Link Categories
Secret
Agent: While you're listening to A Fistful of
Soundtracks through iTunes, be sure to also check out on iTunes (under
the Electronica category) this really sick SomaFM station, which dubs
itself "the soundtrack for your stylish, mysterious, dangerous life."
Secret Agent streams downtempo and lounge tunes and '70s Italian funk
soundtrack cuts and intersperses them with soundbites from 007 movies.
Smoothbeats.com: Another iTunes station I listen to while I work.
Radio Nigel: Another cool station I discovered on the iTunes radio dial: "'80s with Attitude." Formerly known as DayGlo Radio.
The Superficial: From a post about Britney Spears and Kevin Federline: "Jesus Christ I hate these two. I gotta get me a bear. And teach it to maul anything in sky blue Fubu and backwards Yankees hats. And then release it in Malibu. Once chunks of Kevin showed up in the bear's stool, animal control might be pretty upset, but then I'd explain it was Kevin Federline and we'd all have a pretty good laugh."
 Sunset
Gun: A blog about film by Kim Morgan (that's her from an appearance on The Screen Savers, looking good
as always). Her post about '70s
cop shows is my favorite of her writings, because
of lines like this one: "When Aaron Spelling pictured black people, his
head apparently whistled 'Sweet Georgia Brown.'"
The A.V. Club:
They listen to dull and aimless DVD commentary tracks so you won't have to.
Alan Sepinwall's What's Alan Watching? blog and Matt Zoller Seitz's The House Next Door blog: Sepinwall writes about TV for Tony Soprano's favorite paper, the Newark Star-Ledger. (Sepinwall's old "All TV" colleague was Seitz, who joined the New York Times after the Star-Ledger's TV desk was forced to do "more with less.")
Geek Monthly:
You had me at "Kristen Bell tied up in crime scene tape."
aspecialthing.com:
"The premier comedy community on the Internet."
Patton Oswalt: "'Quit yer bellyachin', Buck Rogers! It's just a diver's watch!'"
Louis
C.K.:
"How do you know if you're good or bad? Sept. 11 gave us a good barometer
for how bad a person you are. Here's how you figure it out: When was the
first time that you masturbated after that first plane hit? Was it a month
or two days? For me, it was actually between the first building going
down and the second, which was probably not a good sign for me. I had
to though. Otherwise, they win."
 Chris
Rock: "Music was so hard to sell this year they
had to sell it without even mentioning the music. 'Cuz the 50 Cent album
came out—I never heard a damn thing about the music. All I kept hearing
was, 'He got shot nine times!' 'Who produced it?' 'He got shot nine times!'
'Well, what is on it?' 'He got shot nine times!' 50 Cent took more shots
to the face than Jenna Jameson, man!"
Lewis
Black: "The good die young, but pricks live forever!"
The
Daily Show with Jon Stewart: "We've secretly replaced the White House press corps with actual reporters..."
The
Colbert Report: "Here's a movie I can recommend, a story that promotes good old-fashioned values. I'm talking, of course, about Brokeback Mountain. Didn't see it, but from what I understand, it's a classic cowboy fable. Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal co-star as two cowboy buddies: real men doing what real men do, riding the range, fighting bears. You can practically smell the leather."
Aziz Ansari: That 24-hour Human Giant marathon made MTV worth watching again.
Satellite
News: Mystery Science Theater 3000 ranks
right below Paul Mooney and The Simpsons as my third reason for
wanting to pursue a career in comedy.
Dana
Gould: "[Charlton Heston] did this movie called
Touch of Evil... The lead role in the film is a detective from
Mexico... played by that towering ethnic talent Charlton Heston: 'Well,
I think I'll have one of those chicken fa-jye-tas... and give me
that bottle of te-kwuh-la!'"
Rex
Navarrete:
From the
"Top 5 Good Reasons Why the X-Men's Wolverine Might Be Filipino":
"#4. He's strong but not very tall, was in the military, gets into
too many fights, can't stop smoking and never gets drunk, he doesn't know
anything about his past... oops, let's stop here."
