Fast & Furious 6. Justin Lin. 2013. ⚃

[three quarters of an hour pass]

It’s… it’s got a fun plot? Intrigue and espionage and stuff; it’s the most high-class plot so far. But I think it’s slightly… scattered? The previous movie was a lot of fun, and this tries to hard to be equally fun, but it’s not quite hitting it, I think.

There’s some scenes that feel really dates, like the scene where Hobbs beats up the car thief in custody and the cops are going “Is that legal?” “No, but are you going to stop him?” and then smirking… I guess 2013 was the peak of the “good guys torture bad guys” thing popularised by 24…

And now they’re repeating it with the … guy that’s giving them the cars…

But… it’s got a lot of charm. It’s hard to stay annoyed.

[half an hour passes]

This is a lot of fun, but there’s boring scenes in here that could have been cut. I don’t mean the ones where Vin tries to get his amnesiac girlfriend (who now works for The Enemy (yes, indeed)), but the ones where the men stand around talking to each other portentously.

[the end]

I thought they had reached the limits of absurd action scenes with the tank-on-the-highway thing, but then they topped it with the cars v. plane scene! Fabulous!

But it’s not a perfect movie. They could have cut down… like… fifteen minutes of flab? That’s not a lot. It’s almost The Greatest Action Movie Ever, but it’s not. But it could have been.

I like that it leans into the serial nature of these movies… hard. I don’t think anybody watching this isn’t going I WANT TO SEE THE NEXT MOVIE.

Fast Five. Justin Lin. 2011. ⚄

Oh deer. Another Justin Lin take of The Fast and the Furious.

Oh fuuuuuck! Lin does them all from now on out, except number seven? Hollywood is so unadventurous — he’d delivered two F&F movies that (one of them vaguely) made money, so he gets to own the franchise?

OK, I guess that paid off here, with the studio taking in several hundred M…

Perhaps this’ll be a good one, then? 50% bigger budget than the last one.

[half an hour passes]

Well, there was a fun action scene, but now it’s all… The Rock flirting with a cop in Brazil. I don’t know why, exactly.

[ten minutes pass]

My standard joke about character development in movies is “You’re not my father! You were never then when I grew up! *development achieved*” Guess what just happened here:

That’s a variation, at least…

But this F&F movie is the best since the first one. At least so far — it’s got a good heist thing going on, and all the gang’s together again…

[an hour or so passes]

This is such a good-natured movie! Finally they’ve got the chemistry back from the first movie after a streak of movies that were difficult to care about. This one also has got a lot more and more fun action than the previous movies, so it’s no wonder that it’d go on to gross 2x the previous movie and 4x the one before that. Lin is coming into his own, balancing out the scenes a lot better: You can actually tell what’s going on, even when there’s a lot of action.

[the end]

This was what I imagined one of these movies would be like! It’s fun! It’s exciting! It’s got a heist plot!

I think this may be the best movie in the series, so far. (I.e., it’s perhaps better than the first one? And the three other ones are execrable, so…)

The Angelic Conversation. Derek Jarman. 1985. ⚅

The British Film Institute released a blu-ray set of a bunch of Jarman movies the other year, but I haven’t gotten around to watching any of them. I’ve seen all of them before, I think… and I was surprised to find that The Last of England wasn’t included?

But here’s The Angelic Conversation, which is probably mostly famous for this:

I’ve listened to the Coil soundtrack CD a bunch of times, so it’s odd and eerie to new watch the movie (which I haven’t seen since I saw it at the Cinematheque in the early 90s)…

[ten minutes pass]

The 8mm footage looks great in the 2K version. All the grain and all the wonky colours. I’m guessing it was sourced from Jarman’s 35mm blow-up of the 8mm?

[edit: I’m watching the documentary extras now, and there was apparently a VHS step here? I thought I saw some VHS artefacts here… Oh, and the Lee Drysdale interview, where he tells the story of how David Bowie was going to be in Neutron (and was in talks with them for nine months without signing a contract) is hilarious. Apparently Jarman cribbed Bowie’s Marlboro back and put it on his mantlepiece, and Bowie saw that and freaked out (Satanism or extreme nerdery?), and then just ghosted them. And then he made Elephant Man instead of Neutron. And then the story about meeting him again years later. And how about how the music that ended up on Scary Monsters had been meant for Neutron, and referred to bits that Drysdale had written in the script, and used Jarman’s aesthetic in the videos and stuff. I have no idea whether any of that is true, but it’s fun.]

Oh, if you haven’t seen this movie: It’s Judi Dench reading a bunch of Shakespeare sonnets over a low-framerate (3 FPS? I tried counting) blurry shots of some guys with torches.

It’s great!

[more minutes pass]

“Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds”

[the end]

It’s so weird how well this works. Your mind (well, my mind, FSVO) drifts off during the more abstract bits, and then snaps back into focus when Dench starts declaiming a sonnet, and then it’s like YES!

It shouldn’t really work at all… Jarman just got on eye for visual rhythm and pacing, and what could have been, well, nothing becomes something very much indeed.