Speed Racer was our first selection. It's long, 135 minutes, and it shouldn't be. I would have thought that the Wachowski Brothers, and that's a non-gender specific brothers, would have learned from the complaints directed at their last two movies and toned down the self-indulgence, but maybe this is just their style. SR is a bombastic version of the tv show with some awfully longwinded speeches and hard to tell what's goin' on races. The story is typical of your racing movies and that's fine. We all like rooting for the underdog racing team who battle the rich powerful blowhard and his team of cretinous creeps. I have mixed feelings about the family of characters in the movie. They are colorful in their appearance, that's for sure. Some of them are more annoying than others. I think we all disliked the kid who keeps getting into all that trouble, but didn't mind the monkey so much. Maybe it's me, and I'm getting old, but that kid sucks and he needs some major punishing. I would have thought the monkey would have known better. John Goodman plays the dad and Susan Sarandon plays the mom, and they're just great. Christina Ricci plays Trixie, and she's hardly ever looked that thin. She might have been tweaked by the CGI fairy but I haven't bothered to look that up. The movie has been processed so much nothing is real. Parts of the processing I liked but parts were annoying after a while. Same with the story and dialog. Some good and some annoying. The melodrama keeps ramping up and some of scenes run way too long. I actually forgot what the villian was going on about at one point. He'd gone on too long and the visuals were racing at speeds the cars couldn't have kept up with. Maybe I just didn't care at that point. Now I have seen it I won't feel the need to go buy one.
The Being is a family affair. Producer Bill Osco, who produced both Flesh Gordon and the nudie musical Alice In Wonderland with Kristine DeBell, hired his wife Jackie Kong to direct him as the main character, whom Bill is playing as Rexx Coltrane. They also hired their baby daughter and sadly she was one of the most natural actors in the movie. There's something going on in a small Idaho town. Jose Ferrer is the mayor and the head of Big Potato. Ruth Buzzy is his wife. Martin Landau is a crappy crooked science guy who says that dumping radioactive waste into the lake is doing it no harm. Of course there is a radioactive mutant who kills people. They have to stop it before it kills everyone in the town. The monster and the movie are laughable. Sadly we enjoyed ourselves more with this movie than the first. I wouldn't run out and buy a copy of the movie but I might watch it again in 10 or 15 years.
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