The Fast And The Furious Japan
Enon Zoberman
Ah yes, The Fast and the Furious, our old standby. As you know, we are working our way through the extended catalogue of The Fast and the Furious films in preparation for the newest release in April. This week, we got to the cult classic of the series: Tokyo Drift. Loved by few, loved-to-hate by many, Tokyo Drift is a special member of the Fast and the Furious franchise and has found its way into the hearts of many. We thought it deserved an extra-special meal.
It should not come as a surprise that we chose Japanese for our meal. Instead of our gourmet Sharknado approach to Japanese food, we decided to honor the spirit of the Fast and the Furious movies by making quick and tasty food that everyone can enjoy, possibly even on the go. Looking at you Japanese Businessman who commutes the work over an hour a day, drinks at night and needs something to fill the void of a stomach in between.
For our appetizer, we made mixed vegetable tempura (天ぷら). Here at Munch, sometimes we set our sights high, and this time around we decided not to stop at just two types of vegetables but instead picked five: king oyster mushrooms, lotus root, green beans, kabocha, and the strongly flavored shiso leaf. We imagined that these fried vegetables were exactly the kind of snack that Han would like to munch on in his free time or really any time, knowing Han.
Next up, we made gyudon (牛丼) for our main course. Gyudon is a common quick eat in Japan, the kind that we could see Han picking up on his way home from a night out at a secret back room club that is already within the secret back room of another club that also happens to have access to a large garage of cars. Making it was pretty simple: we just sauted an onion and thin-sliced beef, added a little bit of sake, mirin, and soy sauce, poured a couple of whisked eggs over it, and then served it all over a bed of rice. We garnished it with chopped green onion and pickled red ginger.
We concluded the meal with ice cream covered with homemade mochi. We made some with plain vanilla ice cream, inspired by the packs often sold in Japanese convenience stores, and the exact kind that Han probably gorges on in between drifting and collecting money for the Japanese mafia. We also added red bean paste to some and made a few with green tea ice cream.
Ben: 88% I will confess that I am the one that actually owns this film, in all of its Full-Screen DVD glory, and I am completely okay with that! This movie is a lot of fun, as is the whole franchise, with one big caveat: you have to be able to turn your brain off for a little bit. Even with Tokyo Drift being the low point in the series, at least critically, the change in style of racing really gave the series a new set of wheels that seems to have allowed them to go that extra mile. There seems to be no stopping on this high speed adventure, and I doubt that there will ever be a finish line in sight. If you feel like going for a ride, hop in on this hot wheels of a movie franchise. (In other words if you have not partaken in the wonderful world of The Fast and the Furious, you should do so soon.)
Another option is that Han actually DID die in Tokyo Drift, and Tokyo Drift takes place between F6 and F7. In F7, we will be re-introduced to an older, faster, and more furious Sean, and he will have several flashbacks featuring Han. Maybe this movie will start out with that same Vin-Sean scene, and Sean just hops in the car with Vin. Or maybe Vin has to beat Sean in a race to earn his trust first. Yeah, the movie is actually probably going to start with a Sean-Vin race. Prediction: Vin wins, so Sean owes him a favor.
After Sean wrecks a construction site during a car race, the judge offers him a choice: Juvenile Hall, or go live with his father in Japan. So here he is in Tokyo, wearing his cute school uniform and replacing his shoes with slippers before entering a classroom where he does not read, write or understand one word of Japanese. They say you can learn through total immersion. When he sees the beautiful Neela sitting in the front row, it's clear what he'll be immersed in.
"The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift" is the third of the F&F movies; it delivers all the races and crashes you could possibly desire, and a little more. After only one day in school, Sean (Lucas Black) is offered a customized street speedster, and is racing down the ramps of a parking garage against the malevolent D.K. (Brian Tee), who it turns out is Neela's boyfriend.
The racing strategy is called "drifting." It involves sliding sideways while braking and accelerating, and the races involve a lot of hairpin turns. The movie ends with a warning that professional stunt drivers were used, and we shouldn't try this ourselves. Like the stunt in "Jackass" where the guy crawls on a rope over an alligator pit with a dead chicken hanging from his underwear, it is not the sort of thing likely to tempt me.
