Thread by @108

for YEARS i've been yelling at anyone who calls SPEED RACER (2008) "actually" "good." no "actually" necessary! it's Just A Masterpiece. love it or go home!

well, @mikeyface went and made a perfectly justified link between SPEED RACER, picasso, and james joyce in this video :-O

https://twitter.com/mikeyface/status/1357743298648096768

a not-insignificant percentage of the worst conversations i have ever suffered in my life have involved a different guy scrounging through thin air for Cool Points by boldly declaring that "pretending to like" SPEED RACER is "just a fad". nope!! it owns, scientifically

maybe i should elaborate: as mikey points out in the video, speed racer came out a week after iron man. mainstream critics had been programmed, by films like batman begins, to accept iron man as a "serious comic book film" which also happened to have Something For Everyone

the way i see it, comic book movies were aiming for naturalism, and iron man impressed audiences and critics by presenting a distinctly different, cheekier brand of batman begins' "gritty reboot" solution. this just so happened to spawn a dynasty of billion-dollar-makers

speed racer, at that exact moment in time, came across as an immediate regression: comic book (in this case, cartoon) films--on the surface of the surface, at least--devolving back "away" from the film medium, back to cartoons. critics found it easy to lambaste it and move on

only True Weirdo Movieheads were able to take it all in at that exact time (me and my soul-buddy mccune among them, if i may aggrandize myself a bit!)

yet the marvel cinematic universe wasn't the ONLY evil born out of that dark year: we also had . . . twitter

people in my acquaintancesphere saw twitter in 2008-2009 as a sleeker, sharper alternative to facebook. here you could share your opinions fast and loud, chasing quick virality as reward for the harshest owns. soon the thrill of sharing eclipsed the thrill of having an opinion

i do not recall any exactly "viral" tweet-owns of SPEED RACER, though i do recall critical consensus being casually volleyed around until the film achieved the colloquial stench of a horrible disaster more quickly than playground discussions of my youth had ever killed a thing

so it was the film earned its "Actually" Moment: most of its haters simply hadn't seen it! humans have osmosed the opinions of others since the dawn of language, and passed them off as their own without firsthand experience. it's how our brains work. twitter (et al) exploits that

you've no doubt seen a blog post or two explaining why mediocre films tend to win best picture: because they use runoff voting. voters choose a #1 with their gut, and peoples' guts differ. their safe #2 and #3 wind up winning. this is why marvel makes billions, etc

anyway i'm opening up too many topic boxes, so i will have to cut this off soon. let me just say: speed racer didn't have a "re-evaluation" in the mid-2010s. it had its "evaluation." no "re" needed. people were watching it for the first time! thus the gravity of the "Actually"

around 2017, i recall seeing two twitter users awakening to SPEED RACER per week. soon, liking SPEED RACER became "Sort Of Normal." this is when i started to overhear said would-be Cool Kids try to debunk the film's excellence proximal to the figurative office water cooler

part of me thinks "speed racer probably doesn't need a guy like me to get people to watch it anymore", and then i see videos like this and realize, oh, there's way, way more stuff to say about this movie than even *i* have ever said about it. and that's sayin somethin!!

i was tempted to make a video about SPEED RACER back when that CATS movie came out, because i saw *so* many people on twitter hate-watching it. they were Live-Tweeting, from the theater!! those monsters!! and i wanted to say, "this reminds me of what happened to SPEED RACER"

then i actually watched that CATS movie, and, lol, well, my mom gave me some cliche advice once about when to say anything at all

the notion i grappled with then is this: in the 11 years between SPEED RACER and CATS, however, social-media-users had started to communally WATCH the stuff upon which they intended to dunk. is that progress? i think "sort of yes, though mostly no . . . ?"

does all this rumination have ramifications outside mere Talking About Movies? absolutely. does it involve politics, etc? sure. do i have a LOT more to say about this? of course. will i say SOME of it in the near future? maybe!! can i ever articulate it all perfectly? lmao no

SPEED RACER's status as an alternative use of hollywood mega-monster-budget is interesting, though only in a footnote capacity. when it comes right down to it, the film Just Plain Owns. whether it's still cool or too obvious to like it exactly right now doesn't matter: it owns.

in conclusion, if you haven't seen SPEED RACER (2008), you should watch it. if you HAVE seen it, why not watch it again? and in either case, watch the wonderful video i linked above.

also, watch his video about THE MATRIX as a companion piece

postscript: social media also murdered INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL, though to a much smaller extent than it did SPEED RACER

maybe i'll talk more about that some other time! bye