Slow Sarah and Speed Racer

5/15/08 - 5th Day - After Breakfast. Here is Sarah hamming it up, except for the partial cast on her arm. The nurse at the hospital gave her the pink pig with a cast on its arm. On Friday she will have to go back to see the doctor and will probably have a full cast put on her arm. They suspect that she has a fractured ulna, but we won't know for sure until Friday. Coleman is a small town, and the hospital is more of a large clinic, and they did not have a radiologist on staff, so the X-Rays have to be sent away for analysis and we'll find out what is up on Friday, Lord Willing.

No word yet on the pig, either.

David and I went and bought a hog trap from Coleman yesterday. We considered building one, and may do it some day, but we have "now" problem, and we do not yet know how to weld, etc. We haven't trapped hogs before, so I am reading up on it and will be experimenting some over the next week or so. I'll try to get a picture of the hog trap later today and may post it tomorrow.

Speed Racer

I promised a review of the new live-action Speed Racer movie, so here it goes. If you do not watch movies, I understand. Feel free to skip this part. We do not have a television, and generally only watch a very limited amount of "electrical entertainments", but I had been looking forward to the Speed Racer movie for some time. I was a huge fan as a young boy, and I remember being completely wrapped up in the story line. Speed Racer was a cartoon way ahead of its time. It was somewhat serialized, so there was a continuing story line - which was really unheard of at the time. There was an overarching mythology to the show with great drama, much like today's prime time dramas like LOST. Speed Racer also had the coolest mysterious "hero" character ever (Racer X).

So, I was very interested in seeing the new Speed Racer. Now, there were certain things that I was very wary about. First of all, I hate CGI (computer generated graphics). I especially hate CGI when it pretends to be real. I have always told people that IF movie makers are going to use CGI, then they might as well go all the way with it and make a TRON like cartoon movie. Well, finally someone did. For those of you who were blown away by TRON in 1982 (I was 15), you will absolutely love Speed Racer. Ok, so I hate CGI, and second of all... I hate Anime. I always have. I guess I even hated anime on Speed Racer. I always wondered why the characters had these huge round eyes, and why they spoke in such a fast, broken style. Well, I didn't learn until later that the English was dubbed onto a Japanese anime style rendering of what the Japanese thought white people looked like. You know, big round eyes that are approximately 1/4 of the size of the whole head. So, I was probably the last candidate to be considered a Speed Racer fan. But I was.

Ok, so here I am... I am an Agrarian separatist without a TV, who hates industrialism, hates speed, hates artificial electrical entertainment, who hates movie makers and Hollywood, hates CGI, and hates Anime. So, why would I like Speed Racer? At first I liked it because it is just a great film, great family fun, and a great story. I also liked it because it was extremely faithful to the original source material, and that it was groundbreaking movie making. THEN... after I got home, I liked it even more because the corporate movie critics hated it.

Eight of us went to the theatre. We don't go to the theatre often. It is quite a spectacle when we do go, what with a whole load of Amish looking folks (the men with long beards and the women with headcoverings) standing in line and buying tickets for a movie. People stare... a lot. You should have seen it when the whole community went to see The Bourne Ultimatum! The theatre was pretty empty. This was opening day, and a matinée, so I expected as much. Speed Racer is over 2 hours long, so you would expect we would all be anxious to leave after the flick, but we all stayed there glued to our seats all the way through the credits. In fact, we all would have sat through the movie again. It was that good.