Howard
M. Shum: I'm a fan of Shum's indie comic Gun
Fu, about the adventures of Cheng Bo Sen, a brash, skirt-chasing '30s
Hong Kong cop who talks in hip-hop slang. The idea for Gun Fu might sound like Poochie the Dog from The Simpsons but unlike Poochie, it works because Cheng Bo Sen isn't a middle-aged white
network exec's idea of how hip-hop heads talk—Shum listens to hip-hop
all the time, so the dialogue never comes off as corny—and you can
feel Shum's enthusiasm for creating a protagonist who isn't your typical
earnest, sexless Asian action hero. Shum has quite a wit too, showing
a Joss Whedon-esque sense of humor in interviews and on his own site.
The
Dan Band: They stole what has to be my favorite
scene in the Will Ferrell movie Old School—the "Total Eclipse
of the Heart" scene. "F**kin' every now and then I fall apaaaart..."
The
John Cusack Test: This quiz tells you which
John Cusack character you're most like. According to the quiz, I'm Lane
Meyer from Better Off Dead. I'm "obsessed, suicidal and I
live in a very, very strange world."
The
Onion: All the news that's fake to print.
Modern
Humorist: A few years ago, they recorded
a silly fake theme song for the first X-Men movie, inspired by
Jewel's "Hands" ("We're special, see/Born differently/The
children of the atom/Senator Kelly/Calls me 'mutie'/He'll taste my adamantium").
Poplicks: A blog run by music critic Oliver "O-Dub" Wang and Junichi Semitsu ("Crazy Asian people love hammers" comes from the title of an amusing post Semitsu wrote about the Oldboy-esque hammer fetish that appears to be shared by batshit crazy Kenneth Eng and the Virginia Tech shooter).
DISGRASIAN: I love their jabs at Gwen Stefani, whom they call "a yellow slave owner. She's like the Colonel Sanders of Tokyo." They even started a "Free the Harajuku Girls" petition.
angry
asian man:
A Fighting 44s poster once wrote that sometimes he has to skip reading this blog because whenever he reads it, it makes his blood pressure go up. The same thing happens to me too. This blog keeps an eye on all sorts of dumb and annoying shit that's perpetrated against
Asian Americans (although I think a.a.m. should find a new catchphrase
other than "That's racist!" or at least come up with different
ways of saying it, like "Racist bitch!" or the Mike Tyson-esque
"I'm gonna make that bigot my girlfriend!").
The
Fighting 44s: In 2004, no other topic divided Asian Americans
like William Hung, or as I like to call him, Long Duk Dong 2.0. Here's what the 44s have to say about him: "This Chinese
equivalent of Cletus the slack-jawed yokel deserves all the criticism
he gets: his presence will deny our generation, and those to come later,
any possibility of a healthy sex life." I also enjoyed the 44s' articles
on "Chinagirl Chasing Crackers" and "Cracker Chasing Bitches." The 44s
make angry asian man look like Wayne Brady.
Yellowworld.org Forums: Some interesting theories on Lost eps can be found here and at the Fighting 44s "Shows and Movies" board.
Morricone
Youth:
They're a New York band that's done kickass covers of soundtrack themes
by the likes of Ennio Morricone, Lalo Schifrin and other great '60s and
'70s film composers. My first exposure to them was when they did a live
set on WBAI-FM's All Mixed Up. The photo gallery on their site—which
has the band members posing as characters straight out of a crime flick
(a chick in a bathtub wielding a gun, a gangster running away with
a suitcase, a wiretapper)—is a nice touch.
fluffertraX: "A celebration
of the vastly unappreciated adult movie genre."
Cinematic
Sound: This movie music radio program airs on C101.5 FM in Hamilton,
Ontario, Canada and is hosted by Erik Woods. A list of some of Erik's
personal favorite film score cues can be found here
on my site. Props to Cinematic Sound for letting me know the correct pronunciation of "Michael Giacchino" (his last name happens to rhyme with my last name).
