Still no new ideas from Hollywood

So I'm watching television the other night and it seems the promo machine is running full-time now for the newest Fast and Furious installment. If you haven't heard of it, it's called "Tokyo Drift" and supposedly features a "new" (to Americans anyway) style of racing that involves tail-sliding a lot...

And what really irks me is that once again Hollywood is going to bastardize and glamourize a routine phenomenon... which in turn will suddenly inspire a bunch of punk-@$$ kids to start spending money on impractical upgrades and driving recklessly across North America.

I remember one time years ago walking around town and my friend ridiculed a suped-up sport compact (I think it was a Honda Civic, but I don't remember anymore). I kept my mouth shut. For my own opinion, I thought it was kinda cool that someone who had a love for the little import car had it in them to try to squeeze the last drop of juice out of it. Who knew that a year or two later, following the film The Fast and Furious (which wasn't such a bad film, by the way), that the import tuner scene would suddenly explode the way it has? That local tuner was ahead of his time.

Fast forward to 2004 and Inital D is the hottest anime/manga/video-game series in Japan... And a Hong Kong studio decides it's high time to make a live-action adaptation.
If you can - find it in an import DVD shop - the Hong Kong disc has English sub-titles on it and like most HK flicks, is region-free so don't worry about compatibility. This film has humour and action and a passion for life, love, and family. And if you can overlook the inherent cheesiness of HK film (and Jackie Chan notwithstanding), it's actually superior to the Fast and the Furious in many ways.

But one thing's for sure, drifting has been around Japan racing circuits for years and was nicely covered in "Intial D" (which by the way also feature realistic drift-racing scenarios on secluded mountain roads) nearly 2 years before Hollywood caught on.