Fast & Furious 6 review

Hands down one of the silliest movies I’ve seen in a while.
And Battleship is one of my favourite movies.
Fast & Furious 6 was very silly, so much so it pushed suspension of disbelief to breaking point and beyond.

The thing about Battleship is that it knows it’s a silly movie, it’s a movie based on a board game.
It’s got aliens in it, there’s ships, most of them aren’t battleships (spoiler; there’s only one ‘battleship’ in the movie Battleship), the rest of the ships in Battleship are destroyers or other sorts of vessels.
Actually all this information is given in quite a simple way with a bit of footage and a short bit of dialogue so you understand the difference between a destroyer and a battleship. It doesn’t however impart the difference between a boat and a ship. But generally you can put a boat on a ship but you can’t put a ship on a boat.

Returning to the topic for a moment....
I watched this on blu-ray, and used the fast forward button more than a few times, it was the only way to get through this movie, (even my favourite movie Battleship I usually skip through the soccer scene at the start).

Fast & Furious 6 carries so much baggage from the previous films that its title/opening credits sequence serves as a “Previously on” for the movie.
Small mercies at least it wasn’t a character having a flashback sequence of all the salient events of the previous movies, that would have been worse, even more so if it included a voice over.

Fast & Furious 6 takes itself too seriously and it’s a film that shouldn’t be serious it should be a movie that knows it’s a bit silly, or at least know that what they’re up to is at least a bit silly. Aside from one mention of ‘James Bond shit’ there’s no acknowledgement that the events within the movie are practically impossible and outside the bounds of ‘normal’.

The setting for most of Fast & Furious 6 was London.
Maybe they were running out of interesting locations to shoot. My first thought was that there was some sort of money deal that meant they could shoot there. But skipping through the Wikipedia article for Fast & Furious 6 there doesn’t seem to be the word “concession” used anywhere in the article. “Tax” is used once in relation to them shooting in the Canary Islands who gave a tax rebate of 38%.

The early ‘Fast and Furious’ movies were a fun mix of fast cars, soundtrack and vaguely good looking people doing stuff in a vaguely real way. This movie just smashes a lot of the suspension of disbelief out of the way. It’s definitely not helped by the way it treats physics. Optimistically I would say that physics are treated in a cartoon fashion. But it’s the way they play it so very straight whenever they ignore the laws of physics. There are jumps and catches mid air and then when they land it’s against a car’s windscreen or something.
I probably would have had less problem with it if they had some of the characters, after having done this do the movie-style thing of coughing up or spitting out some blood. Giving you some vague indication that they were hurt rather than just shrugging.

With Fast & Furious 6 I just couldn’t help while watching the scenes in London, just thinking, that The Italian Job, the original 1969 one not the really quite awful other film from 2003 also of the same name, that was the best car heist film. It’s got everything in it, some great quotable dialogue, some great uses of cars. Iconic cars at that; Minis.

Also, I never really noticed how god-y Fast and Furious 6 is. Maybe I never really noticed it in the previous films, but there’s a fair amount of god-related stuff in the films which could have been avoided, so it was obviously a deliberate choice to have them in there.

Finally. I didn’t like any of the characters in this film.
Some like Dwayne Johnson (aka The Rock) playing Hobbs I couldn’t work out why he was in the movie. I seem to recall he was in the last one. Johnson is cartoon like in his presence on screen, and that’a against Vin Diesel who is also almost cartoon like. Both are buffed up, except Johnson is too much, just him being in a scene throws out any believability.

Going back to Battleship, with its silliness, basic plot and lots of explosions and big soundtrack with AC/DC on it, it makes you understand and like the characters very quickly.
It’s quite economical with how it establishes everything (even if there’s a soccer match at the start which wastes about 10 minutes of the movie). Most of the characters in Battleship are likeable, there’s moderately interesting and you kinda care about them.
I didn’t really care about any of the characters in this movie, the biggest emotive response I had to the characters was fining them irritating.

Double finally, as all movies seem to have a post-credits sequence then I’ll write a final paragraph after ‘finally’. Things that make little sense; Paul Walker’s character flying back from London to the US to be locked jail up to find out information that could probably have come to the characters with some hand waving and tech-related sort of scenes in London. Location choices; RAF Bentwaters standing in for NATO base in Lusitania, Spain. I recognised this one because it’s been used on Top Gear. It’s also only shown on an overcast day and at night. If it weren’t for the onscreen graphics you wouldn’t know where it was (ok, fine there was dialogue indicating that the characters were going to Spain). That overcast day could and should have been either re-shot on a sunnier day or had the sky repainted to make it look sunnier. There’s enough movie short hand that exist that says Spain = sunny. Not overcast. Even in a moody military scene involving NATO Spain it should have been sunny, otherwise it could have been anywhere.

Grief, wishes and the future

My dad has been going through his calendar / diary looking at dates, the when and where of mum’s diagnosis and illness.

I and my brother are trying to look to the future.

Mum said, not to feel guilty when she was “gone”. That was one thing she always emphasised, to go on with my life, our lives.

Dad, he’s looking into the past, trying, I think, and he’s said, sort of, to work out what else he could have done.

Near the end he was up at the Alfred twice a week, taking mum up for blood and platelet transfusions.

