Man

I am the biggest Speed Racer fan ever but

man


this film sucked.

I'm disappointed.

you were alive in 1967?

also

the outré strategy of pandering to a low-brow, retro-nostalgic crowd can be considered anything but business as usual in 2008. The faux naivete on display here -- right down to the imitation-fruit-flavored FDA-food-dye coloring -- is both shamelessly quaint and shamelessly cynical.

For a certain generation of American kids, "Speed Racer" was our introduction to the lo-fi animated form now known as "anime." At the time, we just thought it was cheapo Japanese animation: flat, static, dubbed into badly translated English and barely "animated" at all, given that the frame only seemed to change approximately two times per second and the "moving" backgrounds were made up of about four cyclically repeating drawings instead of the eight or so we were used to seeing in Hanna-Barbera cartoons. The faster Speed went, the slower the sequence of backgrounds. Wow.

To us, this show was just filler between after-school reruns of "Gilligan's Island" and "The Munsters." We watched it because it was on, and it was in color.

Now the Wachowski brothers (of the "Matrix" movies) have spent $100 million on a mixture of photography and digital animation and called it "Speed Racer." They have captured (almost) all the chintziness, inexpressiveness and incoherence of the TV show in two hours and nine minutes, or about two hours too long, give or take. Yet some of us would just rather re-rent "Tron" (1982), which was not only a more immersive, dimensional and original take on the Commodore 64 video-graphics aesthetic, but also funnier and more exciting.

The original cartoon was fucking dreadful. Bad animation, lame, repetitive jokes, stale characters and some of the shittiest dialog outside of German industrial films. Anyone who tells you otherwise is deluded by some sad notion that his childhood was idyllic. Probably, he's not even thinking that the show was great, just that his life was better back then. Back then his mother bought his sugared cereal and did his laundry and he had yet to be rejected by women. None of that had anything to do with Speed Racer, but nostalgia is all about associating objects with some vague feeling that you once had a good time in life, and you are no longer capable of doing that.

The other half of the movie is the racing. The races are supposed to be extremely fast and dangerous. They are definitely colorful and cartoonish. The best parts of Speed Racer are in them, like villains who try to launch beehives at other cars, or slice off tires with retractable blades. There is also a racer named Snake Oiler (same as the cartoon) that is supposedly a bad guy. He has a car straight out of Death Race 2000, covered in snakeskin and with a giant golden cobra for a shift handle. That sort of silliness could be pretty entertaining if the directing Wachowski Brothers didn't zip past it in their need to use every color every damn second.

thats just two I can remember, it's just pretty funny how they are all using the same progression.

Finally, my wishes will be fulfilled.  My friend and I are going to this, and we're going to make fun of this while occasionally sipping from flasks.  Good day, sir.

god god god

GO SEE THIS

NOW

if you have ever wanted to laugh at a bad movie, make it this one.  hoooly fucking shit.  i was fucking crying, guys.  it's so sad to me that i found this funnier than harold and kumar.

edit:  in this thread john goodman channels a fifteen-year-old: ninja?  heh, more like non-ja. 

also there's seriously a drinking game to be made out of counting every time someone's face or body is scrolled left or right across the screen while something else is going on.

Man, I saw Speed Racer's trailer when I went to see Iron Man and it looked so bad. Seriously, the acting seemed horrible and the lines they used in the trailer were ridiculous. Ugh. It reminded me of the pod racing part in Star Wars episode 1 except more colorful and even worse acting.

I dunno dude, this doesn't really seem like the kind of movie where you can blame the acting. Clearly the directors were going for a specific style. Like, I'm sure the actors were being told to say there lines in a campy way, and I doubt any of them really took it too seriously. I'm sure the movie is terrible but it seems like it would be more the Wachowski brothers' fault than the actors.

I haven't seen the movie so I could be completely wrong, but mostly I just wanted to defend it because Emile Hirsch is Speed and he was so good in Into the Wild.

the show first aired in America in 1967, chances are you didn't see it when it came out, something that I was mentioning these critics did.

Overdrift was way better.

yeah this movie is so bad its comical, especially the fight scenes. And I loved the "twist" with racer X (and by loved I mean hated because it was gay as shit).

Was Captain Caveman in it?  He was cool.