Confessions of a Comic Book Guy is a weekly column by retailer Steve Bennett of Super-Fly Comics and Games in
Well the Speed Racer movie got well and truly boned at the box office and honestly I can’t tell you exactly why, though it just could be there are too many similar movies scheduled in too short a time. But Speed Racer’s disappointing opening weekend makes me wonder how many of these films the average moviegoer (let alone people such as us) can go see in a summer. It’s possible they’ll be burned out on them by the time The Dark Knight and Hellboy II are released.
Getting back to Speed Racer, it wasn’t just that there seemed limited interest in it among potential viewers (though there was; could this be another example of just how limited the appeal of anime in mainstream America really is?), or the running time (at two hours fifteen minutes “experts” suggested it was too long for a kid’s movie). And it wasn’t that the bulk of the reviews were negative, it was that reviewers didn’t like it and they seemed offended anybody would.
Sure they hated the “bad dialogue” and uncomfortable mix of drama and comedy, but mostly they seemed to hate the colors and constant motion to such an extreme degree I have to conclude they didn’t like it because they didn’t “get it” because it was, well, new. It’s certainly not like anything else out there.
I don’t want to waste your time with what amounts to a rebuttal review, but I would like to mention a couple of things I liked no one else has mentioned: First there’s the fact that it’s a very international movie, clearly designed to work on as much of the globe as possible. On top of the universal themes of family loyalty and the underdog triumphing, there’s the casting. Sure, they could have shaved a good twenty minutes off the running time by eliminating the character of racer Taejo Togohan, but he only exists to give something for Korean pop star Rain to do (and help ticket sales on the Pacific Rim). It’s why the Korean Rain plays Japanese, as does Chinese actress Yu Nan cast as his sister; why mechanic Sparky is inexplicably Australian, and it’s certainly why in his final scene an unmasked Racer X leaves a party with a beautiful black woman on his arm; unfortunately you’re not going to see Hollywood do anything like that anytime soon.
I liked how, though never specified, it was set in some weird alternative 1960s America (people kept referring to events in the 1940s so when else could it be?) where they actually delivered on the stuff promised to us on the pages of Popular Mechanics.
I liked how great actors actually, you know, acted in a “cartoon movie,” like the always great John Goodman (who, according to an interview in the current issue of Geek magazine is a comic and anime fan), Susan Sarandon, and of course, Christina Ricci (now that there’s cinematic proof she can smile on cue, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she was offered much less depressing roles in the future).
And it’s actually less violent than the cartoon. I used to like to say you were guaranteed a fatal crash and burn in every episode of Speed Racer but here, before their cars crash, drivers are ejected from their vehicles wrapped in what appears to be packing peanuts. And while the animated Speed didn’t much mind machine-gunning enemies, here the good guys refuse to use guns.
I saw it with my friend Vivian, a woman almost exactly my own age with (as she later told me) “almost no interest in either cars or racing”* and only a vague memory of the original animated series, and she loved it. I couldn’t be a bigger Speed Racer freak (there’s a Mach 5 sitting on top of my fridge) and I loved it; Well, to be absolutely truthful, the first seven minutes or so didn’t do much for me, but when I saw Racer X driving The Shooting Star coming up on The Monster Car (The! Monster! Car!) from behind, things I’ve had in my head since I was six, well, I’m only human.
It’s fun and heartfelt and if you haven’t already seen it, prove conventional
And since this column is supposed to be about comics… I finally did see a copy of Shonen Jump at a Wal-Mart, sitting right next to a special Iron Man/Hulk themed issue of Spider-man Magazine. Now if only DC could crack that market…
* It’s a little surprising that there doesn’t seem to have been any attempt by the filmmakers to court the NASCAR crowd; but then, they probably think the movie demeans their sport.
The opinions expressed in this Talk Back column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.
