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By Cole Smithey

‘Speed Racer’

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The Wachowski Brothers achieve a divine vision of psychedelic visual ecstasy — you won’t believe the sheer amount of color on the screen at any given time, while digging deep into a campy comic/dramatic tone that speaks to audiences of all ages. Emile Hirsch leads a flawless cast as the title character who carries the death of his car-racing brother Rex Racer (Scott Porter) as a constant inspiration to win races for his family’s racing business. Anti-corporate themes abound as the sport’s predatory company, Royalton Industries, tries to bring Speed and his family to the dark side of greed. Far-out racing sequences, ninja attacks and a budding romance between Speed and his girlfriend Trixie (Christina Ricci) attend the trippy visual fun. Like a revved-up turbo mix of Warren Beatty’s “Dick Tracy” with “Tron,” “Speed Racer” is a blast from start to finish.

Since ending their Matrix trilogy with a whimper rather than its anticipated bang, the Wachowski Brothers have successfully turned their attention to uniting cartoon logic with live-action appeal. The pay-off is immediate and non-stop. Fans of Tatsuo Yoshida’s ’60s era Japanese anime cartoon series get plenty of positive reinforcement with key story elements, like the functional “A” through “G” buttons on the steering wheel of Speed’s car, the “Mach 5,” and his little brother Spritle’s pet monkey Chim-Chim. The filmmakers are careful to emphasize Spritle (Paulie Litt) for his humorous kid qualities of loving candy and constantly trying to prove himself as worthy of adult respect. Spritle and Chim-Chim get plenty of welcomed screen-time, and their constant slapstick shenanigans anchor the movie’s wild racing sequences from a child’s knee-high perspective of seeking fun at every opportunity.

The diabolical Royalton (Roger Allam) introduces himself to the Racer family as an effeminate pancake-loving family man who wants nothing more than to provide them with the riches they deserve. But when Royalton gets Speed alone in his office to sign a contract piled high across his desk, we learn the depth of his corporate villainy. Every raced is fixed in Royalton’s worldview. If there is a running theme smuggled into this summer’s family movies, it’s that profit for profit’s sake is to be avoided like the plague.  

“Speed Racer” balances nicely between its dastardly dangerous car race rallies and the nefarious intrigue that surrounds them. A low-fi animated introduction sequence gets us inside the mind of young Speed daydreaming in class about racing with his brother and doodling car crashes in the pages of his notebook. It’s impossible not to be transported to the joys of childhood when all that mattered was how far your imagination could take you away from the mundane realities of homework, chores and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, Speed’s mom (Susan Sarandon) makes them by the tray full. If Speed is a rebel with a one-track mind, it’s an ethic of independence that he consciously inhabits with his family’s allied approval.

The movie’s greatest achievement lies in its embrace of representing a modern family entertainment in a broad yet boiled-down spectrum of soup to nuts humor, action and unbridled celebration. You can find touches of inspiration drawn from everything from the Three Stooges to Jerry Lewis comedies to the camp humor of Pee-wee Herman. The audience is encouraged to laugh at characters, with characters and at themselves for being so easily led. The Wachowskis achieve a universal postmodern style and sensibility that comes from a connection between individual ambition and familial trust combined with lots of color and speed. It’s the fastest movie ever made. CV

‘Standard Operating Procedure’

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Documentarian Errol Morris effectively takes the viewer inside the atmosphere of psychological and physical abuse doled out by American military personnel at Abu Ghraib by connecting the hundreds of damning photos taken by soldiers to their context. And he doesn’t stop there, but rather shows the judicially perceived differences between which abuses were considered criminal acts and which were determined to be merely acts of “standard operating procedure.” With his trademark use of slow-motion microscopic /images and direct-to-camera interviews, Morris spells out in no uncertain terms the extent of one of the biggest cover-ups in modern U.S. history. Morris correctly calls his investigative documentary a “nonfiction horror movie,” but it is also an essential window into the depths of depravity that the Bush administration instilled in its lower ranks. You could very easily walk away from this film convinced that the fall of Western civilization is already upon us. Once again, Morris confirms his status as the greatest documentarian working today.

Audiences familiar with the documentaries of Morris (“The Thin Blue Line” and “The Fog of War” being his most famous) know how he methodically dissects subjects with a formulaic approach that benefits from his self-devised “Interrotron” camera that enables interviewees to speak directly to a video image of Morris instead of a camera lens. Because some of the people he interviews are soldiers dubbed by the Bush Administration as “a few bad apples,” there’s an immediate preconception that melts away as the accused describe their experiences. Where the media portrayed Lynndie England as a mentally challenged MP of limited education, we discover an articulate individual seething at circumstances carefully orchestrated by White House officials. Of the seven MPs implicated in the scandal (Sabrina Harman, Megan Ambuhl, Lynndie England, Charles Graner, Ivan Frederick, Jeremy Sivitz and Jamal Davis), Morris interviews all except Graner and Frederick, who were in prison when the film was made.

