Speed Racer (2008) (with Tim Robey)
Strap in for Episode 104 of the podcast as the thrill ride that is Lilly and Lana Wachowski’s Speed Racer (2008) provides the focus for this latest instalment in all its unwieldy and unruly CG glory. Chris and Alex’s special guest for this episode is Tim Robey, renowned film critic and author who has written widely on all kinds of cinema for The Daily Telegraph for over the last 20 years. He is also the co-editor of the book The DVD Stack: The Best DVDs of the Best Movies from Around the World (2006) - a guide to the best versions of movies available globally - and has discussed film on Radio 4’s Front Row, the Film Programme, Monocle FM Radio, and BBC Film. Listen as they seek to get to grips with Speed Racer’s manic energy and digital mayhem, including its relationship to computer graphics at a time when digital VFX imagery was perhaps reaching its elastic limit in Hollywood; connections between the film’s abrasive style and 1950s melodrama via the work of filmmaker Douglas Sirk; the fragmented labour of digital processes and the implications that such shifting temporalities hold for understanding digitally-mediated screen performance; the digital or virtual backlot as a production trend popular within early-2000s U.S. cinema; the conjunction of photorealist and videogame aesthetics with live-action characters; and how Speed Racer’s capitalist contradictions unfold in both a narrative and restless visual style that pits ideas of authenticity against those of surrealist fantasy.