Academic

Because I'm the best mom ever, I spent Mother's Day at the movies with my older two watching Speed Racer.  I have to admit that I only vaguely remember the original cartoon (which actually began as Japanese manga), but I think the main characters and the basic plot remains intact.  In a nutshell, my kids loved it.  (I guess they didn't read the NYT review first.)  The movie is very long (over two hours), but my six-year-old never squirmed.  In fact, he stood up much of the last hour, as if to get closer to the action.

And action there was.  There are frequent car racing sequences, which are a blur of color and light.  There are also several martial arts sequences.  As someone who wanders through our living room now and then, I have had the opportunity to observe video games from afar, and several scenes in the movie seemed to have been created for the primary purpose of a Speed Racer video game.  So what's not to love?  Three of the things that my son loves best, car racing (a la Cars), martial arts (a la Power Rangers), and video games were rolled up into one movie.  So, it seems like a movie made for kids.  Except its confusing.  Much of the back story of Speed's brother, Rex, is told in flashbacks superimposed on the present.  I had to explain to my kids that the movie was flipping back and forth, because they were not following.  To make it even more confusing, during the large "flashback montage," Speed Racer is in a race in which Rex held the track record.  A hologram of Rex's car is racing right in front of Speed Racer's real car.  So, the movie flips from Rex racing a decade earlier to Speed racing now to Rex's hologram racing now.  And of course, Rex and Speed look very similar.  I'm still not sure if Luke understood what the true identity of Racer X is, but I think I explained it to him.

The movie is a good Mother's Day movie.  The mother is Susan Sarandon, which is automatically a good thing.  But the movie has a lot of good family-as-team stuff.  My only regret about the movie is that my colleague Larry Ribstein wasn't there.  The movie has a lot of what Larry hates -- evil corporations stamping out the heart of the artist-driver.  Plus, it has outsider trading!  What kid's movie has as its core plot a scheme to use car racing victories as ways to manipulate stock prices for the purpose of mergers and acquisitions?