The movie observes two ancient Hollywood conventions. (1) The actors play below their ages. Although the "students" are all said to be 17, Lucas Black is 24, and his contemporaries in the movie range between 19 and 34. Maybe that's why the girls in the movie take their pom-poms home: They need to remind us how young they are.
They are also rich. After Sean wrecks the red racer that Han (Sung Kang) has loaned him, he has access to a steady supply of expensive customized machines, maybe because Han likes him, although the movie isn't heavy on dialogue. "I have money," Han tells Sean after the first crash. "It's trust I don't have." He lets Sean work off the cost of the car by walking into a bathhouse and trying to collect a debt from a sumo wrestler. Meanwhile, in the tiny but authentic Tokyo house occupied by his father (Brian Goodman), a U.S. military officer, Sean has to listen to a movie speech so familiar it should come on rubber stamps: "This isn't a game. If you're gonna live under my roof you gotta live under my rules. Understood?"
Yeah, sure, dad. Sean is scorned in Tokyo as a gaijin, or foreigner, and that gives him something in common with Neely (Nathalie Kelley), whose Australian mother was a "hostess" in a bar and whose father was presumably Japanese, making her half-gaijin. "Why can't you find a nice Japanese girl like all the other white guys?" Han asks him. Luckily Neely speaks perfect English, as do Han and Twinkie (Bow Wow), another new friend, who can get you Michael Jordans even before Nike puts them on the market.
The racing scenes in the movie are fast, and they are furious, and there's a scene where Sean and D.K. are going to race down a twisting mountain road, and Neely stands between the two cars and starts the race, and we wonder if anyone associated with this film possibly saw "Rebel Without a Cause."
What's interesting is the way the director, Justin Lin, surrounds his gaijin with details of Japanese life, instead of simply using Tokyo as an exotic location. We meet the sumo wrestler, who will be an eye-opener for teenagers self-conscious about their weight. We see pachinko parlors, we see those little "motel rooms" the size of a large dog carrier, and we learn a little about the Yakuza (the Japanese Mafia) because D. K.'s uncle is the Yakuza boss Kamata (Sonny Chiba). One nice touch happens during the race on the mountain road, which the kids are able to follow because of instant streaming video on their cell phones.
Lin, still only 33, made an immediate impression with his 2002 Sundance hit "Better Luck Tomorrow," a satiric and coldly intelligent movie about rich Asian-American kids growing up in Orange County and winning Ivy League scholarships while becoming successful criminals. That movie suggested Lin had the resources to be a great director, but since then he's chosen mainstream commercial projects. Maybe he wants to establish himself before returning to more personal work. His "Annapolis" (2006) was a sometimes incomprehensible series of off-the-shelf situations (why, during the war in Iraq, make a military academy movie about boxing?).
But in "The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift," he takes an established franchise and makes it surprisingly fresh and intriguing. The movie is not exactly "Shogun" when it comes to the subject of an American in Japan (nor, on the other hand, is it "Lost in Translation"). But it's more observant than we expect, and uses its Japanese locations to make the story about something more than fast cars. Lin is a skillful director, able to keep the story moving, although he needs one piece of advice. It was Chekhov, I believe, who said when you bring a gun onstage in the first act, it has to be fired in the third. Chekhov might also have agreed that when you bring Nathalie Kelley onstage in the first act, by the third act the hero should at least have been able to kiss her.
If you are a Fast and Furious fan, you will argue the franchise is outright the best car-based movie franchise ever. But that only holds true if you only consider the first few releases, where the franchise adhered to some semblance of believability. Recent films have switched from street racing to big-budget action-packed sequences with stunts that defy all laws of physics. The only thing everyone can agree on is that the Fast and Furious franchise featured plenty of cool JDM cars and helped fuel a car culture revolution.
The two decades of movies helped shape the automotive landscape and elevated the sport-compact scene from a subculture to the mainstream. This, while helping create lots of car enthusiasts. Cars too benefited, with Japanese imports getting lots of love. For instance, the Honda Civic, once a hand-me-down car from parents, was now subject to modification after the first Fast & Furious film came out.
The franchise has always featured cool Japanese cars in all their movies. Craig Lieberman might have played a crucial role in including JDM cars in the first two movies, and the tradition has lived on to date. Here's our pick of the coolest Japanese cars featured in the F&F franchise.
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