katikat | Ramble On, Wednesday Edition

Gal Gadot - Gisele from Fast & Furious was cast as Wonder Woman in the next Superman movie: link. Good. I like her. Loved her as Gisele. She is Israeli and she was in the army, so she CAN kick ass!

Regarding the completion of Fast 7, it looks like their insurance company might end up being the one who decides if the whole movie will be scraped or completed: link. If they scrape it and throw away everything Paul filmed, it will be frickin' disrespectful! I would hate that more than if they killed Brian off, to be honest. Paul was so proud of his work on this movie...

ETA: They now officially shut down the production while they contemplate what to do next: link.

An interesting take on why Brian O'Conner needs a happy ending in the Fast & Furious franchise:

More importantly, Mr. Walker’s death has dealt a potentially serious artistic, and thus potentially financial, blow to the franchise as a whole. The long term peril to the long-running cars-and-crime franchise is not to be dismissed. Because the franchise gave Brian O’Conner and Mia Toretto a newborn child, Brian is arguably the one character in the franchise that can’t be easily written out without negating the entire series’s emotional arc.

The Fast & Furious series is rooted in its character relationships and mythology as much as its action spectacle. The surrogate family unit headed up by Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, and Jordana Brewster forms the emotional backbone of the series which makes the action and stunt work matter beyond pure pyrotechnics. The entire “arc” of the last several films has been one of creating and keeping the family whole. The fourth film was about avenging the death of a loved one, the fifth film was about providing a stable environment for a new child, and the sixth entry was about retrieving a lost family member. Keeping Brian, Mia, and their son a cohesive whole, making sure young Jack had a father like Dom’s (active and participatory) rather than Brian’s (a complete non-entity in his son’s life) is the thing what makes their adventures “worth it”. It’s what made us care (...).

Killing off Paul Walker’s character in an action-based fashion (explosion, gunfire, etc.) directly or indirectly due to his involvement with the Toretto “family”, leaving his wife a widow and his young son without a father, would invalidate the central narrative arc of the films up to this point. It would make the entire franchise an exercise in failure on the part of these characters who have fought so hard and risked so much to keep their family whole. A theoretical happy ending for Brian’s immediate family is absolutely essential to the franchise as an emotionally satisfying journey. (...) If the franchise is to continue, there needs to be a “happy” reason for Brian O’Conner to never show up again.

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The cause of Paul Walker's death was revealed. He didn't die on impact, the cause was burning: link. FUCK IT! This is just getting worse and worse!