Huffington broke the news that there was a new Wachowski movie, and she was appearing in it, by tweeting a series of pictures showing "how I'll look in 90 years." Including the one above and this one:

And Huffington also tweeted that it's a "futuristic movie on Iraq." (Presumably looking back at the Iraq war, not just about the country in general.)

No further details were forthcoming, even on Huffington's own site. Speculation among film bloggers is that the Wachowskis are simply doing screen tests for their next project. Cinematical's Erik Davis points out, in an email to Slashfilm, that the Wachowskis did option David Mitchell's novel Cloud Atlas, parts of which take place in a post-apocalyptic future. In Cloud Atlas, a series of nested stories take us forward in time from the nineteenth century to the distant future. It's not clear right now if the Wachowskis are producing the film and reported director Tom Tykwer is still on board, or if the Wachowskis have taken over the directing reins.

Update: Chud insists, based on inside sources, that the Wachowskis aren't actually filming a new movie at all:

In fact, [Huffington]'s participating in tests for their next project. They're just shooting a couple of days this month, but it's all just test footage. As to what that next project is... well, I'm trying to find out. But in the meantime know that the Wachowskis are not shooting a secret movie... I should mention that these are likely camera tests. They're shooting on the RED.

Oh, and here's a picture of Huffington with Lana Wachowski and her parents:

[Slashfilm via Obsessed With Film]

After I saw Watchmen, which was a bumpy but intriguing ride, I realized what the movie was missing that might have saved it. It needed the visual pyrotechnics of the Wachowskis, whose movies always make you feel like your eyeballs just got an upgrade. Watchmen may have been gorgeous, but it wasn't visually arresting the way The Matrix was. Remember when you first saw bullet time? Or any of the fight scenes in any of the Matrix flicks (even the sequels)? They were insane in the best possible way.

If only Zack Snyder could have brought in the Wachowskis to do the visual effects and fight staging for Watchmen, the movie might genuinely have changed the way we see comic book movies - the same way the Matrix Trilogy changed scifi. Arguably, Snyder's 300 could never have existed without Matrix - all those slo-mo, hyperstylized fights were straight out of Wachowskitown.

The problem with the Wachowskis is that they seem to have a hard time hitting on stories that make audiences flock to the theater. Certainly the first Matrix flick was popular, but that may have been a lucky accident. The second two films were talky and slow, driving away fans. And for various reasons that I must confess I don't entirely understand, Speed Racer was critically panned and sent audiences away in droves. I actually loved Speed Racer, and thought the Matrix sequels had a lot of interesting stuff in them, but they were not hits (though the Matrix sequels made decent box office).

Still, I think that audiences respond to the Wachowskis visual stylings, even if they don't like the movies the duo hang them on. And that's why I think the Wachowskis' next move should be to open a visual effects studio like George Lucas' LucasArts and ILM, or like Peter Jackson's Weta Workshop. We need to get the amazing visual creativity of the Wachowskis harnessed to a Hollywood story that will pull in audiences. I know they want to get more into writing - they worked on the V for Vendetta screenplay - but I think visual effects are their true calling.

Imagine, for example, that the Wachowskis had been hired to do the visual effects on, say, World War Z. This is a post-apocalyptic war flick currently in production, which will require droves of CGI zombies as well as lots of concept design on the cities ravaged by the war between disease-ridden "zombies" and the uninfected humans. Based on a bestselling novel, this movie cries out for a team that can totally reimagine the way CGI might be used to show hordes of rampaging zombies. Imagine the scene where Trinity and Neo gun their way into that building in the Matrix, but with zombies. Or how about a zombie whose body moves with the same cyberorganic grace as the Machines? Or a Battle of Yonkers whose pyrotechnic madness is an echo of the light chaos in Speed Racer? Freaky, awesome, and surprising.

And if the Wachowskis had done the concept design and visual effects for the upcoming Terminator 4 movie? Well, I would have total faith in its awesomeness. Not that I think McG's flick won't rock - but I'm also not expecting to see anything new. A Wachowski-created Terminator, however, would probably blow the eyes right out of my sockets.

I'm not saying I don't want to see another Wachowski movie, because I do. But I also don't want to see the Wachowskis' considerable talents squandered. I want to see their visual audaciousness working its way into many more movies, transforming the way we look at Hollywood flicks from the inside out.

10. Most of the colors in Speed Racer are sparkly pastels, not the hard reds and butch "gold titanium alloy" of Iron Man. What is this? Queer Eye for the action hero?

9. Speed Racer dresses in a shiny purple suit at one point, and in a scarf at another. He wears a lot of white, and is just as pretty as Trixie, his girlfriend who drives a helicopter and repairs engines in the shop. Gender bending in an action movie not directed by Ridley "G.I. Jane" Scott? Not allowed.

8. Monkeys are gay.

7. When there's a ninja fight, Racer X pulls the ninja's pants off and we see that he's wearing big white boxers with a cute pattern on them. What kind of counter-ninja pulls off the ninja's pants? And what kind of ninja wears big white boxers?

6. One of the semi-good guys, Taejo (Rain), dresses up like a woman as part of an elaborate scheme for revenge. And he looks seriously hot in lady clothes.

5. Which reminds me of director Larry Wachowski, long rumored to be fond of lady clothes himself — or perhaps even on the road to becoming a woman. I can't believe how many people writing about Speed Racer have mentioned Larry's gender. Who the fuck cares about whether Larry is a he or a she or a bug person? Unless you are worried that this movie is too GAY for you.

4. One of the bad guys wears fake snakeskin and yells "ooohhhh!" a lot.

3. Several other bad guys are giant hairy men dressed in furs and Viking helmets. I think some of them might even have been centerfolds in Bear magazine.

