chapter 7

released June 22nd, 2001
10 years ago today!

Wow, I never would’ve predicted this: THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS has aged well. Or maybe I just wasn’t ready for it back when I first saw it. Skimming over my intentionally pretentious and off-topic original review I can see that I saw it as an attempt to exploit a fad. This is supported by all the old dvd extras (now on blu-ray) which make a huge deal about it being based on a Vibe article about street racing, and how they went to watch races and ran from the cops and all the cars and extras in the car show scenes are real racers who responded to a web posting. They wanted us to know this “street racing” was a real thing happening somewhere at night, and director Rob Cohen and friends are on the front lines ready to show us what’s going down.

That shit (and the music on the soundtrack – “Rollin’” by Limp Bizkit!?) is still goofy, but watching it with ten years and four sequels of distance it seems like the street racing is a relatively small part of the movie, not worth fixating on. It’s a story about these men who happen to be obsessed with fixing up cars to go fast, and who use those skills to hijack shipments of DVD players. But it’s more about them as characters than about the specifics of their engines. It’s way more based on POINT BREAK than on that Vibe article, and I never got hung up on the portrayal of surf culture in POINT BREAK. It’s just the world that the story takes place in.

There’s one major street racing scene, the one where Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker) puts his $80,000 car on the line and loses it to Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel). I always thought it was a funny idea, they’re just driving in a straight line and their winning seems to mainly depend on pushing the button that kicks in the nitrous oxide, or as I would call it “the go-faster button.” Cohen tried to come up with a new way of showing speed on film, so it’s all very artificial, the actors driving fake cars with blurry, pulsating surroundings, and the famous camera-move-through-CGI-engine that was in a couple of these and then became standard in movies for a while in the early 2000s.

Watching it now it’s more of a special effects sequence than an action one. It reminds me of the speeder bike chase in The Return of the Jedis. But in my 2011 wisdom I can just smile at that silliness and appreciate the scene for its place in the story and characterization. I like it for Brian smiling like a stoner (or like Keanu?) after the catastrophic loss of his car, because he knows he’s earned some kind of respect with his impressive showing; for Dom’s macho and overly-competitive rebuttal to Brian’s claim of “Dude, I almost had you!”; for the way the outcome of the bet sets up their relationship and the perfect ending to the movie.

The stunt coordinator and second unit director is Mic Rodgers, director of UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: THE RETURN. Alot of his career has been spent with Mel Gibson, as his personal stunt double, stunt coordinator on alot of the movies he was in, and second unit director on APOCALYPTO, among other things. He also performed stunts in ROAD HOUSE and ON DEADLY GROUND, making him an important part of our nation’s great cultural history. And he does his job well here. Despite the digital slickness of that street race scene the rest of the movie feels very organic. It’s real car stunts, lots of crazy car flips and people climbing on and off of speeding vehicles, getting shot at. They’ve made this type of scene more elaborate over the course of the series, but the original ones still work great, sold by great stuntwork and the conviction in Diesel’s face and arms.

The filmatism is better than what I associate with Cohen. Although I don’t care for the song I like the musical montage of the police raiding Johnny Tran (Rick Yune) and his people. Busting in, humiliating a guy in front of his family, the guy’s father slaps him. And he didn’t even do the crime. (Although he did blow up the car Dom won from Brian, and later shoots one of their friends.)

One thing that hasn’t changed in ten years: the movie lives or dies on Diesel’s charisma. His type of macho confidence was a rarity in the pop culture of 2001 and arguably even moreso now, although averaging in THE EXPENDABLES might fuck up the statistics on that one. Dom is introduced behind chain link fencing in the back room of Toretto’s, the cafe and mini-mart that his sister Mia (Jordana Brewster) runs. Brian sits there eating his tuna fish sandwich and sees Dom’s bald head and muscular shoulders from the back. He doesn’t get to meet him until getting in a fist fight with Vince (Matt Schulze) and Mia begging Dom to intervene.

Dom is a great character, or at least Diesel makes him great. Brian’s boss, in a car movie variation on the “just how badass is he?” scene, says Dom’s “got nitrous oxide in his blood and a gas tank for a brain.” But Mia describes him as “gravity,” attracting everyone to him. We see this at the street races, where he doesn’t really have conversations, more like makes speeches to the crowd, like he thinks he’s Maximus from GLADIATOR, or Cyrus from THE WARRIORS, or The Humungus in MAD MAX 2. They hang on his every word, “ooooooohhh” on his every dis, cheer for his macho proclamations like “Ask any racer, any real racer. It don’t matter if you win by an inch or a mile. Winning’s winning.”

I mean really, is that supposed to be a great piece of real racer wisdom there? Why would you cheer for that? Because Dom said it, that’s the only reason. He can sell it like a preacher.

Not many actors could’ve pulled that part off. I know there’s a long list of all the people who were supposedly considered for Brian (Academy Award winner Christian Bale) and Mia (Academy Award winner Natalie Portman). I’m not sure who else was up for Dom, but I know Diesel had to leave John Frankenheimer’s REINDEER GAMES to take the part. You can describe that kind of presence, but you can’t simulate it. If it was phony the movie would be nothing. Obviously Diesel returning to the series is a big part of its growing success, but I think if it hadn’t been him in the first place there never would’ve been any sequels anyway, because nobody would’ve gave a shit.

There’s been some talk lately, some positive talk, about this series being “post-racial” and admirably diverse, the way it brings together all different races and nationalities in its cast. FAST FIVE has a super team of African-Americans, Latin Americans, Asian Americans, Puerto Ricans, Brazilians, some Samoan in The Rock, and one white guy. I would add that TOKYO DRIFT has a hick from Alabama who tries to graciously ingrain himself in Japanese culture, doesn’t drag his feet about it, doesn’t complain about having to take his shoes off.

But I gotta credit part 1 (and the Vibe article) for this approach. The street racing culture seems to be primarily Asian. You’ve got an Asian team, you’ve got a Hispanic team, and you’ve got our lead team which is 3 white guys, Jordana Brewster and Vin Diesel. They all have rivalries, sometimes with machine guns, sometimes with deadly results. But nobody ever calls anybody a racial slur, or seems like they have a problem with race, or notices it. Nobody even brings race up, it’s not about that.

This becomes more interesting when all the racers converge for a big convention that’s called “Race Wars.” That’s what they fucking call it! And you gotta wonder… didn’t they know what that sounds like? They had to’ve. Or maybe not. To them “race” means cars driving fast, what else would it mean? They’re not whites or blacks or Asians, they’re not a race, they’re people who race cars. Racists.

In a way it’s the same as that scene that had to be explained to me in the Coen Brothers version of TRUE GRIT. The little white girl and the little black boy talk about what a great name “Little Blackie” is for a pony, and it’s sweet because they’re both too innocent to be uncomfortable about any racial connotations in this conversation. Race Wars is the same thing. People from all walks of life can come together and have a Race War and still be brothers.

But then again they’re not all good people. Some of them are killers. Dom and his friends are behind a string of truck hijackings, that’s the whole reason why undercover cop Brian had to get acquainted with them in the first place. But why are they doing these robberies? What are they spending the money on? Mia isn’t going to medical school like she wishes, Jesse isn’t going to MIT like Brian says he should, the house is not real fancy. In a deleted scene we learn that Vince is paying medical expenses for his mom or grandma or somebody, but I’m not sure that counts since it’s not in the movie. As far as we know all this money goes into their cars. If so that’s kind of an accidental condemnation of the sport, isn’t it, if that’s what you gotta do to afford the equipment? You don’t gotta commit grand larceny to play basketball. You just gotta beat up somebody your size and steal their shoes.

