When I was a kid “Speed Racer” was a cartoon running on channel 20 in DC everyday after school. I’m pretty sure it followed “Ultra-Man” but came on before “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.”
Anyway, I remember Racer X, Sprittle, Chim-Chim, Pops, Trixie, The Mammoth Car, Mrs. Racer, and Speed himself. They all had big eyes (except Racer X), like they did on “Kimba the White Lion”, “Marine Boy”, and “Astro Boy” although I never connected them at the time. If you’d mentioned Japan to me I would have told you it was where humble house of Hashimoto was and sometimes they had giant monsters fighting each other near power lines and Jonny Socko’s robot.
And the people were all ventriloquists because their mouths never matched what they were saying.
Flash-forward a hundred years and I’m taking The Kid along with a bunch of other The Kids to the local Googleplex this weekend and dreading it. The movie is all CGI, runs over two hours and is made by the guys who drank their own Kool-Ade on the last two “Matrix” movies. But it’s The Kid’s friends and they’re all going to see it with their dads and The Tribe has spoken: The Pack is moving this way. Come on.
And I am undeniably curious. And it’s a matinee. They’re cheap(er). And how many movies can you go to where you don’t care if The Kid wants to go potty five times or just leave half-way through?
It’s why I agreed to see “Mr. Magorium’s Career Crematorium.” (Oh, Dustin…)
Okay, digressing. Back to business.
“Speed Racer” is a lot better than the good ol’ MainStream Media has led us to believe.
Honestly, if they were as tough on Bush/Cheney as they were on this movie we might be saying farewell to President Gore next year. Again, I digress…
The movie is still not for everyone and I must emphasize that if you are epileptic “Speed Racer” will kill you during opening credits.
It’s too long by at least half an hour.
The big “I’m a corrupt corporation and we run everything and I’m going to waste ten minutes telling you how it all started with Henry Ford and the Freemasons on the Tri-Lateral Commission” was another version of the Architect’s speech from whichever “Matrix” had Keanu watching himself in Adrian Veidt’s living room.
(BTW, could somebody tell Everybody that you don’t get to go on about How Evil the Big Corporations Are when you’re making a 120 million dollar movie for Time-Warner?)
Thanks.
All that being said, you’ve got a cast of great actors (doing fluff, I concede), somehow managing to perform in such a way that you never see them screwing up their eye-line looking for Jar-Jar’s head or otherwise suffering from Green-Screenitis.
Young Emile Hirsch especially deserves credit for playing low-key as a contrast to the exploding paint factory his character lives in. Really, what actor this side of Shatner could keep up with such kinetic mayhem?
Anyway, my impression is that this is the comic book movie Ang Lee tried and failed to make with “The Hulk.” It’s all wipes and spectacle and day-glo, Good and Fruity colors coalescing around a Mike Brady neighborhood and a series of race courses where impossible cars float sideways at 400 miles per hour and Newtonian laws of motion are just rumors.
It’s a slightly too precious joy-ride which will achieve status over time as the point at which games and movies really started to merge and actual constructed sets became more of an anachronism.
Last two points:
1. This will be the “drop acid” movie destination for this generation in the same way “2001: A Space Odyssey” was for the hippies.
2. Sacha Baron Cohen would have ruled as one of the bad guy Wacky Racers. I mean, I was actually looking for him in the shots…
Oh, and The Kid and his friends all loved it. They’re four and five years old.
As was I for a couple of hours.
That is all.
