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.

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.

I’d been looking forward to seeing Forgetting Sarah Marshall, since I’m a fan of “How I Met Your Mother,” and Knocked Up was one of my favorite movies of last year. I wasn’t disappointed; the movie’s hilarious, and I’d recommend it to just about anybody.

Anybody who’s not in my immediate family, at least, since the movie continues the trend of Judd Apatow-produced raunchy romantic comedies. This one is the most bipolar of the ones I’ve seen — the plot is about as straightforward as a romantic comedy gets, but the scenes and language are about as explicit as an R rating will allow.

Everything I’d read and heard about the movie makes a big deal about the scene at the beginning where Jason Segel appears naked; after seeing the movie, you’ve got to wonder what all the fuss is about. The camera keeps cutting away quickly, not for artistic effect but because there’s only so much they’re allowed to show, and the scene on the whole feels oddly truncated, like you get the idea of how awkward and pathetic it was supposed to be, but it doesn’t carry through. Besides, every major character appears naked — you don’t see as much, but everybody’s got a scene or two having sex with somebody else, in all kinds of positions, filmed from all kinds of different angles.

But the movie’s goofy, oddly romantic, mostly good-natured, and overall, sweet. It doesn’t even have the edge that Knocked Up has; it’s got a simpler, be-comfortable-with-yourself-and-you’ll-find-happiness mentality. You have to like Segel’s character to like the movie, but it’s not that difficult. He’s not just one of the crass, horny losers of Knocked Up and The 40 Year Old Virgin or worse, the execrable Superbad; he’s a big, goofy, earnest and kind-hearted guy disguised as one of those losers.

It struck me as a lot more daring and exposed to put on a rock opera about Dracula performed by puppets, than it was to appear on screen naked and sobbing. Ultimately he just comes across as a guy who’s comfortable with himself — laugh at him if you want to, but more likely than not, he’s in on on the joke.

The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters got a ton of attention from videogame sites around its release last year, as well as from the critics. It’s all deserved; it’s just a great movie.

Of course, to appreciate it to the fullest, you have to have spent a good bit of the 80s in front of an arcade machine, but it’s not the geek-core exploitation of nostalgia that I expected it to be. As it starts out, you think you know where it’s going — an hour and a half of “look at the funny videogame geeks!” And there is plenty of that. But as the movie spends more time with these people, the condescension and mockery fades away, and a genuinely compelling story develops.

Story’s the key word here; nobody’s going to accuse The King of Kong of being objective. They might as well superimpose a halo around Steve Wiebe’s head and show Billy Mitchell surrounded in hellfire. But it’s masterfully edited: gleefully manipulative without making you feel like you’re being manipulated. It’s a classic story filtered through 8-bit nostalgia, the plot of every other 80s movie superimposed on an 80s pasttime. You’ve got a comically arrogant champion as your villain and the straight-shooting challenger coming out of nowhere as your hero. And the movie keeps the right tone throughout, letting you laugh at the characters as much as you get caught up in the story.

Now I’m glad I didn’t see it in the theater, because the DVD is the way to go. They add a few updates on the big rivalry, and more importantly, include interviews done for promotion of the movie as well as extended interviews deleted from the final cut. Those give you the sense that the movie’s not entirely mean-spirited or purely manipulative, and remind you that the people involved are passionate about these games, but can still laugh at themselves.

Plus, it’s got a gallery of art from I Am 8-Bit, including a Donkey Kong painting by Steve Purcell. And the DVD has an alternate cover by Scott Campbell of Double Fine. The version I saw was a rental, but I’m going out to buy a copy as soon as possible to support the movie.

A month or so before The Darjeeling Limited was released, they made the Hotel Chevalier short film available on iTunes. Watching that sucked away any desire I’d had to see the full movie. I just kept thinking: This! This is exactly what people hate about Wes Anderson movies! It’s so overcrowded with affectations and artificially enigmatic dialogue that forces you to struggle to find some semblance of meaning, only to find the entire production crew smirking back at you.

It helps a little that the short film turns out to be a short story as written by the most self-satisfied character in the full movie, but the full movie still has most of the same flaws. I’d reckon that it’s got about 60% of what Anderson’s fans (including myself) love about his movies, but still 100% of what we hate.

Visually, it’s astounding. You often hear about authors and filmmakers making a work that’s essentially a love letter to a place, but somehow the magic of it never quite carries through; you go away thinking, “I guess you had to be there.” That’s not the case with The Darjeeling Limited’s version of India. There’s not a location in the movie that you can’t imagine seeing and immediately wanting to make a movie of it. And I have to wonder if the real version has that same color: they must’ve done some post-processing on it to make everything look that way, right?

But the story meanders, forcing you to keep paying attention to characters that stopped being interesting about 20 minutes in. But what disappointed me the most was how clumsy so much of it was: the guys dragging around their father’s baggage, Owen Wilson’s character taking off his bandages and saying “Looks like I’ve got some more healing to do,” their mother’s leaving them one final time followed by a cringe-inducing ritual on the top of a mountain. This is the “depth” we get, from the same people who made three movies that can have me going from “bemused” to “bawling in the middle of a crowded theater” on the basis of just one line?