Despite their crimes you like these guys because they’re like a family, and Dom is like their dad. He even brings them together for a fried chicken backyard picnic and he makes them say grace. Afterwards they lay around in the living room and watch DRAGON: THE BRUCE LEE STORY.

(By the way, I wonder whatever happened to Leon [Johnny Strong]? He was the guy on the racing team who didn’t get anything to do. He wasn’t Vin Diesel, he wasn’t the guy who’s jealous of Brian, he wasn’t the ADD computer expert, he was the other guy. They should bring him back in part 6, have him do something.)

Watching it now it doesn’t seem like a movie about racing (or “racism”) as much as it’s about macho bonding. The family doesn’t always take care of each other. Dom gets abandoned and almost picked up by the cops and can’t believe it when it’s Brian that saves him. He comes home and the people that should’ve been looking out for him are having a party. Vince is playing guitar. Lettie is playing video games. Girls are making out. Nobody gave a shit about Dad, except Brian, so he’s in.

Of course, he’s an undercover cop, he has ulterior motives to get in with Dom. So the key moment is toward the end when Brian and Dom are in a field tending to the wounded Vince, and Brian calls for a medevac, calling himself “Officer Brian O’Conner” right in front of Dom. Dom gives him the ice cold “you motherfucker” stare. At this moment he could easily bash Brian’s skull in with a wrench like he did to the guy who caused his dad’s death. But he has to eventually come to understand what Brian has done. He found out when Dom was going to hijack a truck, didn’t want the cops to catch him or for the truck driver to kill him, so he went to help. He had Dom’s cell phone traced to get his location. Why didn’t he just call him and say the cops were onto him? I don’t know, but I’m glad he didn’t because everybody had failed to get Vince safely off the side of the truck, but Brian swooped in and did it. And Vince fucking hated him, so this is a supreme act of grace, like Babe saving the pitbull that tried to kill him in Babe part 2: Rise of Babe.

In summary, O’Conner has blown his cover, betrayed his people, risked his life and performed incredible stunts, all to save the life of an asshole that tried to beat him up and (at first) refused to even eat chicken with him. Brian did that because the guy was Dom’s friend. And all of that’s in the air while he’s looking down at the wounds trying not to blush from Dom’s “I’m gonna fucking tear your throat out” stare.

A whole lot of movies have squeezed drama out of the undercover cop forming a bond and then feeling like Benedict Arnold. Sometimes they just relate to the guy, sometimes they actually switch sides like this, and now they’re a rat to the crooks and to the cops. We’ve seen it a million times. But somehow this dumb racing movie pulled off a really good one, an almost mythic take on this classic situation, and not with dialogue – just with the expressions and physicality of two actors whose skills are generally shat upon.

Something occurred to me about the title. I always thought of “the fast and the furious” as being a lurid description of this group of people, or this subculture, or this generation or something. Like “the young and the restless.” But could it have been intended like THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY? Brian is “the fast” because of his driving, Dom (despite being equally fast) is “the furious” because of his anger about what happened to his father and what that did to his life. I don’t know, maybe that’s not what they meant, but I kind of like it.

This one cost about $38 million, less than half a MUMMY RETURNS, but they got way more for their investment. It’s a hi-octane thrill ride, a rubber-burning action vehicle, a nitrous-injected race car thingy, and other Peter Travers type quotes. This isn’t the type of movie I think of when I’m talking about the sons of JAWS and the Big Summer Popcorn Movie and all that shit, but it’s by far the best and most entertaining movie in this retrospective so far. It’s silly and it’s derivative of a better silly action movie, but it’s got heart, it’s got screen presence, it’s got codes of honor, and it’s got a hell of a car crash. That poor Dodge Charger, man. It’s been through so much over the last decade.

Happy birthday THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS. And many more.

* * *

legacy: 4 sequels so far and giving inspiration to other movies such as TORQUE.

Summer ‘01-’11 connections: the best movie of the summer so far is FAST FIVE, sequel to this sleeper hit of ‘01, and reuniting most of the original cast (even Matt Schulze).

would they make a movie like this today? The music would probly be better. And I would say the stunts would be more digital, except FAST FIVE has gone back to the glory of the real car stunt. FAST FIVE has also drifted away from the souped up Japanese cars to the classic ’70s muscle cars many of us prefer to see on screen (here just used as Dom’s dad’s car).

Of course, Bruce was born in San Francisco, raised in Hong Kong, filmed his movies in Hong Kong. He only lived here for about 5 years. But I think it’s fair to say they were important years. Any biography of Bruce mentions that he studied philosophy, right? Well that was right here at our University of Washington. He actually majored in drama, so give us partial credit for his acting too. He started his first kung fu schools here. He met his wife here. He married her here. When he died his family still lived here, so he’s buried here, and so is Brandon. We still don’t have a Bruce Lee statue, but Linda and Shannon Lee are trying to build The Bruce Lee Action Museum here. So we got a legitimate claim, I think. We are a Bruce Lee town.

That’s why it’s so embarrassing that some dumb motherfuckers dropped the ball and got us completely erased from this biopic. The University wouldn’t let them film on campus because the script depicted one UW athlete being racist toward Bruce. That seems like denial. I have a hard time believing things like that never happened to him. But more importantly, Bruce hands the racist’s ass to him (here you go – I think you dropped this) and in the very next scene the guy and all his friends are converted into Bruce’s students. The movie hardly dwells on racism. It portrays his college years as a good experience.

But somebody said no, and according to the commentary track by director Rob Cohen (DRAGONHEART, THE MUMMY: TOMB OF THE DRAGON EMPEROR, THE FAST AND THE DRAGON FURIOUS) the city of Seattle wasn’t very cooperative either. So he got pissed and rewrote the script (and history). In the movie Bruce goes to college in California, Linda is a California girl, and some version of Ruby Chow (famous restaurant owner and politician in Seattle) is in San Francisco’s Chinatown instead of ours. Oh well, they’re basically the same – liberal west coast port cities where Bruce Lee had schools. Smash together DIRTY HARRY and McQ.

It makes me sad that they didn’t film in Seattle, but I guess it’s no big deal because it doesn’t seem like too many people remember this one anyway, or have any respect for it. They complain about all the Hollywood bullshit. It gives him fictional fights – an alley brawl with the cooks at Ruby Chow’s (with him balancing on a wire and dodging cleavers), one with American sailors (where he does a flip and perches nimbly on a table like Spiderman), a huge grudge match on the set of THE BIG BOSS (captured on film but then he destroys it), and even some nightmares or visions where he’s chased by an armored demon (Sven Ole-Thorsen). The part that seems the most like Hollywood bullshit is the duel for the right to teach kung fu to non-Chinese students, but that’s based on a real event. Of course, the movie still has to set it in a spooky BLOODSPORT type temple instead of a normal martial arts studio, and they make it the source of his debilitating back injury (actually caused by weightlifting) and create dramatic conflict by having him hide it from his wife (in real life she was there).

Despite all this I really like DRAGON and think people are too hard on it. I mean have you seen any of the Hong Kong Bruce Lee biopics? Because the Hong Kong bullshit is worse than the Hollywood bullshit. BRUCE LEE: THE MAN/THE MYTH for example just has him getting in a bunch of fights to prove that Chinese kung fu is better than the fighting techniques of other countries. Then at the end it says that he might’ve faked his death and will come back in 1983. This has less lies and more truth. Compared to those movies DRAGON seems like the Maysles brothers followed Bruce around and filmed his whole life. Yeah, so it has some silly exaggerations about the type of life he lived. But it also shows him as a fully dimensional human being. It shows his family life, his philosophy, his rebellion against tradition, his struggle to become a leading man despite Hollywood small-mindedness and racism. It shows some difficulties with being in an interracial relationship in America of the 1960s.

