After seven-and-counting entries heavily dedicated to gravityless, CGI-assisted bank robbing/international espionage antics, it can be easy to forget that the Fast & Furious franchise was once about racing cars. The earlier films were far more modest affairs, with a commitment to foregrounding racing melodrama and practical stunt work which reached its apex in the series’ third film, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. After a street race with one of the kids from Home Improvement causes an astonishing amount of property damage, high school delinquent Sean Boswell (Lucas Black) gets shipped off to live with his father, a perennially soused Navy lieutenant stationed in Tokyo. Almost immediately, Sean is back to his old ways, linking up with another young American car nut, Twinkie (former kiddie rapper Bow Wow), running afoul of a local organized crime syndicate (with a leader played by legendary martial artist Sonny Chiba), and mastering “drifting,” the locally popular racing technique in which cars slide laterally through corner turns. Unique not only for being an essentially stand-alone entry in the series, but also for its focus on a particular regional racing niche, Tokyo Drift has become the cult favorite of franchise aficionados and skeptics alike, wedding kinetic racing action with leering chrome-and-fiberglass porn in a hymn to the grace of Japanese auto balletics. 

Preceded by: “Routemaster – Theater of the Motor” (Ilppo Pohjola, 1999) – 17 min – 35mm from The Film-Makers’ Coop