Critical and Curious

The final chapter in the Fast and Furious story has begun. Fast X, directed by Justin Lin, features the return of family members from the past, new family members like Lil B and Abuelita, and a new villain that mirrors Dom in a myriad of ways. We talk about what Jason Momoa brings to the franchise, the dramaturgical integrity across nearly a dozen films, and the increasing  absurdity of stunts and dialogue that has become a hallmark of Fast and Furious. 

In the third and final installment of Season 2 Episode 13, we discuss John Wick: Chapter 4. Although the film is the longest (169 minutes), John Wick only utters 380 words, a strategy by Keanu's own design revealing his vision for the character. We describe how – by removing himself from the dialogue and in some cases the screen all together – the audience is encouraged to question the simplistic discourse of media violence in some of the most historic Parisian locales. John, along with Ted and Neo, are clearly Keanu passion projects, and we should all be so lucky.   

In the second installment of Season 2 Episode 13, we discuss Keanu's reprisal of Neo in Matrix Resurrections (2021). We debate the goals of the film, both from the perspective of the audience as well as from the perspective of Lana Wachowski and Keanu Reeves. Although the film was widely considered the “worst” in , and what it means for the discussion of Keanu's agency. We talk about the new Thomas Anderson, the dichotomy of joy vs. profundity in the franchise, and connect the story to our other seasons. 

In the first supplemental episode of Season 3, we return to where we began: West Side Story (2021) directed by Stephen Spielberg, starring Rachel Zegler, Ansel Elgort, Ariana DeBose, and Rita Moreno. We discuss the evolution of mainstream social awareness over the past 60 years and how this impacts the production and meaning of the film (a phenomenon Charisse refers to as “historical HD”), including the role of gentrification in racial and class-based strife, the attempt to rectify the racial offenses of the first film, and how Rita Moreno's return provides a nuanced take on the Romeo and Juliet story itself.  

We return to Season 1 of our podcast to discuss The Fast Saga (AKA F9), which features the return of director Justin Lin along with Han and other characters from films past including Sean Boswell and Twinkie (F3), Stasiak (F4, F6), Queenie and Owen Shaw (F7, F8), and Cypher (F8) as well as John Cena as Dom's brother Jacob. We talk about the flashbacks that summarize 30 years of the Toretto family legacy, the self-referential awareness that Lin brings back to the family and the franchise, and the embrace of Roadrunner cartoon aesthetics. And magnets, we also talk about magnets.  

In Part 1 of Season 2's Episode 13, we discuss the revival of Theodore “Ted” Logan in Bill and Ted Face the Music (2020). Bill and Ted continue to struggle as musicians, husbands, and now fathers, but it's clear that Ted's experiences have diverged from Bill's somewhere in the 30 years since their bogus journey, a sly but important narrative point. More importantly, we fawn over Billie and Thea, musicologists who are just as silly and lovable as their fathers, and their potential to continue the franchise.

In this Season 2 supplemental episode, we return to our star study of Keanu Reeves with a focus on his cameos in Always Be My Maybe and Toy Story 4. Released within weeks of each other in 2019, Keanu's characters are deeply flawed yet delightfully unaware in both films, continuing his embrace of the beta male and commenting on mediated expectations. Along with brief mentions of Keanu (2012) and The Spongebob Movie: Sponge on the Run (2021), we discuss Keanu's willingness and eagerness to laugh at himself.

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We discuss Hobbs and Shaw (2019) in this Season 1 supplemental episode, Dwayne The Rock Johnson, Jason Statham, Vanessa Kirby, and Idris Elba star in this off-narrative comedic extension of the Fast and Furious universe that elaborates and parodies many elements of the franchise. The hilarious antagonism, the existential villains, and the conflict between the family you have and the family you make. Filled with great dialogue and profound commentary, the film continues to show us where this series can go.

Our final episode discusses Aleta Chappelle’s Romeo and Juliet in Harlem (2017). Crowdsourced and shot on site, it is the first and only version to feature a cast composed entirely of people of color. As our only female director this season, Chappelle brings an innovative approach to the story by featuring Harlem as a character to create some of the best scenes in the film, and embracing the feminine by casting Benvolio as a woman and showcasing the relationship between Lady Capulet, Juliet, and the Nurse.

