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Fast Five (2011)

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threehalfstar

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In my review for the bottom-of-the-bucket sequel Fast & Furious (despite the misleading title, that’s the fourth film in the franchise), I called the film “unnecessarily dour”, which remains true, but that doesn’t mean it was entirely unnecessary. Fast & Furious worked as retroactive franchise glue, culling the scattered pieces of the first three films into a cohesive whole for the first time ever. While the first three installments seemed increasingly disinterested in constructing a consistent narrative as a set (with Tokyo Drift being the most hilariously detached of the bunch), the fourth was hell-bent on pretending that there was a grand purpose all along. It was not a pleasurable experience (there’s no reason it couldn’t have been fun while still being functional), but it did serve a purpose: setting the stage for Fast Five.

Fast Five picks up immediately where the fourth film left off, with newscasters (including Perd Hapley!) reporting on the disappearance of Vin Diesel & Paul Walker that concluded the last film, completing Walker’s transition from undercover cop to wanted man. Replacing Walker on the dangerous policing side of the occasion is a supercop played by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. This is essentially the perfect role for The Rock, as he is allowed both to show his chops as a legit actor (his natural charisma is undeniable) and also as an action-film-ready superhuman muscle god. More importantly, an all-star crew of the gang/”family” members from the first four films are assembled here in the single best team-building montage outside of MacGruber. Tyrese Gibson & Ludacris return as a genuinely hilarious comedy duo, playing off of each other’s personalities expertly. Jordana Brewster is finally allowed behind the wheel again (speaking of natural charisma, I can’t explain exactly why I like her so much). Han (Sung Kang) again teases just when Tokyo Drift will occur in the chronology, just like last time. When a character asks him about this directly, saying “I thought you wanted to get to Tokyo?” Han responds “We’ll get there. Eventually.” That’s just gold. Diesel & The Rock’s onscreen interactions are pure gold as well, especially in a especially brutal fistfight that almost results in a bare-fists murder. There’s an overriding vibe of “the gang’s all here” that makes the film a fun, over-the-top ride of campy action.

Giving the cast a narrative reason to coexist was a somewhat important development, but what’s really important is that they’re firing on all cylinders as a group here. This is apparent as early as the opening heist, which is easily the most absurd action set piece of the series so far. It’s a glorious spectacle of a high speed train robbery that includes flying cars, flying Paul Walker, and a grand entrance in which Vin Diesel rips the wall off the side of a train. There’s a second over-the-top action sequence at the end of the film featuring an oversized vault being dragged behind a car like a wrecking ball, but even that scene has a difficult time topping the jaw-dropping opening minutes. In between those two points of widespread, car-driven mayhem, there’s a return to the torture scenes of the first couple films, a callback to the on-the-lens fecal splash of Tokyo Drift, and the highest kill count by gunfire of any film in the series so far, just endless scores of dead Brazilian cops & criminals left by the wayside.

There’s a lot of killer action movie surface pleasures scattered all over Fast Five, but that’s not what makes it special. What distinguishes the film is Vin Diesel’s Dominic’s sudden conviction that his gang of ragtag criminals and former cops is a “family”. Why is it suddenly so stirring when Diesel talks about family in Fast Five, so much more so than it was in previous installments? It’s because it feels like he truly believes it. As far as the franchise goes, the “family” in the first four films act like distant cousins who might see each other once a decade. Suddenly, in Fast Five it’s genuinely moving when Dominic talks about how his father taught him about the importance of backyard grilling, how a family always sticks together, and so on. It’s not a perfect film; it could’ve allowed more screen time for The Rock & (I can’t believe I’m saying this) more street racing and a ludicrous post-credits stinger has the gall to bring the dead back to life without explanation, but it was a huge step forward for the Fast and Furious franchise. Five films in, all the separate elements are finally clicking as a cohesive action movie unit. Where most extended franchises gradually unravel over the course of their sequels, this is one that took that time to find itself and cull its own “familial” mythology.

-Brandon Ledet

Fast & Furious (2009)

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onehalfstar

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Over its first three installments, the Fast and Furious franchise had very little concern for establishing a consistent narrative. Watching the films for the first time, it’s been difficult to imagine just how & when it got to the grand, sprawling-cast action spectacle promised in the trailer for Furious 7, as there was very little connecting the films besides a sports car fetish and an affinity for Corona. 2 Fast 2 Furious shared only one actor with its predecessor (face-of-the-franchise Paul Walker) and the third installment, Tokyo Drift, didn’t even have that much of a vague connection, but instead was only spiritually tethered to the rest of the franchise through the stunt casting of a rapper-turned-actor, in that case (Lil) Bow Wow. I loved Tokyo Drift for its lack of concern with justifying its own existence (and its voracious enthusiasm for driving sideways), but there wasn’t very far for the series to go as a cohesive unit by leaving that film . . . adrift.

