Worth Mentioning - Having Sex for Buicks

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning. 

Vin Diesel gets called a butthole and Jennifer Lawrence is a maneater.

FAST X (2023)

I used to consider the Fast and Furious franchise to be a guilty pleasure of mine. I really enjoyed the first few entries in this goofy action series. I loved The Fast and the Furious because it was so similar to Point Break. 2 Fast 2 Furious continued the fun. I enjoyed The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, even though it was almost completely separate from the films that preceded it. Fast & Furious was a bit of a downer, but things swung back up with Fast Five. I enjoyed Furious 6 and Fast & Furious 7 to a lesser degree... and while the spin-off Hobbs & Shaw is decent fun, The Fate of the Furious was less fun, and F9 lost me so much that I had next to zero interest in Fast X when it was released. But I was guaranteed to see it at some point, because once I’ve seen entries in a franchise I don’t let any further entries go by without a viewing. When I did get around to watching Fast X, it didn’t win me back – I still greatly prefer the early days of this series – but at least it was more entertaining than F9.

Justin Lin, who directed several of the previous movies, was going to direct Fast X as well, and still receives writing credits alongside Dan Mazeau and Zach Dean. But during the first week of filming, Lin ran into creative differences and decided to walk away, handing the helm over to The Transporter and The Incredible Hulk director Louis Leterrier – and this was an infusion of fresh blood that really seemed to bring a new energy to the film. Leterrier did a great job directing (and, with editors Dylan Highsmith and Kelly Matsumoto, cutting together) the action sequences in this movie, making them entertaining to watch even when they happen to go a bit too far over-the-top for my taste. The first major sequence involves a giant bomb rolling through the streets of Rome, and as soon as I saw how Leterrier brought that sequence to the screen I was already putting Fast X above F9 in my ranking of the series.

Another thing that boosts Fast X above the previous entry is the addition of Jason Momoa as the villain Dante Reyes – who happens to be the son of the villain from Fast Five, and is out to avenge his father. Momoa clearly realized the Fast and Furious franchise has become a joke by this point, and he came to the set ready to play. He makes Dante a total maniac who cackles and dances his way through scenes, making nearly every moment with him a delight to behold. We know this is all ridiculous, Momoa knows it’s ridiculous, so let’s just laugh our way through it together. A highlight comes when our hero Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) punches Dante, knocking out one of his teeth... and Dante tosses the tooth at him while calling him a butthole.

Dante causes a lot of trouble for Dom and fellow returning heroes Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), Roman (Tyrese Gibson), Tej (Chris “Ludacris” Bridges), Mia (Jordana Brewster), Han (Sung Kang), Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel), and Little Nobody (Scott Eastwood), as well as former villains turned heroes Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham) and Jakob Toretto (John Cena), plus another villain who might be receiving an undeserved redemption arc, Cipher (Charlize Theron). How Dom will end up forgiving his ex Elena, the mother of his son Little B (Leo Abelo Perry) back in The Fate of the Furious remains to be seen. Maybe Elena will somehow turn out to be still alive, like almost everyone else who has been “killed off” in this series. In the meantime, we meet her sister Isabel (Daniela Melchior). Kurt Russell’s Mr. Nobody is absent, but his daughter Tess (Brie Larson) is around, as is Shaw’s mother Queenie (Helen Mirren) and... for some reason... Dom’s abuelita (Rita Moreno). Reacher star Alan Ritchson is added into the mix as a new character called Aimes, and there are a couple surprise cameos.

Notably missing is the late Paul Walker and his character Brian, who somehow manages to avoid these villains that keep coming after his family and friends. The franchise hasn’t been the same since Walker passed away and it doesn’t make sense within the world of the films that his character never shows up. In some ways, the franchise ended when Brian drove away at the end of part 7 and it’s just being dragged along with sequels that aren’t nearly as effective as they used to be. But at least there’s some fun to be had when watching Fast X, thanks to Leterrier and Momoa.

NO HARD FEELINGS (2023)

The passage of time never ceases to amaze me. Or disturb me. When Life Between Frames was first starting out, so was the acting career of Jennifer Lawrence. Her breakthrough role came in the 2010 film Winter's Bone, where she played a 17-year-old. She became an A-list star, took a brief break / slowed down her output a bit, and now she's the star of the comedy No Hard Feelings - where, since so much time has passed since Winter's Bone without me being aware of how much time was passing, she plays a 32-year-old character who strikes up a frowned-upon "relationship" of sorts with a 19-year-old. A kid two years older than the character she played in Winter's Bone. Time is a mind-boggler.

Lawrence's character is down-on-her-luck Maddie Barker, an Uber driver and bartender with commitment issues. When her car is repossessed, Maddie is desperate enough to answer a Craigslist ad posted by a wealthy couple, Laird and Allison Becker (Matthew Broderick and Laura Benanti). The Beckers are offering a nice Buick Regal to any experienced woman - ideally someone in the first half of their twenties - who is willing to date their socially awkward 19-year-old son Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman), who has never had a girlfriend, and give him a taste of life before he heads off to college later in the year. Maddie has her share of experience and figures giving Percy a good time won't be much of an issue.

Maddie didn't count on just how awkward Percy turns out to be, and Feldman does a terrific, highly entertaining and endearing job of playing the character and showing how he gradually comes out of his shell. In the meantime, Maddie makes several amusing, unsuccessful attempts to seduce the guy so she can get her Buick. Lawrence and Feldman both display great comedy skills throughout the movie - and Lawrence even gets a surprise laugh by participating in a fight scene while fully nude.

No Hard Feelings has a raunchy set-up, but it also has something that's very important for this sort of comedy: it has heart. We come to care about Percy as the story plays out, and we see that Maddie has more depth than she initially seems to. As a sidenote, it makes great use of the Hall & Oates song "Maneater" as well.

Directed by Gene Stupnitsky, who also wrote the screenplay with John Phillips, this is a solid comedy that was released in a time when there aren't enough straightforward comedies reaching theatres. (Instead, most of them seem to go to streaming services.) We need more theatrical releases like this.