similar kind of nostalgia--for People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, The Low End Theory(*) and Midnight Marauders. (Those three albums were like my high school soundtrack, and to relive them on the big screen and to be treated to stories about the making of those hip-hop masterpieces is an experience I enjoyed more than any of the blockbusters that have been released this summer. Sorry, well-doneCaptain America adaptation.)
(*) "Scenario," the classic Low End Theory joint that was such a breakthrough for guest rapper and then-Leaders of the New School member Busta Rhymes, is absent from the film. According to Rapaport, its absence is due to those dreaded clearance issues.
I never buy a beverage when I watch a movie because they often make me leave the screening room in the middle of the movie to rush over to the bathroom, and I don't like having to miss a few minutes of the feature presentation, but AMC's Coke float is worth snapping up--even though I did end up having to hold it during the entire "And then it all came crashing down" half of Beats, Rhymes & Life. I'm glad these Coke floats are available only for a limited time because having too much of them is a bad thing. Just ask the diabeticPhife. But in a heat wave that's as terrible as this summer's, a Coke float hits the spot.
Previously on A Fistful of Soundtracks: The Blog:#20-#11.
My favorite Current TV show is a recent addition to the channel's lineup, The Rotten Tomatoes Show, a unique movie review show that's reminiscent of both the earlier years of G4's X-Play (the hosts participate in movie parody sketches) and ReelzChannel's Movie Mob (it features webcam reviews that are less obnoxious and insipid than the ones on Movie Mob because they're submitted by film bloggers who have a sense of film history and professional comedians, instead of anonymous morons who think they're funny and make the review about themselves instead of the movie). Two of my selections on this post are examples of why The Rotten Tomatoes Show is the most entertaining movie review show since the time Ebert threatened to sit on Siskel.
10. "YouTube's Worst Parents" Brett Erlich's "Viral Video Film School" is always a highlight of infoMania.
9. "Hipsters in Space" When's South Park going to skewer hipsters? SuperNews! beat them to the punch.
8. "Beatboxing the Flute" One thing that's missing from this piece about Nathan "Flutebox" Lee is his ill cover of the Knight Rider theme. I assume the music clearance fee would cost more than a new chassis for KITT.
7. "Hookers are the Best Roles in Town by Ellen Fox" The Rotten Tomatoes Show co-host sardonically sings about Hollywood's fixation on hoes-with-hearts-of-gold. On the shallow side, Fox looks hotter in the Pretty Woman hooker outfit than Julia Roberts does.
6. "Joe Gets Game" Even though I know very little about Harry Potter (the first movie was so ponderous I never got into the rest of the franchise), Joe's bad pick-up lines in Potter slang are amusing.
5. "Blue Scholars Seattle" This mini-doc featuring Geo and DJ Sabzi is actually more about Seattle than Blue Scholars, but any segment with them is worthwhile viewing. The video title makes the duo sound like a bad prime-time procedural franchise (Blue Scholars: Seattle, Blue Scholars: Miami...).
4. "La Vida Flamenco" Damn.
3. "Sexy Scientist" Double damn.
2. "Ode to the Indie by Ellen & Brett" There's one frequent indie comedy element that's missing from this Rotten Tomatoes Show list of indie clichés: "Oh, those funny-talking yellow-faced and brown-faced people!" humor.
1. "Sarah Haskins in Target Women: Cleaning" Each week on infoMania, Haskins' great "Target Women" segment shows how advertising panders to female viewers. The funniest of these "Target Women" pieces spoofs dumb bathroom cleaning product commercials.
The San Francisco-based, Al Gore-owned Current TV is the once little-known documentary/news channel that went from covering headlines to becoming a headline itself earlier this year when two of its employees, journalist Laura Ling and footage editor Euna Lee, were arrested on trumped-up charges of trespassing by North Korean authorities and sentenced to 12 years of hard labor. Fortunately, Bill Clinton successfully negotiated with Kim Jong Il for the release of Ling and Lee, who were in the middle of shooting a story about human trafficking for Ling's investigative journalism series Vanguard when they were captured.
