Speed Racer!: Go?

Speed Racer!: Went.

Shumina

The idea of Speed Racer could have been cool. But not in the hands Of Emile Hirsch or the Wachowskis.

BowlingForDollars

I so wanted you to be wrong about Speed Racer, but I went to see it Saturday night and it sucked. Also, there was hardly anyone else there.

I will never doubt Defamer again.

extracrispy

Yeah, couldn't see this one coming. Target audience: kids. Only built-in audience: fans of old school anime (virtually no one). You could see this one miles away.

Mel Gibstein

Cue sarcastic "ha ha" from Simpson's character...

CourageousCoward

How wrong was I about this one! Wow.

Benovite

@Monsieur.Mind: The editing was extraordinary. But other than that, no. It was not experimental or avant-garde or anything of the sort. How do we know? Because it has no audience. Look at The Fountain, which Warners also had no idea how to handle but at least had the good sense to position it for a potential art-house, experimental crowd. Here, it just had a stinker. Kids don't wanna see it. Adults don't wanna see it. Fans of avant-garde cinema don't wanna see it. I know it will have apologists lined up ready to make excuses for years, but it really was a straightforward narrative film with visual aspirations that largely failed. It happens.

STV

Next up: a live-anime version of Marine Boy, produced by Michael Bay.

Hart88

The movie's great. It reinvents toon/comic-to-live adaptation in a much more substantial way than Sin City or 300 did, and redefines what action choreography, cinematography, and editing should look like!

It's really an avant-garde, experimental film. An art experiment even. The public hates experiments.

Monsieur.Mind

Knew it.

RocketRockit

A SR movie was a doomed idea from the start. The show's main fanbase are not kids, they are middle-aged hipsters and folks who saw the reruns that MTV aired 15 friggin' years ago. Back in '93, the show was popular to laugh at because it was as tacky as the men who ran around in rubber suits and fought the Power Rangers.

Cam/ron

I also think the two hour plus run time dissuaded parents from taking their young children, or at least that was the case in our family. My 5-year-old loves fast cars, but to spend two hours telling him not to squirm in his seat and pay attention to the movie, no thank you. I'll rent the DVD.

pumpkinsoup

@NoGrumpys: were those cars running on gas, or something else futuristic? wasn't sure...

emberglance

@Monsieur.Mind: You are on crack. I thought it was going to be an experimental film that the public and critics just didn't get, but alas they were right about this one.

extracrispy

Speed Racer gives Stephen Colbert a good reason to hate RAIN

Silly Racer - Trixies aren't for KIDS

Speed Racer is just a big bowl of WIERD.
It is environmentally unfriendly and the whole. " If I can't RACE - I don't want to live - premise is a giant so not 21st CENTURY.

NoGrumpys

@Monsieur.Mind: I was taken in by susan sarandon and john goodman. they invest the whole thing with pathos. the scene with mom consoling a grieving little Speed as pops watches from the doorway really got to me. Not unlike bridges' Stane in Iron Man crossing the Lebowski Valley, I thought Fox was a boon to the proceedings and didn't find myself thinking "Jack!" once.

There are so. many. Un-fucking-believably-gorgeous women in Speed Racer, but Trixie. The "do you like this"? bit in the car... that's some pretty salacious material for a movie with a monkey.

StratfordX

@Monsieur.Mind: I agree. It set a new benchmark for visual effects - one I don't expect anyone else to match for some time...

emberglance

@Monsieur.Mind: Sorry, erase "crap" from that last sentence. Freudian slip. (actually, remnant of some other sentence)

Monsieur.Mind

@extracrispy: Well, look, it isn't experimental for its narrative (though I haven't seen this particular flashback structure in kids' films before). It's visually experimental. Have you ever seen anything like it, whether live-action or animated?

@STV: I'm not the target demo of SR according to you... not a fan of the toon (though I remember liking it as a 6 yo, though not nostalgic for it), and not a kid. No, I was simply one of those taken in by the trailers, which I thought were gorgeous.

I saw a screening of TRON at the MOMA in San Fran, and the director said something very interesting. "We essentially made an experimental art film right under Disney's nose." (or something to that effect) I'd never thought of TRON that way, but he was right. It looked like nothing that came before it (or arguably, since) and in that sense, and in its use of CG, it was experimental.

Speed Racer has visual ideas that we've definitely not seen on film before. The car-fu choreography, with cars that have 4 degrees of freedom, in combo with the camerawork in those scenes, is unique. Unique! How often can we see a movie that strives for visual inventiveness, let alone achieves it? SR's doing things nobody else had thought up yet, and it's experimental in that sense.

Narratively, sure, it's simple (though effective IMO). The actors bring heart to the style. The fact that its conventional (and normally acceptable)story is being rejected due to presentation... well, doesn't that signify something different and new is afoot?

If it was less experimental and more in line with what people are used to crap it'd be a more conventional hit with the adult set that usually resigns itself to kiddie plots and CG during summer and takes the kids.

Monsieur.Mind

@STV: I'll have some of what he's having!

