Pass the Cheetos....

Speed Racer, the Wachowski Brother's follow up to the Matrix series is nearly impossible to describe. Every critic hated it. It runs to a brain-freeze inducing 135mins. It's based on a 1960's Japanese cartoon that only creepy 40-year-olds still living in their parent's basement could possibly remember. It's 90% CGI, 5% story and 5% credits. It has impossibly ridiculous racing sequences, a membrane-thin plot, some cringe-inducing cheese-acting from adults who should have known better (Susan Sarandan?... Jezus Christos girl, shouldn't you be concentrating on the environment or something?), a ludicrous child actor that looks like Grampa Munster reincarnated ...and a pet chimpanzee. Wow. Sounds like a winner huh?

Yup. It is.

The upside.... and it's huge.... is this. Speed Racer is the stoner movie to end all stoner movies. Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating you spark up a big spliff here, just that if you did you might want to prepare yourself for the biggest mind-fuck since Kubrick's 2001. The kaleidoscope of colours and imagery saturating every frame of Speed Racer completely boggle the senses. This movie will be the reference DVD in every BluRay player sold this Christmas, I guarantee you.

Notwithstanding the 600 or so fundamental problems with Speed Racer, I enjoyed the hell out of it. It's not as completely awful as the critics say and it's visually unlike anything that has ever been done before. This is the new CGI benchmark for filmmaking. By the way, this is also a film that people will be watching a 100 years from now in the same way Fritz Lang's Metropolis is viewed today. It has cult masterpiece written all over it. People will say.... “It was a bomb in its day, you know?”

....or no one will remember it by early next year. It could go either way.