I was familiar with Current and Vanguard long before the Ling/Lee situation. I've always liked the mini-docs (the VJs refer to them as "pods," kind of a dorky term for these docs) and original programming like Ling's often fascinating series and the animated SuperNews! Lately, the channel's hosts have been presenting countdowns of their personal favorite Current stories, which have ranged from Vanguard segments to SuperNews! shorts. Because Vanguard's new season premieres tomorrow night at 10, I'm taking a cue from the hosts and posting my favorite Current stories. (One of these selections is an example of Ling's terrific work as Vanguard team leader and correspondent.)
20. "He Punched the Sandman" Remarkable one-armed Muay Thai champ Baxter Humby is the subject of this mini-doc. At 5:19, is that Joey Buttafuoco?
19. "Black Violin" Miri Ben-Ari isn't the only hip-hop violinist out there. There's also the Florida duo Black Violin.
18. "The Poor Dollar" I've never been much of an expert on the economy, so this piece by Vanguard correspondent Adam Yamaguchi opened my eyes to the weakened U.S. dollar's effect on the rest of the world (it makes imported goods like gas and oil more expensive). Yamaguchi's segment, which first aired in early 2008, mentions how at that time, one U.S. dollar is worth 40 and a half pesos in the Philippines, my parents' birth country. This year, the peso will gain even more strength against the dollar due to the influx of cash that's being sent from overseas Filipinos to relatives who have been affected by the Ondoy disaster, as a post by a Filipino blogger from the Netherlands points out. "The Poor Dollar" also provides some interesting insight into what travel and food expenses are like for Vanguard correspondents and producers while they're out in the field. At 5:09, I like Ling's reaction in the background as Yamaguchi calls her a cheapskate.
17. "Joe Gets Bent" I don't know what's funnier: The humorless yoga instructor or a purple-faced Joe Hanson looking like a turnip with eyes.
16. "Urban Streetbikers" This piece from the channel's VC2 imprint (it stands for "Viewer-Created Content" and is pronounced "vee-cee-squared") was the first Current video that caught my eye because of the Harlem bikers' badass wheelie stunts.
15. "My Friends at Fox" infoMania host Conor Knighton mocks Fox and Friends. Watching a single minute of Fox and Friends would make me want to start the day with a gun to my head.
14. "KAPOW! The New Comic Book Heroines" I wonder what any of the female illustrators who appeared in this mini-doc would think of "Sampler" if they read it. If "Sampler" ever spawns a miniseries, I'd like to have one of them take a crack at drawing June Park--or better yet, writing her dialogue. There needs to be more female comic book writers, and a Sampler miniseries would be a great way to give some of them work or introduce them if they're newbies like me. My plan would be to write the first couple of miniseries (I'd rather have it be a bunch of miniseries instead of a regular series that's always in danger of being cancelled, partly because as "KAPOW!" interviewee Valerie D'Orazio noted on her blog, regular series about superheroines are doing poorly), and then I'd hand the rest of the storylines over to female scripters, particularly Asian American ones.
13. "Geek Monthly Magazine" I was introduced to Geek Monthly at WonderCon a few years ago. Jeff Bond, a frequent interviewee during the earlier years of the college radio incarnation of A Fistful of Soundtracks, has been running an excellent magazine, and it's the only one I currently subscribe to. This VC2 piece takes a peek at a Geek Monthly photo shoot with hot actress-turned-mathematician Danica McKellar. It also includes an appearance by Geek Monthly staffer Heather Anne Campbell, who's currently co-starring with Dollhouse's Fran Kranz and Wild 'N Out's Randall Park in Atom.com's funny series MegaBot, a Power Rangers spoof.
12. "TV's Gay Friend Obsession" Bryan Safi's gay version of Jack Bauer is the funniest part of the segment.
11. "Battle Against Bird Flu" I first caught this 2006 Ling piece while swine flu paranoia first swept America (and while Ling was imprisoned). It puts a human face on an overseas problem I wasn't aware of, Vietnamese bird flu's effect on the livelihood of the country's poultry farmers.
