![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
verushka70So I went to see Speed Racer the other day. I left having come to the conclusion that all of the critics who reviewed it negatively totally missed the point. It was a totally faithful adaptation of the original Speed Racer cartoon's spirit (complete with annoying Spritle and Chim-chim and their stoopid G-rated comic relief that isn't) with a totally updated whizz-bang 50s space-age design style, reinterpreted by the 70s, filtered through 90s retro nostalgia, with 21st century technology.
In other words, this movie was made by people on drugs for people on drugs. To wit: if I had dropped acid or eaten shrooms or smoked some amazing sensemilla marijuana before seeing Speed Racer, I am sure I would have been deliriously entertained because it was cotton candy for the eye and brain. The casting was perfect. I love that they used Susan Sarandon--only someone her age could make it believable that Mrs. Racer would have a son as old as Rex/Racer X, a coming-of-age son Speed's age, and a pre-menopausal accident son Spritle's age. John Goodman was perfectly cast as Pops. Trixie was updated to the post-Title IX age in which we live (thank God) but she was almost as one-dimensional, and yet Christina Ricci was perfectly cast as Trixie (although she was looking a bit anorexic to me). Emile Hirsch was so earnest. Everyone played their parts so earnestly.
The actors who played Rex and Racer X were hot--especially the guy who played Racer X. Then again, it's pretty hard not to be hot, when you're covered head to toe in black leather and wearing what I didn't realize in childhood, but I know now, is pretty close to a BDSM master's half-mask.
But earnest is how the actors had to play it. If they'd gone over-the-top and campy, it wouldn't have felt like Speed Racer. That insane sincerity and belief that a young man, barely out of boyhood, could save the world (?) as a race car driver (??) participating in races and competing against evil race car drivers with villainous sponsors (???) with a seriously tricked out, ultra-modded car (?!?!) has to be integral to the characters; it's the basic premise necessary for all the rest of the implausibilities to be tolerated within suspension of disbelief. They were all very one dimensional characters because those characters always were one dimensional.
When I was really little, I had a crush on Speed. (Gimme a break, I was like four years old.) When I was a little older (around nine-ten years old), I realized Speed was lame and Racer X was hot and mysterious. (Kind of like how before puberty I though Ashley in Gone With The Wind was handsome, but after puberty, Rhett was the one I was hot for. Eh, live, learn.)
Everything I loved and hated about Speed Racer when I was a kid was present in the movie--which to me means it was a pretty damned faithful adaptation, complete with all (and I do mean all) the flaws of the original cartoon. That's why you should be on drugs when you go see it; you're much more likely to tolerate the schmaltzy stuff without gagging, because your eyes will still be seeing afterimages of the visuals that were burned into it by the previous scene.
OK, enough about Speed Racer.
I found this web site that lets you create a world map of all the places you've visited. Here I thought I was so world-traveled. Not! I've only been to about 8% of the world. Also, I clearly have a huge European bias going, an Ontario-heavy tourism perspective on Canada, and need to spend some time west of the Mississippi, south of the Mason-Dixon line, and in the third world.
In other words, this movie was made by people on drugs for people on drugs. To wit: if I had dropped acid or eaten shrooms or smoked some amazing sensemilla marijuana before seeing Speed Racer, I am sure I would have been deliriously entertained because it was cotton candy for the eye and brain. The casting was perfect. I love that they used Susan Sarandon--only someone her age could make it believable that Mrs. Racer would have a son as old as Rex/Racer X, a coming-of-age son Speed's age, and a pre-menopausal accident son Spritle's age. John Goodman was perfectly cast as Pops. Trixie was updated to the post-Title IX age in which we live (thank God) but she was almost as one-dimensional, and yet Christina Ricci was perfectly cast as Trixie (although she was looking a bit anorexic to me). Emile Hirsch was so earnest. Everyone played their parts so earnestly.
The actors who played Rex and Racer X were hot--especially the guy who played Racer X. Then again, it's pretty hard not to be hot, when you're covered head to toe in black leather and wearing what I didn't realize in childhood, but I know now, is pretty close to a BDSM master's half-mask.
But earnest is how the actors had to play it. If they'd gone over-the-top and campy, it wouldn't have felt like Speed Racer. That insane sincerity and belief that a young man, barely out of boyhood, could save the world (?) as a race car driver (??) participating in races and competing against evil race car drivers with villainous sponsors (???) with a seriously tricked out, ultra-modded car (?!?!) has to be integral to the characters; it's the basic premise necessary for all the rest of the implausibilities to be tolerated within suspension of disbelief. They were all very one dimensional characters because those characters always were one dimensional.
