A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick

The main character of this well-known novel can't get enough of Substance D, a psychoactive drug that's also known as Slow Death. It turns out that even his dealer works for the government and has been part of a police operation all along — and even more surprisingly, he finds Substance D grow fields at his rehab clinic. Dick never reveals the true source of the dangerous drug, but his hints on the subject are the staples of conspiracy theory fiction: evil Communists, evil aliens, evil government, or evil corporations.

The Invisibles by Grant Morrison

Drug use and conspiracy theory stories go hand-in-hand, it seems. Morrison wrote The Invisibles after an incredible hallucinogenic experience in Kathmandu — one he originally attributed to alien abduction. He later learned to just blame the drugs, and so The Invisibles became the most psychadelic comic ever, filled with swearing, bright colors, and wild characters. The protagonist of the first volume, Dane McGowan, is plucked from his life as a petty thief and sent to a corrupt juvenile detention center. After his rescue, the vast conspiracies surrounding everything in his life begin to reveal themselves, and he teams up with the eclectic Invisibles to discover more and more about the vast suffering of humanity.

Dark City, written by Alex Proyas, Lem Dobbs, and David S. Goyer

In 1998, a revolutionary sci-fi film noir hit cinema screens. It began with a man waking up at a murder scene in a city that never sees daylight, a man who's unable to remember who he is or how he got there. As he's trying to find answers, he discovers that the world is not at all what it seems, and that a group of mysterious figures called the Strangers are controlling human reality. There's a conspiracy for ya. Luckily, this man possesses the ability to change reality, or "tune," as well, and so puts up a good fight so he can escape to a better world with his wife.

The Matrix, written by Andy and Larry Wachowski

A year after Dark City's release came The Matrix, which was far more successful — the stories are similar, but there's a lot more gunplay and leather in the Wachowski brothers' version. The Matrix certainly offered us a very good reason to be paranoid: It's possible that aliens have invaded, subjugating all of humanity by convincing us that our lives are progressing as normal. The chilling reality, that humans are harvested for energy and fed with the dead matter of their own species, is one of the scariest sequences in film. Plus, the simulated reality that most humans believe is nothing more than a computer program, and the stewards of that program are stony-faced agents who have all the power. That is, until a cute computer hacker shows up to save us all.

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

Often thought of as a sequel to her also fabulous dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake is a scathing criticism of current society. She portrays the 21st century as a world dominated by international corporations who subjugate their employees, a world where even children watch live executions on the internet, a world where humanities and the arts are vilified in favor of fields like biotechnology and engineering. The Crakers, human-like creatures who also inhabit this world, have a mysterious origin — and at the end of the book, Atwood reveals that they were created by a giant corporation's genetic engineering experiment. In the end, the creator of the Crakers also launches a genetically engineered virus that kills almost all of the humans; it's quite a formidable cautionary tale about the dangers of corporations with too much power.

Dreadful Sanctuary by Eric Frank Russell

1948 saw the release of perhaps the first major conspiracy novel in science fiction, Russell's Dreadful Sanctuary. In his story, a secret society keeps the rest of humankind from discovering or contacting alien life. After several failed missions to space, it seems that Earth is being quarantined by the universal community; in fact, however, the secret society is simply spreading that illusion to control the population. Dreadful Sanctuary was originally serialized in Astounding Science Fiction, but Russell rewrote it to publish it as a paperback novel in 1967 — just two years before humans successfully reached the moon. Thank goodness no one's stopping us from space exploration in real life ... or are they?

Whether it's Communists, Russians, our own government, or an extraterrestrial one, fears of hidden and powerful villains will probably never end. As ridiculous as conspiracy theory stories may sound sometimes, they're necessary for a society that wants to give its average, ordinary members some level of control. After all, nobody likes totalitarianism, except perhaps totalitarian leaders.

CHUD is reporting that the Plastic Man script has been done for years. This superhero movie is pretty unbelievable but I don't want it to get made just so I can see some Hollywood hot shot don the bathing suit bottom, lace-up front costume of Plastic Man.

Jason Segel

Why He's Perfect To Fight The Clam: This man knows how to use his body for comedy, he's practically buck naked throughout most of Forgetting Sarah Marshall and it's hilarious.
Why He May Not Be Flexible Enough: This isn't a Segel flaw so much as a Seth Rogen problem. With Rogen making the Green Hornet movie, Segel may be tempted to go in a Rogen direction, I urge him not to.

