Speed Racer: The Movie

[anarky]

You do that.

And you know why?

He's a demon on wheels. He's a demon and he's gonna be chasing after someone.

(Never let it be said that the theme song had deep lyrics.)

[Ran]

Ok, it was a 4 minute behind the scenes bit. I didn't know John Goodman and Susan Surandon were in it.

[anarky]

The first couple of reviews seem to be negative, blasting the movie for its total disregard of physics, silly characters, and focus on cartoony races.

Um... sounds like a good thing to me.

I'm going to assume none of these folks ever watched a Speed Racer cartoon in their lives, and probably didn't even know it was a cartoon until their editors told them that they should mention the old show.

[mabudon]

Total disregard for physics?? Silly Characters?? Focus on cartoony races??

NEGATIVES????

what were they expecting, "Manufacturing Consent" by Noam Chomsky??

I bet once they found out the main character's actual name was "Speed Racer" their stupid minds folded up like an origami crane and then exploded.

I HATE the whole "seriousness" that we're all supposed to crave from FUCKING ENTERTAINMENT nowadays, like you 'Nark all's I can think is that these folks are joyless douchebags who would sit through 8 straight hours of "gripping courtroom drama" and actually have god things to say about it no matter how overwrought, emotionally exploitative and soul-crushingly boring and pointless it really was.

A movie based on a ridiculous cartoon actually looking "too much like a silly cartoon"?? Why didn't Pirates OTC not get panned for being completely historically innacurate??

with negative reviews saying such ridiculous things about it, sounds like the media is afraid of it for being too awesome- I mean films like Mission Impossible had pretty much the exact same "faults" and it got a bunch of "EXHILIRATING!!!!" soundbites



hahaha total disregard for physics... I wonder if since the Holocaust doesn't take up a good part of the film it's "blatantly anti-semitic" too- guess we'll have to take a look when it streets

Anyways, the fact that everything named a a problem also happens to be exactly the same as my "demands" list for it, I am pretty excited. And I'll wager NewsBot is too

[anarky]

To prepare you all, I bring:

The five greatest Speed Racer parodies ever!

Honorable Mention: Chim Chim's Bad Ass Revenge by Fishbone
This didn't rank, because I know nothing about it aside from seeing it in a clearance bin once and not getting it. I'm not sure it even counts, as I'm only assuming it's referring to the Chim Chim.

5: Family Guy
This was one of their earlier "random pop culture moments," and falls pretty flat. The funnier moment, which I can't find online, is later in the episode. "Ha ha! Peter Griffin is going to [somewhere]!" "Ha ha! This plot twist does not involve us at all! Ha ha!"

4: Volkswagen commercial
This should be unfunny, but it's not. Not truly hilarious, but enjoyable for half a minute.

3: Robot Chicken: "Gold Dust Gasoline"
"It's important that I do not move because if I were to move that would add to the cost, so if I stay perfectly still that will be preferable to moving because animation costs money. Awhhhhh."

2: Dexter's Laboratory: "Mock 5"
Frigging awesome. Every detail is perfectly spoofed, right down to Dee Dee playing both Racer Dee and herself (who is thought to be dead, though she isn't), with Monkey as Chim Chim. The best line is something like: "I'm Dexter's sister Dee Dee and I once was a racer and everyone thought I was dead but I really was not dead and now I race under the disguise of the mysterious Racer Dee because everyone thinks I'm dead but if I'm dead I can't help Dexter win the race. [pause] I have a monkey."

1: Speed Racer itself
How can you argue that any parody is sillier than the real thing, when this is the opening sequence. I can see that a billion times and still laugh my ass off at the fiery explosion around 0:40. It just so does not fit with everything else.

[anarky]

I just found this.

I wasn't even aware of it. That's fucking scary. Like "Speed Racer Meets the Shitty 1990s Marvel Cartoons."

And, uh, I dunno about this, either.

[Diabolical]

Sponge did a badass version of the theme song back in the 90's.

