Author: Benjamin Rosenstock

I’ve been wanting to watch the Fast and Furious movies for a while, ever since Furious 7 came out and I saw tons of people ranking them and felt left out. And, since I’m a completist, I wasn’t going to be content just watching the ‘good ones’—people usually say that Fast Five is when the series gets good, but I was for sure going to watch them all now.

Well, today, I finally watched Furious 7 and finished the series, which is perfect timing, since The Fate of the Furious comes out this weekend. Here’s my ranking, from worst to best.

7. The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift

Some people will tell you that this is the best one, for some reason. It’s not. Lucas Black’s character has to be one of the blandest, most boring, least convincing protagonists I’ve ever seen. Paul Walker is pretty bland in his movies, but he’s mostly adequate for the role he’s playing. You don’t really need to have a lot of acting chops to play the protagonist in a Fast and Furious movie, but Lucas Black somehow makes it possible to be ‘not good enough for a Fast and Furious movie.’ That’s impressive.

Also, this is probably one of the more sexist and exploitative entries. All the Japanese imagery is cliché and stereotypical. Some people claim that at least this movie is stylish, which makes it more interesting than 2 Fast 2 Furious or Fast & Furious, and I agreed for maybe a few minutes at random, but it’s really not that stylish. The action scenes are just not exciting. Maybe that’s where we disagree, Tokyo Drift fans.

6. Fast & Furious

I thought this one would be a step above the second and third movies, since it brings back the original cast: Paul Walker, Vin Diesel, Johanna Brewster, and Michelle Rodriguez. Well, it was better than Tokyo Drift, but that’s not sayin’ much. This one is mostly just boring. The only really enjoyable action scene is right at the beginning, and the climax falls pretty flat.

5. 2 Fast 2 Furious

I kinda liked this one. People say this one is super boring and unstylish, but I thought it was actually pretty entertaining. I particularly liked the trick where Brian and Roman hid their cars inside the garage, then Tej released hundreds of cars at once so the cops didn’t know which ones were them. Was that not clever? I also, of course, liked the climax, when Brian drives the car off a ledge and crashes it onto a boat. That was something straight out of the later movies!

Roman is boring compared to Dominic, so Dom is still missed here, but he’s mildly funny, so it works.

4. The Fast and the Furious

Very solid movie! The first entry in the series is pretty simple and grounded compared to the insanity of the later movies, but it’s reliably entertaining, and Vin Diesel is instantly engaging, somehow super charismatic. Maybe I’m just saying this because I’ve gotten used to watching him, but I still think he was most effortlessly engaging in this first movie.

These movies aren’t super emotional or complex, but I really like the simple hook of Brian getting in too deep with Dom’s crew and eventually thinking of him as a legitimate friend who he looks up to and wants to help out. The final turn of the movie, when he lets Dom go instead of arresting him, just lands perfectly.

3. Fast & Furious 6

I’m tempted to put this above Fast Five, because they were very close for me. This one has Luke Hobbs working with the team, and I love his rapport with them. Dwayne Johnson is great, obviously. I also quite liked both of the climaxes—the early, fake-out one, where they’re racing down the highway, and the real one, where they’re racing down the runway. The highway scene also features one of the most ridiculous things I’ve seen in this series, defying-the-laws-of-physics-wise. It’s when Dom sees Letty about to fall between the two parallel bridges, so he crashes his car and leaps out right at the perfect moment in the perfect direction, somehow careening himself across the chasm, knocking into Letty, and hurtling them to safety. So many parts of it are absurd and impossible, which makes it great.

2. Fast Five

This is where the series gets really good, and I think if you were watching this without realizing how big an uptick in quality it would be, you’d be shocked, and you might over-rate it. I’ve heard so many good things about this one that my expectations were pretty damn high, and while I wasn’t disappointed, it didn’t quite exceed my expectations. It also felt maybe ten minutes too long.

That said, so many things about this movie are amazing. Dwayne Johnson’s Luke Hobbs instantly becomes the best character in the series. The heist plot is super fun in an Ocean’s Eleven, assembling-a-team way, and the humor is pretty good. And this has some of those deliriously fun action scenes that you come here for, like the opening train heist, and most notably, the climax. A couple of cars dragging a giant vault is just a recipe for success; from the very beginning of that scene, I realized how fun it was about to be to watch them absolutely demolish everything with that vault, and I had a big grin on my face the whole time.

1. Furious 7

I think most people like Fast Five the most and agree that Justin Lin’s directing of action sequences is a tad better than James Wan’s, but I really liked Wan’s work here. The trick he does where he flips the camera when a character flips is great. Also, this movie is just so over-the-top and great. The whole scene where Dom drives their across a chasm between two skyscrapers, then does it again, is so deliriously fun, as is the scene when the cars go sky-diving, and much of the climax is like that, too.

Plus there’s the ending tribute to Paul Walker/Brian, which is legitimately emotional. I almost teared up seeing all those flashbacks to earlier movies.

Can’t wait to watch Fate!

Well, there are only two episodes left of Girls, guys. I have a lot of thoughts about this season, so I thought I’d just go through some of the different characters and plot lines and share my thoughts about what I’m hoping for in the last two episodes.

