Fast and Dumb

I watch an action classic for the first time. I read more from Segar, Ellroy and Aristotle. Roulette conjures recollections more of where I was when I read certain books than of the books themselves.

I watched my first-ever Fast & Furious movie. It was the original one, The Fast and the Furious from 2001, directed by Rob Cohen with Paul Walker as an undercover policeman infiltrating Los Angeles’s underground street-racing culture to smoke out a ring of thieves who use their superior driving skills to heist trucks in motion. The investigation settles around a charismatic and muscle-bound driver and race-organizer played by Vin Diesel whom we are meant to pretend we don’t know is the leader of the heist outfit. Jordana Brewster plays Diesel’s character’s sister and the lust interest who helps splinter the loyalties for Walker’s conflicted character. Michelle Rodriguez plays the girlfriend of Diesel’s character who is also a member of the heist crew.

Structurally this movie owes a surprising amount to the fine 1991 action film Point Break, with souped-up Southern California street-racing culture substituted for big-wave Southern California surfing culture. But there’s a leaden disconnect in The Fast and the Furious between the picture’s frenetic, densely-saturated period aesthetic and the script’s mannered, overly-expository dialogue. Walker embodies this defect: looks fantastic and sounds ridiculous, both because of his mediocre line-delivery and the tritely-written lines themselves. But he is not nearly as bad an actor as Rodriguez, who has an ideal look for her tough-as-nails femme fatale character but really, really sucks as an actor (in this film anyway).

That points to the other thing that holds this caper back: Vin Diesel is too superior of a screen presence in contrast with the other principals. His first outing in his now-iconic signature role finds him cast so perfectly that he simply steamrolls over the weak other leads. From what I hear this charisma imbalance gets redressed to some extent as other talented marquee names like Jason Statham and Charlize Theron come in later to populate the franchise, but I probably won’t be sticking around to find out. From what I’ve heard it gets a lot faster and a lot dumber, and that’s starting from a pretty dumb place to begin with.

Where have I been hearing this? That brings us to why I watched this movie at all. The Frosty Fellas at The Worst Idea of All Time podcast have structured their newest season around an ingenious conceit whereby they watch the first nine Fast & Furious films for the first times in reverse order AND also have to watch each film a number of times that corresponds to where it falls in the series. So they watched the ninth film nine times, the eighth eight times and so on until they will soon watch The Fast and the Furious just once. When those good, brave boys watch a terrible movie over and over I usually like to scope out whatever they are talking about at least once for context if I can stomach it, so I figured if I was going to watch a Fast & Furious film I would make it the first one and proceed from there as desired. Think I’m good for now.

After the Popeye book I’m gonna revisit a comic strip I used to read every day in the newspaper as a kid but haven’t looked at in a while, title to be revealed in due course. Meanwhile on November 2, 1930: Castor Oyl enrolls Popeye in a “Free School for Dumb Adults.” I know some people I want to go to such an institution, what with the utter dearth of spatial courtesy and basic common sense that has pervaded our aisles and promenades in these here United States. Basically I want everyone to look up, get out of my way, move with a reasonable sense of urgency and keep their fucking dogs away from me unless they ask first if I’d enjoy being lunged at by a toothy and poorly-trained animal. And I want motorists to just accept my “you go first” wave at a four-way stop sign and not try to prove they are more polite than me by coming back with that cursed “I insist: YOU go first” gesture that forces me to disrupt the flow of my stride and ends up getting both of us where we are going a few seconds later than if my initial wave had been honored in good faith. Essentially I want everyone who lives, works or walks in the neighborhood where I spend most of my time to go to the Free School for Dumb Adults. Please get out of my way and, if you must, call me both fast and furious indeed.

In My Dark Places I’m through “I: The Redhead,” where Ellroy explains the background of his mother’s 1958 Los Angeles-area murder and the early investigation thereinto. In “II: The Kid in the Picture” he switches to a first-person account of how he went from being the troubled, crime-obsessed child of a dead mother and degenerate father to a troubled, crime-obsessed criminal degenerate adolescent to a troubled, crime-obsessed professional caddie and burgeoning crime writer (bringing us right up to the publication of his first novel, which I wrote about some entries back).

Maybe I’ve just been reading too much of one writer at a stretch but I don’t find myself falling ineluctably into this re-reading of the non-fictional My Dark Places the way I did with the novel cycle of the outstanding L.A. Quartet. I’m also sniping off bits of that Aristotle book whenever I have a clear field of fire, which is often when I’m on the go because it’s a much slimmer and more totable volume than My Dark Places. Rest assured I’ll get both chalked up on the big board soon enough.

Roulette

Rust Belt Review: A Comics Anthology Volume 4, edited by Sean Knickerbocker, read in 2022. Wrote about this one at the time of reading.

Froggy Gets Dressed by Jonathan London, illustrated by Frank Remkiewicz, read in 2017. I don’t remember anything about this children’s book but I see from where it falls on the reading list that it was during my first round living in that now-burned house here in San Francisco before I moved to Seattle for a while. Just before that move I was working at a warehouse and reading a lot of Peanuts, Wodehouse and books about the Civil War. And the Ellroy novel The Cold Six Thousand, incidentally.

AND, partly for my volunteering responsibilities and partly for my own enjoyment, lots of children’s books. I’m not sure into which category Froggy Gets Dressed falls but it’s the second of five children’s books in a row that show up at that point on the list in mid-2017.

The Complete Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy Dailies and Sundays 1935-1936 Volume Three by Chester Gould, read in 2017. Jumping ahead some months to after the move to Seattle, I did my first of three book-length dalliances with the meticulous, stylish, psychotic newspaper comics legend of Dick Tracy. An unusually grisly and violent crime/adventure strip about a clever and rigidly moralistic police detective with an arsenal of fanciful gizmos and a rogue’s gallery of baroque and thematically-oriented criminal grotesques to hunt down and sometimes kill. A pretty clear influence on characters like Bond and Batman, Tracy also spawned an enduring media franchise of his own. Chester Gould is one of the greatest cartoonists to ever work in the papers and he kept at it for a long time, generating a sprawling cast of oddballs and constructing lengthy multi-week continuities that rewarded close attention and kept readers riveted. Between the life-and-death stakes for Gould’s characters and his commitment to dragging out nail-biting scenarios for strip after strip, Dick Tracy is almost certainly the most suspensful newspaper comic strip ever published.

As a child my imagination was captured by a theatrical viewing of the 1990 Warren Beatty film Dick Tracy but it took me until adulthood and becoming a working cartoonist myself to do three books’ worth of research on the original strips. These Thirties strips are narratively inventive but also seem rather prosaic and gritty compared to the unique and discordant tone that Gould came around to in the later years I read from 1954 to 1957 when Tracy jutted his square jaw and steely squint toward the oncoming decade that was beginning to send tremors through the American cultural landscape. Looks like the San Francisco Public Library doesn’t have any full-length book collections of Gould’s work but some time I should get back into Dick Tracy and read up on what kind of trouble Tracy got into in the Sixties when things really went off the rails. Until then, watch this space for that favored Nineties strip that I liked as a kid; more on that coming next entry or the entry after that.