Word: auto
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Video games have always seduced us with fantasy. Whether you play a carjacker in Grand Theft Auto or a mad scientist in The Sims, you can forget your worries as you plot your path to glory. So it may seem odd that the very first thing you do in Wii Fit, an unconventional new game that goes on sale for $90 in the U.S. on May 19, is step on a scale and weigh yourself. I don't know about you, but weighing in each morning is not my idea of a good time. And it's certainly no fantasy...
...Like the Downey film, Speed Racer is plenty satisfying in traditional action-movie terms. It boasts enough auto-erotic car-nage to make Grand Theft Auto IV seem, by comparison, like a junkyard jalopy. Beyond that, there's the edifying display of people taking control of their own destinies by building beautiful, useful machines. The heroes of Speed Racer and Iron Man could be the garage geeks who paved Silicon Valley with cybergold; or Hollywood's visual-effects alchemists, translating their fantasies into pixels to create gorgeous movies like these. Iron Man and Speed Racer are tributes to practical ingenuity...
...seem naive glorifying scientific innovation in an age of surface-to-air missiles (the kind Tony Stark's company manufactures in Iron Man) or exalting auto races at a time when many Americans have trouble paying for the gas that gets them to their jobs. But summer movies are parables, fairy tales that, for a couple of hours, let us dream while we're awake. And it's not the worst idea to have stories that both address our intimate relationship with machines and allow us to feel good about the connection. In fact, it's downright American...
...suits and race cars in order to vanquish the bad guys. And in doing so, they've provided plenty of standard action-movie pleasures. Iron Man gives you a guy flying over L.A., disrupting military aviation and confronting a villain in even larger metal couture. Speed Racer boasts enough auto-erotic car-nage to make Grand Theft Auto IV seem, by comparison, like a jalopy junkyard...
...punctuated, Hemingway type of nonstyle that seems to growl, I'm giving you the straight dope here, son. (A sample: "They lived in a small town in an eastern state it was nowhere anywhere everywhere, a small American town full of alcohol, abuse and religion. He worked in an auto body shop and she worked as a clerk at a gas station and they were going to get married and buy a house...