Here he comes, here comes Speed Racer!
May. 14th, 2008 11:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
loopychewSaw Speed Racer with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
damienroc yesterday at the Metreon in San Francisco, on an IMAX screen.
Short summary: Watch it on the biggest screen you possibly can, leave any notions that you are an adult behind for a couple of hours, have an absolute fucking blast, then turn your normality back on and never worry about watching it again.
Let's get the less-relevant stuff out of the way first. Outside of the setpieces, Speed Racer fuses the feel-good naïveté of 60's cartoons with the cheeseball slapstick found in 80's comedies. And somehow, it works. Between action scenes involving NINJAS!!!!!!, John Goodman's wrestling moves, the little excited kid in the background miming karate punches, and, uh, the monkey, the movie is goofy enough to charm.
There isn't much that can be said about the acting, because thanks to the fact that it resides in its own cartoon world, you don't really care about the acting. Or you wouldn't, if it weren't for the fact that the actor who plays Royalton (Roger Allam) manages to chew scenery so furiously that he makes you wish there were other memorable performances. Speed Racer was played by Emile Hirsch with the right amount of earnestness, but he can never shake off the fact that his character archetype is never really memorable. The same goes with pretty much everyone else, and I would argue that the ONLY reason Allam's role stands out is because of the nature of his archetype. The best that can be said about the acting in the film is that everyone seems to be having fun giving what would otherwise be considered phoned-in performances. I think it's a directorial wink to the audiences, though I wouldn't have believed so had it been a different cast and crew helming the show.
On the other hand, Christina Ricci has a blink-and-you'll-miss it helloooo red dress that I couldn't get enough of. Or maybe I just have a weakness for Christina Ricci.
So, yeah, the visual style. The racing is extremely OTT, but that's pretty much a given. Again, it really needs the biggest screen you can get to indulge in everything. I saw the first seven minutes ahead of time on my laptop, and thought it looked okay. The very same seven minutes on an IMAX screen were a wonder to behold.
They pull out all the stops for the second act, an obstacle course named The Crucible which would normally be The Big Race, except for the fact that they'd already mentioned the actual Big Race thirty billion times beforehand. Which kind of sucks, because The Crucible is where most of the really fun stuff lies. The ending serves as a climax to the character arcs that nobody really cares about (although it finishes in that Big Thrilling Climax complete with the character meditating on everything he's heard throughout the film), but The Crucible is where most of the all-out action is, including the use of the different buttons on the Mach 5, the crazy stunts, and all that jazz.
And boy, is it fun to watch. Going into the Metron, I joked withdamienroc that I wasn't ready to watch this movie without a heavy dose of Dramamine (or that's how it would've gone, if I hadn't botched the punchline by forgetting what Dramamine was called), but quite honestly, the racing sequnces WORKED. While from time to time it careens straight off the path of visually-inundating-but-cohesive into to what-the-fuck-just-happened-my-eyes-were-stabbed-with-pixels-land, for the most part the race sequences looked spectacular. Even the opening "race," in which a young Speed crosses the finish line after taking on a bunch of hand-drawn competitors, manages to be visually arresting. The sursursurrealistic appearance drives the race sequences straight through the Uncanny Valley and never gets out, which only adds to the cartoony feel of it all, thus marking one of the few times the Uncanny Valley benefits a film as opposed to detracts from it.
Even during the non-race sequences, you're constantly bombarded visually. There aren't a lot of straight cuts, instead using close-ups of characters as...uh...wiping agents (I honestly have no idea how to describe it, no matter how dirty that sounds!), keeping to the idea of Everything In Motion. Even a shot of Mom Racer making and serving sandwiches becomes a dynamic, dramatic shot when sandwiched between wipes of Sparky drawing out blueprints and Pops working on an engine.
And the color! It's like they took all the color that was missing in the Matrix Trilogy and shoved it into this movie instead. The whole aesthetic, between the color, the characters, and the settings, is what happens when the Wachowski Brothers force Tatsunoko Productions and Hanna-Barbera to have kinky, kinky sex at gunpoint. And although that sentence doesn't make sense, I like the way it sounds, so it stays.
Suffice it to say, visually the whole thing is arresting, but really, you don't expect anything less, or anything else, from the Brothers Wachowski. Which is why you want to watch it on the largest screen possible.
I can understand the poor reception of the movie amongst a lot of the critics out there. This pill is a pretty hard one to swallow for those people not used to a world full of the Wipeout games and Junkie XL. I had already turned down watching this movie once in favor of watching Iron Man a second time, 1) because I figured my uncle and I would probably be completely blind from the constant visual bombardment afterward (his nine-year-old son wanted to go watch it, while his twelve-year-old daughter wanted to watch What Happens in Vegas) and 2) the critics said "no, Speed Racer, no." I'm pretty thankful that what seemed like a whimsied suggestion at first actually happened, because I definitely got my fifteen bucks' worth out of the whole thing.
damienroc yesterday at the Metreon in San Francisco, on an IMAX screen.Short summary: Watch it on the biggest screen you possibly can, leave any notions that you are an adult behind for a couple of hours, have an absolute fucking blast, then turn your normality back on and never worry about watching it again.
