Recently in The Wachowskis Category

So, last night, after deciding on a whim to go catch the midnight IMAX showing of the Wachowskis' hyperkinetic, candy-coated Speed Racer, I had a bit of a Gob Bluth moment. (As in, "I've made a huge mistake.") For, after the ticket had been purchased, Metacritic informed me that Racer is currently rocking a lowly 35, and some critics are really hating on it. (See, for example, wry film-snob Anthony Lane, who calls it "pop fascism" and ridicules the anti-corporate message as "faux-leftish paranoia." And even critics I tend to agree with, like Stephanie Zacharek and David Edelstein, seem to have loathed it.) And once i got to Lincoln Square, matters looked worse: As compared to every other midnight showing I've ever been to, the crowd was sparse to the point of non-existent. Did, I wonder, the Wachowskis have a Matrix: Revolutions-level bomb on their hands?

Maybe, maybe not, but Speed Racer really doesn't merit all the contempt being heaped upon it this morning. Mind you, Racer is definitely a movie for children, but that in and of itself shouldn't argue against it. (I've sat through considerably worse kids' movies in my day.) Basically, Racer is a preteen-friendly, maybe slightly overlong, summer pop confection, and it's no better or worse, narratively-speaking, than the Spy Kids flicks (all three of which did significantly better with critics.) And, in terms of eye candy, it pushes the envelope and showed me things I'd never seen before in a film, and at breakneck speed to boot. What, exactly, were all these critics expecting? Did they miss that this movie was based on a 1960's Japanese cartoon, and that one of the characters was a chimp wearing overalls? Speaking of which, I have even less fondness for Racer as a pop-culture product than I did Iron Man -- I wasn't born when the cartoon aired, I was living overseas at the age when I would have enjoyed it, and found it kitschy, dated, and dumb when MTV brought it back in 1993. So, this isn't the "nerdstalgia" talking: If I was between the ages of 5 and 11, I'd probably think this movie was just about the coolest thing I'd seen since...well, since Iron Man, I guess, but I still would've dug it. And, as a 33-year-old, there were more enough splendidly weird wipes, flashbacks, and fades to keep me interested through the rough spots.

If you've never seen the cartoon before, the gist is this: Boy drives fast, family applauds, monkey does something funny.

Oh, you want more? Ok, well, Speed Racer (Emile Hirsch, eventually), the second son of a car-crazy family (conveniently named the Racers), spends his school hours day-dreaming of the track and hanging with his pixie-cute (girl)friend, Trixie. (Christina Ricci, eventually.) But Speed's life takes a tragic and Kennedyesque turn when his older brother Rex (Scott Porter) is vaporized in an ugly car accident, some time after he'd left home angry with Pops (John Goodman) and Mom (Susan Sarandon). As such, Speed grows up to inherit the family racing mantle instead, and, as it turns out, he's pretty darn good at it, so much so that the ruthless head of an obviously evil corporate conglomerate (Roger Allam of V for Vendetta, still looking exactly like Chris Hitchens) wants Speed to race for his well-funded team. But, when Speed decides to stick with the mom-and-pop outfit instead, he incurs the wrath of the insidious Bad Guys, who now set out to destroy him. But, with the help of the mysterious Racer X (Matthew Fox...I think that's his jawline), the racing scion Taejo Togokhan (Korean pop star Rain...shouldn't this be Stephen Colbert?), and, of course, his loving family (also including little brother Spritle, handyman Sparky, and monkey Chim-Chim), Speed sets out to beat the odds regardless. And, hey, maybe he'll learn a few things about racing -- and life -- in the process.

And that's about it, folks...Like, I said, it's a kids' film. (And while maybe Speed Racer and his friends versus the Big Bad Oligarchy isn't nuanced enough for the likes of Anthony Lane, I'm guessing it'll resonate well enough for eight-year-olds.) Helping things along are a bevy of solid performances: Hirsch is a bit of a cipher as Speed, but it's hard to see how it could've been otherwise. Better are John Goodman and Susan Sarandon as the Racers. Both are excellent actors in their own right, of course, but it's good to see neither suffer from the Portmanitis that has afflicted other otherwise-respectable thespians in heavy-green-screen productions. And then there's Matthew Fox as Racer X, which is funny for several reasons. Not only is it absurdly perfect casting -- Fox looks and sounds exactly like the cartoon character -- but the sight of Fox intoning blandly (and occasionally bringing the kung-fu) in his leather Racer X outfit almost seems like it has to be a self-deprecating knock by the Wachowskis on their earlier franchise. (Well, at least I hope they're in on the joke. The Neo-isms of the final act are way over the top, and a lot of the secondary performances, from Speed's teacher to the goons dressed like From Hell extras to the fellow playing Inspector Detector, often seem like Eurotrash rejects from the heady days of Zion raving too.)

