Speed Racer

Speed Racer
a fantasy-action movie
IMDb | Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 6/10
Meets Expectations: +1/-1
Apparent Rating: 6/10

Overall, this movie was good. Considering the dearth of non-fluffy source material and the quality of the underpinnings, the movie was excellent.

There are a lot of things in this movie that were impressive and very few failures if you have accepted the general premise. The general premise is ludicrous, of course, and the beginning of the movie does nothing to submerge a skeptical adult’s psyche in the fantasy world.

That lack of solid beginning would be my main complaint. It took me probably 25-30 minutes to overcome the first scene. The movie is about fanasty car racing, the kind of racing where cars can jump into the air and do loop-the-loops and jumps and dives on tracks that rival modern-day roller coasters. So why did they start with a lumpy looking kid filling out a multiple choice test form? It did nothing for setting the stage and convinced me that the kid was some sort of defective jerk whose sole purpose on the Earth is to keep other children from learning and succeeding in life. I was shocked that was the same character from the cartoon, where Speed is presented as some sort of brilliant prodigy and an upstanding man.

This school stuff continued a lot longer than it should have too, because we had to know that Trixie (who flew a helicopter in the cartoons and acted as Speed’s spotter for rally races) had been with Speed from almost the beginning. Mostly it seemed like an egregious pandering, “If there are kids in the movie, kids will love it!”

Then the movie starts and the whole thing is a ride as wild as the track.

The main actor, Emile Hirsch also starred in Into the Wild and he definitely has a real career ahead of him. I’m not sure I would have noticed his performance as a performance if I hadn’t seen Into the Wild before Speed Racer, but he brought real acting chops to the part. A lot of the movie was CGI, so they must have shot it in a soundstage against a green-screen, but even knowing that intellectually, I thought it looked as real as it could have. Speed really looks like he’s driving and Hirsch brings it home.

John Goodman does an excellent job as Pops Racer, though too many points he went over-the-top to the cartoony style of the original. In a very strange way, Pops Racer looked like Fred Flintstone, with that sense of “I’m an actor playing a ridiculous role and you shouldn’t take me seriously.” If it had been played straight, there should have been more focus on Pops, with the constant tongue-in-cheek attitude, I’m glad they minimized it. Spritle and Chim Chim were ridiculous sops to the original cartoon and really could have been omitted in my opinion. The girl playing adult-Trixie was not good (her counterpart during the childhood/schoolyard scenes was better.) Whoever she is, she’s a lousy actress. Her part had real solid meat in it and she couldn’t sell it. It’s the inverse of Natalie Portman in Star Wars where Portman was a decent actress and had nothing to demonstrate that with. Trixie was a real role played by someone who is good at standing around looking pretty but nothing more. Susan Sarandon was good at the acting but she didn’t jive with the rest of the look— she looked ancient. The main villain, Royston was good but way too obvious. It looked like he’d been told to camp it up.

The other racers managed to make themselves caricatures. Rex and Racer X did not get much screen time and were played by different actors. No opinion. Taejo was not as bad, there was a lot more to his part and he managed it, but he was still a cartoon.

The car modellers and costumers and CGI people were brilliant in this. I wish the movie had been edited so there were whole scenes of racing without flashbacks or cutaways and I’m not one for watching competitions.

Someone saved this movie from being campy, someone said, “Let’s play this straight and let the audience find the humor themselves.” And that made it a really fine piece of entertainment whenever that shone through. I wish it had been done that way throughout with intent. Whenever there was campy humor and “We know you’re not taking us seriously!” it was disasterous.

It could have been better if they’d been making the movie for real throughout. They had the actors and the script and the CGI and the models and the special effects. But a lot of people brought that “This is humor, I don’t have to be professional.” attitude to the movie. It is, at its heart, a fantasy. For all the action, for all the mechanics, the story is one about a magician who goes on an epic quest to save his family. And you cannot have a successful fantasy without convincing the audience to suspend disbelief. But humor requires bringing external knowledge to the experience and is contrary to suspending disbelief. Humor pulls people out of the immersive experience. And Speed Racer, despite succeeding on many levels, failed at providing an immersion for me.

It could have been an 8 or even 9 out of 10 for me, with the story they had and the material/resources. I liked it, 6/10 or so, but I resent that quarter/third of a movie experience I didn’t get. Obviously most people don’t see turning in merely good work as a failure. I see this movie as taking a great idea and wasting half of it on this product. If they had taken the great idea and really rolled with it, this could have been a phenomenal experience. +1 for some great acting, -1 for wasting an idea.

