I still review movies

I just hardly ever watch them any more. But yesterday I saw two! In Theaters! Wow!

School is over and to celebrate my (almost) finishing of the packing up and leaving process, I went to an afternoon matinee of Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. Now those of you that understand my thoughts on movies should be shocked that I even watched this movie. You should be saying to yourself "there's a total lack of depth in character, story, symbolism, foreshadowing, dramatic irony, cinematography, dialogue, ACTING or anything else that makes a good movies in that picture - what is he doing paying for it? Even at matinee price?" And those are valid questions. The answer is this - I am in the midst of a torrid love affair with japanese cars, one that tentatively began with the original tFatF movie but has mainly been solidified by my interest in the manga/anime/video game Initial D and the culture of japanese street racing embodied by these stories. So a movie about hopped up japanese cars drifting is irresistible to me nonetheless. I came to the movie planning to sit through absolute garbage just to see these amazing cars get sideways. And that's exactly what I did. So I'm in no way suggesting that you should bother with it.

Then later in the afternoon (I literally went home, picked up my girlfriend, turned around, and drove back to the theater, to get into a show 20 minutes before the deadline for matinee prices! - under 20 bucks for three movie tickets today w00t!) my whole family went to see Disney/Pixar's Cars for my Grandfather's birthday. You know we loved it. A beautiful short film about two one-man-band street performers competing for a little girl's single coin donation, and then an absolutely beautiful feature length film as you've come to expect from the little hopping lamp intro. And you know what I discovered? Cars portrays drifting more accurately than Tokyo Drift did! The only specifics given about how to drift are "pulling the e-brake is the easiest way" (which technically isn't drifting) and "there is no wax-on, wax-off of drifting - you have to learn by doing it" (which is great advice). In Cars they at least prominently feature the important idea of countersteering, which is crucial to a successful drift and is never really noticed in Tokyo Drift.

Actually there are many parallels between these films. The cars are prominent characters in both movies, embodying (in FF:TD) at least as much personality as any human actors involved.

In FF:TD the human's fates are tied to those of their cars - when the main character wrecks a car to the point that it's totally useless, it represents the end of his life in a certain place. Another main character dies when his car is flipped over and destroyed. The main character beats up another car on his way to the bottom (reputation wise) of a particular organization, but later rescues the drivetrain (the "heart" within the battered "outer shell" of that car) as he completes a similar redemption of his status within the same group. The baddest character drives a dark colored car while another character drives one that is black but with an all-enveloping orange body kit representing the duality of his morality.

In Cars, many characters receive new paint jobs representing changes in their personality, or the way that they rust over time or get fixed up later in the movie represents degradation and redemption of their characters. The physical changes that happen to the cars are used just like they are in FF:TD to demonstrate character development. The only exception is Ramone, the low-riding latino coupe who changes his paint job every morning but never changes (or really has) much personality. He hardly affects the story at all except for injecting an ethnic cool factor that is much appreciated since some of the joy of the movie is going "ooooh ahhh" at all the cars (much like in FF:TD) and enjoying the witty interactions of the vibrant characters through their dialogue.

One thing both movies struggled to do (but again Cars was more successful) was telling the story of the races themselves. This is different than telling the story through racing, which both movies did, using races as climactic plot points to resolve conflict between characters (in FF:TD very predictable and wooden, in Cars very organic and natural). But what I mean is getting a sense of why what happens during the race happens. Why does one car pass another? How does one driver determine the proper timing for making their move. Why is one car able to drive faster than another at a given point in the race even though before he was being left behind? Why do cars always shift to a higher gear at the most dramatic point, as if the all out struggle they had been in with their arch nemesis had somehow been not trying their hardest despite the drastic consequences of losing? This is because both movies lack understanding of the dynamics of a race, or why the cars change position as they do.

It's never a simple test of speed. The only way to physically go faster is to shift to the highest gear and push the pedal all the way down. Once you are doing that, the car will reach a maximum speed (governed by air resistance, much like a falling body reaching terminal velocity) and your car cannot go any faster. Unless you use NOS which is thankfully only present in one scene of FF:TD. The thing is that in most races, the car is rarely at its maximum speed. This is why one car may pass another - the dynamics of the race limit how fast you can go - when rounding a corner, when dealing with multiple opponents, when conserving fuel and tires, when drifting, when coming downhill or going uphill, etc. The trick is managing these dynamics to give yourself a shot at going very fast, rather than allowing the consequences to conspire and keep your speed down. It's not that two cars are travelling at top speed and then somehow have another gear that allows them to go faster. When one shoots past another suddenly, it's not because he has a higher top speed and only needed his first four gears to stay even with his opponent and when he shifts to fifth gear he blows by him. It's because he has made a specific change in the way he is driving or in his actions relative to his opponent that allow him to approach closer to his top speed than the other driver can at that point. And both movies kind of failed to show that.

Ah well, the end result is that Cars > FF:TD and even includes several scenes openly mocking the Fast and the Furious series - quite successfully, I might add.

Either way, I still want to get sideways.