The Marci Rating System

No fic rec today, but a totally awesome article and vid about the Fast & Furious movies:

11 questions you were too embarrassed to ask about the Fast & Furious movies, Updated by Todd VanDerWerff

“If you ever watch a Fast & Furious movie, there is at least a half-hour — and often more — smack-dab in the middle of the movie where the characters talk about how they feel about each other.”

SO TRUE!

[NOTE: The page is VERY graphics heavy. My browser crashed twice trying to scroll through it quickly this morning. BUT! If you can get down to the bottom, there is a truly fun video (‘Every Fast and Furious movie plot in 10 minutes’) that explains how all the movies fit together and made me laugh multiple times. CHASE SCENE!]

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Finally watched #6! What can I say? It was fast; it was furious; it had an amnesia plot!

Mostly, I’m very glad I already knew exactly what was going to happen, because I hate surprises. (Despite that, I’m not really sure why the ending wasn’t Elena pulling up with a badass baby sling and taking out the bad guys without breaking a sweat.)

Lessons to be learned from this movie:
*Guns run out of bullets
*Harpoons are not toys
*Just because you are hot shit at driving a fast car does not mean you should neglect your hand-to-hand combat skills

Overall:
I liked a lot of things about this movie, but I think I would have been happy for them to leave it at #5.

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Of the three movies I’m looking forward to this May, there’s only one where I feel invested in the plot.

MAY 3 (not this one)
Iron Man 3

(Very easy to remember, movie #3 on the 3rd.) I’m hoping nothing too scary or awful happens, but it’s a comics fandom, which means anything and everything can be fixed, changed, or alternate-universe’d into a better version. DEFINITELY looking forward to the expected massive outpouring of fic after this one.

MAY 17 (not this one either)
Star Trek: The One We All Hope Spock Doesn’t Die At The End Of

Also looking forward to fresh fic in the Star Trek fandom! (It could be a very good summer for reading!) In terms of plot, though — really just watching for the witty banter. I’d much prefer a movie that was just the Enterprise crew hanging out and going on regular boring missions. (Or whales. Honestly, I’m really hoping they do something with whales at some point.)

MAY 24 (yes, totally this one)
Fast and Furious 6

After five movies (or four, depending on how hard they’re retconning Tokyo Drift), I find myself deeply invested in the plot of FF6. Will Letty rejoin the family? Is Mia’s baby a boy or a girl? Will anyone ever call Brian on his horrible, horrible fashion sense? And what even is happening in this picture???

[pic from movie insider]

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How does that song go? “This is the worst trip I’ve ever been on”? I wouldn’t go quite that far, but it’s been a wild ride, and not always in the fun way. But the joy of nano-noveling isn’t in the *doing*, necessarily, but in the *having done* — looking back and going “I wrote this?! How did I do that?”

That’s where I am tonight. I wrote this?! How? Why? And in a nano classic, while skimming through the file: I don’t remember *any* of this!

But here it is. 50,000 words of fic. Amen.

title: this is how the world begins
author: marcicat

word count:
summary: It’s the end of the world as we know it, and all the fandoms come out to play.

And really, was it that much of a stretch? Vegas had vacationing demons, Ohio had angels that ate pie, New York had masked superheroes. Okay.

Note 1: I have not read through this fic. At all. Edits/fixes still to come; posting now as a placeholder and proof of finishing.

Note 2: Somewhere along the way I apparently decided ‘chimerae’ was an acceptable pluralization of ‘chimera,’ despite all logic and grammatical evidence to the contrary. Sorry about that.

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I used to have a weird thing about genderswap in fics, but not any more! (Oddly, still leery about crossdressing, not sure why.)

the (comics) Avengers one (a key distinction because of who knows about Tony Stark being Iron Man, but no actual comics knowledge required):

Some Assembly Required, by valtyr

(I don’t care that much about Tony Stark, but I really liked the team stuff — Bruce, and the Hulk, and Spiderman, and Giant Girl, and Captain America being friends with Wolverine…)

the one that’s the second Fast and Furious movie (the Miami one); AU in that Brian is a woman

Fearless on My Breath, by pprfaith

(I think it helps with this one to have seen the movie, but I’m not sure. I’d love to see this author do Fast Five with these characters.)

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I’m falling behind in my reviews of tv and film, along with (of course) the lols from my most recent adventures in what’s affectionately called “professional development.”

Here’s my placeholder list of the posts I haven’t written yet but really, really mean to.

1. the last 3 eps of Doctor Who (11th Doctor, series 1, “The Lodger” through “Big Bang”) — is recursive logic really an explanation for an entire season’s worth of shenanigans?

2. the movie Fast Five (which you’ll be glad to know I did *not* confuse at any point with movies involving animated pandas or kung fu) — is Vin Diesel the next George Clooney?

3. the official signs for my professional development class read “Supervisor’s Boot camp” — no, Proper Capitalization Was Not One Of The topics.

