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| SPEED RACER (2008)
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SBD Star Rating:
by LEW IRWIN
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 Reviews of Speed Racer are likely to compound the nervousness of Warner Bros. execs over the Wachowski Brothers' expensive animated/live-action movie. Cheap horror films are often treated with greater critical kindness. Consider Joe Morgenstern's critique in the Wall Street Journal: "This toxic admixture of computer-generated frenzy and live-action torpor succeeds in being, almost simultaneously, genuinely painful -- the esthetic equivalent of needles in eyeballs -- and weirdly benumbing, like eye candy laced with lidocaine," Morgenstern writes. A.O. Scott has a less corrosive review, but it's nearly as damning: "The childhood experience the Wachowskis evoke is not the easy delight of lolling in the den watching one cartoon after another, but rather the squirming tedium of sitting in the back seat on an endless family car trip, your cheek taking on the texture of the vinyl seat as some grown-up lectures you on the beauty of the passing scenery," he says. Or take Kyle Smith's comparison in the New York Post: "This adventurously awful film is awful in many ways at once," Smith observes. "It is, like a Ferraro poking across East 42nd Street at rush hour, fast yet slow. It is futuristic ally retry. Its attention span is measurable in microseconds, yet it runs more than two hours. And it spent a trillion dollars imitating the look of a 10-cent cartoon from the primitive '60s -- artistically, the Cro-Magnon era. I was initially awed by its splendors. Bu ºt when I'd had my fill, there was still an hour-45 left." Nevertheless, a few critics are impressed with the artistic achievement of the animators. "On the levels of technical craftsmanship and pure eye-candy, Speed Racer is some kind of triumph of the will," Try Burr comments in the Boston Globe. And Refer Guzmán in Newsday calls it "one of the most visually audacious films to come along in years." |
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