Speed Racer

This tale starts with Speed Racer (Emile Hirsch), he is an aggressive, impetuous, and brave crack pilot to win breathtaking world races. He lives with his mom (Susan Sarandon) and Pops racer (John Goodman) who designs a fabulous car along with a mechanic(Kirk Gurry), the Match 5 . The proprietary of Royal Industries does him a lavish offer but he rejects it. And he also uncovers a dark secret about the biggest races are being fixed . Speed Racer must save the sport he loves and his family racing business. Then Speed join forces with his one time rival Racer X (Matthew Fox) to win ¨Casa Cristo¨ rally , a cross country race, competing against dangerous racers and a shifty Japonese racer(Rain) and ultimately the ¨Grand Prix¨.

This exciting movie contains thrills, action-packed, tension, suspense and overwhelming races, but also some commercial elements. This is a dynamic, fast-paced and amusing movie. Full of action, its complemented by silly comedy in charge of a little boy and a monkey. The picture relies heavily on the overlong and death-defying races that are incredible and magnificently made by 3D computer generator. The story moves like a supersonic bullet for most of its running time and the last generation of fantastic cars steal the show. Contrived beyond belief with spectacular races that play like video games, but slickly calculated to please 2000 audiences and children especially. Emile Hirsch as valiant racer is good, he's an instinctive, stubborn and valiant young man. Susan Sarandon and John Goodman are sympathetic as his affectionate parents and Christina Ricci is beautiful as his love interest. Colorful cinematography plenty of pastel and glimmer color by David Tattersall. Impressive and groundbreaking production design by Owen Patterson. Stirring and moving musical score by Michael Giacchino, usual of J.J. Abrahams movies. The motion picture is well directed by the brothers Larry and Andy Wachowski adapting the famous Japonese anime . The Wachowski, also screenwriters(Speed Racer, V for vendetta)achieved his big success with Matrix trilogy and here get another great hit.

I saw this the same night as the latest film by my favorite filmmaker and I must admit that this held its own.

Sure, the story is silly and there are the requisite two lessons for children. All the shots with the parents could have been replaced with a dialog card so far as I care. But this is highly cinematic in a fine-grained sense.

Coursegrained long form would be the cinematic values of that Peter Greenaway film, where the narrative has substance and is cast cinematically. The contrast is shocking, with this Wachowski business seeming to be mere busy style.

But look again. There's real value in how the story is told even though the story is as close to vacuous white noise as possible. In fact, there's a statement there that matters. This movie is about movie-making. The watchers of the "race" are watchers of the movie. Its a simple fold.

I consider this the best of the brothers' films because their sometimes intriguing plots distract from their deeper intent. That intent is to visually explore what it means to watch. Sure, those plots are about watching as well. But people watch "The Matrix" and build religions around the story mechanics as if they matter. Previously, "Bound" was my favorite Wachowski film because it suppressed the noise of the story so as to equal the expression of that story in terms of the eye, the desire of eye.

These folks are to Welles as Coltrane is to Getz. They run riffs whose patterns are derived from the languid, meaningfilled studies of what went before, but which are presented so quickly you cannot possibly comprehend the fullness with which they were originally loaded.

That overloading of serious visual grammar has an immediate effect: that we are really there instead of digesting something filtered to be simple enough for us to understand. But there's a deeper effect: there is so much motion here, so many paths we can choose from to decide what we see, that there's a sort of tease between the film and our mind about what options they will present — and what tricks they will use to suggest paths to comprehension. And on our part to discard, to race ahead of the track suggested, to speed ahead and get to the end before even the movie.

I consider this serious work, and an advance in film grammar that possibly will be profound.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

Personally I have never been a fan of the original animated series, and I wasn't sure what to expect of this movie. After seeing the trailers I thought it looked kind of cheesy and over-done. After watching this I realized that the cheesy graphics, work to it's own advantage. This movie really caught a good look at Live action Speed Racer without losing the characteristics of the Cartoon. I didn't think even the Wachowski brothers could pull this off, but as usual, they did.

As far as the actors performances, Emile Hirsch did exceptional, but my eye was mostly on the brilliant performances by John Goodman, and new comer Paul Litt who plays Spritle, Speed's mischievous little brother. I recommend this for the family, don't wait for the DVD get to the theaters while this stunning cinematography is on the big screen!

I just loved Speed Racer. It did an amazing job at entertaining, and overall the movie blew me away altogether. The movie may have became a little idiotic and somewhat uninteresting at points, but they did a very good job on the script and I loved all the awesome kick-ass action. One of my favorite parts is when they are fighting in the hotel bedroom, that scene was awesome, and I laughed at a lot of the cute jokes too.

I understand it was mostly all for thrills in the vision department, but that is what you should have been expecting when you went in to Overall Speed Racer exceeded my expectations, and in the end I was very glad I had the chance to view it, for I loved it and think it rises above a lot of other movies out there recently. It did not deserves it's Razzie noms. Give it one more chance if you did not like it.

I must admit that I know, or knew rather, very little about the story or history of Speed Racer- and his TV series - and maybe that is why I enjoyed this movie so much. Although, this is still a different type of situation where one who was a big fan of the shows might be seriously critical of every little detail of the turned movie. I don't believe anyone who considers themselves truly knowledgeable about Tatsuo Yoshida's work can say that this was not represented well on the big screen. I'm now intrigued to go back and check out some episodes of Speed Racer.

That aside, as far as it being a movie and a work of art, I would give this movie high marks in both categories. For it being a movie, it was nice to see something so different as far as the approach to making it go. Also, having such an incredible cast makes it all the more intriguing. I don't see anyone else having portrayed any of these characters any better than the cast that was hired to do so.

On an artistic level, it is extremely hard to think of any other movie that comes close to being in the same league. I did not see The Matrix, but I would say that anyone who liked Sin City for its cinematography and graphic elements, would love Speed Racer. The use of bright photography that's added behind a green screen makes for a far more dramatic effect.

Take the artistic elements of this movie, and put it together with the amazing cast (both looks and talent) and throw it together with a very different but coherent plot, and you've got yourself an extremely enjoyable movie that is definitely worth seeing. And seeing at the theater no less! My hats off to The Wachowski Brothers, and the rest of the cast and crew for putting together something different for a change.

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