Fast Five: If you want to know what this review is about, see my icon

I am the first person to get extremely annoyed at slashers. Look, you people have all the goddamned right in the world to think two dudes (or ladies, but you do so less often) are boning each other because they were friends/were enemies/said "hi" to each other/shared an overlapping second of screen time together. But it's very irritating to those of us who appreciate seeing homosociality (same-sex, deep and abiding friendships) done well onscreen. Because those relationships are devolved into slash. VERY ANNOYING.

That being said, linaerys linked me to this fantastic, soon-to-be-on-TV-Tropes-if-it-isn't-already idea of No Heterosexual Explanation Moments. This nice blogger has a very good point. Occasionally, you watch something and you know that there is absolutely no feasible way to explain any of what's going on other than two people, of the same sex, are clearly hot for each other. Or, at least, one of them is. Take Spartacus: Blood and Sand. (No, please. Take it.) There be more titties flying over that show than you can get in a night out on a coochie bar crawl with the crew of Girls Gone Wild. Spartacus and his beeeeeeest friiiiiieeeeeeend, uh, what's his name, Cupid? They're both mourning women they cannot have because they're imprisoned/because she's dead, whatever. (A prison where you turn into an unstoppable killing machine? Hard to see how that plan could go wrong for the guards!) But even my father knows that Cupid wants Spartacus more than he wants air. No, for real, I watched one episode, mid-season, of that show with my dad, and after one scene went down, I just blurted out, forgetting I was with my Dad, "Wow. Cupid wants Spartacus so hard." My Dad, definitely embarrassed, probably uncomfortable, but ultimately honest, said, "You know, I think you're right."

That, ladies and gents, is a genuine "No Heterosexual Explanation Moment" right the fuck there. And that is what The Fast and the Furious series of movies has become. ( No spoilers, just some thoughts. )

Fast Five was ridiculous, but I feel like critiquing it on those grounds is pointless. It's like being mad that the dancers in something like Step it Up 2 or whatever aren't good actors. Are you there to see a plot, with logical procession from conflict to climax to resolution, or are you there to see Vin Diesel get into a fight with The Rock? Yeah, I thought as much. My brother-in-law and younger sister were talking about the biggest chase (because naturally there were several) and how implausible it was. For my part, I kept mum because a) it's nonsensical to make an issue out of how unrealistic The Fast and the Furious movies are, since that's what you pay for, and b) I was certain my grumpiness over the fact that women were completely without agency in the movie wouldn't impress anybody. (I said I wouldn't go into it, but, come on. The movie is almost blithely indifferent to how multi-cultural its cast is, even though the white guys are the stars, but women? They are to be having the sex with. And maybe working the phone during the heist.)

What's interesting to me is the overt interest in turning this franchise into something more like the Ocean's Eleven movies. The very premise of drawing together all the characters from other films to fill certain roles, and even giving those roles specific names (not as clever as the ones in the Ocean's movies, but you get the idea), is an attempt to move beyond Macho Posturing: The Series. I find it funny that they went that route in the most macho-est, posturing-est outing to date.

Feel free to agree/disagree in comments. There will probably be spoilers!

Addendum to my last post

Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott talk about the increasing presence of violent women in cinema. I'm not sure it's worth investing one of your 20-articles-a-month freebie reads at the NYT for, seeing as they say nothing really new. I did, however, appreciate this point made by Dargis:

I complain about the representations of women, but I’m more offended when in movie after movie there are no real representations to eviscerate, when all or most of the big roles are taken by men, and the only women around are those whose sole function is, essentially, to reassure the audience that the hero isn’t gay. The gun-toting women and girls in this new rash of movies may be performing much the same function for the presumptive male audience: It’s totally “gay” for a guy to watch a chick flick, but if a babe is packing heat — no worries, man!

Bingo. This touches on what I was trying to say earlier about how this latest Fast and Furious movie seems more gay than previous ones (despite my not remembering exactly how often the men in the first movie were shirtless together). NHEMs aside, so long as there is a sop to heterosexuality--a hot chick with a semi-interesting personality (she doesn't have to be that interesting, which is how Kate Hudson has a career)--the movie gets to skate the gay issue. (Not so with slashers, but then the slashers can slash anything. And they do.) But when you literally remove every single female character, there's nothing left. I mean, that's how it appears to the decidedly heteronormative folk, even me (and I'm the one who was rolling her eyes at BSG for the way they didn't--and then, worse, did--engage with the gay characters.)

Like it or not, if there's a chick between two guys, the movie is not gay. It can be SO GAY, like Top Gun gay, and the 18-49-year-old dudes it's aimed at will never see it, and a good chunk of us hetero ladies will miss it (or not think it's as bad as reputed). I could see it, if I squinted, in The Fast and the Furious, but I like it better without that spin. Once you get down to Fast Five, and the tokenism of the lady-parts-having characters is that blatant? You can't squint to not see it.

I also share their interest--though not their concern--about violent ladies in cinema these days. A.O. Scott makes a good point about how it's creepy that a lot of them are young girls being shepherded by father figures. But otherwise, I don't subscribe to Dargis' point that this is two steps forward and two steps back. There is something to Scott's claim that the movies emphasize the woman's ability to fight at the expense of her sexuality (often as a means of pre-empting her sexuality). That's a valid point to make, seeing as we argue at women in the public sphere all the time to be perfect--maybe not killing machines, but definitely at every thing else--while insisting that "good" women haven't got sex drives at all. I don't know that the films reinforce that belief so much as reflect it, is all I'm saying.