Previewing Speed Racer - and Summer 08.

Picking up from the entry on Iron Man and other summer movie previews (updates include the NYT and LAT packages), it's already time for one on Speed Racer, which will close the Tribeca Film Festival this weekend and then opens everywhere next Friday.

Variety's Todd McCarthy finds it to be "pure cotton candy - entirely non-nutritious but too sweet and pretty for young people to resist."

"Thematically, it's classic stuff: the little guy versus the corporation, free will versus destiny," writes Dave Calhoun as part of Time Out's Speed Racer package. "Only the telling, as you'd expect from the Wachowskis, pushes the boundaries of what we expect from the image.... It doesn't make for original storytelling, acting, or writing, but the spectacle eclipses those expectations."

Updated through 5/8.

"The basic laws of gravity and aerodynamics aren't simply denied; they are totally repealed," writes the Hollywood Reporter's Kirk Honeycutt. "This causes the sensation of being trapped inside a 3-D video game."

Catherine Elsworth talks with Christina Ricci for the Telegraph.

"Say Goodbye to the Blockbuster," the AV Club's summer movie preview: parts 1 and 2. And, yikes, another list! "Part Hype, Part Art, All Movie: 18 Pretty Great Summer Blockbusters Not Directed By Steven Spielberg."

The Los Angeles Times' Kenneth Turan is actually looking forward to several films due this summer, but considering the general trend of Hollywood's blockbuster season, "Not to put too fine a point on it, but the summer is killing American movie culture." Oh, and he reviews Iron Man, too.

Some of the LAT's "Movie Sneaks: Summer 2008" package is sneaking online:

• John Horn has a making-of sort of piece on The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian in the Los Angeles Times.

• Josh Gajewski chats with Uma Thurman (The Accidental Husband).

• Susan King with Amanda Seyfried (Momma Mia) and M Night Shyamalan (The Happening).

  Lesley O'Toole with Romany Malco (Love Guru).

Tim Walker writes up the Independent's summer preview.

Variety's Pamela McClintock considers the box office expectations for Hollywood's summer.

Updates: "One of the most genuinely confounding films to come along in years, the Wachowski Brothers' follow-up to The Matrix trilogy is, if viewed from one angle, the most headache inducing kid's movie of them all; if viewed from another, it's the most expensive avant-garde film ever made." Glenn Kenny in Premiere.

At the House Next Door, John Lichman argues that translating anime to live action simply does not and cannot work.

For the Guardian, David Thompson considers the Wachowskis.

"ScreenGrab Predicts: The Top 5 Bombs of Summer 2008." Also, the "Top 5 Hits."

Updates, 5/3: The New York Times presents its "Summer Movies" special this weekend and "Is There a Real Woman in This Multiplex?" is the first question right off the top. "Iron Man, Batman, Big Angry Green Man - to judge from the new popcorn season it seems as if Hollywood has realized that the best way to deal with its female troubles is to not have any, women, that is," writes Manohla Dargis. "Welcome to the new, post-female American cinema. Nowhere is our irrelevance more starkly apparent than during the summer, the ultimate boys' club." And there's a slide show.

"The male rejection of adulthood is now the dominant attitude in Hollywood comedy, even (or perhaps especially) in movies whose sexual frankness makes them officially unsuitable for children," writes AO Scott after first considering the career of Adam Sandler (You Don't Mess With the Zohan opens June 6). "I suspect I'm not alone in growing weary of the relentless contemplation of that psyche in its infantile state, and of the endless celebration of arrested development as a social entitlement." And: slide show.

As she always does with these seasonal specials, Karen Durbin picks out a handful of performances to highlight; this time around it's James Franco in Pineapple Express, Nurgül Yesilçay in The Edge of Heaven, Matthew Goode in Brideshead Revisited and Mary-Kate Olsen in The Wackness. And Durbin narrates an accompanying slide show.

Ginia Bellafante profiles Michael Patrick King, head writer of Sex and the City back in the day and writer-director of Sex and the City: The Movie.

