LET'S GIVE OUT SOME AWARDS! THE "BEST" OF 2011

The more generic the better, that's our motto.

This year, inspired by the glut of awards-season stuff I've been reading for weeks on Twitter, I decided to give out my own awards. Mine are free of the capricious political bullshit (to say nothing of the sentimentality) that infects the Oscars. No, mine are more likely to result in my accidentally awarding Best Supporting Actor to Rajon Rondo because I'm getting distracted by the Celtics-Heat game on the TV as I type this. Which would be a neat little surrealist statement about how stupid movie awards are, but I'm going to stay on topic. EVEN IF IT KILLS ME.

As you'll notice, there are categories here that you won't find on the Oscars. These awards, not having been voted on by any kind of electoral body or bunch of critics or even my mom or her cat—and lemme tell ya, the cat was pissed at the over-representation of dogs this year, damn—just me and my lil ol' foul-mouthed lonesome. So these are all my usual blend of hyper-erudite genius, axe-grinding, and wildly overblown advocacy. And, of course, lots and lots of fucking cursing. Which is why the only possible nickname for the first annual Movies By Bowes ™ Academy of Motion Picture Farts and Scientology Awards is . . . The Fuckos. Let us now begin. Some spoilers, unavoidably, so be forewarned.


ACTING:

Best Performance By An Actor, male: George Clooney, The Descendants. It's an amazingly good performance, with so much done in the eyes. It helps that the movie's fucking great too, but a huge part of it being great is Clooney. This was a great year for lead performances by men; there are at least seven that I wouldn't mind seeing win the Oscar. For the Oscar, because it'd be awesome, I'm advocating Gary Oldman in Tinker Tailor, but this here's “best” and that means Clooney this year. Though seriously, Brad Pitt in Tree of Life or Moneyball, Clooney, Gary Oldman, the dude from The Artist, Andy Serkis in Rise of the Planet of the Apes . . . loaded fuckin' year.

Best Performance By An Actor, female: Keira Knightley, A Dangerous Method. When I first saw this, I couldn't quite figure out what it was about her performance that struck me as off. I thought it might have had something to do with Keira Knightley not having the formal training that Fassbender, Viggo, and everyone else had. But something I couldn't quite describe was telling me “Resist the knee-jerk reaction that she sucked. She didn't. Figure out why she didn't.” And the conclusion I came to was that her character (and characterization) was a challenge to the way men traditionally view women. She's very sexual but not in a way that's geared toward pleasing men. She's way the hell smart. And by the end of the picture, when she's figured out how to make her way in the world, she doesn't really need Fassbender (the POV character for dudes in the audience) anymore. So that's the character. As for the performance, Keira Knightley keeps throwing in these little darts to keep everyone off balance, so that no one, in the movie or out, quite knows what to make of her. She pulls all the focus to her, which sometimes works to the detriment of the movie at large but since A Dangerous Method is, more or less, all about her—she's the engine that drives the whole thing, including the Fassbender/Viggo Jung/Freud relationship—she did the job. And that's why Keira Knightley's performance in that picture deserves a little more love than she's been getting this award season. (6/1/12 EDIT: The preceding paragraph was written before I saw Young Adult. Charlize Theron was better. Sorry, Keira; I still stand by the above assessment of your performance, you have to share the trophy though.)

Best Performance By A Movie Star, male: I know, I know: “What the fuck, George Clooney's not a movie star?” Yeah, he totally is, he just happened to also out-act all the AC-TORRRRRs this year. This here's about swagger, ownage, and charisma, the un-subtle arts. And this category was looooooooooaded this year. From Vincenzo Gasolina (not to mention the Rock, nor Paul Walker) in Fast Five, to Baby Goose in Drive, to Salman Khan in Bodyguard, to Shahrukh Khan's both-barrels bid to reassert his status as king in Ra.One and Don 2 (hey, what can I say, they grow good movie stars in India, about which more later in the acting categories), it's Shahrukh's American analogue who takes this one: Tom Cruise, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. Dude hung off the hundred and what the fuck floor of the fuckin Burj Khalifa (roughly “REALLY FUCKING TALL BUILDING” in Arabic) by himself and did all that wacky rappelling shit and propped himself up on the fucking building by basically telling the building “Building? I'm a fuckin movie star. I can just chill here, right?” and the building went, “Sure. You are Tom Cruise, after all.” It was real nice to see Tom Cruise be the Tom Cruise that made him Tom Cruise again. That movie was fucking dope. Good to have ya back, Tom.

Best Performance By A Movie Star, female: Rooney Mara, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. I still think the book is horseshit and that Lisbeth Salander is a creepy jerk-off fantasy. But holy God Rooney Mara swaggered in that. The script material undercut her but she was just like “Fuck this shit, I didn't get all these piercings for real and start smoking for real and get in shape for all those nude scenes I didn't really need to do but did anyway because I ain't no punk . . . I didn't do all this fuckin shit to let a fuckin script undercut me. Prepare to be owned.” Et voila.

Best Performance By A Dog: Another weirdly loaded category this year. I was about an inch and a half from giving this to that wonderfully taciturn long-faced dog in Hugo, especially because Marty being a wise-ass with the 3D really let us into that dog's trip, but I have to be a conventional asshole and give this one to Uggie in The Artist. It is “best” performance by a dog, after all.