To Every Season, Turn Turn Turn (the channel)

This has been a season for heavy television watching. The summer mini-season from cable networks kicked in right before the fall season from broadcast started. I have to say that I love the summer mini-season idea. There was so much stuff, especially with the marathon of Tru Calling, that I never even noticed the olympics were on, much less the political conventions.

I loathe the Olympics. We’ll get that out of the way right now. But it doesn’t hold a candle to my rage about the political conventions. We knew who the nominees were before each convention started. It’s not like there were going to be any surprises. It wasn’t “news”. They could have put the transcripts out on the web in advance so people could read them and someone could sum up. The whole thing would have taken about 15 minutes per party. Instead everything was disrupted for weeks while people read their canned patter of lies to the world. It’s a waste of time. And I don’t mind if people want to have pep rallies to get supporters jazzed up, but I really mind that it pre-empts stuff I want to see—- like the actual news.

Speaking of news, the MSNBC scheduling department really sucks. Constantly they’ve changed their timeslots around for the new Rachel Maddow Show and not bothered to tell anyone about it. So I get random crap instead of the show I was expecting. If someone has a recommendation for non-political news from a liberal slant, I could really go for that. I like Countdown because it’s actually talking about stuff I don’t hear about otherwise—- though they’ve been slow lately, scooped by The Daily Show for most major stories. But the sheer volume of fluff makes me crazy. I hate that liberal news must be tempered by humor lest someone take it as criticism of the king— if the news media must play the court jester, then it’s not news.

Burn Notice was my favorite show of last season. This year, I’ve been bored. It seems like Michael is spinning his wheels and making no progress toward finding out who burned him. So we see him interacting with his mother and she’s horrible enough to justify ignoring. We see him taking yet another case just like the previous ones. The caliber of the writing has really faltered. The show is still good, but it lacks the desperation to get the contract renewed quality that it used to have.

I watched the season finale of In Plain Sight, (yeah, I’m a little slow) but was told the rest of the episodes weren’t like that. If they were all like that last 2-parter, eh, it’s okay.

The new series of Bones has been strange with all the Zack replacements and the season opener in London.

I enjoy Eureka, but I wish they would go back to the emphasis on smart people that the show started with. Lately it’s been a lot too much normalcy. But the huge problem is that the plots are not just telegraphed or foreshadowed, the writers made a metaphorical video and served it up canned so everything that happens is dead-obvious and feels almost plagiarized. About 5 minutes into an episode, I know what’s going to happen, that the “unblamable villain” will be that guy we’ve never seen before (they don’t wear red shirts, but they might as well).

((I’m still kind of appalled that they let a man (the character Sheriff Carter) have custody of his child-of-statutory-rape (seriously, the character bios originally showed that Carter could not have been more than 16.5 when his daughter was conceived.) After a while, someone else must have noticed because the ages were not both incremented for the next season. It’s really hard to take him seriously as a parent because he says he expects his daughter to take after him and be an upstanding citizen, except she’d have a baby now if she’d followed his example. I would like it if they got rid of the whole Carter family on the show and just concentrated on everyone else.))

We attempted to pick up some new shows for the season, Raising the Bar… lawyers on opposing sides of every case shown were in a relationship with their opposing counsel. I don’t know much about law or NYC, but it rather seems like someone would notice how they’d paired up and claim malfeasance. My comment was, “Doesn’t that seem a little incestuous?”

I’ve got a flag out for Santuary and Leverage. First ep recordings scheduled for the new Knight Rider and The Mentalist. Saw the Fringe thing, thought it was terrible, though if I’d known the guy who did Lost was behind it, I wouldn’t have bothered. If I’d known they were marketing it as akin to X-Files I wouldn’t have bothered.

With all this, I have not watched many movies. I finished the last DVDs of Cadfael, I can see why they stopped, really scraping the bottom of the barrel there. We got The Last Detective and thought it was OK enough to get more.

Forthcoming new episodes of NCIS, Chuck, NUMB3RS, and a handful of other things. If I’d been wise, I’d have put my Netflix subscription on hold, but I really thought I was going to need material to bridge the month-long gap of content from the Olympics and the political conventions. I wish Netflix and TiVo could have gotten together so I could download movies to my TV… instead there’s the business with Amazon downloads (which confuse me) and TiVo makes a stand-alone device. My TV doesn’t have any more input device slots though.

I have read a stack of books lately, but between those reviews being hard to write and my not feeling like anyone cares what I think of them (true among friends, let alone strangers)— I find myself lacking in ambition. So I close one and start the next without commentary and that has taken away from blogging about them.

Forbidden Kingdom

Forbidden Kingdom
a fantasy/kung-fu movie
IMDb | Netflix
Overall Rating: 4/10
Meets Expectations: +2
Apparent Rating: 6/10

This is my kind of story. I did not think it would be because I have very little enthusiasm for kung-fu as a movie genre. But the story was about a young man in the inner city who is transported to this magical realm while unconscious from a fight.

