2 FAST 2 FURIOUS

Critics: 36%
Audience: 59%

While I wish I could write about nothing except Fast and Furious movies, we jump right in to the second film in the series because the first was actually too good.

Allow me to get my opinion straight: this is not a good movie.  It is nothing but horrible dialogue, terrible CGI car races where everything blurs into looking like they're jumping to lightspeed in Star Wars, and borderline offensive, over-stereotyped characters throughout.  It's also probably not a great sign that it's 'theme song' is Act a Fool.


However, you get to watch Paul Walker over-act for 100 minutes.  Add Tyrese Ludacris, and a host of other actors that you recognize from 'that that thing,' and Eva Mendes, and it's a fairly entertaining movie.  More importantly, the Fast and Furious series is as American as it gets, and every American should be celebrating every frame of it.

Here's a simple litmus test: watch the following clip, starting at 1:45.  If watching Paul Walker and Tyrese be this bad at acting doesn't entertain you, you're in for a long movie.

One other thing stands out while watching a street-race movie: the cars are really bad.  The first movie at least had Vin Diesel driving some different cars, including an awesome 1970 Dodge Charger.  2 Fast has... a lot of Mitsubishis?  Even the lead actor can't pretend like they're cool:

It's one of the two worst movies in the series, but it's probably a necessary evil in order to appreciate the wonderfulness of Paul, Tyrese, and Luda in Fast's 4-7.  And if you happen to really enjoy horrible dialogue and acting by America's early 2000's poster boy, all the better.

Out Cold: A Truly TRBL Movie

The first question that always comes up about the blog is, what kind of movies is it really going to be about?  Well, Out Cold is at the top of the list.  Just check out it's stats:

Critic's Rating:  8%
User Rating:  82%

This is exactly the kind of spread we're looking for.  Out Cold has everything you can look for in a movie: the star of a classic whose career never panned out, 8 years after the hit (Jason London, the QB from Dazed and Confused; perpetual supporting cast members (David Denman, aka Roy from The Office); 70's TV action star Lee Majors; a former Playmate; comedy's perennial Andy Richter David Koechner; and to top it all off: the one and only Zach Galifianakis.

If you're one of those people that think Zach's style has gotten old since The Hangover in 2009, you might be surprised to learn that it he's been doing it for over a decade, ever since he started "performing his unique brand of humor in the back of a hamburger joint in Times Square."

So what do you get when you put all of these actors, along with the fat kid from Bar Santa, together?  A snowboarding stoner-movie loosely based on Casablanca....?

That's right.  These back country-boarding stoners are movie buffs, apparently, although not very classy ones.  References are scattered throughout the movie, most notably by substituting a fake Cancun spring break bar called Pedro O' Horny's into Bogart's "We'll always have Paris" line.  Oscar-worthy stuff.

Summary
Here's what you're going to get with this movie.  Are there painful-to-watch stretches of terrible dialogue, with jokes that target 14 year-olds that still don't land?  Absolutely.  But the critics got it wrong.  You get exactly what you would expect from this cast, along with some pretty solid heli-boarding shots.  82% audience rating can't be that wrong.