Speed Racer is a live action movie based on a Japanese cartoon television series from the 60s called “Speed Racer.”

I would’ve thought that was obvious, but based on the reviews, I’ve got to wonder what the hell these people were expecting. They’re fanning themselves with their press kits, complaining of “nausea” at all the colors and motion (in a movie called Speed Racer) and bemoaning the incoherent script (in a movie based on a 60s Japanese cartoon). Did you guys never bother to watch the original cartoon? Or any one of the trailers, for that matter?

The movie is an almost slavishly faithful homage to its source material, right down to the chonk chonk chonk sound whenever the Mach 5 jumps, and the inclusion of both English and Japanese lyrics in both of the movie’s heavily-sampled theme songs. When the source material is “Speed Racer,” that means nonsensical wackiness, ridiculously amped-up driving, and slapstick.

When someone complains about the screenwriting in a movie with an annoying little brother named Spritle with a pet chimpanzee named Chim-Chim who dress identically, you just have to smack yourself in the forehead and ask “Why don’t they get it?”

I said “almost faithful” because the overall look of the movie is way beyond what the original animators could have ever accomplished, assuming they’d wanted to. The environments look like the cities of the Star Wars prequels with the saturation knob turned past its maximum, and the race tracks are filled with flashing corkscrews and Hot Wheels loops. It feels like the Wachowskis’ homage to the show they wanted to see, instead of the show as it actually existed. You can also see the Wachowskis’ influence in the casting — all of the side characters are straight from a Matrix-like Eurotrash freak show.

And they dropped the ball with Inspector Detector; I was actually kind of looking forward to seeing them try to do that beard in a live-action movie.

Overall, the movie’s got exactly what I was expecting from a live action Speed Racer, with a few nice surprises. A bee catapult! A weird Zoetrope tunnel with an animated zebra! Their own version of the mammoth car! Fight scenes with the anime-style speed line backgrounds! The ominous Maltese Ice Cave! Even the main bad guy sounds like a typical Speed Racer villain. I was disappointed the Alpha Team wasn’t included, but I guess you can’t have everything.

Although in a movie this long, you’d expect it to have everything — it’s over two hours long, and it should’ve been about 45 minutes shorter. The scene-to-scene pacing is all right, since the manic episodes are balanced with slower moments. The problem is that the slower moments drag on forever. It’s as if they weren’t just trying to mix up the pacing, but were actually trying to make a “real” movie, with a plot and everything, which was their downfall.

The other big problem is that everything gets repeated so often that it stops being cool. Everything in the movie is so unapologetically fake, it’s surprising that the race sequences have any feeling to them at all. But the first time you see a car flip over another one, it’s impressive. Then they do it again, about a billion times. It’s the same with the anime-background fight scenes, and the montage sequences with a character in profile panning across the foreground, and the heart-to-heart speeches Speed has with Mom, Pops, and pretty much every other character.

You get a real sense that this movie wasn’t just made about speed, but made on it as well. And that they just refused to cut anything out. Pretty much the entire thing reminded me of the second Matrix movie, in that it was just a hyperactive dump of ideas, many of them good, but without any regard for the overall story and pacing.

But still, I liked it. It’s goofy, manic, spectacle, with more than a few genuinely cool moments. And best of all, it struck me as being full of genuine affection, or at least nostalgia, for something the filmmakers grew up with. Poop jokes and all.

Speaking of series that blur the line between science fiction and “real” stories: this week’s episode of “Battlestar Galactica” hit me like a ton of space-bricks. It’s called “Faith” and the rest is spoilers and you’re gonna have to give me a second because I think there’s something in my eye…

I was already annoyed with the episode even before the opening credits started, because its episodic television underwear was showing. Characters were doing stuff not because it made sense, but because the writers needed them to go from here to there and squeeze a cliffhanger in the middle. So there’s a big standoff with everybody yelling at each other and pointing guns and I was hoping that somebody would just shoot already. And then they did, and it wasn’t as cool as I’d been hoping for.