Score,
Baby!: It's a great guide to spy movie soundtracks,
crime jazz albums, blaxploitation scores, Bollywood compilations, erotic
score collections from labels like Right Tempo and Crippled Dick Hot Wax!
and horrotica soundtracks like Vampyros Lesbos. Highlights include
the review archives, a page about 007 soundtracks, a list of crime jazz
tunes that have been sampled by DJs and trip-hop artists and a section
about imaginary soundtracks like Pop Fiction and Soul Ecstasy
(I should do a show about imaginary soundtracks someday).
Blaxploitation.com: What a site. A huge section of Blaxploitation.com centers on
funk and acid jazz scores—most of them from blaxploitation movies—and
gives detailed descriptions of soundtrack LPs, from ubiquitous ones like
the Shaft soundtrack to lesser-known gems like Quincy Jones' Dollars
score. Film music fans on the Web can be a really staid bunch, with
their preferences for classical scores and their hatred for anything funky
or jazzy, so it's nice to see a site devoted to the underappreciated funk/soul
jazz sound. This site has some good articles, including an amusing one
about a blaxploitation movie geek convention that has Richard Roundtree
as one of its guest celebs, and he doesn't seem to be too thrilled about
speaking to a crowd made up entirely of paunchy, Comic Book Guy-ish white
male fans.
Film
Score Monthly: Their soundtrack reissue label is awesome.
SoundtrackNet: Reviews and film composer interviews.
David Arnold: Mr. Arnold, you have a nasty habit of surviving.
Jeff Beal: Best known for the scores from Pollock, Rome and Monk, Beal won an Emmy for Monk's first-season main title theme.
Elmer
Bernstein: The official site for the late maestro
who wrote the scores from such films as The Man with the Golden Arm,
The Great Escape and The Magnificent Seven.
Terence Blanchard: Don't sleep on Blanchard's music. His crowning achievement as a film composer is one of his earliest film projects, the Malcolm X score.
Alf
Clausen: The man behind the clever music for each episode of The
Simpsons is Emmy-winning composer/conductor Alf Clausen. Rhino has
released two CDs of Clausen's best Simpsons musical numbers and
end-credits variations on the show's Danny Elfman-penned theme music.
George
S. Clinton: Nope, not the P-Funkster. This George
Clinton is the man behind the mod music for the Austin Powers movies.
John
Debney: If you watched a lot of mediocre sci-fi
TV shows during the '90s, you might remember Debney's majestic themes
from seaQuest and The Cape. Debney's most popular work is
the score from Lethal Whipping, a.k.a. The Passion of the Christ.
Michael Giacchino: His best work to date? Probably the music on Lost.
The
Bernard Herrmann Society: A remarkable site
about Herrmann (Psycho, Taxi Driver), considered by many to be the greatest film composer
of all time. Known to his closest friends as "Benny," Herrmann was a temperamental
guy who always thought film music was beneath him and preferred to be
remembered for his concert pieces.
James
Newton Howard: An unofficial site about the
composer who regularly scores movies for M. Night Shyamalan (Signs)
and Lawrence Kasdan (Grand Canyon). Howard also wrote the ER
opening credits theme.
Michael
Kamen: The official site of the Lethal Weapon
and Die Hard composer, who passed away in 2003. I like that mini-keyboard
menu.
Rolfe
Kent: He wrote a great score for my favorite
film of 1999, director Alexander Payne's Election. Kent also wrote
the scores to Payne's subsequent films, About Schmidt and Sideways.
Mutato Muzika: The official site for Devo frontman-turned-film composer Mark Mothersbaugh and his film/TV score production company.
John Ottman: His
editing/composing career was jumpstarted by the film that jumpstarted
so many careers: The Usual Suspects.
ParodiFair.com: The official site for the married duo of Starr Parodi and Jeff
Eden Fair, best known for their modernized take on the Bond theme for
the GoldenEye and Tomorrow Never Dies trailers, as well
as the music for the '90s United Artists logo (that's a favorite logo
cue of mine). Parodi was that miniskirted keyboardist on The Arsenio
Hall Show.
