Movies: May 2008 Archives

After giving Iron Man a pass, critics generally seem to have knives out for Speed Racer, despite the fact that Speed boasts the most radical visual strategies seen in a movie theater since Sin City, and maybe longer. Yes, of course "unconventional" is not equivalent to "excellent" or even "interesting," and I guess I can understand why you might not want to let the Wachowskis play your optic nerve like a Jew's harp for more than two hours in a sitting. But, man, if you value a little razzle with your dazzle, this one delivers a lot more of that stuff than, say, Iron Man.

Flight of the Red Balloon is one of those movies where nothing much happens. It's a simple, relatively peaceful film, notable in part because director Hou Hsao-Hsien is shooting outside Asia for the first time. Hou's starting point--dictated by Paris's Musee d'Orsay, which commissioned the film--is La Ballon Rouge, the 1956 Albert Lamorisse film about a little boy and his companion in the streets of Paris, a floating red balloon.

When I read Glenn Kenny's line about Iron Man being, essentially, the best Marvel superhero movie to date, I have to admit: it pissed me off. Or, at least, Kenny pissed all over the Spider-Man fanboy inside me. But movie critics are all standing in line to carry Iron Man's jock, so what do I know?