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REVIEW: Speed Racer

Are you kidding? That Highlander anime was on par with the second movie; my god, it was an atrocity. Who are you hearing this from? Anime fans by chance?

So it didn't make money? What's your point? Many great films don't make money and many crappy ones top the box office, those numbers reflect the mainstream. Using that as your basis is silly considering that if those standards meant anything to you, then you would have to view anime in an equally negative light considering the poor showing anime makes at the box office and DVD sales.

Are you kidding? That Highlander anime was on par with the second movie; my god, it was an atrocity.

Who are you hearing this from? Anime fans by chance?

I find it hard to believe that classic literature fans who are not anime fans just happened across Gankutsuou, considering it gets essentially zero exposure outside of the anime community. The word of people who are part of the demographic the adaptation is catered towards is meaningless in relation to what I was saying.

And Gedo Senki is better than the Sci-Fi mini-series, but it's still a horrendous adaptation of a good book. If the Sci-Fi mini-series was the source material then you'd have a point, but it's not, so your point is lost.

As an adaptation of a literary classic though? I'm afraid it doesn't even come close to the depth and complexity of the book and only suffers from the attempts to "anime-ize" the storyline and setting.

So you liked Iron Man? Good for you, but I'd be willing to put money on that if Iron Man was a manga instead but was done exactly the same as the US comic was, and the movie was done identically, you'd probably be complaining about it instead.

So it didn't make money? What's your point? Many great films don't make money and many crappy ones top the box office, those numbers reflect the mainstream.

Using that as your basis is silly considering that if those standards meant anything to you, then you would have to view anime in an equally negative light considering the poor showing anime makes at the box office and DVD sales.

Neither is "Speed Racer" a commercial avant-garde film (though fans of the Wachowski brothers may wish to make such claims), unless you still consider Laserium shows of Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" to be cutting edge. (Lights! Shapes! Colors! Motion! Money!) And there's nothing terribly adventurous these days about Eisensteinian montage treated as if it were William S. Burroughs' "cut up" technique -- with digital clips randomly scrambled like pixelated confetti.

Nor is it some kind of subversive commodity....The faux naivete on display here -- right down to the imitation-fruit-flavored FDA-food-dye coloring -- is both shamelessly quaint and shamelessly cynical.

penguin: That's Ebert's co-writer. I made that mistake, too.

Jim Emerson had to have been grown in a test tube from various bits of Roger Ebert, he's got Ebert's "Witheringly pompous by a factor of 10 more then I have any right to be, but also making a pretty good point" style of writing down so pat I didn't even bother looking at the byline.

Goodpenguin wrote:

Jim Emerson had to have been grown in a test tube from various bits of Roger Ebert, he's got Ebert's "Witheringly pompous by a factor of 10 more then I have any right to be, but also making a pretty good point" style of writing down so pat I didn't even bother looking at the byline.

That is so wrong and unfair that I have to assume you haven't actually read any of Ebert's books or followed his career at all.

I find it hard to believe that classic literature fans who are not anime fans just happened across Gankutsuou, considering it gets essentially zero exposure outside of the anime community.

Sure, there were many differences between the anime and the book, but most of those were intelligent and interesting changes, obviously written by people who knew what they were doing.

mufurc wrote:

Sure, there were many differences between the anime and the book, but most of those were intelligent and interesting changes, obviously written by people who knew what they were doing.

Like adding giant robot fights, dumbing down the characters into stereotypes, spoiler[transforming the Count into a monster] and missing some of the most important aspects that made the book such a classic? Just kidding, but one have to admit that the adaptation kinda sucked in comparison to the source material (not saying it's a bad anime or anything, it's great).