Family fraying at the edges

FAST X

Director: Louis Leterrier Cast: Vin Diesel et al Rating: (M) ★+

I’ve long been a staunch defender of the ‘‘switch your brain off and enjoy’’, ‘‘big, dumb fun’’ movies that have populated the multiplexes since forever. I practically grew up watching Cgrade, straighttovideo action, scifi and horror flicks, which helped make me the, er, wellrounded cineaste I am today.

The Fast & Furious franchise is the literal definition of mindless entertainment, and normally I wouldn’t have a problem with that, but I swear that if I switched my brain off any more during Fast X I would have fallen into a coma.

The problems here are twofold. Firstly, director Justin Lin, who helmed five of the previous instalments, left the project early due to the oftcited ‘‘creative differences’’, which is always a bad sign, but bringing in an outsider for the 10th entry in a series where ‘‘family’’ is a key theme was obviously a mistake.

Secondly, for a film that is reportedly the eighth most expensive ever made, it looks surprisingly cheap and ugly, filled with unconvincing green screen, fakelooking CGI explosions, and boring, incoherent action scenes. How could you top the car chase in space in the last one? The answer, apparently, is not to try.

The thing is, in a postJohn Wick world, it simply comes across as tired, joyless and outdated. None of the actors look like they want to be there, yet by ending with the most uninspired cliffhanger in cinema history, it seems they’ll all be back again for that enormous paycheck. Because family.

Anew record offers the chance for reinvention but Dunedin songwriter Leah Hinton’s latest release, No Time To

Explain, presents more than the usual number of twists and turns.

The biggest surprise by far is that Hinton cocreated the LP, as part of her gothicpop solo project Murmur Tooth, with German house DJ and producer Lars Moston.

The collaborative album marks another pivot in Hinton’s lengthy songwriting career.

With a music degree from the University of Otago in hand, Hinton originally left Dunedin to embark on more than 10 tough years touring across Europe with various heavy metal bands.

One moment on the road sticks out in Hinton’s memory. ‘‘We were lost, laughing hysterically in a random Polish supermarket carpark,’’ she recalls.

‘‘The map looked like someone had smashed some typewriters on the ground and thrown away everything except the Zs and Cs’’.

‘‘That was the moment that I realised I was finally living the dream as a touring rocker,’’ she says.

But there was trouble on the horizon.

The band’s UK working visas were about to expire. ‘‘We had to go somewhere, I can’t actually remember how we decided on Berlin — it’s highly possible we