Word: racer
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...theme of the first two blockbuster movies of the summer season. We saw it last weekend when Iron Man, the one where arms merchant Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) builds himself a heart, opened to $102 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...
...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...
...Speed Racer is the familiar fable of the little man fighting the big corporation, the inventor vs the exploiter, the young athlete whose talents would be used and abused by the establishment. In the Racer clan, Pops (John Goodman) is a mechanic turned car designer. Mom (Susan Sarandon) is the family's emotional center, a font of dewy wisdom. Older brother Rex (Scott Porter) is a champion racer who confides some of his Zen driving secrets to his younger brother Speed before mysteriously disappearing after a car crash. Years later, Speed (Emile Hirsch) is ready to carry on the Racer...
...Lavish indeed, and relentless - a hallucinatory workout for the eyes. On his show this Monday, Stephen Colbert described Speed Racer as "the classic story of boy meets seizure-inducing lights," and noted that, to get a sense of the picture's cinema style, you should "put 80 pounds of fireworks into an industrial dryer, crawl right in there with them, turn it on and then light the fuse. It'll give you a good idea of the visual onslaught you'll be enduring." As usual with Colbert, the humor highlighted a sneaky truth: in its assaultive creativity, its high-speed...
...entire film exists in another, nether, Never-land where standard narrative and visual decisions are dismissed as way too confining. The location of the Racers' home seems to be in idyllic suburban America, yet Speed's schoolteacher and classmates speak with English accents. The time, never specified, could be today but is emotionally the '50s or early '60s. Mom and Pops Racer's three sons - Rex, Speed and the youngest, Spritle (Paulie Litt) - are each separated by about 15 years. So just never mind that Goodman 55, Sarandon 61, are more likely to be Spritle's grandparents than his parents...