The movie opens with another fairly ham-fisted scene, where Bill Murray’s desperately trying to catch the train but is passed at the station by Adrien Brody. ‘Cause you see, Anderson’s movies have built up this little repertory group, but Murray can’t quite make it into this one but hey folks let’s welcome our new co-star. I can remember a time when I would’ve thought this was extremely clever, but here it just annoyed me.

One good thing this movie does is give more evidence of how collaborative the moviemaking process is. I have been, and will likely continue to, refer to these movies as “Wes Anderson” movies. (I’ll point out that in this case, that’s just something that movie fans like me do; from everything I’ve seen, Anderson acknowledges the people in his group without hesitation, and never attempts to put forward the movies as being all his work). And the auteur theory has merit insofar as you can definitely see his influence in all of them — from the diorama-like composition down to the choice of title font, you’re given no choice but to see his hand in them.

(And by the way, if there had been one more long tracking shot of people walking or running in slow motion for no particular reason, I would’ve ejected the DVD immediately and it would’ve taken all my resolve not to smash the disc right then and there).

But the movies only transcend “visually interesting” when there’s somebody in the cast who can both live inside all of the excess eccentricity, and then cut through it to get at a real moment. All of these characters live in super-fake worlds with super-saturated colors and British Invasion music playing somewhere off in the distance, and they’ve all got their neuroses and personality flaws on display as if they were name tags. It all swirls around, begging for attention like a child, building up to the point where you think it’s going to collapse under the weight of its own artifice. Then it delivers one moment that peels all the artifice back and simply and succinctly says what the whole thing has been all about: in The Life Aquatic, it’s “I wonder if it remembers me;” in Rushmore, it’s Bill Murray’s character showing up for a haircut; and in The Royal Tenenbaums, it’s “It’s been a rough year, Dad.” (either Gene Hackman is a suitable substitute for Murray, or Ben Stiller’s a better actor than I’m willing to give him credit for). The Darjeeling Limited made me realize that how much I like a “Wes Anderson movie” is directly proportional to the size of Bill Murray’s part in it.

Roy Blount Jr. wrote an essay about Murray’s career (the two are good friends, apparently), saying basically that Murray’s greatest talent is being able to exist in the world of a movie and in the world of the audience at the same time. He doesn’t need to break character or mug at the camera, or stand detached from his character and make fun of everything that’s going on, but you still get the sense that he’s someone in the audience who stepped into a movie and is having a blast with it. Blount’s article was about Ghostbusters, but I think Rushmore and The Life Aquatic are the movies that make the best use of Murray’s talents.

They desperately need someone to ground them, to give the audience a point of focus as well as a reminder that all of this artifice is actually going somewhere, that there’s a point to it. I can see how The Darjeeling Limited’s “spiritual journey” demands a certain amount of meandering “it’s not the destination but the journey” pointlessness, but ultimately, I needed there to be something “real” behind it all.

Even though I’ve gone on record as being unimpressed with the French New Wave, I still feel totally justified in my rental of Le Samourai. Movies with the word “Samurai” title have rarely let me down.

And listen to the Netflix description (with most intriguing words highlighted by me):

A little bit gangster film, a little bit samurai flick, this 1960s French masterpiece from Jean-Pierre Melville introduces the memorable anti-hero Jef Costello (Alain Delon), a contract killer with the instincts of a Japanese warrior and the features of Adonis. After offing a nightclub owner, Costello has two big problems: his double-crossing employer, who now wants him dead, and the dogged police investigator who’s determined to rein him in.

Now listen to my description:

Ninety-five minutes of attractive but vacuous people opening and closing doors and walking into rooms. Our expressionless hero spends great stretches of time lounging on a bed smoking and occasionally feeding his pet bird. The action begins with a 45-minute long police lineup, continues with a barrage of shots of the hero parking tiny French cars on Paris streets and walking into convenience stores, and culminates in a climactic 20-minute long sequence being casually pursued by old men and young women on the public transit system!

I suspect that my issues with Le Samourai are pretty much the same as my problems with Breathless: the movies it influenced are 10,000 times more interesting than the original. After watching the movie, I attempted to read more about it online to see if there was something crucial about it that I’d missed, some justification for its being called a “masterpiece” and warranting a Criterion edition. The writing about this movie is even more soporific than the movie itself, but the bits that I can glean before I nod off are always the same: it’s influenced dozens of other directors; and it’s not about action, but cinematography.

I can appreciate a filmmaker’s attempt to go for style and establish a mood over plot. Sometimes that approach even works. But whether it’s because Le Samourai has always been painfully dull, or because it’s had over 30 years of movies and TV expanding on the concept, the attempts at style here seem as forced, self-conscious, and self-important as a student film. Pointing to this movie as groundbreaking or influential seems pretty silly, since there are plenty of contemporary and earlier movies that do more interesting things with both the storytelling and the filmmaking.

So here you end up with a pretty and whisper-thin guy with an OCD fixation on his hat who lives alone with a tiny parakeet (c’mon, even Baretta had a cockatoo) and keeps all his car-stealing keys on a gigantic ring and reacts to a bullet grazing his arm by running back to his apartment and very carefully dressing the wound with a comically oversized bandage before hopping on Le Metro for a polite and relaxed ride through the Paris suburbs. When you try to sell me that as being a “samurai,” you just come across as being a poseur.

