| Overall Grade: |
A+ |
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| Story: |
A+ |
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| Acting: |
A |
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| Direction: |
A+ |
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|
| Visuals: |
A+ |
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The Critics Have It Wrong
by Akira Buttermaker (movies profile)
Jul 12, 2008
304
of
360 people found this review helpful
I guess you can't expect people who are about to watch a movie on, say, World War II to be experts on the topic. A film has a responsibility to inform its audience to some degree, but the producers would expect movie goers to know the basics: World War II came after World War I, the allied forces won, Hitler was evil . . . that kind of thing.
You would think that people who got paid to review "Speed Racer" would have at least armed themselves with a similar understanding of the basics behind the cartoon before heading into theaters and forming their opinions and writing their reviews (whichever order those events actually transpired is up for considerable debate). They would have understood that the movie recreated the cartoon's wry and ironic sense of humor and indefinable sense of style. They would have noticed how perfectly Matthew Fox captured Racer X's immobile and dry expressions even behind the wheel of a careening racecar. They may have been awed by the color, the imagination, the dialogue, the purity. They may have recognized the unique twists that make this movie stand out from the drab cinematic landscape while impeccably duplicating the pop artistry of the series.
But the critics (even the ones who wrote otherwise) obviously never watched the cartoon. They were incapable of seeing the movie for what it was: a film version of a cool cartoon about racing. Instead, they review it as some sort of socio-political commentary.
Long story short: it is not a filmmaker's fault that critics have become so imaginatively crippled that they can't get lost in an escape device.
I did. And it was awesome. |
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