Rich, evil, purple-clad industrialist Mr. Speed once idolized his big brother Rex Racer ( Scott Porter), who died in a fiery car crash as idolized big brothers named "Racer" will sometimes do. The live-action components of "Speed Racer" include Speed himself ( Emile Hirsch, consigned to anonymity again after a breakout performance in " Into the Wild"), who lives with his Mom ( Susan Sarandon), Pops ( John Goodman), mischievous little brother Spritle ( Paulie Litt), pet chimp Chim-Chim (Kenzie and Willy) - as well as, apparently, his mechanic Sparky ( Kick Gurry) and his gal-pal Trixie ( Christina Ricci).
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.
#WHAT IS THE CAST OF SPEED RACER 2008 DOING NOW TV#
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. 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. The faster Speed went, the slower the sequence of backgrounds. The faux naivete on display here - right down to the imitation-fruit-flavored FDA-food-dye coloring - is both shamelessly quaint and shamelessly cynical.įor 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. Nor is it some kind of subversive commodity, unless the outré strategy of pandering to a low-brow, retro-nostalgic crowd can be considered anything but business as usual in 2008.
Burroughs' "cut up" technique - with digital clips randomly scrambled like pixelated confetti. (Lights! Shapes! Colors! Motion! Money!) And there's nothing terribly adventurous these days about Eisensteinian montage treated as if it were William S.
Neither is "Speed Racer" a commercial avant-garde film (though fans of the Wachowski brothers may wish to make such claims), unless you still consider Laserium shows of Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" to be cutting edge. "Speed Racer" is not a feature film in any conventional sense - although there is nothing so conventional in today's marketplace as a corporate product based on a campy vintage TV show that is developed for extremely brief exhibition in multiplexes on its way to more appropriate platforms such as DVD and video games, which provide the principal justification for its manufacture in the first place.
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