Best Performance By A Cat: The Cat, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Before Stieg Shithead Larsson (spoiler alert) iced the cat in a sensationalist hysterical bid to get the audience to really hate the bad guy, there was enough business with the cat that Daniel Craig got to chill with him a bit and let David “Honey Badger” Fincher make the dumb joke “huh huh Blomkvist is a pussy, get it? Hahahahaha” because why not. I liked that cat. I didn't like him getting iced. (End spoiler)

Best Performance by a Dude Playing A Chimp: This whole category is just cuz of Andy Serkis in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Caesar is truth. Caesar is revolution. Caesar Occupies your entire shit. Yeah a huge part of that was the VFX, but they just rendered what Serkis gave 'em. Don't forget this movie, and don't sleep on it. This was good stuff.

Raddest Old Guy: Amitabh Bachchan, Bbuddah Hoga Terra Baap. He is the Big B. All hail. There were other cool things about this movie, like Sonu Sood and the adorable Charmy (oh, Charmy . . .) but it would have just been another “meh, whatever” picture without Amitabh holding it the fuck down in the lead. He's pushing 70 but still owned the living crap out of every bad guy in the whole picture without even smudging any of those crazy white suits of his.

Best Nudity: This is a total protest category about how all the goddamn time in movies filmmakers feel like they have to justify nudity or de-eroticize it and it all has to be for some kind of “purpose.” Fuck that shit. So, while 2011 featured a lot of very attractive actresses appearing full-frontally nude, the context was frequently such that the audience was being scolded not to find it hot. Emily Browning in Sleeping Beauty, lit and made up luminously, is being pawed by skeevy old dudes, who are saddened by the experience (also that movie is inert, miserable crap). Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander, we already covered that. So I guess by default it's Carey Mulligan in Shame because at least, brother-sister weirdness aside when Fassbender finds her in the shower, she's just kinda kickin' it, and she does look good, and the purpose of the scene isn't to leer over her or make her into some bullshit fantasy character. Actually, my rationalization just convinced me to strike the “default” part of that. Carey Mulligan, Shame.

Best Dudity: Michael Fassbender, Shame. Of course it was him. It had to be him. Michael Fassbender has a very good chance of being the first actor in the history of the Oscars whose penis gets a nomination while he splits the vote between his performances in this, Jane Eyre, A Dangerous Method, and X-Men. Cue months of tabloid stories about the split in the partnership between Michael Fassbender's Penis and Michael Fassbender; Fassbender's penis will go off to LA and make big gaudy movies and wear gold chains and hang out with fast women and start doing coke, while Fassbender spends most of his time bereft, on airplanes, heading to do another play or art movie, missing his old friend, before a tearful reunion in the third act preceding a renewed and glorious collaboration as the music and credits swell. A final kiss will only be possible if Fassbender does some serious yoga in preparation.


DIRECTING:

Steven Spielberg, energized by War Horse and Tintin, plans to direct this many movies in 2012

Best Directing, Big Budget: Martin Scorsese, Hugo. I had problems with this picture but exactly none of them had anything to do with what Marty S. brought to the table. Marty had a big fuckin' vision, he got someone to give him $150 million and some 3D cameras and he went and got a DP and a design team that'll make ya change gods. Marty got performances out of the kids, he kept Sacha Baron Cohen from flipping out and taking over the movie, and he got Ben Kingsley and said, “Be Ben Kingsley.” And Ben Kingsley said, “Fuck that, I'm gonna be George Méliès.” And Marty said, “Works for me. See you on set.” This picture drove me bonkers while I was watching it because I wanted to go find the writers and kick them in the balls for not being able to keep up with Marty's brain, but the more I think about it, the more I'm like, goddamn, that Marty S. sure knows what the hell he's doing with this filmmaking racket. If he keeps it up he might make something of himself.

Best Directing, Small Budget: Joe Cornish, Attack The Block. Yeah, $13 million's a lot of money in regular people terms, but it's a fuck of a lot less than 150, and Attack The Block's a better movie than Hugo is, so the math is pretty much done. In ten years, people are going to be like, “Yeah, I saw Attack The Block in theaters” and people are going to be like “Whooooooa . . . cool!” Because in ten years Attack The Block is going to be a cult classic of near-Lebowski (chill the fuck out, I said “near”) proportions. This is absolute. Quote this back to me in ten years and I'll say, “Don't ever argue with the big dog, the big dog's always right.”

Best Directing of Actors: Alexander Payne, The Descendants. This would have been close if Woody hadn't fucked up Rachel McAdams' character in Midnight In Paris, but he did, so it's not. Payne got performances out of George Clooney, multiple different kids (the youngest we can credit to Payne and maybe even Nick Krause as Sid channeling a hetero Keanu, but to be fair, when Shailene Woodley decides it's time to move on from that life of the American teenager show or whatever it is, she's going to be just fine with or without Alexander Payne), Beau Bridges, and the less scary killer from Scream, who's now all growns up and stuff. They all feel like real people who are of that place; whether or not they actually resemble native Hawaiians is up to Hawaiians to say, but there's a great connection between the actors and the place, and it's a movie to a very large degree about place. And that's that.

Best Directing of Ownage Sequences: Nicolas Winding Refn, Drive. Could just as easily have been Justin Lin for Fast Five, Brad Bird in Mission Impossible: Motherfuckers I Shot Tom Cruise Hanging Off The Top Of The Fucking Burj Khalia: A Brad Bird Film Directed By Brad Bird's Testicles (the only reason he doesn't win this is because Tom Cruise owning Michael Nyqvist at the end wasn't as impressive as it might have been because, come on, Michael Nyqvist? Still a pretty cool sequence with all the moving parts, but definitely loses points because by that point Tom Cruise has demonstrated sufficient awesomeness that getting his ass kicked by the guy from the shitty Swedish Girl With The Dragon Tattoo seemed implausible.) No, The Long And Winding Refn takes this one because hammers, straight razors, and Clippers games. And for involving Albert Brooks in an enterprise where he owns someone somehow other than verbally (and then doing it again) and having the audience be like, “Daaaaaaaamn, Albert Brooks a bad motherfucker!” rather than “Really? Albert Brooks? Please.” That right there wins this category, no question.