The fourth Fast and Furious film, the succinctly titled Fast & Furious, tries to pull the series’ act together by working as retroactive franchise glue. In an opening high speed heist (an immediate callback to the first film), the original Furious couple of Dominic (Vin Diesel) & Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) make their triumphant return to the fold by robbing an 18 wheeler. This time, however, they have a new compatriot in their schemes: Han (Sung Kang), a very important player from Tokyo Drift who (spoiler) is supposed to be very dead. So, what does this mean? Is Fast & Furious supposed to be a prequel to the series? Not quite, since Paul Walker’s undercover cop shenanigans from the first two films have already taken place. So does that make Tokyo Drift a pseudo sci-fi car racing film set sometime in the near future? I buy that. I mean, they were driving sideways. This chronology is not-so-seamlessly (but very much amusingly) set up in an exchange where Vin Diesel’s Dominic tells Han “Time for you to do your own thing.” and Han replies, “I heard they’re doing some crazy shit in Tokyo . . .” They’re doing some crazy shit indeed, Han. First of all, they’re driving sideways.

The problem is that after these first ten minutes of retroactive narrative, Fast & Furious loses its sense of purpose. Setting the undercover police intrigue in the Dominican Republic, the film offers the franchise a new location, but not much else. There’s some nonsense about using liquid nitrogen to pull of heists, the only new toy for the cars is a GPS visualization (that plays into the series’ video game aesthetic, but really, it’s GPS; who cares?), and the movie introduces the idea that Vin Diesel’s Dominic has the ability to mentally reconstruct car crashes based on tire marks, but none of it really amounts to much. For the most part, the action is standard stuff you’d expect in any action franchise: Vin Diesel hanging dudes out of windows by their ankles, Paul Walker chasing criminals down back alleys in his tailored federal agent suit, lots of tumbling cars, etc. The best moment, action wise, is when Diesel does a controlled slide (Tokyo style) under a tumbling 18 wheeler, but that takes place during that saving-grace opening set piece.

Fast & Furious can’t even get its own franchise’s charms right. Besides there being no new shiny toys for the cars (unless you’re especially wowed by GPS), there’s no cartoonish warp speed during the street races, the leering lipstick lesbianism makes too big of a return, and although the rap rock is back (Hispanic rap rock this time) it takes a back seat to relentlessly sappy acoustic guitar work. The main thing it’s missing, however, is a sense of fun. Fast & Furious is just so unnecessarily dour, especially after the cartoonish excess of Tokyo Drift. If there’s one thing you want your mindless car-racing action movies to be it’s fun and Fast & Furious undeniably fails on that front. There’s some mild hilarity in its failure to achieve a serious tone, like in the exchange, “Maybe you’re not the good guy pretending to be the bad guy. Maybe you’re the bad guy pretending to be the good guy. You ever think about that?” “Every day.” For the most part, though, this tone just makes the film unbearable. There are a couple bright spots here or there, like the much-appreciated return of Jordana Brewster & the spectacle of the opening heist, but for the most part Fast & Furious is only concerned with herding the narrative cats of the first three installments. Once that business is out of the way the movie becomes exceedingly difficult to love. Hopefully it’ll serve as a bridge to better movies down the line, but when considered on its own, it’s not really worth its near two-hour runtime.

-Brandon Ledet

The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006)

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threehalfstar

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Tokyo Drift, the third installment in the Fast and Furious franchise, is not a particularly unique film when considered on its own merit, but it is very much an outlier in the series it’s a part of. The first two Fast and Furious films are undercover police thrillers about trust & family and the criminal world of California street racing. Tokyo Drift, on the other hand, is about a high school reprobate’s struggle to find The Drift within. The Drift, in case you somehow didn’t already know, is the ability to more or less drive sideways, something Japanese teens are apparently very good at. The Drift also serves as some kind of metaphor for growing up or taking responsibility or something along those lines (with a direct reference to The Karate Kid for full effect), but one thing’s for damn sure: it has nothing to do with the world of the Paul Walkers, Vin Diesels and Tyrese Gibsons of the first two films. There’s a hilarious last minute cameo that attempts to tie it into the rest of the series, but for the most part Tokyo Drift is a free-floating oddity, just sort of . . . drifting out on its own, disconnected. It’s also a genuinely fun bit of trash cinema.