[anarky]

I just watched the first episode of Speed Racer: The Next Generation.

Fuck me, that was bad. It's another attempt to make Speed Racer "hip" and "current." It hasn't worked before, and it's not working now. So much of what makes Speed Racer great is how cheesy it is. That's why I think the movie is going to rock. It looks like it's taking a property that resists updates, and trying to duplicate it, warts and all, on the screen. The only other movie I can think of that attempted this was Dick Tracy.

The animation is some of the worst I've ever seen. I don't mean bad in the same way as the original, where they're cutting corners and working out ways to get around it, which doesn't always work. This is just lousy. I especially hate anything that clumsily mixes CG and hand-drawn animation. Why have the studios not realized that it looks no less shitty than it did a decade ago?

And Jimmy Palmiotti was one of the co-writers! WTF? The guy who inked so many great comics back in the day? He should stick to tracing.

The only credit I will give this is that there were a few clever, well-done homages to the original. Like a photo of the original Speed Racer that is directly out of the old show. Clever or not, it doesn't mesh with the "updated" stuff.

A pice of carp to rival the Genral Grevos Trans Former if ever there was one.

[mabudon]

oyes, the "new adventures" were fuckin terrible- I was SO excited when I heard about it, and I don't think I saw the entire first episode, practically everything baout it was wrong wrong wrong

And you know, I BET that we would have gotten a version of Speed that looks VERY much like that POS if whatever combintaion of luck and good pitches didn't get tossed around at the exact right time

Furthermore, I expect that a New Adventures-type pice of carp is what these reviewers would have praised- I bet the (obvious to me) TOTAL lack of angst really screamed "unrealistic" to them idiots

[anarky]

Next Generation is on now (I'm not sure from your post if you're mixing up the two shitty remakes), airing Fridays on Nickelodeon. You might appreciate it. I made myself watch the first episode, hoping it would pick up, but I won't waste anymore time on it.

[mabudon]

damn, thanks I WAS mixing them up- figured YOU were mixing them up but didn't even want to see a single image from "New Adventures" to confirm same...
I guess I could give it a shot...

[anarky]

By "appreciate it," I meant it's a train wreck, but you might enjoy seeing the nods to the original until they get really heavy-handed. The statue of Speed Racer that's the still from the end of the credits is cool. The robot monkey called Chim Chim is not.

[anarky]

Review from the Hollywood Reporter:

Flashy "Speed Racer" quickly wipes out

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Amid the push by filmmakers to deny photo reality in favor of animated impressionism comes the Wachowski brothers' "Speed Racer," a movie that gives the sensation of being trapped inside a 3-D video game.

In this aggressively rudimentary emotional drama designed -- literally -- around impossible racing car action, actors are painted into a cartoon world through computer-generated imagery and vividly colored backgrounds as images move across the screen like shifting panels in a comic strip. The basic laws of gravity and aerodynamics aren't simply denied; they are totally repealed.

Sounds to me like they totally nailed it. The Wachowskis, that is. This guy apparently isn't familiar with Speed Racer at all.

I didn't get any sort of "video game" vibe. Honestly. What's been shown definitely looks fake, but it one be one goddamned confusing, unplayable game.

While multitudes of young people the world over undoubtedly will make a dash for this new movie experience from the siblings who created the "Matrix" series, the film plays very young. Unlike a Pixar cartoon that embraces as wide an audience as possible, "Speed Racer" proudly denies entry into its ultra-bright world to all but gamers, fanboys and anime enthusiasts. Story and character are tossed aside to focus obsessively on PG-rated action and milk-guzzling heroes.

"Story and character...tossed aside"? Again, dead on. The whole thing about the movie "proudly den[ying] entry...to all but gamers, fanboys and anime enthusiasts" is pretty telling. It says the reviewer not only never watched the show, but somehow never even heard of it. It's a fucking household name.

The Warner Bros. release, derived from a '60s Japanese cartoon television series that is itself inspired by a Japanese manga, opens in North America on May 9.

