Speed Racer Sucks

The Warchowski brothers have been hoodwinked into thinking that technology makes films good and/or cool. After the runaway success of The Matrix and it's amazing breakthrough technology "bullet time" (previously seen when Edward Myubridge was taking pictures of naked people and horses) they knew that their charge in the world was to use technology to make awesome films.

They got off to a good start as noted in this article:

"To simulate the appearance of cloth and its interaction with light, the wardrobes for both Neo and Smith were scanned using a Bidirectional Reflectometer, which captures the light reflectance (Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function or BRDF) values for all kinds of cloth. Using this extremely powerful machine allowed ESC to scan the various types of cloth involved in the actors’ wardrobes, which could then be recreated and simulated in the computer."

Miraculous. Well. Except for the fact that the "Burly Brawl" as it was called looked exactly like the barely-not-a-video game VFX shot that it was. All that work for that cloth and it still looked like fake plastic men moving like Grand Theft Auto extras.

So you must understand how excited I was when I read that they were doing to use a magical camera from Sony, the F23. I mean listen to this:

"Whatever you think of Speed Racer, the new alternate-reality VFX fest from the Wachowski Brothers directorial team, you'll have to admit that it doesn't look like anything you've seen before."

Unless, you, you know, have ever seen television, in which case, this will look a lot like many things you have seen before.

Apparently, this amazing camera gets more color, which, you know, cool. Except for the fact that this is the digital age and all you need is any video software to up the saturation.

Then there was some rumor about it being able to shoot things with everything in focus. I suppose that makes it like the camera Gregg Toland used for Citizen Kane.

So I saw the movie. They didn't need that shit. They didn't need it because every shot in the film is a flat greenscreen shot with a defocus plugin that, GET THIS, makes the Bokeh into Diamonds and Hearts and Circles!

The car parts are decent, and do a much better job than anything involving humans or "amazing defocusing techniques" at being not lame.

So, much like every other film John Gaeta and the Warchowskis brag about their new tech in, the technological innovations were completely pointless and also not new.

The worst offense in the film isn't the technological innovations, it isn't the waste of the actors' talent, it's this kung-fu scene.

Somewhere in the movie, all our good guys get surrounded by bad guys with guns. A mediocre kung-fu fight ensues as each good guy uses their specific fighting strengths to overcome the odds. It's not miraculous, but it's probably the best use of humans in the film. As the tide has turned and the fight is wrapping up, each good guy disarms a bad guy and the fight resolves with all the good guys pointing guns at the final bad guy.

That's right, this kids movie, which has done a pretty good job of showing action and danger in a cartoon setting up to this point, this kids movie has to ratchet up the adrenaline with some GUNS. Whoo haaaa. It's bad enough that the only way to make the bad guys menacing at all is to arm them in a movie like this, but to have all our good characters, who solve their problems on the track, pick up guns and threaten someone's life is beyond offensive.

I know it's fun to talk shit about their dumb visual effects gimicks and these posts really shine when they are about inconsequential things, but the gun thing has me incensed.

There's no reason for guns in that movie. Movies already (and Warchowski movies specifically) use guns as a crutch far too much. They're becoming late night cable programming, where every dude has a bad attitude and a gun and no capability to solve anything without them both. The bad guys were beaten, there was ONE LEFT and no one needed any guns to get to that point, so what is so insanely powerful about that one dude left that requires the Speed Racer team to say "knock it off or we are going to fucking kill you."?

The very definition of shitty writing.