Wachowski Brothers and the Speed Racer Movie

Steven Weintraub writes "Susan Sarandon talks about the Wachowski Brothers Speed Racer movie and confirms the revolutionary way the brothers are making the film — the entire frame will be in focus like a cartoon."

Comments

Focus is a tool

[suv4x4]

Focussing on an object draws the people attention to it. It's used as an artistic tool. If everything is in focus, then the public will most likely not even notice (unless they specifically check for this).

I hope they don't spend a lot of money/effort on this "feature", the way they did on the game-quality 3D graphics of the Burly Brawl (ref: Matrix 2).

Re:Focus is a tool

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe, just maybe they're a bit more imaginative than you.

Re:Focus is a tool

[sabernet]

When one is presented a vague idea or goal to accomplish, it always seems easy to those who didn't have to do it.

I can ask dozen different questions, each with a simple answer, but that most people will fumble at. Not because it is difficult to execute the conclusion, but that the conclusion is non-obvious from the offset. Only once it is presented to all the answers, including those to which you would find 'better' become 'obvious'.

Hindsight is 20/20.

Making a graphic novel into a movie sounds easy. The average shmuck(by your own logic, I suppose that would include you), might say "Pffft...The story was already written down and framed, how could they screw THAT up?"

But only once you realize that you have 2 hours of film, a certain budget, actors with certain demands and a market with certain thirsts does the enormity of the task become apparent. How would you convety something that takes 2 hours to -read- into 2 hours of action? And how do you pull it off without boring the snot out of people or resorting to the cheap trick of keeping the silly camera moving too goddamn fast to make out the shortcomings of the choreography(I'm looking at you Transformers and Borne Supremacy).

I happened to like V for Vendetta.

I loved the first Matrix movie, the second one was meh and the third one was crap in my opinion. They shouldn't have been done. But given the massive plot hole-ridden concept the original was based on, I guess they sorta painted themselves in a corner.

But besides all that, I will ask a simple question: how do you make a boiled egg stand straight up on a table without using any materials except the egg and the solid table(no tablecloths, salt, etc...

The solution is simple. But can you think of it?

The answer(in reverse, right to left):

.dnats ot hcihw htiw esab rediw a ti gniwolla kcarc lliw gge eht fo mottob ehT .elbat eht no ti malS

To prove my point, after reading the answer(if you could), the solution becomes far more obvious then it was from the offset.

The big problem is sometimes the average shmuck thinks of himself too highly to probe deeper then a superficial holier then thou, self gratifying way a la Simpsons ComicBookGuy.

Good, another movie I don't need to watch

[heinousjay]

Does anybody still pay attention to these guys? I mean, okay, people seemed to like The Matrix (although I never understood why) but everything since then has been uniformly awful. It seems like hitting on some lottery numbers and then playing those same numbers every day for the rest of your life in the misguided belief that they have some special odds of hitting again.

Re:Good, another movie I don't need to watch

[somersault]

Yep.. the first Matrix film was pretty fresh and interesting (to people that don't watch a lot of anime at least!), but they even managed to mess up the sequels. They do seem to be about the gimmicks :o The car scene that they spent millions on in the second movie wasn't even any good. Good car chase scenes don't even need expensive cars or special effects to be good, they just need good drivers and interesting locations/stunts

Re:Good, another movie I don't need to watch

[Colin Smith]

It seems like hitting on some lottery numbers and then playing those same numbers every day for the rest of your life in the misguided belief that they have some special odds of hitting again. Bingo. You just hit the reason religion exists. The human brain looks for patterns all over the place, even in random chance.

Re:Good, another movie I don't need to watch

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you mean "the reason why science exists"?

Re:Good, another movie I don't need to watch

[itsdapead]

Yep.. the first Matrix film was pretty fresh and interesting (to people that don't watch a lot of anime at least!), but they even managed to mess up the sequels

But that was the problem - the first one was completely fresh and different (for mainstream audiences not into anime and extreme martial arts) - the sequels were obliged to follow broadly the same style, but by the time they came out, bullet time, wire-work Kung-Fu and "extreme" fight scenes had become cliched. Have you noticed how tame the bank lobby shootout scene looks today, compared with the first time you saw it? The long delay (probably not helped by the death of two cast members and the post-9/11 hiatus for any film in which things got blowed up) didn't help.

