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I recently bought The Fast and the Furious : Tokyo Drift.
I'd always liked the first one, from since I saw it on some dodgy VCD with no soundtrack (which worked very well, except the bit where everyone was dancing to nothing and you could hear their feet shuffling around). I since got that on DVD and it was my favourite stupid car movie for ages. The second one seemed too much like a kind of Miami Vice/Dukes of Hazzard thing for my liking, not so much about immersing you into the fictitious world of cool underground street racers.
I'd read that Tokyo Drift wasn't really a FnF movie, that it was shoehorned into the "franchise" at the last moment (which is true, quite literally as it turns out).
It is, however, glorious.
The protagonist is a kid from the wrong side of whichever tracks are in town. A loner who's been moved from town to town, school to school through his bad behaviour. Anyway, importantly, he doesn't have one of those pastel coloured cardigans or a European roadster, so he's Worthless Poor Person. Never mind that although his old muscle car is painted in primer, it seems to have $30,000 worth of shiny Edelbrock chrome gubbins or whatever under the hood, and runs on racing slicks(!) Let's pretend that he doesn't have any money and so can't be popular.
So we get a fun race at the start versus some smugly punchable dude with highlights who probably moisturises or something. The consequence of which is that Poor Hero Boy has to move to Japan, where his dad lives. (Of course his parents are seperated).
Japan, it turns out, is full of casually grinning young men on the periphery of Yakuza influence, who give $50,000 cars to people for a laugh, and also full of high school students who drive $50,000 cars on the mountain roads when they "just need to deal with life", presumably instead of crying to Tori Amos records or masturbating, like regular teenagers. they also have impromptu parties in multi-storey car parks, but instead of being a bunch of pimple faced kids in leisurewear playing Basshunters out of their Corsa stereo, these cool kids have loads of girls! And proper DJs and stuff. And a kid who has the most extremely pimped little car ever, funded by selling sneakers to Japanese kids who I guess couldn't find a Foot Locker in their nearest mall. I mean, there would be one, you would think.
It's a fantasy world. I don't believe it exists. But gosh, is it cool, and don't you wish it does.
So what's the story? Well. Boy meets girl, girl has Angry Boyfriend. Boy's mentor is friend of Angry Boyfriend, but basically betrays him, but Angry Boyfriend is Mean, so Boy fights him/races him/whatever. It's wonderfully morally ambiguous, I felt that Angry Boyfriend had a good point, actually.
Mostly, it's a movie full of cool stuff like car chases, and skidding around and stuff which looks and sounds great. These people live in a world nobody really lives in, but it has a kind of consistency, and teenagers still talk rubbish while Being Really Deep, which is always funny, and a little embarrassing if you recall your own teenage years.
Most importantly, it doesn't make too much effort to snaz the story up by making it about some Serious Undercover Criminal Infiltration like FnF did. It's just this crazy world of young adults who seem to have no cares past their nightly car oriented lives. It's true to itself, and wonderfully daft. It helps if you squee at turbocharged Nissans sliding around, bouncing off their rev limiters, even so.
I'd love to read about other people's favourites. Possibly I'll comment on "But I'm A Cheerleader" which a friend of mine loves for no sane reason.
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Me flickr
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Also, Return to Oz with a young Fairuza Balk.
Tim Curry.