Although there’s very little narratively connecting Tokyo Drift to its predecessors, it does share a lot of their surface pleasures: it brings back the rap rock from the first film (with Kid Rock in this case), it adds new toys to the vehicles (this time a revolving sports car vending machine, 3-D paint jobs, and nitros tanks shaped like champagne bottles), and the cars reach the cartoonish, blurred warp speed that the series finds so fascinating (although this time they’re moving sideways). The most important connective tissue here, however, is the stunt casting of a rapper in a supportive role. The first film had Ja Rule, the second had Ludacris. Tokyo Drift has (Lil) Bow Wow, playing a wisecracking sidekick who winks at the camera, delivers one-liners like “Japanese food is like the Army: don’t ask, don’t tell,” and refers to the Mona Lisa as that lady who’s smiling all the time. In the previous two Fast and Furious films Paul Walker served as the only common element between them; in Tokyo Drift, Bow Wow’s stunt casting makes that connection even more tenuous.

Substituting Paul Walker in the central role is the aforementioned teenage reprobate Sean, played by Lucas “The Kid From Sling Blade” Black. Never you mind that Sean is easily in his mid-twenties (and the rest of his American high school classmates are nearing their thirties). He’s a teenage dropout who burns his last chance for redemption in an opening street race with Zachery “The Kid From Home Improvement” Ty Bryan in an attempt to “win” his opponent’s girlfriend. By the time the girlfriend in question declares “Looks like I got a new date to the prom” it’s more than fair for the audience to ask “Who are these people?!” The answer to that question never comes (although their connection to the franchise is hinted at in that all-too-important last second cameo). Saved from going to jail for his street racing transgressions by his leopard print hussy mother, he’s promptly shipped off to Tokyo to live with his military daddy, who really only exists to occasionally give the film some girl group song levity in lines like “It was either this, or juvie hall” and “Have you been racing, Sean?” Sean himself isn’t a particularly essential addition to the Fast and Furious world, but it is amusing to hear him pronounce Japanese words in a thick Southern accent once he reaches “The Drift World” and the idea of a girl-group style teenage bad boy looking for his inner Drift headlining one of these movies is a bizarre enough detail on its own regardless of execution, given how far removed it is from the undercover cop intrigue of the rest of the franchise.

Besides Bow Wow’s antics and Sean’s extended screen time, the real draw of the film is The Drift World itself. There’s an unashamedly trashy pleasure in Tokyo Drift’s world of Japanese sports cars sliding sideways in parking garages and down mountainsides, its Yakuza members who speak English even when they’re the only people in the room, and the live-action videogame feel of its downtown street racing. There’s a few innovations to the format here: it’s surprisingly the first film in the franchise to feature a car being built from scratch via montage; spectators discover a way to watch an entire race through a series of flip phones; this has got to be the only Fast and Furious movie to feature a Shonen Knife song on the soundtrack; and I’m pretty sure that during the opening race a smashed porta potty splashes digital feces on the camera lens. The most entertaining part of Tokyo Drift, however, is how little it is concerned with engaging with the rest of the franchise at all. It’s its own little side story about a young Southern boy trying to make his way through the class struggles of two worlds-apart high school hierarchies. Does he ever find his inner Drift? Yes, but does he get the girl? You betcha. As Sean himself says in the film, “It’s not the ride, it’s the rider,” and Tokyo Drift takes that lesson to heart, using the franchise as a vehicle to create its own space as a ridiculous, surface-pleasures action thriller with some ridiculous one-liners, a car racing fetish, and career high moment for rapper-turned-actor Not-So-Lil Bow Wow. I’m a little surprised by how much that formula worked for me and it ended up being my favorite film in the series so far.

-Brandon Ledet

Grunt! The Wrestling Movie (1985)

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three star

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Later today I will be cramped in a friend’s living room with a pile of fellow drunken weirdos shouting at a television screen as WrestleMania XXI unfolds live from Santa Clara, California. It’s an exciting, yet nerve-racking day to be a fan and a difficult feeling to describe to those who don’t share in it. I’m expecting a potent cocktail of camp & violence tonight (along with the usual variety of potent cocktails), the spirit of which is difficult to capture in words. It’s also difficult to capture on film. The allure of pro wrestling is an elusive, intoxicating, yet deeply flawed quality that’s better served experienced in a crowd than it is described on paper or depicted in film. Attempting to accurately capture pro wrestling’s appeal in a fictionalized setting and sell it back to its fans as a feature film has been a struggle for decades, a struggle that saw a significant uptick during the sport’s bloated spectacle heyday of the 1980s (as previously discussed on this site in our coverage of 1986’s Body Slam and 1989’s No Holds Barred). It’s a difficult task for several reasons, but not least of all because both the people making the films weren’t genuine fans of the sport themselves and because there’s a basic blending of reality & fantasy at play that’s entirely lost when a story is fully fictionalized.

