Photographs of my girlfriend naked (3/25/07)
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The Fast And The Furious: Tokyo Drift. [Justin Lin, 2006.]
My loathing for Paul Walker having overcome my love of movies about fast cars and beautiful women, I missed the intervening installment, but return here with light heart and renewed spring in my step to the perusal of the ongoing saga of illegal street racers and their absurdly bodacious campfollowers. — Nor am I disappointed:
Slow-talking but in all other respects preternaturally swift Alabama lad Lucas Black gets tossed out of high school after an exciting albeit predictably destructive afterschool race in which his trailertrash Monte Carlo smokes the upscale Viper of the star of the football team — striking a blow in the war between the classes, of course, and making a suitable impression upon the feckless jock’s shameless-coquette cheerleader girlfriend, but, alas, trashing several acres of residential construction, both cars, and his front teeth in the process; with the result that he finds it politic abruptly to relocate to another continent.
After a brief interlude, accordingly, we find our hero on the other side of the Pacific, a bornagain army brat living with his estranged military father in the fabulous megalopolis Tokyo — capital of the mysterious East, neonlit like a pachinko parlor 24/7, and, apparently, the site of the longest-running hiphop video of all time — and home, therefore, to a numberless Asiatic horde of microskirted hotties in tall glossy black leather boots, who alternate Shaking It to Nipponese boogie/rap with bending over impossibly shiny exotic cars the colors of turbocharged jelly beans, aiming either their luscious thongberibboned derrieres or the hooters that always seem to be on the verge of popping out of their pathetically inadequate halters with unerring precision at the [understandably hormoneaddled] camera — and, also, of a new and daring breed of street racers all versed in the occult science of drifting, a technique of precision highspeed power sliding [spinning out under control] which allows the initiate to negotiate mountain roads, city streets, parking structures, etc., with considerably enhanced speed and efficiency — and, more to the point, looks incredibly cool.
Herewith, naturally, the scenario assumes the familiar form of the martial arts movie: our obnoxiously overconfident though unquestionably talented hero suffers a preliminary humiliation at the hands of the wicked Drift King; is taken under the tutelage of a mentor figure who schools him unrelentingly in the black art of driving in a continuous state of skid; pursues an unattainable female who can be his only if he conquers his nemesis; learns a few words of Japanese and discovers he can stomach sushi if he smothers it with ketchup; gets bounced off the walls by an enormously fat Sumowrestler dude covered with indecent tattoos; loses his mentor in a phenomenally exciting but ultimately fatal street race through downtown Tokyo [actually LA tricked up to look like Tokyo, but why quibble]; makes the obligatory descent into the Underworld — here the dens of the Yakuza, ruled by the great Sonny Chiba, who is as always himself worth the price of admission; and attains the culminating triumph in a final suicide run several vertical miles down an oxcart track descending Mount Everest — for which, in keeping with a slightly different but no less important set of conventions, after hotrodding around in flashy Japanese iron for most of the picture he saddles up in the inevitable iconic Shelby Mustang [Hattori Hanzo steel] to defend the honor of American racing and the venerable tradition of the muscle car against the Yellow Peril. — So watch your ass, Driftkönig: you won’t come back from Dead Man’s Curve.
The characters, in short, are cardboard stereotypes; the plot is a mechanical contrivance; the backgrounds are mostly CGI; the grimaces of the actors as they knot their jaws and grip their wheels and pretend they’re doing something extraordinary and dangerous are bogus, and filmed in the studio. — But the cars are beautiful [or were, at least: they must have wrecked about a hundred of them], the stunt drivers prodigiously gifted, and the burning rubber real enough that you can smell it. And that’s enough for me.
And, indeed, this third chapter goes far enough toward resurrecting the spirit of the original that Vin Diesel himself [in a gorgeously restored Buick] consents to a cameo at the end; bestowing his blessing upon the proceedings, and speaking the implicit moral that this might be a good place to stop. — Speed is not all there is to racing, after all; you also have to know enough to quit while you’re ahead.
____________Further adventures of Tom Cruise (2/14/07)
