Word: matrix
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...million at the domestic box office last weekend. Now comes Speed Racer, based on the '60s Japanese animated TV series, Mach GoGoGo. It's the new sound-and-light show from brothers Larry and Andy Wachowski, who in 1999 stamped the template for high-IQ effects entertainment with The Matrix. I don't think it'll do half of Iron Man's first-weekend business, but it's certainly got twice the visual dazzlement of that very handsome Marvel Comics movie...
...Wachowskis, and production designer Owen Paterson (who's been with the brothers since The Matrix, and before that dreamed up the chromatic excesses of The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert) don't want to evoke feelings so much as visualize them. When young Speed first meets young Trixie, candy hearts and roses bloom around him, illuminating his innocent ardor. The color scheme of the Racer home evokes Pee-wee's Playhouse in its cartoon cheeriness, and the decor is pure '50s Populuxe. Even the choice of wallpaper - cheery flowers in the kitchen, a tangle of rectangles...
...Matrix, the brothers hid allusions to the Bible, Greek mythology and mathematics. If there's any complex philosophy in Speed Racer, it went over my head (probably at the speed of light). Here, the texture is the text, and it's deliriously dense, with more than 2,000 effects shots, often layered on top of each other. The effect, if you get into it, isn't just a store window of technology. It is, as Mom says of Speed's mastery behind the wheel, "inspiring, and beautiful, and everything art should be." That's what the Wachowskis are aiming...
...Yeah, well not Tom. He may be a morose drunk with an on-the-job vicious streak, but Reeves' presence assures that he holds our sympathy and, more important, never surrenders our interest. In action films from The Matrix through Constantine (not so much in the romantic films he's fronted), Reeves has a star quality that's perfectly distilled, in part because it's almost impossible to explain...
...option for an affordable abortion exists with ready access. The state has managed to keep teen pregnancy on the decline for 15 years. For this, it should be applauded. There has been reached a clear recognition that these births are both the source of personal anguish and the matrix of large-scale social problems: natal health risks, dropout rates, and even incarceration figures share an observable, direct link to the number of young mothers. This makes cuts in health-education funding—down 26 percent since 2001—seem especially puzzling; each dollar spent teaching students about birth...