I'LL STOP THE WORLD AND DRIFT WITH YOU...
nos nerds
I don't get out for a ton of movies these days (babysitters = not cheap) but when 1) The Center for Asian American Media sponsored an advance preview of The Fast and The Furious 3: Tokyo Drift last night and 2) my friend Josh G. down in Hollywood said that advance audiences responded well to the film, I figured, why not?
CONTINUE READING...
This film has an interesting backstory. The first TFATF was based on a Vibe story written by a friend of mine, Ken Li. He profiled underground street racing in the New York metropolitan tri-state, involving mostly Black and Latino racers. However, TFATF reflected nothing from this story - they moved the location to Los Angeles, it was mostly White racers at the center of the story (surprise, surprise), with some ridiculously stereotyped AZN bad boys (hello Rick Yune!) as the strawmen.[1]
I never caught 2 Fast and 2 Furious and would never have remotely bothered to check out Tokyo Drift had it not been for the fact that Universal hired Justin Lin to helm it. I've following Lin's career for nearly 10 years now, was a big booster of Better Luck Tomorrow and was curious to see what Lin would do with a mainstream, big budget film[2].
Within Asian American filmmaking, this is a big deal. There's clearly been a dramatic generational shift from the days of immigrant family melodramas by the likes of Wayne Wang to someone like Justin Lin being handed the reins to an immensely successful action series (the last two in the franchise have earned close to half a billion dollars worldwide). I also wonder if race really had much to do with this at all: I'm sure Universal would have had no qualms, whatsoever, letting a White director handle TD and as a Taiwanese American, Lin would have no automatic insight into the world of Tokyo street culture. It seems more the case that Better Luck Tomorrow was a well-liked, "edgy" film about outcast teenagers and TD taps into similar kinds of characters.
One thing haunting Lin is that his previous film, Annapolis, was an unmitigated disaster. Not only did it score one of the lowest Rotten Tomato scores I've ever seen, but more importantly, the film hasn't even earned back half its budget yet. However, in a recent SFGate.com article, the director says he wasn't willing to take on TD if that meant he was going to be forced to recycle more tired, stereotypical, exotic images of Japan and Japanese culture. According to writer Jeff Yang, after Lin read the original script, he told the studio:
- 'I think it's offensive and dated, and I don't have any intention of doing it.' But Stacey [Snider], the head of the studio, said, 'Just tell us what you'd do differently.' So I said, 'To begin with, I'd get rid of all the gongs and temples and Buddhas and the visual gags about how the white guy is a foot taller than all the Asians.' And she said, 'OK, we'll make the kind of movie you want.' I was like, 'Uh, are you sure?' "Ultimately, it ended up being a constant challenge -- I kept on getting into discussions that were like, 'You signed me to do a certain type of movie, if you don't want to do that movie, get rid of me.' But all you can ever ask is that the producers and the studio be fair and reasonable. And to their credit, they were very fair and reasonable."
Moreover, Lin was able to get a variety of Asian and Asian American actors cast for film, including Sung Kang as one of the major characters (an Asian American transplant in Japan), and he does quite well - a considerably more charismatic character than the lead. In fact, I think the film would have been far more interesting if the casting had been flipped (Asian American protagonist, White mentor) but whatever; it's Hollywood.
Unfortunately, if the film was a small step forward on racial politics (it might have been bigger had it not been for the villain, a boilerplate Yakuza wanna-be who gives the same, flat, smoldering-rage-looks as Rick Yune did in the first TFATF), it does absolutely nothing for women, Asian and otherwise. It's not like TD is the most sexist film made in recent memory but for all the talk about the film's racial transgressions, no one bothered to write a single good female role into the entire film. There are exactly two kinds of women in the film: women to be ogled at or women to be fought over but other than that, the idea of "female agency" is utterly absent. The main female character is flirty, indeterminably exotic and at least knows how to drive but other than that, she lacks a real personality that's not tied back to a man. Hell, there's not even a token Michelle Rodriguez "bad girl" character thrown in here.
Provided, I've never been to Tokyo so it might really be the case that all the women there wear mini-skirts short enough for a pelvic exam or flash more cleavage than a Hooters convention. Interestingly enough, the film has absolutely no sex scenes - some quick girl-on-girl kissing (far tamer than the average Girls Gone Wild video) is about as racy (no pun intended) as it gets but in terms of eye candy, TD feels like one long reel of "hot" Japanese chicks flashing T&A. It's like visual Cialis for an Asian fetishist. Sure, it's not like the film is outright misogynistic (though it plainly doesn't think much about women outside as sexual objects) but given some of the chatter about the film's more progressive racial/ethnic dynamics, it was truly disappointing - though hardly surprising - to see it rely on exactly the kind of images you'd expect for a film about import car racing. This was no more defensible than your average rap video - the best you can say is that, "it caters to the male audience" and that's that.
Politics aside, I also didn't find the film too satisfying as an action flick. The car drifting scenes are definitely visually captivating at first but after a while, the film goes into drifting OD. My favorite line in this regard is a scene where one of the leads is reminiscing, "when we were young, we used to come up here [the mountains] and watch the drifters," as if drift racing were part of some halcyon memory on par with watching elk leap across an open plain[3].
The bigger problem is that the majority of the racing scenes are shot with tight close-ups (not to mention jarring, frenetic editing) rather than longer shots that allow you to see more of the action. Call me old fashioned but I thought the whole thrill of a car chase is seeing cars chase - I could really care less about watching the umpteenth cut to someone shifting gears or an intense look of focus on the driver's face. What gets lost is the physical grace of a good car chase scene - not to say TD doesn't have good ones (there's a great one that takes place in the dense throng of cars and bodies in the Shibuya district) but too often, the movie relies on an orgy of quick cuts and close-ups that never let the audience get a sense of what's going on in the bigger picture. It's also worth noting that almost all the key race scenes take place at night and thus, with the exception of the aforementioned Shubiya streets scene, you rarely get a sense of the racing environment that things take place in. Contrast that with the original TFATF where at least half of the races take place in daylight.
This all said, it's not like I hated the film - it certainly wasn't as bad a suck-fest as say, X3: Last Stand (I've never seen a movie nosedive so hard after a surprisingly compelling first hour). And I do genuinely hope the film does well if only because it will empower Lin to make other films in the future. According to Yang's article, his next film will be: "a self-financed indie movie called Finishing the Game, which reunites the cast of Better Luck Tomorrow for a period comedy set in the '70s." Somehow, I don't really see the same crowd lining up to catch that film compared to TD but I'll be there.
[1] Largely absent, except in a superficial way, were all the Asian rice rocket racers largely responsible for fueling the import racing craze of the 1990s and beyond (Yune's little yellow brigade of black-clad thuggies excepted).
[2] TD's budget was rumored to be over $100 mill. Seriously, is it me or does $100,000,000 not really buy you what it used to? For a car racing movie? Seriously? Is there a team of CGI-racing squirrels involved?
[3] The screenwriting, in general, was terrible but predictably so - same goes for the acting, character development, etc. It's not like anyone was expecting Brokeback Mountain (though there is quite a bit of unintentional homoeroticism as my wife noted). By describing much of the movie's narrative qualities to be boilerplate, I'm only confirming what the film probably set out to do anyways. This is not what you'd call "a thinking man's action series."
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