Going Faster Miles an Hour

[roadrunnertwice]

Next up: Speed Racer.

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Okay, so the first time I tried to watch Speed Racer*, I made the mistake of doing that "Megavideo" thing, where it seems to magically want to show you a movie for free but then it cuts out after an hour and tries to make you pony up. And I was like, "Yeahhhhh maybe I'll just find three bucks and rent it on iTunes instead for a +8 to my save against bullshit." So I did! And then I forgot about it until it started warning me I had like four days left, so I watched it on the 6th.

And wow, what a deliciously broken movie! It was completely insane. I liked it a lot, and with absolutely no irony. Yes, it's silly as hell, but it's an incredibly ambitious work of silliness and how can you not love it for that? It is glorious.

• That thing where they run different parts of the same shot at different speeds and it kind of makes you queasy? Aces.
• The wipes. The CONSTANT WIPES. Wow.
• I don't think I've seen anything structurally similar to that part where the same clips are functioning simultaneously as conditional future tense, present tense (maybe), and past tense. In fact, it was complicated enough that I probably described it incorrectly, but it was totally legible in situ, which was impressive as hell.
• In a way, the movie is there to teach you how to be enthralled at ending credits that consist of a chimp thrashing around in a go-cart over the top of the dimensional gate sequence from 2001.
• I kind of love that it's a non-functional piece of SF. Based on the positioning of past technological reference points, it seems to be taking place now or earlier, but there doesn't seem to be any way to get there from here, or from slightly earlier than here, or for that matter from the 1940s.
• The face Royalton makes right at the very end of that confrontation between him and Speed is one of the most perfect things I've seen on a screen. So hilarious.

I actually have a lot of lingering questions about to what extent we're supposed to take the candy-colored insanity of this world as literal and to what extent it's a reflection of the characters' emotional landscape. In part, this came to my mind with something someone (either Kip Manley or Mike Russell or Bill Mudron) said about how Scott Pilgrim may have been the first unqualified success of this new conception of what visual FX are good for, but Speed Racer was the first one to land on that shore at all, and people will evaluate it very differently in just a few years. In Pilgrim, we're very much wearing Scott-goggles for the entire film, although Scott-goggles are us-goggles for much of my generation and the FX are always functioning at least partially literally anyhow. (No matter what else a zombie functions as, it's still also a flesh-eating zombie.) And I can't shake a suspicion that there's something kinda sorta similar going on here, but it doesn't map very cleanly at all, and I'm having a hard time tracking it down.

Anyway, Speed Racer! Definitely worth a watch, especially if you saw the previews, said "eww," and haven't thought about it since. Give yourself some time to calibrate to its aesthetic, and check it out.

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* The 2008 Wachowski version, we're talking, just to make sure we're on the same page here.

Comments

[kiplet.livejournal.com]

No questions! I take it literally enough: I like to think it's the far-flung future of 1965! (Or, Zot's world.) —My point is more that it's the first gesamtkuntswerk of the 21st century. (—Scott Pilgrim is also, but I'm only vaguely going to respond to the videogame grammar either here or there.)

The conditional-tense scene is technically a flash-forward; what makes it conditional is that the flash-forward is never explicitly sited in the film's timeline; we never see a scene or a hint of a scene from it when it's "actually" happening. We see in the confrontation that he's gonna lose, and then we cut to him dejected in the lockerroom. Brill.

The thing about it that never stops blowing me away is the first 20 minutes, where in the course of a race we're shown how the races work, how physics works (here), backstory highlights for all our main characters and the plot, and all told through the bewildering variety of wipes and overlaps and timeshifts that make up the grammar of the film: in short, we're explicitly taught how to watch this film and they make it all look so effortless.

[ndgmtlcd.livejournal.com]

It's an historical movie. It's also an hysterical movie. I saw it in the theater in perfect conditions. I rushed to buy the DVD as soon as it came out. It does a good transition to the small screen but for full, greater pleasure you need a theater. It's one of the most underrated movies of the first decade of the millenium.