The script is based mostly on Linda Lee’s book The Bruce Lee Only I Knew, so it really does show sides of him nobody else had bothered to show before, and (through Lauren Holly as Linda) it shows a female perspective of Bruce as boyfriend, husband, lover and father. It’s the rare Hollywood movie with a love scene between a white woman and Asian man. It’s not only about why he’s awesome, but why she loved him.

I mean, they try to show him being awesome too. The fight scenes are fun and well shot, although it’s kind of weird that they’re supposed to be real life but use a more exaggerated style than what Lee tried to do in his movies. For example the first one has Bruce doing a flip and tearing his shirt off Incredible Hulk style. But they do pay tribute to many of Bruce’s moves and weapons (of course they got him using nunchakas and wooden staffs). Although they could be a more accurate depiction of his fights I don’t agree with the complaints about them being in the movie. I personally believe that all biopics would be improved by adding 5 or 6 kung fu scenes, and here’s a rare example where it makes sense. I mean admit it, RAY wasn’t bad, but we’d all own the DVD if it had a bunch of sword fights and stuff.

As a tribute to all the other Bruce Lee imitators, Jason Scott Lee doesn’t look very much like Bruce Lee at all. But he strays from their tradition by actually trying to imitate him. Somehow with his facial expressions and poses he makes a believable (if bulkier and rounder-faced) Bruce Lee. Jason Scott not only had to imitate Bruce’s Jeet Kune Do, he also had to recreate his charm and chemistry with his wife and the pain of his struggle to make it in America. Like Will Smith in ALI he has a thankless job, trying the impossible feat of portraying an iconic human force whose presence and charisma are impossible to duplicate. But I think he does an impressive job and deserves much more credit for this performance than he ever got. And for Christ’s sake somebody give him some good movies to be in. He’s a good actor.

The movie very intentionally ends on the set of ENTER THE DRAGON and doesn’t show his death or deal with the rumors about what he was up to and what caused it and all that. It’s true, there’s no reason at this point to dwell on his death. This movie celebrates what he accomplished in his short life, and it makes it clear that his spirit is still out there. He had an enormous impact on the martial arts (especially what we now call MMA), on martial arts movies, on the careers of Asian actors in western countries, maybe even on racial relations in general. And just as Bruce Lee’s spirit lives on in our hearts, DRAGON: THE BRUCE LEE STORY’s theme song lives on in our trailers and inspirational sports broadcasts. Examples below.

starting about 1 minute in:

1:37 in:

50 seconds:

1:50:

1:16:

and there’s this one:

(of course that one’s not as weird as when I heard the theme from SUSPIRIA used for Olympic gymnastics)

[ratings]

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Okay, I should get a couple disclaimers out of the way. First of all, mummies are not one of my favorite monsters. Off the top of my head the only mummy movie I can think of that I like is BUBBA HO-TEP, but that didn’t really need to be a mummy to be good. It just needed to be a slow moving monster so an elderly Elvis could be a fair match for it. If it was about a giant space slug or mutant sloth it could also be good if it had the same characterization of a sad, lonely Elvis Presley. The Universal MUMMY with Boris Karloff is a great monster at the beginning, then he disappears and it’s just Karloff in a fez for the rest of the movie. It’s no DRACULA, I’ll tell you that. And as you can see above I didn’t think the Hammer version was that great either.

As for the MUMMY that started this series, I hated the fuckin thing. I remember it as having no sense of build or rhythm at all, it was all clatter and mayhem and stupidity. In RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK they have scenes where he’s at school teaching, right? But when Stephen Sommers rips off RAIDERS he’s worried that your attention span is too short for a story to develop so in an early scene in a library the love interest character played by Rachel Weiss for no reason at all clutzily destroys the entire library Jar Jar style. I hated his style enough that I decided not to watch Sommers movies anymore, so I skipped out on part 2. I only watch non-Sommers spin-offs such as THE SCORPION KING (which was much more fun).

So when I found out Rob Cohen (DRAGON: THE BRUCE LEE STORY, DRAGONHEART, THE FAST DRAGON THE FURIOUS, etc.) was taking over I thought I would go see it. He also makes crappy, stupid movies, but it’s a style of crappy stupid movie that is more watchable for me. It’s kind of like after Arizona finally started celebrating Martin Luther King Day you didn’t have to boycott it anymore, same thing here, without Stephen Sommers I was excited to watch a stupid MUMMY movie with poor Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh in the cast.

But then when it came time to put my money where my mouth was I couldn’t do it, because we actually had a good movie summer. Usually I’d have fun seeing a crappy movie in August (I paid to see Rob Cohen’s STEALTH, for example, and didn’t regret it) but this year I really felt like if I was gonna go to a theater I might as well just see DARK KNIGHT again. It seemed almost unethical to go see something I knew was crap when there was one that good still playing.

But now THE MUMMY TOMB OF THE DRAGON EMPEROR A FILM BY ROB COHEN comes to the DVD and I’ll be damned, this is actually a legitimately great adventure movie! Brendan Fraser returns as the globetrotting hero Rick O’Connell, a gun tot– nah, just jerkin your chain, this is a piece of shit, but I kind of enjoyed some of it. Details to follow.

Jet is the wicked emperor who conquered China and built the Great Wall and could shoot fireballs (not sure if this is historically accurate). Michelle is a witch who brought him to a secret place to find spells that would help him defeat his last enemy, Death. Basically the whole trouble in this movie stems from the emperor’s best friend General Ming violating the ancient Bros Before Hoes covenant. The emperor said “Let no man touch her – she is mine” but then General Ming fell in love with her and impregnated her, so the Emperor had him drawn and quartered. Luckily, the witch pulled a Jamie Kennedy style practical joke where she did the wrong spell and instead of giving him eternal life she cursed him and his army to become terra cotta warriors.

Once all that’s explained it skips to the 20th century and we soon come to the sad realization that this movie still stars Brendan Fraser. Now, I feel bad saying this, because the guy seems pretty nice. But I must be honest. I fucking hate Brendan Fraser. How does this guy star in movies? He has all these old timey hardass lines but they don’t sound at all believable coming out of his mouth. He has jokes and he delivers them wrong, so they don’t make sense. He has a son in the movie who looks like he’s at most ten years younger than him. He’s not believable as being that age or as being a father in general, or a war veteran. Basically, every aspect of the character does not fit the actor. I don’t get it. He must have some charisma, people like him, but I don’t see it. To be fair I’m a little color blind, his charisma might be a shade of green that I have trouble with or something.

Did you see the trailer? I did, about ten thousand times. One thing that bugged the shit out of me is when the crazy pilot says “I’d tell you to put your seatbelts on, but I couldn’t afford to get any!” Fraser looks disgusted, laughs sarcastically and then sarcastically says “Why am I laughing?”

It doesn’t make any sense! Clearly Fraser is supposed to be charmed by the crazy pilot and laugh along with him, then realize that his life is in danger and ask himself “Why am I laughing?” But it doesn’t make any sense for the laugh to be sarcastic, or the line, for that matter. What I don’t understand though is how Fraser does the scene wrong, then it ends up in the trailer, and then ends up in the movie. There was plenty of time to fix it. Shit, you should’ve told me you didn’t have time, I would’ve figured out some way to fix it for you just for the betterment of mankind.