But then it all started to kick in, and they tapped right into the section of my brain that can have me bawling at a TV show. I can make a list of all the parts that made me gasp and/or tear up and/or were intensely creepy:

• Showing an FTL jump from the cockpit
• Jumping right into the middle of the semi-organic Basestar wreckage
• Starbuck finally seeing the gas giant and “comet” from her vision
• Six’s violent attack, and the crew member trying to talk and take a few steps before falling down dead
• Roslin’s description of her mother’s (or her own) fear of death
• The hybrid’s long sustained scream as she was about to be unplugged
• Emily Cancerpatient running to her family on the shore
• Adama telling Roslin that she’s the one who gave him faith in finding Earth

This is the only episode of “Battlestar Galactica” that’s really moved me like this — going from genuinely scary (that scene with the hybrid really creeped me out, reminding me of the scene in Miller’s Crossing where the Dane gets attacked), to genuinely moving without being maudlin. It’s the potential of the whole series that’s always been hinted at, but in my opinion was never quite achieved.

“The X-Files” tried to hit on the same themes of death and purpose and faith and belief, struggling to be more than just genre television, but ultimately imploding from the mass of its gimmicks. It almost never worked; Scully’s cancer was more tedious than moving, and many of the episodes managed to be good but not all that deep or meaningful.

A lot of “Battlestar” has the same problem, actually: whenever they try to be relevant, it seems like ham-fisted allegory or a clumsy attempt to shoehorn “meaning” into a sci-fi/action show plot. (Worse is when they try to shove “shades of gray” into a situation that hasn’t earned it.) The characters and stories are strong enough that it’s usually good television, but I always feel like I’m giving them credit for being intelligent enough to make an effort, not that it’s made me genuinely feel like they want me to feel.

All of the scenes with Roslin and Emily Cancerpatient totally worked for me, though, even though their version of the afterlife wasn’t all that original. (And they were especially moving performances when compared to Gaeta’s “don’t let them take my leg” stuff, which just struck me as fake drama coming out of nowhere). And what was genius was finding a way to have it not be just a standalone episode, but fit in with all the themes of the series — the search for Earth, the Cylons’ questioning their existence, and all the characters trying to figure out their purpose, their individuality, and their identity.

Plus, apparently there’s going to be a Cylon Basestar in the Colonial fleet now. That’s kind of cool, right? And Lucy Lawless is coming back!

And if anybody was wondering like I was, but didn’t feel like looking back through the end credits: the other cancer patient was played by Nana Visitor from “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.”

Most of the people who wander into this blog are looking for one thing: pictures of the star of Resident Evil without any clothes on. But the ones who don’t get here via misguided Google searches usually mention the “Lost” recaps. I missed last week’s because I’ve been commuting between Strong Badia and Liberty City.

It’s just as well, since last week’s episode, “Something Nice Back Home,” was kind of dull. There are still spoilers though: Jack had his appendix taken out, Claire revealed who her dad was (to the audience, who’d already figured it out anyway), and… Baltar hung out with a bunch of horny women? I can’t remember. Something about Jack being haunted and getting engaged to Kate in the future, too.

This week’s episode, “Cabin Fever,” made up for it by being double plus cool. I started counting “holy crap!” moments, where I actually said, out loud, watching alone in my apartment, “No other show would do something like that.” There was only one of those, but plenty of times I was reminded how cool this show is. Here’s a list!

• Seeing creepy immortal guys following Locke around his entire, 50s-cliched life.
• It made me feel mysteriously smart, somehow, when I was able to predict that Locke would pick the vial of salt (sand?), the compass, and the knife before he did it. And that the knife would be the wrong choice.
• I liked young Locke repeating the old Locke’s “Don’t ever tell me what I can’t do” mantra. I didn’t like it so much that this guy has had the most miserable life imaginable, but it does kind of make you root for his being happy on the island for once.
• Special-ops guy tries to shoot Michael and fails; I’d already forgotten that the island was keeping him alive.
• I was surprised to see the doctor up and about on the ship, since I mis-remembered him already getting snuffed in an earlier episode. It was kind of perfunctory how they closed off that time loop real quick — special-ops guy just does not understand the word “hostage” — but I still appreciate the effort.
• “Lost” has the coolest dream sequences; Locke’s dream about Horace Mathematician is my favorite since Hurley’s dream inside the bunker where Jin showed up speaking English.
• I wasn’t expecting to see Jack’s dad in the cabin, and I definitely wasn’t expecting to see Hot Claire lounging there, either. I’m still hoping that there’s some point to that, and it wasn’t just there for shock value.
• Some of this feels like moving pieces around on a game board and having to skip a few moves — what was the point of Desmond just sitting there and watching the climax on the boat take place?
• In case anybody reading this has access to the writers’ room, could you sneak an index card that says “DANIELLE’S BACK STORY” up on the board somewhere? It shouldn’t be a problem to sneak some explanation in the show, since they’ve got no problem making dead people main characters.

