Movie Review: Fast Five

                ‘Fast five’ has accomplished something no other movie has: summer has moved forward to this Friday, April 26^th. Usually summer begins on June 21^st but due to the extreme hotness and anticipation of the fifth installment of the “Fast and Furious” franchise, well; let’s just say that groundhog didn’t see this coming. How could he? It was moving too quickly for him, leaving him in the dust. That groundhog didn’t even see the shadow coming. 

                The movie starts with a bang. Kid Charlemagne (Vin Diesel) is busy crafting legislation to increase the tax on ethanol in Brazil. Brazil is facing a serious budgetary gap, and may otherwise have to cut social programs to the poor. On television Kid Charlemagne tries to explain to the nation how everyone will need to sacrifice for the betterment of society. Halfway through his speech of eliminating poverty, he says “Fuck it” and chooses to steal money using really fast cars. 

                Everyone is shocked in Brazil at how the dedicated civil servant fell so far from grace. He establishes himself as the major player in an international drug cartel. Financing the underground musical movement called ‘chillwave’ he increases drug consumption in the United States by over 350% during the summer of 2009. Kid is considered a god among men, and his revolutionary spirit of financing music to take drugs to have countless impersonators. Only Kid has a leg up on them as he worked at his university as a radio DJ during the pivotal hours of 11:00pm to 1:00am on Thursday nights. No one realizes this except for a lone US Federal Agent.

                A US Federal Agent named Steely Dan (played by Dwayne Johnson) remembers those sweet jams Kid used to play. Memories flood Steely’s mind, of him and his Cousin Dupree, of his good friend Dr. Wu who wrote him prescriptions to painkillers he’s now addicted to, and of his orgies with the Babylon sisters. Knowing how tough it is to kick the habit, he hopes to at least help Kid turn back to his old ways, of helping others. Plus, he worries about stronger strains of music being unleashed, requiring even heavier drugs. 

                Driving furiously after Kid listening to jazz-rock fusion from the 70s, he fails to stop Kid’s most recent contribution to the popular music blog “The Hype Machine”. After Salem’s newest album hits the site, the site becomes nearly overwhelmed. Heavier drugs become an in-thing among the cool kids in such hip, relevant places such as Austin, New York, Portland, Chicago and Minneapolis. Tears roll down Steely’s face as he sees how absolutely strung out of his mind the lead singer of Salem is, like he doesn’t even know what’s going on or why people invited him to play at South By Southwest.

                Steely Dan is perplexed. In this role, Dwayne lived with Bill Murray for six months to get down pat the goal of being a hip older man. Then he read various hip blogs for an entire year to hone the exact language his character would use as a cool dad. Putting this together took time, and there’s a lot of screen time dedicated to Steely Dan g-chatting with his teenage son in the US, telling him to avoid purchasing wrap-around headphones. By avoiding that kind of purchase, Steely hopes his son will continue listening to music on those shitty waxy IPOD headphones and avoid the hypnotic grooves of Dubstep and Chillwave.

                Years go by as Steely Dan plans his next move. He’s trailing Kid, who grows stronger by the day. An entire team is assembled by Steely, set on destroying Kid’s influence on the young people of Brazil and the United States. This 80s throwback nostalgia stuff only makes kids want drugs even more, reminding Steely of the botched efforts he undertook in the late 80s working with the Reagan administration. 

                Finally, Steely’s team goes into action. Driving cars so insanely fast they have been banned from Germany’s famous Autobahn, they spring into action. This is the most intense chase of the movie and the longest, lasting for nearly 30 whole minutes. While we watch them drive at unreasonable speeds in the Bugatti Veyron, we get the most character development and dialogue in the entire movie. Apparently Kid had developed impotence, making him rely on ever-increasing amounts of Viagra to please his hipster wife Sue (played by Zooey Deschanel). Combining their musical taste made them an unstoppable force.

                Kid is used to being the best driver. But Steely’s excellent handling and reckless driving has him worried. Having to choose between escape or releasing the latest music fad (Post-Chillstep, a mixture of Post Rock, Chillwave and Dubstep which instantly makes the brain crave unconscionable amounts of dopamine) he chooses to live another day. While frustrated, Steely is happy to have somewhat defeated him. The movie ends with Steely abusing prescription drugs listening to Neon Indian’s “Deadbeat Summer” wondering where he goes from here. Steely looks down at his feet, mumbling ‘Bad Sneakers’ before passing out. 