Lalo
Schifrin: The official site for the composer behind the music from the Mission: Impossible
TV series, Enter the Dragon and Bullitt. Another site about Schifrin, run by jazz reviewer Doug Payne, can be found here.
David
Schwartz: He wrote the themes from Northern Exposure, Arrested
Development and Deadwood.
Alan
Silvestri: An unofficial site about the Back
to the Future and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? composer.
Phantasm: Shirley Walker: It's a shame
that her rousing scores for Batman: The Animated Series and Superman:
The Animated Series have never been released. Walker, who passed away in 2006, also wrote the scores for Final Destination, Escape from L.A. and Space:
Above and Beyond.
Craig Wedren: The former Shudder to Think frontman wrote music for MTV's The State and several shows and movies featuring State alumni (Wet Hot American Summer, Reno 911!, Stella, The Baxter). My favorite Wedren tune has to be the Stella theme. It's cowbellicious.
Christopher
Young: His credits include the scores to Species,
Entrapment and The Hurricane.
Varèse
Sarabande: The soundtrack label's site. However,
you won't find an explanation for that strange Rorschach-test logo.
GNP
Crescendo: This soundtrack label, which started
out as a jazz/big band label in the '50s, was named after founder Gene
Norman and his legendary Sunset Strip nightclub, the Crescendo.
Intrada:
Part film and TV score label, part online soundtrack store.
Footlight:
Another great online soundtrack store. This was where I got my copy of
the Battle Royale soundtrack after a listener requested a theme
from the movie.
MovieMusic.com: This site named Jim.Aquino.com "Favorite Movie Music
Website of 2000." MovieMusic.com features soundtrack reviews and
links, plus—now this is odd—a movie music comic strip. It's
odd because there aren't very many people in film music who don't take
themselves too seriously.
Film Music: Find out which soundtracks
are getting the most airplay on North American film music radio programs
like A Fistful of Soundtracks at the site for Film Music,
Mark Northam and Lisa Anne Miller's magazine for film and television music
industry folks.
The
Internet Movie Database:
Find out almost anything you want to know about any movie. Wanna clarify
if Ingrid Bergman said "Play it, Sam" or "Play it again,
Sam" to Dooley Wilson in Casablanca? The IMDb will tell you.
Wanna know who the best boy was on Ulee's Gold? They sure as hell
will tell you. Also useful for finding links to reviews and cult movie fan sites.
Bullitt: A fan site focusing on Steve McQueen's Mustang.
Fistful-of-Leone.com: A good site about
Sergio Leone, the Italian filmmaker behind the Man with No Name trilogy, Once Upon a Time in the West
and Once Upon a Time in America.
Directed
by Brian De Palma: Perhaps the only director
fan site in which the director himself liked it so much he actually granted
the webmaster an interview. The critics' heads were definitely up their
asses when they bashed De Palma's Mission: Impossible (which was
wittier and more thrilling than John Woo's terrible sequel) and Mission
to Mars.
 Titles
Designed by Saul Bass:
I'm a big-time Saul Bass fan. His title sequences for Hitchcock, Scorsese
and Otto Preminger (check out Bass' Anatomy of a Murder logo) were
the illest. I'm surprised nobody has noticed that the animation for the
credits that slide across the screen during the often-imitated Sopranos
opening title sequence is a homage to Bass' GoodFellas titles.
Pablo
Ferro: Another favorite opening titles designer. The title sequences
for Dr. Strangelove, the original Thomas Crown Affair, Bullitt,
the Men in Black movies and Napoleon Dynamite are among
the highlights of Ferro's career.
Badmovies.org: "A website to the detriment of good film."
AsianAmericanFilm.com:
Vowing to "refrain from tepid cheerleading," this site features
some good interviews with up-and-coming Asian American filmmakers.
Comics 101: The university class I always wanted.
PopMatters:
Reviews of films, TV, music and comics are the focus of this zine.
TeeVee: The sharpest TV reviews site/blog around, run by a bunch of
enjoyably surly columnists who want the head of the Fox exec who ordered
Andy Richter Controls the Universe to be taken out back and shot.