Best Understated Yet Vividly Clear Political Statement: Asghar Farhadi, A Separation. This movie was so goddamn good you forget it's a foreign movie—shit, I forgot I was reading subtitles—because the people are so recognizably and universally people. Then you're like, why's she so dead set on amscraying the country with the daughter (who's amazing in this, by the way), and why are these random schlubs in shitty offices wielding omnipotent power over these people's . . . ohhhh, right. It's a totalitarian regime where religion and the state control everything. That didn't even hit me until the final scene, at which point it just popped up in high definition like, “oh yeah, none of this shit needed to happen.” (Ed. Note: the reason Rise of the Planet of the Apes didn't take this is, if you'll recall, the political message wasn't subtle. It was “FUCK THE STATE, WE DROP EVIL WHITE GUYS IN SUITS OFF OF BRIDGES IN FLAMING HELICOPTERS UP IN THIS. WHAT.”)

Most Unexpected Homage: Woody's fucking Inception trip in the Belle Époque sequence in Midnight In Paris. Okay, okay, I know it wasn't a straight-up homage to Inception. It just needs mentioning how great Midnight In Paris was a few dozen more times. And because the idea of Woody Allen directing Inception is really funny.


VISUALS & EDITING:

Raoul Coutard

Achievement in Camera Mastery: Emmanuel Lubezki, The Tree Of Life. Know why all the voice-overs in that were spoken in stunned fragmented whispers? They were watching the dailies while trying to talk. Those images were powerful, dude.

Most Immersive Production Design: The team that brought you Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. I said in my Tor.com review, it felt like they had a time machine and shot on location in the 1970s. And, well, yeah. It felt like they had a time machine and shot on location in the 1970s.

Best Use of Visuals As an Expository Tool: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. They packed hundreds of pages of Stieg Larsson's bullshit into brisk, completely coherent minutes. That picture may have been two and a half hours but it was a fast two and a half, for sure.

Best Shot: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Gary Oldman + David Dencik + airplane slowly taxiing up behind them. Mmm mmm mmm that's some good stuff. Though, call me crazy, that one continuous shot in Hanna when Eric Bana walks through the airport, gets each baddie hiding behind each pillar to start following him, then lures them down into that underground walkway and owns all of them, concluding with throwing a knife through a dude's face (done without cutting away!) is a close second, and even better than Joe Wright's massive Dunkirk shot in Atonement, which was cool but it was also the only good thing about that movie. But there's something to be said for understated subtlety, which is why the Tinker Tailor airplane shot takes this one.

Uncanny Valley Memorial Achievement in VFX Verisimilitude: Rise. Dude Caesar was fucking real. (Resisted the urge to give this to the kid in Hugo, because otherworldly though he and those anime blue eyes were, he actually was a real person, I'm told.)

Best Editing, Action Movie: Drive. Cheating slightly because it's not an action movie, per se (as that batshit insane lawsuit plaintiff realized, much to her dismay) but the action sequences in this are put together fucking amaaaaaazingly. Patience goes well with action. Who knew?

Best Editing, Non-Action Movie: A Separation. Trust, that editing is crazy good. That movie isn't much more than people talking for an hour forty but damn is it ever intense. That's part writing and part performances, but the medium is montage. (Not in the Team America sense, wiseass, we talkin bout Eisenstein.)

Best Editing, “Damn, that picture didn't feel near that long” category: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Two and a half hours, and it barely felt half that. Runner-up, Fast Five, which—bizarrely—was two hours and twenty minutes long. It felt like the hour forty-five it should have been in any rational universe, which leads me to believe that Justin Lin might know the Jedi mind trick.


MUSIC:

Best Original Score: Attack The Block. Nothing else other than Hanna even need think about asking to be part of this category; while the Chemical Brothers did an excellent job with that, that movie wasn't propelled by the score to the same extent Attack The Block was. Attack The Block owns all. Not only does it work perfectly in the movie, it's the best goddamn writing music ever recorded.

Best Original Song: “Life's A Happy Song,” The Muppets. Though I'll hear arguments for several other songs from that movie. And the title song from Bodyguard, with the whistle-whistle, flex-flex, guitar-guitar hook. But “Life's A Happy Song” for the win.

Best Basically Original Song: “A Real Hero,” Drive. Everyone whined about it being in their heads for weeks/months afterward but you know why? Because it's a good song, that's why.

Best Use of a Previously Existing Song: the Soviet national anthem, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. That scene at the Circus' Christmas party before any of the bad shit happens, and they're all a little lit and start singing along . . . that's just awesome. It's a nerd joke, it's them kind of making a dark joke about the enemy, but also, all political implications aside, that's a really good fucking song; The Hunt For Red October would have won this category with the same song in 1990.

Best Song Cast As Pearls Before Swine In A Shitty Movie: “Shelter,” The xx, I Am Number Four. Terrible movie, and the song was used really badly, just because the xx were trendy when they were shooting the movie. But, even though no one cares about the xx anymore (nor do they care about I Am Number Four, thankfully), this song is still great and their album has a bunch of other good stuff on it.

