Speed Racer and the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, or, "Holy Crap, Was That a Ninja?"

First off, I've been horribly negligent as of late, and for that, I am sorry. I was insanely busy and stressed out over finals and the end of the semester, but that's hardly an excuse. I'd say that I'll never do it again, but that's not true...I almost certainly will. However, I will promise that I'll try to never do it again. I'm sorry. All I can say is mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
In other, more fun news, I saw Speed Racer with some friends this past Saturday. I'm still not entirely sure how to describe the experience. It was simultaneously the worst and best movie that I've ever seen. Ever. The closest I can come to verbalizing it is when you're watching a movie that's so bad, it's good. But that's not it either, exactly, because underneath Speed Racer, there's a feeling of deliberateness that never actually comes to the surface. It isn't like some parodies where they break the fourth wall to remind you that it's a parody, because that never happens in the movie. It never breaks character or changes tone at all. Part of me still isn't sure that it was deliberate, but with lines like "you don't ride the track; it rides you," "Racer X, the harbinger of dooooom!!!!" and my personal favorite "holy crap, was that a ninja?" it's too ridiculous not to be.
Parody or not, the movie is also rife with drug references, and I'm convinced, that if it wasn't made by someone on LSD, it was certainly inspired by a past trip. The tracks are psychedelic in their design, there are several points where the screen is literally just a kaleidoscope of pretty colors, and at the very end the colors of the credits change very slowly. Not to mention, of course, that someone had to be high on something to come up with the idea for the movie in the first place. I can just imagine the pitch, "It's the story of Speed Racer, an old Japanese cartoon that's widely mocked in America, only we'll use real actors, add in a smidgen more plot, and have computer generated backgrounds for everything!" You can't possibly tell me that drugs played no part in this movie. My friends and I walked out of the theater wondering if we'd been drugged by some psychotropic gas that came down from the ceiling, because that was the only way we could explain what had just happened. It was very entertaining, but unfortunately, it still left me with a few questions, like: What kind of parents would name their kids Rex, Speed, and Sprittle? Who would name a monkey Chim-Chim? If Sparky is a member of the Racer family, why does he have an accent? And of course, why isn't racing actually like that?