Speed Racer finally hits the Big Screen

OK, here’s my review. Three stars (out of five). It’s not that Speed Racer is an unwatchable movie—it’s just that the neon eye candy feels like it’s taken directly from the Star Wars prequels. The greenscreen vistas look very similar to Coruscant’s cityscapes and the pod race on the desert planet Tatooine, only with no depth of field and more two-dimensional. You wouldn’t be surprised to see Jar Jar Binks hanging out with Chim-Chim here. The race cars glide and shuffle around a videogame racetrack in a reality without any friction or mass, it seems. But if you can accept this  bubblegum technocolor world on its own terms, there is some good story telling here: we have an intriguing plot that expands on the original anime’s backstory of Racer X (the filmmakers wisely decided to make his body suit all-black instead of white with a big red “M” across his chest, as in the original cartoon—duh, kind of looks like the hood of the Mach 5, doesn’t it?—not a good way to hide your secret identity as the presumed-dead elder brother of the Racer clan). And, for those who aren’t in the know, that “M” stands for “Mifune,” the original Japanese surname of Pops Racer, founder of Mifune Motors.

Rather than opting for the obvious mindless rollercoaster summer entertainment, the Wachowski brothers have added a simple yet compelling message: keep driving for your dreams. OK, not exactly original. So what? Our young hero is faced with the dilemma of giving up the rights to a small-company to a corporate goliath. Which will he choose? Guaranteed riches under the automobile world’s evil empire or keeping the family-owned business intact and enjoying Mom Racer’s pancakes until he finally gets hitched to his comely girlfriend Trixie?  How did an after-school cartoon get this political and deep?

Well, in case you couldn’t guess, Speed doesn’t choose the former. But first he has to show off his kung fu skills on some lame ninjas with Pops (John Goodman as Pops makes a pun in Japanese that had the audience chuckling) doing his de rigeur helicopter spin toss. But why is Speed’s fixer-upper buddy Sparky speaking with an Australian accent? Why couldn’t they have picked a cuter kid for Spritle? The real monkey who plays Chim-Chim can act pretty well and delivers his reactions right on cue. Rex Racer has the right body build and tone of voice; Matthew Fox nails it and clearly knows the original cartoon series from the early 70s. Susan Sarandon tries to make Mom Racer into more than a cardboard cut-out character, but is there any reason to? How can you not cringe when she says to Speed, “I’m just so proud to be your Mom”?

In the end, of course, Speed wins the big race, which comes a little too late in the film, on the heels of the previous one. With his aggressive driving he proves, as the song goes, that he’s a demon on wheels. The well-known theme music rises to glorious symphonic heights. Speed Racer has finally been done in live action (of a sort), and actually it has been done quite well. It could have been a lot worse. I’ll probably get the DVD for repeated viewings.

The First Dutch American President

With all the innuendo about Obama being “foreign” and too exotic for America, it’s interesting to note that the United States has a long history of selecting Presidents from outside the so-called mainstream. America’s eighth President, Martin Van Buren, was the first Dutch American President. Actually, his first language wasn’t even English; he grew up speaking Dutch. I have an affinity for the name of Van Buren since I spent my childhood in a house on Van Buren Street in San Mateo, California. I still remember the address. One of my best friends was also named Martin, so somehow the name Martin Van Buren sticks in my memory, even though I knew nothing about the man. Looking at Wikipedia, however, I can say we owe a lot to Van Buren. He played a leading role in forming the early Democratic Party. Ironically his name was linked to a man named DeWitt Clinton, and according to Wikipedia “He allied himself with the Clintonian faction of the Democratic-Republican Party,” Coincidentally DeWitt Clinton was a Senator and Governor of New York. Strange how those names keep popping up in history. Van Buren’s nickname was “Old Kinderhook” since he was born in Kinderhook, New York. According to one theory, this is where we get our ubiquitous word “O.K.”  It was originally Van Buren’s stamp of approval. OK, believe what you want to believe. If Barack Obama does manage to become president, however, I doubt that “B.O.” would go over well with the public.