I’ve been plenty frustrated with the series, but every once in a while you’ve got to take a step back and marvel at how such a weird show got to be such a huge phenomenon. Larry mentioned in a comment that they “lied” about its not being a sci-fi show, but really, it’s not. It’s just a conglomeration of pop culture detritus, and sci-fi is just ingrained in pop culture at this point. Treating it as a separate genre just seems kind of weird and dated now; when everybody has a communicator and a robot that’ll vacuum your house, and time travel is a concept that most people can grasp with no problem, what’s to be gained by trying to confine this stuff to some nerdy ghetto?

In the universally-praised game Grand Theft Auto IV, you play as a swarthy immigrant recently arrived in a new country, beating up the locals and fighting gang leaders on a quest to pick up some coin and get a date.

I liked this game better when it was called Super Mario 64!

Man, that joke gets funnier every time I hear it. And if you enjoy seeing “jokes” get beaten into the ground as hard as a random drug dealer, then you’ll love Grand Theft Auto 4. Wait, what’s the name of that internet cafe? Tw@? I don’t… let me see it again… ohhhhhh, now I get it. That is rich. And you say that gay people are silly? Man, you have skewered American culture with your biting insight, Rockstar. It’s a good thing this game has body armor, because it’s the only thing to keep my sides from splitting.

So whatever, the game’s pre-adolescent writing — aimed squarely at the Spike TV crowd and folks who think “The Man Show” was too highbrow — has already been criticized here and elsewhere, ad nauseam. Nothing more needs to be said. So I’ll only say three more things about it: this stuff makes Joe Eszterhas look like the Coen brothers. And I’ve seen reviews that compare the story and writing to “The Sopranos,” by which I guess they mean it’s every bit as cliched and stilted as one of Christopher’s screenplays. And although the writing varies from the insultingly amateurish to stuff that’s admittedly competent, when I see reviews describing it as “excellent” and even “Oscar-worthy”, it actually makes me depressed to realize how embarrassingly low the standards of the videogame industry have dropped.

But that’s more than enough of that. Nobody (I hope) is playing this game for the story, so how’s the actual game?

In an interview in New York magazine, the co-writer of GTA IV (and VP of Rockstar) was apparently concerned people had gotten bored with the whole hooker-shooting and murder-simulating angle, and had to stir up controversy some other way:

Yeah, fuck all this stuff about casual gaming. I think people still want games that are groundbreaking. The Wii is doing something totally different, which is fantastic. We’re hopefully going to prove that there’s also a very big audience for people who want entertainment in another form, who think of games as being a narrative device that can challenge movies. We always said: We’re not going release a large number of games. They’re going to have the production values of movies.

And I do have to say that playing GTA IV makes me feel like I’m in a movie. Unfortunately, it’s not Shaft, or The French Connection, or even The Fast and the Furious. It’s Groundhog Day.

Because you’ll play each mission over and over and over again until you get it right. And by “get it right,” I mean “play it the way Rockstar wants you to play it.”

Every mission but the simplest ones — at least so far, about twelve hours into the game — have required me to play at least twice. Once to find out what to do, and another time to actually do it. Each time, it plays out exactly the same. And each time, I go away not with the rewarding feeling that I accomplished something clever, but feeling like I did nothing more than jump through a set of hoops the game designers had set up and then failed to mention until the last minute.

And this is all over the place. The game promises a huge, open experience where you make all the rules. Instead, you have to learn how to drive the cars and bikes their way. You have to find the three or four specific buildings that are useful to you, and not just closed-off facades. You have to learn that holding the Y button down for about .75 seconds will let you get into a cab, but holding it for less than .75 seconds will cause you to try to steal the cab, summoning the police. You have to learn that “tailing” someone means staying an exact distance behind them, as they follow the exact same route to their destination. You have to learn not to run out of your apartment, because you might bump into a cop, who’ll instantly shoot you to death.

