Word: matrixes
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...early reviews have criticized Wanted for being derivative of The Matrix. (For what it's worth, Millar says he dreamed up the story when he was a kid.) But the notion of an ordinary, frustrated young person who discovers special powers in strange surroundings is as old as The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and, before that, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - not to mention every fable about a commoner revealed as having royal blood and reserves of derring-do. It's the essential wish-fulfillment template: start in drab, constricting reality; hyper-drive into heroism...
...telling that the Secret Service code name for the press secretary was "Matrix." As McClellan notes, a large part of his job was - much like the villains in the Keanu Reeves film - to project the reality the White House wished the world to see, regardless of whether it actually existed...
...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...