2. Trixie's outfit matches her helicopter.

1. Speed loves his mother and is super-nice to his girlfriend. Obviously a homo! A true straight dude would be like Iron Man, obsessing over his dead dad and abusing every woman in his life.

According to Variety, "The story centers on a female journalist who is assigned to investigate a series of bizarre murders and discovers that the victims were all being treated by the head of an org that researches alien abductions." Wow so many questions. What do they mean bizarre? Bizarre like they died in clown suits of will be there wonderful horrible gore? Will there be aliens? And finally why make the main character a journalist? I feel like there are only 5 jobs for women in movies, journalist and secret agent being two of them. It's exciting to let McTeigue get his hands in this, he's pretty crafty with conspiracy theories and cover ups. First he worked with machine cover-ups, then government conspiracies now aliens. He's like Mulder. [Variety]

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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In this scene, where Speed and his pals race through a geometrically-impossible "ice mountain," it's clear we're inside an artificial world where humans and machines have become interchangeable. Watching Speed and his car is like seeing the movie Tron from the point of view of one of the programs. Lights dance everywhere, nobody obeys the laws of physics, and the cutsey thrill of it reminded me of Mario Kart 64. This flick captures the fun of racing videogames better than many racing games themselves do.

There's a kind of Disney-cartoon surrealism here: every character is a caricature, and reality has been pared down to one astonishing idea, which is that Nascar has become both beautiful and the very center of all culture. I love the way Speed does something visually incomprehensible with his car (going behind a guy to make him swerve or something?) that the announcer greets with the shout, "Great move!"

Speed's racecar work-family is like something out of the 1950s, the 1970s, and the 2000s; meanwhile, the scene itself is a mashup of Grease and Power Puff Girls. What is happening here? What decade is it? Who has the freakin nerve to make a muscular, tough-guy thing like a race car out of shiny white and pretty, pyrotechnic fizz? You have to be seriously badass to do that, and the Wachowskis pull it off with glammy zeal.

Ninjas make everything better, as you can see in this scene where the guy being attacked by the ninja knows that first he should put a shiny scarf over his face to do his anti-ninja moves. When I saw this fight, I was finally sold on the movie. This really is The Matrix, except with a sense of humor this time around.

7 New Clips from Speed Racer [Collider]

[IGN]

In a move similar to Battlestar Galactica hijacking your internets this Friday, Warner Bros will be speeding up show promos and website clips for various Viacom channels, including MTV, VH1, Spike, TV Land and Comedy Central from April 10th through 18th, promoting not only the Speed Racer movie, but also a tie-in contest giving fans a chance to win their very own Mach 5 through the RaceForSpeedRacer.com website.

The promotion is intended to detourn viewer's commercial-skipping DVR habits, according to MTV's creative director of digital fusion, Mark Fortner:

Consumers are utilizing their TiVos and DVRs to speed up programming... So instead of playing against that, we can sort of tie in with the way people are actually consuming media and behaving.

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.

Watch the trailer in HD at Yahoo.

Remember how dark the Matrix movies were? How gloomy and gray their pallette was? Well, the Watchowski sibs don't, judging from this new footage. This time, they're serving up a bright candy-floss-colored dystopian future, in which virtually everything is a shade of sherbet. My advice: wear your Neo sunglasses to the Imax showing.

There are so many ways to make Christina Ricci look like a cartoon character AND awesome, but this is not one of them. Click here to see ET's interview with Ricci, which isn't on YouTube yet. She doesn't reveal much, except that her character kisses Speed Racer, and she had no idea what was going on during filming because it was 100 percent greenscreen.

On the plus side, the car looks cool. And after the head-clutching Existentialism For Dummies of the two Matrix sequels, it might be good for the Wachowskis to serve up some brain-dead action. I'm just not sure why it needs to have actors, since it's all CGI and sticks close to the cartoon original.

• The Wachowskis' Speed Racer movie backgrounds will be all greenscreen like 300, says star Emile Hirsch. All except for Chim Chim the monkey, which is real. And presumably flung its poop at the pristine green walls. [Empire]
• Dave "Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" Eggers collaborated with director Spike Jonze on the script to Where The Wild Things Are, Jonze's next movie. Wild Things will mix live puppeteering and computer animation. [Hollywood Reporter]
• The Mist took ninth place in the holiday weekend box office, behind more obvious holiday movies Enchanted, This Christmas, Bee Movie and Fred Claus. But Beowulf, American Gangster and Hitman also blew The Mist away.

• Jack Black is bummed that he didn't get to star in a Green Lantern movie. Black was set to star in a comedy, involving an ordinary schlub who joins the corps of space cops with wishing rings. He would have attacked his enemies with green boxing gloves, cages... and condoms. Suddenly, the upcoming Justice League movie (which includes Green Lantern) doesn't sound so bad. [MTV Movies Blog]
• But Black's getting his revenge, by creating a fake trailer for Robocop. It's one of the viral videos posted on the Web site for Be Kind Rewind, his January 2008 film about a guy who erases a video store's stock and decides to remake every movie himself. [Slashfilm]
• When Michelle Forbes return to play Admiral Cain one last time, she chased the other Battlestar actors around the set demanding if they knew who the final Cylon was. And she got nothing. Come to think of it, maybe Cain's the last Cylon? [TV Guide]
• The fans are all right. Southwest Airlines' Spirit in-flight magazine randomly decided to feature an article about fan-fiction. Want to see a version of Heroes where the physics actually makes sense? Leave it to the fans. [Spirit]