Of the few 80s stabs at capturing this particular brand of lighting in a bottle I’ve seen so far, 1985’s Grunt! The Wrestling Movie was by far the most successful. A surprisingly funny mockumentary about the sport, Grunt! exemplifies both pro wrestling’s charms and (unintentionally) its crippling faults. You can tell the film was made by true fans of “sports entertainment” (as well as comedies like Airplane! and This is Spinal Tap). Grunt! captures both the camp and the violence of pro wrestling early and often (like in the opening scene when a competitor is comically decapitated during a match), but also has the good sense to lose itself to the action in the ring, knowing when to drop the mockumentary gimmick and “mark out” at the already-ridiculous-enough spectacle on display. It’s far from tastefully made and can at times be overwhelmingly corny, but those qualities make it all the more akin to the subject at hand.

Grunt! is a nerdy wrestling comedy made by wrestling-loving nerds, as is on full display when the director (as depicted in the film) explains, “Ever since I was a young child and I walked into my parents’ bedroom and my father said to me ‘Get out of here! We’re wrestling,’ frankly I’ve been fascinated by it.” That brand of juvenile sex humor isn’t the only thing the movie gets accurate (trust me, it’s accurate) about pro wrestling’s appeal. It also captures the chair shots, interfering managers, rings pelted with trash by booing crowds, snarling promos and shameless merchandising that surrounds the matches as well as the sport’s less savory features, like racial & cultural caricature and the embarrassing mockery of little people. Grunt! isn’t entirely purposeful in its documentation of the sport’s faults, but even when it’s incidental it’s fascinatingly accurate. For instance, the film’s absolutely horrendous rock & roll soundtrack is all too close to the reality of wrestling. Original songs that make declarations like “I’m only happy breaking bones”, “Do you wanna dance? Do you wanna body slam?”, and “Wrestling tonight! Everything is bigger than life!” are almost so bad that they’re downright punk and it’s that exact sentiment of unashamed cheese (along with the bone-crunching violence) that makes the sport appealing.

Grunt! isn’t a necessarily well-made movie, but it is one that serves its subject well. Its decision to tell its tale through mockumentary was downright brilliant in that it allowed the film to blend reality & fiction the same way pro wrestling does in the ring. There are some artistic touches to the way the actual matches are shot, especially in its disorienting reliance on a strobe light effect, but for the most part the film is a straightforwardly cheap comedy about a straightforwardly cheap sport. Much like the way Grunt! occasionally stops telling tawdry jokes and loses itself in the spirit of the in-the-ring action, there are times tonight when I will lose my grip on what’s “real” or what’s funny and lose myself in the actual consequences of WrestleMania XXXI. Even when the film’s jokes don’t land (though it’s surprising how often they do, considering its pedigree) it’s still incredible that they managed to capture that aspect of the sport on film, intentionally or not.

-Brandon Ledet

2 Fast 2 Furious (2003)

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three star

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In my review of The Fast and the Furious, 2001’s kickoff to the hyper-masculine car racing franchise, I supposed that somewhere down the line there would be some “sure-to-come shameless retreads inherent to sequels”. The series did not waste any time getting there. 2003’s 2 Fast 2 Furious isn’t necessarily much better or worse than its predecessor, but more like an echo. It hits the same plot points as the original (undercover policing, sports cars reaching warp speed, Paul Walker’s half-assed modes of seduction, etc.) with just a few basic casting substitutions distinguishing the two films. Sure, we’re blessed here with sex god Tyrese Gibson (who wastes little time in removing his shirt, of course) instead of Vin Diesel and a Chicken-N-Beer era Ludacris instead of the much-less-captivating Ja Rule, but the two films are more or less the same. The strange thing about it is that the repetition doesn’t feel like much of a problem.