Their greatest moment: when writer Philip Michaels described much-maligned
Homicide cast member Jon Seda as "the
fart at my Thanksgiving dinner."
Jump
the Shark: Often, you know your favorite sitcom is about to jump
when it adds a baby or a kid to the cast. The term "jump the shark" is a reference to the lame-ass
Happy Days ep in which Fonzie waterskied over a shark in his leather
jacket—considered by many to be the ultimate signal of Happy Days'
decline, although the decline began much earlier, when it stopped being
a M*A*S*H-like one-camera show and it switched to the three-camera
sitcom format and started looking less like the '50s. And then the arrival
of Chachi changed everything. "Chachi" is Italian for "final
nail in show's coffin."
Sledge
Hammer! Online: Sledge Hammer! creator
Alan Spencer once e-mailed me with a note of thanks for declaring my love
for his show. When I was a kid, I adored Sledge Hammer!, as well
as The Young Ones and the Ralph Bakshi/John Kricfalusi version
of Mighty Mouse, while the rest of my family thought Full House
was the height of comedy. That tells you all you need to know about my
family.
Freaks
and Geeks: I loved this show, and I'm so
jazzed that all the eps were restored on DVD. Dialogue that was removed
by Fox Family Channel censors has been kept intact, and so have all the
period pop and rock songs that were originally featured during the series.
I'm also glad creators/producers Paul Feig and Judd Apatow kept Freaks
and Geeks's fully loaded official site up and running long after the
show's unfortunate cancellation.
30 Rock: "Proud as a peacork, baby!"
The Venture Bros.: Show creator Jackson Publick's LiveJournal exposes secret files of the Ventureverse.
Veronica Mars:
The official site for the other Rob Thomas, the one who didn't sing "Smooth" with Santana. This Rob Thomas is the guy behind Cupid and Veronica Mars. Neptunesite is one of many Veronica Mars fan sites.
 Battlestar Galactica:
The show's official site is loaded with deleted scenes, commentrak podcasts and blog entries by showrunner Ronald D. Moore.
Homicide:
Links on the Sites: Links to articles about
two of the best cop shows ever made, Homicide and The Wire,
both set in Baltimore and co-created by former Baltimore Sun crime
reporter David Simon.
David Mills: The P-Funk fan and writer of the Homicide ep "Bop Gun" gets real deep.
WHEDONesque:
Links to articles about the Joss Whedon shows Buffy, Angel
and Firefly, as well as non-TV Whedon projects like the Astonishing
X-Men comic.
The NewsRadio Archive: Peep the cool cartoon versions of the NewsRadio characters that were drawn by somebody named "piano." Is there some animated NewsRadio feature film I don't know about? Because that's what this illustrator's drawings look like. "piano" is that good of an illustrator. The ep review section on another fan site, NewsRadio and the Comedic Art, serves as a perfect companion piece to the DVD box set of the show's first two seasons (the commentraks were moderated by creator Paul Simms, who persuaded Sony Pictures to delay the DVD release so that he could be given time to record commentraks with the cast and crew, and the wait was worth it—they're among the most entertaining commentraks I've ever heard).
TV
Tattle: A blog that collects reviews and articles about TV from all
over the country.
TVShowsOnDVD: The best section is a list of changes that studios made to shows on DVD. The most frequent (and most annoying) example of TV-to-DVD alterations is the removal of existing songs that the studio couldn't afford to get the rights for on DVD (I hope J.H. Wyman and Warren Littlefield bitchslapped Paramount Home Entertainment for its butchering of the music on their show Keen Eddie).
TVgasm: Their recap of the Rosie O'Donnell masterpiece Riding the Bus with My Sister is must-read material. Sitting through Riding the Bus with My Sister—now that's what I call courage. Another must-read post is their recap of Tom Cruise's antics on The Today Show.
Danger
Mouse:
The Gnarls Barkley producer's Grey Album—which grafted Jay-Z's rhymes from The Black
Album onto tracks from the Beatles' White Album—may be
the most famous mash-up of them all.
