The Secret of the Wednesday’s Haul

Welcome to the 21st century cartoon. Only know it’s a semi-live action/adventure movie.

Let’s set up why this may be the perfect movie for me.

Whenever I talk about the Wachowski brothers (or siblings or whatever they are now,) I always feel the need to throw up the preface that I actually like all three Matrix movies. The sequels aren’t great but there are good things happening there even if the concepts tend to get out of hand from time to time. But I do like them and that’s that.

Another caveat I’ve got to throw out there is that, as a kid, I loved Speed Racer. As probably my first exposure to anime as a child of the seventies, the Mach 5 probably tied with the 60’s Batman television show’s Batmobile as the greatest car created by god or man or Pops Racer. I don’t know if I can really express or even remember what I enjoyed about the show but it had an energy and excitement to it that really captured a seven year old’s imagination. Every car I’ve ever had has, in the back of my mind, been some iteration of the Mach 5, even the trucks I’ve owned.

And finally, I loved Hot Wheel and Matchbox cars as a kid. I still have almost every car I ever had in big cases out in the garage. I tell myself that I’m going to give them to my son some day but honestly, they are there for me. While I never had many of the tracks, I had a lot of friends who did and I remember going over to their houses and creating jumps, loops and turns for the small cars to speed their way through. Many afternoons were spent trying to create elaborate schemes of track down fairly straight and normal stairways.

Speed Racer fuels all three loves and brings them together into an explosion of technicolor that bend and break the laws of physics and reality. The Wachowski’s have created something that’s pure and unadulterated eye candy through color and motion and some hammy but appropriate acting. And my fear is that the audience almost surely doesn’t exist for this film. And if the opening weekend numbers so far are correct, they’re not flocking to see this movie. Even if it didn’t open up between Iron Man and Indiana Jones (with some Narnia thrown in there to cover the family fare,) I’ve been left wondering just exactly who is this movie for other than me and those like me. Oh, and those of us with small kids to drag along.

For those of us who do see it, it’s a bit of a chore to get past a pedantic storyline– a hotshot racer trying to avoid corporate sponsorship. Yes, it’s another corporate America is bad storyline. I really wish they could have gone another way because when you see the storytelling and the races, it’s easy to get lost in the multi-colored and multi-layered narrative that the Wachowski’s are trying to put together. This isn’t a movie you go to for the story but to see how that story is actually told through technology and experiment. The plot only gets in the way of the three or four big race scenes. Those race scenes are full of ideas and images that make you wonder what they could have done with a better developed plot underneath it all.

The races are like the old Hot Wheel sets brought to life. Imagine the craziest Hot Wheel track set up you thought of as a kid and multiply that by 100. And throw in a couple of extra loop-de-loops and that’s exactly what the races are like. Heck, even the races are more like an elaborate set up of bumper cars, as the cars hit and careen off each other as part of the big game that they’re all playing. It’s not so much a race as it’s survival of the fittest to see who can outlast who. It’s Speed Racer and Racer X vs. the world and all that counts are the wild races.

As the Wachowski’s fifth film (Bound and the three Matrix films,) I think that now no one can call them great directors or filmmakers. They’re interesting storytellers that I think are creating new paths for more competent storytellers. Now that they’ve created a film like this and taken the CG environment to a new level, I’d like to see what someone else could do with this. Imagine if a filmmaker like Todd Haynes or Wes Anderson created a whole new world with CGI. Imagine Charlie Kaupfman or Spike Jonze at play in the field of the Wachowski’s. It may not be the future of movie-making but it would sure be interesting.

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