It’s okay that both The Fast and the Furious and 2 Fast 2 Furious share so much in plot & sentiment because plot & sentiment are inessential to the films’ central draws: absurdly intricate action set pieces, a fetishistic love of sports cars, and charmingly dated ideas of cool. 2 Fast 2 Furious delivers on the action end early, opening with a ridiculous high speed drag race that features hooligans breaking into a bridge control booth to create a makeshift ramp. The ramp, of course, results in Paul Walker leapfrogging the competition as well as a competitor comically smashing through a Pepsi advertisement. Later, in the cop drama portion of the film, a second car is launched into the air (this time into a yacht) and a much more brutal highway race results in some dude driving a convertible being unceremoniously crushed by an 18-wheeler. The vehicles themselves are updated with some nifty new features: weird lights, Barbie car paint jobs, fire-breathing tail pipes, steam-shooting pistons, and nitros-powered ejection seats. The cops have upped their technology game as well, employing a futuristic, electrified grappling hook that somehow disables car engines through a kind of EMP device. As far as the movie’s 00s ideas of cool go, the CGI camera movements are hilariously dated, there’s a not-so-sly verbal reference to Ludacris’ hit “Move Bitch” (which honestly should’ve been the theme song), the Universal logo in the title card morphs into a spinning rim, and in the opening scene we’re treated to the defining hallmark of only the uppermost echelon of classy movies: break dancing.

2 Fast 2 Furious may be an exact structural photocopy of the first Fast & Furious installment, but it has such a deliriously lighthearted approach to the intense violence of its reality (a quality that made 80s action films the golden era of the genre) that it’s difficult to be too hard on it critically. As a cultural time capsule, there are a couple differences between its worldview and the one from just two years before. For one thing, there’s thankfully no more rap rock on the soundtrack and for another there’s an abundantly frequent use of the sharp uptick of the chin gesture that roughly translates to “What’s up?” The sequel also one-ups its torture game from force-feeding someone engine oil in the first picture to forcing a rat to eat through a stooge’s stomach wall in second one. For the most part, the two films are nearly identical, though. Although nearly all of the actors except Walker are substituted for new faces and there’s a complete absence of rap rock, lipstick lesbianism, and backyard grilling, 2 Fast 2 Furious is essentially a shameless retread of its precursor, but it’s one that finds a way to make its more-of-the-same formula entertaining despite the familiarity.

-Brandon Ledet

Serena (2015)

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Serena is a masterclass in piss-poor editing. On paper, it’s baffling that a prestige costume drama featuring two of Hollywood’s currently best-selling acts, Jennifer Lawrence & Bradley Cooper, would skip a wide theatrical release and go straight to VOD. On film, it’s entirely understandable. Drowning under an endless flood of inept editing choices is the raw material for a potentially great movie that’s gasping for air, but never allowed to surface. Alternately, Serena is also just a few cuts away from being a brilliantly funny camp classic, but it’s not even allowed to be enjoyable as a terrible film. It’s downright fascinating how frustrating this movie can be. It’s rare that a Hollywood film is released this unpolished and . . . off, but that doesn’t help the fact that it’s not even entertaining as a total disaster.

On the side of the film’s fight for legitimacy there’s an oddly old-fashioned big studio classic feel to the whole affair. Having two of Hollywood’s biggest stars struggle to negotiate their romantic & professional dynamic in an ancient, treacherous locale feels like the exact kind of movie that would’ve been made by every major studio 50 to 80 years ago and it’s charming to return to that familiar Old Hollywood vibe. This is a world where brassy women assert their power with lines like “I didn’t come to Carolina to do needlepoint,” in traditionally male arenas occupied by lumberjack types with perma-stubble & prison tattoos. Cooper & Lawrence aren’t gruff enough to believably sell the dangerous frontiersman developer and his half-feral wife routine, but their natural charisma and the effortlessly pleasant nature of costume dramas in general makes me want to root for the movie to turn out well. If the pacing had the good sense to slow down and let any of these elements breathe it really could’ve been something. That is not what happened.

There is so much more arguing for the movie to go in the camp classic direction. We’re introduced to Jennifer Lawrence’s titular Serena as she’s galloping on a horse in slow motion, a horrendously tender acoustic guitar plucking away in the background. The music doesn’t improve from there, with its slow, sappy, meaningless musings poisoning nearly every moment. The emptily symbolic animal imagery doesn’t stop there either. Bradley Cooper’s character spends the entire film on a laughably maudlin, metaphorical panther hunt and Lawrence finds empty metaphors of her own in the repetitive scenes where she trains an eagle to hunt the snakes that have been biting Cooper’s workers. The animal imagery, like nearly everything else in play, is almost always followed by blunt interjections of Cooper & Lawrence fucking, as if the film were edited by a half-awake Russ Meyer on cough syrup. Immediately after we meet Serena on the horse she’s squirming under the sheets and she comes out of an abrupt montage a married woman. The same The Room-esque sex interruptions occur after her eagle kills its first snake and after she hits on her husband’s investors at a ball in yet another scene that goes nowhere (except back to the bedroom). The images in these montages all feel like placeholders for longer scenes to be added later, a task that no one ever got around to. Oddly enough, the one image afforded the most room to breathe is the most disturbing one of all, a vigorous bathtub fingering that I’m likely to never forget thanks to Cooper’s intense, empty stare. In time, that bathtub moment might be the only image from this film I remember all, both because it’s so uncomfortable and because the other contenders are way too brief to make a lasting impression.

