At first, we even heard the Wachowskis were aiming for a G rating. Then again, this has always been intended as a family film. What surprises me is how adamantly fandom has refused to budge since that point. The first trailer for SPEED RACER was so bizarre and extreme that I’m not surprised there was a massive knee-jerk reaction against it.
I enjoyed the first film, but didn’t revere it as the second-coming of cinema as many seemed to, and I like things about both of the sequels and think they’re closer to the original than many fans are willing to admit.
I like the Wachowskis, and I find myself slightly out-of-step with fandom on the MATRIX series as a whole. I’m not a big fan of the nerdstalgia that has taken over our film industry, and even though I had fond memories of watching the original cartoon when I was a kid, I also remember how completely wacko the show was, and how part of its charm was the idea that it only barely survived the translation process intact. When the early announcements of SPEED RACER were made, I was ambivalent towards the enterprise. The superhero films I enjoy the most are the ones that manage to capture and reproduce the sort of giddy pop joy that the best comic books can generate, that understand the particular pleasures of comics and embrace them rather than trying to reinvent them wholesale. Wesley Snipes (as well as Norrington and Del Toro) understand that a big part of the iconography of superheroes is the poses they strike, the way those fights look as much as the actual impact of them.
It’s one of the reasons I love BLADE and BLADE 2. Wrong.Ĭomic book movies are a different subgenre, related but not the same, and some of the same problems crop up as filmmakers try to take this static art form and translates its particular vocabulary to film. Part of the problem is that cartoons are often simplistic in terms of dialogue and characterization, and when you suddenly have flesh-and-blood actors trying to pull off the same sort of material, it feels threadbare. I thought the way Beatty and Vittorio Storaro played with color in TRACY was sort of ravishing as well, but that was a film that was easier to respect than it was to like. And to varying degrees, I admire what those guys tried to do with POPEYE and DICK TRACY because they seemed dedicated to the idea of bringing a surreal world to life. There’s something sort of crazy about trying to make a live-action cartoon in the first place, and over the years, we’ve seen some great filmmakers hit that wall so hard they left marks on it.
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