Alternate Reality, Or No Reality? | Emile Hirsch surveys his all-digital surroundings in Speed Racer.
Glenn Kenny, Premiere | “Speed Racer is, if viewed from one angle, the most headache-inducing kid’s movie of them all; if viewed from another, it’s the most expensive avant-garde film ever made.... After multiple double-crosses including ninja attacks and faked identities bring the intrigues to a boil, the good and bad factions face off in a fight involving guns, fists, martial arts kicks, and, alas, chimp feces. Except there’s no action per se. The various characters strike, and freeze, in heroic poses. The camera revolves around them, and they look totally, like, awesome and iconic and, well, heroic. Then there’s a sound effect, or a bunch of sound effects, and maybe a depiction of a single blow or shot. It’s entirely ridiculous, and it’s presented to the audience as if it is what is actually happening—that is, this is the way that Speed and his family and allied are putting down the bad guys. One has seen precursors of this idea in certain martial arts or Asian fantasy movies. But to have a series of poses effectively substitute for battle in a live-action summer blockbuster film in this way is to... well, it’s to take Godardian notions to places where even Godard might never have dreamed of taking them.”
Anthony Lane, The New Yorker | “Faux-leftish paranoia about big business should be slightly harder to peddle when a chunk of your paycheck comes from Time Warner, whose revenues make it the largest media conglomerate on the planet, but the Wachowskis are unabashed; they want everything both ways, stuffing the cast with multinational actors yet still supplying the hero with a pancake-flipping mother, a father who builds a winning car in his own garage, and a glass of cold milk on the victor’s podium. Though the film is not as criminally poor as V for Vendetta, which the Wachowskis wrote in 2005, it struck me as more insidious. There’s something about the ululating crowds who line the action in color-coördinated rows; the desperate skirting of ordinary feelings in favor of the trumped-up variety; the confidence in technology as a spectacle in itself; and, above all, the sense of master manipulators posing as champions of the little people. What does that remind you of? You could call it entertainment, and use it to wow your children for a couple of hours. To me, it felt like Pop fascism, and I would keep them well away.”
