#MONKEY SPEED RACER 2008 MOVIE#
The movie to come is hinted at during a beautiful sequence early on in which a young Speed spies Trixie for the first time.
The eccentric visual unity coursing through the movie’s fuel-injected veins is kept humming and vibrating by the Wachowskis’ go-for-broke bravery, and each new sequence seems to up the ante on the directors’ breathtaking comic audacity. Any of the movie’s spectacular, gravity-defying race scenes qualify for such a description, but the movie’s triumph is that it has infused its entire visual approach with the same intensity, and the result is not nausea, as has been widely reported, but instead a kind of transporting, transcendent euphoria. Like Godard, the Wachowskis integrate their pop-culture-soaked point of view on the material into the very skeleton of the filmmaking itself each cut, either jarring or graphically continuous, adds a degree of emotion that can blindside a viewer with its candy-coated beauty (I’m thinking of a single cut from the blue flames of a crash that has taken his brother’s life to a mournful shot of Speed sobbing silently in his mother’s arms, his bedroom cloaked in shadow) or with a flurry of gasp-inducing disorientation. Oddly enough, it was seeing Jean-Luc Godard’s similarly irreverent pop culture mash-up Pierrot le fou on the big screen a month or so before Speed Racer bowed that best prepared me for what the Wachowskis had in store for those few of low expectations who passed through the opening-day turnstiles. This is a movie of shimmering poetry, shifting, gliding perspectives and a velocity that pulsates with meaning and feeling, a movie so far ahead of the curve of the general audience (and levels of tolerance for its disorienting and radical visual grammar) that it might take at least 20 years, and a wave of failed, Wachowski-tinged pyrotechnical movie piracy, for it to be able to take its rightful place as a landmark of personal filmmaking in the blockbuster mode. To that list of recognized classics I volunteer to add the unjustly maligned, often willfully misunderstood, and completely enthralling Speed Racer, my unashamed pick for the best movie of 2008.