"Rock Box" Track of the Day: Cameo, "Candy"

Song: "Candy" by Cameo
Released: 1986
Why's it part of the "Rock Box" playlist?: It's featured in The Best Man (and was stupidly omitted from the Best Man soundtrack album). It also turns up in the Death at a Funeral remake.
Which moment in The Best Man does it appear?: The Cameo jam is the bachelor party lapdancing music for Candy (Regina Hall), an Audre Lorde-reading stripper Murch (Harold Perrineau) falls for. It also plays while the characters do the Electric Slide at the wedding reception at the end of the movie. "If you ask me, it's impossible to not like a film that ends with the entire cast doing the electric slide to Cameo's '80s funk classic 'Candy,'" wrote online film critic Michael Dequina in 1999. True that.

When Hall appeared on Late Night with Conan O'Brien in 2005, her entrance music was "I Want Candy" by The Strangeloves. Someone in The Max Weinberg Seven must have been a Best Man fan (La Bamba?).

"Rock Box" Track of the Day: Vampire Weekend, "A-Punk"

Song: "A-Punk" by the yacht-rocker-wardrobe-loving band Vampire Weekend
Released: 2008
Why's it part of the "Rock Box" playlist?: I have no idea what exactly this song's about, but it opens my second favorite Adam McKay movie after Anchorman. In addition to Step Brothers, "A-Punk" has also been featured on the Britcom The Inbetweeners.

The foul-mouthed Step Brothers premieres tonight at 8 on FX with all of its f-words gone and one of its best gags--the sight of demure Mary Steenburgen unleashing an f-bomb--ruined.

Classic Star Trek now remastered with added lens flares

This YouTube video by user "partmor" cracked me up--it's the vintage 1967 trailer for the old-school Star Trek episode "Space Seed," but what if it were filled with the lens flares that cinematographer Daniel Mindel (Enemy of the State, Mission: Impossible III) made heavy use of during J.J. Abrams' Star Trek(*)? Someone was obsessed with Holly Valance's naked "Kiss Kiss" video, All Saints' "Never Ever" video and Jay-Z's "Jigga What, Jigga Who" video while working on the new Star Trek.



[Via Geeks of Doom]

And this concludes today's edition of "Stuff That's Funny Only to Cinematography Geeks."

(*) Abrams' Trek is the best Trek feature film since 1996's First Contact. Michael Giacchino's exciting Trek score is a nice throwback to the epic sounds of '80s Trek film composers Jerry Goldsmith and James Horner after years of yawn-inducing, tinny-sounding musical wallpaper by Rick Berman's stable of composers. Giacchino's "That New Car Smell" cue (track 13 on the Varèse Sarabande score album) is straight out of those '80s Goldsmith/Horner Trek scores.

Why so many damn '80s songs about heartbeats?

I heard King Crimson's "Heartbeat" on Radio Nigel recently, and it got me thinking the above question.

Pop songwriters must have really been out of ideas in the '80s, a decade that gave us such gems as Reaganomics, widespread Asian-bashing humor, crappy sitcoms featuring creepy little girl robots and wisecracking babies who share a roof with third-rate stand-up comics who think Bullwinkle impressions are the height of comedy, and of course, overly earnest power ballads about heartbeats.

Manhunter is my favorite movie based on a Thomas Harris novel, but the one thing that dates that movie is Red 7's very '80s closing credits theme, also entitled "Heartbeat." Michael Mann has great musical tastes (I'm looking forward to the Public Enemies soundtrack), but I don't get his love for Red 7's "Heartbeat," which he used in both the original Miami Vice and Manhunter.

Okay, I somewhat get it. Joan Allen listened to a tiger's heartbeat earlier in the movie, hence "Heartbeat." But otherwise, I'm not feelin' the song.

And somebody at the "Heartbeat" video shoot should have told the Red 7 lead singer, "Dude, the mullet's not gonna cover up the fact that you're balding."

Or "Hey, party in the back, dying lawn up top."

Speaking of things dying, Don Johnson's "Heartbeat"--his attempt to launch a singing career during Miami Vice's run--makes me die inside. It was the lamest of 25 videos Jon Stewart, Denis Leary, Janeane Garofalo and Chris Kattan literally destroyed during MTV's legendary and unlikely-to-be-rerun-again 25 Lame special in 1999. In the case of "Heartbeat," Leary and Kattan destroyed the channel's master copy of the Johnson video by stuffing it in a blender. The four hosts' commentary during "Heartbeat" was one of many highlights of 25 Lame. (What's the difference between 25 Lame and the countless VH1 Awesomely Bad Videos specials it spawned? 25 Lame was funny.)

An agony booth recapper wrote that when they watched "Heartbeat," "the comedians were mostly sitting in stunned silence. Was this post-traumatic stress disorder brought on by the Vanilla Ice [baseball bat] incident? Or were they just completely stupefied and confounded by what they were watching?" Actually, they weren't mostly silent. I remember they got in a few good lines about the Miami Vice star's overdramatic lip-syncing, the constant footage of exploding stuff and the baffling storyline (Johnson as a war photographer who's into dead terrorist chicks? Huh?).

The one '80s heartbeat song I like isn't a power ballad. It's Taana Gardner's funky and frequently sampled "Heartbeat" from 1981. Otherwise, like I said, '80s pop tunesmiths must have really been out of ideas. The fact that I'm blogging about this means I'm out of ideas too.