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Spectacularly silly movie of the summer

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    Spectacularly silly movie of the summer

    If Speed Racer is half as silly as Chris Sims says it is, it should be awesome.
    Okay, first things first: This is a movie where John Goodman wrestles a Ninja, thus bringing its JGAKQ to a respectable 7.5, right above O Brother, Where Art Thou?, but still well below The Big Lebowski.

    The best thing, though, actually happens during one of the races, in which every single car can jump and in which everyone drifts all the time. So there’s this one part where these guys have hired a team of racecar vikings–yes, RACECAR VIKINGS–to kill Speed and Racer X, which one of them tries to do by spinning his car through the air while swinging a giant metal hammer from the bottom, to which Racer X responds by flipping his own car through the air while the Viking is upside down and punching him in the face.

    #2
    Spectacularly silly movie of the summer

    Please, please, in the name of all that you hold dear, don't put yourself through the agony of watching this film. It is excrutiatingly, unremittingly bad. They've tried to pitch the level somewhere between Sin City's moody noir and Wacky Races' knockabout macap fun and failed miserably, ending up with a mix of live action and CGI that looks like nothing more than an expensive episode of Lazy Town. I'm not sure who the film is trying to satisfy - there are countless tedious scenes where the plot, which centres around the pernicious role of big business in sports, rumbles along interminably but the car action is clearly geared up to apppeal to under-eights, so at any point half the audience are shuffling around restlessly waiting for something more exciting to happen. And anyway, the film will only really appeal to people who adore - not just have an interest in, but absolutely fetishise - the timeworn view of 50's American car races; all chrome, fins and Dead Man's Curve heroics. You won't be surprised to hear that commentary duos sitting behind big shiny microphones feature very heavily, an uninspiring inclusion that does very little to make the CGI-fests any more entertaining. Yeah, the gleaming, twinkly-lit car chases are the sort of thing that kids will find momentarily distracting; but in all honesty, if you see that your children are enjoying this film, get them to a psychiatrist.

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      #3
      Spectacularly silly movie of the summer

      ending up with a mix of live action and CGI that looks like nothing more than an expensive episode of Lazy Town
      That's not a bad thing by any standards.

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        #4
        Spectacularly silly movie of the summer

        But it runs for nearly three hours. I have trouble coping with fifteen minutes of Lazy Town.

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          #5
          Spectacularly silly movie of the summer

          I had to go to the premiere for work reasons and the significant chunks of the film they previewed on-screen while the final red carpet interviews were going on (along with the looming Man U v Barca CL semi-final) persuaded me to leave before the lights went down.

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            #6
            Spectacularly silly movie of the summer

            Speed Racer is also the first big bomb of the summer. The reviews were poor and I guess more people wanted to see Iron Man(which got generally favorable notices - or at least, as good as one can expect for a summer action film. The New Yorker, predictably, didn't like it) on its second weekend than see Speed Racer on its first.

            I didn't see it. It looks shit. They seem to have grossly overestimated the following audiences:

            1) People who really loved the old barely animated Speed Racer series.

            2) The subset of those people who enjoyed the series, not for it's retro-kitsch value, but for it's well-written stories, its breath-taking racing scenes and deep character exploration.

            3) People left on the planet for whom lots of "dazzling" CGI effects is still a novelty. I don't know who these peopld could be, outside of some aboriginal forest-dwelling peoples who have never seen a film and children under 3.

            4) The aformentioned group of people who have a nostalgic view of 1950s sports car racing.

            5) The group that were moved by Into the Wild and assumed that, naturally, Emile Hirsch's next project would be similar. This is, of course, a wholey unreasonable assumption, but idiot filmgoers do this all the time. Like all the people who were disappointed that The Last Kiss was nothing like either Scrubs or Garden State.

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              #7
              Spectacularly silly movie of the summer

              Ah, it's a remake of an old anime series. Riiight. That explains alot.

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                #8
                Spectacularly silly movie of the summer

                It would be misleading to call Speed Racer "anime." That term is generally reserved for the good stuff, like Akira and Ghost in the Shell.

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                  #9
                  Spectacularly silly movie of the summer

                  "nothing more than an expensive episode of Lazy Town. "

                  Magnificent line, and desired and intended effect on myself.

                  Lazy Town is an incredible show, as in it's not credible. It's a train wreck. It's jaw-dropping that it exists, but those 15 minutes that one struggles through are enough to remember it forever.

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