The Fast and the Furious

The Fast and the Furious. Rob Cohen. 2001. ⚃

I’ve just seen the 100 movies on the Sight & Sound directors’ poll. So I was thinking… “What would be the opposite of that?”

And then it just came to me: The Fast and the Furious series! And it turned out they’d just released a 4K box set, so I got that.

It’s not that these movies are universally reviled:

Instead, it’s just that these movies aren’t even really talked about at all; they’re outside the consideration of polite society?

I know nothing about these movies except that they’re about people driving around in cars.

Sounds great!

[seven minutes pass]

This started off with a … truck heist? And then we went to some drama stuff where a bleached blond(e) guy got punched by a guy who called him a faggot, and now they’re fighting while the soundtrack is playing a song where the lyrics just seem to be “macho crap! macho crap!”.

It’s very… knowing?

[fifteen minutes more pass]

It’s very hard not to enjoy this movie. It’s guys shit-talking each other while looking really cool, with slightly unrealistic cars, and driving around really fast. But it’s also got chemistry: The bit after the bleached blond(e) guy lost that race was really charming. It’s very playful.

[half an hour passes]

I’m still liking this movie, but it’s got problems. So much of the cinematography is pure cliché — the dramatic swoop up, the switch-aroung, etc — that it starts to get grating after a while. Not that there isn’t fun, bold stuff.

I was also thinking “hey, there’s no daddy issues! Just a pretty complex and confusing crime thing” and then Vin started in on his monologue about his dad.

*sigh*

[half an hour passes]

I’ve always liked Vin Diesel… he’s got charm, and he ends up in slightly off-kilter genre movies like Pitch Black. He doesn’t take the movies very seriously… and it’s obvious he didn’t think much of this movie. You can see him smirking after delivering every shouty line, just before the director cuts to something else. It’s fun to watch.

Of course, this because a box office behemoth, so I wonder whether that’ll make him all serious and stuff in the subsequent instalments…

[the end]

Well… plot-wise, so to speak, this didn’t really stake the ending. But on the other hand, the final scene was fun, and perhaps that’s the important thing.

I’m not surprised that I liked this movie, but I was surprised at how un-annoying it is. These sorts of movies are usually offensive in some way or other, and it steer clears of all that stuff by just having one fun action scene after another.

Now I’m all excited about seeing the next (oh dear) seven movies.

Fellini: A Director’s Notebook

A Director’s Notebook. Federico Fellini. 1969. ⚃

Over the years, there’s a bunch of supplemental movies included on DVDs and blu-rays that I haven’t watched. I thought it might be fun to spend a couple of days watching these…

I’m not going to blog about the normal “behind the scenes” Hollywood documentaries, because that would be even less interesting than usual.

So here’s a fifty minute sort of… er… It was included on the 8½ DVD.

Fellini filmed a “sort of semihumourous introduction” to past and future plans: the recently abandoned project, The Voyage of G. Mastorna, and his latest work-in-progress, Fellini Satyricon.

[twenty minutes pass]

It’s not really a documentary, but… it’s very Fellini.

I haven’t seen Fellini Satyricon in decades, and this thing seems to reference that a lot… but as pantomime. This would probably had more resonance if I were more familiar with the movies this seems to be commenting on…

But I don’t, so it just seems like an oddity.

[twenty minutes pass]

But it’s kinda entertaining. It’s very meta. I mean, it’s Fellini; how could it be otherwise? I found myself falling into the patterns of this thing kinda hypnotised…