Speed Racer (Andy & Lana Wachowski, 2008)

Triumphantly, an action movie that embraces movement in an all-encompassing tribute to friction and gravity. It creates a wonderful movie that lasts 18 minutes long. Then it continues to be a movie for two more hours, sometimes including parts that are good enough to be in that 18 minute movie. Other parts are not. The parts that are not eclipse the parts that are by quite a large quantity, yet these drowsy moments of slippery gloss are not enough to keep the hard, crushing, bouncing, diving, swooping, cheering parts from boggling the eyeballs. When I was talking about movies taking inspiration from video games, this is what I meant. A cavalcade of weighty, beefy CGI race cars hurtling at and through and over and against each other in spinning, exploding, joyous ways.

It's difficult for me to come to terms with the idea of car racing being a sport, exactly, I suppose for the reason that, despite the great physical skill and stamina required, the car is the real participant. And, though likely for different reasons, Speed Racer is all too willing to indulge in my distinction between driver and car. Unlike Sucker Punch, which likely could've increased its watchability ten-fold by simply being a 100% animated movie, the faces of drivers are only seen in close-ups, while CG cars bounce and shift and slide in their own cartoon world gloriously divorced from reality. This is the movie I was hoping for when I started to watch Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, which was insantly bogged down by endless chatter and an awful sense of how to make movies. The Wachowskis, whatever their faults, apparently can actually make movies. And make em good. If only this weren't a flash in the pan in a long and strange career that apparently has them moving away from genre exploration and into that most turgid of film exercises, the hot button political drama.

The world should apologize for this movie's flop at the box office. In the same way that Usher's Love in This Club promises a pop world we are not good enough for, Speed Racer should've ushered in a beautiful new era of action filmmaking. Maybe in some alternate reality Thor and Captain America wouldn't look like awful husks of comic book antiquity, and people everywhere are grooving to delirious ambient space pop. I wanna be in that world so bad.