Monday Morning Movie Reviews

1. Speed Racer - Ignore what you have heard. This movie totally rocks! It helps, a lot, if you watched the old cartoon series as a kid, because the movie is fast paced with lots of flashbacks, so figuring out character relationships can be difficult. It also does this cool "ghost car" thing where Speed imagines that he is racing the ghost of his dead brother, Rex Racer. My two boys, aged 8 and 5, completely loved it. Partly because it has a monkey "Chim Chim" (who's really a chimpanzee) as a pet of the Speed's little brother Spritle. Susan Sarandon looks fab as Speed's Mom, and John Goodman does a good "Pops." Christina Ricci is nearly unrecognizable as the cute and tough Trixie. And that guy from Lost, Matthew Fox, is great as Racer X. Speed is played by Emile Hirsch, whom I've never heard of, but kind of has an Elvis thing going for him. We saw it at IMAX, which made it even better. My kids asked questions about it and laughed about the funny parts all the way home. The race scenes are like watching fireworks.







2. The Mist - This was a "what's on par-per-view tonight?" selection at the Worldview household, the grown-up half of the family appreciating a good, scary flick. Unfortunately, good, scary flicks are hard to come by these days. This movie is sooooooo baaaaaad that it should not be allowed to call itself a movie. It has absolutely no redeeming quality whatsoever. SUCKS SUCKS SUCKS SUCKS. An actress named Marcia Gay Harden is in it, and I've heard of her before but I can't remember why. And after this piece of crap wasted 90 minutes of my life, I'm not inclined to spend 2 more minutes finding out.







3. Untraceable - A Diane Lane flick that my wife picked up at blockbuster due to slim pickings there. Ms. Lane has been in some really bad movies lately. Not as bad as The Mist, but overall a real stinker. It's an "internet thriller," which means lots of tense typing scenes, unsavvy characters who are bewildered by high tech terms like "IP address" and "host server." while we viewers are generally presumed to be idiots without web access. Oh, also lots of unnecessary gore that does nothing to further the plot. Sadly, this film had plot elements that could have made it a good "who done it?" or "cat and mouse" flick. But close-ups of key boards, over-acting, and a bad script sink it.