Best Soundtrack: Midnight In Paris. Seriously. This might have been Woody's best soundtrack ever. “But what about the soundtrack to Drive?” What about the soundtrack to Drive? Woody's got Sidney Bechet, Josephine Baker and Jacques fucking Offenbach on this fuckin thing. The soundtrack to The Descendants with all the Hawaiian stuff is right up there, but when Woody's awake and paying attention to detail, really good things happen.


SILLINESS:

All due respect to Melissa McCarthy, this was the year's breakout comedienne.

Best Joke: When Kumar goes to cop some weed off Patton Oswalt's mall Santa in A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas, and he's going through all the Christmas-themed kinds of weed and a couple Hanukah ones, Kumar mentions something being as good as the “Diwali Dank” Patton Oswalt had had in October. That was a damn good joke.

Funniest Movie: The Trip. Going by US release date, it totally counts. GENTLEMEN TO BED.

Achievement in Unintentional Comedy: Atlas Shrugged, Part 1. Everything about this is funny, from the fact that they made a movie out of the most boring part of Atlas Shrugged, to the fact that the adaptation goes out of its way to make the material seem as dumb as possible. Not enough was made out of the fact that the director voted for Barack in '08; this movie seems like an out-and-out trollpiece, presenting Atlas Shrugged just straight enough that all the Randian dummies will get boners about there being an Atlas Shrugged movie, but engaging in a whole bunch of subtle acts of sabotage (and some not subtle ones, like directing the male and female lead, the latter of whom can be seen in the above photo, to act like robot tards) so that the end result just flat-out fucking sucks. I cannot wait for parts two and three. Can. Not. Wait. The only way to improve on the first one is by hiring Tommy Wiseau.

Best Deadpan: Corey Stoll as Hemingway in Midnight In Paris. That speech he gives Owen Wilson capped with “Think about it” was gold.


OWNAGE:

The concept, reified.

Best Car Chase: Oddly enough, I think I gotta go with Priyanka chasing Shahrukh in Don 2. All charges of n00b infatuation with Bollywood can be referred to my dick. The car chases in Fast Five, the seeming clear favorite, were great and everything, but they were just like the car chases in the other four movies. And Drive was Drive, but that was more “good filmmaking” than “dope car chases,” which aren't mutually exclusive or anything, but when I think car chases I think of the director turning to some Australian 2nd unit director with an incomplete complement of eyes and limbs and going “it's all yours,” to which the Australian replies “Lit's git ta fuckin wehhk, mate!” and next thing you know stunt drivers are nearly getting blown up driving Dodge Chargers through oil tankers and shit. (Ed. Note: Australians own.) Now, the car chase in Don 2 wasn't, on the surface, all that flashy. It was just a basic meat-and-potatoes car chase, but with an ineffable batshit insanity that made it fucking rad. Also, Shahrukh fucking destroys his car, and as we all learned from The Blues Brothers (in which is the greatest car chase of all time) at the end of the car chase the car has to just be like fuck it. I'll debate this one, but only to a certain point.

Best Fight: Vincenzo vs. The Rock in Fast Five. Just don't even step to this one. I don't care that Justin Lin gets trendy with the shaky cam. I don't care that it was relatively short. It's Vincenzo Gasolina fighting against The Fucking Rock.

Best violent death: In a year with many contenders, among them several grisly ownings in the bullshit historical epic Ironclad, the gorilla grabbing his nuts and going “sure, I can take on a helicopter with machine gun turrets with nothing but my bare hands” (not only did he win, the evil white guy in a suit—who was played by a black actor, proving that Evil White Guy In A Suit is an attainable state of mind that crosses racial barriers, just as Cate Blanchett proved in Hanna that it transcends gender barriers too—eats it in the ensuing crash) in Rise, and The Rock casually putting two in Joaquim de Almeida's dome without breaking stride to go be homoerotic with Vincenzo, the prize has to go to Albert Brooks owning Bryan Cranston with that straight razor in Drive. He slices his wrists open lengthwise, and then while Cranston bleeds out he's like reassuring him that the worst part is over and he'll be dead soon. I mean holy fucking shit. Albert Brooks. Good God.

Best shirt removal: This is only a category so I can say what's up to Salman Khan in Bodyguard. The way the water hose filled his shirt up with water til it exploded, revealing Salman's muscles really needs to be seen to be believed. It manages to simultaneously be hilarious, ridiculous, awesome, and frankly kind of inspiring. And each quality depends on the simultaneity with the other three. There really is only one Salman Khan.

Greatest “Go fuck yourself” moment: The above-mentioned bit with the Rock casually putting two in Joaquim de Almeida's dome without breaking stride to go be homoerotic with Vincenzo, in Fast Five. I mean, come on. It's a shame JDA couldn't have still been alive for a second to be like, “Wow, yeah, okay, I understand the magnitude to which I just got owned.”

Best explosion: Gotta be when John Boyega, as Moses, detonates his apartment to kill all of “dem tings” at the end of Attack The Block. Not only was it a cool explosion, it was also Moses. Moses saved the fucking planet. Trust.

Best revolution: Caesar. Rise.

Awesomest hero: Moses. Attack The Block. Which, by the way, for anyone wondering how the Badass World Cup turned out, an update: there was a huge scandal surrounding North American Group Stage, when due to the fact that none of the participants would concede, America ended up pulling some 1980 Moscow Olympics shit and decided to withdraw from the competition entirely. The rest of the world kind of shrugged and went, “Well, with Makmende, Mad Max, the guy from The Secret In Their Eyes, Moses, and Tequila and Tony, America wouldn't even be a top seed, and fuck you guys for not letting Canada and Mexico play.” The only thing is, with America out of the Cup, American media stopped treating the Cup as if it existed (same as it ever was) and the wildly entertaining knockout stages, resulting in Moses' eventual victory, were lost to posterity. (Ed. Note: rumors that the real explanation is that Movies By Bowes ™ simply got bored with the conceit and had to write about other shit to pay the bills are scurrilous fucking Communism.) The point is, Moses is a hero. He saved the planet from dem tings. You do not attack the block and not get owned.