The scale really is tipped for Serena to reach a camp classic status, but it just never gets there. Besides the sex & animals, there’s also an evil, jealous, homosexual henchmen and a mystic, murderous woodsman who has “visions” that both feel like odd caricatures out of a different, thankfully bygone era. Also, any credibility Serena’s struggle to assert herself professionally adds to the plot is severely undercut by her gradual transformation from a confident woman to a murderous Lifetime Movie sociopath in the wild, like a knife-wielding Nell. I promise that sounds so much more fun than the film allows it to be and just as the characters are prone to fast, flat mumbling, so is the film’s editing. Each scene in Serena bleeds into the next in a way that makes no particular moment feel any more or less significant than the one preceding it. A hand being chopped off feels just as important as miscarriage or a blood transfusion or a town hall meeting. It’s all fast, flat mumbling here.

I truly believe someone could recut Serena‘s raw footage into something worthwhile, (starting by pulling brief images out of the endless montages to allow them room to breathe and scrapping the entire awful soundtrack wholesale) and come out the other end with a polished finished project that would have audiences counterintuitively rooting for Cooper & Lawrence to chop down thousands of trees as well as impregnate & murder their employees. It’s entirely possible. It’d be even easier to cut it into an over-the-top melodrama ripe with Lawrence going full, feral Mommy Dearest on the frontier folk. It’s almost there. In Serena’s fight for either legitimacy or camp, it was decidedly much closer to camp, but thoroughly disappointing as either. If nothing else, if someone wanted to learn how not to edit a film’s separate parts together into a cohesive whole, this would be a great place to start.

-Brandon Ledet

Crossroads (2002)

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Shonda Rhimes is currently one of the most powerful women in television. She’s the mastermind behind programs such as Scandal, How to Get Away with Murder, and Grey’s Anatomy, but before all of her fame and success, she wrote the infamously terrible film, Crossroads. After attempting to figure out how Rhimes was responsible for writing such a bad movie, I came across a quote that explains everything: “I never thought the critics were going to say Crossroads was a brilliant movie. My goal was for 12-year-olds to think it was brilliant [. . .] I became a rock star to the preteen set.” She went on to say “That movie bought my house.” It turns out that she has always been a genius. In 2002, Britney Spears was a god to teenagers around the globe and Rhimes was able to make loads of money by writing this garbage.

I was a 12-year-old Britney Spears super fan when this film came out and I annoyed every adult I knew by constantly begging them to bring me to the movie theater so I could see Crossroads. The movie trailers would play on MTV all throughout the day and I never got tired of watching them. I remember thinking that by watching this movie I would be an even better and more loyal Britney Spears fan. Come to think of it, it was like being in a preteen cult. Well, someone finally caved in and I was able to see Crossroads on the big screen. I didn’t really understand most of the movie, but that didn’t matter because I was so thrilled to see Britney Spears in something other than a music video or a Pepsi commercial. I recently revisited the film for the first time in 12 years and the experience I had was very different compared to my initial one. Everything was just so embarrassing and awkward to watch, but it was slightly enjoyable due to its nostalgia value.

Lucy (Britney Spears) has lost touch with her two childhood friends, Kit (Zoe Saldana) and Mimi (Taryne Manning). After their high school graduation, the girls dig up an old “wish box” they created as children and they’re reminded of their past wishes and friendship. They all decide to go on a road trip across the U.S. to fulfill their wishes: Mimi, who is pregnant, wants to go to California; Lucy wants to visit the mother who abandoned her in Arizona; and Kit wants to visit her flawless fiancé in Los Angeles. They hitch a ride to California with a supposed ex-con from a local trailer park, which is such a terrible idea for 3 immature teenage girls, but since this is a tween flick, he actually turns out to be a hunky good guy who doesn’t slit their throats. Their journey brings out many horrible secrets and truths, but it really makes them all closer to each other while allowing them to sort of “find themselves.” The film ends with Britney performing “I’m Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman” and the song pretty much sums up the meaning of the film.