4. Must Hawaii Five-0 spend so much time advertising the team’s phones? Actually, that’s really all I have to say about this week’s ep. Not a top five contender in my book, though the thing with Kamekona’s “grandmother” calling was great (I’m easily amused).

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I’m all about finding out whether I’m going to cry in the theater before I commit to a ticket. (Also, if I’m dragging my sister along I want to make sure it’s not going to be horrible. I’m just saying, out of four movies, they’re not exactly at a 100% awesome rate.)

SPOILERS FROM wikipedia:

How it begins:
O’Conner and Mia Toretto arrive in Rio de Janeiro expecting to find Dominic, but their friend Vince has not heard from him for weeks. Vince needs O’Conner and Mia to help on a job he had lined up for Toretto: stealing cars from a train.
(Yeah, that sounds about right.)

The Toretto Classic:
Hobbs refuses to let Toretto walk free, but cannot bring himself to arrest him, and so agrees to give O’Conner and Toretto a twenty-four hour head start.

I don’t even know what to say about this:
O’Conner and a pregnant Mia retire to a beach in the Pacific, where they are met by Toretto and Elena. While the women talk, O’Conner challenges Toretto to one final race with no pressure and no prizes to decide who really is the better driver.

***

Now this, I love:
In the United States, the title was simplified to Fast Five to avoid confusion with the Kung Fu Panda franchise, which uses the term “Furious Five”.
(Right? It’s an obvious move, because there’s got to be a *lot* of crossover between those target markets.)

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Okay, so this is what’s happened in my story so far.

1. serious and emo beginning part

2. surprise!crossover

3. repeat #2

4. ridiculous silly part

5. completely random and meaningless section

6. gratuitous kitten reference

7. car chase!

I think the real question is not “wtf is going on in this story?” but “would it be possible to introduce a flotilla of sharks at this point, so as to jump over them?”

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I liked it, even though I had to not watch a couple parts (the basement torture/death scene, and the fight where the dog got hurt). Too scary for me!

I liked the dog, I liked Sam, I liked Quinn Sarah (although, replace ‘photography’ with ‘singing,’ and what was the difference, exactly? except without the teen pregnancy, I guess). On a related ‘why do I recognize that person?’ theme, Mark James (the quarterback) is played by Jake Abel, aka Adam from Supernatural.

A note to movie-makers:

You can put someone in a hoodie, but it doesn’t magically make them look like a teenager.

A note to potential refugees from other planets:

When monologuing to yourself about the direness of your situation, while you may find it more dramatic to think ‘there were only nine of us left,’ you should keep in mind that this may irritate your guardian, since the more accurate statement would be ‘there were nine kids, and of course nine warrior-guardians, and — oh yes, don’t forget our assorted pets.’

And a note to our local theater:

Thanks for running sixteen minutes of previews today, because that line was pretty long, and we appreciated being able to get in under the wire. That being said, really, Fast Five is considered an appropriate preview for I Am Number Four? And what’s up with showing a preview for another movie starring the same actor? I was completely thrown for a loop.*

(*And I had to wait till I got home to wiki it! I’ve been resisting getting a smartphone, because, hello, I never call anyone, I don’t even need the phone I have now. And yet — the internet, at my fingertips! Do want!)

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(By making a list, of course!)

I’ve been thinking about fandom vs canon, and how things become fanon, and how characters are written, and what things become part of my mental landscape because of the things that I watch and read. And I’m wondering, how do we come up with these things?

The Inception Smoking Thing: Okay, so I’ve only seen the movie once, and my google-fu isn’t even *close* to ninja!level. But I don’t remember anyone smoking in the movie. Like, at all. And yet — fanon is full of Arthur and/or Eames as smokers.

The Swearing Thing: I’m looking at you, Supernatural fandom. It’s a 9 pm show on a major network (not even cable!). They don’t swear. Same goes for Star Trek Reboot*, Hawaii Five-0, Inception (again!), Burn Notice, Stargate, etc. [I'll totally give a pass to the Fast & Furious fandom, because -- yeah, canon's all about the swearing for that one.]

The Tats: Okay, this one doesn’t really fit on the list, but tattoos are totally making a comeback (as far as I can tell), and I’m super curious as to whether there’s an identifiable chicken-and-egg thing. Like, is the increasing popularity of tattoos because they keep showing up in our pop culture? (Prison Break, Hawaii Five-0, Inception, Supernatural) Or are they being allowed/highlighted more in pop culture because they’re gaining ‘real world’ popularity? Also, this one has a lot of interesting actor/character crossover implications. (The reason fanon Eames has tattoos is, I’m guessing, because Tom Hardy does.)

[*In the interest of full disclosure, there's totally swearing in my reboot fic. Sorry about that.]

([ETA @ 9 pm] For those interested in more info on the 'swearing' topic, particularly when it comes to the word 'fuck,' the wikipedia entry has some thoughts.  I think the phrase 'This is what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps' will never not be funny.)

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