2001 -

Director: Rob Cohen
Starring: Paul Walker, Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, Jordana Brewster, Rick Yune, Chad Lindberg

- Movie reviewed by special guest Stephanie

The Fast and the Furious makes you want to take your mother's Honda Civic hatchback, lower it, put on chrome hubs, and dump your paycheck into the engine. It makes you believe that your meager 4-cylinder Toyota can go over 80 mph. You race down the freeway checking for flashing lights in your rear view mirror, feeling the speed as you pass cars on the left.... Until, of course, some Ford Taurus passes you on the right....

This is an adrenaline-pumping, loin-throbbing rush of a movie. Hot cars, hot school girls, T&A, manly men, guns, fistfights and a great soundtrack... it's a whole lot of lip gloss, see-through-shirts, short skirts, ass-shakin', cleavage-flashin' fun! Oh yeah, and the Dodge Challenger? Unh! <deep grunt accompanied by thrust from the pelvic area> 

And when Vin Diesel grabs Michelle Rodriguez's ass in those leather pants—I want to be those hands! I want to be that ass! I'm tellin' ya—It's the best action movie of the year!  

  DVD NOTES   - by Linda

Though I can't quite, um, share Stephanie's enthusiasm about the film itself, I will say that it has some of the most quotable dialogue since Showgirls (I'll let you interpret that comment for yourself). And now I know what NOS is. At least I think I do. Let's just say that if I had some, I'm sure my Honda wouldn't hiccup, take three attempts to start, shudder at 60 mph, and smell like burning oil... it would just smell like burning NOS! Yeah, baby! <as flames shoot out the back of my car> Oh.

The DVD suffers from the gratuitous back-slapping comments by the cast and crew (you'd think all involved were DeNiros, Scorceses, and Streeps the way they admire each other). However, there were a couple of nifty extras that I thought were quite interesting. 

There is a featurette about film editing for the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America... the ones who love violence, but hate sex). In this case, the director and editor discuss the editing tweaks made to a disturbing scene where a man is hanging from the door of a semi (of course speeding down a road), only by wire wrapped around his arm (ewww!). We see as the filmmakers made ever-so-slight adjustments to how much you see, and what angles used. Voila! Rated PG-13 instead of R!

Also another extra I liked was an interactive doo-dad where you can flip through all the camera angles used in a climactic car crash, where one vehicle hits a parked truck and flips through the air, right over the hood of the car it's racing. Eight different cameras, eight different angles, all cut-together to make one kick-ass action scene. It almost made me want to see the movie again. Almost.

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