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.

Fast and Furious. Justin Lin. 2009. ⚁

[ten minutes pass]

Now, this is how you start one of these movies: Lots of really stupid and stupidly fun highway action. (The CGI is horrible, though, even for a 2009 movie.)

I started watching these movies because I wanted a contrast to, well, serious movies, and the first F&F movie was just about perfect. And then the second and the third movie made me lose the will to live.

But we’re back on track now? *crosses fingers*

It’s by the same movie as the really boring Tokyo Drift movie, though:

Which didn’t make much money. So why did they let him make another one?

Oh! But this one did make a lot of money, so whatever their reasons were for giving him a second chance, it did pay off.

[fifteen minutes pass]

Ah, so basically all the characters from the first movie is back? Including Diesel and Parker. I guess that’s why this was green-lit.

But after the initial action scene, this movie drags. Draaaaags. And not in a good way (no, not that way and not that way either). It’s just all … getting caught up with the “plot” which I think is pretty superfluous anyway.

But perhaps there’ll be a pay-off.

[ten minutes pass]

I don’t know… I think it lacks… rhythm? I’m not really talking about how Lin is making a cut once per second, but just how it all fits together. Like, when ex-bleach blond(e) guy rolled into the garage with all the (presumably) cool cars — that was an opportunity to play some “dope” music and fuck around with sensual shots of the cars. And there was basically nothing.

Or in the montage when ex-bleach blond(e) guy and Dom were fixing up their cars — it was just hard to get hard about that, or even tell what they were doing, or even, on a basic level, to tell the two sets apart.

Lin… isn’t a good director. He’s no Cohen. It’s just a jumble of images instead of a synaesthetic overload.

It’s also weird, casting wise — all the drivers (so far) are male, which goes counter to the first two movies, at least.

[half an hour passes]

This is better than the previous two er episodes — but it’s still a really, really bad movie. Some of the scenes almost work, but there’s so much tedium in-between the stuff that’s almost fun…

[the end]

Look, I would have been fine with a movie that was all guys and gals driving their cars around, interspersed with scenes of them adding more gadgets to the engines of their cars, but apparently that’s too expensive to film? So instead this movie is 90% guys sitting around talking to each other, being angsty and stuff.

So I get why this movie is this way, but I only hope that the next movie has a bigger budget so that there’ll be more driving around. And not an end scene like this one has, with CGI cars in CGI tunnels. But I guess that may be what the target audience likes, anyway? Make movies more like video games?

ME AM LIKE DRIVING CARS AROUND ME AM GEARHEAD

Hm… should I watch the next movie in this series now or one of the Derek Jarman movies I got on a 2K box set the other month? Hm… It’s been a while since I watched The Last of England…