..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

Speed Racer
and Redbelt,
What Happens In Vegas
Plus Rating This Week's DVDs

Speed Racer (Three Stars)
U.S.; The Wachowski brothers

Confession: Watching the Wachowski brothers' Speed Racer, often felt like i was getting my head jammed down the gullet of a huge, monstrous video game/pinball machine. Sheeeesh! Based on the celebrated Japanese anime TV series about a young race-car driver, this is a blazing, whiplash-cut, CGI-laden screamer of a movie - not entirely a pleasurable experience, but you sure won't forget it soon.

The Wachowski brothers have taken the story line and characters of the original series -- called "Mach Go Go Go" in Japanese -- and turned it into an explosive mix of lightly satirical family comedy and full-throttle action spectacle, jam-packed with races, crashes, eye-smacking computerized settings and deliberately one-note TV sitcom or Saturday afternoon kiddie show acting, all done in a jazzy, snazzy, sometimes brilliantly high-tech style that often suggests a live action cartoon on LSD, and never lets up for a minute.

The TV Speed Racer was a worldwide hit in the '60s and afterwards, but I never caught it. Back in the late '60s, in the middle of the antiwar riots and turmoil of the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus, I never watched much TV. But I wouldn't be surprised if the Wachowskis, devotees of the original, have really caught the original's mood here. This movie feels like a cartoon blown up into big-budget live action, with characters that suggest action toys -- and who basically are action toys.

The Wachowskis, reportedly eager to make a move their niece and nephew could watch, have given us a teen-dream hero: sturdy Speed Racer (played by Emile Hirsch), a gutsy but surprisingly dirty-racing young speed demon. And then there's bearish Pops (John Goodman), who looks like a futuristic Rosanne refugee and designs and builds the Racer family cars; Mom Racer (Susan Sarandon) who comes on like a blend of Hillary Clinton and June Cleaver; and smarty-pants kid Spritle (Paulie Litt), a rowdy little John Goodmanesque scamp whose best buddy is a chimpanzee named Chim-Chim.

Christina Ricci, in a bouncy mood, plays Trixie, Speed's staunch girlfriend. And there's a nasty, snobbish corporate villain named Royalton (Roger Allam), who tries to seduce Speed with a big fat contract, is spurned and then screams that the racing world is a fixed fake and sneers that he'll destroy the holdout Speed. (Can't this corporate genius keep a secret?) Allam is a Christopher Hitchens look-and- sound-alike (with a touch of bloated Tim Curry thrown in ) -- and for a while I almost convinced myself I really was watching the Vanity Fair leftie-turned neo-con TV news pundit, and that Hitchens had tried of sneering at liberals and found a new career as a live action cartoon. (It's the job he may have been born for, but Allam is a more persuasive bully.)

The plot ties together all these characters -- and several more, including a rival driver played by Korean pop idol Rain -- into an eye-popping crash-athon that has Speed following in the tire-tracks of his supposedly late brother, Rex Racer, a presumed casualty who may be still racing under the nom du cartoon Racer X (Matthew Fox). Anyway, after displeasing Royalton, Speed and Pops proceed to battle the fiendish tycoon through race after race, including the Casa Cristo 5000, which knifes through the Zunubian Desert, and the Glacier Cliff to the Maltese Ice Caves, leading to a ferocious climax in the super-posh World Racing League Grand Prix.

All the racetracks are CGI creations and they tend to look like video game acid trips. The whole thing is somewhat trippy; this is the least realistic and most fantastical movie of any kind that I've seen recently. In fact, the first 15 or 20 minutes of Speed Racer were too much sensory overload for me; I felt a migraine headache coming on. Then, suddenly, I began to get used to it, even impressed by it.

But I suspect this movie will suffer from being released a week after Marvel's nifty Iron Man, a super-flashy teenager's action epic that also inserts believable characters and emotions into its comic book plot. If you're going to do something as assaulting, innovative and unusual-looking as Speed Racer, you probably need somebody a little human to identify with -- and not just a style to die for.
 

Redbelt (Three stars)
U.S.; David Mamet

David Mamet may be the world's champion English-language screenwriter.  Anyway, his competition would include Woody Allen, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Ronald Harwood and just a few others. But there's something about Mamet's directing that's always bothered me, and it crops up again in his latest movie, the quasi-realistic martial arts thriller Redbelt.

The good thing about Mamet-as-director is that he has respect for Mamet-the-writer and preserves his texts, in all their testosterone-driven, four-letter-word, intellectual tough-guy glory. The bad thing is that he has too much respect. Mamet seems far too finicky about avoiding overlap and hearing all his own words and his self-directed movies often take on a robotic quality, as if he were too much in love with the sound of his word processor -- or as if were trying to apply Bertolt Brecht's epic theater style to what would work better as classy film noir or Sidney Lumet social drama.