When I returned home I looked up the reviews on RottenTomatoes.com, and I was shocked to see that it was getting horrible reviews. In fact, how was it already getting so many reviews by professional critics? Had they all seen an advance copy? Then, how did it happen that they all were saying the exact same thing? How is it possible that almost all of them called the movie "anti-capitalist"? Had someone sent out a memo? I was pretty sure after reading the professional critics reviews that they had not seen the same movie I had seen. First of all, how corrupt do you have to be to consider a movie that is ANTI-CORRUPTION to be anti-capitalist? I mean, if a movie showed a horse trainer ruthlessly abusing a horse, would the horse trainers consider the movie to be "anti-horse training"? Or would they rightly see that the movie was against the abuse of horses? Speed Racer is certainly anti-corruption, but it is hardly anti-capitalist. After reading review after review, I was pretty convinced that there was something going on. On Rotten Tomatoes the editors have reviews divided into three categories. The first is the "T-meter critics", which I suppose is a handpicked group that is supposed to be representative of the larger body of professional critics. The T-meter rating for Speed Racer is 35%. The next category is "Top Critics", which I suppose is the most famous critics. The original Top Critic rating was around 21%, which was shocking, but it has since climbed up to 31%. So the next category is "RT Community", which is the average Joe movie-goer. The original RT Community rating on the first day the movie opened was about 69% - a shocking difference between the professional/corporate movie critic and the average movie-goer. I read a bunch of the RT Community reviews, and I noticed something interesting. A bunch of the really negative reviews had been posted before any one was supposed to have seen it! Some of the reviews were obviously from people that either had not seen the movie, or who had never watched the original Speed Racer TV series. Some of the comments in those reviews were just laughable. One man said, "I took my two young boys.. we walked out after an hour it was so bad". Well, I can tell you for a fact that unless his two young boys were completely retarded from sitting in front of a video game for 25 hours a day, those boys didn't walk out of Speed Racer willfully. My children would watch grass grow on a big screen in a theatre for two hours, but then my children aren't mind-numbed by constant input like most children are. Still, I highly doubt that any father with young boys has walked out of Speed Racer in the middle of it. I would have had to pry Robert out of his seat with a crowbar to get him out of the theatre in the middle of Speed Racer. So, I sensed a conspiracy. One reviewer claimed that the "new Speed Racer was nothing like the original", and that he had watched "the original in the mid 70's" when he was a boy. Well, the "original" began airing in 1967, not the mid 70's. I told Danielle that I supposed the RT Community rating would go way up over the next week as real people began to go see the movie. Lo and behold, this morning the RT Community rating is up near 80%, and if you discount the hundreds of early-negatives, the rating would probably be up near 90%. Yahoo movies has it rated as a solid "B" after over 2600 reviews. Other big rating sites also have the movie reviewed as a solid 80% or a "B" rating. What is shocking about these ratings is that there is a great gulf in the ratings. For example, on Box Office Mojo, the movie has received 175 "A's" (43%), and 89 "F's" (22%). As you can imagine, there were very few "C's" and "D's". People either hated this movie, or they loved it. I suspect that the haters either a) never saw the movie, or went in planning to hate it; b) never saw or enjoyed the original; c) were paid or motivated by some corporate interest to hate it; or d) were right-wing fascists who look at any hint that corporations can be evil and that the love of money corrupts people, as some type of communist propaganda.

Ok, enough of my rant. Speed Racer is a great movie. There is no sex in the movie. There is no implied sex in the movie. There is only one kiss in the movie and it is interrupted by a "cootie alert". There are a very few curse words, and in one scene the little boy makes an obscene gesture to the evil villain. The violence is cartoonish and not real. This is really contrary to the original TV series which was considered to be so violent that the show was canceled in Europe in the early 70's. In the TV show, there were horrible fiery crashes where people died, while the crowds cheered the victor. This is a much more mild and gentle Speed Racer. This is a great family movie. The overall theme is that winning isn't everything, and that family trumps money and greed. The Racer family tries to stay independent in a sport dominated by big companies who lie, cheat, steal, and even kill to fix races. My favorite lines are those spoken by the Racer family (or by Trixie) when they comment that life is not about winning. Trixie says to Speed, "When did this become about winning?". Ma Racer makes a great speech to Speed about how what he does is art, and it doesn't have anything to do with winning. Anyway, in a culture where winning is everything, and people seem to be perfectly fine with corruption and cheating in sports, Speed Racer is a breath of fresh air. The bad guys are really bad, the good guys are really good, and the movie never for a minute takes itself seriously. There are some funny scenes with Chim-Chim the chip and Spritle, Speeds younger brother. Pa Racer is brilliantly played by John Goodman, who nails it. By the way, who would name their three sons "Rex, Speed, and.... Spritle?" I would hate to be named Spritle when my two older brothers got the cool names. Anyway, go see the movie - and if possible DO NOT wait until it comes out on DVD. You really want to see this movie on the big screen.

So in conclusion, YES I think there is a conspiracy to stop people from seeing the movie, and YES, I think you should see it just to spite the corrupt capitalists who are doing so.

Now, I must return to my Amish life. Go, Speed Racer, Go!

Michael