Alan Tudyk:

Why He's Perfect To Fight The Clam: Tudyk is a wonderful blend of humor and honesty, a perfect combination for a superhero. He totally sells any character he steps into, be it the pilot of Serenity of a gay rehabbing body builder. Tudyk would make you believe the Clam was real, and a force to be feared, but then deliver some quality one-liners.
Why He May Not Be Flexible Enough: How bendy is he really? He may need to take up pilates.

Glenn Howerton

Why He's Perfect To Fight The Clam: Hilarious member of the It's Always Sunny gang. Glenn will sell even the most unbelievable laugh-at-yourself script, which makes him perfect for plastic.
Why He May Not Be Flexible Enough: He may be too unknown to star in a big superhero movie.

[CHUD]

When asked if the Wachowski brothers were going to jump on the 3-D bandwagon Joel Silver confirmed that they had all been talking about making the original Speed Racer in 3-D. But thankfully the screen jumping cars will have to wait for the sequel.

"Yeah, we talked about this being 3-D. We actually discussed this being 3-D. There aren't enough theatres yet right now to make it really...it would have taxed us to make this 3-D right now. But maybe if we make a sequel, I mean, they have a story for a sequel and if they make it."

Silver also explained that the Speed Racer story isn't over for the brothers, and while they may not be the ones to direct it, they definitely don't want to give up writing for Speed Racer.

"Well, there's things they want to do with him," Silver explained. "There's as many episodes of this cartoon so there's a lot of ideas, but if we make the sequel maybe that will be in 3-D, but I mean it would have been possible, because it was digital to begin with, to do it in 3-D and all those shots were rendered so it would have been possible."

From the moment the movie begins with young Speed Racer in elementary school spacing out during a test by drawing pictures of cars, you know the movie isn't just going to be a lot of empty visuals and "oh look we can make live action look cartoony." For when Speed draws, the next thing you see is him zooming through a landscape that looks just like his drawing — it's a lovely, quick way of showing us the inside of a kid's imagination, as he draws himself crossing the finish line and lets out a "crowd goes wild" noise in the middle of class.

There's a lot of stuff like this scene in the movie, where kids are going nuts over pop culture — and it works. The kid excitement in Speed Racer is genuinely infectious. You'll find yourself whooping along with Speed's little brother Spridle and chimp Chim Chim when they watch anime on TV and suddenly jump inside it, fighting each other and the spikey mechas with bright CGI lines careening around their bodies, and their faces transfigured by crazed, abandoned childish delight. Maybe it's just because a lot of us who grew up with nutty, zoomy pop culture like original Japanese cartoon Speed Racer still have the walls of our minds painted with crayon-bright explosions. Whatever the reason, the Wachowskis have hit a sweet, goofy nerve here and they play it well.

The plot of the flick couldn't be simpler. Nice kid Speed Racer wants nothing more than to compete in the big leagues of racing. His family runs Racer Motors, a tiny independent car design company that turns out beauties like the Mach 5 (and later, the ultra-awesome Mach 6). After he wins his first big race, giant mega-corp businessman Royalton tries to become Speed's sponsor, promising him all the riches in the world. But Speed turns him down because he wants to stay independent with Racer Motors. That's when Royalton gets ugly and says racing is all about money and power and Speed can never hope to compete without corporate sponsorship.

Will the love of family and indie production values be able to topple big business and evil corporate overlords? And who is the mysterious Racer X who keeps helping him fight the evil Royalton thugs? That's what Speed Racer is all about. There's a heaping dose of Matrix-style politics here, and even a long speech from Royalton about the nature of power that totally felt like a satiric take on the Architect's speech in Matrix Reloaded. Luckily, we don't linger too long in the chambers of philosophy and instead head out to the glowing, crazy, hallucinogenic race track.

As I said earlier, you won't be shocked to know that the visuals in Speed Racer are seriously awesome. You've probably seen some previews by now, so you know the cars swirl and shimmy and the citiscapes are full of dazzling rays of light. Nothing on screen remains unaltered by CGI: it's augmented reality top to bottom, and the attention to detail is sometimes a little overwhelming. What may startle you, though, is the feeling you got watching The Matrix for the first time and said, "Holy fuck what the hell I have never seen that before and it looks crazy fucking great." There are a lot of things in Speed Racer your eyeballs will be experiencing for the first time — cool ways of composing scenes to make them look like cartoons, awesome concept design, and ninja fight scenes that are both exciting and silly enough for kids.