All that being said, you're not going to walk out of Speed Racer talking about the performances. The real star of the show is the hypersaturated, zippity-quick look of the whole enterprise. And, while I easily see how people could feel overstimulated to the point of nausea by it (or that it might very well be less captivating on a non-IMAX-sized screen), I was consistently diverted by the look of Speed Racer, and particularly when the brothers Wachowski experiment with some all-new tricks. The cartoonishly-integrated flashback wipes, while perhaps overused, are definitely a neat effect, as are the squiggly-enhanced kung-fu/romance scenes and the "radio" zooms. And the whole movie just has a bizarre wonder to it: Note the sequence just before the start of the desert race, for example -- It's like something out of a fever dream, The Sheltering Sky by way of mescaline-laced Skittles.

So, after all this, am I recommending the film? Well, it really depends on how much you [a] prize visual invention over everything else and [b] can hang with a story pretty clearly pitched at pre-teens. (Having played and enjoyed F-Zero, Wipeout, or SSX will help too, I'd wager.) As I said above, however cotton-candy-thin and dumbed down the plot, I'd never seen a movie that looked like Speed Racer before, and that counts for something in my book. Whatever its faults as a film, I feel I saw something...quite new...last night, and as such I'm willing to forgive Speed Racer probably having too many notes. In any case, it's definitely not as uniformly terrible as the press is making it out to be.

In case you haven't already gotten the gist of it, a really long trailer for the Wachowski's Speed Racer is now online. This still looks mostly headache-inducing to me, to be honest. But I've seen so few movies this spring (as in, well, none) that I expect I'll probably indulge once the summer begins in earnest.

I missed these the other day, but via Bitten Tongue, two new international trailers for the Wachowskis' Speed Racer are now online. You might want to stay away if you have any propensity for epileptic seizures. Also out today, the final trailer for Pixar's WALL-E: Lonely boy-robot meets egg-shaped girl-robot, gets lost amid the stars. Pretty standard, really. Update: The full domestic trailer for Speed Racer is up, now with 95% more Susan Sarandon. (And, I'm not sure if I've mentioned it before, but Matthew Fox as Racer-X is a stroke of genius.)

The brothers Wachowski return to the fold with a bizarre new trailer for their live-action Speed Racer, starring Emile Hirsch, Christina Ricci, Matthew Fox, John Goodman, and Susan Sarandon. Ouch, my brain hurts...Not sure I see myself sitting through two hours of this one, even with the Wachowski imprimatur.

So, in the midst of last week's somber news, I followed my usual routine when needing to unwind and caught a double feature with a friend. The second film we saw was Superbad. The first was...well, super-bad. Oliver Hirschbiegel's The Invasion, the fourth movie version of Jack Finney's science fiction novel The Body Snatchers, is, alas, a trainwreck. Apparently, somewhere along the line, the studio got the sense they had a stinker on their hands, and brought on the venerable brothers Wachowski to try to salvage the patient. Well, whoever's to blame -- and it's probably all involved, since it feels so much like a movie-by-committee -- the result is an ill-thought-out mishmash of stock tropes, bad ideas, and warmed-over elements from The Matrix. As filmed, The Invasion barely makes any sense, and it brims over with unnecessary car crashes, obligatory cute-kid scenes, and some of the clunkiest sci-fi exposition I've ever heard in a big-budget film. That being said, I have to admit I did sorta enjoy myself through the film in a so-bad-it's-good kinda way, even if I felt sorry for otherwise-quality stars Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, and Jeffrey Wright for having to churn their way through this morass.

To be honest (and perhaps like other recent invasions that come to mind), The Invasion actually peaks at the very beginning. Trying to fend off a sleep-dep delirium amid a sea of fluorescent flat caffeine lights, a scared, haggard Nicole Kidman (inasmuch as she can seem haggard -- she looks great in this movie, even for her) furiously scans the back room of a ransacked pharmacy for the remaining uppers, amphetamines, and assorted other go-pills. Before we know what's going on, we then cut to convincing CNN coverage of a space shuttle tragedy, which occurred during an unplanned re-entry and which has strewn wreckage across the continental United States. Enter government fixer Jeremy Northam to inspect the scene, and the trouble begins. After cutting his hand on a piece of the aforementioned wreckage, Northam returns home to his live-in girlfriend (Malin Ackerman, soon of The Watchmen), establishes he has an ex-wife and child somewhere, and promptly falls asleep...and you can probably guess what that means. (Ack! Merchant-Ivory Pod Person!)

We then cut over to Kidman, who it seems, is a Washington D.C. psychologist with a relentlessly adorable kid, a hunky doctor boyfriend (Craig -- sadly for The Golden Compass, the two don't show much chemistry here), and an accent borrowed from Kyra Sedgwick on The Closer. Over the next few days, Kidman slowly discerns that her ex-husband, her patients (and their spouses), her neighbor's kid, and varied other D.C. denizens are starting to act curiouser and curiouser -- They're calm, flat, level-headed, magnanimous...assuredly not the usual Inside-the-Beltway mentality. And, as this virus of clear thinking spreads (in a rather unseemly fashion -- don't drink the water), Kidman, Craig, cute-kid, Craig's colleague Basil Exposition (Jeffrey Wright, slumming it), and the dwindling host of honest-to-goodness humanity must negotiate their way though a tightening noose of epidemic protocols and cordons sanitaire, all designed to catch those among us who would continue to display their emotional baggage in public. We're coming to get you, Oprah...

