It deserves all caps and much much more.
I don't have to argue with anyone that this is a good movie. If you get this movie you will get it and love it. If you don't get this movie, you might not love it, and give it horrible reviews like most of the movie critic community.
I don't blame them for giving it bad reviews, they simply do not have the capacity or the prior knowledge needed to correctly experience it.
This is a movie about racing. Not nascar racing or formula 1 racing. This is actually a movie about video game racing. The car physics and dynamics are designed for those who understand what it means to race in a video game. If you are experience in playing games like Burnout (any version) or Rally Sport Racing or various science ficition based racing games, or even Mario Kart, you will understand this movie better. Even from the very beginning this is plainly obvious by their inclusion of a "ghost" car race, something that most video game racers know well.
It is also a movie that is designed for those with experience with fast paced visual perception (mostly video gamers again). I would also include people who play fast paced sports and any one who is just really good at absorbing visual stimulus very quickly. Otherwise this film will simply move to quickly. It will not be as enjoyable if you are falling behind the action because your eyes simply can't keep up.
Also, the visual effects of this film are best understood by those with experience with 3d computer generated imagery and most 2d video effects. It requires a deeper understanding that graphics are not about what technically looks good, but what looks good artistically. For example, there is a scene where everything is composited horribly in the technical sense. It is pretty much just video overlaid over more video. To someone who understands how it was done on a computer, this is similar to a sketch done by an artist, details are dropped out because they are simply not important. Why composite characters that are unimportant in an important way?
For photographers, this films plays with concepts of photography by messing with how effects are generated by computers. Animated long exposures create excessively dynamic imagery. Even the bokeh takes meaningful shape (i'm not giving this one away, you have to figure it out yourself).
And why dull any colors you don't have to. This film is a marvel of color. Color theorist would love this film.
On a story front, the film is not entirely innovative, but it is exceptionally strong. It is such a solid foundation for the rest of the film that no fault can be found in it. And if you can actually figure out the meaning of this film by the climax, I found it to be euphoric. This film is not about winning or losing. The message is clearly expressed in a way with no shortfalls or exceptions. I would suspect it is my reading of Ayn Rand and Eckart Tolle which let me figure out the real meaning behind this film. And I am not going to give it away.
For me, this film is the first master piece of a new era of film making that most likely started with 2001 A space Odyssey.
I don't expect everyone to understand or enjoy this film right off the bat. But this is where film is going. I am so excited. This is what I can build off of. This is the type of innovation I love.
As my painting teacher always drove us to do in class, this is something NEW!!!
Kyler
5 comments:
I just saw Speed Racer. You're right, it's awesome.
I think you're wrong about why people don't like it, though. I don't think it takes any special knowledge or experience to appreciate it. You don't need to already like futuristic racers to like its premise. You don't need to understand animation to get caught up in the momentum. You certainly don't need to have read Ayn Rand to understand its story of evil corporate control.
Speed Racer is extremely simple. There's not all that much to get. It's a bunch of clichés about family and sports and "sticking it to the man". There's nothing here I haven't seen many times before. What sets it apart is its childish enthusiasm. There's nothing revolutionary or masterful about the colors, they're just unrestrained. There's nothing particularly clever about the story, it just tries to hit you as hard as it possibly can with each emotion.
So I think it's safe to say that everyone who sees the movie will understand it. There's nothing to misunderstand there. The issue is, can they care about a movie which is not grounded in reality? This is a movie which has never heard of the concept of "subtlety". So what it boils down to is whether the viewer is willing to leave the real world for two hours, and blast their brain with bombastic entertainment.
I always am, and I had a great time.
You seem to think there are techniques here which aren't well-known. That's not the case. The reason no one uses composite shots is because no one's crazy enough. To play with your frame like it's a work of art is saying that you don't want to create the illusion of reality. This movie has lots of shots where one element is a static camera while other elements spin around. Imagine if you tried sticking that in a drama. In an instant it would destroy the reality the movie built up. So it's not the next step of film-making, it's a step to the side.