The early scenes that introduce Fraser’s character Rick and his wife Evey in retired boredom are extremely painful. It’s the type of “humor” where adults act like annoying little kids and that’s supposed to count as comedy. They also have not one but two “jokes” where music is playing and then it skids to a stop to denote wackiness (I wonder why they didn’t go for the needle scraping off the record routine?)

Making things worse is the fact that Rachel Weiss knew when to call it quits so they replace her with poor Maria Bello, trying her best at an English accent. Bello is a great actress who comes across like an idiot in this moronic horse shit. But hey, let’s consider her paycheck on this one a reward for A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE.

Anyway, their dashing adventurer son has skipped out of college to dig up the titular tomb, meanwhile his parents are tricked into delivering some magic crystal deal to the same place and this resurrects the emperor who walks around, then turns into a three headed dragon and flies around, then turns back into a man and never thinks to do the dragon trick again, which in my opinion is very, very poor strategy on his part. His plan is to revive his army at the magic pool of whatever and such and then who knows, all kinds of evil and what not, etc., would potentially, you know. You can imagine. That is what is at stake here. All that kind of stuff.

Luckily Michelle Yeoh is alive. Why is she still alive? I will let her character explain with actual dialogue from the movie:

“I would have died too by his hand, if the yeti had not found me and brought me to this pool.”

Yes, that is correct, that is why this movie is worth watching, because Michelle Yeoh plays a witch who clashed with an evil emperor in ancient China but luckily a yeti found her and brought her to a magic pool so she lived into the post WWII period when the emperor was brought back to life and then she killed him again.

Of course, when she says that line in the movie it’s not a complete surprise, because there was already a part earlier when her daughter (also immortal) is in trouble so she yells a bunch of words and then some CGI yetis show up and help her. You may have heard about the scene where they kick a guy through the air and then celebrate a field goal. What made me happy was that after the battle they stay in the movie and help them up the mountain. It’s like THE WIZARD OF OZ, they just pick up different weird characters along the way and nobody questions it. (Unfortunately after a while the yetis disappear and never come back. But hopefully they will get a spinoff prequel like the Scorpion King.)

Here’s another line of dialogue that made me laugh:

“Hey, mom – sorry I blamed you guys for raising the emperor.”

I wish they would stick to the heartfelt lines, they’re way funnier than the smartass ones. The movie’s pretty fun whenever it’s not trying to be fun.

Like the first MUMMY movie and probaly the second one that I boycotted this one has constant show-offy special effects sequences, some better than others. The yetis, unfortunately, look like video game characters. But I did think the emperor mummy guy was sort of cool. He’s like a video game character also because of the fireballs, but I like how he’s a clunky clay man whose face sometimes breaks to reveal a ZOMBI style rotted face beneath. Since he can grow back the clay parts he actually breaks off a chunk of his head in one scene and throws it as a weapon. I can respect that. Also Michelle Yeoh resurrects all the people who died making the Great Wall and uses them as an army. I thought those guys looked cool although I didn’t understand why some of them still had faces – I was under the impression that the Great Wall had been built quite some time ago. Haven’t checked wikipedia yet though.

Jet Li and his special effects team make a pretty good villain, but you can’t help but think they’re wasting this guy. Of course he gets to fight a little bit, but not as much as he would in pretty much any other movie he’s ever made. Michelle doesn’t do much either, they do have a short sword fight where she spins around a couple times. But really this is all lead-up to the showdown movie fans have been begging for for years: ladies and gentlemen, the long awaited duel between Jet Li, 15 time gold medal winning champion of Beijing Wushu Team, and the legendary Brendan Fraser, of MONKEY BONE and MRS. WINTERBOURNE. Li started out fighting in the Fanzi Eagle Claw style, Fraser I believe started out in ENCINO MAN.

This brings up an interesting question. Not just “how am I supposed to believe Brendan Fraser defeating Jet Li in hand-to-hand combat?” but “how am I supposed to root for Brendan Fraser against Jet Li?” They try every trick in the book, including making Jet completely fucking evil, putting Michelle Yeoh on the Fraser team, even giving him yetis. Still it takes effort to side with him. Maybe they should’ve made it a tie.

Now that I’ve seen the movie I will not stand for any of that “ironically the INDIANA JONES ripoff was better than the INDIANA JONES sequel” business. I understand there are harsh feelings because you didn’t get what you wanted out of that one, but if you’re gonna claim this garbage is better you’re clearly too emotional to make a serious argument. But that’s okay, maybe this stupid movie will cheer you up. For those who get a kick out of watching the stupidest shit Hollywood can waste money on, this one gives way more bang for your buck than a 10,000 BC, and the pacing is not quite as pan-banging-against-your-head as part 1. So I didn’t regret it. On the other hand, DARK KNIGHT is on DVD. I could’ve been watching that.

Or volunteering at a food bank. I’m sorry, everybody.

[ratings]

Even though they know for sure that there are no innocent office workers, janitors or burglars inside the building, our three top guns check out some statistics on their onboard computers to make sure this is morally sound. They know this is in the middle of downtown so they have to plan out a way to implode the building so that it will be all neat and tidy and no bricks will fall on anybody’s heads or anything. And they pull it off!

So this is actually a pretty optimistic near future where the pilots are not only interested in preventing casualties, but given the tools to do it and the courage to turn down the mission when it will harm civilians. It’s also optimistic because despite the amazing technology on display here, they have not gone and militarized space, which would make this super plane flyers obsolete.

Another thing that might make them obsolete, and the reason we are gathered here today to discuss a movie, is EDI, pronounced Eddie. That’s the new plane they got with a robot brain. He is their “new wingman” and they gotta teach his robot brain (which looks like it was made in a collaboration between Macintosh and Tron) how to fight terrorists. Eddie of course gets struck by lightning, his brain starts to evolve and he decides to disobey direct orders and go start selecting his own targets to attack. Which could cause some problems, is what the military people start to worry.

He got this “disobeying orders” idea from the main character of the movie, Josh Lucas. This actor was real good as a psychopath in UNDERTOW. Here he’s playing a charming McConaghey type who plays by his own rules. A maverick if you will. He doesn’t want to admit it but he’s in love with Jessica Biel (Whistler’s daughter), pilot number 3 in the secret super flyer anti terror space attack squad. There’s a scene where he sits in Whistler’s daughter’s quarters talking about the foster homes he grew up in, and in the background of the shot you can see her childhood drawing of a jet plane with the words “my aunt” at the bottom. This is another way the movie is optimistic, it assumes anybody gives a shit where these characters come from.

While this is going on, pilot #2, Oscar winner Jamie Foxx, is in his quarters by himself, going over a computerized briefing about Eddie. Also, he’s dancing and singing along with music and spinning a basketball on his finger. That is not a joke. I bet Mr. Foxx convinced them *not* to have his character eating fried chicken during this scene. I kinda figured he signed on for this before he won any awards for RAY, since this is after all a Rob Cohen movie about a talking jet plane. But I was still pretty surprised by how weak his character was. He spends half the movie trying to get laid or talking about his dick, then he dies. A Seattle critic I usually don’t agree with named Charles Mudede called him “the negro sidekick” which is pretty accurate.

I didn’t expect this out of Cohen. Obviously his movies are big on stereotypes, but he has made a movie about racism (DRAGON) and made use of multi-cultural casts (FAST AND THE FURIOUS) so you’d think he’d be up on the advances of the last 50 years.

