The Fate of the Furious Sends a Message

There are two seasons in the movie business. Masturbate to aren't we artistically diverse time, and make money time. April through August is unadulterated cash money time. Also known as the time of movies people want to see without being told why it's important they do so. There's nobody on Facebook explaining why you should support The Fate of the Furious.

The Fate of the Furious killed it again at the box office over the weekend. It's the umpteenth sequel to a film franchise that openly mocks the need for any dramatic convention, or a plot or story or interesting characters. It's bare tits away from being perfect. Michelle Rodriguez pegging Vin Diesel would be near-perfect, though admittedly uncomfortable in its approximation to reality.

Less well popularly received was Katherine Heigl in Unforgettable. That film tanked in time for lazy entertainment reporters to use it's own title in headlines against it. The science is settled. Nobody likes Katherine Heigl. Even the women who defend her in public secretly loathe her for reasons they can't put into words, yet feel to the core of their being. They teamed Heigl up with a female director which by some politically correct magic was meant to reverse all voodoo curses. This movie was better when it was called Sleeping With the Enemy, and even then not particularly good. Everybody loves Julia Roberts for the same inexplicable reason they hate Katherine Heigl, so Sleeping With the Enemy scored big at the box office back in the day.

The $100 million blockbuster genocide romance The Promise played to largely empty theaters. The producers are blaming Turkish loyalists blackballing the film on the web for its failure while noting that it still provided tremendous publicity for the issue of the 1916 Armenian genocide. The investors must be thrilled that their massive financial losses proved socially positive in some narrow niche. A three album box set from System of a Down would've been far cheaper.

It's great sport watching the film industry attempt to craft an image completely different than what the great bulk of its customers actually care about. The porn movie industry knows to keep its First Amendment PSA's to a minimum sidebar. Ask yourself what a sixteen year old boy wants, exactly, and give back exactly that. That is both porn and The Fate of the Furious. Cha-ching.