Contact me - marensdasein@gmail.com
Well, dispite my silence here I've been doing well. I recently got my HRT dosage upped so I'm looking forward to more dramatic changes happening more rapidly. Unfortunately, This does mean taking twice the previous dosage of a diuretic (the T-blocker Spironolactone) so thats been somthing to deal with. Also, legislative attacks on trans people in Kansas and at the federal level continue to be more then a little scary, but I'm still fortunate enough that I'm still isolated from any direct impact on my life. Really I've just been transing harder. I've been trying read more fiction recently too. I've been working my way though the cyberpunk urtext Neuromancer. I was expecting a pulpy if somewhat thought provoking sci-fi noir, but what I got was much weirder, and much more... postmodern? It's not like James Joyce or Hunter S. Thompson, but it feels stream of consiousnes in a way that third person narrative books don't usually. It also throws a lot of world building and jargon at you with context your only means of picking up the details. Suffice to say its a very hard read. This is being curiously counterbalanced by an attempt to read Twilight. I've already made some comments that might explain my choice to read a generally maligned piece of YA fiction, but i'm not feeling in a vulnerable enough mood to really go into it in a public space now. If you're really that curious reach out to my email at the bottom of the page. If I know you well enough then I just might tell you.
So thats the updates on my life, but typically I only bother to write a blog if I have somthing specific to write about so what is it this time? Well, I just got the opportunity to see Speed Racer (2008) in a theater for the first time. If you're a regular reader then you know I am the Wachowskis's biggest cheerleader, and I love all of their movies; even the ones everyone else hates. It used to be Speed Racer was one of those but it's kinda not anymore. Dispite its abysmal 42% Rotten Tomatoes score, the general consensus now is that both critics and audiences were too harsh on it. It makes some sense in context. Think about the most popular movies of 2008: The Dark Knight and Iron Man. These are gritty realistic interpretations of superhero media. If you're only familiar with the recent MCU stuff you may not realize that Iron Man was actually quite a bit darker and more grounded than more recent MCU offerings, and it really wasn't until The Avengers in 2012 that the series really started down the jokey comicbook tone that the movies have settled into. Now along comes a live-action adaptation of an internationally popular anime by the filmmakers who wrote and directed the dark and mature Matrix Trilogy. Of course in 2008 it would be a grounded realistic reinterpretation right? Nope, its a frenetic, hypercolor acid trip of a movie with a fluid sense of time. It never sits still. It also pioneered a strong, novel, visual aesthetic that incorperated 2D animation elements with the live-action material. This description of Speed Racer bares a strong resemblence to another modern, and very successful adaptation of a 1960's property: Spider-man Into the Spider-verse. They aren't the same kind of film of course. Spider-man has the benefit of being an animated movie to begin with, so its addition of 2D animation techniques feels more intuitively natural. However, I believe the wild success of Spider-verse does serve as in indication of how Speed Raver would be received had it been released today almost 20 years later. It seems it takes around 20 years for people to come around on any Wachowski led film not titled The Matrix. Additionally, I think the success of Everything Everywhere All at Once for its gonzo rediculously complicated story, and fractured sense of time serves also as an indicator of the possible success of Speed Racer in the 2020s.
Of course its not just it's stylistic similarities that make Speed Racer the masterpiece that is secretly is. If you've seen it you'd know that its story, while complicated, is engaging. It's shockingly emotionally affective, and the performances, while exaggerated are engrossing. Speed Racer utilizes this to construct a metaphor for the intersection of art and economics, and in doing so delivers an anti-corporate fable that celebrates independent artists. It winds up being somewhat self-reflexive as the knowledgeable viewer would consider the conditions under which the film was made. Speed Racer is a corporate product. One made by passionate artists, but the movie begs you to consider what compromises were made to accomplish it. In one scene Speed calls the racing sponsers
Contact me - marensdasein@gmail.com