by Cole Smithey

The Fast and the Furious


For all its cheesy dialogue, one-note characters, and lawless racing hijinx, The Fast and the Furious comes with some welcome understated restraint in its action sequences. It’s not your typical music video inspired drivel of tight shot, quick edit action that a Michael Bay (The Rock) would have rendered. There is actually an arc to the action. By the time the picture hits fifth gear in its third act white-knuckle double climax, you can fully appreciate the B-Movie glory that the movie aspires to. There’s even a less-than-predictable audacious ending to send you on your way after watching macho Los Angeles street demons tear up the asphalt in high-tech souped-up Hondas. Sure, it’s a guilty pleasure watching stunt drivers put flashy state-of-the-art streetcars through impossibly daring maneuvers, but it’s a happy indulgence nonetheless.

The movie opens with an impressive nighttime highway heist in which a team of thieves driving modified Acura Integras whiz around and beneath a tractor-trailer before the lead car gives the 18-wheel driver the biggest surprise of his career. A hijacker pops up from the Acura’s sunroof and fires a crossbow that extracts the truck’s windshield before firing a second line that anchors to the passenger seat, enabling the shooter to jump inside the truck and overpower the driver (all at better than 65 mph). It’s a breathtaking sequence, typical of other racing scenes in the movie, which has led Universal Pictures to add disclaimers, hoping to ward off kids who might attempt driving underneath big trucks at speed or other deadly shenanigans.

Enter undercover cop Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker), sent to ingratiate his way into an elite club of LA street racers/heist suspects led by hunk-of-the-week Vin Diesel as Dominic Toretto. Diesel, who had his big break with the sci-fi sleeper Pitch Black, is still green enough in the acting department to ‘hide’ rather than ‘express,’ but his efforts are still two lumps stronger than Paul Walker’s studied performance. Walker’s vocal delivery bares an uncanny resemblance to Keanu Reeves’ monotone diction and infects the movie with a Point Break quality that never lets you forget you’re watching a wanna-be action star.

As O’Conner goes through conventional undercover cop plot points about getting yanked off the case if he doesn’t produce results in x number of hours, tensions build with a rival team of Chinese bad boys who may or may not be the highway bandits Brian is following. Brian makes the mistake of falling for Dom’s feisty sister Mia (Jordana Brewster - The Invisible Circus) and the way is paved for abrupt character revelations and blood-spilling, tire-burning crisis.

One of the most ridiculous elements of the movie is the product placement of “Nos” (short for nitrous oxide), the key ingredient in the cars’ fuel systems which allows the driver to push a button unleashing an extra dose of rocket-fast speed. There are “Nos” ads all over the place and the characters are obsessed in talking about the stuff that comes in SCUBA-like tanks. There’s even a bit of Fight Club inspired camera work that follows the inner workings of a car’s engine as the gears turn and the fluid reaches internal combustion. Certainly there will be a clamor by some hot rod buffs to upgrade their shiny engines with the highly flammable liquid.

The Fast and the Furious is a cult movie in waiting. The melting pot mix of its characters reflects the modern face of America, and the film’s fetish for slick looking super fast stock cars is deeply imbedded in mass culture. The Wall Street Journal called the movie “amoral in tone,” because the bad guys are appealing and “the good guys do bad things. It’s the first Hollywood movie to come along since Fight Club to rattle the narrative cage that Washington and the ratings board are so concerned with guarding. It’s a wonder that the movie slipped through the cracks without being molded into a preachy parable about the evils of crime and fast cars. Instead the story stands by a decidedly rebellious reflex that young people have, and makes no apologies for it.

I don’t think the movie is particularly amoral or bland, as the New York Times called it. It is an entertaining movie that’s sure to rile a lot of people as teens flock to a perfectly timed summer feature. Parents will grip, once again, with the eternal question of whether or not their good child will go bad. That’s the stuff cult films are made of.

crazy/beautiful


As a teen romance, crazy/beautiful scores by giving its target audience a healthy dose of coming-of-age sensuality in the guises of “It Girl” Kirsten Dunst (Nicole) and newcomer Jay Hernandez as her Latino love interest Carlos. But the movie goes a few steps beyond the typical pitfalls of the genre by embracing Nicole’s promiscuity and alcohol and drug use to underscore her emotional unsteadiness. Carlos is a perfect foil to Nicole as an even-tempered, straight arrow kid from the barrio, in Los Angeles, who gets up before dawn to take two busses to high school so he can be accepted into the Naval Academy. Writer/director John Stockwell (Cheaters) mixes contrasts between forbidden teen romance and severe emotional confusion to include subtle social and political currents in a heartfelt and realistic way.

Kirsten Dunst (The Virgin Suicides) commands crazy/beautiful with a fresh and fragile charisma that constantly peeks out beneath her dirty hair and braless torn t-shirts. Dunst is like a pixie cross between Bridget Fonda and Jennifer Jason Leigh. She has a kittenish charm with a lion’s backbone that she can switch to glamorous sophistication with a tilt of her head. But Nicole is a wild acting and reckless girl who lost her mother to suicide when she was 12 and is now on medication, presumably anti-depressants, to control her own suicidal tendencies. The movie explores, through Dunst’s complex performance, a central question of what can become of young American girls marked by parents, teachers, and doctors as ‘damaged goods.’

Nicole’s congressman father Tom Oakly (Bruce Davison - The King Is Alive) is too busy with work and his materialistic wife to put much energy into communicating with a daughter he has already written off as a loser who destroys everything in her path. When Carlos meets with the liberal congressman to discuss a letter of recommendation into the Naval Academy, Tom seizes the opportunity to leverage Carlos away from Nicole because he thinks she will only ruin Carlos’s chances at success. Tom promises to write the letter on the condition only if Carlos stays away from Nicole. It’s a significant scene because it shows how intimate connections are broken off by political leverage that usually wins out over good intentions in the real world. Carlos is clearly shaken by the meeting and does indeed begin to question Nicole’s influence and reckless behavior by avoiding her.

crazy/beautiful is a convention-breaking movie that would most certainly have been better had its Disney producers allowed John Stockwell to go as far as his original script allowed in giving greater scope to Nicole’s escapist tendencies. For all of Nicole’s implied alcohol and drug use, we never see her doing any of these things, but are informed by her behavior that she is doing them. There are hints of bi-sexual, and perhaps even group sex activity, with her boyish sidekick Maddy (Taryn Manning), that rear up in brief bits of dialogue and subtle actions. It is clear in one pre-sex scene with Carlos that Nicole is not a proponent of condoms, although Carlos demands their use.

The film gives voice to the way that a large number of young American girls respond to their surroundings with a hell-for-leather attitude that doesn’t necessarily make them a bad person. That it does so without patronizing or moralizing is its strongest suit next to Dunst’s acting. Nicole is an underdog character battling against a cruel stepmother, a bland and regimented school life, and a culture vacuum city. But her biggest problem is a self-destructive nature that threatens to conspire with the people who see her as too dangerous to love. We don’t get to see the how Nicole overcomes this disapproving appraisal of her negative influence, but we do get to see her honest struggle.