Every time I’ve tried to experiment, I’ve been quickly smacked down. Want to shoot out a dealer’s tires so he can’t make a clean getaway? Cops come, I’m killed. Want to find a secret way into a warehouse? There’s only the single conveniently-opened window. Want to just drop a molotov cocktail in there instead of getting in a shootout? Can’t do that, burn to death. Want to run over to kill the bad guy who just cornered me in a warehouse shootout? Better not hit that invisible trigger box, because it starts a cutscene of the bad guys running away, and then suddenly gives control back to me, to be shot dead in one second because I didn’t take cover. Want to get some quick health before going on a mission? The pharmacy and the restaurant with a big sign over each aren’t real, but facades — you need to drive six blocks away to the hot dog cart that’s open at 3 AM.

Reviewers and fans are willing to give the game a pass for all this stuff, because that’s just how games work, and because the world is so huge and impressive and nice-looking. And it really, genuinely is one of the best worlds ever created for a videogame. But that’s exactly the reason the constraints shouldn’t get a pass. The more you pretend to offer an open experience, the more glaring it is when you fail to deliver any part of that, and when you punish experimentation.

This is not a “sandbox” game. Sandbox games let you choose to do a lot of stuff, all of which affects the game. GTA IV just lets you choose to do a lot of stuff. In The Sims 2, you can sit and watch TV, and it ups your Sim’s “fun” motive. In GTA IV, you can sit and watch TV, and it ups your desire to bang your head repeatedly against a table at the lame attempts at parody and satire.

It’s also not the “murder simulator” people would like you to think it is. A real murder simulator would be every bit as morally reprehensible, but would at least let you show a little bit of creativity and initiative. Just tell me who to kill, drop me in this awesome city, and let me figure out how to do it within the time limit. Give me a goal and the tools to do it with, don’t just give me a series of weakly scripted events. Or at least, if you are going to give me a series of scripted events, don’t claim that you’re doing anything more rewarding or satisfying than any other type of game.

So if I hate the game so much, why do I keep playing it? Because the world is impressive, even if it reveals more and more of its limitations the more you drive around in it. But there really are jet planes taking off at the airport, and police helicopters flying randomly overhead, and apartment blocks and parks and tourist attractions and a whole island’s worth of stuff I haven’t yet seen. The game’s got near-infinite potential fun, that’s just not being converted into actual fun. At this point, it would be impossible for the story to win me over, so I’m just slogging through until I get to fire a rocket launcher and fly a helicopter, and see the game’s version of Times Square.

And I’m a little nervous and worried that people are going to take away the wrong lessons from this game. That videogames are all about volume, you don’t need to have really great components as long as you throw in enough different stuff. That writing for a game means cutscenes, scripted events, and dialogue. Or that being “cinematic” means being like a Michael Bay movie. People are talking as if this is the Citizen Kane of games, but I’m seeing Armageddon.

On the plus side, though, the game’s got a decent soundtrack. This is the first exposure I’ve had to David Axelrod, and listening to “The Edge” and especially “Holy Thursday” on the radio are perfect accompaniments to the kind of things you wish you were doing more of in this game. I’d put a comment in here about GTA IV cheating, because the music makes it seem better than it really is, but I guess that’d make me a hypocrite.

Holy crap this movie is awesome!

I had zero interest in seeing Iron Man. I’ve always been a DC guy, not Marvel. All I knew about Iron Man was that he was a drunk, and that his cartoon had the best theme song. So I’d be sitting in theaters with my peer group, seeing a trailer for the movie and watching everybody around me go absolutely nuts, where I just wasn’t feeling it. It’s a guy in a flying suit of armor, with a couple of Air Force jets. What’s the big deal?

The big deal is that we finally have a superhero movie made by people who really get superhero movies. Most of the other ones, even the best ones, act as if the audience is really into characters and action-movie plots, so it’s the burden of a superhero movie to convince the audience how cool the powers and fight scenes are. Iron Man just takes for granted that a guy in a flying suit of armor who shoots power beams out of his hands is inherently cool, so it puts the bulk of its effort into showing why the characters are cool.

