CS Film Club II

Well played Drac, very well played.

Y E S

I'll go with Millennium Actress.

PG Cooper

13 Assassins
The Hunt
Seoul Station
You're Next
Time Bandits
End of Watch

Let me know if you need additional choices as well.

Doomsday - still owe review from last round. Watched it last week, just been busy AF with a big work project. It's wrapping up this week, so I'll get both reviews in this round.

I can do Seoul Station.

The Fast and The Furious: Tokyo Drift

Not only did I choose the third Fast and Furious movie because Dracula called my bluff by choosing Geostorm as his watch for this round, I also chose it and am posting my review today because it's exactly one year to the day since leaving my film club review for 2 Fast 2 Furious. I thought it would only be appropriate and for those film club participants who want to plan out your Doomsday picks for next summer, you know what to do.

So Tokyo Drift, wow. Gone are the days of enthusiasm titans Vin Diesel and Ryan Walker. No more cops, no more undercover busts and shootouts. We're going deep. We're going raw. We're going to high school. Right out the gate our hero Sean (Lucas Black) is caught up in a street race through a residential construction site. In this one scene alone he races against a) Zachary Ty Bryan of Home Improvement fame who's b) driving a Dodge Viper with c) Bawitaba by Kid Rock playing. All of these are relics of the late 1990s being featured in a racing movie from 2006. Bawitaba was an 8 year old song by this point. Based on this opening scene alone does the movie come off as over the top? Sure, but there's an audience for this and it's certainly not the worst thing I've ever seen. It just feels very dated while at the same time trying to carve out its own place in a franchise by doing nothing new.

Like I said with 2 Fast 2 Furious, I'm trying to keep my limited knowledge of the franchise out of the equation and only comment on the movie as I currently see it in the context of the previous two. Clearly this installment is a step in another direction and while the intentions may be noble it's also obvious that at this point the franchise was a ship without a rudder. The first installment was entertaining enough considering its time and place, the second was a clear step down in almost every regard as it took everything that made the first one passable and cut it in half, and I imagine with the third one they were attempting some sort of soft reboot. LIke I said before, gone are the undercover cops who are after gangsters and drug dealers, now enter the teenagers. Sean is our new protagonist who is kicked out of one high school too many and now has to live with his Navy dad in Tokyo so he doesn't go to juvenile hall, naturally. Almost immediately he meets Lil Bow Wow who's the Ja Rule replacement and Sean is introduced to the Tokyo racing scene. Maybe racing is the wrong term, it's the 'drifting' scene, something Sean isn't familiar with. He challenges the 'Drift King' DK to a race but has no car and for no reason whatsoever another of DK's associates, Han, lends Sean his ride which he immediately crashes. Now Sean is in to Han for a new car but in the meantime Han shows Sean the ropes of the teenage Tokyo underground and, what's infinitely more important, he teaches him how to drift. Why does he do these things? We don't know other but thanks to some throwaway dialogue like 'I see something in you' we're given a glimpse into the nonsensical thinking that Han employs. Things start going south competition-wise between Sean and DK and lo and behold, DK's uncle (Hattori Hanzo from Kill Bill) is Yakuza and before long Sean is in over his head. With lines like 'We're not so different, you and I' and 'The loser leaves town' you know that everyone means business and the only way to settle any beef...is BEHIND THE WHEEL!

So simply put, is this movie a dumpster fire? No, at least not entirely. It's not great or even good either but I can't completely fault a movie for being exactly as advertised, that being a watered down knock-off installment of a franchise that was really trying to force itself onto moviegoers at the time. I can't compare Tokyo Drift to any of the future installments but this movie took everything that made 2 Fast 2 Furious inferior to The Fast and The Furious and dropped it a few rungs further down. The excitement isn't quite there, the 'cool' or 'macho' factor isn't quite there, even the acting isn't quite there which says nothing and everything at the exact same time. Lucas Black makes Paul Walker look like Robin Williams by comparison and there's just nothing to care about in this movie. I suppose had I assumed that Han were really dead I still wouldn't have been taken aback, I would have been one of the many people who I'm sure thought 'whatever' when they first saw this movie upon release. That's because it's a movie that's pretty aimless but even mostly fails at being 'cool' at the same time which was its entire purpose for existing. These creative decisions might be intentional as I think this was a failed attempt to ground the franchise to something that might be more relatable for its target audience, making a movie about high school kids whose primary audience will be high school kids, but then again maybe I'm just giving this movie too much credit. I don't know, Tokyo Drift perplexes me because it's not good but at the same time does exactly what it intended to do, no more, no less. It's a movie that I know didn't tick all the boxes of what makes an effective film but I didn't hate it either, it's just there. I think a lot of my criticisms for 2 Fast 2 Furious were very similar to the ones I have for Tokyo Drift but I'm not sure what more there is to say. I mean how can you really lay into a movie that lives up to the low standards that it set for itself? I have a feeling that my thoughts would be similar if I were to go through any other movie in the franchise. I know, I'll try another angle and I'll put it this way; Tokyo Drift is better than 2 Fast 2 Furious. At least this tries to be a little bit different and has some faint semblance of something that might be called a story. At least I didn't feel like this movie thought I was a total idiot. Maybe that should have been my entire review in the first place.


C- so says Doomsday

Tokyo Drift is one of my guilty pleasure movies. I always watch it when I see it's on TV.

Watched Top Secret tonight. Review up by Wednesday night.

Millennium Actress


A television interviewer and his cameraman visit a retired actress that was once a well-known star but is now a recluse. When they return to her a key, a special memento that she had held onto most of her life but had lost many years back, it prompts her to share her life story with them.

As short as this film is, I had to split it over two nights, as I was pretty confused the first half. As the actress reflects on her life story, it’s shown in flashbacks, with the interviewees appearing as spectators in the flashbacks, but the flashbacks of her story are told throughout the various films she’s been in. One could assume that you’re just seeing a scene of one of her films in the flashback, but without warning the scene will switch to another film of hers, one with a similar plot of her last film. It wasn’t until watching the back half on the second night that I picked up on it and everything clicked. Once it did, I was rewarded with a bittersweet story, beautifully told, of the pursuit of lost love.

Beautiful anime, touching story, and a bit of humor, although slightly confusing.

7.5/10

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