The most memorable scene from the film would be the “I Love Rock n’ Roll” karaoke performance. The ex-con’s car breaks down near New Orleans, and no one has the money needed to fix it. They just so happen to come across a karaoke contest with a cash prize at a bar on Bourbon Street, so the girls decide to give it a shot. They do a really awkward performance of Joan Jett’s classic hit and end up winning a good bit of cash. Even though it’s the most memorable, I think this is actually the worst scene in the entire film because it’s so embarrassing to watch. Lucy, Kit, and Mimi try their best to look “alternative” and cover themselves in glitter. Mimi nervously attempts to do the lead vocals, and the audience trys to boo them off the stage. Dave Allen has a quick cameo as a bar patron that yells “Get off the stage!” and it’s pretty damn hilarious. Of course, Lucy saves the day by taking over the lead vocals, and the entire bar starts dancing and cheering them on. I cringed the entire time because everything about their performance (especially their outfits, facial expressions, and dancing) was so horrendous.

Britney Spears is a kickass performer that I still adore to this day, but she is definitely not cut out to be an actress. She didn’t seem to be very comfortable with her role as Lucy; every gesture she made and every word out of her mouth felt forced. It’s a good thing she sticks to music videos, commercials, and the occasional guest appearance nowadays. Still, I honestly think that Crossroads is worth a watch due to its goofy nature and its nostalgia value. Thankfully, it’s currently streaming on Netflix.

-Britnee Lombas

The Fast and the Furious (1955)

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twohalfstar

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When I said yesterday that I had yet to see a single Fast & Furious film in full, I wasn’t being 100% honest. I had previously seen the film the series derived its name from, a 1950’s car racing cheapie from Movie of the Month vet Roger Corman. 1955’s The Fast and the Furious is far from Corman’s most interesting film, but it is only the second title (out of hundreds) that he’s produced and the first title produced by American International Pictures, the film company that helped make him a b-movie powerhouse. The film has very little connection to the much-more-infamous Paul Walker series outside of the purchase of its title rights, but that purchase was most certainly worth every penny. It’s a damn good title. Good thing they decided not stick with the much less compelling original name for the film, Crashout.

When considered on its own, The Fast and the Furious doesn’t amount to much. It’s story of an (innocent) escaped convict who comes to hold a female race car driver hostage in hopes that she will drive him to freedom across the Mexican border. At first they bristle at each other’s hostility. In an early exchange, the race car driver, Connie, spits, “I hate you.” Frank, the convict, responds, “Just hate me all the way to Mexico.” There’s a lot of violent sexual energy between the couple that becomes less violent and more sexual as they stop struggling to outsmart each other and start working as a pair in their confrontations with police & other, less forgiving race car drivers. The racing culture of 1950s is portrayed as rich man’s hobby here, which leads to some occasionally interesting class politics in Frank’s interactions with Connie’s circle. This also plays into why Frank was convicted of a crime he didn’t commit in the first place, which is revealed in his line “It isn’t what you are that counts. It’s what you get taken for.”

Filmed in just ten days, The Fast and the Furious is one of many examples of Corman’s superhuman ability to make a surprisingly watchable picture on a tight budget, even if it isn’t a particularly memorable one. It does share some incidental similarities the Paul Walker franchise of the same name, like felons getting mixed up in car racing, racers inspecting/admiring each other’s gear, the featured inclusion of female racers, and (most incidentally of all) mentions of Coachella, California. Both Corman’s film and the 2000s franchise also have a tendency to mix corny comedy in with their criminal intrigue as well as an over-reliance on dated effects (whether they be CGI or driving scenes filmed in front of a projector). Corman’s The Fast and the Furious is by no means essential viewing, but it is an interesting footnote to the trashy cultural powerhouse that followed nearly 50 years later.

The Fast and the Furious (1955) is currently streaming on Netflix.

-Brandon Ledet

The Fast and the Furious (2001)

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Despite the 15 year run of the franchise’s cultural ubiquity, I’ve somehow managed to avoid ever seeing a Fast & Furious movie in full. Sure, I’ve seen them playing as background noise in various bars & living rooms over the years, but I’ve never bothered to watch a single picture from front to end. When the series first got started I was a gloomy teenage snob who wouldn’t be caught dead watching such mindless machismo, but something happened in the years since: I grew a sense of humor. And while I was working on that, something else happened: the series seemingly got exponentially ridiculous with each sequel. It’s rare these days for any genre film outside of slasher flicks to earn six sequels, but here we are in 2015 with a car racing movie reaching its seventh installment next month: Furious 7. It’s with the ads for that seventh installment that I’ve finally reached my tipping point. The trailer for Furious 7 is so deliciously over the top that when I first saw it in the theater I finally felt compelled to catch up with the entire series.