The Big Tent

OK, so by now everyone has posted a blog entry about Obama’s finally wrapping up the Democratic nomination. It was an inevitable moment, but somehow it has been framed as news, as a historic moment in American history. Well, yes and no. If Arnold Schwartzenegger can be Governor of California, why people are surprised when Obama gets the Democratic nomination? It has been a long time coming, and it’s about time. So why did he win, and not Hillary? I don’t live in the U.S. anymore so my take on things is probably a bit warped, but I think part of the reason is language. If you listen to his speeches, it’s always about “Us,” “We,” and “Ours.” If you listen to Hillary’s speeches, it’s all me, me, me. I don’t think that’s a trivial difference. Rhetoric moves people to action. Words do matter because words have power. We’ve heard Obama’s detractors say that he’s all talk but no action, but people were saying that about Ronald Reagan, and now history has somehow deemed him the Great Communicator and the Man Who Collapsed the Soviet Union (I think Mikhail Gorbachev would beg to differ). Although those of us who lived through the Reagan era remember all the homeless and the culture of greed spawned by the “Wall Street” era, I will give Reagan his due in getting the nation beyond the malaise of the Carter years, primarily by his use of language. He projected optimism and confidence, primarily through his voice.  This was what the country needed at the time. This is why “Raiders of the Lost Ark” was made in the 1980s. Here you had B-movie actor from the 1950s running the most powerful nation on Earth. People were looking for Indy Jones to save the day.  And Reagan delivered by playing the role to the hilt. He was of his time. Barack Obama may not be the most experienced candidate to run for President, but he is of his time, just as the Beatles were of their time, the 1960s. This is a new time. Let a new chapter begin. That’s what people want.

Rainy Metropolis

A year ago people were talking about how low the dams were in this country due to the lack of rain. This year, it’s a completely different picture. It has been a very rainy year, and the residents of Tokyo are feeling like they are in Seattle. So now we are all Sleepless in Tokyo. Which reminds me of the ancient PBS miniseries “The Lathe of Heaven” based on the 1971 novel by Ursula K. LeGuin.The film starts out in an always-rainy Portland, Oregon of the not too distant future (actually, 2008 is probably about the time represented in the late 70s flick). The protagonist, George Orr, has the peculiar talent of “effective dreaming”— that is, his dreams affect reality. The twist, however, is that nobody knows that reality is being changed right from under everyone's feet whenever George dreams a new dream that changes everything—nobody except the dreamer, George himself. The humor in the film comes when the people around George blithely comment on the new reality as if nothing has changed. For example, one rainy day George goes into his psychiatrist’s office and dreams that Portland is, and has been for years, a sun-drenched metropolis. When he wakes up, that’s exactly how everyone has experienced it. The psychiatrist’s secretary walks into the room wearing a cool sundress when only moments before she was donning a heavily padded raincoat. It is a conspiracy made up by the dreamer in his own brain which nobody else knows about. The idea has been used in numerous Star Trek episodes, to the extent that the characters find themselves wound up in layer upon layer of changed realities. Changing Reality Through Dreaming. The Internet itself provides a good analogy of this idea. So the LeGuin novel was certainly prophetic. We can easily find ourselves lost in cyberspace after a few hyperlink clicks. The only difference is that everyone is now an “effective dreamer,” dreaming up this constantly changing cyber landscape, dreaming from one drought-plagued year to a rainy one in a bustling futuristic metropolis. As Willy Wonka said, "We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.”

First Contact

Today in the news we saw amazing pictures of a tribe that had been completely cut off from the rest of the world and locked out of time until an airplane finally came to their enclave of huts in a clearing in a remote part of the Amazon jungle. It’s amazing that this can still happen in “our” day and age. The tribesmen in the picture were covered in red body paint, as was typical of many indigenous peoples in the ancient Americas, and they were aiming their bows and arrows at the flying machine above them. I wonder if they thought the flying machine was an alien invader. They no doubt had never seen anything like it before.  They must have been scared out of their wits. It must have been a life-changing experience in which their fundamental view of the universe was changed. It was the day of their First Contact. I wonder if they could comprehend that that there were other human beings on the planet who possessed a technology light years beyond their own. Hopefully this isn’t all just a stunt made to prove a point. Like the man in the Bigfoot suit.

At the same time, NASA has another funky space probe on Mars. Seeing the bleak pictures of the barren Martian landscape taken by the Phoenix lander, I couldn’t help thinking that the most interesting things on Mars now are our own Earth probes. We will probably find nothing on Mars. No life, no microbes, nothing. But in the year 2008 (by one civilization’s reckoning) “We” have discovered Life on Earth, in the remote Amazon. Who are “We” anyway?  And what is “discovery” anyway? Maybe someday, sooner than we think, we will have another First Contact when the Vulcans finally come down to Earth and tell us to live long and prosper.