And those, dear readers, are the first annual Fucko Awards! Tune in in a couple days for the Top 11 movies of 2011!

"GO H.A.M. OR GO HOME": WHY THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS SERIES IS THE GREATEST THING IN THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE

The antihero occupies a very special place in America's heart. Sure, we claim to be all about the guy in the white hat, and the stereotypical American to many is a meathead incapable of processing nuance, but we're really drawn to moral ambiguity. This addresses a number of programming issues in America's code from its origins (a democratic republic with unprecedented civil liberties for all enfranchised citizens . . . but only dudes had the franchise and half the country's economy depended on slavery to function; that's some moral ambiguity for your ass) to its mythic adolescence (outlaws and gunfighters, many of whom were little more than psychopathic murderers, were folk heroes in the Old West) to its early adulthood (gangsters fascinated us throughout the 20th century), to the modern day, where many kinds of transgressive behavior are thought of fondly, romantically, titilating in their forbiddenness. The concept of the victimless crime is one man's rationalization, another's justification for cathartic desire to be just that little bit bad. The very word “bad” means “good” in certain contexts. And this, of course, leads us to Dominic Toretto, the charismatic axis of the Fast and the Furious series.

Of course, a biiiiiiig part of Toretto's charisma is the fact that he's played by the incomparable Vincenzo Gasolina, whose talents—having big muscles and a voice so low-pitched at moments it can only be described as the “Vin Diesel octave,” not to mention an ability to make women go “holy Jesus I want to fuck the shit out of this guy but I have no idea why” (though many of them know exactly why)—fit the character so perfectly that it's hard to tell sometimes where Vincenzo ends and Dominic begins. And really, it doesn't fucking matter.

I saw Fast Five yesterday, which consists largely of Vincenzo's dick dragging the ground, when he isn't bludgeoning bad guys—or The Rock, who also appears—with it, or using it to shift his insanely customized Dodge Charger into “fuck you” gear. The movie is fucking great. This whole series is one of the great pleasant surprises in popular culture: an ongoing movie series where each installment builds on the already existing story, that delivers the goods without pandering, is executed with great skill, and unites moviegoers of all ages, genders, races, and levels of cineastic foofery in smiling very wide and going “Wow, that fucking owned.”

It was not always thus. I saw the first movie on cable once, maybe 2003 or 4 or something like that and enjoyed it, but didn't really think one way or the other of it once it was done. I was already an avowed Vincenzo fan, and Rick Yune was fucking great as the villain and everything, and Paul Walker did the whole tango with moral ambiguity fairly gracefully, and the car stunts were rad, and the girls were hot . . . I mean, I enjoyed it. It was just a busy time, I guess, and in any case whenever I needed a Vincenzo fix I had xXx on DVD.

Years later, I was having one of many squabbles with an ex-girlfriend about what movie to watch (I can be undiplomatic, and she could be a bit insular; c'est l'amour, entre les immatures) which she won, and we sat down to watch The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. About thirty seconds in I totally forgot my objections to watching it and succumbed to its wiles.

What made Tokyo Drift so much fun was director Justin Lin's self-aware sense of humor about the kind of picture he was making, and ability to imbue the entire picture with a crooked smile and swagger without mocking the movie or its characters. Lin was both smart enough (watch his debut, Better Luck Tomorrow, for evidence) and a good enough director (see previous) to make a movie that is less “brainless escapism” than “viscerally stimulating.” The plot is simple, the characters similarly so, and you know the good guys are going to win in the end, but the picture is well executed, its attitude toward multiculturalism is refreshing and subtly, matter-of-factly conveyed, and most importantly, it has a massively fucking on-point sense of what's cool.

While the fact that neither Lucas Black's gaijin-in-Japan nor Bow Wow's motormouthed sidekick to same are annoying is cool enough, neither can hold a candle to Sung Kang as Han Lue (the same name as his apparently unrelated character in Better Luck Tomorrow). Han is a thinking man's badass: lounging upside shiny, expensive, ludicrously fast cars, surrounded by shiny, expensive, ludicrously fast women, rarely smiling because, well, shit, that'd take effort but also—as we find out over the course of the picture—he's haunted by his past and despite what lazy Westerners might think, as a Korean he's just as much an outsider in Tokyo as Lucas Black and Bow Wow (these fine “we don't all look alike, motherfucker” distinctions come from having a Taiwanese director in the driver's seat).

Then there are those car stunts. Now keep in mind, I'm not saying this as a bad thing at all—especially in light of the horrible fuckin shit Japan's dealing with these days—but they do love really strange, dangerous things that look awesome, and “drifting” qualifies as all three. Lucas Black shows up in Japan, having basically been kicked out of the United States for LARPing Smokey and the Bandit, thinking “yeah, I'm badass.” Drifting is a whole other ballgame, though, as he soon finds out, and he successfully masters this exotic discipline, leading to some fucking dope car chases, though one of them unfortunately kills Han. (Ed. Note: actually, in light of certain other “deaths” in the series, there's a chance Han made it out of the flaming wreck and there's some awesome explanation why).

