Warchoskis' 'Speed Racer' to Employ 'Car-Fu'

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From the creators of “bullet-time” and “the Burly Brawl,” comes “car-fu.”

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/movies/la-ca-speedracer13jan13…

Befitting a movie that owes a stylistic debt to the early ’60s, as well as notions of what the future would look like, writer-directors Andy and Larry Wachowski came up with a mashed-up nickname for the film’s mélange of Formula 1, the X Games and demolition derby.

“Car-Fu — that’s what the boys were calling it,” said “Speed Racer” producer Joel Silver, speaking for the notoriously media-averse Wachowskis, the dystopian auteurs behind the blockbuster “Matrix” trilogy. “Cars fighting in the air.”

And:

Unlike most movies in which computer generated imagery stands in for sets, extras, props and even production design (“Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow” please stand up), “Speed Racer” is using high definition digital video to blur genre boundaries.

“We looked at the textures and attitude of the original ‘Speed’ and wanted to be faithful to the core concepts of the story,” Gaeta said. “But we thought it would be fascinating to take the structure of old animé and modernize it. It’s computer generated but it’s not a cartoon. It’s a high-fidelity interpretation of animé.”

Also:

“The perspectives were deliberately done wrong to have an emotional impact rather than a realistic one,” said visual effects supervisor Dan Glass. “We wanted an impressionistic feel. This is a movie for kids and families. They tend to not have as many judgments in place about what cinema should look like.”

Finally:

To achieve what they call “Speed Racer’s” “hyper” color palette, production designers mined the work of animé pioneer Hayao Miyazaki (“Spirited Away”), Tokyo-born pop artist Takashi Murakami, the high-concept fashion photography of David LaChapelle and neo-noir shoot ‘em up “Sin City,” among myriad other avant pop influences.

MagnoliaFan's picture

Also

PatrickMcD's picture

Go Speed Racer, Go!

As an old school, after school watching uber fan of Speed Racer (please, please let him roll on the ground while firing a machine gun) this movie is either going to be spectacular (which I’m predicting) or will approach Matrix Revolutions ambiguity, which will have the general googleplex audience going “huh?” Maybe Larry Wachowski will dress up as Trixie at the premiere.

Hank’s in a band! www.myspace.com/thetelepaths

MagnoliaFan's picture

Googleplex

Is “Googleplex” a reference to Ebert’s Answer Man column this week?

Q: On the strength of your naming “Juno” the best film of the year, I just took it in at my local googleplex, and I was a tad disappointed, even though I largely agree with your review. I was distracted to the point of annoyance at the implausibly hipper-than-thou sentences zipping out of the lips of the movie’s characters. Juno is hip. Juno’s friends are hip. Juno’s parents are hip. Even Rainn Wilson’s character, the guy behind the counter at the store, is hip. Only Jason Bateman’s and Jennifer Garner’s characters seem to be spared this indignity, probably to make some obscure point about the evils of yuppiehood.

A wise reviewer once wrote: “I have a problem with movies where everybody talks as if they were reading out of an old novel about a bunch of would-be colorful characters. They usually end up sounding silly.” Well, of course that reviewer was you, and the movie was “Raising Arizona.” So can you explain why the affected English bothered you in one but not the other?
C. Morris, Noblesville, Ind.

A. Your local “googleplex”? We discourage that kind of hip coinage around here. Isn’t “movie theater” good enough? Although you have caught me in a contradiction, I would argue that the dialogue in “Juno” mostly works because Ellen Page sells the tone so convincingly. She wins us over. Think of Diablo Cody’s words in the mouths of Page’s contemporaries, and you cringe. Yes, her parents talk that way: Where do you think she learned it? As for the drugstore clerk and Juno’s best girlfriend, it’s as if she affects the linguistic weather when she enters a room.

I’ve never heard anyone call a theater a googleplex before this week.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googleplex

MagnoliaFan's picture

I Guess I'm Wrong

PatrickMcD's picture

Roger Rules!

Busted. I picked it up from Rog on Friday. But I knew it was in the lexicon somehow.

Hank’s in a band! www.myspace.com/thetelepaths

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