Its not as if the plot of the sequels was any sillier than the first movie (the whole humans as power sources thing - holy thermodynamics Batman!) just that the first film was such compellingly brilliant eye candy that your brain's services were not required, and we never worried about why someone punching you in VR should give you a fat lip in reality. By "Reloaded" we'd seen it all before (with freeze frame, commentary and white rabbits too, thanks to the original's role in popularizing DVD) and were starting to worry about plot holes.

...plus the first film had the "advantage" that it came out fairly close to Star Wars Episode one, and benefitted from rather favorable comparisons... (NB: I still think that Universal should have gambled and released "Serenity" head-to-head against "Revenge of the Sith" - then they'd have been a story, and people love to root for the little guy).

Hmm

[Shinra]

I'll reserve a judgment until I at least see a trailer of the movie.

Re:Deep Focus?

[Oktober Sunset]

the difference is they add the words 'like a cartoon' at the end, instantly making it both revolutionary and really cool.

Re:Deep Focus?

[gowen]

The difference is that Welles used deep focus because of his overarching artistic vision for Kane. The Wachowskis use it because they're talentless hacks who really, really like visual gimmicks. (Note how bad the Matrix sequels got once the original gimmick had got a bit repetitive).

Re:Story this time?

[Phybersyk0]

How substantive do you think a movie with a girl who flys a helicopter whilst wearing a mini skirt and go-go boots can be? Don't even get me started on the kid and his pet monkey.

Re:Brothers?

[Seumas]

Yeah, but too bad it's for a cartoon that nobody under 40 remembers. Jesus, why not do a Mr. Magoo or Magilla(sp) Gorilla movie while you're at it?

Wait, I think they did a Mr. Magoo actually... nevermind.

Re:Brothers?

[squiggleslash]

He's saying they're both the same thing because they both involve multiple still cameras. This, of course, means that the field of special effects has had no innovations whatsoever since the end of the 19th century, when motion pictures were invented. Anyone who thought Birth of a Nation, Citizen Kane, 2001, Star Wars, Blade Runner, The Matrix, et al, were in any way different to anything produced before them clearly was just imagining it because some of the technology they used had something in common with technology that had previously been invented.

Pretty light on details

[zero_offset]

I'm getting a huge kick out of these heated debates over such a tiny bit of crappy information. Sarandon says she doesn't understand it, then proceeds to give a really crappy description which amounts to "everything is in focus" ... and suddenly the /. readership are experts on the subject (and why it has been done before, and how they'd do it better, and why one of the Wachowski brothers chopping his nuts off makes him a sister, etc etc etc).

Personally I couldn't glean almost anything useful from the article.

Are brains prone to superstition?

[Colin Smith]

Also. The point being that it's part of our makeup to create significance, whether there is any or not and whether we can rationally explain something or not.

In fact, as one of the other posters pointed out about the pigeons, it may well be a feature of the way brains work. We may well find out that any life which uses something like a neural network to generate consciousness will be prone to superstition and religion.... Which becomes interesting when you start building big neural networks into machines.

Re:You asked for it

[Bandman]

>In the end, they probably decided that "deep focus" wasn't enough. They want absolutely pristine shots that defy reality,
>to try and distinguish this film from the countless other cartoon adaptations that have all sucked in immeasurable ways.
>In brief, they're trying to do it different than everyone else, and hopefully better.

I think you're relying too much on your premise that the Wachowski Brothers aren't retarded.

They did one thing well. The Matrix. Reloaded was on the fence, and could have been saved by Revolutions. But it wasn't. It crashed, burned, and died way faster than Trinity did. Then they did V for Vendetta. Cool story, but they didn't write the story. They shaved Natalie Portman's head. It wasn't a terrible movie, but it was an unremarkable movie. Only the broad overtones of the story had merit, and they didn't invent those.

No, I'm still pissed at them for ruining the Matrix. If they would have just left it as it was, they would have been known simply as the people who created one of the most amazing sci-fi movies ever, instead of the people who ruined one of the most promising sci-fi trilogies ever.

Re:Brothers?

[Chyeld]

Wouldn't a Mr Magoo film need the exact opposite effect? Everything out of focus?