I’m delighted to announce that The Overview, our series of alternative commentaries to your favorite movies, is returning on a high note! Or rather, is returning with the sound of highly-tuned souped-up engines revving and raring to go!
The film we watch and discuss real-time is the now-classic 2001 franchise-starter, The Fast and The Furious, starring Paul Walker as a cop trying to make good, and Vin Diesel as the surrogate father to a group of misfit gear-heads. Pete Fenzel and Matthew Wrather delve deep into issues of genre, storytelling, character building, identity, morality, and pre-9/11 ideas of empire, “globalization,” and utopian cultural harmony. That’s a lot for a movie that gets called just about cars.
You’ll need your own copy of The Fast and The Furious in any format, and you’ll need to buy and download the file for just $1.99.
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The Overview is a series of alternative commentary tracks from Overthinking It, where the we watch and discuss your favorite movies in real-time. The commentary is meant to be played while watching the movie, which means you’ll need your own copy of the movie and a way to both watch and listen to a MP3 track in order to take full advantage of what you’re buying.
Everyone’s getting in on this! The Digital Drift crew are also examining the series in the build up to #7.
http://www.digitaldrift.co.uk/
MEH. It’s not terrible, but “THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS” is no cinematic classic. The best I can say about it is that it kick started the movie franchise.
Yes – I am SO EXCITED FOR THIS.
I love the Overviews and I’m glad to see they’re back, and although I have never seen any movies in the Fastiverse, I just watched The Fast and The Furious now in preparation for watching it with the Overview and I can totally see why you all love it so much!
Please keep going and do the other five, I can promise you 5 more purchases (and a whole lot of comments) from me if you do!
I will probably be back in a bit with my thoughts on the Overview when I’ve watched it, probably in the next few hours.
Hey, I’ve just watched the Overview.
Great job to both of you, I really enjoyed it!
I loved the discussions of framing of family, mental illness/cognitive abnormality, and authority in dominant vs subaltern discourse.
I have a question I want to pose to you because it really stood out to me as being odd: In a scene in the middle of the movie (I believe it was the one where Vin Diesel is showing Paul Walker his dad’s car and talking about why he beat the other guy) Vin begins the scene working on a car, presumably surrounded by oil and grease and other things which would prohibit the wearing of fancy expensive clothes. As he is doing this, he is wearing a pristine “Von Dutch” shirt, a brand which I remember from 10-15 years ago as being quite expensive, and strongly associated with showy inherited privilege. Basically, this was a shirt for the children of the wealthy, with no concept of the value of money. Wearing such a brand as a shirt while working on a car engine where it is certainly going to get ruined seems to turn this profligate wealth signalling up to 11.
Vin Diesel’s character does not AT ALL fit in this category, so what do you think is happening here? The underthinking it answer is “product placement = money” but why this product, in this movie, associated with this character at this time? I can’t believe they would just throw this in without thinking about how it would inform the character, so what does this say about Dom?
Am I misremembering Von Dutch’s associations? Did these associations change after 2001 so that they would have meant something different to the target audience of the movie at the time? (to be fair, I was 9 when this movie came out, so I’m probably more remembering the associations of Von Dutch in an Australian middle school circa 2005 which might have been quite distinct.)
I throw this open to the floor!