Those silly fight scenes are the other really cool thing about this flick, especially for the usually grim-and-dirty Wachowskis. A whole lot of Speed Racer is pure CGI slapstick and it's funny as hell. Blink and you'll miss some zany shit like a crazed Segway race in Royalton's tower, evil racing Vikings doing their evil Viking thang, and ongoing hijinks with Spridle and Chim Chim. Normally, I hate cute kids and monkeys in flicks, but (dare I say it) the Wachowskis did the right thing with them here. We get just enough monkey poop, and then we're back on the mesmerizing race track.

As somebody who watched the Matrix trilogy more times than I care to admit, one of the interesting things about Speed Racer was realizing that maybe those previous movies were actually a lot more tongue-in-cheek than they seemed. Or maybe the Wachowskis have finally grown a sense of humor about their previous deadly-serious, ninja-laden efforts. While Speed Racer may not go down in history like Matrix did, I think it marks a hopeful turning point in the Wachowskis' careers. If they can keep successfully switching gears like this, I think they have a lot more awesome in store for us in years to come.

In the meantime, they've given you a giant dose of fun and flash to start your summer right.

Speed Racer opens tonight.

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We've watched the full-length Speed Racer trailer a bunch of times, and we keep being blown away by a lot of the bizarre cityscapes that Speed races through. Where did those come from?

In the genesis of Larry and Andy's idea, they were trying to pay homage to the cartoon that came out of Japan in the 60s. And so the idea in a nutshell was to do a movie that was photographically real, but that was two dimensional that and had a sense of the cartoon style. And of course along with that, you need to design a city that s fresh and different [and] that's not as threatening as the city in The Matrix. [A city that's] fun and blatantly colorful. The original cartoon was full of colors that contradicted each other. They used color very well and they used two-dimensional design very well. We've tried to take it to the next level.

It looks like the designs have a lot of bright purples, reds and pinks in them.

There's lots of greens as well, and oranges, I think you'll find every color in the palette. And at times, it was quite a challenge to get all those things to work together.

Why was that challenging?

I think using a very broad palette with a lot of colors in it is very complicated. Larry and Andy wanted the film to be very colorful. There is a retro feeling to it. It's not exactly psychedelic at all, but it has parts of that. We were doing a lot of the pre-production in California, and we used that ranch style house and a lot of the colors from it, and we amped it up a hundred fold.

It definitely looks amped up. And it looks like it has a very cartoony style in general.

Larry and Andy are renowned for their groundbreaking worlds, and this will be another one. This will have a profound effect on how people go about doing things. There are a lot of very graphic images within the film. In one of the trailers, you'll see the faces kind of swirling across the background while the camera is moving. The camera is rotating around the room or panning around the room, and it's following a character, and intercut with that is another character who comes into the frame and sort of pushes the other character out as they're doing their dialog. It's very unusual. It's come from the world of 2D cartoons.
One of the fantastic things about the Wachowskis is their transitions from one scene to another. In Bound, which I didn't work on, there are some fantastic transitions. In The Matrix, they'll drop through the road [or the floor] from one room to another. I think in trailer #1, Speed and Royalton are having an altercation, and you'll see how one face almost pushes another face out... it's not a traditional way you'd cover a scene. There is a sense of a cartoon or an anime.

So does the movie take place in a future city? It certainly looks weird and futuristic.

There are two cities. Cosmopolis is the main city. George Hull did a lot of the design of the actual cities for me, he's one of the illustrators. We were taking inspirations from a lot of buildings around the world — and even from the [American] dollar bill, with the pyramid and the eye on top. One of the buildings is in fact that [pyramid], or very similar to that. It's a completely fanciful city. It's a huge city that's built on advertising and commerce. [In the movie]the world was a world of "corpocracy" as opposed to democracy.

It sounds a lot like our world, actually.

I suspect there's a kind of reference in that. They're very smart guys. The city came from that. We were trying to make a city that is full of color. There's a building that looks like a big sushi fish. There is a sense of playfulness — You could take a giant caterpillar and do some elongations and some geometry on it, and you could create a building. If you look really closely and freeze one frame, the background is like that.

In the film, when they get to the Grand Prix toward the end, the city surrounds the Crucible, which is the Grand Prix track. The track is literally in the city, and parts of the buildings are great big grandstands that can look down into the Grand Prix track. If you go to Chicago, to Wrigley Field, all around the baseball field, there are grandstand buildings that are five stories high and on top of some of them are homemade grandstands that people sell tickets to and you can sit there and look right down into the baseball.

What's it like designing sets and backgrounds using CGI? Is it harder than the design work for The Matrix?