In this season’s penultimate episode, we discuss Carlo Carlei’s Romeo & Juliet (2013) written by Julian Fellowes (Downton Abbey). Fashioned as the millennial Romeo and Juliet, it features teen stars Hailee Steinfeld, Kodi Smit-McPhee, and Ed Westwick alongside Damian Lewis and Paul Giamatti. Despite the A-list cast, the beautiful scenery, sets, and costumes, and some very striking photography, the film falls flat and often feels like a big budget high school performance instead of a major Hollywood movie.

Since its release in 2011, Gnomeo & Juliet has become a post-postmodern classic. This 3D computer-animated fantasy romantic comedy directed by Kelly Asbury and written by a team of ten writers, features an overwhelming mashup of Romeo & Juliet, Elton John songs, and pop culture references. However, the film’s refreshing take on essential elements - the initial meeting, the balcony scene, the wedding scene - creates a Shakespeare appetizer for young viewers and almost makes up for its desperate hodgepodge.

In the pandemic, Bob and Charisse go back in time to discuss Shakespeare in Love, the 1998 Oscar Best Picture starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Joseph Fiennes, written by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard. We originally thought it was a film built around Romeo & Juliet but not a true Romeo & Juliet story. We were wrong. The film is not only a retelling of our classic tale, it retells Shakespeare himself by literally pulling back the curtain, winking at Shakespearean scholars, and embracing early modern fan culture.

We discussed Jonathan Levine’s Warm Bodies (2013) in March 2020, just as COVID began to ravage the US, but the conversation is just as relevant 8 months later. From playing with the traditional components of Romeo and Juliet to adding a common enemy, the film hilariously adapts the Bard and postulates how love is both comic and tragic even in the apocalypse. One of Bob Thompson’s favorites, the film takes on new meaning in a world where we struggle to find human contact in the midst of a global pandemic. 

Set in a military academy, Alan Brown’s Private Romeo (2011) is a love story between two young men where Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is the ancient grudge forbidding this pairing, even though it is never mentioned. Brown liberates the text from its minimum daily requirements and embraces a brilliantly pedestrian approach - jumping between a high school class struggling with Romeo & Juliet to the struggles of love and hate in the hallways of an empty school - to juxtapose how we learn and how we live Shakespeare.

The 2008 independent film David & Fatima sets Romeo and Juliet in Jerusalem and frames the story as a microcosm of the longstanding religious and ethnic conflicts in the region. Producer Luigi (Kari) Bian and director Alain Zaloum’s combination of  history, social commentary, and romance swings between cliché and profund. However, the narrative decisions that openly defy the original text offer an interesting perspective on the Shakespearean philosophy of fate and the inevitability of star-crossed lovers. 

Romeo Must Die (2000) is a hip hop martial arts mashup starring Aaliyah and Jet Li. Despite Bob’s desire to detach this movie from the original text, Charisse insists that this reimagining complicates the rivalry by fleshing Ladies Montague (Kai) and Capulet (Mac) and sacrificing Po (Mercutio) and Colin (Tybalt) early on. We also read Aaliyah as a real-life Juliet, whose onscreen kiss with Jet Li did not test well with "urban audiences" despite her not-so-secret romance with R. Kelly just six years prior.

In this episode, we take a sharp detour away from Hollywood representations of traditional romance to discuss Tromeo and Juliet (1996), a grotesque RomCom by Troma Entertainment, an indie production company. If you can get past the dismemberment and incest, the film features a tongue-in-cheek read of the sexuality of secondary characters and a (T)Romeo and Juliet who take control of their lives in a new world (New Jersey), all while surrounded by the visceral aroma of meat. Watch, listen, and love; if you can stomach it. 

