SPEED RACER: Gotta Go Fast

March is Women's History Month, which Post-Credit Coda will take as an opportunity for weekly reviews of films by female directors. Of all the reviews I've written in 2+ years, only four and a half of the movies have been directed by women. Women are slooooowly starting to receive better on camera roles in Hollywood, yet the lack of female directors is a continuous blight on the industry. Unskilled and inexperienced men are typically given far grander opportunities while proven, talented women are ignored. Despite the adversity, some women still manage to bring their projects to fruition. Let's hope that in the future this becomes the norm rather than the exception.

Other Reviews in this Series.

Directors: Lana and Lilly Wachowski
Writers: Lilly and Lana Wachowski
Cast: Emile Hirsch, John Goodman, Susan Sarandon, Christina Ricci, Matthew Fox, Kick Gurry, Paulie Litt, Roger Allam, Rain
Runtime: 135 mins.
2008

The film opens with a flash of color, then the camera creeps in on the back of a racer. We hear the sounds of revving engines and squealing tires. We see the racer's foot tapping in anticipation. Then, a match cut to a child's pencil tapping on a standardized test. This is a flashback that shows us a glimpse of Speed Racer's troubled youth. The teachers consider him a problem child because all he wants to do, all he can really focus on, is racing. The boy sits at his desk, his concentration ebbing, until the drab classroom transforms into multicolored streaks of light, the essence of speed, and the little boy is driving just like his older brother Rex.

What follows is an extended sequence of adult Speed Racer racing, intercut with inserts of his family cheering him on from the crowd, each of which zips us away into another propulsive flashback that fills out Speed's relationship with all of the main characters and contextualizes the importance of the race. Typically "propulsive flashback" is something of an oxymoron, but not here. This isn't like Deadpool's clever but pedestrian use of backstory in the midst of action. This sequence is edited, paced, and scored such that even when we have entered quiet character moments, we feel as if we have never left the race.

All of this adds up to a stunning twenty minutes of discovery and emotion, culminating in Speed racing the ghost of his dead older brother for the course record. It is the absolute perfect way to begin this film, an opening that perhaps only compares to Up with regard to sheer bang for your buck, emotional investment refined into the most efficient and efficacious package.

I knew from one minute in that Speed Racer would be a masterpiece.

A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT: Every Good Boy Does Fine

March is Women's History Month, which Post-Credit Coda will take as an opportunity for weekly reviews of films by female directors. Of all the reviews I've written in 2+ years, only four and a half of the movies have been directed by women. Women are slooooowly starting to receive better on camera roles in Hollywood, yet the lack of female directors is a continuous blight on the industry. Unskilled and inexperienced men are typically given far grander opportunities while proven, talented women are ignored. Despite the adversity, some women still manage to bring their projects to fruition. Let's hope that in the future this becomes the norm rather than the exception.

Other Reviews in this Series.

Director: Ana Lily Amirpour
Writer: Ana Lily Amirpour
Cast: Sheila Vand, Arash Marandi, Marshall Manesh, Mozhan Marno, Dominic Rains
Runtime: 101 mins.
2014

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night has, first and foremost, a killer title. Amirpour could have easily gone with something bluntly evocative like The Vampire, but instead she went the route of a flashy eight syllable name that makes this movie something of a commitment to bring up in casual conversation. Marketers hate that sort of thing, but as this article about naming conventions suggests, we wouldn't want Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to be called The Dream, would we?

The title also perfectly plays upon our preconceived notions. When presented with the image of a girl walking home alone at night, especially in the context of a horror movie, we assume she will be the victim of some perverse attack. Every signifier in that string of words is meant to evoke vulnerability. The joke's on us, though. In this movie the girl is the aggressor, the shadowy figure out for blood.

THE HITCH-HIKER: Thumbs Up

March is Women's History Month, which Post-Credit Coda will take as an opportunity for weekly reviews of films by female directors. Of all the reviews I've written in 2+ years, only four and a half of the movies have been directed by women. Women are slooooowly starting to receive better on camera roles in Hollywood, yet the lack of female directors is a continuous blight on the industry. Unskilled and inexperienced men are typically given far grander opportunities while proven, talented women are ignored. Despite the adversity, some women still manage to bring their projects to fruition. Let's hope that in the future this becomes the norm rather than the exception.

Other Reviews in this Series.

Director: Ida Lupino
Writers: Collier Young, Ida Lupino, Robert L. Joseph
Cast: Frank Lovejoy, Edmond O'Brien, William Talman
Runtime: 70 mins.
1953

When Ida Lupino was a child, her father told her, "You're a strange, interesting girl. Your mother and I, to be honest with you, prayed... we would have a son. I think you're going to end up doing what my son would have done. You will write, direct, and produce." This would turn out to be prescient, or perhaps something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, as Lupino would grow up to become an actress who was dissatisfied with the limits of a Hollywood acting career. She was frequently suspended by Warner Bros. for not making the movies they wanted her to make, and during that time she familiarized herself with the technical processes of filmmaking. In her words, while she was sitting around being bored on set, "someone else seemed to be doing all the interesting work."

Lupino transitioned into producing, writing, and directing with her own production company, an unheard of feat for a woman in Hollywood during that era. In the earliest years of film female filmmakers were fairly common, but by the '40s and '50s Hollywood had become a boys' club, with women primarily relegated to acting and editing. Seventy years later and women are still by and large unwelcome in the director's chair, which makes Lupino's achievements all the more extraordinary. Not only was she prolific, but she was uncompromising in a way that was unpalatable to the gender roles of the time, yet she still managed to toe the line enough to keep finding opportunities to make her art. She was interested in creating strong female characters, "[not] women who have masculine qualities about them, but [a role] that has intestinal fortitude, some guts to it." Again, seventy years later and this is still a concept that big budget writers and studio execs cannot wrap their minds around, instead construing the term Strong Female Character as a hot woman who can punch things hard. Lupino accessed the power of the feminine in a masculine-dominated world, preferring to be called "mother" while on set, which she considered emblematic of the act of creation.

All this is fascinating to keep in mind when looking at The Hitch-Hiker, Lupino's sixth (though only fourth credited) directorial effort. The film follows two fishing buddies who pick up a dangerous hitchhiker, the psychopathic killer Emmett Myers (William Talman). The film chronicles their captivity, in which they are forced at gunpoint to aid Myers' escape across Baja California. Snippets of the police pursuit are sprinkled throughout, but for the most part we are trapped in pressure cooker situation after situation, in which Myers abuses his captives both physically and psychologically. He considers them weak, you see, too dependent upon the love and support of others, whereas he is strong because he's always made his own way and never taken any help from anybody.