One of the reasons the movie interests me is because I am a sucker for dumb action movies that have some kind of serious political point hidden in there somewhere. And this really is trying to be a movie about an issue. It’s like Top Gun meets 2001, except stupider. Josh Lucas and Joe Morton both play characters who are concerned about this idea of machines doing all the war. Josh gets to make a couple little speeches about how war SHOULD be horrible and require sacrifice, and how these decisions should be made by people with emotions. His admiral argues that if we can send these planes to do the fighting we might have fewer Jamie Foxxes coming home in bodybags. So they both got a point. And then they chase a plane around.

I guess the big question is is this movie funny, and to me it kind of is. It is definitely not in the higher echelon of funny-bad movies, but I got my money’s worth. I’d say it’s arguably less asinine than Cohen’s XXX, but also less gloomy and boring. And less pro-establishment. Sorry I keep bringing that one up, but I still feel betrayed by the way that guarana swilling dickhead Xander Cage sold out in that movie. Anyway, one aspect I liked in this one, there’s a little bit of a sullen teen personality in the plane as he goes through these growing pains. He starts to download MP3s and blast shitty rock music when he’s mad. Later there’s a scene where he goes to refuel from a shiny blimp thing in the sky, and he gets rejected. When Josh Lucas’s plane comes and successfully has intercourse with the blimp, Eddie comes back and starts a big shitstorm. If I can’t have her, nobody can! I HATE YOU!

There’s also the creator of Eddie, guy by the name of Dr. Keith Orbit. They make fun of his name and say he changed it, give you the idea he’s some space cadet. But then when you meet him he’s a normal dude so you know they added that late in the game when they started to worry about having a character named Dr. Keith Orbit. Anyway, he lives in Seattle in a fancy lower Queen Anne building I never noticed before. They obviously put him in Seattle to make him a Paul Allen billionaire software type, but they have this L.A. idea of guys like that being hip and glamorous. He fondles the cover to a Thelonious Monk LP while listening to some completely unrelated music. Which shows that he is cultured without having to actually have good music on the soundtrack.

Unfortunately, they didn’t do as much as they could’ve with Dr. Keith Orbit. I really wanted to see Eddie come after him, and not just because I want to see my home town attacked by an artificially intelligent jet plane in a big dumb movie. It’s also because it would’ve been funny if they tried to pull some kind of Frankenstein shit and have the plane come after his creator. But they didn’t.
There is one action scene I kinda liked, where Whistler’s daughter has to eject and finds herself between a rock and a hard place: above her is a couple tons of burning wreckage, below her is North Korea. She manages to not get hit on the head by a chunk of burning plane, but her chute does catch on fire.

And the movie didn’t quite go where I expected it to. I don’t want to give it away but let’s be realistic, nobody else wants to see this shit so I will give it away. The plane is ultimately not evil. It actually develops emotions, and Josh Lucas is able to win it over. Then it becomes a buddy movie or a flying Knight Rider scenario, before Eddie ultimately sacrifices himself to save everybody. Jamie Foxx gets a military funeral at the end (just like the end of Under Siege). Eddie doesn’t get shit. I woulda at least liked to see a single tear come out of his windshield before he died, to prove that he had become a real boy, but maybe I’ll have to wait for the unrated DVD. For more information on the films of Rob Cohen, see 5 ON THE OUTSIDE: VERN’S WRITINGS ON THE FILMS OF CINEMA which is the only book that will ever exist with a full chapter on Rob Cohen.

[ratings]

There have been many fine biographies of this particular Bruce, among them Bruce Lee: The Man the Myth starring Bruce Li, who also starred in one called Dragon Story. In The Man the Myth Bruce is depicted as a nationalist always out to prove the superiority of chinese kung fu over thai boxing, japanese karate, and fat Italian-American guys. Bruce Li at times looks similar to Bruce Lee although the karate or kung fu I guess is not as good. He has a good haircut and pants in my opinion but still does not capture the essence of the man.

Other Bruce Lees have also played Bruce Lee from Bruce Le to Bruce Lei to Bruce Liang, Bruce Leung, Bruce Lin, to even Dragon Lee and Conan Lee. They have told Bruce Lee’s life story as well as his exploits beyond the grave, etc. I have read about a lot of fake Bruce Lee films but I do not know where to rent them. They have Bruce Lee Fights Back From Beyond the Grave, Black Dragon Revenges the Death of Bruce Lee, The Clones of Bruce Lee, Ilsa Meets Bruce Lee in the Devil’s Triangle, and Bruce Lee versus Gay Power.

I also had a friend named Bruce Leee, a bootlegger who was probably the best Bruce Lee I have ever known. I am not easy to please when it comes to Bruce Lees, I have been around the block a few times, so I was skeptical about this Jason Scott Leigh Bruce Lee from Dragon. I mean what kind of a Bruce Lee name is that nobody’s gonna fall for that one.

More than that, this dude doesn’t even look remotely like Bruce Lee. Bruce Lee was a lean and compact Chinese man, Jason Leigh is this beefy Hawaiian dude. When you dress Jason Leigh up to look nerdy, you see the muscles underneath so your not surprised when he jumps into the air and flexes to rip the shirt off mid-air. If Bruce Lee had done that, which I gotta tell you I’m skeptical whether he did, it would have been more of a surprise.

But somehow this Jason Leigh makes the movie work. I mean fuck Jim Carrey in The Man On the Moon, anybody can play a guy who wrestles girls. Bruce Lee is a whole different ballpark, one of the greatest fighting showmen who ever lived, and this Jason Leigh manages to capture much of Bruce’s physicality. When he starts fighting, his face curls up and his body twists and somehow, for some reason, this beefy little bastard contorts himself into Bruce Lee. Fucking incredible transformation in my opinion and one of the better acting jobs of the ’90s as far as I can tell.

Like most biopics this movie is a lying sack of shit as far as telling the true story of Bruce Lee, but I like how it combines Bruce’s life with his work and his philosophy. This is kind of a melodrama/romance type deal about his struggles, his emotions, relationship etc. but at the same time it is a full fledged karate movie. And I tell you the karate is good. In real life Bruce was a braggart and liked to prove his superiority by beating ass or at doing a high kick from behind to nip somebody’s unexpecting ear. There is a legend of him going buck wild on the set of Enter the Dragon, kicking a guy so hard that he broke the ribs of a different guy. That’s what Bruces are all about.

Well in the movie most of the fights are probaly complete hogwash historically but it makes for a better movie than if it was all Bruce doing exercise and signing contracts. The best scene in the movie is when Bruce is working as a dishwasher, and some chefs get jealous of him. So Booker T and the MGs or something starts playing and Bruce goes out into the alley and fights about five evil chefs with meat cleavers. Now it is one thing how Seagal is an asskicking chef in Under Siege, but could he take on five other asskicking chefs at once? I don’t think so.

Another thing I like is the way this deals with racism between whites and asians like Bruce lee. (We don’t use oriental anymore, by the way.) Usually in a movie this is completely a white and black issue, but I know for example in the joint there is all kinds of tension with puerto ricans, samoans, asians etc. It is a lot more complicated than just whites accepting blacks and even though it’s nothing deep it’s nice to see a movie that mentions that.

Bruce has to deal with his white wife’s mother who worries about “yellow babies.” He also gets called gook by the UW Husky Football team before beating them all up and then teaching them karate. This is why the University of Washington wouldn’t let them film on campus, even though they are very proud that Bruce Lee attended there they thought it would be in poor taste to admit that football players are racist idiots.