"You're gonna piss me out!" --one of many Rex Navarrete character malapropisms during Badly Browned
While watching a back-to-back KQED evening marathon of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month-themed documentary programming (Arthur Dong's Hollywood Chinese and Jeff Adachi's The Slanted Screen, a doc that both PBS and TCM seem to air a million times), I thought to myself, "These APAHM nights on KQED could really use a doc about Asian American comedians like Adachi's other doc, You Don't Know Jack. Why are minority history months always so damn reverent and serious?"
I wonder when You Don't Know Jack--the doc about comedian and Barney Miller scene-stealer Jack Soo, not the recently greenlit Pacino-as-Jack Kevorkian biopic of the same title--will show up on KQED and add some much-needed humor to their often stuffy APAHM programming.
(Somebody ought to make a doc about present-day Asian American stand-ups, and it better not be in the style of annoying and vapid reality shows about stand-ups like Last Comic Standing or any other show that's not the short-lived Comedians of Comedy, still the only reality show about stand-ups that's worth a damn. The doc ought to be more like Comedian, the smart 2002 doc about Jerry Seinfeld, Orny Adams and the difficulties of the craft of stand-up. The Asian American stand-up scene has enough fascinating stories, interesting ideological disagreements and juicy rivalries to fill an entire edition of Make 'Em Laugh: The Funny Business of America.)
Comedians of color don't get enough praise or props during minority history months, which is why I'm devoting this post to the first Filipino American live stand-up comedy album, a 1998 CD that's a solid knee-slapper for almost all of its 65 minutes. It's even got kickass scratch instrumental interludes provided by DJ Qbert too.
I used to play Rex Navarrete's Badly Browned CD all the time on my university radio station. Navarrete is the first Filipino American stand-up I've seen who's represented us--a certain generation of Empire Strikes Back-watching, Skratch Piklz alumni album-buying Filipinos who grew up on Pryor, Mooney, Cosby and Murphy instead of Dolphy. For a while, I used to be able to recite huge chunks of Badly Browned tracks like the Star Wars bit, the ad-libbed "KBOY with Mr. Bolisario" skit ("Long time ago, when I was a childrens, uh, the, uh, Aquaman, uh, Sunday afternoon, used to cook me chee-ken!"), "Maritess vs. the Superfriends" and "Mrs. Scott's ESL Class," about a rambling Pinay ESL teacher named Mrs. Scott who makes hilariously ditzy statements like "the Philippines is the southernmost island of Spain" (I love hearing the mostly Fil-Am San Francisco State audience boo after that line).
Kormann Roque of Classified Records and I came up with the same idea, why don't we experiment and record a live show of mine and see how it sounds? So we did. My buddy, Elrik Jundis, produced a venue and a show for me at UC Berkeley's International House on November 1st, 1997. A one-night only, two show evening. This was where "Maritess" was taped. The best thing about accomplishing that feat was helping one of my best friends give birth to her son, Lakas, earlier that afternoon. I became an instant godfather. I named one of Q-bert's tracks after him on BADLY BROWNED. I'd say that that day had to be one of the most blessed days of my life and my career.
On April 20th, 1998, the same production team, now with full support from Classified Records, came together to bring to SF State's McKenna Theater the live taping of BADLY BROWNED in a packed, standing room only house of 700 plus fans. This was so awesome, I never thought so many Filipinos would dig Flip comedy this much and this intensely. Nevertheless, we finished that night exhausted and a couple months later came our with that first live comedy CD. It featured scratch tracks from DJ Q-bert from the Invisibl Skratch Piklz which gave it a Def Comedy Jam kind of feel to it. It still remains to be a great seller online and at my gigs, thanks to your support. I think BADLY BROWNED contains some of my most favorite material to that point in my career.
