Screening times:
Saturday, June 27, 8:30 PM
The Wachowskis | USA | 2008 | 135m
In celebration of the 30th Anniversary of Bound and the brand new 4K restoration of Speed Racer, we’re running a new retrospective series featuring three of Lana and Lilly’s masterpieces on Saturday nights throughout June. Finally, it’s the coup-de-grace of hyper-digital cinematic adrenaline, SPEED RACER.
A wild post-modern reinterpretation of the 1960s anime of the same name, Speed Racer tells the story of a young and brilliant racing driver, named Speed Racer (Emile Hirsch). When corruption in the racing leagues costs his brother his life, Speed must team up with his family (John Goodman, Susan Sarandon, and more) and the mysterious Racer X to bring an end to the corruption and criminal activities.
The world wasn’t ready for Speed Racer in 2008.
Even today, the film is a miracle in cinematic reinvention. Gone are the stringent use of cuts and edits as means of defined punctuation that the 20th century demanded and are instead integrated and at times replaced with the flowing temporal kineticism of Cubist art. Lana expounds on the film’s expansion of cinematic form in a 2012 interview with Ray Pride called “Lana Wachowski on Speed Racer and Influence”:
“…Editing is a really interesting topic, too, because it’s also aesthetic-based. It is essentially the grammar of cinema, the sentence of cinema. And pretty much every movie since I was 9 was, you know, from a capital letter to a period. Scenes progress through a series of cuts, and maybe you throw in a dissolve, which is more of an ellipse, you know, instead of a period. But we were sick of that, too. And if you read postmodern fiction, something like James Joyce’s Ulysses, you see an author trying to transcend the boundaries of conventional grammar, trying to get your brain to think about language differently. And so we started trying to do that same thing with Speed Racer.”
The effect is dazzling. The movie moves between the past and the ever forward-moving present as easily as pistons in a well-oiled engine. Characters in different locations and temporalities slide across the screen to illustrate multiple points-of-view synchronously, all to serve the internal and external struggles of the titular Speed Racer. There was nothing like it back then and almost twenty years later, there still really isn’t. Underneath all of this aesthetic reinvention, it’s also just really, cartoonishly fun to watch.
Back in April, Warner Bros re-released the new 4K restoration of Speed Racer in cinemas all across North America, reigniting the cult obsession with the film like never before. As per usual, this re-release never made it to Halifax screens, but of course if you want something done right, you better do it yourself. If there ever was a film to see on the big screen, it’s this one. Don’t you dare miss out.
— Praise for Speed Racer —
“Pure joy. The Wachowskis have more heart and zest for life than just about any other directors. I could feel my heartbeat in my chest almost cresting in anxiety full well knowing I was watching a family crowd pleaser. Big studios don’t let people make art much anymore. If you had to pick one of their movies to say every frame is a treat it would be Speed Racer. I haven’t seen anyone use their budget equal or bigger than this as effectively since this came out.” – Gwen Hilton, Author of “Sent to the Silkworm House”
“One of the amazing things about the movie is that it doesn’t feel like it’s aged a day. If anything, it still feels like it’s from the future” Emile Hirsch, Speed Racer
“Speed Racer owns harder than a bank on a defaulted loan during the 2008 financial crisis and I think it’s the greatest piece of filmic art in the 21st century and honestly… everyone else is racing for 2nd.” - Aja Essex, Establishing Shot
Tickets : $12.00 ($11.40 at the door if available)