Terrence Rafferty calls up Steven Spielberg to talk about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Michael Cieply talks with producer Akiva Goldsman and director Peter Berg about Hancock. More from John Horn in the Los Angeles Times.

"Faves, Hot and Cool" is probably the most fun feature in the package: Neil LaBute on Doctor Zhivago, Sony co-prez Michael Barker on Brewster McCloud, Diane English on The Graduate, Larry Charles on Female Trouble and Tamara Jenkins on Last Tango in Paris.

Charles Taylor and Stephanie Zacharek look ahead to some of the highlights of the DVD release schedule, featuring, among many others, Godard, Disney and Sinatra.

And there's a theatrical release schedule, too, but Dave Kehr's usual notes are missing. Rats.

Turning to the Los Angeles Times and its "Summer Sneaks 2008"... Now take a look at this. Each movie has its own page. The Dark Knight, for example: LAT stories at the top; photos and videos; appropriate links on the side - in this case, the IMDb, the Wikipedia entry, the official site, DC Comics and a fan site - and then a string of stories, evidently fed via RSS. Well done!

Geoff Boucher introduces a big breakdown of this summer's superheroes - who they are, what their Achilles heels might be, their enemies and the bottom line on the movie - and the release dates. The titles link back to each movie's page, too. My, my.

Boucher also talks, by the way, with Aaron Eckhart about his role in The Dark Knight: "I can tell you that, basically, when you look at Two-Face, you should get sick to your stomach. Being the guy under all that, well, that was a lot of fun for me."

"Universal was always going to make Wanted, but the R-rated assassin drama originally was penciled in for a March release," writes John Horn. "Once the studio began assembling the film's Super Bowl commercial, though, Universal had a change of heart: Maybe this movie was good enough to compete against Hancock, The Dark Knight and all of the season's biggest kahunas." The LAT page. Nifty.

Susan King has a brief chat with Sigourney Weaver about being one of the only human voices in WALL-E. Related: In the NYT Magazine, Andrew Stanton, the writer and director behind A Bug's Life, Finding Nemo and Wall-E, tells Edward Lewine about his daily routine, his likes and habits and such.

"This summer, [Don] Cheadle will star in Traitor, in which he plays former US Special Operations officer Samir Horn, a duplicitous man being investigated by government agents for his possible participation in international conspiracies involving terrorist organizations," writes Amy Kaufman. "His pursuers include an FBI agent (Guy Pearce), a CIA contractor (Jeff Daniels) and an FBI agent (Neal McDonough) who try to link Horn to past attacks." And guess who came up with this idea: Steve Martin. Really. Kaufman talks with Cheadle.

Steve Carell tells Irene Lacher why he'll not be doing an impression of Don Adams in Get Smart.

Robert W Welkos: "Director Wayne Kramer's new ensemble film, Crossing Over, has been compared to Crash, the Oscar-winning exploration of race relations in LA that also featured a high-profile cast, but Kramer said his focus is much more on immigration itself and how the morass of US laws play out in the City of Angels."

Updates, 5/4: More in the LAT: Geoff Boucher talks with David Duchovny about The X-Files: I Want to Believe and with Harrison Ford about Indiana Jones.

"It's about women whose crisis is that their ingredients are so exquisite that no man can ice their cake." Deborah Orr in the Independent on why women love Sex and the City.

More on Iron Man: Francis Cruz and, at the House Next Door, Ryland Walker Knight.

"I love a good summer movie as much a the next guy, but this morning I found myself looking back at some of the little films that cropped up during the summer; some of them managed to get a 'summer' feel on a much lower budget and without all the advertisement and hype." A list from Jeffrey M Anderson at Cinematical.

At PopMatters, Bill Gibron looks back over 40 summers.

John Horn talks with Guillermo del Toro about Hellboy II: The Rise of the Golden Army.

David Poland writes a reply, in a way, to Manohla Dargis: "Hollywood is neither monolithic nor terribly interested in the content of what they sell."

Updates, 5/5: Emily Nussbaum profiles Sarah Jessica Parker for New York's cover story on Sex and the City: The Movie.

