| Posted by: spacemonkey at July 2, 2008, 3:34 pm | | Topic: Speed Racer Forum: JoBlo | | "For a movie about velocity, the excitement factor is low and the races feel like a drag. Perhaps that has a lot to do with its length: 2 hours and 15 minutes, which is at least a half-hour too long for a movie based on a cartoon. Or maybe it's the predictable story about a guy who goes up against crooked corporate sponsors." - The Huffington Post "The Wachowski brothers have tumbled into a matrix of their own with "Speed Racer," one which has rendered them completely out of touch with the outside world. In adapting the 1960s Japanese anime television series, writer-directors Larry and Andy Wachowski have created a noisy, overlong, mind-numbing extravaganza that seems tailor-made for nobody but themselves and their twisted sensibilities." - Associated Press "This adventurously awful film is awful in many ways at once. It is, like a Ferrari poking across East 42nd Street at rush hour, fast yet slow. It is futuristically retro. Its attention span is measurable in microseconds, yet it runs more than two hours. And it spent a trillion dollars imitating the look of a 10-cent cartoon from the primitive '60s - artistically, the Cro-Magnon era. I was initially awed by its splendors. But when I'd had my fill, there was still an hour-45 left." - The New York Post "Emotionally, "Speed Racer" stays in the family lane; when cars crash and burn, there are little bubbles called "quick-saves" that transport drivers to safety. The nostalgia factor is slight, and nothing new is added besides the effects. While that's not enough to make it a classic even among chintzy cartoon-born movies, middle-schoolers will have a blast" - The New York Daily News "Speed kills, but it also thrills. Watching Andy and Larry Wachowski's hyperkinetic, candy-colored "Speed Racer" is like spending two hours caroming through a pinball machine. Sense and subtlety are road kill as the cartoon-deep plot zips by, but your inner third grader will be too jazzed to complain. If, that is, you still have an inner 8-year-old. If you're totally grown up, you'll find "Speed" a long, dreary, migraine-inducing slog." - San Diego News "Like The Matrix (or its engagingly primitive precursor, the DOS-era Disney relic Tron), Speed Racer gives the not-unrealistic impression of taking place inside a computer. But love, hate, or ignore it, The Matrix proposed a social mythology. (Just ask Slavoj Zizek.) Speed Racer is simply a mishmash that, among other things, intermittently parodies the earlier film's pretensions...The villain (Roger Allam, V for Vendetta's fascist talk-show host) is a slavering tycoon, while Speed Racer is, as his mother tells him, an Artist. In the movie, racing is itself a racket--the effluvium of decaying Capital within the Matrix. Multinationals sponsor drivers, fix races, and use the sport to drive up the market price of their stock. (So the Wachowski brothers might once have regarded Hollywood.) Ideologically anti-corporate, previous Wachowski productions aspired to be something more than mind-less sensation; Speed Racer is thrilled to be less. It's the delusions minus the grandeur." - The Village Voice "Many will love the eye-candy portions of the movie. There are certainly several spectacular sequences that recall the cartoon but spin it in a compelling live-action way. Parts of it are truly beautiful. However, there are equally as many parts that just read to my eye like Easter eggs in a blender: the screen just seems a wash of luminous colors and glossy highlights, without any discernable shapes to latch onto. I'm being serious when I caution epileptics to avoid this film." - Comics2Film "There's a lot of potential and opportunity for fun, but ultimately, it's an experiment that fails, since they've made such a bizarre-looking film that's an almost unwatchable display of bright clashing colors that hurts the eyes and the brain with garish colors that make you wonder if the production designer showed up for work on acid.Few kids will be able to follow all of these various subplots, and there's so much exposition between the scattered races that the movie tends to drag. The Wachowskis missed a great opportunity to recreate the frenetic pace of the cartoon's dialogue that was such a large part of it being so memorable. Rather, the movie takes things way too seriously, especially in the scenes between Emile Hirsch and Matthew Fox, both whom give stiff, lifeless performances that suck the energy out of the room whenever they're on-screen. It's like someone forgot to tell them that they're supposed to be having fun and since they act like limp, dead fish, the viewer's mind starts wandering. it's embarrassing that much of "Speed Racer" literally looks like model cars plopped in front of computer backgrounds, especially coming so soon after groundbreaking racing games like "GTA4" and "Mario Kart Wii." By comparison, this looks like a '90s racing video game that someone vomited on. There's way too much bad green screen work across the board with the foreground characters not blending into the backgrounds. The Wachowskis try to recreate the pace of a cartoon by cutting between the racing action and announcers commenting on the race (mostly in bad accents), but it's jarring and headache-inducing, especially when they start cutting in flashbacks to scenes we saw earlier in the movie... and all of that needlessly stretched out to over two hours makes it hard not to bear a grudge. - ComingSoon.Net "Is it me or does this Speed Racer movie look so dumb???!!!!? Sorry, I can't see anything good about this movie. It looks horrible, Racer X looks like a clown and it really looks like a PSone game. I really think it's this years bomb movie. It sucks cause I like the cartoon, but this movie just ruined it for me.......what do you think?" - "RockT" poster on "Yahoo Answers" Theres more where these came from...Im just sayin.. |
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