Baz Lurhmann’s 1996 Romeo + Juliet, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Daines, along with John Leguizamo, Paul Rudd, Pete Postlethwaite, Paul Sorvino, and Harold Perrineau, was one of the highest grossing adaptations of the story. We discuss Luhrmann’s unique visual style and his unabashed hodgepodge of traditionalism, pop culture, and current events, from Mexican Catholicism to The Graduate to the unrest in Los Angeles in the early 1990s. 

In the midst of the social unrest of 1968, Zeffereli’s adaptation of Romeo and Juliet discards the social commentary established by West Side Story, and focuses instead on the simplicity of teenage lust.  We discuss the embrace of the original text and Elizabethan style and the strategies of storytelling in what would come to be one of the most critically acclaimed versions of Romeo and Juliet.

In the first episode of the third season, Charisse and Bob describe why Romeo and Juliet is the ultimate postmodern fodder and the process of tackling 1 story across 10 (eventually 12) different iterations. They then focus on how West Side Story (1961) – by foregrounding the racial climate of the time – launched the understanding of Romeo and Juliet as a blank canvas on which current events could be inscribed.

In the final episode, we discuss Reeves’ newest long-term project, John Wick with three films to date, John Wick (2014), John Wick Chapter 2 (2017), John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum (2019). We explore the fetishization of violence, the complexity of forgiveness and vengeance, and the march toward absurdity that inevitably accompanies franchise films. With John Wick, Keanu proves that he is the hardest working man in show business, laying bare his kinesthetic acting methodology and his commitment to the craft.

In this episode, we discuss Generation Um... (2012) and Knock Knock (2015), two films from wildly different genres with common themes. In both films, Keanu plays an aging man eager to reclaim his youth opposite two younger women eager to offer themselves as solutions to his midlife crisis. Charisse L’Pree and Lani Diane Rich of Chipperish Media discuss the goals of film, gendered roles, and the deployment of rape fantasies in pop storytelling. Trigger Warning: Discussion of rape.

In this episode, we discuss Keanu’s embrace of East Asian legends and the free will of warriors in Man of Tai Chi (2013) and 47 Ronin (2013). Despite geographic similarities, the two films are wildly different in their storytelling and authenticity: whereas the former features Keanu taking a back seat to the world of Tiger Chen in his directorial debut filmed mostly in Chinese, the latter features Keanu artificially inserted into Japanese history. However, he plays characters in both films that are narratively marked as mixed, thus engaging with his own multiracial roots, and inspiring the title of the episode: kao, or warrior in Hawaiian.  

In this episode, we discuss Keanu Reeves’ other worldliness in Constantine (2005) and The Day The Earth Stood Still (2008). Both of these stories are adaptations of earlier content, and, in choosing these films, Keanu repeats his status as reluctant savior, continues to problematize the concept of free will, and embraces the jadedness that he has been “dress rehearsing” for decades. We talk about the philosophy of Keanu Reeves and the tricky business of auteur theory in these critically panned films.

In this episode, we talk about Keanu Reeves’ venture into sports comedies between Matrix movies, including The Replacements (2000) and Hardball (2001). Both movies are loosely based on true events, establishing characters that are both dynamic and cliché. We talk about how Keanu talks back to the sports comedy genre, the use of specific songs in both films, and his ever present reluctant hero, which manifests in a complicated representation of the White Savior. This episode is dedicated to the memory of Lorraine Branham, Dean of the Newhouse School at Syracuse University who passed on April 2. She was a wonderful captain who led our team over the past decade through some very trying times for the media industry. It’s been an honor sharing the field of battle with you. 

In this episode, we celebrate the 20th anniversary of The Matrix with an extended analysis of Keanu Reeves’ character Neo across all 3 films in the franchise: The Matrix (1999), The Matrix Reloaded (2003), and The Matrix Revolutions (2003). We talk about the Wachowski’s masterpiece as a culmination of Keanu Reeves’ career to date and the series’ legendary status in popular culture.

In this episode, we discuss A Walk in the Clouds (1995) and Feeling Minnesota (1996). The duality of Romantic Keanu is evident in these two films: one has an abundance of sentiment and the other, an absolute dearth. However, both films feature good guy Keanu saving the damsel in distress, often at his own peril, and the complex emotions from him that we have come to love. Lani Rich (chipperish.com) joins us to talk about the story structure of romances.