Yes and no, in that we were designing a city that had particular style to it and color to it. There was a little more two-dimensional quality to it than there was in The Matrix. In The Matrix our big city was based on Sydney and then it was expanded, buildings were made taller, buildings were made longer. Particularly in the first Matrix when Agent Smith is talking to Morpheus — whey they have Morpheus a prisoner in the government building — the city behind Morpheus in the window is the city of Sydney, and we had just added a bigger building to it. Agent Smith says this was built at the pinnacle of human success.

Whereas the city of Cosmopolis is actually based in a fantasy world. There are a lot of elements based on car parts [in the buildings] but they're very subtly done. It's a lot like how when you look at the Empire State Building, they take a particular design motif and they expand on it. Certain things like that have been done with the buildings and the city of Cosmopolis, they'll take a particular piece of a grill of a car and they'll extrapolate on it so it doesn't look like a car part any more but there's a hint of it.

And you mentioned it's a very corporate-dominated world.

It's also a world where they don't use gasoline. They have motors that take like battery power and convert it using a thing called a transponder and they convert this theoretical energy through a convertinator, into a high powered non-CO2 fuel. They're not burning up gasoline when you see those cars going around.

Did you work on designing the cars as well as the sets?

Yes, the art department does that. We have a team of people who work with me who were doing that. The original Mach 5, the car Speed drives around in, was a cartoon car. We had to make a physical version of the car, it doesn't drive, but you can push it around. Julian [Jenson] reinterpreted that car to bring it into the 21st century. It's a very beautiful looking car. It certainly has a retro quality to it. When you look at it you say, "Oh it's the Mach 5 from the cartoon," but it's developed a long way. They did a beautiful job of doing everything from the bumble bee to the shooting star that flies out of the car that Rex Race drives. That's an absolutely gorgeous car. [The cars in the movie] can do lots of tricks, they have saws and jumping legs.

Everybody who worked on this was out to put in the fun elements that you have a cartoon that you can't really put into a regular movie.

In our world we have architects. In Speed's world, they have carchitects. [If you] want a car, you get someone to customize or design your car for you. It doesn't have to be the most expensive. All the street cars [are customized], so when you drive down the road what you see is just the most beautiful cars and exotic cars that you could possibly imagine. It's like going to the Pebble Beach Concourse up at Monterey. The Concourse de Elegance. They have the most beautiful cars in the world, from all time periods from the futuristic cars the concept cars to the 1910s and earlier probably. Some of the cars there are the concept cars of the 1920s or 1950s. If you're going to have a city called Cosmpopolis, it has to be very cosmopolitan. Every car you see is absolutely uniquely beautiful.

And then there are the race cars?

Race cars in Speed's time are called T-180s, and their wheels are able to rotate 180 degrees, rather than the regular 90 degrees. So the car can travel down the race track sideways. In its simplest form, the wheel is captured form above and then it has a drive shaft.

Captured from above?

You know, in a shopping trolley, the wheel is captured from above, and the wheel can spin right around, and then the car has a flexible drive-shaft which is coming off this very powerful non-polluting engine. It's like ion power. So the T180s, they'll do 300 miles per hour, they're very fast. Some other racers we see, [like the one] that Rex Racer is racing, they're the cars that are pre-T-180, their wheels will only partially spin. We were trying to make a film of a parallel world. It's our world, but it's slightly off axis a little bit.

Famous names: The Wachowski brothers, Keanu Reeves, Carrie Ann Moss, Laurence Fishbourne

Crunchy goodness: 5

Sequels: The Matrix was followed by The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, which were released within months of each other (a release method later employed by Quentin Tarantino for Kill Bill I and II). While both sequels were as visually stunning as the first, many criticized the second film for getting bogged down in long, philosophical debates and a 6-minute rave sequence that appeared to serve no purpose other than to allow Neo and Trinity to have sex with bad music in the background.

Design breakthrough: Director/producer pair the Wachowski brothers spent a lot of time and money on special effects for The Matrix, resulting in visual extravaganza that influenced science fiction films of the early twenty-first century as much as Bladerunner influenced those of the late twentieth. Chief among their innovations was something they called "bullet time," where a 360 degree arrangement of cameras around their subject allowed them to create "virtual cinematography" where the audience's point of view whirls in real-time around a slow-motion (fight) sequence.

Memorable product tie-in: Trinity uses a real-life hacker's tool, a port scanner called nmap, to break into a power plant. This caused thousands of geeks everywhere to embrace the trilogy as the only movie that had ever represented hacking "realistically."

What Is The Matrix? Official Site