The Fate of the Fast and the Furious Movies

Bigger is supposed to be better, and, on the surface, that appears to be true of the Fast and the Furious franchise. Each installment has a more ridiculous action set piece. Last movie, it was cars speeding through the window of one Abu Dhabi skyscraper to crash into the window of a neighboring one. This one has Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson grabbing a torpedo with his bare hands and altering its course on top of a frozen lake.

There’s no shame from the filmmakers with these outlandish scenes. Nor should there be! The Fast and the Furious is basically a different kind of superhero franchise, in which the avengers are a diverse group of lower-class nobodies who overturned the system to achieve the American dream. This franchise has single-handedly replaced the bar for what action movies should be going forward, so why should the filmmakers adhere to arbitrary rules about what they can or cannot do? Why shouldn’t they construct a heist in which the main gambit is strapping a ten-ton safe to two Dodge Chargers and careening through Rio?

That scene of kinetic bliss is from 2011’s Fast Five, which might be the purest iteration yet of the Fast/Furious saga. It featured Johnson’s introduction and Vin Diesel’s Dom recovering from the apparent death of his long-time girlfriend, Letty (Michelle Rodriguez). It was the first time the Family as we know it today was all together- Johnson’s Hobbs, Diesel’s Dom, Paul Walker’s Brian, Ludacris’s Tej, Tyrese’s Roman, Jordana Brewster’s Mia, Sung Kang’s Han, and Gal Gadot’s Gisele, minus Letty, of course, though her presence was very much felt. Five is where the series’ concept of Family truly solidified and became the fulcrum for every plot twist and car chase thereafter.

The Fate of the Furious (the eighth in the run that started with 2001’s relatively minor The Fast and the Furious) actually mirrors Fast & Furious 6, in which Letty returns with amnesia and is working against Dom’s crew. This time, however, cyber-terrorist Cypher (Charlize Theron) has turned Dom against his people. Pleas of “But family!” seem to mean nothing to him, and the Toretto crew has to team up with Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell, introduced in Furious 7) and Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham, the last movie’s villain) to track Dom down.

Cypher is an effectively cold-hearted villain with a terrible plan for Dom, and the estrangement between him and Letty is genuinely hard to watch. Furious 7 is the emotional peak of the saga, due to the perfect way the filmmakers handled honoring Paul Walker after his tragic death. This movie can’t compare to that, but what could?

Even so, it does seem like this franchise may be wearing out its emotional heft, after a trio of movies in which the “Family” trope became something almost real. In Fate, deaths in the Family lose some of their power. One member’s passing feels like a mere plot point, and Han’s death in Fast & Furious 6 becomes something of a loose end with the team embracing Shaw, who murdered Han as revenge for the Family putting his brother in a coma. Shaw’s induction into the team seems a little too easy and takes you out of the movie. However, it sounds like the filmmakers may address justice for Han later.

Nevertheless, director F. Gary Gray (The Italian Job, Straight Outta Compton) has made The Fate of the Furious a thrill ride, and, even with my above questions, exploring the grief induced by Dom’s betrayal only strengthens the Family’s 8-movie history. The box office returns on this one have been lower than Furious 7’s, which produced a lot of hand-wringing by pundits about diminishing returns. There has also been a lot of hand-wringing from critics about a dip in quality. I saw one critic that I respect (and he’s not alone in this) saying Fate might even be the worst of the series, which is pretty much impossible when the series includes Tokyo Drift.

Even if this one is not quite as good as the last one, so what? It’s the eighth movie of a supposed ten in a franchise that has so far spanned eighteen years and will likely extend five more. The Fast and the Furious has already written cinematic history with its box office records, its diverse stars, and with the worldwide ardor it has received. If they want to make two more movies of controlled chaos that are utter garbage, more power to them. They’ve already changed the game. All I ask is that they stay true to this Family and that they blow my face off. For The Fate of the Furious, check and check.

Hurray for the Riff Raff Navigates a Story of Protest

Had Alynda Segarra released a perfectly innocuous album of folk music this year, critics still might have foisted the protest label on her. Segarra, who has been making music as Hurray for the Riff Raff since 2008, is of Puerto Rican descent. Any record she put out might have been mistaken for a referendum on the current climate for immigrants, even though Segarra is from the Bronx (and even though Puerto Rico is technically part of the United States…) and has made folk music firmly rooted in the New Orleans scene for her band’s entire existence. The color of her skin is now of political interest, whether or not she makes direct protest music.