Should all four girls share any more scenes together? If you’ve seen the previews for next episode, you’ll know that this one’s already settled: there will be at least one more scene (but probably most of an episode) with all four girls hanging out again.

One of the biggest accomplishments of the show—one of the things I’ve always admired most—is how brutally realistic it is about friendships, how you can feel so close with a group of friends at one age and then life can take you all in different directions until you don’t feel close with them anymore. “Beach House” in Season 3 illustrated this beautifully, and part of me thinks the show doesn’t need to revisit them all as a unit anymore. That said, it’d be nice to see them together at least one more time, if only to recreate the magic feeling that the show used to inspire when all of them bounced off each other. (I’m thinking of the aforementioned “Beach House” and “Wedding Day.”)

Should we get more scenes of Shoshanna? This one is pretty much an unqualified yes, because Shoshanna is probably the most likable of the four girls at this point, and we’ve gotten so little of her this season. That said, a lot of my friends have been deeply bothered by the lack of Shosh this season, and I don’t care quite as much as they do. Shosh has already undergone a lot of character development over the course of the series, and her time in Japan last season seemed to bring her character arc to an appropriate close, in some ways. As fun as it is to watch her onscreen, I don’t mind her reduced screen-time that much. She’s grown a lot, and I’m content to imagine her working on herself and living life happily when she’s not onscreen.

Should any of the characters be paired off romantically at the end? I think it’d be kind of refreshing if all four of the girls were single at the end of the show, just because it’d be different from most shows, where all the characters are conveniently paired off by the end. Hannah and Adam have definitely run their course, and last episode gave us some (heartbreaking) closure on that front. Marnie is done with both Desi and Ray. Part of me still wants Ray and Shoshanna to get back together, but I think Alex Karpovsky said that’s not going to happen. Besides, Ray had a lovely meet-cute with Abby last episode, so I wouldn’t mind seeing them together. Especially because there’s been so much main-cast-incest in this show that it’d be nice to end with a realistic ending of the characters actually meeting new people (or staying single).

Jessa is still with Adam, presumably, but I wouldn’t mind them breaking up, especially because they seem manic and unhealthy together, and Adam was pretty quick to drop her and go back to Hannah last episode. Surprisingly, though, if I had to root for any couple to be together, I’d probably pick them. It’d be cool to see Jessa actually caring about a monogamous relationship for once.

Can—and should—Marnie and Jessa be redeemed? The most realistic thing, I think, would be if most of the characters in this show achieved a modicum of maturity by the end, but maybe one didn’t. The obvious candidate for that is either Marnie or Jessa, who have both experienced huge character regressions over the course of the show.

I think Marnie is still somewhat redeemable, but I’m not sure about Jessa—if there’s anyone in this show I’d like to just watch suffer and fail and end up alone, it’d be her. That said, I did feel an iota of sympathy for her last episode, so I guess I wouldn’t mind seeing her end the show a little more mature and a little happier.

Still, though, I think the one main flaw with this season lies in its insistence on making Marnie and Jessa regress again and again, after last season let them be human and learn from their mistakes. Marnie, after four and a half seasons of immaturity and selfishness, spent a night with her ex-boyfriend, decisively ended her marriage to the cartoonishly awful Desi, and got back with Ray, someone who seemed to actually care about her. It was the perfect place to get rid of Desi and let Marnie be a likable person for once, but this season she’s been almost unrelentingly entitled and selfish, treating Ray like garbage and repeatedly going back to Desi. The pawn shop owner last episode finally seemed to yank her out of her cycle, but it’s too little, too late. Maybe if these next two episodes continue the upward trend, though, I’ll walk away from the show with an optimistic feeling about how Marnie’s arc has gone. Or, if they’re going to make her regress again, at least do it in a satisfying way, and show that it’s not a character inconsistency. I’m okay with showing weak-willed characters who repeatedly fail to become better people, but too often in this show, Marnie and Jessa’s characterizations have just seemed inconsistent.

As for Jessa…Season 4 was her low point. She kept doing things that were so selfish and evil that they bordered on sadistic and sociopathic, like pushing Adam and Mimi Rose together just so she could be with Ace. It was just too much. Season 5 turned that around and gave Jessa an actual reason why she was being a horrible person—sure, she was being a bad friend to Hannah by dating Adam, but at least she seemed to genuinely like him—but Season 6 has returned her to that borderline-sociopathic state. I’m not sure there’s an ending for Jessa that will completely redeem her or make up for the stuff she’s done.

Should Hannah have a baby? This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot as this season has progressed. When I learned that Hannah was pregnant, I had a lot of reservations about it. Even if Hannah is much more mature this season, and even if I believe that she’ll be a good mother, I’m kind of just sick of seeing final-season pregnancy plots. I’ve never envisioned pregnancy as the ultimate sign of maturity for Hannah; so much of the show is focused on her relationships and her writing that it seems odd to just give her a baby and use that as a sign of maturity.