When I was really little, I had a crush on Speed. (Gimme a break, I was like four years old.) When I was a little older (around nine-ten years old), I realized Speed was lame and Racer X was hot and mysterious. (Kind of like how before puberty I though Ashley in Gone With The Wind was handsome, but after puberty, Rhett was the one I was hot for. Eh, live, learn.)
Everything I loved and hated about Speed Racer when I was a kid was present in the movie--which to me means it was a pretty damned faithful adaptation, complete with all (and I do mean all) the flaws of the original cartoon. That's why you should be on drugs when you go see it; you're much more likely to tolerate the schmaltzy stuff without gagging, because your eyes will still be seeing afterimages of the visuals that were burned into it by the previous scene.
OK, enough about Speed Racer.
I found this web site that lets you create a world map of all the places you've visited. Here I thought I was so world-traveled. Not! I've only been to about 8% of the world. Also, I clearly have a huge European bias going, an Ontario-heavy tourism perspective on Canada, and need to spend some time west of the Mississippi, south of the Mason-Dixon line, and in the third world.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
i saw it
Date: 2008-08-18 01:50 am (UTC)Re: i saw it
Date: 2008-08-18 01:59 am (UTC)Re: i saw it
Date: 2008-10-31 11:14 pm (UTC)shrooms
Date: 2009-11-09 11:20 am (UTC)Re: shrooms
Date: 2009-11-12 05:40 am (UTC)Ya know, I just realized... standard drug tests (at least the ones we give in our ER, and presumably the ones I would be given for employment as a RN (registered nurse) don't test for shrooms. Hmmm. This could mean that shrooms would be the recreational drug of choice for me! If only there wasn't that diminishing-returns effect where you develop a tolerance so quickly. We made that mistake in Amsterdam... the first day there, we bought weak shrooms, and did half of them. Two days later we bought strong shrooms, did all of them, and REALLY got off. The last day, we didn't want to waste our drugs by throwing them away, so we did the remaining weak shrooms we'd bought the first day. We didn't get off at all! But that's because we'd had the strong shrooms in the interim only 2 days before! It was such a bummer.
I hate that I work in a profession that tests for drugs. It's like, if I'm not high on the job, and I don't do drugs on the job, who gives a fuck what I do in my spare time? I give 200% in my ER nursing job. It is very demanding and active and sometimes really stressful, but I don't lose my cool and I don't flip out on patients or co-workers. I should be able to do whatever the fuck I please to wind down in my spare time on the FOUR days a week I don't work (full time is three 12.5 hour shifts per week). (I totally don't do the drugs that we see in the ER all the time: heroin, coke, crack, meth.)
And, btw, in over 2 years of ER nursing, I have lost count of the numbers of coke, crack and heroin-related emergency patients I've had to care for. I would say it's less than 130 but more than 70. But in those 2+ years I have had exactly 2 marijuana/hallucinogen related emergency patients. One was a girl who held a hit of pot so long she passed out (but she had been drinking and doing other drugs, too, so you can't even hold that against the marijuana). The other was a patient who was schizophrenic and had stopped taking his psych meds... then decided to take some mushrooms. Well, of course he was hallucinating... but this guy had a *history* of hallucinating WITHOUT drugs, because he was schizophrenic, and he heard voices all the time and sometimes saw things. So, in both cases, you can't even blame the hallucinogens for the health emergencies each patient was suffering.
I think that pretty much rests my case on the harmlessness of marijuana and shrooms.
Well, sorry for the rant. I just get so irritated at the drug intolerance and paranoia in the US. And then whenever Canada gets ready to loosen laws on mj, since they're the US' bitch, the US forces them *not* to loosen their laws. It's so frakkin' ridiculous. MJ and shrooms are NOT a public health problem. Heroin, coke, crack, and meth ARE definitely public health problems. I see them in my ER *all* the freakin' time.
Well, sorry for that rant.
Re: i saw it
Date: 2010-11-08 05:31 am (UTC)We went and saw speed racer on shrooms and it blew all our minds. We sat at the back giggling like retards in our chairs, while our friend K provided his mushroom altered interpertations of the political and social meanings behind the movie and gennerally provided tripped out comentary. We weren't really hassled about being loud.
It was one of the best days of my life. I would reccommend watching speed racer on mushrooms to anybody anwhere at any time! You have to watch it in theatres so you should get a bunch of people together and break into an abandoned movie theatre and play it there.
Re: i saw it
Date: 2010-11-08 05:34 am (UTC)whjgwfpl meyh
Date: 2011-02-06 07:57 pm (UTC)