Let's get the less-relevant stuff out of the way first. Outside of the setpieces, Speed Racer fuses the feel-good naïveté of 60's cartoons with the cheeseball slapstick found in 80's comedies. And somehow, it works. Between action scenes involving NINJAS!!!!!!, John Goodman's wrestling moves, the little excited kid in the background miming karate punches, and, uh, the monkey, the movie is goofy enough to charm.
There isn't much that can be said about the acting, because thanks to the fact that it resides in its own cartoon world, you don't really care about the acting. Or you wouldn't, if it weren't for the fact that the actor who plays Royalton (Roger Allam) manages to chew scenery so furiously that he makes you wish there were other memorable performances. Speed Racer was played by Emile Hirsch with the right amount of earnestness, but he can never shake off the fact that his character archetype is never really memorable. The same goes with pretty much everyone else, and I would argue that the ONLY reason Allam's role stands out is because of the nature of his archetype. The best that can be said about the acting in the film is that everyone seems to be having fun giving what would otherwise be considered phoned-in performances. I think it's a directorial wink to the audiences, though I wouldn't have believed so had it been a different cast and crew helming the show.
On the other hand, Christina Ricci has a blink-and-you'll-miss it helloooo red dress that I couldn't get enough of. Or maybe I just have a weakness for Christina Ricci.
So, yeah, the visual style. The racing is extremely OTT, but that's pretty much a given. Again, it really needs the biggest screen you can get to indulge in everything. I saw the first seven minutes ahead of time on my laptop, and thought it looked okay. The very same seven minutes on an IMAX screen were a wonder to behold.
They pull out all the stops for the second act, an obstacle course named The Crucible which would normally be The Big Race, except for the fact that they'd already mentioned the actual Big Race thirty billion times beforehand. Which kind of sucks, because The Crucible is where most of the really fun stuff lies. The ending serves as a climax to the character arcs that nobody really cares about (although it finishes in that Big Thrilling Climax complete with the character meditating on everything he's heard throughout the film), but The Crucible is where most of the all-out action is, including the use of the different buttons on the Mach 5, the crazy stunts, and all that jazz.
And boy, is it fun to watch. Going into the Metron, I joked with
damienroc that I wasn't ready to watch this movie without a heavy dose of Dramamine (or that's how it would've gone, if I hadn't botched the punchline by forgetting what Dramamine was called), but quite honestly, the racing sequnces WORKED. While from time to time it careens straight off the path of visually-inundating-but-cohesive into to what-the-fuck-just-happened-my-eyes-were-stabbed-with-pixels-land, for the most part the race sequences looked spectacular. Even the opening "race," in which a young Speed crosses the finish line after taking on a bunch of hand-drawn competitors, manages to be visually arresting. The sursursurrealistic appearance drives the race sequences straight through the Uncanny Valley and never gets out, which only adds to the cartoony feel of it all, thus marking one of the few times the Uncanny Valley benefits a film as opposed to detracts from it.Even during the non-race sequences, you're constantly bombarded visually. There aren't a lot of straight cuts, instead using close-ups of characters as...uh...wiping agents (I honestly have no idea how to describe it, no matter how dirty that sounds!), keeping to the idea of Everything In Motion. Even a shot of Mom Racer making and serving sandwiches becomes a dynamic, dramatic shot when sandwiched between wipes of Sparky drawing out blueprints and Pops working on an engine.
And the color! It's like they took all the color that was missing in the Matrix Trilogy and shoved it into this movie instead. The whole aesthetic, between the color, the characters, and the settings, is what happens when the Wachowski Brothers force Tatsunoko Productions and Hanna-Barbera to have kinky, kinky sex at gunpoint. And although that sentence doesn't make sense, I like the way it sounds, so it stays.
Suffice it to say, visually the whole thing is arresting, but really, you don't expect anything less, or anything else, from the Brothers Wachowski. Which is why you want to watch it on the largest screen possible.
I can understand the poor reception of the movie amongst a lot of the critics out there. This pill is a pretty hard one to swallow for those people not used to a world full of the Wipeout games and Junkie XL. I had already turned down watching this movie once in favor of watching Iron Man a second time, 1) because I figured my uncle and I would probably be completely blind from the constant visual bombardment afterward (his nine-year-old son wanted to go watch it, while his twelve-year-old daughter wanted to watch What Happens in Vegas) and 2) the critics said "no, Speed Racer, no." I'm pretty thankful that what seemed like a whimsied suggestion at first actually happened, because I definitely got my fifteen bucks' worth out of the whole thing.
