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Any illusions that Speed Racer might actually be sophisticated, and not just a flashy visual distraction for pubescent boys with toy car collections, are shattered on the DVD.
Set for release tomorrow, the Speed Racer DVD is a kid's eye view of what the Wachowski Brothers conjured, in live action, from Mach Gogogo. That is the original 1960s Japanese anime created by Tatsuo Yoshida. It was renamed Speed Racer when it was adapted for North American audiences.
With Emile Hirsch playing the hero car driver named Speed Racer, the movie is all lurid colour, explosive action, cartoon-like characters, twitchy video game speed and an incredibly simple-minded story. That fantasy tale is deliberately twisted, fragmented and made to sound complicated. The special effects that deliver the fragments are phantasmagorical, although one Internet wit suggests the kinetic edit of the movie could trigger epileptic seizures.
In any case, Speed Racer the movie masquerades as something meaningful, a sleight-of-hand that once seemed plausible because the Wachowskis also created The Matrix trilogy. For all the fuss about the funky sequels -- and they do have problems -- the entire trilogy is staggeringly ambitious. It is actually about nothing less than the meaning of life.
In Speed Racer, life has no meaning. The extras on the standard DVD lead off with the 15-minute, on-set doc called Spitle in the Big Leagues. Spitle is Speed's younger brother, an annoying imp who hangs with a chimp and serves as lowbrow comic relief in the movie.
Spitle is played by the 13-year-old, New Jersey child actor Paulie Litt (aka Paulie Litowsky). Litt takes us on the tour of the Wachowski Brothers' movie set in Berlin, where only three locations were built as real sets (the Racer family home and shop, Royalton's office and the Cortega Hotel). The rest are digital creations, according to one of the many pop-up info boxes in the doc.
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Unlike his character, Litt seems like a nice kid but, without a script, he is rather boring as he introduces us to various crew members creating those fantasy effects. "So whatcha doing over here?" he asks one.
Litt's only cast encounter is with Hirsch, after the actor has stepped down from the gimbal that was used to create his racecar driving sequences (and to scramble his brains). "Yeah, no," the usually articulate Hirsch tells Litt. "It's fun. It's like a roller coaster. The gloves and the hat and it's really hot and you're sweating! ... All right, buddy, see you soon."
That is not exactly what I would call insight, unless I could revert back to being a pre-pubescent boy myself. The behind-the-scenes video crew also mistakenly let Litt wear a baseball cap emblazoned with a logo for some of his tour, forcing them to blur it out for the DVD.
The only other standard DVD extra is the 16-minute mock-doc, Speed Racer: Supercharged! Aiming the featurette at tech-hungry boys, this doc pretends that all the cars in the movie are real and so are their tech-specs. As a result, you get ridiculous lines like this from the narrator (in this case describing the Mach 6 car the Racer family invents for the final race: "The whole package sits atop a hand-welded nitonium cage with octo-valve fasteners and an outer shell reinforced with submolecular metalizers."
I feel like I have been hit in the head with a submolecular metalizer -- because this sounds like movie-mad gibberish.
Meanwhile, there is nothing from the Wachowskis, not entirely surprising because they have gone underground in terms of interacting with the media. But, unlike in The Matrix Ultimate Collection which came to DVD in 2004, we don't even get a glimpse of these eccentrics at work on set.
Maybe they are scared that someone might ask an adult question about Speed Racer. Such as: "What were you thinking?"