                Masterfully directed by Vin Diesel, Fast Five is easily the best of the “Fast and Furious” series. The exploration of good and bad, alongside the latest musical trends, makes it a movie capturing the moment. I’d strongly urge everyone to see this, for Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnston give the performance of a lifetime.

Mollom: Will it ruin millions of Spammers careers?

Mollom runs its business under the premise that you don’t want spam clogging up your website. Naturally you’ll only want the very best commenters so you can “have more time and energy to interact with your community”. They claim to have a 99.91% success rate in this field. But really, are they thinking about the little guy?

The little guy might enjoy your writing. But the little guy might like it so much that they must tell you about heavily discounted Viagra or getting better protection for your computer. Without this information, what will you do? How can your computer be protected against nasty viruses, and how can you sexually satisfy your significant other. 

Perhaps your writing attracts a certain loner, ready and willing to bring you the best in online advertising.  Maybe your website is the only way they can interact with humanity, since they suffer badly from agoraphobia. But Mollom doesn’t care about this individual. No, instead they are using the worst of internet etiquette against your very readership. In fact, they even bluntly state that they “kill unwanted content”. Honestly though, who doesn’t want to help out a member of royalty get their money out of their bank account for only a small fee? They even state that you’ll get a piece of the action, so Mollom just ruins that chance for you. 

Your readership has a right to explain how important their rights are as your faithful followers. Online spam advertising brings in billions of dollars of revenue, lifting thousands of people out of poverty every day. Of course, these heartless Belgians couldn’t care less. And isn’t it ironic that Belgians want you to be closer to your community, despite the very fact that their country is being torn apart by indifference to the concept of the nation state. Maybe they should stick to what they are good at, making waffles and being Europe’s Canada. 

 Benjamin Schrauwen appears to be the ringleader, having grown in the demo scene, a sick perverse underworld of nerdom so extreme I can’t even explain in here on a music blog, which in itself is extremely nerdy. Oh, he says he has a blog, but you can’t even follow the link. Some computer programmer this guy must be. Each morning when he wakes up he paraglides over the drab, featureless Belgian landscape, wondering why he hasn’t moved to a more physically appealing country. Maybe a country that has trees or anything resembling “soul”. As he is up there, he looks for the .09% of spammers he hasn’t caught, and, when he finds them, he immediately hits them with a dart containing a deadly combination of Nutella and rattlesnake venom. Every time a spammer on the internet can no longer make pointless posts about pharmaceutical products for cheap, Ben gets a new pair of wings (gliders).

If Ben is the ‘bad cop’, spying on others from far above, Dries Buytaert presents a more positive face to the unsuspecting public. For one, his blog actually works. There you see his inner most workings reveled, like the international conspiracy to rid the internet of spam, delicious, barely relevant spam. And you see how an amateur photographer works, very immaturely.

Together they have their pictures up on Mollum’s website with the requisite sunglasses. Sunglasses are needed to cover their eyes, since it has been said that “eyes are the window to your soul”. Rather than expose their true evil, these Antwerps hide their true colors. They talk about “spambots” as if they weren’t living things, complete with emotions, grammatical errors and misspellings. So heavy is their sheer gall that they even call desirable content ‘ham’ with little to no concern about vegans who may operate websites and may take offense to such harshly worded language.

Spambots are needed. People need to feed themselves off of Spam, not everybody has access to high quality food products like some Western European populations. And they don’t charge, but they say “you MAY never have to pay for our service”. By using the word may instead of will, they open you up to potential gouging, all the while hiding behind obtuse European laws. The laws which are so absolutely boring that even the Europeans who wrote them don’t care.  

They’ve already begun to charge. “Only 1 Euro per day” their site proclaims, but in US dollars that comes out to an unreasonable sum of money (via the collapse of the US dollar in foreign exchanges). Concern about the American way doesn’t end there. When asked if their system jeopardizes freedom of speech, they’re all like “Hells yeah it does, but it was like that when we got here”. Obviously this is an affront to the joy of speaking about offensive topics, like pornography or Nickelback. Falling back on an established way of doing things through the internet isn’t enough.

 America is number one at Spam making, so perhaps Europe just wanted a little piece of the spam pie. Mollum will allow our Spam making competitors to beat us. I mean, we’re literally light years ahead of Iceland’s spam making abilities (1 spam attack) or Norway’s (3). That’s pitiful. We need to continue being number one at this, so our economy can grow more robustly. It is the roughest economic downturn that America has faced since the Great Depression. Please Mollum, let us have this one, not just for me, but for my future children, who yearn to tell you about discounted pharmaceuticals and offensive images. Thank you.

Mollom