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Speed Racer's Aesthetic Filigree
Continuing with my plan to see one summer blockbuster per week until the bitter end (we'll see how long I can last), I saw the Wachowski Brothers/Brother and Sister's Tolkien-inspired epic tribute to 70s' butchered anime, Speed Racer, this weekend.  As Eric B. and I were discussing, if you could turn the screen upside down, it would like an experimental film, something along the lines of Stan Brakhage's 1991 film, Delicacies of Molten Horror Synapse:



But with the more vibrant colors of the 70s cartoon series (a bowdlerized version of Tatsuo Yoshida's anime from the 60s, Mahha GoGoGo):



Although Time's critic Richard Corliss proclaims the new film "the future of movies," I have some hope to the contrary, as allegorically alluded to in this scene from auteur producer Roger Corman's Death Race 2000 (another film that Speed Racer resembles):



Just think of the geriatric sacrifice as a stand-in for classic filmmaking.
Posted by Charles Reece on May 10, 2008 at 11:11pm | Post a Comment

Relevant Tags

Summer Movies, Speed Racer, Wachowski Brothers, Richard Corliss, Tatsuo Yoshida, Stan Brakhage, Roger Corman

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