Yeah, it’s a bit weird, IIRC the only two things that happen after Tokyo Drift in the timeline is Furious 7, Fate of the Furious, and post credits scene of 6. Agree on the rest, though, as much as I like those movies, I liked them more as underdogs, and when they seemed to give a shit about the people around them rather than just going hog wild wrecking everything around them.
You still have some fun to look forward to, though, 7 and FotF are a fucking trip.
5 is easily my favorite as I feel it really has started the whole REALLY OVER THE TOP wonderful action. Also enjoy a few songs on the soundtrack.
I’ve been rewatching them again because why not?
My best of the FFs:
Furious 7 2015
★★★
Fast and Furious has almost completely transitioned into a Mission Impossible movie franchise by movie seven. Everything is there: get the team together, find the person, the person helps find a widget, and the widget is important because reasons. The only difference: instead of using face masks twice per movie it’s car chases.
Movie seven is a small but noticeable step up in quality from the sixth. There is a bit too much clunky foreshadowing in terms of “cars can’t fly” which inevitably leads to various different ways cars can fly, but at least there’s a lot of fun to be had along the way.
Jason Statham is the new antagonist, and again I’m putting money on him joining the family in the future, despite killing one of them. But he’s too much of a badass to stay a bad guy.
There’s a new lady hacker? Okay. Kurt Russell turns up but isn’t as good as Alec Baldwin in the same role in the Mission Impossible movies, that of the elder statesman running things politically while the crew do the dirty work. I mean, sure, Mr. Nobody… fine. Could have done with more Dwayne Johnson instead.
Near the end of the first Transformers movie they say “Let’s take the widget to the city to more easily hide it” or similar, but all that really means is “let’s move the action to a big city where there’s lots of things to destroy”. And so too in Furious 7. It’s like the script writers ran out of location ideas, but still wanted some car chases with helicopters and drones, and Los Angeles is as good as anywhere. Why don’t they take the bad guys, I dunno, maybe away from population centers? Cut to: multiple buildings being destroyed whatever.
Anyway, the real kicker is the very end, where I must admit I shed a tear with the “goodbye Paul Walker” sequence, even though it makes little sense in the movie. The script only says he’s retiring and saying goodbye, but it’s a nice touch to give him a eulogy anyway.
It’s only when I looked it up afterwards to see how much of the movie was made without him when I was astonished to find out it’s like six months shooting without him there?!?!? His brothers and other body doubles for most of the live shooting, plus about 400 special effects shots to put his face in the right place. I noticed a few bits of face replacement and using weird angles, but most of it blew right past me. That’s some seriously impressive work for me not to notice it 99% of the time.
It was a strange experience watching the movie expecting one particular main character to die at any moment.
The Fate of the Furious 2017 ★
The movie opens with a street race in Cuba, which is fun, but I guessed that it had to be there or else there would be no other street racing action in the whole movie. And indeed there wasn’t.
Instead just very sub-par Mission Impossible action. But my problem is that if literally the fate of the world is at stake, I don’t want Dom and the gang to solve it, I want Ethan Hawk and his gang.
In the first movie, these guys were stealing DVD players and the main reason the FBI wanted to stop them is that they didn’t want truck drivers arming themselves and dishing out dangerous vigilante justice. And now we are stealing a nuclear bomb, or trying to stop someone from stealing a nuclear bomb.
And so cars are just shoehorned into the action. It doesn’t make sense. Massive car crashes in New York? Just to steal a briefcase? It’s inelegant.
Jason Statham joins the team, despite killing one of the family in the previous movie. A new pretty white guy joins the family too, to replace Paul Walker I guess, but he does nothing to actually earn his place there.
Overall I’m just not impressed.
As far as I can tell, not only was the opening scene the last reference to street racing in the movie, but it also seems to be a final goodbye to street racing in the entire series. Might also be the goodbye to my own interest in the series, which admittedly only lasted for about a week.
Don’t mind me I’ll be over here watching Mission Impossible Fallout for the second time and Fury Road for the 12th time.
I’ve got a theory about 8 Fast 8 Furious.
In the book GEB, one of the parables between Achilles and the tortoise is them having a chat with each other in Tortoise’s home (afternoon tea maybe?). Tortoise laments the fact that an author can’t conceal how much of a book is left - the reader can always tell how many pages there are to go.
They come up with a way to signal to the reader the “real” story has ended, without being at the end of the printed text. Have something so out of character with the story happen, so the reader will realize it’s gone off the rails, and that’s the signal the story is over.
Then the cops break down the door, run in, and arrest everyone. It goes on for a bit longer after that, but I don’t remember that part so much. You get the idea.
So in the trailer for Fast 8, after 7 movies of “families stick together”, and the ending of 7, there’s a part that sticks out for me.
Letty says to Dom, “you don’t turn your back on family”, and then he literally turns his back on his family. My signal it’s done, disregard the rest here.
I haven’t seen the movie though.
Spider-verse was what I needed without knowing what I wanted.
I like this reading. The series ends with Dom having a final street race in Cuba, linking up his new family with his old one (his cousin is there, I think), winning respect from his opponents, and generally ending the series where it began.
That will do for me. I don’t think I need or want anything else from the eighth movie, or maybe the series.
The new Spider-man movie was excellent, but the product placement forced in for the Chinese market is so hamfisted. QQ is the only icon on the phones with any detail. It just doesn’t fit at all with the aesthetic of the rest of the movie.
Spiderverse is so legit.
I need more now.
Fuck.
The Hateful Eight was kind of a dud for me. I’m usually a big Quentin Tarantino fan, but I was mostly bored and unsatisfied with this nearly three hour movie.
Funnily enough, I didn’t notice the product placement at all. I don’t even know what QQ is.
Read some Spider-Man comics. If you want ones that feel like that movie, look for anything written by Dan Slott.
What about the actual Ultimate Spider-Man comics that introduced Miles Morales? How are those?
Ultimate Spider-Man as a whole is good. You can start at number one real easy.
Because it was hamfisted product placement for China, not the US. I’m not surprised it wasn’t in the US version. QQ is Chinese Facebook, but less overtly evil (they hide their evil better).
I enjoyed the Ultimate universe as a whole.
Ah, I didn’t understand your post. I thought you meant that the Chinese market product placement was in all the movie versions, not the China-specific version.
I wasn’t sure, but I suspected it was China only. Your confusion confirmed it.
EDIT: It was certainly effective, though. All the Chinese people in the theater were all, “Oh! QQ!”
Ok so I saw that on opening night. Xmas eve 201X in the super duper wide screen. The edition I saw was apparently longer than the three hour one available on netflix or wherever. We went to the ritzy theatre in New Rochelle and my partner and I sort of combined our assigned recliners into one pseudo bed. I remember loving it. That said, that may have had something to do with the excellent circumstances I saw the movie under.
Moana 2016 ★★★
Works okay in the second viewing, and after hearing the music a whole lot more. The opening song isn’t a very good opening song. Thankfully the songs get a lot better as it goes on. The coconut monster scene? Totally skippable in terms of plot. In the end it’s just a silly Mad Max knockoff with not a lot of payoff.
It looks gorgeous though, and Dwayne The Rock Johnson does some good voice work. The chicken steals the show.
Die Hard 1988 ★★★★
Still a good movie. Every single line in the opening 40 minutes is paid off later, which makes it satisfying, but also those same lines are character-building, so it doesn’t feel too expositiony.
Also: weirdly out of focus a lot of the time. Not sure if that is due to the shooting or the transfer to the print.