Josh Lyman posted:

Tokyo Drift is a god-awful movie with god-awful acting and I don't understand why everyone in CD loves it. During one of the mountain races, they blatantly reuse a reaction shot of the love interest and it's incredibly distracting. It was so bad that I didn't end up seeing Fast 4 until after Fast 6's huge opening weekend.

Also Lucas Black is the worst.

The theme song is amazing though:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuJDhFRDx9M

Casimir Radon posted:

Kurt Russell doesn't die. Special forces medics come flying in on a helicopter.

ruby idiot railed posted:

The way they leave him sitting by the side of the road and the way the chopper was not really visibly approaching made me think his "insurance option" wasn't so much his but his bosses', and I thought he knew that and Dom knew that.

Echo Chamber posted:

More importantly, while most critics panned the movie for being dumb, Ebert was the big exception. I'll just link to the review so here it is. Ebert helped maintain the franchise's fragile critical credibility when most others were already reducing the films to a punchline.

ruby idiot railed posted:

The way they leave him sitting by the side of the road and the way the chopper was not really visibly approaching made me think his "insurance option" wasn't so much his but his bosses', and I thought he knew that and Dom knew that.

Big Bob Pataki posted:

I unironically think the evolution of the Fast franchise is the most interesting movie series progression ever.

toanoradian posted:

Few questions:
1) So the movies aren't always this ridiculous? Don't get me wrong, I like ridiculous movies and this movie's 'ridiculousity' is certainly different from, say, Transformers. I was already loving it when they dropped out of the plane in their cars and about the time they drove through a skyscraper I was so on board. But apparently the first few movies are relatively much more low-key?

4) From my brief travel through the world of people who watched previous films, it seems like 5 is the cream of the crop, with 6 (or 7) after it. Is it worth watching the first four movies if all I want is more exciting car stuff?

Quasipox posted:

I'm definitely speaking from a position of having seen almost all the movies (still need to catch Tokyo Drift), but I think it's absolutely worth watching them. They are less ridiculous and can feel dated, but are still totally awesome in their own ways.

40 Proof Listerine posted:

Someone pointed this out in the Fast and Furious 6 thread and it's even more true in this film - this whole franchise is a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, but instead of magic swords everyone had magic cars. Here's the original post:
This also explains the infinitely long runway at the end of 6 being the product of a turn-based combat being filmed in real time.

quote:

It's also explicitly a D&D campaign, as confirmed by a Justin Lin interview posted some pages ago. The order in which I saw the movies was 5, 1, 2, 3, 4, and going from 5 to 1 I was floored by how low-key everything was. But it's about escalation. Dom Toretto in Furious 6 is not the same person as Dom Toretto in TF&TF because he's leveled up from like 5 to 20-something. And there are things that are necessary to the process of leveling that far. There's the continuing growth and harmony of the adventuring party/family, and the acquisition and use of magic items/cars. Cars are not just a thing you drive fast in this series (Though it's kinda hilarious how there's the additional parallel of broadening scope of items. In TF&TF, the cars are super important but they don't really do much. They drive exclusively in straight lines, often badly, because these are just +2 Cars compared to the +5 Vorpal Holy Avenger Cars we get later).

Cars are a lifeblood and a part of the character, and as someone astutely noted earlier in this thread, Letty starts to remember "who she is" when she gets behind the wheel against Dom. When you're describing your epic-level character, the artifact-level items he's attained are part of that identity. This is the correct way to play D&D, Lin claims, as opposed to Shaw's crew who are again explicitly referred to by Rome in "evil mirror party" terms. These guys are powergamers. They drive ridiculously minmaxed armored F1 cars, they've looked through a hundred splatbooks to find a little car-disabling artifact that's totally gonna be broken in this next encounter, and they've sorta forgotten to give their characters personality. Shaw just cares about the result, the winning/losing binary, and if one of the characters in his party dies it's because that character wasn't optimized enough. So whatever, roll a new one.

And then it's still confusing somehow when Epic Level Dom Toretto does a superman jump to save Letty and they land on a car which breaks their fall. "How did you know there's be a car to break our fall?" is a line that's ridiculous on purpose and ideally jolts the audience into realizing "Wait, it's probably not actually literal cars that are being talked about here". I'm pretty sure cars are not actually soft and do not actually break falls. But that doesn't matter because it's a (not-particularly-subtle, this movie is not particularly subtle) set of metaphors. You take a big ridiculous risk, as big and ridiculous as you can, to save your fellow party member, and it pays off because of the life-saving force of epic level items. The DM (Lin) is not a neckbearded gently caress, so his priorities are straight. He rejects Shaw's code (brutal, gamist, us-versus-them minmaxing) and accepts Dom's (escalation predicated on doing cooler and cooler things with your friends that you're getting closer and closer to as you play).