There are also some parts about a demon curse and whatnot.

This is a fun movie that does a pretty decent job of showing how Bruce Lee’s enormous talents elevated asskicking and even the Badass movement to the level of art and philosophy.

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Then in the other group we have the commercial or “hack” filmatist who goes from one project to the next just looking for something that might be successful, or that seems cinematic, or that might capture that fuckin zeitgeist thing the germans are always so interested in. Some of these guys might even be decent at the directation of films but they just don’t put that strong of a personal stamp on them. For example you got your John Badham (Saturday Night Fever, Dracula [1979], Short Circuit, Point of No Return) or your Randal Kleiser (Boy in the Plastic Bubble, Grease, The Blue Lagoon, Big Top Pee-Wee, Honey I Blew Up the Kid). Occasionally they make a good picture like Saturday Night Fever but you still have no idea what these clowns are trying to do artistic-wise. They’re just doing a job, like plumbing or washing windows or passing out pizza coupons and gum samples on the street corner. They punch the clock and then they go home.

I like Rob Cohen better than I like those individuals but I think he’s in the same category. He even produced three of John Badham’s movies. His best movie was DRAGON: THE BRUCE LEE STORY. That one’s about Bruce Lee. But he followed it up with crap like DRAGONHEART and DAYLIGHT. The ONLY thing these three pictures have in common is that they have the letter A in them. And MAYBE the letter D but even that’s being generous.

Now this dude seems to have suddenly hit a stride making commercially successful PG-13 movies with up and coming actors that are widely considered to be surprisingly entertaining at least on an unintentional level. The first in this series was THE SKULLS, and he hopes to continue in that vein with the Vin Diesel bungee-jumping-James-Bond movie XXX and of course THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS PART 2: THE FASTER AND THE FURIOUSER.

I haven’t seen any of those but I have seen THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS PART A and this is my essay about it, one of the most important film Writing works of the 21st century so far, in my opinion. (If it turns out as planned anyway. I am only on the fifth paragraph here. Those of you who can count will back me up on this one).

THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS is a hollywood vehicle about “the underground culture of street racing”. Basically, in many urban and especially non-urban (i.e. boring) areas there are groups of rich kids who spend thousands of dollars jacking up their mom’s car and then they have drag races for money, which if they win they will spend on new engine parts. Somebody Wrote an article about it in Vibe or Cigar Afficianado or somewheres so Hollywood said “It is our duty to exploit this.”

They did it with breakdancing, they did it with skateboarding. They did it with BMX, lambada, pirate radio, cockfighting, snowboarding, “extreme sports”, rollerblading, hacking, low budget filmmaking, nintendo, rave, grunge, rap, “the cocktail nation”, karaoke, luge, solar car racing… Basically, if you’re young and you have a wacky hobby, it’s gonna be a movie some day, most likely about 3-6 months after everybody you know stops doing it. If Hollywood had been on their game, they woulda had Unicycle: The Movie and Pogo! and Hula Hoop Nation. They woulda had animated pet rocks and tamagotchis and one about “wilding” in New York or collecting star wars dolls and selling them on e-bay. I’m sure they came inches from making movies about Tai Boe and country line dancing and your momma jokes, or even made up fads like street yoga or freestyle bowling. If you do some stupid shit, Hollywood wants to know, so they can dress it up in neon colors and spiky hair and call it a phenomenon.

Cars. I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed this, but alot of men love their cars. Kids grow up with their hot wheels cars and model cars and go carts and posters of Ferraris and Corvettes. Some of them even watch race cars on tv or watch kids on tv with beds shaped like race cars. There is even a cartoon based on NASCAR racing. There are kids with subscriptions to Motor Trend magazine and Hot Rod. When they get older they still like pictures of cars, especially with women in bikinis next to the cars or, better yet, on top of the cars. Riding them. The cars are bigger than men but they know what to do. Cars will take good care of their women. Car commercials fill magazines and play on tv all day and sometimes equate the quality of a car to the size of a man’s dick.

On TV, it’s all about owning expensive cars. Rappers want their Lexuses or their lowriders with hydraulics. They mention them in their lyrics and they rent them and show them in their videos and pretend that they own them. This goes back a long ways. You can read in Iceberg Slim why Cadillacs were an important status symbol to people who couldn’t afford to buy a house. But the bar has been raised and now you can’t have just one solitary car as a status symbol. I don’t care if it’s a gold plated Knight Rider, you need a fuckin armada to be really impressive. Many actors and music stars collect armies of expensive cars, or give them away, or ask for them as payment for doing movies. You know, like we used to use cigarettes inside, or marbles or sandwiches on the playground. The heroes on TV shows and movies always drive expensive sports cars no matter what. Even the cops drive sports cars instead of cop cars, like cops drive. The only time their cars don’t work is if they are being chased by a maniac. Otherwise their cars are perfect and they don’t have to wait five minutes for them to warm up or for the windows to defrost and they don’t have that problem that they can’t drive on the freeway because the old piece of shit can barely make it above 40.

I have not driven in a while due to lack of car type difficulties. What I mean by that is, I don’t have a car. I don’t even ride anymore. And I want to say right now that I have decided to abandon cars altogether. This will not decrease the size of the penis and I encourage all men and women with penises and breasts of all sizes to do the same.

Fuck cars. All you do in cars is take years off your life. I live in Seattle and we have some of the worst traffic in the country. Alot of people spend half as much time in the car to and from work as they do actually at work. If they don’t give themselves high blood pressure they might get that road rage shit. It’s like mad cow disease but on wheels. One time a guy took somebody’s poodle and threw it across a couple lanes of traffic. Another guy crashed his car through the side of a Jack in the Box, got himself one hamburger and took off. Another guy in a car chased the hamburglar but got his car rammed. Even if you’re a good car guy like the guy trying to catch the hamburglar, it’s too much trouble.

And that’s the thing, people feel like because they have a car they are entitled to something. Entitled to not get cut off in traffic. Entitled to not stop for somebody to cross the street, even at a crosswalk. Entitled to just be a big fuckin asshole, just because they’re wearing what amounts to giant mechanical pants.

If they almost run over you on a crosswalk they don’t apologize or even look embarassed after they slam on the breaks. They won’t even make eye contact. One time a guy actually hit me on a crosswalk while talking on his cell phone, and his first reaction was not to gasp or apologize, but to honk at me! If you step out into the road before your light turns green, then decide not to cross and get back on the sidewalk, they still honk at you, because you gave them an opening. If the cars are way down the street, so you jaywalk, thirty seconds later they pass you on the sidewalk, and they honk (I’ve seen this happen especially to young black men). They live 2 blocks from the grocery store, they still drive there, even if it takes longer when they have to find parking, because why the fuck would you walk? There are young people that use a car like an old dude uses a Rascal.

Riding the bus to work in Seattle is expensive because of this fucker from Bellevue named Tim Eyman. He’s some Lexus driving asshole who got rich selling engraved watches to fraternities on the internet. Then he started a company that creates initiatives to lower the taxes on expensive cars, taking money away from transit. So there are less routes than there used to be and the buses come less often and the schedules at the bus stops are not up to date, if there are schedules there at all. After this year’s initiative the city announced that they’d have to close the Seattle Public Library down 2 months out of the year. Which is more important to you – low taxes on expensive cars, or reading? Washington had to make that choice, and they chose cars.

