Movie Reviews

I just watched Speedracer.

Okay, when I saw my first trailer for this movie, about a gazillion years ago, I thought “Holy fuck, that looks amazing. I can’t wait!” Cool effects, some nice stylized stuff, looked like overall beautiful production design.

Then, I saw commercials on TV. Suddenly there’s a fat kid and a monkey. Suddenly it looks like an unbearably stupid kids movie. Screw you, Matrix guys, I think. I’m not seeing that crap.

And that’s pretty much my last thought about it until Sam reminded me of it a few days ago.

And holy! Freakin’ ! Dang!

Because (leaving out the fat kid and the monkey) this is a freakin’ terriffc movie.  It’s too bad the ad campaign killed it dead, because this would have been just glorious to see in a theatre. The visual effects, the lighting, the stylization, and the goddamned movement of the cars were all so beautiful I can’t believe I didn’t get to see it huge. I think I would’ve cried. The light trails in the ice caves! The hand-to-hand combat in the snow! The sand billowing behind the cars! The lighting in the ninja fight! The beautiful bit in the last race where the background billows like exhaust clouds, oh my god, and the part right at the end where Speed pulls in to the red checkered finish! It was like the absolute best of animated shows and comic books crossed with the most beautiful live action production; it was so fucking appropriate and sensitively handled. It blew my mind. If any movie was going to change filmmaking, this one is ‘way more worthy than The Matrix.

Yeah, yeah, you can yell at me about that assertion in the comments.

Oh fuck, the editing was sooooo good. The argument between Trixie and Speed while they’re racing the Casa Christo is so beautifully edited; you’re never out of the action, and still the argument is perfectly paced, and it heightens the tension by giving you a break from the main business. It’s so note-perfect.

Issues: They threw my feminist critic brain a bone and had a few chicks racing cars and being something other than a helpless dishrag, but it barely passes muster – whatever the original story was like, you can’t really get away without a protagonist chick in a movie like this anymore (see the new Bond films).

Christina Ricci (who should still maybe eat a sandwich) is great, but I could’ve used more from her. When she finally grows a pair about halfway through the movie, I had started really rolling my eyes about the lack of women.

Similarly, the Asian characters are duplicitous (okay, not Horuko, but I really liked Taejo and wanted him to be a good guy), which felt jerky, the evil guy is German (which seemed silly – Germans?! Not threatening. Nice Commodore 64 reference, though), and there are others that are less important to the plot. It’s honestly ‘way too bigoted for a film released in 2008. For me, anyway. The stereotypes aren’t amusing, add nothing to the plot, and are essentially meaningless except for being mean-spirited and for me, the only place the production design/script feels lazy and phoned-in.

And I can’t, though I wish I could, purge from my memory the lame lameness of that stupid kid and the stupid monkey. I know that they were trying to make a family movie (kiss of goddamn death, blech), but it didn’t work, and if you edit out all those scenes you have a fucking amazing movie. If, like me, you can even ignore Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai, you may be able to work around the stupidity, but if not, it might seriously impair your enjoyment.

But try – try to ignore that crap, and watch those unbelievable race scenes, and if you’re anything like me you’ll have that familiar sense of wonder that you had the first time you watched the Light Cycle sequences in Tron. Yessir; you can yell at me about that in the comments too. I don’t care. Tears welled up in my eyes at one point. Over an effect. It was awesome.

Um, plot? Yeah, there is one, and it’s serviceable. Y’know. There’s villains and love and piranhas, and it does the trick. Since the trick is to deliver awesome and mind-blowingly beautiful visuals and effects.

So, in answer to the oft-asked question “Does Candace like anything?” the answer is “Yes. I like Speed Racer.”
And also Tron.
And anyone who doesn’t is a total neener-head.

It’s a hard one to rate; I give the kid with the monkey 10 forks, and the rest of the movie 2 forks (those forks are for relying on outmoded stereotypes for weak sight gags that add nothing to an otherwise gorgeous movie).

