2008 Directed by Lilly Wachowski, Lana Wachowski
Speed Racer is the tale of a young and brilliant racing driver. When corruption in the racing leagues costs his brother his life, he must team up with the police and the mysterious Racer X to bring an end to the corruption and criminal activities. Inspired by the cartoon series.
Emile Hirsch Christina Ricci John Goodman Susan Sarandon Matthew Fox Benno Fürmann Hiroyuki Sanada Rain Richard Roundtree Karl Yune Ariel Winter Roger Allam Paulie Litt Kick Gurry John Benfield Christian Oliver Ralph Herforth Scott Porter Nan Yu Nayo Wallace Melvil Poupaud Ramon Tikaram Ben Miles Peter Fernandez Cosma Shiva Hagen Moritz Bleibtreu Joon Park Nicholas Elia Melissa Holroyd Show All…
Joel Silver Bruce Berman Grant Hill Lilly Wachowski Lana Wachowski Michael Lambert David Lane Seltzer
Studio Babelsberg Village Roadshow Pictures Silver Pictures Anarchos Productions Velocity Productions Warner Bros. Pictures
Speed Racer - Totál turbó, Speed Racer - O Filme, Hızlı Yarışcı, 스피드 레이서, スピード・レーサー, Meteoro: La película, Спиди-гонщик, Спіді Гонщик, Vua tốc độ, 極速賽車手, ਸਪੀਡ ਰੇਸਰ, مسابقه سرعت, متسابق السرعة
so this is a joke right? 5 stars for speed racer? weirdly enough, speed racer is a movie that means so much to me. that's not a normal thing to say. but it's true.
my brother died in 2011. he was 7 years old and never went a day without smiling and making everyone around him smile. his favorite movie, and mine at the time as well, was speed racer. i talk about this movie now as a joke, considering how bright and insane it is. but in 2011, in a car accident, my brother died, leaving me with an emotional mother and a drunk father. i was left with movies and speed racer was what was left of carter.…
While maybe not as consistently engaging, this is genuinely in the same lane (haha) as Spiderverse and Fury Road in terms of visuals. If you had any doubts that this wasn’t a good movie please revisit the “Non-ja” joke.
Okay, I do NOT like the way things look when they are outside or surrounded by a lot of people. All those scenes look somewhere between a nauseatingly-saturated mid-2000s boy band music video and a Robert Rodriguez-directed episode of Angela Anaconda. They also look like they were a nightmare to shoot! But the rest of it? Unimpeachable.
The Wachowskis absolutely understand how to translate a ridiculous anime to a ridiculous live-action piece without making it feel like they’re just taking the story and not the entire energy of the original. The plasticky look of the cars works so well in making the race sequences feel like a child playing with Hot Wheels, and the ghost car effect they cribbed straight…
100
Ate Twizzlers and Air Head Xtremes Bites while watching. Saw a lot of indistinct shapes and sounds clustered around the vibrant colorscape of a cameraless paint-bucket bedazzlement. I think John Goodman called a Ninja a 'nonja' but I'm not sure. Truly an achievement in rendering the presence of the lens mute to the point where frames woosh by like cotton candy. The Grand-Prix is Heavenly Art; a stain-glass creativity monument, complete with a Cooties Warning to boot.
"You can feel her talking to you, telling you what she wants, what she needs. Listen."
So visually dense that you can get completely lost image to image. A triumph of idiosyncrasy, the Wachowski Rosetta Stone, and a spectacular anti-capital assertion of individuality over oppressive systems. Would make a great double feature with ALI.
There was a period in the mid-2000s, when digital was first taking full root as the new form of filmmaking, when some directors decided to test the technical possibilities of the format. 2006 was a watershed for this, with Pedro Costa, David Lynch and Michael Mann turning in radical works that boldly explored unique properties of lighting, compression and image speed. In terms of blockbuster filmmaking, the high water mark for the use of digital remains Speed Racer, a living cartoon that fulfills the Wachowskis' attempts to make anime out of the Matrix films.
When I think of this film, I think of Sergei Eisenstein's love for Snow White, how he saw in animation the potential of a total filmmaking,…
It's been almost ten years and there still isn't another film that looks like Speed Racer. The film begins with a kaleidoscope unfolding until the Warner Bros. logo appears. That single moment involving the kaleidoscope informs the visual language that is used throughout the two hour and fifteen minute runtime. This is created through the effect of camera wipes, but The Wachowskis go even further with that technique and use it to superimpose backstory, exposition and emotional imagery into the film seamlessly. The shot/reverse shot structure is all but swept to the wayside in favour of a camera always unfolding inside of itself or moving on by placing an image on top of another. This is to say nothing of…
every so often I get really drunk and stay up past my bedtime and watch speed racer and cry through the grand prix to make sure I can still feel anything
i love how SPEED RACER teaches you how to read all its visual rules within 1 opening 20-minute sequence that dissolves time/stretches space. SPEED RACER is beyond editing, beyond the frame, beyond cinema. past and present/cut and image become one.