There's a stiff quality to Mamet's movies (especially Oleanna) which often hurts them. The kind of actors who can always rescue him -- a Gene Hackman, a Danny De Vito (both in The Heist) or a Steve Martin (in The Spanish Prisoner) -- aren't always around. That's why James Foley's 1992 film of Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, with its remarkable cast headed by Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Kevin Spacey and Ed Harris, is so much more moving than any of director Mamet's stuff. 

Redbelt has another fine, lean machismo-drenched mamet script. it's about a martial arts teacher named Mike Terry (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who finds his business in jeopardy when he and a cop-student try to help a nervous lawyer (Emily Mortimer) in a jam -- and create problems compounded later when Mike trusts a corrupt movie star (Tim Allen). All these miscues lead the highly moral Mike into a fixed fight, in which the hero must discard his principles to salvage his life.

Mamet is dead serious about all this, which is all to the good. But the turnabout climax doesn't work, morally or dramatically -- not only because it's a weird idea that needs some craziness to put it across, but because it's too stiff and unspontaneous. The movie however redeems itself, as do almost all Mamets, because the writing is so saltily eloquent and the acting, even when it's a bit over stylized, is so intelligent. The supporting cast includes Mamet regulars Joe Mantegna, Ricky Jay and Rebecca Pidgeon, but while the whole ensemble is fine, Ejiofor surpasses them all. Nobody can make that guy a robot.


What Happens In Vegas (One and a half stars)
U.S.; Tom Vaughan

Two movies about fixed sports so far. How about a fixed marriage?

What Happens in Vegas borrows its title from the leering Las Vegas TV ad campaign ("What happens in Vegas...stays in Vegas"), and it's one of those movies in which the high-priced cast -- especially ultra-photogenic stars Cameron Diaz and Ashton Kutcher -- behave odiously or stupidly to each other for a couple of hours, and then make a convenient switcheroo just in time for a madly unconvincing "happy ever after" ending. In other words, What Happens in Vegas is a romantic comedy for masochists, crum-bumophiles and star-gazers. It's barely romantic and not very funny and, unlike most unfunny Hollywood sex comedies, it doesn't even look very good.


The Witnesses (Three and a half stars)
France; Andre Techine

Andre Techine, is at his most nakedly emotional in The Witnesses, a three-act drama about the AIDS crisis in the early '80s. The movie has intelligence and empathy, and, as usual with Techine, it offers juicy parts to some of France's excellent star movie actors: the gnomish sad-eyed clown Michel Blanc (here at his most serious), Moroccan actor Sami Bouajila (of the powerful war movie Days of Glory) and that radiantly sexy belle de jour Emmanuelle Beart, whose special blonde beauty has rarely seemed more poignant or affecting. (In French, with English subtitles.)



MW on DVD

PICKS OF THE WEEK:

CLASSIC RELEASE

La Roue (Four stars)
France; Abel Gance, 1922 (Flicker Alley)
The cinematic event of the week -- hell, one of the masterpieces of the year so far -- is this DVD release of one of the great French silent films: Abel Gance's thrilling, moving melodrama about the tragedy of a passionate railroad engineer, Sisif (Severin-Mars), who falls in love with Norma (Ivy Close), the woman whom, as a little girl, he rescued from a train wreck and secretly adopted. The third side of the triangle: Sisif's son, Elie, a sensitive, romantic violin-maker. This tremendous new version of Gance's Myth of Sisif restores four and a half hours of the original seven and a half. It's an amazingly experimental and innovative, massive, heartfelt epic -- and, in many ways, just as impressive an achievement as Gance's great 1927 Napoleon. (Silent, with intertitles and new orchestral score.)

NEW RELEASE

I'm Not There (Three stars)
U.S.; Todd Haynes, 2007 (Weinstein Company/Genius Products)

BOX SET (Already in release)

The Films Of Morris Engel, With Ruth Orkin (Package:Four stars)
U.S.: Morris Engel/Ruth Orkin/Ray Ashley, 1953-8 (Kino)
Includes: "Little Fugitive" (1953) (Four stars); "Lovers and Lollipops" (1955) (Three stars); "Weddings and Babies" (1958) (Three and a half stars).

OTHER RECOMMENDATIONS

The Bridges Of Madison County (Fourstars)
U.S.; Clint Eastwood, 1995 (Warner)

- Michael Wilmington
May 8, 2008

May 1: Iron Man, Son Of Rambow, Flight of The Red Balloon
April 24: Tuya's Marriage, Chapter 27
April 17: My Blueberry Nights
April 10: Shine A Light, Plus Young @ Heart, Smart People, and The Forbidden Kingdom

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