#fastchise

[girderednerve]

i do not wish to make unnecessarily negative comments about fun queer art but i do sometimes think about how disappointing i found the 2 trans 2 furious zine, which is conceptually catnip to me. it has some great pieces but it also has, i don't know, an attitude to it that that i found frustrating, where many of its contributors were very aware that it is a silly project & they treated it as though transing fast & furious is necessarily unserious. i'm not contending that transing fast & furious is a vital & world-saving endeavor or whatever but you can do silly things seriously, or with care & attention; and i do anyway think that there is a lot to say about fast & furious, which you can tell because i regularly get on my tumblr blog and say a bunch of bullshit about the fastchise. but it is interesting! like. i don't know. you can do things with narrative reveals that recontextualize earlier events (brian's vile cop-itude; dom telling the story of his assault charge; whatever is going on with john cena's character); personally i think it could be interesting to press on transformation (the franchise itself goes from a series of loosely connected car movies to A Franchise, with noticeably different aesthetic concerns; they're remaking cars all the time ship of theseus style and there's real slippage between car & identity, as gretchen felker-martin's 2t2t entry points out with gory delight); there's a lot of weird metatext (all of the dominic toretto memes? what's going on with those? also, if you don't mind being a little morbid, there's the absence that the franchise works around after the death of paul walker; they don't say his character's name anymore, but he's off being a stay-at-home dad. i'm just saying this has potential! to do something!). but instead multiple contributors to this lambda award winning zine, in response to the question 'which fast & furious movie is your favorite,' said that they hadn't seen all of them or didn't have a favorite, and i simply do not think that being embarrassed about finding something interesting is conducive to saying something interesting about it, & if you aren't interested in something at all then i don't see how i'm supposed to be interested in what you have to say about it. and also your favorite fast & furious movie is fast 5 QUIT LYING

[girderednerve]

okay so if you had to pick the best movie in the fast & furious franchise (fastchise to its friends), obviously you'd go fast 5 because it's fun & splashy & our heroes kill like a hundred cops in it blues brothers style, or tokyo drift if you're a contrarian pretending you're in it for the racing. not me i'm going the fast & the furious (2001), the first fast & furious movie, because i think it's the most homoerotic. but fast & furious (2009), the fourth fast & furious movie, is the most interesting one in the series because it's the pivot point where fast & furious becomes A Franchise. and it does this with nonsense border violence, as if to make up for the diversity of its cast

[girderednerve]

it is a hilarious title for a movie but we all know that 2 fast 2 furious is called that because they were not legally allowed to call the sequel to the fast and the furious (2001) "the fast and the furious 2" because there was a movie called the fast and the furious (1954), and when the producers of the 2001 movie licensed the older title they did not get the rights to use it in a sequel title. right. like we knew that already & we're just doing jokes for fun. also to be clear i think 2 fast 2 furious is the most underrated movie in the franchise. everybody wants to stick up for lucas black's accent in tokyo drift for some reason but where are the people showing up for devon aoki's bedazzled pink chaps??? lesbophobia is so real

[girderednerve]

fast & furious instant death