With this year’s The Navigator, Hurray for the Riff Raff made something better than a protest album, something richer and deeper. We will always need songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Redemption Song”, albums like What’s Goin’ On and To Pimp a Butterfly, that address head-on the issues of the time. Directness is a virtue, but it has its limits. I’ve always been more partial to albums that tell a story and address issues through characters. Give me a Born in the U.S.A. or a “Fast Car”, works of pop art that paint pictures of the forgotten and beaten-down. These vivid lyrical images move me more than a lyrical jeremiad might.

The Navigator is a concept album about a Puerto Rican girl named Navita who seeks to escape her childhood hometown by enlisting the help of a witch. The witch’s influence eventually wears off, and Navita returns to her city and mourns the loss of her family’s culture. The album comes with liner notes mimicking a Playbill, and musical theatre’s influence can be felt all over the contours of The Navigator’s music. But as performative as this album is and as theatrical as the production sounds, it is hard to digest The Navigator as anything other than a reflection of Segarra’s real life.

On the first half of the album, in which Navita is attempting to escape her past, Segarra sounds like her old self, committed to the folk vibe she’s made her bones on until now. This could have been Act II of Hurray’s last album, 2014’s Small Town Heroes. Shades of Caribbean and Latin influences feel their way into the music, foreshadowing the album’s midway shift, but she’s largely focusing on the same Americana beats she’s trod over the last 9 years of her band’s existence, only with a new focus.

Segarra’s always had an eye on female empowerment (hear: “The Body Electric” off Small Town Heroes), and that’s no different here, though this time she’s exploring the theme through the power of story. “Living in the City” finds Navita shaking off chauvinism and the confines of growing up in a place a lot like New York. “Nothing’s Gonna Change That Girl” explores Navita’s commitment to herself over the prospect of romance, knowing that one or the other will shape her life. They are powerful songs in and of themselves, but the through line of Segarra’s narrative imbues them with a shared catharsis, an empathy that a lot of girl power anthems sacrifice for a catchy hook.

The story turns around track 7, “Halfway There”, when Navita realizes the idea of escaping your past is a lie. By the next song, the fiery “Rican Beach”, Navita has returned home, and Segarra sings of the victims of white colonialism and the thievery therewith. It is a historical fact that every race has lost something to white people, and Navita is coming to terms with what her response to that should be. The song ends with a repeating mantra, “I’ll keep fighting to the end.”

The whole album is great, but the final five songs really clarify the album’s purpose for Segarra. “Fourteen Floors” has Navita return to where her childhood tenement used to be, and she finds a connection between the removal of her old home and what the system has taken away from her people. Segarra has been vocal about the folk music community’s failure to live up to their genre’s role as activists, remaining largely silent in the face of rising xenophobia. The first half of Navigator suggests Segarra feels complicit; the second half promises: no more.

The album’s climax, both narratively and musically, is the penultimate track, “Pa’lante”. That song title is important to the history of Puerto Ricans here on the mainland. It translates to “onward, forward.” It is a call to arms, a battle cry, but, one distinct to her culture. So much of the recent protests have been to call outside attention to long-standing injustices; “Pa’lante” is an encouragement to her people, a plea to “be something”, a prophecy meant to unite. As her will crescendos with the music, she cries, “From Marble Hill to the ghost of Emmett Till, pa’lante!”

It would be a struggle not to feel of one mind with Segarra on this song and, by association, on this album. The Navigator tells a story that equates life’s value with moving onward and forward, and not with how much anyone or anything is holding you back. There’s a temptation on the right side of the aisle (especially the alt-right side) to find complaints of victimhood in any mention of oppression or injustice. The Navigator is a fine argument that one of the greatest forms of strength is admitting victimhood and still choosing hope over despair.

Get Out Is More Than a Horror Movie

Nothing about movies makes me happier than a movie upending mainstream norms to take the box office by storm. There are a lot of big studio movies that I enjoy, but something about seeing the system turned upside down gives me more joy than a well-tailored blockbuster. By all conventional wisdom, Get Out, the new horror movie from Jordan Peele, should not be a hit. It should not have made $162 million domestically. For context, the next highest grossing horror movie with a similar budget in recent years was 2016’s Don’t Breathe, and that made $89 million.

