Originally published at: How to write a Fast and Furious film | Boing Boing
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The Fast films are dumb from the ground up.
I have zero interest in these movies but dumb formulaic films appealing to the lowest common denominator of audience IQ is still a central part of the studio business model.
There’s an old story about a Golden Age studio executive out golfing with a friend. He’s asked “Hey, Jack, what’s your latest picture about?”, to which he replies “Same f*cking thing as all the rest: one movie star falls in love with another movie star. Now are we gonna play or what?”
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Step 1: watch a lot of WB RoadRunner cartoons…
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Or maybe sometimes, people who are plenty smart enjoy turning off their brains and just watching some cars go vroom-vroom for a couple of hours? Not my cup of tea, but sometimes some mindless entertainment can be fun…
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Very happy with myself that I never watched one of those films.
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Sort of guilty, just not with the F&F franchise.Speed was one of those where, if you ignore the plot holes large enough to drive the bus through and turned your brain off, was good for 90 minutes of silliness.
Granted, there’s also the Zen of making subway tunnels in Minecraft, but that’s something else entirely.
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We need more gear changes.
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Armageddon was one of those movies for me.
Thoughts on leaving the theater: “OK, that was dumb, but at least it was entertaining. It is science fiction to the extent that any “science” in the film is fictional and unrealistic.”
Every J.J. Abrams movie I’ve seen falls into that same category.
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I had no idea people actually wrote Fast and Furious movies. I had assumed that they were created by an AI programmed by middle schoolers.
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I watched part of one once. Tokyo Drift. I could see why it’s popular, but it looked like it was aimed squarely at a much younger demographic than mine.
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I thought the first one was ok – not great plot wise, but back then they really couldn’t afford CGI so had to limit themselves, most of the time, to actual car stunts. By the third, though, the plot repetition kicked in, and if something “cool” happened on screen, it was clearly enhanced, just bits on someone’s sceen, not an actual stunt. From the commercials, I’d say it hasn’t improved since.
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OK, super disappointed with everyone here for their uninformed F&F takes
I was converted to “The Family” from listening to How Did This Get Made. I figured they loved the movies so much I would give them a try. I got hooked and watched the first six in three days. Then I forced my wife to watch them with me, she thought I was crazy at first, but now she wants to watch them more often then I do. We went to Fast 7 opening day.
I was 45 when I got hooked on these movies and my wife is dean at a decent size college.
It’s really only the first two movies that are repetitive. The 3rd movie looks repetitive, but it uses the new ‘genre’ to smuggle in themes about immigration and belonging. But you have to stick with the movies until Fast Five.
You can watch Fast Five without watching the first four, but what Fast Five does to mythology and timelines of the movies is quite literally fucking amazing. It’s like a movie length version of the “Luke, I am your father” moment turned up to 11 and it’s a hell of a lot of fun.
Vin Diesel is a big sci-fi nerd that plays D&D and obviously loves cinema. In other words, he would probably fit in pretty well around Boing Boing.
The movies are big, dumb, and fun, but they are smart about how they are dumb.
You all are really missing out
And the effects are practical with CGI cleanups and enhanchments. They throw those cars outta the plane for real
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When Marvel movies swing towards the unenlightened, it’s due to problems with adaptation and not the source material.
I’m going to disagree with this contention.
The Marvel movies are as formulaic as any other Hollywood big budget product. It wasn’t always the case with comic book movies, but they haven’t come up with anything particularly original in more than 10 years from what I can see.
Don’t get me started about Star Wars.
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I’m 58; are you older than that? I’m firmly in the Fast & Furious demographic. Vroom! Vroom!
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They use an infinite amount of monkeys on an infinite amount of typewriters.
But, the twist is:
For unexplained reasons, they use the result of the very first monkey on the very first typewriter.
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When it comes to the pantheon of F&F films, Tokyo Drift (F&F3) is probably one of the best film in the series. It is a completely separate entity from the other F&F films* and can stand on its own. It has a decent cast, the racing is fun, it doesn’t take itself as seriously as the other films, and some of it was actually filmed in Japan giving it a certain air of authenticity. The biggest gripe I have while watching it is that with a few exceptions, most of the characters’ Japanese is absolutely AWFUL while their English is entirely too polished.
* There is a cameo by Vin Deisel at the end of Tokyo Drift. In a bizarre twist, Tokyo Drift was later retconned in such a way that the film actually overlaps with F&F 6 and 7. This altered the entire series’ chronology by making 4 & 5 take place after 2, and 3 taking place concurrently with 6 and 7.
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They had heart, though.
While I still enjoy the newer films I sometimes lament how they drastically changed at around F&F 4 from being big dumb car movies with heists to big dumb heist movies with cars.
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You are showing entirely too much knowledge of the F&F franchise!
So what I’m hearing is: you’re still in denial and havent hit rock-bottom yet.