CourageousCoward

I thought I was having a bad day at work. Epic fail, WB, alas.

hummingpenguin

Budget of Speed Racer: $100 million
Box office of Speed Racer: $20 million
Calling a big-budget movie "experimental" after it bombs: Priceless

Little Mintz Sunshine

@Monsieur.Mind: The narrative wasn't all that simple. I had to try and explain share prices to an 8-year old afterwards.

emberglance

@BowlingForDollars: I think it is wrong to blame Emile Hirsch.

britneyspearstears

@Monsieur.Mind:
"Experimental" isn't necessarily good. Experiments either pass or fail. "Eraserhead," one of the most famous experimental films, have images and atmospheres that burned in my mind years after I first saw it. The SR movie's visuals looked terribly garish and overdone, just like the "bullet time" camera shots that made the Matrix movies famous.

Cam/ron

Speed Racer has been a pain in Hollywood's ass for 15 years now. I can't even count the number of people that have been trying to develop it since the early nineties. I remember J.J. Abrams was set up in the Gracie Films offices at Sony in about 1995, trying to tackle the script. Nothing happened and nothing happened after the project moved into other hands. Finally, after all that development, the Wachowski's settled on their version that looks like an exploding Tokyo disco. Rough road.

StylusPictures

@NoGrumpys: He looked very unwell. Dyed hair only highlights the fact that skin greys with age too...

emberglance

@britneyspearstears: I agree, although I think audiences were expecting George Clooney.
[www.jibjab.com]

Benovite

@emberglance:
...the bad guy said he made his fortune and all he he had was a Commadore computer...SR is obviously an Anime LSD trip - why connect it to actual events which places it in reality when the sport of auto racing-Roller derby is not.

Plus John Goodman was really showing man boobs. He's always looked fat but healthy. During most of the movie he looked sickly. A fortelling of the box office?

NoGrumpys

@Monsieur.Mind: Again, no. Just NO. "Experimental" is not a label you get to slap on mainstream failures after the fact. Experimental films don't apologize for themselves, either. They address themes through formal concepts, not the other way around. Kenneth Anger didn't just accidentally realize Fireworks was about sexuality and repression after he filmed it. "Car-fu" is great in theory and everything, but just because we haven't seen it before (though even goddamned Inspector Gadget had a car that moved vertically) doesn't mean it's "experimental." It means the Wachowskis had an interesting concept and no place to anchor it.

What really pisses me off is that if this film had hit, then no one would be calling it "experimental" or blaming the the hoi polloi for failing to get it. It's condescending, disingenuous, mendacious and so, so transparent.

STV

I thought the guy at LA Weekly said some good stuff:

What you see is what you get. "Production design" is a poor term to describe Owen Paterson's avidly garish look. Gaudier than a Hindu-temple roof, louder than the Las Vegas night, Speed Racer is a cathedral of glitz. The movie projects a Candy Land topography of lava-lamp skies and Hello Kitty clouds - part Middle Earth, part mental breakdown - using a beyond-Bollywood color scheme wherein telephones are blood-orange, jet planes are electric fuchsia, and ultraturquoise is the new black.

Call it power kitsch, neo-Jetsonism or Icon D - this film could launch a movement. A dream (or perhaps nightmare) team of pop artists might have collaborated on Speed Racer's mise en scène. The futuristic, multihued skyscrapers seem a figment of Kenny Scharf's imagination; the glazed female leads might be Jeff Koons sculptures sporting Takashi Murakami accessories. And that's just the "Sunday Styles" stuff. Once the various gizmobiles accelerate to warp speed on roller-coaster racetracks seemingly conceived by Dr. Seuss, the screen reconstitutes as a Bridgett Riley vortex or a mad geometric abstraction of Kenneth Noland racing stripes.

emberglance

I must not be picking up on that certain je ne sais quoi that apparently has been keeping Emile Hirsh in the running as a viable Hollywood prospect all these years. Maybe it's handjobs?

KingHater

@mitchel_stevens: Is that the $25 I have to pay to buy the DVD? Or is that what you'll give me when I say it's equally bad?

STV

@Monsieur.Mind: @Monsieur.Mind: Oh, dude. Stan Brakhage just did a 360 in his grave.

[www.imdb.com]

PaisleyPajamas

Technical wizardry is engineering, not art.

Who in god's name ever thought Emile Hirsch could open so much as a window?

raincoaster

This really fucks up my hopes for an Astro Boy adaptation. Oh no wait -- it doesn't at all, because that would be equally fucking retarded.

KingHater

@mitchel_stevens:
"experimental art house" is also the same as "cheap hentai."

mitchel_stevens

@STV:
$25 says you change your tune when the experimental art house film "La Blue Girl" is remade by the Wachowskis next year for Vivid.

The tentacles will be made of real demon! And painstakingly crafted by John Gaeta. They'll also be using dabs of Joel Silver's blood to make the Spiders.

mitchel_stevens

@STV:
either or, really.

but i'll win in the end as the undeniable shame of watching it emerges in your heart.

mitchel_stevens

@emberglance: A lot of great keywords in that post

StevieQ

@emberglance: Ugh, file that review next to the essays about the Matrix movies' Cartesian and Buddhist values.

Cam/ron

@Monsieur.Mind: You don't "experiment" with $100mil.

Desk_hack

I now feel comfortable predicting an opening weekend of $1.2 million for the upcoming "Land of the Lost" big screen adventure, and am also willing to predict that some time in the not too distant future some ridiculous studio chief somewhere is going to green light a feature remake of THE GODFATHER, to be directed by M. Night Shyamalan. JUST WATCH....

Mr. Ice