Royalton snarling with relish in Speed's face "I'll tell you what's going to happen. You're going to march out of here all self-righteous and you're going to do everything in your power to prove what I've told you is a lie."
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(It's to make commercials and trick people into buying shit It's for putting in every corner of every public place to create a ubiquitous surveillance state and get people arrested It's for making blurry selfies and sexting and other random social garbage)
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You are one of the only ones, the lucky ones, who gets to use one of these things *just because it's cool* Who gets to push it to the limit, to see how fucking cool it is, this miracle the eggheads invented and never understood when they did
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The feeling of moving faster than any animal with legs has ever moved, the landscape turning into a colorful blur, the G-forces clutching your body like a fist, your eyes and hands and nerves becoming one with a steel beast with the power of five hundred fucking horses
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Knowing how steadicam and greenscreen and VFX workstation fit together just like engine and transmission and wheels Pointing and clicking and like magic here's a hail of gunfire, here's a fiery explosion, here's a majestic sunset and a moon that fills half the sky
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I'm allowed to do anything, no speed limit, no red lights, no traffic laws of any kind I get to go as hard as my skill and my tech and my courage can take me
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I can film a flashback that takes place *during* the framing scene flashing back to it, literally overlapping each other through superposition I can break the rules of cinematic space, I can have things and people my character imagines literally physically wander into frame
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(Speed Racer walked where Sense8 ran here, and Rian Johnson, again, owes Lana and Lilly a cup of coffee) I can use modern VFX to make "live-action" transitions -- wild whip-pans and absurdly long zooms -- only dreamt of in the tackiest Saturday morning cartoons
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I can do anything I want, because for now I'm in the driver's seat, and even if tomorrow I wake up a bankrupt laughingstock, if the money men never let me touch the wheel again, right now I'm redlining the engine and I just broke the sound barrier and nothing can fucking stop me
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("I don't -- I don't believe it! SPEED RACER IS DRIVING UP A SHEER CLIFF! THIS SHOULDN'T BE POSSIBLE!" A moment that, as we say, addresses the audience on multiple levels)
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In this appreciation thread I will add one more thing I don't know if Lana Wachowski has an ADHD diagnosis, but this movie is an absolutely ADHD movie and I mean that in the best possible way The movie makes that clear from the very first scene
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It's literally little kid Speed Racer being unable to focus on his schoolwork, compulsively stimming, his mental landscape morphing into a racetrack His teacher bringing in his parents for the concerned family meeting
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When he's in that zone, when he's hyperfocused on getting to that finish line, everything makes sense, everything fits together, he's on top of every single thing he needs to know and he's fucking unstoppable When he's not in the car and it's just him, he's helpless
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(I think this is notable because it's a major shift from the original character, who was a stereotypical all-around awesome dude including being a straight-A student This little detail feels... very real)
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(Lana's interviews about her tough childhood, struggling with dysphoria and with just generally being a lonely nerd Never feeling actually present in the world around her, throwing herself into theatre and movies hoping they could teach her to really *be*)
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The message of this movie, corny as it is, is this message about eudaimonia, about what it means to really succeed in life, as a human being That the purpose of art isn't to make money or to earn fans or get laid -- it's not even to make the world a better place and fix society
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Speed gets all of those things in the end -- even changing the world and fixing society, thanks to the hilariously unapologetic way this world is built completely around Racecars Are Serious Business ("The world economy rests on the outcome of a children's card game")
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But that's not the reason to do it The reason to put the bad guys in prison and to usher in a new era of freedom and prosperity is... he gets to keep on driving The reason to make a movie you hope will save the world is so there will be a world where you can make more movies
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The point of being alive is to have that one thing you're damn good at that no one else can do quite the same way you can, and to fucking NAIL IT and know that in that moment YOU ARE AWESOME And to look at your loved ones and see that joy reflected between you and them
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(As
@FilmCritHulk points out one of the ways this movie nails it, where a wussier movie would just be schmaltz, is the unapologetic use of quick cuts and sensory overload We fully see his victory in the rapid-fire succession of everyone else reaction to it)Show this thread -
(The whole story is told this way -- nothing stays in one place as long as it should, it meanders, it wanders, it jumps back and forth through time and space, things overlap and carry over from scene to scene Talking and talking in one long string without punctuation marks)
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(They diagnose minds like this as broken Always moving *too fast*, speeding toward the horizon, that moves on four wheels and not two legs, that can't change direction without accelerating, that needs to travel down an open road without obstacles or it will shudder to a halt)
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(And in a world without roads, it would be A racecar trying to go where a racecar can't -- trying to hike through the woods like an animal bred for the rough terrain of nature -- is a sad, useless, expensive hunk of metal)
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(But maybe, just maybe If you can, somehow, scrape together the seed capital Give that car a pit crew, fill up its tires and its gas tank, clear a path for it down the smoothly paved track a racecar needs And watch it do the things ONLY a racecar can do Watch it fucking GO)
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This movie is a pretty great demonstration of "show, don't tell" and the power of form over content in cinema Talking about it at all in words sounds schmaltzy But the movie works because it is, in every way, in every shot and every cut and every frame, a demonstration
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Like, maybe it's my meta knowledge of the Wachowskis' struggles in Hollywood Or maybe it's how the years since 2008 have gone for me, personally A lot of harsh lessons, about talent, and success, and neurodivergence But when Speed crosses the finish line I was fucking bawling
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End of conversation
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