In this episode, we discuss Johnny Mnemonic (1995) and Devil’s Advocate (1997). With these films, Keanu embraces projects in which he is deeply interested, taking pay cuts and criticisms to work with William Gibson, Robert Longo, and Al Pacino. We discuss the nature of free will and dependency, the Bible, and the duality of self in these two films and across all of Keanu’s films to date.

In this episode, we discuss Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), Much Ado About Nothing (1993), and Little Buddha (1994). In each of these roles, Keanu brings his own interpretation to classic characters, which is met with harsh critique and high praise. We talk about his accents, his brownface, and how these films capitalize (rightly or wrongly) on his blank innocence. NOTE: This episode runs long in order to address all three films.

Keanu Reeves capitulated into Hollywood in the early 1990s with Point Break (1991) and Speed (1994). These two roles established him squarely and a thoughtful action hero. We discuss the psychological backstory in Point Break and the lack of in Speed, the evolution of Keanu’s Everyman, and the metaphor of Los Angeles on screen.

Keanu Reeves was introduced to the American public consciousness with Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989) and My Own Private Idaho (1991). Both buddy films, Keanu simultaneously demonstrates an acting range and a consistent presence that has defined him for 30 years. We discuss the American Dream, healthy male-male relationships, and Keanu's ability to draw on the audience's underestimation. 

The final film in the series, Fate of the Furious starts in Cuba on Dom and Letty's honeymoon and ends in New York City with the next generation of family. In our final discussion, we talk about the redemption of the Shaw family, Cipher, the first female villain in the series, and the comedic gravitas of Rome and Hobbs. We also discuss possible spinoffs to keep the family going. Watch the Trailer for Fate of the Furious (2017)

We discuss the seventh film in the franchise, the first film post-Justin Lin, the last to feature Paul Walker, and the theme of of shadows and ghosts. Directed by James Wan and on the other narrative side of Tokyo Drift, we also speculate on possible additions to the family. Watch the Trailer for Furious 7 (2015)

In this installment of the conversation we talk about the franchise's transition to absurd, over-the-top, 1980s television, from the opening credits to the oldest soap opera trick in the book: amnesia. We also talk about the representation of villains in the movies and Shaw's analysis of Dom's "code." We also talk about our own codes. Watch the Trailer for Fast & Furious 6 (2013)

The fifth discussion addresses the evolution of the franchise as the family comes together in Rio. We talk about the self-awareness of the franchise as well as the representation of Brazil, fatherhood, and the introduction of Hobbs as Dom's even twin. We also talk about which actors or actresses we would like to see join the franchise. Watch the Trailer for Fast 5 (2011)

In the fourth installment, we discuss the franchise's transition to the revenge film genre, the biblical references in Letty's resurrection as an automobile, and Dom's embodiment of the Lone Ranger as his Charger rears for battle. We also talk about the short film, Los Bandoleros (2009), the prequel to Fast & Furious released a few months after the film, and we suggest cities for future Fast and Furious movies. Watch the Trailer for Fast & Furious (2009)

In the third conversation, we discuss the visualization of Tokyo, the inescapable concept of a gaijin, and the way class privilege manifests in the series. As the first of four films in the franchise directed by Justin Lin, we talk about the film as a symbol of stories to come. We also answer the question: When have you felt like a gaijin? Watch the Trailer for The Fast and The Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006)

In the second installment, we talk about what John Singleton brings to the franchise, diverse representations of Black masculinity in Rome and Tej, and Brian's trip east from LA to Miami in the 2 Fast 2 Furious Turbo Charged Prelude (2003). Profs L'Pree and Thompson also answer the question: Who is your Roman Pierce? Watch the Trailer for 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003)

In the first discussion, we explore what makes the Fast and Furious franchise so endearing, including automotive ballet and bromances, the lack of the "damsel in distress," and Racer X, the inspirational 1998 article from VIBE Magazine. We also answer the question: What was your first car? Watch the Trailer for The Fast and The Furious (2001)