Another place I've seen a similar philosophy of filmmaking was in Ang Lee's (box office disaster) Hulk. He was trying to capture the aesthetic of a comic book, so he had shots (for instance) where people would be on opposite sides of the room and yet both appear in close-ups in the same frame.
By the way, have you ever seen Samurai Jack? That seems like it'd be right up your alley.
But I digress. In a later post, you talk about the climax and how brilliant it is and how it shows that other movies should be less linear or some such nonsense. The climax was indeed fantastic, and I can't picture it working in almost any other movie.
This movie's most quiet sequences are as loud as some movies' climaxes. So while another, more subdued movie would be content with ending on a big race (using real-world physics, even), for Speed Racer that's something barely exciting enough for the middle of the movie! So it needs to have cars flying up and down all over the place, it needs to raise the stakes to the point where every single racer wants him dead, and even that's not enough to be the ending of this particular movie. So it starts pulling you out of the movie, using a montage of things that have already happened so that each one will increase the intensity a little bit more. It's a massive crescendo, and at the end of it it stops pretending there's any sort of coherent world to it at all.
When you start as over-the-top as Speed Racer does, this is the only way to pay it off. Most movies would give their viewers heart attacks if they went that ridiculous. It's a matter of tone. Now, I don't think the storytelling of the montage is particularly nonlinear- it's all part of the crescendo for that one moment, which we've arrived at linearly just like in any other movie. But breaking the realism of the movie by repeating stuff is a trick which most films reserve for major revelations and plot twists. Most movies have restraint, this one doesn't- that's all there is to this. It doesn't add anything you don't already know. It's not like an intelligent viewer will have forgotten how important the race is and why. It's just that the movie is milking every second for all it's worth. And you can't demand that everyone do that.
But hey, I'm with you. I wish more movies would be less grounded, or better yet if they could switch on a moment's notice from incredible subtlety to over-the-top bombast. But I don't expect that to happen, because it's a minority that enjoys having things so overblown.
Wow, that was a lot of talking and not much saying. I really did like this movie.
Oh, and one more thing. I absolutely can fault it. Those sidekicks were sooooo irritating. I'm referring to the brother and the monkey, of course. The worst offense was when it intercuts the most pivotal moment in the movie (Speed having a one-on-one with Royalton) with the sidekicks stealing candy. Argh! I figure they must have been in the anime, but the movie would have been so much better without them.
You've made a lot of good points about this film, the one I think is the most important is that they simply seemed to have push everything in this movie to the max, turned it up to 11 and so on.
What I am interested in knowing is what you thought the underlying theme of this film was.
When I suggested something to do with Ayn Rand, that had nothing to do with evil corporate control.
Underlying theme? I guess I'd say it's about insisting on doing what you're good at, even though it means going up against the world. I can see how you might compare that to The Fountainhead, but really it's a common theme in sports movies. You always have the athlete saying how there's nothing in the world that matters but his sport, struggling with whether it's worth it to go on when the world's telling him it's not important, then (predictably) beating everyone in a stunning final game. It's a cliché, just like the second theme of trusting family.
Now that I think of it, Ratatouille had the same plot.
There's another problem I have with the movie, related to the same midway scene I mentioned before. As the businessman is telling Speed what'll happen, we cut to the actual race, and see him fail. Then it jumps back. "Ah ha,", I said, "that was just a visualization of what he was predicting. Clever. Now let's see how he does in the real race!". And then it jumps past the race and has them dealing with his failure. It took a minute before I understood that the race had already happened, so the emotions of that scene didn't work for me at all.
Similarly, at the very beginning it took a while (and a little bit of rewinding) before I recognized that the flashback to childhood was a flashback, as opposed to a symbolic representation of how the older Speed felt at the moment he was waiting for the race. I didn't think it was literal, I thought the test was saying that Speed felt young and unqualified and anxious. When the test's wording included something along the lines of "Drivers, get ready!", I thought this confirmed my understanding that it was a daydream.
So I guess it is a nonlinear story in small parts. And when you're cutting back and forth, there's a great deal of ambiguity over what the transitions mean. The Wachowski's evidently expected viewers to immediately know exactly what they were thinking, and that's a mistake.
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