It was at Barley’s Brewing Company in Columbus, Ohio. June 2015. Sunday evening, Origins having wrapped up for the year. We were having dinner with the Magpie crew and the discussion focused on movies. Mark Diaz Truman tells me I should see two films: The Purge: Anarchy and Furious 7. I respond with incredulity, and Mark essentially tells me not to be a movie snob. He explains that the Fast and Furious are very diverse superhero movies at this point in the franchise. I don’t feel in any rush to see them, but it plants a seed. Cut to today.
The Fast and The Furious is inarguably a massively popular film series with eight made and at least four more to come it appears. I have seen fifty-something school bookkeepers who attend church every Sunday and exude all the expectations of Southern femininity make sure they are at the new F & F film opening night. A movie series that has such a cross-demographic appeal must have something redeemable about it. So, I decided I needed to watch them all, starting at the beginning, knowing it would be rough going for awhile, but that there is a chance I might find something good along the way. For better or worse here we go…
The Fast and The Furious (2001)
Written by Gary Scott Thompson, Erik Bergquist, and David Ayer
Directed by Rob Cohen
LAPD officer Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker) has gone undercover in the illegal street racing scene after a series of electronics truck deliveries were hijacked by crooks with highly specialized driving skills. He becomes embedded in the crew of Dominic Toretto, one of the top racers on the L.A. scene. O’Conner also sparks a relationship with Mia, Dominic’s younger sister which draws the ire of fellow crew member Vince, who also seems to have eyes on Mia. The clock is ticking for Brian as both the LAPD and FBI are demanding he gives them something before things deadly. Will Brian choose his oath as a police officer to serve & protect or will his allegiances fall to the Toretto crew?
The town of Nevada, Iowa doesn’t have much going for it in the late 1990s, apart from the Video Hut. Twenty-something Jeremy works full time there while living at home with his widower father. Life is pretty quiet until customers start returning videos with hesitant complaints about “something wrong with the tape.” Jeremy finally sits down to watch these movies and finds sudden cuts to home video footage spliced in. These strange videos reveal a possible dark secret one of the townspeople is keeping. Jeremy begins to share these film clips with his manager and other people close to them causing more and more people to become entangled in the darkness surrounding his town.
Since DC Comics rolled out their New 52 relaunch, they seem to continue their lack of surety when it comes to Aquaman. Geoff Johns’ run began with a big chip on its soldier about the pop culture joke perception of the hero and Abnett’s first arc in the new Rebirth status quo continues that strange chest pumping. Aquaman aka Arthur Curry has opened an Atlantean embassy to the surface world. The previous story arc in Justice League where Atlantis attacked the surface has led to enormous tensions between the governments of the world and this mysterious underwater nation. While welcoming visitors, Arthur is forced to deal with The Trench, a radical terrorist group of Atlanteans who want to eliminate the surface dwellers. He has his fiancee Mera running interference while Tula acts as the ruler of Atlantis in Arthur’s absence. And his old nemesis Black Manta looms in the distance.
PopCult Reviews 