While he’s there, he learns to fight in several animal styles of kung fu fighting and completes a quest to save the world. He learns what it is to sacrifice for his friends, what it costs the hero to save the world, how to have deep feelings for a woman, and what the bonds connecting him to others mean. He becomes a man and we can see it.

It’s probably my favorite plot.

Unfortunately it’s really badly implemented here. Jackie Chan comes off a lot like Shaggy in the Scooby Doo movies. Jet Li is well, I’m not really sure which character was Jet Li, but all the other ones were cardboard. The girl manages to sound like she doesn’t speak English and we’re supposed to believe she’s stoically trying to avenge her family, but mostly she sounds retarded because she speaks of herself in the third person. The worst part about this is the pacing. The story can’t develop because we rush through all the plot to watch yet another ridiculous fight scene. And the fight scenes are all “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” style where suddenly they have lunar gravity for no apparent reason, so it’s stupid and pointless and wastes gobs of film time.

If we had actually seen the story told, with the building of personality so the characters’ motivations were clear, that would have been an awesome experience.

Some of the humorous parts of the movie require external knowledge of previous kung fu classics, so unless you have seen some of the Drunken Master series, or the ones with Aunt 13, or whatever that one with the emperor of the desert was, you’re not going to get the joke. But the dialog and most of the scenes are blocked with the intent that the audience is going to be laughing along with the cast. I did not find it even vaguely humorous, even when I got the joke.

This was a great story, wasted on this telling. I enjoyed it, but you probably won’t. If you’re a fan of kung fu movies, you’re likely going to be offended by their tongue-in-cheek treatment of the genre. If you’re not a fan of kung fu movies, most of the movie will go over your head and you’ll get to the end frustrated and feeling taunted. However, if you like superhero movies and can put up with the attitude problems the people making the movie have, it was entertaining.

Smart People

Smart People
a drama movie
IMDb | Netflix
Overall Rating: 4
Meets Expectations: -2
Apparent Rating: 4

I did not particularly like Smart People. I liked it better than Netflix thought I would, since they said I would give it 1.5 stars at most. There were several things that made this underwhelming, mostly that none of the characters seemed really catchy. I can’t tell if that is because the acting was mediocre, the script was bad, or because the intended characters just suck.

We have the bitch-dad who cares about no one except how they can be demeaned and insulted. He’s a teacher who manages to not teach and to turn all his students off his subject while complaining that no one really wants to know English and its literature. We have the daughter who is fulfilling the wifely roles in all but affection, while trying to graduate high school and make a life for herself. We have the stoner brother/uncle. We have the son/brother who is in college where dad works. None of these people struck me as especially brainy or brilliant or insightful, so we have only the title to tell us they’re “smart people”.

In my experience really smart people do not need to study. They read the material, they listen to the lectures, they do the required assignments which exist for idiots who need to drum things in even though it’s just busywork, and then when they want to learn something they do outside work. So the daughter who was studying for her SATs struck me as rather dumb. Plus everyone knows the SATs have been watered down until the scores are meaningless.

There was not a lot of real plot in this movie. We have the daughter who hits on an older man. We have the son who is secretly a published poet. We have the father who thinks he wants to be head of the English department and whose book has been rejected. Then we have the father gets a girlfriend plot. That was the really repulsive aspect.

The girlfriend is a doctor. Their first date went so badly she walked out and he had to plead piteously to get a second chance because she really does not like him. They shag on the second date and although they use a condom she gets pregnant. It is my understanding that unmarried women who are sexually active and non-monogamous take contraceptive pills as a matter of course, even though everyone engaging in risky behavior should use barrier methods as well. Condoms break, fall off, or there are user errors. Having sex with a man who has been chaste for a decade (since his wife died) who freely admits he has not used a condom before– well, I think any woman who did that is taking a foolish risk. Any woman who gets pregnant with a man she does not like is criminally stupid. There really is no rational reason for how an educated woman could bring an unwanted child into the world.

I have no idea how I would have felt about the movie without the problems it had. If the writers had actually known smart people, not just assholes who were smarter than the writers, and if a supposedly intelligent woman who can write prescriptions could have done the right thing and gotten herself emergency contraception—- I think I might have enjoyed this thoroughly. But that’s a completely different movie.

And a note about the rating, I think most average people are turned off by movies about (supposedly) smart people, so I think they would inherently expect this to be a 2/10. So my -2 rating is actually down from my expected rating of at least 6/10. And I do really think it was a 4/10 for most people. Most people seem to think that an unwanted baby makes everything better so they would consider that to have been a happy ending which is worth about +2.