There are a lot of reasons why Get Out has been so successful, not the least of which is how relevant it its subject matter seems on the surface. Get Out follows Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) and Rose (Allison Williams) as she takes him home to meet her family. Rose is white, and Chris is black, but Rose thinks this is no big deal and hasn’t told her parents (Bradley Whitford and Catherine Keene). This bothers Chris, but he tries to play it cool. When they arrive, however, It’s pretty clear that something is different about Rose’s parents and the community they live in.

There will be spoilers later in this post, so if you don’t want anything spoiled, stop after this paragraph. But it’s not spoiling anything to say that the weirdness surrounding Rose’s family’s estate has everything to do with their whiteness and Chris’s blackness. At one point, Chris tells a friend on the phone about Rose’s parents and their friends, “They all act like they’ve never met a black person that hasn’t worked for them.”

This directness about the social experience of being a black man in a white world is refreshing and is surely one of the reasons why it has received such great word-of-mouth, and great word-of-mouth is surely the main reason it has been such a successful movie at the box office. It received great reviews (99% on Rotten Tomatoes, 84 on Metacritic), but critics can only have so much effect on audience turnout. Movies outside of established franchises need good reviews from the audiences themselves, and everyone who has turned out for Get Out has gone on to tell their friends that this wasn’t just a good movie, it was a movie they had to see.

And they have to see it, because it is such a unique movie-going experience. There have been plenty of good horror movies released lately, but few that deal so explicitly and effectively with social issues. Personally, I was tempted to be skeptical about how one of a kind Get Out truly was before I saw it. There’s not a shortage of socially conscious horror movies throughout movie history. Night of the Living Dead, the original zombie movie, and Candyman deal directly with race in sharp, striking ways. And two movies that director Jordan Peele cites as influences on Get Out, Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives, tackle gender equality by exposing a special kind of dread that can only be described as sociological anxiety.

Get Out makes use of the same kind of suspense as those latter two movies, slowly ratcheting up Chris’s paranoia as the weird event tally racks up around him. It’s too soon to compare writer-director Jordan Peele to a director like Roman Polanski (the director of Rosemary’s) or to a writer like Ira Levin (the author of both stories from which those movies were adapted), but Get Out is a truly astounding achievement. Its box office success is a triumph, but it’s more impressive that Get Out is a great movie.

Peele is clearly walking a tightrope. There is a scene near the end in which a black man clearly takes pleasure in shooting a white woman. I was forced to confront my own prejudices in this and in other scenes- seeing a black man do something violent to a white woman invoked a weird discomfort in me, more discomfort than I likely would have had seeing the reverse. I have to face the fact that I have that prejudiced inclination. This movie is full of such challenges to the status quo (read: whiteness), and it wears them with quality.

Get Out is not about to solve any problems or heal any wounds; the only things that can do that are people themselves and time (and God, but that’s another conversation for another post). But seeing this movie may be the first time some white people understand even in the slightest that being black is scary. That in itself is a great argument for diversity in the movie industry. The perspective of a black man like Jordan Peele offers an opportunity for a studio like Blumhouse Productions to expand the spectrum of the stories it tells. That is the lesson I hope other studios take from Get Out‘s massive success.

As my friends and I walked out of our showing of Get Out, someone walking ahead of us said, “I can’t believe we paid money to see that.” They were white, which may be incidental, but probably isn’t. It is hard to confront that your very race predisposes you to certain prejudices that yield barbarity, especially when you grow up in a world that works hard to teach you that it’s the other races that are barbaric. Not every white person is going to commit the kind of atrocities committed in Get Out, but every white person needs to deal with the fact that whiteness is a direct factor in a lot of atrocities.

There have been shitty white people in lots of movies, though, both in front of and behind the camera. The genius of Get Out isn’t in the racial dichotomy at the heart of its thrills, though that juxtaposition is fascinating. The genius is in the universality of Get Out’s white villainy. These villains aren’t Ku Klux Klansmen- they voted for Obama, they probably give money to social justice causes, and they probably enjoy political correctness. It would be easy to resent Get Out for making whiteness the villain, even if Peele was more specifically targeting white liberalism. It is more challenging to confront Get Out‘s central theme, that liberal moralizing is worthless, even dangerous, without first humanizing.