So I went and saw the James Bond moving picture Thursday night, still within the first week of its release, as intended. I'll of course be dedicating some space/time here to my take on the movie, but I'd like, first to reflect a bit on several of the previews that ran before the film itself.
First, the trailer for Fast and Furious. There are many many things about this that are completely brilliant. First of all, the title. I think all of us out there remember how dramatically The Fast and the Furious captured America's imagination back in 2001. The mid-summer release captures a happy-go-lucky, pre-"Okay, we admit it, Global Warming exists."-auto-enthralled American culture that we will never have back, a sort of last bash for upper-middle-class materialism that was shaken to its core by 9/11 and An Inconvenient Truth. And yet, even as America embarked upon its immensely expensive, illegitimate war based on the economic principals of "Blood for Oil," the franchise came back, with 2003's epic, and more efficiently titled 2 Fast 2 Furious. This movie, close to my heart now, took place in Miami (parts of it were shot in front of a friend of mine's family's restaurant)--and also, the movie played here for some incredibly longer amount of time than the rest of the country (Miami's upper-middle-class materialism has never, ever, been shaken to its core). And how can we forget 2006's conclusion to the Fast/Furious Trilogy: The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift?
Okay, well, I admit it, I never saw Tokyo Drift, but every time I'm in a car with other people driving around a parking garage which has its floor painted, and the tires squeal, we inevitably make reference to the infamous drifting technique, which, apparently, was made popular in, well, Tokyo. The biggest problem that I see with this movie is that the title has lost all the horrible efficiency of the SMS abbreviations in the title of the second movie in the franchise. Now, I've never actually been in a car that was "drifting," but I did grow up in the Northeast, so have been in several cars that were doing what we liked to call "donuts." (One of my proudest moments of my High School education was driving around in a couple of cars with three or four friends late one night after it had snowed quite a bit, doing "donuts" and purposely driving into snowbanks and things, driving over the snow-covered lawn, etc. and coming to school the next day, in day light to see the absolutely incredible and unmissable number of tire tracks that we had left all over the school's property--this is an experience which should sound familiar to many of all you out there as well, I imagine. In fact, I prepped a screenplay for the series, called The Fast and the Furious: Pittsburgh Doughnut, but as of yet have not heard back about it. I assume they passed on it because the title was too long.
Which brings us back to the trailer linked to above. Movie #4: Fast & Furious. No articles, and an ampersand! And Paul Walker and Vin Diesel are back! One can only assume that both were on the losing end of the recent credit crunch. Walker's profile has been even lower than Diesel's, but to me, it's like neither of them ever even left the franchise. And now it appears as though they're working together. Oh Snap! But, much like Homer Simpson in his letter to Mr. Burns after Bart donated blood to Burns and got nothing but a card in return, if you couldn't tell, I am being sarastic. The Fast and the Furious stank. If I recall correctly, I only even saw that movie because a friend of mine's girlfriend wanted (like, actually, wanted) to go see it (she did take the time to explain to me afterwards that I would have liked the movie more if I knew what it was like to drive a nice car (which I didn't, and don't)). If there was ever a movie which I think will defy any kind of ironic enjoyment, it will be Fast & Furious. One might project Fast & Furious as the first movie in a second trilogy of movies, and therefore expect there to be five more movies in the F&F franchise altogether. I don't see any other way of seeing it (the third trilogy can be based on the real life of Al Gore III). But hopefully we will see the owners of the Fast/Furious ouvre take a step back from their work, and much like Heidegger and his Being & Time, abandon all of the projected further volumes of the series.
Next, Bedtime Stories. Adam Sandler is finally in a Disney movie. He really punk'd us all by making that one movie, Punch Drunk Love, that was kind of, like, unique (as a dude with three brothers, I was fascinated by the fact that the seeming main point of Punch Drunk Love is that, if you have seven sisters, you will be fucked up). Still, though, I'm somewhat fascinated in watching Sandler age. I stand by Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore as being movies that were fun to watch, and actually pretty funny, but since then, the above-mentioned exception aside, all his movies have been somewhere on the scale from dismal to offensive to most sensibilities. In Bedtime Stories, though, Sandler looks older than the last time I remember seeing him in a trailer for a movie. Good. At some point, I wonder if Sandler will Carlin out, and look more or less the same for the next 35 years of his life, though I don't know that Sandler, post-SNL is doing enough drugs for that. Get snorting, Adam!
And, finally, Star Trek. It seems to me that I am both a) not quite nerdy enough (despite having seen, I would guess, I solid 90% of all the TNG episodes ever) and b) not a big enough fan or anti-fan of J.J. Abrams (I've never seen Lost and I was pretty ambivalent towards Cloverfield) to really comment on this. Plus, the blogosphere being what it is, I reckon there's enough people out there worrying about it that my opinion is inessential. However, I will say that casting Harold as Sulu is a brave, brave choice.
And wow! wouldn't you know it? I think, though I don't keep any kind of word count going on my Culturology posts, that if I start trying to discuss QoS at this juncture in this post it'll take way too many more words. That's almost for the best, though, since I am dedicated, in general, as often mentioned, to being just slightly out of date with things here.
Things That it is Okay to Like
6) It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. The basic trend, so far as I can tell, with the things that I deem to be okay to like, is that, generally speaking, I want to be finding "guilty pleasures" within my own cultural-consumptive patterns, but I tend to pick things that I am proud to like and need to be, I feel, either defended or have the generally counter-cultural angle of enjoyment about them pointed out (assuming that my tastes are still, at least somewhat, counter-cultural (Oh darn this counter culture, it's got me all bugaboo)). That being said, the case here is that I actually quite like IASiP, though I only watch it over on hulu (I don't have cable), and I think plenty of other people do to. I'm only confirming it as something which is okay to like, because I can't remember the last time I liked a show while it was actually airing on TV (okay, it's South Park). I famously never watched Arrested Development before it showed up on DVD, though I quite like it now. Why didn't I watch it then? Because it was on Fox, and how could anything be good if it's on Fox? The main negative, as I see it, to IASiP is that it's easy to watch, and a lot of the comedy is easy, and it's about privileged, crass, youngish white people. But, oh well, there's, like, jokes in it.
Things That it is not Okay to Like
6) Weezer's Pinkerton. I was recently driving somewhere in a car with several other mid-to-late-20-year-olds, and we decided to listen to Weezer's first album, you know, the one that's blue. We all agreed that with the exception of a couple of songs; namely, "Buddy Holly," and "The Sweater Song" (though the song about sweaters is redeemed purely by the nostalgia factor of recalling all of the dialogue spoken therein), that it's still a solid album and a touchstone for our pop-cultural coming of age. Personally, the blue album was one of the first pop-rock CDs that I had the wherewithal to purchase when it came out (back in '94, when I was in 6th grade (I had, up to that point mostly just listened to my Dad's classic rock and They Might Be Giants)). Our conversation then shifted to how dismal a band Weezer was when they reemerged with their terrible third album, you know, that one that's green. However, I found myself at odds with the rest of the car when it came to Pinkerton. I say, and maybe it's just that I was preternaturally anti-emo back when it came out, that I never really liked this album, and at best, it's a shitty CD with a couple of good songs on it. Everyone else disagreed, that it's a great album, with a couple of shitty songs on it. In my life, though, since I never liked the music, I've probably only listened to Pinkerton, maybe... optimisticaly, six times. The "Things" portion of Culturology tends to be the section that inspires the most debate, so I'm mostly using this opportunity to see what everyone else here at Audioshocker thinks, with my figures crossed that at least a couple other people out there know what I'm talking about, and agree that Pinkerton is mostly crap, and always was.
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