Also, David Edelstein on Speed Racer: "The film is like a nightmare in which you're trapped in an arcade with screens on all sides and no eyelids. Based on an elemental but happily streamlined Japanese cartoon (an anime precursor), it's an eyesore, a shambles, with incoherent action and ear-buckling dialogue."

"Though the film is not as criminally poor as V for Vendetta, which the Wachowskis wrote in 2005, it struck me as more insidious," writes Anthony Lane in the New Yorker. "There's something about the ululating crowds who line the action in color-coördinated rows; the desperate skirting of ordinary feelings in favor of the trumped-up variety; the confidence in technology as a spectacle in itself; and, above all, the sense of master manipulators posing as champions of the little people. What does that remind you of? You could call it entertainment, and use it to wow your children for a couple of hours. To me, it felt like Pop fascism, and I would keep them well away."

Screen's Mike Goodridge finds it "as exhausting as it is entertaining. Pitched tonally to young kids, but way too long for a family movie, Speed Racer shares many of the problems of the bloated Matrix sequels. The brothers swamp the fragile story and characters with such a deluge of CGI tricks and elaborate action sequences that it proves hard to care about the humans on screen."

"What Happens in Vegas leads to neo-screwball comedy in New York, and the result is an undemandingly diverting and exceptionally commercial pic," writes Joe Leydon in Variety. "Shrewdly positioned by Fox as counterprogramming to the early summer flash and filigree of Iron Man and Speed Racer, this two-seated star vehicle for top-billed Ashton Kutcher and Cameron Diaz wrings a respectable number of laughs from a formulaic scenario about attracted-opposites who bicker and back-stab their way toward happily-ever-aftering."

PopMatters' Bill Gibron explains what Iron Man's $100 million means to all involved.

"In a lot of ways, Pineapple Express is a 1980s flick," writes Matt Dentler, who caught a screening with director David Gordon Green and stars Seth Rogen, James Franco and Danny McBride in attendance. "While the film is the latest from the Judd Apatow machine, it's very unique. It's a pot comedy, sure, but at its heart the film feels more like an undiscovered episode of Miami Vice as made by 'the guys who brought you Superbad.'"

Karina Longworth recently attended a Q&A with Sarah Jessica Parker "o learn something about why adult women find Parker and the Sex and the City phenomena appealing." At the SpoutBlog:

Sex and the City fandom is a curious, powerful thing: there are women for whom the show was not just a show, but an articulation of a kind of post-post feminism in which conspicuous consumption and low-level self-destruction become a kind of political statement, where concerns about independence and empowerment have become so moot that something as seemingly provincial and outdated as "marrying well" has come back around as a reasonable goal for working women. In other words, it allows well-heeled, probably intelligent but politically unconscious women to do what they would have done anyway, and feel really, really good about it.

An interesting contrast with Iron Man fans follows.

Updates, 5/6: "[T]he Wachowskis have created a blast of pure pop family fun," writes James Rocchi at Cinematical. "Speed Racer's a bright, bold visual spectacle designed for kids."

"Imagine someone pouring hot, melted Starburst candies into your corneas, and you just begin to approximate the experience of Speed Racer, an ice-cream headache of a movie that just keeps piling on the unnatural colors, the zoom-zoom of cars that speed and leap and drift and flip, and the ADD editing that makes it all but impossible to follow what little plot there is," writes Alonso Duralde for MSNBC.

Updates, 5/7: "Explosions, pratfalls, and robots; heroes, aliens, and blondes - it must be summertime at the movies," writes Chuck Wilson, introducing his overview of the season in the SF Weekly. "Beyond the flash, though, it's striking to note just how many movies will require us to actually think this summer - aren't we supposed to save thinking for the fall?"

"For me, this carousel, which clocks in at a leisurely 135 minutes, is more fun to describe than to ride." Indeed, J Hoberman's review of Speed Racer in the Voice is surely many, many times more fun than watching the movie. After a couple of paragraphs riding over the "Candy Land topography of lava-lamp skies and Hello Kitty clouds," Hoberman notes, "Like The Matrix (or its engagingly primitive precursor, the DOS-era Disney relic Tron), Speed Racer gives the not-unrealistic impression of taking place inside a computer. But love, hate, or ignore it, The Matrix proposed a social mythology. (Just ask Slavoj Zizek.) Speed Racer is simply a mishmash that, among other things, intermittently parodies the earlier film's pretensions."