Everything I’ve read mentions how Robert Downey, Jr. carries the movie, and he is really, really good. A character who’s really an unlikeable asshole, but somehow manages to win people over by being so charismatic, is not an easy character to play. But everybody in the cast did a good job, and you don’t want to underestimate the influence of the director and screenwriters, either.

It helps that Jon Favreau directed a great, effects-heavy romantic comedy, because Iron Man feels a little like a romantic comedy with some phenomenal action sequences. The characters are charming, and the dialogue feels authentic while still staying just on the edge of comic book camp. And the movie’s genuinely funny, not just through references or one-liners, but sequences where they really earn the punchline. (The suit testing sequence is hilarious).

It’s hard to find problems with it. You kind of wish Terrence Howard’s character did more — I don’t know what his role is in the comic book, but it feels like he’s supposed to be more important, somehow. But then again, it’s good that his character is involved in the major scenes, but his role remains fairly realistic. And you definitely wish the fight scenes were longer. But then again, they’re exactly as long as they need to be, they deliver on all the coolest moments, and they leave you wanting more.

So I guess the only real problem I have with the movie is that when Iron Man takes off, he holds his arms straight down to his sides and sticks his palms out, like a little girl doing a curtsey. And that’s not cool. Other than that, the movie’s flawless.

And speaking of being left wanting more: as I said, I’ve been out of the loop on the background stuff on the movie and all the fan speculation, so I don’t know what their franchise plans are. There is a scene after the credits end that seems to be important. I just hope they keep the scope manageable instead of letting the franchise get bloated, like they did with X-Men 3 and Spider-man 3. I know I’d be perfectly happy with an Iron Man 2, even if they just did more of the same.

In the universally-praised game Grand Theft Auto IV, you play as a swarthy immigrant with a weird accent, recently arrived in a new country. The game’s much-acclaimed, complex storyline has you fighting the locals, occasionally stealing their vehicles, while you wander around an enormous game world, taking on the local gang leaders who are trying to prevent you from achieving your goals of collecting money and getting laid.

I think I already played this game, when it was called Super Mario 64.

It’s a real shame that the game is getting its usual wave of controversy, with immigrant groups and Mothers Against Drunk Driving jumping on the bandwagon for this round. Not because the people complaining are “right” or “wrong,” but because we’ve already been through all this, repeatedly, in the seven years since GTA III was released. They’re games that make you do — and reward you for doing — morally reprehensible things; we know. They still always sell millions of copies, get tons of imitators, and you keep hearing about how influential they are for the next five or six years.

Even Rockstar’s responses are getting tiresome. They make a game where you steal cars and kill hookers, media watchdog groups issue a statement condemning the game, Rockstar responds with variations on the same comments about media over-reaction, politicians looking for publicity jump on the anti-videogame bandwagon, videogame fans write long treatises about freedom of expression.

It’s not even fun anymore to call out Rockstar for being disingenuous in their responses, or to point out that they’re deliberately stirring up controversy to promote sales, because they’ve done it over and over again for the past seven years. It’s not even genuine anymore; it’s just a self-perpetuating machine, a big Bureaucracy of Being Indignant.

And it distracts from what’s really offensive: that they’ve got this phenomenal game world, and they refuse to put a good game in it.

Because the city they’ve built really is outstanding. It’s enormous, and you can go almost anywhere, completely seamlessly. There are fantastic time-of-day and weather effects — fog rolls in off the water in the morning; a storm makes light reflect off the streets, your controller vibrates with every boom of thunder; dusk turns into night and lights gradually turn on. Even taking a subway and passively watching as the train moves through the city is fascinating.

And along the way, you pass case after case of the lamest attempts at “humor” you’ll see in a game. At least GTA III genuinely seemed like something 15-year-olds would think is cool and “edgy”; this just seems like something 30-year-olds would think 15-year-olds would think is cool and “edgy.” It’s 100 million dollars and untold man-hours of development in the service of a morning DJ radio show. I would appreciate seeing something that genuinely offended me; as it is, I’m just kind of bored and annoyed.