Helvetica is an hour and a half of people with bad hair and bad accents talking about fonts.

I don’t want to discourage people from seeing it, really. It’s a very well-made documentary, doing all the things a documentary should do. It stays neutral throughout (like you’d expect from the subject matter), but a couple of sections are downright clever. You can find plenty of reviews from people who never expected to be at all interested in a documentary about a font, but came out pleasantly surprised.

My problem with it is the same thing that pleasantly surprises people about it: it’s not quite a documentary about a font. They do a great job of giving you the history of it, and the intention behind its design and use, and showing how ubiquitous it’s become, and gauging all the different reactions to it.

But to do this in a film without its turning into a dry History Channel-style documentary, they have to interview a lot of people. People who have strong opinions about fonts. In other words, the kind of people you really wouldn’t want to be spending much time around in real life.

Part of my problem with the movie is that I like to believe that geekery is a contained phenomenon, and not some global pandemic that’s all part of the human condition. It’s like Sanctuary for the people inside the city in Logan’s Run* — I know that in the circles I travel in, people obsess over comic books and TV series continuity and the efficiency of algorithms; but I want to believe that there’s a better world outside where the people are free of that.

But this just perpetuates the idea that because of the Original Sin or something, we’re all mired in our own little worlds of pointless obsessions. I have to hear insufferable people claiming that they know they won’t be popular for this, but The People simply must hear their opinions of “Battlestar Galactica” or BioShock or “Sam & Max”. And now I realize that others have to hear insufferable people saying that Helvetica represents corporate oppression and war, or that they realize they are being iconoclasts and their views might not be popular, but they cannot condone using more than one typeface in a publication.

It’s movies like this that make me think humanity was just better off back when we had to spend all our time worried about finding food and not being mauled by large animals.

* The fact that I used Logan’s Run as an example merely proves my point.

I couldn’t tell you exactly why I never got around to seeing RoboCop until tonight.

I vaguely remember at the time being scared off by stories of how ultra-violent it was. Later, I just dismissed it as being another 80s action movie. After that, I put it in the same category as Total Recall — I was sure it’d be entertaining enough, but stupid. Even after seeing Starship Troopers and (after a month or two) finally realizing how brilliant that movie is, I still wasn’t that interested in RoboCop.

I think my crippling fear of Ronny Cox had something to do with it, too.

Whatever the case, I finally know what all the fuss was about. What a great, bizarre movie. I can’t even imagine the confidence it’d take to pull something like that off — there’s absolutely nothing subtle about it, and yet you spend the whole time knowing that they’re in on the joke and still wondering if they’re taking it all seriously. It’s kind of like a quantum movie: simultaneously a straightforward, sleazy, cheesy 80s action movie and a satire of those movies and the 80s in general. (The movie has a guy instantly mutated by toxic waste, and Miguel Ferrer snorting coke off a woman’s chest!)

I mentioned it took me a while to get what was going on with Starship Troopers, and that movie was even more obviously campy, plus it came ten years later, after the audience had plenty of time to get used to deconstructionism. I remember watching True Lies and thinking it was such a clever spoof of action movies, but it didn’t even survive two years before seeming clumsy, vapid and obvious. RoboCop feels like it has after-burners: ride the initial launch as a super-violent action movie that seems a little smarter than average; ride through the irony wave of the 90s as a part of pop culture, surviving references and attempts to make fun of it; then gain a new appreciation two decades later, when viewers can marvel at seeing Laura Palmer’s dad as a hip club-goer and Eric’s dad from “That 70s Show” dropping f-bombs and shooting off people’s hands with a shotgun. And even with the jerky stop-motion and the barrage of 80s hair and glasses, you still have to watch it and think, “that’s just cool.”

I can guarantee that I wouldn’t have understood RoboCop in 1987, since 99% of the movies and TV made in the 80s was exactly like that, with no sense of irony. At the time, “Moonlighting” was still a years-ahead-of-its-time masterpiece of self-awareness and post-modernism, and looking back at those episodes now is almost painful.

The genius of RoboCop (and Starship Troopers, to a lesser degree) is that it still works as an action movie, even if you’re not in the mood for satire on urban decay, the evil that corporations do, and the emptiness of the media. It’s pretty ballsy to make movies that unapologetically say “screw you” to everyone, including the movie’s main characters themselves; to do that and make it not angry and pointlessly cynical, but actually entertaining, takes a hell of a lot of talent. And it leaves you vulnerable to so much that can fail from concept to execution — as Basic Instinct and Showgirls both prove.

Best of all: I finally get another reference from an old episode of “Mystery Science Theater 3000.” In “Catalina Capers,” there’s a scene where the bots are saying their bedtime prayers, and Crow says, “and God bless ED-209, although I don’t know why you’d make a robot who couldn’t walk down stairs.” I’ve made it my goal that by the time I die, I’ll have gotten every reference the MST3K guys ever made. There’s still only a few thousand left.