Next step was watching The Fast and the Furious again on cable and finding it to be fucking rad, if lacking Justin Lin's directorial flair (Rob Cohen is possessed of a little less subtlety, but that's what makes xXx so magnificent). I even went as far as to watch the second picture, 2 Fast 2 Furious, which despite its many charms (Ludacris, Tyrese and especially Eva Mendes are all massive goddamn fun in it) does, sadly, suffer from a lack of Vincenzo (whose cameo at the end of Tokyo Drift was fucking killer). Still, 2 Fast 2 Furious benefits as the latter three pictures in the series do from having a very talented director at the helm, in this case John Singleton. Like Lin in Tokyo Drift (and, credit where credit's due, Cohen in the first one), Singleton managed to make the interracial friendships plausible, and non-shticky while also not dwelling on them at all; the lack of being beaten over the head with “MESSAGE” makes the message so palatable one doesn't even realize it's there.

This is the best thing about the way race is dealt with in the Fast and the Furious movies: it's not. White, black, East Asian, Latin, undecided (Vincenzo and Jordana Brewster, who fittingly play siblings; their parents must have each been from every continent on Earth), none of it matters in the slightest. All are bonded by their deep and abiding love for cars that go extremely fucking fast. Family is decided by choice, though biological family is still very important.

The fact that Vincenzo and those he regards as family commit crimes only serves to deepen their bond. It sets them apart from society, which fails to recognize Vincenzo and retinue's shared moral code, though it is a legitimate one, if founded on a different set of premises than mainstream society's. Vincenzo may occasionally have to wild on motherfuckers, but not at random and never without justification. This perspective is shared by all his “family” (which includes Sung Kang in Tokyo Drift, of course, as he shows up in the following two, earlier chronologically, movies) and sets them apart not only from civilians but also the bad guys, who are also criminals but ones who behave cruelly and court power for power's sake, rather than as a means to an end.

Now, this may seem a bit high-minded for a series of movies where people drive really fast and blow shit up, but it's all there. It's not spelled out, it's not dwelt on at any length, it's simply as fundamental a fact of life as Vincenzo's muscles. And the fact that if you cross him, Vincenzo Gasolina will fuck you the fuck up. If you're lucky he'll just beat you in a race and take your pink slip.

This is the appeal, in a nutshell of The Fast and the Furious. The title alone is most of the explanation. Americans love cars. Shit, everyone loves cars. Driving really fast ranks in very exalted company in the “most fun things to do with your clothes on” category. Speaking of clothes staying on, that's another reason for the popularity of the series: the relatively chaste PG-13 sexuality. People might get pregnant (Jordana Brewster in Fast Five), but the conception happens off-screen. Men may leer at women (who may be randomly making out with each other for no reason) but those women are always clothed. This is another example, and possibly the weirdest, of the Fast and the Furious series getting to have it both ways: the sex is never repressed, but never so open that it'd offend.

As much fun as the first three pictures (especially Tokyo Drift) are, this really became a series with Justin Lin's follow-up Fast and Furious, where—as hinted in the final scene of Tokyo Drift—Vincenzo is back. And is he ever.


Fast and Furious is a prequel to Tokyo Drift, as evidenced by the fact that Han is still alive. It opens with Vincenzo, Han, Michelle Rodriguez, Tego Calderon and Don Omar pulling a rip and run on a fucking oil tanker in the Dominican Republic (one love Wages of Fear/Sorcerer! What's good?) in a simply goddamn tremendous opening sequence. The car stunts are shot and cut as well as anything outside the Mad Max pictures, and if you can keep up with Australians in anything involving ripshit insanity, you deserve a salute. (Ed. Note: that assessment of Australians as ripshit insane people is tendered with love, respect, and awe, FYI).

We then discover that Paul Walker has somehow managed to not get fired by the FBI yet, and he's hot on Vincenzo's case at the behest of superior Shea Whigham (one of the modern cinema's most underrated Evil White Guys in Suits, but not for long if he keeps owning at it like this). After the bad guys kill Michelle Rodriguez—in a truly surprising twist—Vincenzo returns to the US with an even more menacing glower and a growl an octave lower than the Vin Diesel Octave (the scariest aspect of his quest for revenge), and because it's a Fast and the Furious movie, Paul Walker and Vincenzo end up both trying to infiltrate the bad guy's elite squadron of superfast drivers.

Some people checked out at this point, claiming (heretically) that this was retarded. These people, after they go fuck themselves, are advised to recall the prime directive of the Fast and the Furious universe is “All Else Is Secondary to Driving Incredibly Fucking Fast.” You might as well say the Harry Potter movies are retarded because people use magic. If the villain didn't need people to drive incredibly fucking fast, there would be no movie. So yes, Paul Walker and Vincenzo need to race cars against a couple loudmothed retards under the foolish misconception that the race will end in any way other than Vincenzo and Paul Walker within a tenth of a second of each other. What purpose does this serve? Fuck you, that's what purpose it serves.

The bad guy responsible for all this shit is John Ortiz. Civilians may not have that name on the tip of their tongues, so as a reminder, he played Jose Yero in the movie version of Miami Vice (a picture of which no blasphemy be spoken, ever, lest Godmother Manohla Dargis be forced to send me to break your fucking legs). John Ortiz achieved godhood in that picture with his stylized readings of lines like “maybe we could grab a bite,” pronouncing the latter part like “grabbabiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiite.” He's one of those guys who'd been doing theater for a million years in New York and suddenly started getting cast in above-average roles as the drug dealer/villain guy. This is a rough thing for a lot of Latin actors, as once upon a time, those were the only roles they could get, but Ortiz's apparent approach—jump in with both feet and use the caricature of the over-acted bad guy as a means of redeeming the stereotype and turning it on itself—is not only not that hard to rationalize as a positive artistic statement, but a lot of fun to watch. He always looks like he's having fucking huge amounts of fun playing those roles, and it's just as fun for the audience when they see clips of him actually talking and he's totally just a New Yorker (this shouldn't be underestimated as a factor in my enjoyment of his acting, being a New Yorker myself).

