Positive Liberty

Either Constant Viewer just saw Speed Racer or those LSD flashbacks he was promised in the 60s have finally arrived. Quite possibly the most visually stunning motion picture in decades and certainly the benchmark for special effects for the foreseeable future, Speed Racer is a movie which must either be seen at the biggest screen theater in your city or, at minimum, used as the excuse to run out and finally buy that big screen HDTV set. The only serious question here is, “But is it a good movie?”

Yes. Within the limitations discussed below, Speed Racer is a good movie, though not perhaps advisable for anyone with epilepsy or prone to motion sickness. The story is hardly nuanced and most of the characters are three dimensional only in the visual sense, but there are legitimate good guys fighting legitimate bad guys for legitimate reasons, plot-wise, and you might well just find yourself cheering on the good guys as the thrilling conclusion thrillingly concludes. True, the good guys are Speed and his family’s family business while the bad guys are, wait for it, evil corporations; but has anyone successfully switched that shopworn trope in anything actually literary (hence, Ayn Rand doesn’t count) since Major Barbara? Besides, there’s a funny monkey here, people!

Constant Viewer freely if abashedly admits he had every intention of hating Speed Racer. Why? In the first place, he hated the 1960s crappy cartoons — CV wasn’t hip enough to use words like “anime” back then — both because the animation was on a par with Clutch Cargo and because CV finds watching other people (including cartoon characters) driving fast cars either boring or frustrating. In the second place, Constant Viewer considers the Wachowski Brothers’ Matrix sequels among the greatest artistic frauds ever perpetrated on the movie going public.

But fair’s fair. CV could start throwing out adjectives like dazzling, spectacular, mind boggling and so forth, or he could wend his way through a catalog of Speed Racer’s influences such as the color palette of Dick Tracy, the phantasmagorical animation of Fantasia, the mixed media of Tron and, of course, the entire history of Japanese manga and anime. That might, might, mind you, make CV sound like a more knowledgeable film reviewer – then again, it might make him sound like a kid reaching to pad a term paper in a film appreciation course – but it wouldn’t help convey the gape-mouthed reaction most viewers will probably have while watching Speed Racer.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about the film is that, while it starts off with dazzling special effects, it manages to continue to build and outdo itself like a grand fireworks display. Frankly, Speed Racer is a good 20 minutes too long and (reminiscent of just about every Lucas film ever made) a bit too impressed by its own technical brilliance to pay adequate attention to the minimum dramatic requirements any genuinely good movie must have. CV knows he said roughly the same thing about Iron Man recently; but Speed Racer is a borderline experimental film and cannot be judged by mere summer blockbuster standards. By those standards and those standards alone, CV understands that many people will likely judge Speed Racer as an extravagant failure. Judged as a cinematic work of art, however, it’s sure to get serious critical attention long after the summer has come and gone. See it.

Trackback URI |