The thing that I constantly feel is that is isn’t fair, isn’t fair that mum’s died. That she’s gone. It isn’t fair that there’s people out there smoking, and they’re not dying, but my mum has.

I often, well I used to play the “what if” game in my mind, worry, think, feel guilt, worry some more about the what ifs of life. Think about what I could have done differently, what I wish had happened.
Now I don’t.
Now I’m trying to focus on the future.
It’s in the downtime moments where I’m not thinking that I can’t deal with things.

I guess this is grief.

I am trying to look forward. But it seems each time that I am getting used to it a road block is thrown in the way.
Mum’s memorial / funeral was one of those things.
A weird thing I’ve blogged about previously.
Experiencing it was something else.
Coffin at the front and centre.
The benches in the White Ladies area were stiff though had cushions. The White Ladies themselves were professional.
The celebrant wasn’t, got mum’s maiden name wrong. I feel like I should forgive her for that, but I don’t. She was employed to do a job, the job that she supposedly has been doing for a long time and she messed that up.

I think the whole memorial messes up the grieving process.

There’s still mum’s ashes to deal with.

Though for me she ceased to be “mum” in the hospital, where she died. Anything after that is just...I don’t know. Not.

I sometimes wish I believed in an afterlife, or in psychics or something. That I could pray and think that mum would hear me, or listen to the spirits and talk to her.
None of that’s going to happen though, none of that’s real. I can’t just magic it up.
I knew that from an early age, prayer didn’t work, there was no big higher power. There was just life, we live it and that’s it.
I accepted that when I was quite young, sometimes in early primary school or maybe earlier. I don’t really recall.

Now though, looking out into “real life” I’m...not scared. But this is real life, this is what there is.

I just wish...I don’t know, wish that we’d had more time. Despite knowing that our time was finite, that with mum’s disease it was always finite, even more finite than others, yet still I wish...something. I really don’t know.

Funerals

This is something I’ve had to face recently. My feelings about them veer from feeling weird about them to darkly comical.

Mum didn’t believe in anything, though she did at one point believe in god, with the whole ‘don’t eat meat on Good Friday or you’ll be struck down by god’ thing, something I in my teens disproved by eating meat on Good Friday and later burning a bible on that day for good measure.

Then she one day decided to read The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and that changed or maybe cemented her mind change with the whole god thing.

Mum went, that was one of the terms she used before she passed, “goes”, “gone” were others that we used, she went in hospital.

That’s the end, that’s where she went, she’s gone, that’s the end of the story.

A funeral seems like an epilogue to the story, not written by the author, but instead by someone else, someone who isn’t the author of the story, they’re brought in to add this little piece to the end of the story. But it’s not the author writing it, it’s not them, their style, their ink on the page.

It’s something that doesn’t need to be there, the story has finished, this thing doesn’t need to be tacked on the end.

It seems disrespectful, this isn’t something that mum would have wanted, but without having written down anything it seems we must go ahead. Though not for us, for others, that’s what makes me feel unease about this process.

We met with the celebrant yesterday. That was weird and uncomfortable, not something I will be putting my brother through, I will leave instructions that there’ll be no funeral, put me in a hole, plant a tree above.

One of the weirdest things that was suggested was to have a reading at the funeral, a verse, not a religious one, but just a reading of some sort. The weirdest and now that I reflect on it pretty sick thing is a reading written from the first person perspective. So it’s as though mum has said this verse, this bit of prose the celebrant had in her folder of words.
That’s basically putting words into someone’s mouth, someone who’s gone.
Just to make people feel in the funeral, that was what the celebrant seemed to say, make may be too strong, I think she said “allow”.

Unless you’ve done the soap opera / TV series style thing of leaving a message in video format I don’t think there should be anything said by the person whose funeral it is.

Another of the things I had to choose was the music. This I found somewhat darkly comical to choose music for the funeral, they wanted three pieces of music. Mum had an iPod and therefore a pool of music for me to look at, though she tended to just listen through a playlist and then let it repeat. Which meant that I’ve got a lot of songs that have 5+ plays, but I think that’s only because they were in a particular playlist.
Though not all were “appropriate”, mum liked certain songs, some sad, some happy, some Righteous Brothers, some Human Nature doing Motown, some ABBA and some Don McLean.
Out of the music that had 5+ plays I’ve gone with ABBA - She’s My Kind of Girl, Simon & Garfunkel - Hey, Schoolgirl, The Eagles - Life in the Fast Lane.
The last one is probably the least “appropriate” of these songs for a funeral, but is thematically how mum lived her life.

I don’t think there even needs to be a funeral. The story has ended, for my family the end was in the hospital, mum went peacefully, not in pain. That is enough.

There is no “after”. There is no “better place”. We have this life and that is it.

I have decided I will not say anything if anyone says “she’s in a better place”, I will hold my tongue for that one. That I can see is people wanting to say something, there’s not too much religious connotation in that, despite the suggestion of heaven.
But if god is mentioned I will not. Especially the particularly hateful “it was god’s will”, which has to be one of the worst things to say. That one will possibly upset me and I’ve warned my brother that I may raise my voice, cry or possibly be hysteric should someone say something like that. I’m sure anyone who’s there on the day will just put my outburst down to the latter, should it happen.