Speed Racer
So I
saw this Speed Racer movie over the weekend.
I guess after doing a lesbian erotic thriller and a trilogy of fetishistic action pictures that were blamed for inspiring
school shootings, the Wachowski Brothers took the
next natural step and made a kids movie set inside a piñata.
This
film is designed to take you back to your youth with lots of flashing lights
and dinky music, and since I spent most of my youth at raves on ecstasy this is
a pretty accurate depiction of what I remember without the part where I wake up
in a cold sweat lying in parking lot outside of Montreal having pissed my
leather trousers.
The title
character is pretty easy to identify with, as a child he spent all his time in
school doodling drawings of car crashes.
Like we all did. He then grew up
to be a guy like Johnny Cash (as depicted in the film Walk The Line) who
broods in locker rooms about the death of his brother before hitting the stage
on which he entertains his audience who are not Folsom Prison convicts in this
movie. He participates in races to the
death, such as those depicted in Death Race 2000, again minus the
convicts. He’s stuck in a competition
that seems to be rigged against him and the only way he can beat the corrupt
forces manipulating the contest is to win, like Undisputed 2: Last Man
Standing only without the convicts.
Speed Racer’s
parents are played by John Goodman and Susan Sarandon, both of whom have large
breasts, but in this film they have produced three flat-chested
sons. I guess that sort of gene skips a
generation. But despite not really
looking alike, the whole family shares an obsession with racecar racing. It’s pretty hard to discuss the acting in a
movie like this that is clearly trying to be corny and hokey. It’s hard to fail as an actor in a movie this
over the top. In the context of this
film, you can’t overact because the movie is so over the top, and an
unintentionally bad performance would probably come across like a purposefully
tongue-in-cheek joke. On the flip side
there’s no room for subtlety either and a good performance could just as easily
be lost in the shuffle.
However I will
single out John Goodman as giving another great performance. I maintain that he was robbed of an Oscar for
his performance in The Big Lebowski, and seeing
him here just refreshed my respect for him an underrated actor. Somehow he comes out of this movie giving a
performance that is neither silly nor lost in the special effects. And he gets to rumble a bunch, proving that I
always look forward to a good John Goodman fight scene. Plus he’s got a moustache and I liked that.
This film takes
place in a colourful cartooney futuristic world like Ultraviolet. But instead of using the futuristic setting
to make some tired statement about the downside of fascism (HINT: it starts
with a holo and ends with a caust)
this film’s future resembles our own time in that big corporations are above
the law and use their control of the media to endear themselves to the public
they exploit. The Racer family has to
put up with all sorts of shit like big corporations trying to kill them with
car bombs, kinda like that movie Michael Clayton
or The Insider only this movie is slightly more believable and more
socially relevant like Josie and The Pussycats.
But to me this
film was like the Japanese version of Robert Altman’s Popeye in its
quest for bringing the absurdity of a short cartoon to life in a feature-length
film complete with dinky music, one dimensional characters, goofy humour and
wacky visuals. And I think I mean all
those things as compliments in this case.
I’ve never seen the specific cartoon on which this film is based, but
they really capture the frantic feel of most of the Japanese children’s cartoon
shows I’ve seen such as Pokemon. Matthew Fox plays a dude called Racer X who
looks like Mega Man from those old video games I used to play and I would
probably see a Mega Man movie with him as the star. And the hyperactive use of transition effects
and blasts of color fit right in with the Japanese children’s cartoon artform.
But every now
and then you get a true Wachowski moment. There’s a confrontation early on between
Speed and the evil corporate dude in his tower that is a direct lift from the
confrontation between Neo and The Architect from Matrix 2: Reloaded. The corporate dude just suddenly breaks his
facade and goes into rapidfire monotone microeconomic
jibberjab, confronting Speed about all his
misconceptions about the world in which he lives. It was really freaky. He didn’t say “ergo” or “vis-à-vis” but fuck
me if they weren’t implied.
There’s also
some genuine vintage Wachowski eroticism in a scene
with Speed and his girlfriend Trixie parked on
lover’s lane. The conversation dances
around all this innuendo by overuse of the word ‘this’.
Trixie would say
something like “So you’re still into this (motions to own breasts
or crotch with suggestive head nod)?”
Then they cut
to Speed starring at her breasts “I’m definitely into this.”
“So this (motioning again to own body) is what you want?”
“This is
good. Really good.” (Still starring at her knockers and licking his lips)
This sexy
dialogue is interrupted by a monkey popping out of the boot and I’m sure the
producers had to make sure that the Wachowskis
literally meant that the animal called a monkey would actually pop out of the
boot of the car because if I was reading this passage in the script and it said
‘then his monkey pops out of the boot’ I’d figure it meant something
dirty.
I’ll say the
romance in this movie is probably the biggest step forward against the
conventions of family-oriented blockbuster genre. This movie actually shows that the hero can
be a nice skinny guy and actually have a girlfriend at the start of the movie. Normally in this type of film we get a skinny
hero who has to beat some asshole jock teenager (played by a hulking 35 year
old bodybuilder) to prove to his dreamgirl that the
jock asshole is a jock asshole and that he’s a nice guy and worthy of her love
despite being small-shouldered, slender and played by a 25 year old.
So there’s none
of that Transformers / Spiderman style bullshit about skinny
dudes having to save the world just to get a fucking date. All they have to do is ask, and that happened
before the movie even started. There’s
also none of that Spiderman bullshit where the couple has to have a
fight before the big final action sequence so that it has more meaning or so
that the lady can end up in peril and therefore saving her takes the place of
makeup sex in PG-13 action movies. So
Speed and Trixie are just two kids in love who talk
dirty/clean to each other before his monkey pops out of the boot, so good for
them and good for cinema. The strength
of their bond warmed my heart.
Like the Fast
and the Furious movies, this racing movie stresses multiculturalism by
showing how different cultures are united by the desire to go fast. The bad guy is pretty multicultural in that
he acts like a stereotypical French guy, speaks with an English accent, and
mentions that his childhood was in German.
I also feel that this film has the potential to unite the world by being
the cause of equal amounts of epileptic seizures in all cultures. But I still prefer any given Fast and the
Furious movie over this. So as for
the overall movie, I had an okay time.
It was nice to see all those little Wachowski
touches thrown into a kids cartoon and makes me hope David Lynch gets to bring
his vision of Teletubbies to the big screen
some day. The dinky cutsieness
of it all made me smile for one viewing, but I wouldn’t really jump to watch it
again or a sequel.
If you liked this, here are some other dinky
articles with cheesy music that John Goodman shows up to fight:
Danica Fuckin’ Patrick: Crossing the Motherfuckin’
Line
Danica, you’ve won
the checkered flag of my heart.
The most in-depth analysis of this groundbreaking film franchise
in the world.
Puppet sea life movie week
continues.