Y’know, it’s odd. It’s 1:21 as I sit here, stating to type, and I’ve got many reasons to be pissed off; the amount of homework I have to do, the fact I don’t have any noteable confidence, the way I can’t listen to music because of the time, the amount of time I wasted at the cinema watching an utterly shite film (I’ll come back to that,) the way I can’t repeat the song Stockholm Syndrome on Expert mode of GHIII no matter how hard I try, the fact that the one time I’m most awake is the time other people are most asleep. I have many things that could piss me off, but I’m sitting here in a state of Euphoria. Total Happiness. Not many people can say that these days, but give me a web browser, a computer, and most importantly an unrestricted internet connection, and I can quite happily whittle away the hours without a second thought and enjoy myself in the process.

Back to the cinema. It’s odd how I’m going from one extreme to the other here, because while I’m happy now I certainly wasn’t three odd hours ago. Here’s the story. Me and a few mates ALWAYS go to see the latest release at the cinema on a Saturday for the late showing, regardless of the weather. Most of the time, we get to a good flick - Aliens Vs. Predators, Cloverfield, 21, Iron Man, you get the picture - and thoroughly enjoy ourselves int the process, with many wee sayings coming out of it - like “Would you like to deploy <item/object/emotion/etc>?” …. “You have selected: <Yes/No>” - however tonight was different. We went to see a film called Speed Racer, dunno if you’ve heard of it…total waste of time and money. I guess I’m partly to blame for going to see a PG, but this was beyond belief. I mean, I could watch a PG film like
The Lion King or Toy Story for hours, because they’re enjoyable and well done, and the morals aren’t too in-your-face and the story isn’t more predictable than a bus timetable….but this, Speed Racer, just pissed in every decent PG films face and said “Fuck You!” I guess warning bells went off early when we were like the only people in the cinema, and indeed one of my friends noted this….only two other people came to see, and due to their age I think they were either a) there to make out knowing how shite the film is and basing their cinema love on the way no-one would be there or b) planted by cinema staff to keep us being rowdy. Being the conspiracist I am, I’ll go with b).

The film itself was horrendous. A CGI wankfest with little to nothing in similarity to a real world situation, or a feasible future one. I gathered that the film was set in the present to near future, but the technology demonstrated was far-fetched beyond belief, with everyone owning a helicopter or uber sports racer, and the race-tracks themselves being gravity defying, laws of physics ignoring pieces of skewed metal that somehow cars that can travel in excess of 1000mp/h navigate with ease. The main plot of the film is also bullshit: a family of mechanics and racers that take it to the big time and stick two fingers to “the man”, in this case the corporate racing giant who fix races to earn themselves plenty of money. Oddly, these companies have advanced technology and money to throw at what is essentially crap - huge gyms for thousands of drivers they’ll never need, those wee personal scooter things for every staff member who never does anything - yet they don’t develop machines that can build cars faster than 36 hours. Although the amount of cars they’d be producing at that rate is uneconomical to say the least, and improving it would be coporate suicide. Back to the plot though. This family of mechanics is spearheaded by the unfortunately named Speed, who takes the family’s driving slot after his brother dies mysteriously. We later find out that his brother killed himself and got a facelift, and in fact raced alongside Speed twice, however this is so fucking obvious we don’t need a flashback to tell us. That’s another thing: the flashbacks. It seems every five minutes has one member of the racer family looking back at one shitty event in their life or another. Even the dyke/leading lady and love interest of the film has a flashback, which reveals an early interest in Speed from her side. But seriously, no-one cares. These half hearted attempts at adding depth and story to the film won’t save this bullshit. The fact that the story begins with an awful view into Speeds imagination - a cartoon style race where he unsurprisingly wins and then goes to meet his brother and his epic car of mystic win - and the ensuing drive home is so badly done it looks like it was made in Windows Movie Maker and Microsoft Paint leaves a bad first impression on the film - and first impressions are hard to lose. This one is one of the few that are actually right.

So really, this is one of the few films you wouldn’t even pirate. Although, you could watch it and pretend you had epilepsy and take the creators to court, where you’d sue them for making such a dire film.

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