Speed Racer--Killer movie with AMAZING design...  

More Speed...
Boy, just read Roger Ebert's review and he hated it...
It always fascinates me how differently persons can respond to the same movie (or the same design). This is why I think design and the arts are subjective and engineering is objective and that we need to continue using and grasping and improving both.
But back to Roger and me (apologies to Michael Moore).
I usually agree with Roger Ebert on most movies he reviews, but not this time.
My young child, who likes most of the children's movies that Roger Ebert likes, and who likes the Matrix and Alien and Star Wars movies (at least the portions I let him watch) that Roger Ebert likes, thought this Speed Racer movie was fabulous.
In fact, most of the things Roger disliked about the movie (the intense primary colors glinting like Fourth of July sparklers fired through the super collider equivalent of a child's kaliedascope, the light speed cutting, the Sergei Eisenstein washed through Terry Gilliam montages, the just enough to get on with it characterizations and dialogue that makes Star Wars seem like Tolstoy, Racer X's anti-hero grimness and alienation--sort of Sartre bad faith and Camus sense in the Fall clad in black leathers, and Speed's overwhelmingly upbeat victory in the end) were apparently what my son loved about it.
I speculate Roger's dislike of Speed Racer tracks to being a late 50s to mid 60s kid, like George Lucas, rather than a late 60s to early 70s kid like me. Or a 21st Century kid like my child.
Roger probably also has a fundamental dislike and distrust of the populist, democratic, existentialist gear head view of the world that suffuses Speed and to some extent me.
When Roger and I were youthful, there were different moral sensibilities in place. In Roger's time, there was the tail end of good and bad. By my early years, good and bad were bad. Today, it seems there are just various shades of bad that are bad. Good is a concept, but not really operational. Anyway, that's sort of how I nutshell the trajectory of the way American youth have viewed the world these last 40 years.
There were also different cliques of students to feel alienated with or against in his time and mine.

Back in my youth days of the...
Back in my youth days of the late 60s and early 70s days, there were greasers (hoodlums with hair greased back), heads (long hairs into the Eagles and America sound), nerds (the socially inept that had yet to find a way for their intellects to blossom), geeks (smart, scared, resentful kids that later became tech geeks), jocks (athletes who reeked of confidence outside and doubt inside) and gear heads (those obsessed with operating and assembling machines that moved, because people were just too hopelessly unpredictable to relate to. I suspect that in his early youth, you could delete the geeks and the heads.
Regardless, in my time, gear heads often became engineers, or mechanics, or filling station owners depending on IQ and family wealth). Greasers were often gear heads also. But there were a few from all categories that did the cross over thing with the gear heads. I was a jock who did. I wanted to be an intellectual, but the geeks and nerds refused me admittance, because of my jock legacy. The gear heads only cared if you liked cars. If you liked cars, especially engines, social legacy meant little. For this reason, I have always loved gear heads. They took me in, when sports weren't enough, and when the geeks and nerds practiced what seems now reverse discrimination. 🙂
But back to the roots of Roger and my and my son's different responses to Speed Racer.
Roger was old enough to have been a nerd at a time when cool guys drove hot rods, or Chevy Impalas with 327, or the rare 409 V8s with moon hub caps. This was a time when the car was a symbol of the opportunity the world held. The world was so rich with opportunity and prosperity that one could reasonably expect to make a decent living even as rebel. Ah, those must have been the days. Today, even highly skilled professionals struggle to make ends meet. I shiver to think what today's rebels are suffering. But the point, despite the digressions, is that even to a nerd like Roger, cars were good and hopeful things capable of expressing the full range of human emotion.
By the time I came along, a car was no longer that symbol of possibility, be it the possibility of escape from conformity, or escape to the good life, or escape to the joys of college, or escape to back seat sex, or what escape have you. Escape implies something worth escaping to.
By my time a car was just an existential vessel where motion could insulate you from a world no one really believed could be fixed anymore, or that one could really escape.