Rent it and watch it on the biggest screen you can find.

Oooh, I watched Zac and Miri Make A Porno tonight, and despite the fact that everyone told me it was kinda einh, I found it really enjoyable. When it comes to RomComs (for which I have a notorious weakness), most are the worst crap of all time and perpetuate a bunch of stereotypes that make me want to scream.

But this one is touchingly romantic (yes it is!), pretty realistic (once you accept the premise), and funny enough to have made me laugh many times. Also, enough dick jokes to make your boyfriend want to watch it with you despite the romance. And the guy who plays Zack is cute enough that I could imagine myself wanting to date him (unlike, let’s say, Drew Carey), while not being so cute that you couldn’t imagine him being real (like Pierce Brosnin). 1 fork. Which is like, -300 forks for a RomCom, but my system doesn’t work that way.

Just came back from seeing Australia. Now, I heart Hugh Jackman, I heart Baz Luhrmann, am midling-to-cold on Australia itself, and I think Nicole Kidman is super-pretty and I wish I had her clothes, but like, in my size. And I quite liked this movie. Did it hit the epicness that Baz was shooting for? No, unfortunately. But it sure did some nice things on the way to not hitting the mark.

If, like me, you’re a total lighting junkie, huge swathes of the movie are like porn.

If, like me, you have a connoisseurs appreciation of shirtless Hugh Jackman, this movie is not like porn (only shirtless once, though he is shirtless + wet, which kinda counts as 1 and a half).

So you can see how I might be conflicted.

The story is an unlikely one, where, in 1939 a blonde British aristocrat is somehow able to set aside her class-consciousness and her racism in like, twenty minutes and then becomes some kind of race and class heroine. In the process, we learn valuable lessons, like that anyone who isn’t white is magic, everyone in Australia has really white teeth, and that Hugh Jackman only uses moisturizer when he’s in Darwin.

The sets, – hoo golly – lighting, shots and visual effects are mostly created to simulate a really beautiful old film style, though occasionally some of it drops off, which seems a little visually disjointed. The costumes are terriffc. The villains are a sweater-vest wearin’ gang of do-no-goods, the leader of whom is kinda hot in a surly, mustachioed way.

Corniness seeps in through Miss Kidman’s performance, and the constantly-repeated motif of ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ and The Wizard of Oz – but I’ll tell ya now that the corniness gets compounded the earlier you key in that Oz is what they call Australia these days. Baz, you’re hurting me. Sometimes Hugh pulls a Wolverine pose that cracks me up, and some of the lines ought to have been strangled at birth. The kid narrator shut up about 5 minutes after he ought to have, and that could’ve been a total disaster for the film if they hadn’t reined it in.

I called pretty much every good-guy death, which was telegraphed for miles, and in fact there’s very little about this movie that isn’t completely predictable.

But, as you can probably tell, I enjoyed the fuck out of it, probably because it combines the best of two worlds: a movie with lots of bad stuff to mock, and with lots of good stuff to get excited about.

Like I say, the lighting was (mostly) like porn to me.

I’m going to give it 2 forks, which is pretty good for me. I’m totally finished seeing how a brave, independently-minded white person like, is the great fucking white hope and has absolutely no regrettable opinions. But, overlooking that bit (the soft-focus-history bit), and the cheesy bits, it’s a very entertaining movie that didn’t feel like it was a hundred hours long, despite its length. It’s not Baz Luhrman’s best film – weirdly, I think he’s been getting worse, though Baz Luhrman at his worst is still a hell of a lot better than you or I on a good day. It’s more focused than Moulin Rouge (which was a bit of a mess, though a pretty one), more polished than Strictly Ballroom, and I’m totally not going to compare it to R+J because the writer gave him an edge (and Claire Danes took that edge away, via criminal lameness).

Am I going to say it? Yes, yes I am: It’s no Iron Man.

Ouch, Baz!