I’m not even ten percent into the game yet, and I’ve been wondering how it’s been getting perfect review scores around the board, and I keep getting told that it gets better. That even though I’ve been playing for about 5 or 6 hours, and so far I’ve only taken a horny woman bowling, clumsily shot a gun at some drug dealers in an alley, and tried in vain to catch up to a van and run it off the road, this is only the beginning. But whenever a role-playing game makes you kill rats in sewers for the first 5 or 6 hours, it gets nailed in reviews. So why does GTA IV get a pass?

I already know the answer to that question: it’s for the exact same reason that I bought the game after seeing a coworker drive around aimlessly for 5 minutes. That streaming game world is undeniably compelling. You’ll be driving along and see Coney Island to your left, right down to an accurate representation of the Cyclone. (You can’t actually go into the carnival, of course, but it’s there.) There’s infinite potential there. It always seems like you can and will do anything, even though you’re really just going to be heading from flashing arrow to flashing arrow and watching cutscenes. As bored and disappointed as I’ve been with the actual content, I’m still anxious to get back into the game, because I want to believe it’ll spring something surprising and amazing on me.

I can’t help but think how awesome it would be if they took this kind of technology and money and effort, and made a game actual grown-ups would want to play. And I can’t help but be discouraged at the thought that it would fail, because no one would want to buy it without all the hooker-killing controversy.

And incidentally: it seems like every time I go on a tirade against the game, somebody brings up the awesome feature of being able to sit and watch the hours of fake television they’ve created to play on the in-game TV sets. These are the same people who always say that gameplay is king, old media is dead, cutscenes are evil, non-linearity is the wave of the future, etc. etc. What the hell, people?

Book
Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky

Synopsis
The history of “the only rock we eat,” and how finding, producing, and transporting it has shaped economies and governments from pre-history to the modern day.

Pros
Extremely well-organized, with short chapters presented in chronological order describing how a particular region and a particular group of people were affected by salt during that time. Keeps the subject interesting by using personal stories wherever possible. Exhaustively researched, throwing together travelogues, personal accounts, recipes, and descriptions of scientific breakthroughs and production techniques, along with the geography and descriptions of economics, governments and trade routes you’d expect from a history book.

Satisfied my trivia requirement in the first few chapters — e.g. the words “soldier,” “salary,” and calling the Celts “Gauls” all derived from words for salt. Answered a question I’ve been wondering for years, but was always too lazy to look up: what are those weird geometric pink and brown pools in the south San Francisco Bay? (They’re salt ponds). Manages to follow tangents like the development of tabasco and the creation of Israeli resorts on the Dead Sea, without straying too far from the main story.

Cons
It’s still a book about salt. The book spends so much time talking about salted cod and Basque salt producers, that you can’t help but feel like the author cribbed a lot of the material from his earlier books. Reading the book kept making me crave weird food and games of Civilization. The subject inspires a ton of terrible cliches and puns in book reviews.

Verdict
The highest compliment I can give to any documentary or history work is that it reminds me of James Burke’s Connections series. Despite the quote from Anthony Bourdain on its cover, Salt is more than just a food history book; it really does feel like an extended episode of Connections with a fixation on one particular topic. You get a real sense of the epic history of salt, and you can understand how something that is now so common could have once been scarce enough to influence the outcome of wars and the success of entire civilizations.

Anybody who’s been reading this blog for a while knows two things:

1. Every year or so, I try to redesign everything.
2. It always ends up being a ridiculously laborious process and it always ends badly.

I guess there’s also 3. I need to get out more.

This most recent time, I decided I wanted to avoid squeezing my usual Impenetrable-Wall-of-Text posts into a tiny space, or at least keep from having people wandering in and being scared off by the avalanche of words. Plus I wanted the recent comments and the list of stuff I’ve been looking at around the web to be more accessible.

That led to the last “green & brown paper” version, which sucked for various reasons. This version sucks slightly less.

I’m sure there’s a lot still broken all over, and I haven’t even tried the thing on non-Safari browsers yet. Let me know via e-mail or comments to this post if something is hopelessly broken. And be aware that I’m planning to keep adding and fixing stuff, until I get frustrated with it all again.