And yet this season has pulled off this plot pretty damn well so far, particularly with the various characters’ surprising-yet-fitting reactions to Hannah’s news (Elijah getting pissed, Marnie reacting with shock until slowly saying, “I’m into it,” etc.). There’ve been some really emotional scenes this season based around Hannah’s pregnancy, like the gutting phone conversation between her and Paul-Louis and the argument with Elijah. I’m at the point this season where I’m willing to just wait, see where the plot goes, and trust Lena Dunham. I’ve had many moments of doubt this season, but she’s proven me wrong, so I have faith.

And really, that goes for almost everything this year. Whatever happens, I trust the show to make it good, and make it feel right. Girls isn’t a perfect show, but it’s that lack of perfection that makes it feel so real.

…Wow.

I don’t even know how to begin with this book, so I’ll start by copying the description on the inside cover, to give you an idea of what it is if you’re reading this review: “the story of a corner of a room and of the events that have occurred in that space over the course of hundreds of thousands of years.” So it’s basically as if someone plopped down a camera in one specific spot billions of years ago, and that camera took pictures of the same space for billions of years, past present day, thousands of years into the future. Here gives you a random assortment of those pictures (drawn, of course—this is a comic, I suppose, or maybe a graphic novel, though it’s all semantics) in non-chronological order. There’s no story, really.

And there are no main characters. Dialogue is very sparse, and most of the time we’re dropped into the middle of a conversation that we have no context for. We don’t get to know any characters, and because of the extremely disjointed, non-narrative nature of the story, it’s hard to even know who people are in relation to one another. If you mapped every panel out chronologically, studied the characters’ appearances, and made some inferences, you could probably get a good idea how many different people have lived in the house, and when they moved, and when they moved furniture around, but it’s difficult.

It’s easy to see what kind of fun can be had from a book like this one. It makes you wonder what your own house looked like decades before you moved there. It makes you wonder what it’ll look like after you move out. It makes you imagine your house being built in the first place, and it makes you imagine a time when your house won’t exist anymore—because it’ll be ravaged by something, whether it’s a flood, a fire, a renovation, or just the gradual passage of time. Eventually, humans won’t be here anymore, and your house won’t be, either.

So that’s a pretty strong conceit to begin with, but it could get a little old. It’s possible that you could figure out the format of the book and get the essential themes in the first quarter or so, and your eyes could start to glaze over as you realize it’s pretty much the same thing for the rest of the book.

I think there are a few things that saved this book from redundancy for me. First, there are sprinkles of narrative throughout, sort of little micro-stories embedded in the book. There’s the old couple in 1986 telling the story of how they met. There’s a futuristic hologram woman in 2213 teaching a group of students (or tourists?) about when humans used to rely on primitive technology like wristwatches, wallets, and keys. There’s a man in 2005 taking care of his father. There’s the house itself being built in 1907. There’s the man painting a woman during a picnic in 1870. These mini-narratives keep it from feeling too repetitive.

But even though it’s easy to get stuck in the rhythm of just flying through the book, briefly glancing at each page, getting the gist, and moving on, stopping and really absorbing it pays off. There are so many unspeakably beautiful things contained in here. There are stretches where the disjointed panels get more and more crowded on each page, all from different time periods, and it feels like time is speeding up, like there’s a symphony going on around you and it’s crescendoing and beginning to deafen you. There are so many moments throughout the book where I felt overwhelmed, like I was coming to some sort of epiphany, where I felt all the walls of spacetime closing in around me. It makes you feel insignificant, like one impermanent blip in the greater scheme of things, but it’s also weirdly life-affirming somehow, in ways I can’t explain.

It makes you feel a lot of things. You feel curious; you want to get to know these characters, even though you never will. There are moments when you see the Earth as it was before humans, millions or billions of years ago, and you feel profoundly isolated, profoundly alone. Same goes for some of the panels set in the future. There are moments that are, intentionally or not, horrifying. The book feels like it was written by God, by an omnipotent figure who’s capturing these images throughout the history of the Earth, and it feels like you’ve accidentally stumbled into his office and seen his work. It’s a deeply disconcerting feeling—it almost feels like a horror movie, in a weird, indescribable way.

I remember a quote from Drew McWeeny’s review of The Witch: “Eggers manages to create a sense of mood and dread that is so suffocating at times that it feels like we’re watching something genuinely transgressive, something we should not be seeing.” Most people might not have that same reaction to Here, but occasionally I felt that way: disturbed, like I was being shown something beyond humans, something that I wasn’t equipped to process either intellectually or emotionally. It reminded me a little of watching Under the Skin, or the last act of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

And it’s strange, because this is a story with no characters, no consistent thing worth getting emotionally invested in—you could say ‘the space is a character,’ but that doesn’t describe it quite well, either, because it’s not sentient or anthropomorphized, and it changes forms so drastically. There’s nothing specifically emotional in the book, really; some might say that it’s a thought-provoking intellectual exercise, but a primarily clinical one. You’re not going to cry because a character dies, or because you’re really rooting for a romantic pairing. And yet there are moments reading this book where I found myself shivering, and there are moments when I thought I was going to tear up.

There’s too much I want to say here, and I could keep writing thousands of words and still not describe every thought-provoking image I encountered here, every connection I drew, every deeper thought I had. All I can say now is that you should read it.