Movie: Speed Racer
Feb. 14th, 2009 09:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amediaHere he comes, here comes Speed Racer
he's a demon on wheels!
I ADORED this show when I was little. The movie was tons of fun. Should have been half an hour shorter, but you can't have everything. The soundtrack kept teasing us with little musical quotes from the original theme song, and then over the closing credits they played a playful remix of it in Japanese and English with rap in both languages as well. *note to self: must get that*
I loved Christina Ricci as Trixie; actually most of the cast seemed well-chosen. Spritle was much older than in the show, but the young actor was hilarious.
I loved the way the movie looked like a cartoon and seemed to obey cartoon conventions more than movie ones. The races would have gotten boring if there hadn't been so many flashbacks during them, explaining how certain people got there or why they were doing what they were doing.
I loved the Racers' mod-retro house.
I'm glad I didn't see this in the theater. The race scenes would have been dizzying to the point of nausea. On the home-TV screen, they were baffling but fun to look at.
There was one moment when the Mach 5 skidded up to the camera and Speed jumped out and for a moment it was JUST LIKE the end of the original opening credits. I honestly thought the camera was about to swivel around to show him and the car from a different angle (remember that?) - but it didn't. Still. Magic.
When the family takes the low-flying airplane into the city early in the movie, I thought, back in the 1960's when this show was on, this is what NOW was supposed to look like. Great nostalgia-for-the-future moment.
There were two accompanying short features, each about 15 minutes long. One was a backstage tour pretending to be the unauthorized sneaking-around of the kid who plays Spritle. It dragged somewhat, but there was a lot of neat trivia, often presented like the pop-ups in Pop-up Video. The other was a sort of pseudo-documentary describing the details of the major cars and racetracks in the movie, with three-D diagrams and cutaway views, presented very dryly as it was real. Enjoyed that much more. Couldn't find an Easter Egg; websurfing suggests there isn't one.
ETA: I can't believe I forgot to mention: it had NINJAS! Okay, a lot of the actual fighting wasn't ninjutsu, it looked more like tae kwon do (ninjas don't do those spin kicks). But the chief one did some very nice yoko aruki, and there were some other ninja-ish moves in the close-fighting bits.
he's a demon on wheels!
I ADORED this show when I was little. The movie was tons of fun. Should have been half an hour shorter, but you can't have everything. The soundtrack kept teasing us with little musical quotes from the original theme song, and then over the closing credits they played a playful remix of it in Japanese and English with rap in both languages as well. *note to self: must get that*
I loved Christina Ricci as Trixie; actually most of the cast seemed well-chosen. Spritle was much older than in the show, but the young actor was hilarious.
I loved the way the movie looked like a cartoon and seemed to obey cartoon conventions more than movie ones. The races would have gotten boring if there hadn't been so many flashbacks during them, explaining how certain people got there or why they were doing what they were doing.
I loved the Racers' mod-retro house.
I'm glad I didn't see this in the theater. The race scenes would have been dizzying to the point of nausea. On the home-TV screen, they were baffling but fun to look at.
There was one moment when the Mach 5 skidded up to the camera and Speed jumped out and for a moment it was JUST LIKE the end of the original opening credits. I honestly thought the camera was about to swivel around to show him and the car from a different angle (remember that?) - but it didn't. Still. Magic.
When the family takes the low-flying airplane into the city early in the movie, I thought, back in the 1960's when this show was on, this is what NOW was supposed to look like. Great nostalgia-for-the-future moment.
There were two accompanying short features, each about 15 minutes long. One was a backstage tour pretending to be the unauthorized sneaking-around of the kid who plays Spritle. It dragged somewhat, but there was a lot of neat trivia, often presented like the pop-ups in Pop-up Video. The other was a sort of pseudo-documentary describing the details of the major cars and racetracks in the movie, with three-D diagrams and cutaway views, presented very dryly as it was real. Enjoyed that much more. Couldn't find an Easter Egg; websurfing suggests there isn't one.
ETA: I can't believe I forgot to mention: it had NINJAS! Okay, a lot of the actual fighting wasn't ninjutsu, it looked more like tae kwon do (ninjas don't do those spin kicks). But the chief one did some very nice yoko aruki, and there were some other ninja-ish moves in the close-fighting bits.