I think it's fairly unlikely that we're gonna get a better D&D movie than Furious 6 for a long while. I saw the film a couple week ago and it's still a little baffling just how much Lin "gets" it.

For the new one, it's more obvious than ever in the structure, with a shadowy government organization tasking Vin Diesel's crew to find a legendary MacGuffin and the crew even slaying the villain's pet dragon in the finale while members of the town guard are slain, unable to harm the boss. It's entirely about Vin Diesel's group's narrative at this point, consequences are completely inconsequential.

TheScott2K posted:

Tokyo Drift is great because there is no good guy. Just one rear end in a top hat vying against another rear end in a top hat to be crowned King of the Assholes while being enabled by a suicidal rear end in a top hat who just seems to want to watch the world burn. No crime to solve, no heist, no drug lord to take down. All the men are assholes and all the women are whores. It's the id of Fast & Furious in its purest form.

quote:

CB: If the franchise does continue, do you think the it's possible to top the outrageous, crazy stunts we've seen escalating from Fast 5, Fast 6, and Furious 7?

Wan: I think the only way to sort of pump people's expectation with the next one is to not go bigger, but maybe go more intimate. Maybe go more gritty. I think that will just completely undermine everyone's expectation and take people by surprise and I think that's what this franchise has done so well. Just constantly surprising people with what they're gonna do and I think that if they're smart about it, they will go the opposite way and do something very different.

Mean Bean Machine posted:

This is retarded, please don't post it ever again.

quote:

Diesel said he learned storytelling from reading J.R.R. Tolkien and playing the game “Dungeons & Dragons,” with its intricate mythology that later influenced the scripts of Fast & Furious.

The SituAsian posted:

Edit: Also Hobbs wiping himself down for seemingly no reason was amazing.

The MSJ posted:

http://feature.variety.com/vin-diesel-a-furious-mind/
Diesel said he learned storytelling from reading J.R.R. Tolkien and playing the game “Dungeons & Dragons,” with its intricate mythology that later influenced the scripts of Fast & Furious.

Mean Bean Machine posted:

Wow that's amazing, you're telling me J. R. R. Tolkien and D&D was an influence for an actor, who didn't write or direct any of these movies? You telling me this guy read the motherfucking Lord of the Rings books, like millions of other people? This obviously means Dom Toretto is a friggin level 30 berserker with a +5 Vorpal Holy Avenger Car just pwning those little newbs. Epic. Friggin epic.
Listen this is a movie series about fast cars, explosions, swole guys and hot babes, can we maybe talk about that stuff and leave this geeky dumb poo poo to the literally hundreds of threads in these forums specifically related to that stuff?

quote:

But the first script Lin read was “all cars drifting around Buddha statues and geisha girls,” so he passed. Which only made the studio want him more.

Finally, Lin took the assignment, but under the condition he be allowed to make certain changes. One involved wooing Diesel back for a film-ending cameo that would link “Tokyo Drift” back to the preceding films and open the door for more sequels. Lin recalls an eight-hour meeting with the actor, in which he used Diesel’s affection for the role-playing game “Dungeons & Dragons” to explain how he wanted to deepen the “Fast” series’ characters and make them more mythic, seeding some of the ideas that would come to fruition over the three subsequent movies.

The MSJ posted:

The movie is estimated to have debuted at $384 million globally.

http://variety.com/2015/film/news/box-office-furious-7-debuts-to-384-million-globally-1201466599/

toanoradian posted:

How did it compare to previous two movies?

toanoradian posted:

How did it compare to previous two movies?

Gatts posted:

And I'll second the impressive action work from Walker, he looked like he might actually be able to hang with Tony Jaa for moments.

tvb posted:

This struck me as a cool sort of characterization for Brian, almost, just because the past few movies have established his fighting style as being really well adapted to close-quarters combat. Characters like Dom and Hobbs are great in fights because they're so big and strong that they just cause ridiculous amounts of collateral damage -- pretty much every fight one/both of them are in ends up destroying the entire set. Brian's fights, like the two with Jaa, the one on the flatbed in the Fast Five train chase, or the one in the prison cell in Fast Six, all show that he's really nimble, he takes advantage of his environment, and he can hold his own in a tight space even when he's way outnumbered. It was cool to see that they maintained that consistency in Seven.

The MSJ posted:

duz posted:

He was constantly dripping wet in Rio in #5, I assume it was a joke reference to that.