The Hip Pocket #41: SPEED RACER

Here he comes... here comes one of the best films of the 2000s.

There is no single canon.

We all have movies we love.

Some of them are great movies. Some of them are terrible movies. Love does not care. Love is unreasonable. Love is blind. We love what we love, and the louder you love it, the better.

One of my favorite things is sharing a film I love with someone. Even if they don't love it the same way I do, that experience imparts something about you to that person. When you share something you love, you are sharing a part of yourself, and there is nothing more vulnerable or personal than that.

I don't think of these movies as the canon or the official library or anything that formal. These are all just movies I keep in my hip pocket, movies I've filed away as part of my own personal ongoing film festival as worthwhile and notable.

This is an ongoing list, one without an ending. This is The Hip Pocket.

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Speed Racer
Emile Hirsch, Nicholas Elia, Susan Sarandon, Melissa Holroyd, Ariel Winter, Scott Porter, Giancarlo Ganziano, Peter Fernandez, Harvey Friedman, Sadau Ueda, Valery Tscheplanowa, Sami Loris, Olivier Marlo, Sean McDonagh, Kick Gurry, Christian Oliver, John Goodman, Vinzenz Kiefer, Mark Zak, Paulie Litt, Willy, Kenzie, Christina Ricci, Julia Joyce, Clayton Nemrow, Ricky Watson, Brandon Robinson, L. Trey Wilson, Matthew Fox, Nayo Wallace, Roger Allam, Lauren Blake, Cosma Shiva Hagen, Ralph Herforth, Rain, Waldemar Kobus, John Benfield, Max Hopp, Julie T. Wallace, Hiroyki Sanada, Matthias Redlhammer, Eckehard Hoffmann, Stephen Marcus, Art LaFleur, Peter Navy Tuiasosopo, Yu Nan, Moritz Bleibtreu, Paul Sirr, Richard Roundtree, Benno Fürmann, Ramon Tikaam, Melvil Poupaud, Kady Taylor, Junior Sone Enang, Jana Pallaske, Bojidara Maximova, Werner Daehn, Komi Mizrajim Togbonou, Leila Rozario, Steven Wilson, Karl Yune, Togo Igawa, Jonathan Kinsler, Anatole Taubman, Ben Miles, Frank Witter, Megan Gay, Corinne Orr, Joe Mazza, Joon Park, Ludmilla Ismailow, Milka Duno, Amira Osman, Ashley Walters, Jens Neuhaus, Sesede Terziyan, Ill-Young Kim, Yuriri Naka, Oscar Ortega Sanchez, Yu Fang, Narges Rashidi, Andres Cantor
cinematography by David Tattersall
music by Michael Giacchino
screenplay by Lana and Lilly Wachowski
based on the animated series Speed Racer created by Tatsuo Yoshida
produced by Grant Hill and Joel Silver
directed by Lana and Lilly Wachowski
Rated PG
2 hrs 15 mins

Sometimes, it feels like someone made a movie that the world wasn’t ready for when it was released, and it takes time for the audience to catch up. I’d say that’s true of Speed Racer, but I’m not entirely sure everyone’s caught up yet.

After The Matrix, the Wachowskis could have done anything they wanted. From the perspective of a quarter-century later, it’s easy to forget just how gigantically unlikely the impact of their 1999 breakthrough hit was, but heading into that year, no one was betting on the directors of Bound as being the ones who would change pop culture. Everyone’s attention was on the arrival of the first new Star Wars film in 16 years or the final Kubrick film ever. Bound was well-received when it was released, but it was a very small movie overall, and aimed squarely at an adult audience. The ambition it took to make The Matrix as a follow-up is mind-boggling, and they needed the right partner to help them pull it off.

Joel Silver’s act of faith in making The Matrix is one of the great creative decisions of that decade. I’m not sure I would have had the vision to look at Bound, read The Matrix, and know that they were going to be able to deliver. Silver is a fascinating, complicated figure, a man whose personal taste could be surprising and eclectic but who made a fortune aiming his art directly at the heart of the mainstream. One of my favorite biographical details about Silver is that he created Ultimate Frisbee with a group of his high school friends, well before he worked in the entertainment industry. It’s such a weird, unlikely footnote to a career that includes movies like The Warriors, Die Hard, Predator, Streets of Fire, and so much more, but he took just as much pride in the Ultimate Frisbee thing as he did in any of his films. Joel Silver turned himself into a brand with movies like Lethal Weapon and Commando, so it does seem odd that he spent over a decade trying to make a film version of a ‘60s-era anime series, from a time when people in American called it “Japanimation,” if they called it anything at all. The list of filmmakers who took a shot at figuring out how to turn one of the weirdest cartoons of all time into a feature film includes Julien Temple, Joe Pytka, Gus Van Sant, Alfonso Cuarón and Hype Williams, and all of them eventually bounced off of it. There was a chunk of time where Johnny Depp was attached to play Speed with Henry Rollins as Racer X, with the studio churning through script after script and writer after writer. There was even a moment where Vince Vaughn considered producing and co-writing the film while starring as Racer X.