film review draft

the wokowschis' Speed Racer

The quickest impression this flick gives is its color styling. the color style is reminiscent of the worst 90s disney and daytime tv cartoon style. as krisfaluci noted on the latter, it is ugly.

When I first saw that flick, I thought woe , that's the wochowskis' matrix - their head trip...
Geuaaaah. At first I thought primary colors? but then no. it was not a primary theme like the 80s Dick tracy . it was ghastly. hello john krisfaluci? whaddaya think of the color styling on that thing?

Another big thing about this flick i guess is the races. nevermind the over the top combat that's going on instead of racing. the thing is, I've played car racing video games before - so the spectacle wasn't new to me. Nor was it new since the spectacle (not very convincing) of roadside combat from the matrix 2 or 3 "recycled" or "unloaded" or whatever it was called.
Point is if a racing game I came across looked like that (there's a racest "environment" in there that looked like a take on that mosque in spain with the many columns and striped arches, but large enough to accomodate the feeding frenzy of racing combat that was going on.

i guess criticizing a wochkowskys' flick is like shooting fish a barrel, or nit picking about how bad a movie made by cinderella's evil stepsisters would be , but here goes.

christina ricci must have been really jonesing for work - as in hasn't been getting any - to work in this affair. Then again, being from the "makers" of the matrix , it was bound to be a hit and a sound biz decision for her.

The sets are terrible.

The conceptions of technology eg computer displays , sets, "workflows" like the workers on the indoor segway highway (segway?) were to be polite, not inspired.

john goodman is not well directed / motivated here. i think i now have a visual of what some reviewers call "phoned in his performance"; though assuming he's a good actor, that'd be harsh.

i didn't like the boy or his persona.

the monkey pet , have they been reading jo zette et jocko ?

They must have been watching however a lot of Pixar. I could see some of Cars in there also Monsters Inc., the Incredibles.

But also Willie wonka and the chocolate factory. wasn't it disney that made the remake?

Cutouts? The big corporate mega conglomerate baddie is keeping a life size cut-out poster of god knows what pre-war industry or racing illustrous personnages in tall hats? What the hell was that.

Don't get me started on the score. Which is odd because just today i checking an early Peter jackson (braindead, 1992) , a real rather provincial (the from down under complex) and primary Jackson material . Anyway , listening to the score on Braindead i could appreciate the effort that was made to punctuate and synchronize with the horror-comedy action. In this flick , however, Speed racer, the score, like other scenes was ham-fisted.

it's like the whockoskis' or whatever don't have good taste in colors or music, or what makes for "impressive" and what doesn't , and what's cool and what's not.

which brings me to that it was not cool - cf. the scene where the CEO and the family on what I guess is the corporate conglomerate's "tour train" slide into what looks like a huge bar with gaudy rococo - think gold guilded over purple , intense fuschia-ish pruple. Also with golden edge lighting occasionally on the actors style of a setting sun ray from across the window.

I now recognize that not all outrageous is "good". There is good outrageous outlandish and there is bad outrageous .

did i mention the snakeoil character?

oh or the childhood memory of a letter murder?

like others (see cloverfield and the prior std fest from spielberg to menachemgolan) they are fixated on the t word.

as i'm listening now to the single "Acceptable in the 80s" by Calvin Harris, it Incidentally feels appropriate.

The visuals (game-like CGItricks and all), the cultural assumptions / pretensions would seem to have worked better in the 80s.

I mean when you got a desert-side fight scene that if you pause looks like a Madness video, you got 80s trash on your hand.

One particularly mean race is set in what seems to be one of the wakoskys' personal nightmares: a sort of hybrid arab/muslim/christian european locality called Casa Cristo, a take on the arabs' casa blanca i guess (the sets in that sequence are all their take on arabesque - that's where the bad guys are hanging out and where the snake oil character - a rival race driver - hails from.

There's also the bashing / stereotyping of france, one of the myriad tv presenters cutaways was a clearly disapproving "disgusted" frenchman.

It's clear now after watching matrices 2 and 3 , the freudian v for vendetta and this , that th re were different creative forces at work on the Matrix (the first , the only one).

I was planning to avoid this doobie if it weren't for a friend's recommendation, whose past recommends fell flat frankly. i just don't learn.