While checking out Vol. 2 of the excellent Elvis Mitchell/Timothy Greenfield-Sanders documentary series The Black List, which premiered on HBO last night, I really dug the wall-to-wall yet laid-back and pitch-perfect score by Soulive keyboardist and first-time scorer Neal Evans. The series' cool main/end title theme can be streamed on Evans' MySpace. (There was a lot of terrific original scoring on the tube last night. Besides Evans' Black List score--which is as multifaceted as the range of different black experiences that are captured in the doc--I also enjoyed Jeff Richmond's tinkly "hunting for Liz's boobies picture" theme for piano and flute during the latest 30 Rock.)
Former UC Santa Cruz students like myself will get a kick out of The Black List: Vol. 2 because two of the interviewees are from UCSC's past (Angela Davis was a longtime History of Consciousness professor there, and ex-SNLer Maya Rudolph graduated from the Porter part of campus and majored in photography). Also, there are a couple of film music-related bits in Vol. 2 that are noteworthy (no pun intended). Melvin Van Peebles briefly recalls working on the Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Songsoundtrack with a then-unknown-and-starving band--Earth, Wind & Fire--and in my favorite Vol. 2 segment, Ghost Dog and Afro Samurai composer RZA discusses how he found empowerment through chess tournaments, martial arts flicks like The 36th Chamber of Shaolin ("The Asian history was remarkable and special... That brotherhood right there helped me spawn the brotherhood of the Wu-Tang Clan") and Silver Surfer comics.
Rizz's admiration of Norrin Radd is similar to how many of us Asian American writers and artists have felt empowered through the comics medium, whether it's reading comics about heroes with AA-like experiences and identifying with those characters--even though they're of a different color--or creating comics with actual AA characters like the tales in the Secret Identities anthology (see how I tied it back to Secret Identities? April 14 in stores everywhere). His story about Wu-Tang fans who have asked him during his college lectures why he's not keeping it real and why he's trying to ditch the hood is heartbreaking. Who'd have thought RZA's segment would be the most introspective and moving part of the doc?
Well, my mom and some of my relatives are clingy. Not me. I'm a Pinoy who craves his me time. So I guess that makes me more like Manny Pacquiao's trainer, Freddie Roach, who said the above funny quote about Pac-Man's huge entourage in De La Hoya/Pacquiao 24/7.
The four-episode HBO series about the advent of De La Hoya/Pacquiao Fight Night is my current favorite docu-show. Maybe it's because I'm Filipino, but seeing Filipinos get this much non-Basco brother airtime on American TV is awesome, despite the overabundance of footage of the poorest Filipino areas, as the PinoyLife blog has noted with snarkiness ("Please... film some Pinoys in Manila that are near some offices, universities, and malls"). (During the weight challenge sequence with Pacquiao's entourage, I loved how I could overhear an entourage member saying, "Excited ko!" That's a line I don't hear everyday on HBO. The only Tagalog that's uttered on HBO is during Return of the Jedi, for Christ's sake.)
There's some terrific documentary filmmaking on display in De La Hoya/Pacquiao 24/7 too. The sequence about Pacquiao's Catholic upbringing and his charity work was masterfully shot and edited. The cutaway from Pacquiao's mother to the People's Champ finishing his prayer in the gym was beautifully done. I haven't enjoyed a boxing doc this much since When We Were Kings.
A Slate.com reviewer wrote that De La Hoya/Mayweather 24/7 lacked "what When We Were Kings had in spades: historical importance to match the spectacle... the stakes of the fight are much lower than the promotional bluster would lead you to believe."
But the stakes are incredibly high with this fight, for both the 35-year-old, over-the-hill De La Hoya and his younger, shorter and faster opponent, whom I'm rooting for and whose triumphs in the ring have uplifted "an entire anguished nation," to borrow Geologic's words from his review of the docu-show. If Pac-Man wins this fight, it will uplift us even more. Filipinos everywhere will not show up for work on Monday. If you run a hospital, you can forget about those bedpans being emptied on Monday because your nurses will be out celebrating.
* Funniest line from the PinoyLife recap: "Buboy, Buboy, Buboy. You have the wackest name in the history of Filipino athletics. I'm sure that Manny appreciates all you do being his confidant, his friend, and cornerman. To most of the Filipino Americans reading this site, you're kinda like Too Big MC with Manny being MC Hammer."
