Went to see Speed Racer yesterday, and it was hard to focus on the content of the movie because the picture quality was awful. There were black lines down the screen, and especially during bright scenes (and there are a lot in this movie) the screen would get intermittently darker. I complained, and they said they'd have the projectionist look at it. Fifteen minutes later, no improvement. So I complained again. They gave me free movie passes, but I was still bummed out.

I knew the story was going to be silly. The whole point of seeing a movie like this is for the eye candy, and if the picture quality stinks...well, then what do you have left?

Actually, I thought the movie itself was decent, if over-long. There's about 90 minutes of good movie here, bloated beyond good sense. Maybe I was biased by the crappy picture quality, but I also think most of the action in the race scenes was pretty dumb and incomprehensible. By contrast, the hand-to-hand fight scenes were done extremely well, and the action was clear. Those Wachowski Brothers know how to film a fight scene, if nothing else.

I never watched the animated series that inspired the film, so I can't make a direct comparison. At first the fat kid and the chimp annoyed me, but then pretty much all the characters started to grow on me, so that by the predictable end I'd raised my estimation of the movie.

Just a tad.

I'd recommend it, but I'd also recommend speaking up if you're in a theater where the cheap-ass management won't replace bulbs or incompetent projectionists that don't know how to center a movie (Redbelt was off-center the whole time). You're paying for a product, and if it sucks, you should complain, or it won't change.