It's paradoxically totally obvious that John Ortiz is actually the real bad guy instead of just the front man and handled so well by Justin Lin and screenwriter Chris Morgan that even though it's not a surprise it feels like one. There's also the fact of his mano derecha, Fenix, being not only a lousy speller but the guy who killed Michelle Rodriguez, meaning that Vincenzo has to fuck him up. This is something no rational being would want visited upon himself, and proof that Dark Helmet had it backwards in Spaceballs when he said “[e]vil will always triumph because good . . . is dumb.” Fuckin villains, always with the hubris.

Part of Vincenzo's larger-than-life (and even larger, amazingly, than his muscles) outlaw mystique is that he totally has to be arrested at the end of the picture, and they send his ass to the clink for life—I mean holy fucking shit at this point Vincenzo is basically a character in a fucking folk song—before Paul Walker proves that he's finally come over to the “good” side by leading a daring raid alongside Jordana Brewster and two of the biggest stars in reggaeton (Ed. Note: when staging a prison break, the fact that you would think to make sure the soundtrack is tight is an indication of the highest motherfucking level of style). Like Tokyo Drift, it points the way to the obligatory sequel, but in such a way that makes you totally want to see the sequel. But even in this, admittedly awesome, regard Fast and Furious can't hold a candle to . . .


Fast Five is, thus far—there are two further sequels in the works, according to both Vincenzo and Justin Lin—the culmination of everything the series has come to be: a refutation of every apparently fucktarded thing about it. It's a movie that only exists because of the car stunts? Yeah, but those car stunts are fucking awesome. It's got a simple, derivative plot that coasts on its actors' charisma and chemistry? Yeah, but that charisma lends greater resonance to the pulp plot and eventually (shockingly) coheres into a compelling pulp supernarrative that poses a profound question about what it truly means to be an outlaw. It's verging on the “more is better” conundrum of adding apparently unnecessary elements (in this case, having The Rock be the elite Fed after Vincenzo et al)? Yeah, but The Rock fucking owns in this, to the degree that calling him Dwayne Johnson, as he's billed, doesn't really do him proper justice, whether that's his own name or not.

Fast Five opens with a brilliantly concise, perfectly tuned recap of where the previous picture left off, with Paul Walker and everybody springing Vincenzo from custody. We then pick up with happy couple Paul Walker and Jordana Brewster (having gotten Vincenzo's grudging approval in the last movie) heading down to Rio in the midst of lean times (to top it all off, she's preggers), when they run into one of the dudes from the first movie, Matt Schultze, who's living in Rio with his wife and young kid in the middle of the set of City of God (Fast Five being under the impression that there are three places in Rio de Janeiro: the statue of Jesus, the favelas, and a couple blocks along the beach that look like Miami; this isn't a flaw or anything, pretty much the only parts of Rio where they have enough guns and illegally modded cars to hang out in a Fast and the Furious movie are the favelas). The moment Matt Schultze mentions that he's got a line on a job, stealing a couple high-end cars, everyone in the audience goes “YES! CARS! FUCK! GO!” and Paul Walker and Jordana Brewster are like “awwwwwww yeeeeeahhh.”

Turns out the cars they're stealing have been impounded by the DEA and the doodz who threw Matt Schultze the job are baddies in the employ of one Hernan Reyes (Joaquim de Almeida, one of South America's finest villainous character actors), who, because this is a Fast and the Furious movie is the ONE GUY who controls all of organized crime in Rio and maybe all of Brazil (somewhere Lil' Ze and Knockout Ned are rolling their eyes, sighing, and muttering “Se apenas fosse esse o caso . . .”)

Vincenzo—who joins the job by swaggering on screen in one of the greatest fucking intros ever—and Paul Walker send Jordana Brewster off with one of the cars and stay behind to kill the bad guys and do extremely well-edited things with cars. Only problem is, the bad guys kill some DEA agents (for which Vincenzo and Paul Walker take the blame) and Joaquim de Almeida and his dudes capture Vincenzo and Paul Walker, who are unimpressed. After JDA monologues at them and leaves the room, Vincenzo and Paul Walker escape, having learned that JDA is looking for something in the car Jordana Brewster fucked off with.

They discover that what JDA's after is a chip that, conveniently, has every byte of data about JDA's illegal activities (which calls to mind Stringer Bell's classic rhetorical ode to forethought and caution: “Nigga, is you takin notes on a criminal fuckin conspiracy?”) But before they can get too comfortable figuring out what to do next, a challenger appears, hopping off a plane from sweet home Estados Unidos with about a half a dozen dudes who between them have exhausted the Western hemisphere's anabolic steroid supply. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you The Rock:

“Alright, listen up. The men we're after are professional runners. We find them; we take them as a team and we bring them back. And above all else, we never ever let them get into cars.”

This is a clear indication that ol' Rocky's been beefing up his intellect along with his biceps: as a rational man he knows that if you get Vincenzo Gasolina get into a car, ownage is a foregone conclusion. Rock liaises with the local cops, who are choads and furthermore in JDA's pocket (the exception to both is Rock's knuckle-gnawingly hot translator, who joined the force to avenge her cop husband's death and is subsequently the only honest cop on the Rio PD), and tries to stage a nice, clean raid to bring in Vincenzo except JDA's thugs fuck everything up and the good guys get away after a rooftop chase scene that's almost as cool as the one in District B13 (but neither Vincenzo, Jordana Brewster, nor Paul Walker, alas, are as limber as David Belle).