The film, which the Wachowskis also wrote, pits the Racer family of car nuts -- Rex, long dead thanks to race track malevolence; young brother Speed (Emile Hirsch); Pops (John Goodman); Mom (Susan Sarandon); kid brother Spritle (Paulie Litt); and a chimp named Chim Chim -- against an evil automotive magnate (Roger Allam). He fixes races, probably killed Rex and when Speed turns down a lucrative driving contract, he means to destroy the Racers.

Yawn. This is what we call "mandatory encapsulation of the plot."

Speed and his family-designed car, the Mach 5 -- which looks like a souped-up Corvette by ways of Q's gadget factory in the James Bond series -- take on this Evil Empire in race after race, with help from the mysterious Racer X (Matthew Fox), Speed's multitalented girlfriend Trixie (Christina Ricci in her least interesting role ever) and a ambiguous Japanese racer (Korean pop singer Rain).

Again telling is that the guy has to explain what the Mach 5 looks like. Dudes in deepest, darkest Africa who've never heard of electricity and eat outsiders know the Mach 5.

Like any good video game, each race happens in a completely different environment from tropical island loop-the-loops to a race that starts in a North African desert, takes off into a Mediterranean Grand Corniche and winds up at the Brandenberg Gate. The possible miscalculation here are the wearying number of races that all look alike no matter what the backgrounds. Two climatic races might be one more than any film can successfully sustain.

Again with the video game comparisons just because it's easy. And the complaint about "wearying number of races." Here's the formula for just about every Speed Racer story: "Speed wants to race, but Pops forbids it. Racer X warns him not to race. He races anyway. The race makes up about 60-80% of the story. There's a rival, who usually grudgingly winds up working with Speed to overcome some dastardly villain. The villain is ultimately more silly than harmful. Even Spritle can beat up his henchmen. Racer X kicks some ass. Speed wins the race. It's painfully obvious that Racer X is Rex, but everyone's too stupid to get it. Mix with a copious amount of silliness involving Spritle and Chim Chim, usually involving them hiding in the trunk and eating impossible amounts of candy. There can be no real development of character whatsoever. Everything must end with the status quo as it began."

Anything but that is fucking with perfection. There's a reason everyone and their brother know this show (except this reviewer and a few other people living in a cave), and only a relatively small handful have seen Akira, which is, no question, a far better-made anime.

There is a certain desperation at work here where the filmmakers seek to offset story lags -- i.e., everything between the races -- with chimpanzee tricks, kid-brother hijinks, Ninja martial arts by the whole family and a raft of vicious yet harmless villains.

Hmmm.... Isn't that what I just said was the description of every Speed Racer cartoon, in slightly different words? Sounds to me like they nailed it, unlike every time when they try to make a goofy property more serious and wind up fucking up badly.

By the way, Mister Reviewer-Who-Gets-Paid-To-Be-Ignorant, "ninja" should not be capitalized. I'm going to assume you have no access whatsoever to a dictionary or even the internet.

The whole thing, curiously enough, reminds you of Disney's 1982 "Tron," the very first attempt to make a live-action movie look like something spit out by a computer.

Huh?

I'm not questioning the guy's opinion here, but that is an astoundingly weak way to end a review.

[mabudon]

well, between the review and your comments you pretty much said anything I could have said man...

I LOVE how it complains both ways about how there's A) too much racing AND that B) the stuff BETWEEN the racing is too much

What would they have preferred a fuckin black screen for 2 hours??


fuck that guy, I bet he'll be impressed with the gripping realism of the magic skull in Indy


I am SO excited for this flick it hurts. I am especially interested in seeing how the Crucible race works- I am pretty sure that's the one in the trailers etc where the Mach 4 (red car) and the Mach 5 keep kinda "switching"- the mach 4 will go into a turn in the past and then it'l morph into the present/future Mach 5, every scene like that is cool in that it really ties the whole Racer Family history together

[mabudon]

here is a GREAT review, sounds fuckin perfect- the MACH 5 parks in the middle of the Racers house!!