Z-Trip:
The mash-ups—or "blends," as he prefers to call them—during
his live sets are the illest (example: Jane's Addiction's "Jane Says"
spliced with Jay-Z's "Izzo (H.O.V.A.)"). And how about that blend of the
main title theme from The Warriors with the "Apache" breakbeat?
Genius.
Go
Home Productions: Best mash-ups: "Return of
the Weather Episode" (Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg and Nate Dogg's "The Next Episode"
vs. Crowded House's "Weather with You"), "Making Plans for Vinyl" (Tweet's "Oops Oh My" vs. XTC's "Making Plans for Nigel"), "PiLs, Thrills and Britneyache"
(Britney Spears and Madonna's "Me Against the Music" vs. Public Image
Ltd.'s "Socialist"), "Eve's Phat Gangsta" (Eve and Alicia Keys' "Gangsta
Lovin'" vs. Sum 41's "Fat Lip"), "Rock with Addiction (Awww)" (Ashanti's
"Rock Wit U (Awww Baby)" vs. Jane's Addiction's "Just Because"), "Mortravis"
(Morcheeba's "World Looking In" vs. Travis' "Sing"), "Dirrty Stones" (Christina
Aguilera's "Dirrty" vs. The Rolling Stones' cover of "It's All Over Now"),
"Work It Out with a Foxy Lady" (Beyonce's "Work It Out" vs. Jimi
Hendrix's "Foxy Lady").
DJ Amp Live: Best mash-ups: "Z & G" (Coldplay vs. Zion I, the Grouch and Lyrics Born) and "Ring It" (the White Stripes vs. Mobb Deep).
Defamer:
Ain't he a bitch.
Giant
Robot: An old Giant Robot article
about a capo of Japanese American descent known as "Tokyo
Joe" is a bathroom reading favorite of mine. According to the GR
site, the zine "put the spotlight on Chow Yun-Fat, Jackie Chan and
Jet Li years before they were in mainstream America's vocabulary."
Davey
D's Hip-Hop Corner: Hip-hop news, reviews
and editorials by Bay Area hip-hop journalist and radio deejay Davey
D.
Live365.com:
A Fistful of Soundtracks is powered by Live365. I actually don't mind
some of the audio and video commercials that 365 used to add to the Webcast.
I miss that edible lingerie one.
The
Treatment:
Great move, Grey Lady. Ex-New York Times writer Elvis Mitchell's movie reviews were the only reason to check out the NYTimes. Though Mitchell doesn't seem to be writing anymore, he's still interviewing filmmakers, screenwriters and actors on
the KCRW talk program The Treatment.
This
American Life:
The official site for Ira Glass' clever documentary anthology series,
produced at WBEZ-FM in Chicago.
Merriam-Webster
OnLine: The online dictionary actually allows
you to hear the pronunciations of words. I'll take that over squinting
my eyes to try to make out a schwa in hard-to-read, musty, tattered and
dated copies of the dictionary any day.
snopes.com: Was Fargo really
based on events that took place in Minnesota in 1987? Did a guest really
die on The Dick Cavett Show? Did a contestant on The Newlywed
Game really say the most unusual place where she made whoopee was
in the ass? Find out if these urban legends are true on this amusing site.
Michael
Ticsay: The guy who runs one of the Web's top
John Mellencamp fan sites also happens to be one of my cousins. Also check
out thumbnails of snapshots from his '80s and '90s rock concert photo
collection. The shots of Springsteen, B.B. King and the Barenaked Ladies
are among the standouts.
© 2008 Jimmy Aquino
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A lot of Fistful of Soundtracks listeners tend to be illustrators, graphic artists and cartoonists (perhaps the film score cues inspire them while illustrating). The following illustrators have told me they dig Fistful:
Shannon Prynoski
from Titmouse Inc., the producers of Megas XLR and Metalocalypse
Now available: Shirts, mugs and even thongs. Click on Brigitte Bardot's body to buy some merch.
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