This entire medium peaked with the climax of the Grand Prix sequence. Few films are more joyously, colorfully expressive.
this is my new cinematic religion and quite possibly the greatest movie of all time.
(thank y'all so much for the 1k followers!! this has been such a wonderful community that has led to some amazing friends and beautiful reviewers. you guys are such great, uplifting souls and i hope that never changes.)
"all you gotta do is listen. close your eyes and listen.
the wachowski's are too loving & sweet for this cruel world... what did we do to deserve them?
I got real excited when I was looking at people’s reviews of this movie (4 and 5 stars!) Thinking I was in for a real treat.
This was not the case for me. Whereas I appreciate the “no, look at this art like THIS” angle people are taking with it, like people are excited to be rediscovering this crazy early aughts surrealist pop art collage of a movie, you just have to look at it differently and you’ll get it kinda thing. For me, at its best times, it looked like a 2000’s video game cut scene. The night scenes sometimes came close to achieving something interesting looking. There’s a few interior fight scenes near the end that *almost* felt…
Never understood the hate this film got it's got more originality than most of Hollywood's films today which makes it infinitely rewatchable.
Extremely happy I revisited this. The most ambitious and visually insane big budget movie in recent years.
Is Speed Racer one of the worst films of all time, or a misunderstood masterpiece that we have yet to uncover?
While my review will not give a definitive answer to that debate, one thing I can say is; I like speed racer haha. Its so silly, colorful, flashy and basically a maddening, hard hitting, flying, elephant stomping, delightful picture that stretches' the very fabric of insanity in its fabrication. Like how did this movie get made? Like who on earth would put money into this?
I never had cocaine in my life but if I had one close experience with it is watching this movie. I loved it even though I knew it was maybe not good for me, BUT I WANT MORE, I WANT MORE!!!!
But that's not the point haha. Speed Racer is just fun and sweet for families and kids :)
-throws me off how much Olivia Cooke is the new Christina Ricci
-John Goodman is good and good at wrestling
-1st half: wow.. this looks like a video game. 2nd half: Wow! This looks like a video game!
-monkey
holy holy shit this movie was so bongos my eyes were just like 😦 emile i love you man! so many crazy colors and screen wipes i stg this movie had some of the craziest shots and editing and sound design like wow. so imaginative i could watch this over and over again
What the hell was this film.
I feel like for this film that for every positive there’s a negative so I’m gonna go over the good things then the bad things.
The good things:
Michael Giachinno’s score
The first 15 mins
Bits and pieces of the racing
The ending
The acting
The (indoor) sets
The bad things:
Most of th god awful special effects
The fact that this film is way to colourful
Bits and pieces of the racing
The green screen
The pacing
The villiian
Since there’s equal good things to bad things I’m gonn a meet in the middle
I give this film a 5.0/10
I would probably recommend it
Hershey 20,986 films
I’m sick of sorting through concerts, series, and other non-movies. Anything with more than 1,000 views on Letterboxd that’s longer…
magrosleau 1,397 films
To comfort the disturbed and to disturb the comfortable weirdo / shocking / random / weirdos / psychedelectable
Tobias Andersen 8,809 films
Rules: Generate a number (from 1 to x) via: www.random.org
See how many number of films there are in the…
Vanessa 6,760 films
Check out the official top 100 narrative feature films by women directors list
FAQ (please read before commenting)
1) Why…
MundoF 13,715 films
It’s an LGBTQ+ world and these are my other LGBTQ+ lists on Letterboxd:
➡️Minor Interest Films: In the Closet: A…
John Bodenman 901 films
Psychedelic definition: of or noting a mental state characterized by a profound sense of intensified sensory perception, sometimes accompanied by…
Jack Moulton 1,526 films
Members Represented: 3,295
It's simple: Post your #1 ever (no runners-up or ties please) in the comments and I'll add…
Ivica_Pusticki 1,000 films
You all heard about that famous book called "1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die", right!? There has been…
aobh 15,423 films
This list is for scripts or source material written or co-written by women. Recs welcome!
Be sure to check out…
Owen 171 films
Films that encapsulate that quote from Tenet (2020). Ones that do have an analytical purpose and meaning, but can be…
Lyzette 670 films
***EDIT (March 30, 2014)*** Wow! I never would have expected that I'd get anywhere close to 100 likes on this…