pt3
A car was not a happy thing. It was beginning to be seen as part of the problem. A few particularly organic persons had begun to pretend a car could become a green thing. A car was not even a hot rod or a joy ride back then; again, that was late 50s and early 60s think. By the early 70s a car was an existential machine to be used to deliver you from the nightmare the 60s had turned into and the ghastly tackiness of design that was overwhelming the early 70s. All the true gear head cars had been out of production for at least 3 years by that time. The last truly great and legendary gear head car was the original Z-28 Camaro from about 1969 (the rare 302 ci v-8) and maybe a Pontiac Tran Am from the same year. A Boss Mustang, Shelby Mustang, or a MOPAR Hemi rig could also count.
But by the time the mid 70s Smokey and the Bandit Trans Ams came out, they were jokes for rich kids that had to be stripped down, and have their engines allowed to breath, before a gear head could take them seriously. Corvettes in the early 70s were a joke, except to look at, again, unless you went to the parts bin and let them breath.
In the early 70s, the movies "Two-Lane Black Top" with a black primer 55 Chevy and "Vanishing Point" with a MoPar rig signalled what cars were really about to me and my friends. I suppose Frank Bullit's car fits in there somewhere, too. Going no where fast in a morally bankrupt, hostile world, was where it was at. There was no point to racing as a purposeful act. Racing was corrupt, too. And we didn't look up to Marlon Brando in the Wild One, because it implied that rebellion itself could be cool. Thinking nothing was cool was the only thing that was cool; that and earlier true gear head cars.

pt5
To reiterate, most of the real cars had been defanged by the early 70s.
The gas crisis and the double nickel (55mph speed limit) hand cuffed us. A malaise was on the land that Carter would wait till the late 70s to characterize. The Vietnam War had exposed America's dark underbelly for even the most closeted American to see. By then you knew the Brady Bunch was a farce, whereas once you had wondered if Leave It to Beaver had actually existed some where in America.
The gearheads of Speed Racer come partly from my youth, which makes them easy to relate to superficially, but they have an optimism and individualism and willingness to fight the big sponsors that predates my time, and Roger's time. It actually tracks back to the racing movies of the 30s and early 50s, two times when the country had been put through a ringer, come out the other side, and said, yes, the world is fucked, but life goes on and racing goes on, and, well, you can fold your tent and give in to the oligarchy if you want, but I'm going out trying to win something. This POV is epitomized in Speed Racer by John Goodman's character--Speed's Dad. It takes an existential crisis for the value to transfer from father to son, but it does transfer finally, when Speed begins to realize just how horrible the world truly is--even more horrible than his father realizes, and his father has some serious insight to how terrible the world truly is.
I think Roger's youthful memory of cars and the world is something he would like to have back, at least partially. He yearns for a world with less over evil and more sense that good pervades. And so Speed Racer is very tough to embrace for him, because Speed Racer says that outside of family, and one's vocation, the world IS evil. There is also a tackiness, un unchicness, and an ugliness to this movie's look and sensibilty that relates to the America that preceded and followed Roger's youth. I didn't grow up between it like he did. I grew up smack dab in the middle of the second installment that followed Roger.

pt6
For I, who grew up with this ghastly tastelessness that overwhelmed America in the 70s of my youth, Speed Racer confirms that it really was that way, that despite it there were good persons struggling against insurmountable odds, and winning occassionally. And Speed Racer also gives me something that I KNEW was missing in my youth that should have been there. It recalls the defiant hope and seemingly Quixotic optimism in the face of depression, war, holocaust, and other impossible odds that persons can hang on to...must hang on to...to do more than just survive.
Speed Racer tells of the existential optimism required to carry on, what Satayana once called Scepticism and Animal Faith. Speed Racer reminds us that you cannot contribute to the design of a better world unless you face up to the fact that you are struggling against seemingly insurmountable odds. It reminds us that you can't do it alone. It reminds us that the world emerges from these frequent nightmares like the current one is caught up in by fighting through it, not by transcending it with 20/20 insight. You don't move on by moving on, you move on by struggling on.
My son has grown up in an America operating torture archipeligos, building domestic mass detention camps, rending the Bill of Rights, flooding the world with currency to reduce the cost of repaying debts, invading countries that didn't attack USA based on bald faced lies. He's grown up with a China using prison and peonage labor to try to become a super power, an India that insists on an insanely unfair caste system even as it creates an English speaking cast of cheap tech labor for the west, with European countries that rolled over and accepted the derepresentative federal overlay called the EU rather than fight for their civil rights, and South American countries welching on their massive debts and then doing away with what little democracy they have as they pursue an oil backed currency of their own. He is probably about to live through the USA rolling over to become the derepresentative North American Union the same way the European states became the EU.