That was before the recession. Yesterday I read that they’re closing down alot of the parks too. So I guess these nice little parks will become overgrown weed patches piled up with garbage, fenced off and occasionally combed with flashlights at night to make sure people aren’t buttfucking in the bushes. Pretty soon I think they’ll shut down the animal control department and we’ll have wild dobermans roaming the streets like in Suburbia, getting into Westlake Mall and eating people on the escalator. If an elephant escapes from the zoo and starts hunting for elephant trainers, we’ll have to wait for a team to come up from Portland. And they better take the bus if they want to make it through traffic.

(In a happier note, Tim Eyman will be shutting down too now that the newspapers found out he had taken more than $150,000 of donated money and put it in his own account. On the list of things his supporters paid for: car repairs, a donation to the Republicans, and “stuff”.)

Despite all this, the bus is still better than driving. You almost never get stuck in traffic. You don’t need insurance. You don’t buy gas. You don’t even have to drive. So you don’t risk damaging your car or somebody else’s car or getting a speeding ticket or a parking ticket. You don’t have to find a parking space. You don’t have to pay exorbitant parking fees to some asshole entrepreneur that bought a square and put cement on it, some lines and numbers and a metal box (what a fuckin scam!)

You can doze off on the bus. You can read Iceberg Slim books. Sometimes you can meet real pimps on the bus, or crack dealers, or punk kids straight out of Larry Clark movies, holding skateboards, talking about crystal meth and blowjobs. You can stay in touch with youth culture or see a man suddenly pull a stack of quarters out of his mouth.

You meet interesting people on the bus. Like the young man from Alaska who, high on life, told me I was “sucking Bill Gates’s dick”. Or the gentlemen the other day who suddenly announced, “Okay – trivia time!” and quizzed no one in particular about the history of professional boxing.

When a cop gets on the bus he’s not there for you, unless you’re on the nod or knifing somebody or something. It’s not like when you get pulled over – then you know it’s you they want.

When you’re riding the bus, you’re not contributing to traffic congestion. Unless your bus drives off a bridge, but that’s not regular. One time a guy shot the bus driver and the bus drove off a bridge into a small artist’s community. But most of the passengers survived.

Then there’s the whole moral thing. I’m not some “tree hugger” or “flower child” or “cocksucker” but I think every one of us has to admit we’re really fuckin pushin it as a species. There were only so many dinosaurs and there is only so much oil. We are polluting our air. If you have air conditioning (not that I ever did, you luxury car owning fucks) you’re eating away the ozone layer. I know it’s easy to forget about but I read that thing is 3 times the size of europe now. And you europeans can testify, that’s pretty, you know, that’s pretty big in my opinion.

If a climate that’ll fry us like beer battered onion rings doesn’t do it for you, what about the political climate? George Bush (both of em in fact) came from oil. They would not be in office if they didn’t make money off of all you fuckers buying oil. Cheney comes from oil. Most of Bush’s regime comes from oil. The troubles in Venezuala recently are about oil. The short-lived military coup that the White House praised as a victory for democracy, that seems to have been at least partly about oil. Bush part I’s war in Iraq was mainly about oil. The FBI was pressured not investigate bin Laden or the Saudi royalty for terrorism because of oil. Cheney threatened to go to invade Afghanistan if they didn’t let us build an oil pipeline through their land, next thing you know we got planes crashing into buildings.

I mean, fuck oil. I know we can’t escape it yet but as much as we can, shouldn’t we? I’m not saying that just because it’s morally reprehensible to drive if you don’t have to, that you HAVE to stop. I’m just saying that you SHOULD. Remember when black people stopped buying gold because it was funding apartheid in south africa? How about everybody cuts down on oil because it’s fucking up the whole world?

Anyway, this movie doesn’t explore those issues, really, at least not on a literal or metaphorical level. It just explores racing cars. Sort of. I don’t know if the filmatists would admit it, but racing is not inherently cinematic. They try hard but the racing scenes in here are not that exciting. You got two cars driving in straight lines, trying to go the fastest. That’s not exciting. Why do you think in the olympics, they ski somewhere and then they pull out a gun and start shooting targets and shit? Because racing is boring. I mean think about it. If regular racing wasn’t boring, why would they have invented Wacky Racing? If racing was worth watching then the Wacky Racers would be out of a job. People would just think, I like the way they race, but they are too wacky. There would be no need to spice things up with hot air balloons and contraptions and tying ladies to train tracks and teaching dogs to drive. That would be seen as a distraction.

I mean how many examples do you need here? Nothing that goes in a straight line is exciting. In skiing, you got slalom. In rollercoasters you got loopty loop. Water skiing only makes it on tv if it’s a squirrel. What would you rather watch? A toad race or a chicken fight? And even toads hop. They could hop high or low, long or short. They could hop crooked and go off the track. Who knows how they’ll hop? Nobody. But there’s no room for this type of variation in this straight-line style of racing because the cars don’t hop. They just go fast and the two people try to go faster than each other. It’s all about who has the most money and knowledge to build the most powerful engine and maintain it. And the only thing more boring that a movie about driving a car really fast in a straight line is a movie about people preparing their cars to be able to drive really fast in a straight line.

But anyway this is not about actual driving skill. So there’s not much to depict here. The race itself is so boring they have to have buttons on the wheel that make the car go faster. Uh oh, the other guy is in the lead. I know! Push the button that makes it go faster!

Because of this, they had no choice but to make this car racing movie not really about car racing. So the exciting scenes are the police chases, where you actually get to turn corners and crash through stuff and maybe even jump. Throw some motorcycles in there and they can really jump, and do little sideways kicky things. A few machine guns can pepper things up too. Also you gotta throw in a whole plotline about an undercover cop and some robberies. This bothered some people but I mean, at least they’re not driving in straight lines the whole movie is all I’m saying.

I think I’ve established that theory but you can e-mail me for more information on why racing in straight lines is boring. At least let’s see some side wheelies!

Mr. Cohen depicts this racing world as a multi-cultural underground dressed up by Urban Outfitters, painted neon green and orange with purple stripes. It is inhabited by a charismatic cast who we will call the chassis, because they are the only thing holding this shit together. Most notable is the promising new Badass Vin Diesel, from the robot cartoon and Pitch Black.

There are many reasons why Vin Diesel is popular and why that will only grow. First of all, he’s a deep-voiced muscleman who broke into the industry by directing short films. (Please refer to my THEORY OF BADASS JUXTAPOSITION, which has never ceased to be relevant.) And then there’s this whole multi-racial thing. In Pitch Black I thought he was black. He sounds like it and he looks like it at a glance. On closer inspection he could just be some italian guy, who knows. He could play a number of races believably and he refuses to reveal his true origins.

He’s also got a machismo that you don’t get much these days. I’m not saying I want everybody in Hollywood to be some fuckin self obsessed oaf but let me relay to you this anecdote about his work on John Frankenheimer’s REINDEER GAMES, where he was cast as some kind of supporting thug. Mr. Frankenheimer asked Vin Diesel to take his shirt off to show his muscles in a scene. Vin Diesel refused, saying, “I only take my shirt off in a Vin Diesel film.”

So Frankenheimer fired him. I don’t know if Vin was saying that he’d be headlining movies soon (which was true) or if he was saying he would only take his shirt off in a movie he directed. Either way, good story.

Another good story, which I think is probaly phony, is about how he got started acting. Supposedly he and his friends were caught vandalizing a theater as teens, and the owner agreed to drop charges if they would come in and study acting.

Also, remember, we’re talking about a guy who named himself VIN DIESEL. I mean that pretty much explains him.