"[D]ecadence isn't the same thing as having an artistic vision, especially when the décor is actually kind of tacky (the mise-en-scène looks like a parody of The Incredibles' gorgeously rendered mid-century suburbia)," writes Benjamin Strong in the L Magazine. "Instead, Speed Racer is strong evidence that Susan Sontag was right, that what looks like camp is sometimes - 'when it is too mediocre in ambition' - just bad art."

"Make no mistake," writes Blake Ethridge at Twitch, "the Wachowski Brothers have turned anime into live action visual opera that promises to be the benchmark and standard all other type of adaptations will be judged against for the foreseeable future."

In Iron Man, "there are deeper subtexts and themes that you can tease out if you so desire, and you can do so without ruining the pure, thrill-packed entertainment one bit," writes Jason Morehead.

"The comparisons between the Vietnam War and the War in Iraq as controversial, undeclared wars have been long debated and thus I will avoid prolonging that discussion here," writes Mike Rennett at Dr Mabuse's Kaleido-Scope. "The main point which I would like to take is the similarities between the two and how they relate to Iron Man."

David Poland on Speed Racer: "You will know whether this is a movie that will stay in your heart early on, when young Speed imagines himself racing. I won't give away what the imagery of the scene is, but if you find yourself as charmed as delighted as I did, put on your seatbelt, because you're in for a great ride."

Updates, 5/8: Marlowe sends an early spoiler-ridden review of Hancock into AICN.

"Freakishly perverse, this is an immense, Otter Pop–colored nostalgic thing that expends so much energy replicating every last widget and geegaw from its source that it forgets to be, you know, fun." Andrew Wright on Speed Racer in the Stranger.

"The faux naivete on display here - right down to the imitation-fruit-flavored FDA-food-dye coloring - is both shamelessly quaint and shamelessly cynical," writes Jim Emerson at RogerEbert.com.

"The Wachowski brothers fill the movie with so many new ideas about how to make pictures that it soon becomes fun just to watch those ideas whiz by, even the bad ones," writes Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle. "All the same, if this action extravaganza represents the future of movies, it's going to be a sad, dead and awful future."

"Iron Man and Speed Racer are tributes to practical ingenuity and manual dexterity, to real American innovators like Edison and Ford, Steve Wozniak and Dale Earnhardt - to the grease monkey as genius," writes Richard Corliss in Time. "Movies like Polar Express and Sin City proffered seductive experiments in digital cinema and green screen, but Speed Racer announces the arrival of the virtual movie. If you watch the film overwhelmed by the assault of seductive visual information and wonder what you're seeing, here's the happy answer: the future of movies."

"The Wachowskis are upfront about their desire for narrative one-dimensionality, from the opening sequence of Speed literally racing the ghost of his dead brother, Rex (Scott Porter), to a final front-page newspaper headline that blares, schoolmarmishly, 'Cheaters Never Prosper,'" writes Nick Schager in Slant.

"Hollywood's reliance on comic books and TV shows as source material doesn't simply cater to arrested adolescence; it's about cajoling consumers into a state of permanent adolescence," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "Both Speed Racer and Iron Man are the latest dreadful examples."

For Michael Wilmington, writing at Movie City News, Speed Racer "is a blazing, whiplash-cut, CGI-laden screamer of a movie - not entirely a pleasurable experience, but you sure won't forget it soon."

Online viewing tip. Jeffrey Wells has the first seven minutes.

"Iron Man is spryer than the overwhelming majority of films in its budget range," writes Adam Nayman in Reverse Shot. "[Jon] Favreau showed a talent for framing handmade special effects in the enjoyable Jumanji-in-space romp Zathura, and Iron Man's best moments are similarly low-fi."

Posted by dwhudson at May 2, 2008 7:51 AM