It turns out that the very first installment in the Fast & Furious franchise was a very effective baseline measurement for the series. It was exactly what I had expected: rap-rock era machismo way more concerned with cartoonishly fast cars, gigantic guns, and impressively elaborate action sequences than its superfluous plot about an undercover cop. The movie opens with a dangerous, in-motion highway robbery, then moves on directly to a fistfight, then a drag race, then a feud with a biker gang and so on. In addition to fistfights, armed robberies, motorcycles, and sports cars, The Fast and the Furious features such macho trademarks as rap metal, backyard grills, and lipstick lesbianism. The film also features Vin Diesel in his early 2000s prime (he had a prime, right?), Ja Rule (unmistakably in his prime) as an early sign of the series’ unique interest in rappers-turned-actors, and the strikingly sexy Jordana Brewster as the designated trophy girl for face-of-the-series Paul Walker to lust after. Above all of these macho hallmarks stands what I suppose is the film’s main attraction: fast cars. Cars so fast that light warps around them like spaceships in old-line sci-fi, their roaring engines overpowering the sound design & the inner workings of their nitrous oxide systems becoming a fetishistic focus for the CGI. The series, of course, is all about furiously fast cars, with plot & dialogue taking a very distant second.

The Fast and the Furious is entertaining enough as a mindless action flick & a trashy cultural relic, but it’s nowhere near the peak ridiculousness promised in the Furious 7 trailer. It does have its campy moments, though. The dialogue is often laughable. For example, early in the film when Paul Walker’s character suspiciously patrons a subpar sandwich shop, a hooligan asks, “What’s up with this fool? What is he, sandwich crazy?” In addition to the nonsensical vocal posturing, there’s the hideous detail of someone being force-fed engine oil as a torture tactic, the fact that somehow no one seems to think it’s fucked up that their drag race competition is called “Race Wars”, and a straight-out-of-a-girl-group-song moment when Paul Walker screams “Don’t do it, Jesse!” while trying to convince a reckless teen not to race. Also, as a lazy Louisiana nerd who barely leaves the house, I have no idea exactly how over the top the depictions of widescale California street races that result in thousands of people running from the cops are, but they felt pretty silly to an outsider. The campy charms never reach a fever pitch, however, and the film mostly serves as a baseline measurement for the sure-to-come shameless retreads inherent to sequels as well as the cartoonish absurdity promised in the ads for Furious 7 (and hopefully elsewhere in the five films in-between). It was a decent start to the series, but I doubt it’s the best or the worst that it has to offer. We’ll see.

-Brandon Ledet

The Brady Bunch in the White House (2002)

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I’m still trying to understand what I just watched. Why would anyone think it’s okay to create a made-for-television sequel to A Very Brady Sequel 6 years late with an almost entirely new cast? Shelley Long (Carol Brady) and Gary Cole (Mike Brady) were the only two members of the original cast that I noticed, and they were actually okay since they have all that Brady experience under their belts. However, their talent was definitely not enough to save this movie from becoming a flop. The Brady Bunch Movie (1995) and A Very Brady Sequel (1996) were actually very funny, but The Brady Bunch in the White House was absolute garbage. It was painful for me to endure all 88 minutes of this joke of a movie, but I was committed to making it to the end for Swampflix.

After Bobby, the youngest Brady boy, comes across a lottery ticket in an abandoned building, he ends up actually winning the lottery. The problem is that the ticket didn’t actually belong to Bobby, and his father, Mike, refuses to allow him to claim the winnings. Of course, he gives one of his famous all-American dad speeches that make absolutely no sense and are more annoying than funny. It turns out that the ticket’s rightful owner is on death row, so Mike ends up donating the winnings to charity. This attracts much public attention, and the President of the United States invites the Brady family to the White House for a press conference. Shortly after the conference, a scandal occurs that causes the President to resign and Mike Brady becomes the new President. Guess who becomes Mike’s Vice President? Carol Brady! The Bradys basically take over the White House and, well, do a bunch of Brady stuff (perform synchronized musical numbers, wear tacky 70s fashion, etc.).

Here’s my theory on how this movie came about: someone with way too much money had way too much to drink and said, “Hey, what if the Brady Bunch took over the White House? That would be pretty neat! I should waste a bunch of my money on a crappy movie about it.” There’s no way that a sober person would ever invest their time and money on this. The plot was ridiculous, the acting was even worse, and I’m pretty sure it was filmed with a handheld camcorder. There is a slight possibility that I will watch this movie 10 years down the road just for kicks, but that’s just me being optimistic. I really hope that this is the last Brady movie that will ever be made.

Watch if you dare: The Brady Bunch in the White House is currently streaming on Netflix.

-Britnee Lombas