Diesel’s character here is typical of his roles so far. He is basically a cult leader – an egomaniacal asshole who has some kind of charm that makes everyone gravitate to him, and always want to please him. And it’s convincing. He is the best racer, the best mechanic, and the ringleader of illegal enterprises. And he’s Vin Diesel. In one scene, Vin zooms along the highway right next to a truck that his friend happens to be clinging to the front of, in mortal danger. Things haven’t gone as planned and the buddy really needs to get into Vin’s car somehow. So Vin, one hand on the wheel, flying down the road at maybe 100 mph, pokes his head out the window like a dog, holds out one muscular arm and yells, “JUMP!” And you look at the guy, and you look at Vin, and you look at Vin’s arm, and you really believe that he thinks this will work. That the buddy can jump, and maybe Vin will hug him against the side of the car and be able to pull him in, and Vin’s arm won’t break off or anything.

Luckily, Vin’s friend doesn’t do it. But you gotta admire Vin for offering.

But Mr. Diesel is actually not the main character here. Neither is Outlaw Award Winner Michelle Rodriguez, who still acts tough, and fights to belong in a male dominated world, but mostly is just the girlfriend character except in one scene where she gets to punch a dude in the face.

The star is actually Paul Walker who worked with Rob Cohen in THE SKULLS PART 1 and who was surprisingly good in JOY RIDE. He’s racking up a big collection of roles as whitebread hunks wearing tight shirts. He has that quality of the football player who is so nice you can’t hate him as much as you hate the other football players. He sounds kinda slow and stiff but has some kind of weird hidden charisma that makes you like him anyway.

Like all the fad movies alluded to above, this one pretends to show the gritty reality of the underground street racing culture. Mr. Cohen did manage to get real street racers and their cars as extras in the big tournament at the end. But somehow I can’t imagine the real people who do this are much like the people in the movie, wearing the same designer tank tops every day, exchanging Freudian stories about the first time they drove, making little speeches about the gasoline that runs in their veins.

On the other hand maybe I can imagine it, because this is a hobby that only the richest of the rich could ever get involved in. I mean there is some major equipment involved in this one. Like for example, CARS. In the movie, Paul Walker bets away an $80,000 car the first time he meets the other racers, and nobody thinks it’s suspicious.

You stupid rich fucks.

At least they’re out there on the streets, though, instead of in the board rooms and the white house.

thank you

[ratings]

XXX is completely asinine. And I loved that about it. For about half an hour. Then it just got boring in the exact same way all the modern James Bond movies are boring. It takes a special type of standard lowering to enjoy ANYBODY driving around dreary european villages on motorcycles shooting machine guns and blowing things up in the usual ways. You can only watch a henchman shot into the air by an explosion so many times before you start to ask for more from your badass cinematists. I don’t care if you had a young Clint Eastwood riding piggyback on Steve McQueen, you’d still get bored with this movie before it got to the climax.

Vin Diesel plays Xander Cage, an “action sports” legend on “underground web sights.” In the opening he steals a Corvette from a senator at a country club. While the cops chase him he makes a video saying that the senator tried to ban rap music and video games. Then he jumps the car off a bridge and parachutes out. So he’s a terrorist folk hero to all pudgy 13 year old suburban kids in Slipknot t–shirts. Those kids who you see on the bus wearing big headphones to hide from the world until they are physically capable of growing their first soul patch.

The movie is obvious about playing to the fantasies of these kids. He mentions Playstation at least once, and knows how to use a gun from playing “first person shooter games”. The extreme sports angle is as humorous as you’d expect. My favorite touch is the scene where he is pointing at a map going over tactics with a team of special agents, and he’s holding a can of Amp.

Of course, the pro-rap and video game stunt gets Xander in trouble with Samuel L. Jackson of the NSA. Samuel wants to use him as an agent so he first runs him through some tests, kidnapping him and leaving him in dangerous situations. This is the fun part of the movie, when Vin gets to show off how smart he is and jump motorcycles sideways over barbed wire fences in an ESPN2 tribute to Steve McQueen’s jump in THE GREAT ESCAPE. We learn that he can perform death defying stunts, and that he likes to call people “monkeys” and talk in lists. (”#1, blah blah blah blah. #2, blah blah blah. And #3, blah blah BLAH blahblah.”) Then somebody tells him, “This isn’t one of your stunts!”

You also get a little glimpse into his lifestyle, which involves doing a stunt then going back to party with a bunch of tattooed white guys who enjoy skateboarding and co-opting black slang.

But then he gets his mission, and you spend the rest of the time waiting for the god damn thing to end. Part of the reason THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS was watchable was because the villain was so charismatic. Because he was Vin Diesel. In XXX you gotta watch Vin in a giant fur coat (admittedly a nice touch) trying to get in good with some scruffy guy in a long coat who talks in a Boris Badenov accent. The villains all have the distinct lack of presence and personality that you expect from a lesser Jackie Chan movie. They hang out upstairs in a dance club and then their plan just involves chemical weapons on a little submarine. And they call themselves “Anarchy 99″. There are more imaginative villains in POLICE ACADEMY sequels.

In Europe the least boring character is Dario’s daughter, Asia Argento. She’s just right for this type of movie but all that means is she’s real hot. And it’s not like they would’ve hired somebody that wasn’t real hot so that’s not getting the filmatists any points from me.

The story is completely generic, and so are the one-liners (except one real bad one: “Welcome to the Xander-Zone!”) I did appreciate the way the NSA aren’t COMPLETELY portrayed as good guys. They do save the day but they’re not as selfless as Xander ends up being. They are willing to let one city die instead of ten. He doesn’t want any city destroyed. Even though he likes to snowboard. Wrap your mind around THAT. The NSA follows the “gotta break a few eggs” philosophy, he sticks with “never leave a man behind”. But otherwise there’s not much clever are thoughtful here.

Which should be fine, right? In this type of movie. But you can’t just say yeah, this is XXX, it’s not supposed to have good parts. True, you don’t need to be smart or original. But at the VERY least you gotta do something memorable in the action department. I liked the stupid idea of using a dinner tray as a skateboard, and the snowboarding in front of an avalanche scene was okay I guess. But all the motorcycles and skydiving are old hat – the movie’s really not as different from James Bond as it thinks it is. And just like the car racing in THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS, the whole “action sports” fad is not as inherently cinematic as Rob Cohen probaly thinks it is. When you see those videos of people flying down stairways on bicycles or rolling down impossibly steep mountains and ending up on their feet, its amazing because you know it’s real, and you can’t believe some fuckin moron actually did that on purpose. When you see Vin Diesel do it in a movie you know it’s not real, so all you feel is that itching feeling that you’re supposed to be thrilled.

I mean he does a decent enough job being the new highly paid action hero guy. Even if the character doesn’t have as much appeal as his supporting roles. But he really needs a more interesting movie surrounding him. Maybe the sequel will be better.

P.S. (I added this later)

The sequel oughta be like the first DIRTY HARRY sequel, questioning the values of the first movie. For all the talk about not selling out in the first part of the movie, XXX sure sells out fast and questions it little. I’d like to see all those guys who risked their lives helping him throw a senator’s car off a bridge react to their hero who now works for the man and flies around with a red white and blue parachute. Yes, he saved the world and that’s the right thing to do. But this is hollywood cheating, because the system he stands up against really isn’t trying to save the world, that’s why he stands up against it. I wanna see the system turn against XXX, and vice versa, or I don’t wanna see a sequel at all. End of story. No, there is no negotiating. Sorry.

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