saw: speed racer
With apologies to Dolly Parton: It takes a lot of money to look this cheap. For all of Speed Racer's visual ambition, and what I'm sure was the the Wachowski Brothers' deeply internalized and groundbreaking conceptual approach to rendering live action according to anime aesthetics, the plain fact of its execution is that when you sacrifice depth of field and and saturate every color to the point of chromatic bloodshed, the resulting clutter is invariably chintzy. That said, and despite its problematic pacing, the movie does intermittently achieve the kind of brute-force pop potency that its filmmakers surely intended—even managing to induce an almost synesthetic trance during its climax that borders on physical exhilaration. Grade: C+