Especially telling are letters that Harman wrote home to her domestic partner Kelly, describing the prison’s bizarre atmosphere that led her to photographing the corpse of taxi driver al-Jamadi; an act of documentation that the Bush administration believed was more objectionable than al-Jamadi’s murder and subsequent attempted cover-up. Morris and his production team of consultants and designers went to great lengths to build a sound stage replica of Abu Ghraib’s puke green hallways and claustrophobic cells in order to create re-enacted scenes staged with actors. The sequences resonate with electricity that underscores Morris’ clinical treatment of facts.

There is no shortage of graphics and skillfully interwoven camera angles to divulge unique visual details that lend an organic understanding of the experience of both inmates and their captors. But it’s in its final moments that the film achieves a macro-micro significance as the sheer number of damning pictures receives a court-approved rating. An inmate handcuffed in a stress position with underwear pulled over his head is given an acceptable rating under the military’s “standard operating procedure,” which also condones smearing prisoners with their own feces, or forcing them to masturbate. It is as Hollywood’s torture porn films consciously acknowledge. Killing an enemy isn’t enough. The West demands that in the modern age victims must be sexually molested and humiliated into complete psychological submission before being exterminated. It’s hard to imagine what form of invulnerability such a decadent abuse of power will eventually incite. The Clash sang, “Know your rights.” In this day and age, it seems more important to know your country’s wrongs. CV

‘Baby Mama’

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Baby madness happily invades the brain of Philadelphia bachelorette and thriving businesswoman Kate Holbrook (Tina Fey) who, at the ripe age of 37, hires a surrogate mom to birth her sperm bank assisted baby. Amy Poehler plays Angie Ostrowiski, the white trash bimbet whose uterus will host Holbrook’s kin while she soaks up her upper class lifestyle as her temporary roommate. Poehler and Fey display a snappy on-screen chemistry that supports writer/director Michael McCullers’ quick-witted set pieces. Steve Martin makes a rare and humorous appearance as Holbrook’s crunchy granola boss, and supporting cast members Greg Kinnear, Sigourney Weaver, Romany Malco and Maura Tierney keep the laughs bubbling. Surrogate motherhood is the comic topic of the day, and this is one funny chick flick that won’t rankle male members of the audience.

McCullers makes a feature film debut that profits hugely from “Saturday Night Live” as a pervasive influence of tone. The obvious consequence of former SNL cast members Poehler, Fey and Martin working together as firmly established comedians working at the top of their game, lends an underlying wink of absurdity to everything that happens.

Fey loses herself in a role that draws you in on a primal level because everyone understands the alarm of a woman’s biological clock going off like a three-alarm fire. McCullers pays attention to detail to mine humor from Holbrook’s trips to the sperm bank, bathroom and surrogate baby company consultant Chaffee Bicknell (Weaver), whose ability to give birth in her 50s backhandedly ridicules Holbrook’s desperation.

Class conflict is at the core of the story. Ostrowiski is a trash-talking girlfriend to her high school beau Carl (Dax Shephard), who still drives around in the same old red Trans Am and has an eye on splitting the $10,000 from Ostrowiski’s surrogate pregnancy. Shephard may only have one character in his repertoire, but he knows it well. Carl is set up as a false antagonist pulling at Ostrowiski, whose entree into a world of financial liberty brings out her true nature as a responsible adult, but only after many goofy incidents.

One great example of Ostrowiski’s confused social graces comes when she answers Holbrook’s door to find her courting love interest Rob (Kinnear). “Do come in,” Ostrowiski says with an emphasis on the “do.” Poehler’s comic phrasing goes off on a tear as she lies about being Holbrook’s sister and takes a cell phone call from Europe for which she speaks broken Spanish. Holbrook leaves for her date with Rob with her toothbrush sticking out of her mouth. It’s these kind of detailed comic touches that keep adding up to reveal layers of character in Holbrook and Ostrowiski as opposite sides of the same coin.

“Baby Mama,” a ghetto term turned mainstream thanks to K-Fed and Britney Spears, is a comedy of female humor set to spin by its gifted performers. The film’s producers’ aim to attract viewers for Fey’s television show “30 Rock” is a worthy goal if generating this level of comedy is the thing movie audiences get in exchange. As with all comedy, it’s all in the delivery. CV

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