"Speed Racer" Review



I haven't seen "Speed Racer", so I can't vouch for it. My interest arises for only two reasons:

• Some people have been directed to this blog in error - they are doing Google searches for 'Emile Hirsch' and they get the YPT's 'Emily Hirsch' by mistake; and,
• There is a great review panning the movie at the Wall Street Journal. Here are some excerpts:

This toxic admixture of computer-generated frenzy and live-action torpor succeeds in being, almost simultaneously, genuinely painful -- the esthetic equivalent of needles in eyeballs -- and weirdly benumbing, like eye candy laced with lidocaine. "The Matrix" gave us the trippy pleasure of bullet time, a super-slo-mo vision of the world. "Speed Racer" gives us the paradox of a drive time that's super-fast and all but interminable. If its target audience turns out in vast numbers, we'll be looking at child endangerment on a global scale.

..."Speed Racer" is a nightmare vision of children's entertainment. It's overstimulation as an organizing principle -- colors that call for a riot squad (who knew that pastels could be assaultive?); pacing that approaches the precipice of looniness; a moral tale -- Speed's virtue versus the racing world's vice -- told in stentorian tones better suited to propaganda. The visual style, descended from anime, seeks to up the videogame ante, but the movie misreads that medium too. Gamers enjoy a sense of control, whether real or illusory. Audiences here must sit in passive stupefaction. "I go to the races to watch you make art," Speed's mother tells him, "and it's beautiful, inspiring, everything art should be." She lies. It's exactly what art isn't. It's chaos.