So, it's with pleasure that I read Anthony Lane's amusing review of Speed Racer. He writes:
A four-year-old will be reduced to a gibbering but highly gratified wreck; an eight-year-old will wander around wearing a look that was last seen on the face of Dante after he met Beatrice. But what about the rest of us? True, our eyeballs will slowly, though never completely, recover, but what of our souls? I reckon the M.P.A.A. should use the advent of “Speed Racer” to revive an old ratings symbol: a big Roman X, meaning “of no conceivable interest to anyone over the age of ten.”Or, as Stephen Colbert put it "it's the classic story of boy meets seizure inducing lights".
2 comments:
Count me in as a fellow Wacky-whatever-ski skeptic. And I'm so glad to read that review, especially ...
So how did this rainbow of velocity end up bleached of fun? The answer lies with those darn Wachowskis, and with the theory, mooted in the first “Matrix” film and clung to ever since, that all of us, whether we know it or not, are squirming under the thumb of dark controlling forces. ... Oh, please. There have always been filmmakers who lauded the home-baked virtues of the family enterprise, but none, perhaps, have done so with such a gaping want of irony. Faux-leftish paranoia about big business should be slightly harder to peddle when a chunk of your paycheck comes from Time Warner, whose revenues make it the largest media conglomerate on the planet
And...
There’s something about the ululating crowds who line the action in color-coördinated rows; the desperate skirting of ordinary feelings in favor of the trumped-up variety; the confidence in technology as a spectacle in itself; and, above all, the sense of master manipulators posing as champions of the little people. What does that remind you of ? You could call it entertainment, and use it to wow your children for a couple of hours. To me, it felt like Pop fascism, and I would keep them well away.
I'll be even more pleased when my subscriptions arrive in the mail!
Though Colbert's definition is funnier.
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