Vincenzo, whose balls have a gravity well, decides that the thing to do, with every cop and gangster in a notoriously violent country after him, is to rob JDA of over $100 million in cash, which is going to be stored in a state-of-the-art vault inside a fucking police station. Hey, why the fuck not, go H.A.M. or go home, that's what I always say. Paul Walker, in response says, “Good idea, Vincenzo. Let's get every single surviving supporting character from the whole series to help us out.” (Ed. Note: paraphrase) and Vincenzo, in response, expresses his assent in the Vin Diesel Octave.

This is how Tyrese, Ludacris (both from 2 Fast 2 Furious), Sung Kang (from Tokyo Drift), Don Omar, Tego Calderon, and the mouth-watering Gal Godot (all from Fast and Furious; and no, the last is an Israeli model-actress, not a high-concept “His Girl Friday written by Samuel Beckett” joke I made when stoned) all end up coming down to Rio to form the world's most tuneful, most decorative, most speeding-ticketed heist team. They get to work and put together a plan that requires awe-inspiring balls, fancy driving, and a couple brief variances in the laws of physics to pull off, but these formulate the trinity of the Fast and Furious universe, thus making it the perfect plan.

Fate intervenes in the form of excessive competence on the part of The Rock—who is quite fucking badass in this, and just about the only worthy police adversary left for Vincenzo—who totally busts Vincenzo (after Vincenzo beats the fucking shit out of him in a fight scene that's actually kind of scary) and Paul Walker, only to have JDA's doodz show up and ambush them, killing all The Rock's doodz, leaving he and his translator no choice but to join forces with Vincenzo.

The monkey in the wrench, however, is that Vincenzo is dead set on going through with the heist. Everybody's like, “dude, I know the sun revolves around your balls, but seriously, this is fucking suicide,” but Vincenzo's hearing none of it. Until a very manly voice chimes in:

“I'm in.”

Dwayne motherfucking Johnson, reporting for duty. This moment was sufficiently awesome to elicit an almost awed “WORD!” from the gentleman sitting next to me (Ed. Note: this was an afternoon show on a Monday and the theater was fucking packed. This one ain't stoppin with the $86 mil opening weekend folks, this picture's gonna make a lotta money) and an immediate change of heart from Mr. Paul Walker and subsequently everyone else in the room. I mean, this one's a no-brainer. Following Vincenzo into battle is one thing; sure, you still follow him but he's the kinda guy who might get killed in a movie someday, he just has that Beowulf/Beat Takeshi/existential roid-martyr vibe, know'm sayin? But Vincenzo AND The Rock? Fuck outta here, you might kill one of them but you couldn't kill both of them without Arnold Schwarzenegger and even then you'd need twelve movies.

So our outlaw squadron swaggers into the breach and totally fucking house JDA's vault. Every cop in Brazil pursues, including JDA and his mão direita. Vincenzo and Paul Walker drag the vault behind their two heavily reinforced, awesomely fast cars through the streets of Rio; naturally, lots of shit gets destroyed (including, to Jordana Brewster's great amusement back at the command center, a bank), but because they're the good guys (and somehow this is justified through their driving ability; don't ask me how, it just is, and legitimately, no less) no innocent bystanders get killed.

As the terrific chase sequence draws to a conclusion, Vincenzo has one last “fuck this, I'm going to take one for the team” moment, and goes and plays chicken with JDA, using the vault like it's his car's tail to destroy cop and bad guy cars, concluding with JDA's. Paul Walker, because he's got Vincenzo's back til the end, shoots JDA's mão direita. The Rock and his translator drive up, and Rock passes JDA's broken, mumbling form on the ground. Rather than any big dramatic “YOU BETRAYED ME!” histrionics out of Mr. Johnson, he just puts two in JDA's head as he walks past like it ain't even a thing (a move that elicited a “HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO SHITTTTT!!!!!!!!” from the audience). Rock then pulls some straight up Western shit on Vincenzo: the old “I'm keeping the vault, I'm still gonna chase you, and I'll be coming for you in 24 hours” routine, where it's heavily wink-wink-nudge-nudged that you get the fuck out of Dodge, as when I come for you in 24 hours and you're not there I guess it's God's will or something. THIS IS HOW MEN DO THINGS. Naturally, Vincenzo and team have pulled a switcheroo and made off with the $100 mil, and vanish into thin air, and Rock smiles: “Yes, Vincenzo, you are a worthy adversary.” The whole “two sides of the same coin” thing between cop and crook is as old as time, but never has it been executed with such large muscles as it is here. The team-up of Vincenzo and The Rock could not have gone better, in any possible universe.

Then, during the credits, a surprise scene. First, Eva Mendes is back! Looking muy caliente, by the way. She walks into Rock's office at The Government and tells him, I got somethin' for ya. She hands Rock a dossier . . . HOLY FUCKING FUCK MICHELLE RODRIGUEZ IS STILL ALIVE IN GERMANY! Stay tuned for The Fast and the Furious Part Six! HELL yes.


This series defies every typical expectation for a movie franchise. Starting with a not-bad but unremarkable crime picture with a vivid, palpable obsession with cars, it's become—and yes, I'm serious—an epic pulp narrative that defines a very real aspect of our time: a plausibly post-racial, international society of adrenaline addicts who don't take orders from The Man. They believe in nothing but each other and the moment, living their lives, as Vincenzo says in the first movie: “a quarter mile at a time.” These movies are fast. They're furious. They're fucking awesome.