pt7
And yet, all the little Speeds and Speedettes of this world need to know that as Martin Luther King spoke, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but no lie can liver forever." So: all you Speeds, and Speedettes, both the young ones, like today's children, and the old ones like me, and the even older ones like Roger...this too shall pass.
Race on.
Post Script:
I think my son and I could enjoy Speed Racer, because, based on the times both of us have grown up in, we both need a movie with a hero who actually overcomes the villains of oligarchy and bigness and chic ugliness in order to be reminded that the world has been through times like this before and come out the other end of the pipe struggling for something better.
Speed Racer actually reminds me of some of the great car builders and racers that emerged from the wreckage of Europe after WWII. Ferdinand Porsche. Enzo Ferrari. And their equivalents in other countries and in other sports, like bicycling. Some of them had skeletons in their closets. Some did not. But all finally were competitors who struggled and designed and built what came after amidst the wreckage of human folly.
Speed Racer says that in the end, no matter how much of a holocaust the inbred oligarchies make of things, and they make these holocausts with alarming frequency in the world as they pursue their narrow agendas of maintaining and expanding wealth and power that they neither deserve nor have the intelligence to wield wisely, that the human being has to not only go on, but go on aspiring to greatness, and pursuing it in his own walk of life, if the idiotically recurrent messes that the oligarchies make of things are ever to be moved beyond.
As a side note: it is also possible that Roger Ebert secretly likes Speed Racer, too, but that the owner of his employer, the Chicago Sun-Times, might not take kindly to him writing favorably about a movie with villains including an English power broker in league with a Middle Eastern race driver.
But more likely its just his age. Or mine and my sons.
I am grateful for Speed taking me finally beyond my malaise of Two Lane Black Top and Vanishing Point.
C H E A T E R S . N E V E R . W I N !
You would have to see the movie to appreciate this line.

Two Reasons why Ebert didnt like it (contains spoilers)
One is Wachowski Bro's tendency towards self indulgence. Yes, they are quite possibly the most radical filmmakers of the present time - but still, self restraint here and there is a good thing. Speed Race dragged on in some bits, dazzling though it was. A lot of the action sequences could have been edited slightly. Also - about a half hour of dialogue could have been edited down.
Two: I'm guessing Ebert never saw the original cartoon. The Wachowski Bros were very faithful to it - perhaps to a fault. Much of the saccharine dialogue, the over expositional flashbacks, and the obnoxious little brother are taken pat from the cartoon. The most intrusive example of this is at the end - when Speed is on the last leg of the grand Prix, the trippy colors speed up and he enters the 'zone' and his win is inevitable. Insert staccato flashbacks of every character he's talked to in the movie: mom, dad, brother, evil nemesis, monkey etc. This is straight from the cartoon, but the Wachowskis could have made a different choice - offering us a single flashback of Speed as a child in his hand drawn race car. The audience is intelligent enough to make the other connections.

I did, however, like it!
I never thought I'd love seeing a purple Noguchi coffee table... but I did in this movie. The design was (for the most part) spectacularly kitschy. The Racer's home (yes, Racer is their last name...and Speed IS his first name)is an explosion of mod with a big dose of tiki. Purple Luciene Day sofas & chairs flank a purple Noguchi table, set against a bright orange wall abutttin the teal kitchen. I'm surprised that the little brother was the only charachter with visible ADD.
The evil corporate building was a little too disneyfied for me, but I loved the racetracks: We're set in a world where Matchbox and Pantone have merged, cars can be flipped about like playing cards, and racing is THE worldwide past-time.
If anyone has any interest you should definitely see it large screen- it just wont work on a home TV.

A much better review than mine...
Thanks.