More than even most sci-fi parables, Invasion of the Body Snatchers has always been grist for keen cultural commentary, from the sinister spectre of Communist infiltration and/or McCarthyist paranoia haunting the 1956 version to the rising tide of Reaganism evident in the 1978 Donald Sutherland remake. (I never actually saw the 1993 Abel Ferrara one with Gabrielle Anwar, but I'm going to presume it's there too.) And this version is no exception, although what it's actually trying to get at is more confused. There's a running gag throughout the movie -- funny at first, overdone by the end -- that the world as run by Pod People is a kindler, gentler one, where Iran and North Korea voluntarily disarm, Bush passes universal health care, and the Mideast Conflict just sorta settles itself. Or, put another way, the Others Nicole Kidman is facing this time around are exactly the sort of people she's been trying to fashion as a psychiatrist -- bland, innocuous entities that have been over-prescribed into a flat, emotionless stupor, with all their edges taken off. (I'd also like to think that Kidman fighting aliens from outer space who threaten to take over our brains and make psychiatry redundant is a wry parting shot at her ex-husband's Scientology, but I'm probably reading into it.)

But that subtext, which could've made for a wry, subversive little flick, gets confused by all the other elements brought in (to say nothing of the interminable car crashes, "save the child!" pandering, and out-of-nowhere chase scenes thrown about.) Instead, The Invasion spends a lot of time dabbling in epidemic hysteria, an immune-carrier subplot done better in the far superior 28 Weeks Later, and what feels like leftover material from The Matrix. (Kidman finds that, while most authority figures seems to have lapsed into Pod Peopledom quite early, a few other citizens, usually African-American, are also managing to live "under the radar." This would be quite a clever conceit, if we hadn't so recently seen the exact same point made as the heart of The Matrix.)

But, most importantly, The Invasion is just terribly written. Different strokes for different folks, of course, but I'd beware anyone who doesn't cringe at the Czech dinner party scene or the horrible telegraphing involved in the adrenaline needle sequence. And watch out for those who don't restrain guffaws during Kidman and Craig's discussion of a possible antidote, or, for that matter, anytime poor Jeffrey Wright has to open his mouth and spew forth another dubious "tachyon field"-type explanation for recent events. They may just be Pod People.

EW lists the top 25 sci-fi offerings (in tv and film) of the past twenty-five years. Pretty arbitrary, really, but it includes Brazil (at #6), BSG (at #2 -- these two should have switched places), Children of Men (#14), Eternal Sunshine (#17 -- same problem), Aliens (#9), The Thing (#10), The X-Files (#4), Galaxy Quest (#24), and Blade Runner (#3), so it's by no means a bad list. (Both Lost and Heroes should be replaced, however.) Just from what's missing above, you can probably guess #1...can't you, Mr. Anderson?

Um, ok. The Brothers Wachowski sign on to make Speed Racer, a highly unnecessary reimagining of the old Saturday morning cartoon. So if Chim Chim ends up being an androgynous leather-clad existentialist kung-fu master, you'll know why.

"People should not be 'fraid of cookie. Cookies should be 'fraid of people." Guy Fawkes, meet Crazy Harry. By way of my sister, experience Jim Henson's uncompromising vision of the future, C for Cookie.

"Nothing better illustrates the simplism of V for Vendetta, or better highlights the unflattering contrast with Brazil, than V's motto: "There are no coincidences." The comic beauty of Brazil's portrait of totalitarianism is that everything rests on random coincidence, which nudges the bureaucracy into its own blind and murderous momentum: A dead fly falls into a computer printer and -- voila -- poor law-abiding Buttle is mistaken for dangerous subversive Tuttle." Slate's Matt Feeney compares Brazil and V for Vendetta.

"V for Vendetta may be--why hedge? is--the most subversive cinematic deed of the Bush-Blair era, a dagger poised in midair. Unlike the other movies dubbed 'controversial' (Fahrenheit 9-11, The Passion, Munich, Syriana), it doesn't play to a particular constituency or polarized culture bloc, it's working on a deeper, Edgar Allan Poe-ish witch's brew substrata of pop myth." Vanity Fair's James Wolcott seems to really like V for Vendetta. (Via Blivet.)

The new trailer for V for Vendetta is now online. This premiered at BNAT 7 last week and got universally great reviews from the AICN fanboys, most of whom know their Moore...but, frankly, I'm not really feeling the "Matrix with knives" angle of this trailer, and John Hurt seems like he's overdoing it.