Word: rodriguezes
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...Rodriguez begins to ponder the Four Seasons notepad sitting in front of him and, all of a sudden, begins to scribble furiously...
...filmmaker, Robert Rodriguez has a kind of dazzling, turbo-charged vitality that is only enhanced by the flippant, let's-see-how-far-over-the-top-we-can-go nature of his work. Eight years after becoming an indelible symbol for the resourceful tactics of guerilla filmmaking with the taut, no-budget wonder El Mariachi, Rodriguez has become an eye-candy dynamo; a gleeful purveyor of pulp so jammed with spicy flavor that it seems ready to rupture on screen at any moment. With the propulsive mayhem of his neo-Spaghetti Western Desperado, Rodriguez established himself as a caffeine-saturated...
What then are we to make of Rodriguez's whimsical Spy Kids, the kind of innocuous, McDonald's-friendly family feature that's primarily geared towards a demographic that would be lucky to sneak a glimpse of From Dusk Till Dawn on HBO before their parents caught them? A kind of kiddie James Bond dropped into a surreal Willy Wonka-style world, Spy Kids ostensibly stars Antonio Banderas and Carla Gugino as a pair of secret agents who decide to retire from the espionage game and settle into a quiet family life, but the real heroes are their plucky tykes...
...Rodriguez, however, pushes into uncharted territory through the cotton-candy dreamscape world of his impish villain Floop (a marvelous Alan Cumming), a Pee-Wee Herman clone who serves as ringmaster for a Teletubbies-styled kiddie show and dreams of-what else-world domination. Some of the elements in his towering, Gothic seaside castle reflect a vibrant visual imagination, most notably a sprawling floor that proves to be composed of giant jigsaw puzzle pieces. Others, such as the robot minions whose limbs consist of nothing but thumbs, smack of watered-down Tim Burton...
...larger problem with Spy Kids, however, has to do with Rodriguez's inherent brand of filmmaking, which proves less suited to the constructs of the family feature. It's hardly a secret that his movies-especially the ones he writes himself-offer all the complexity of a dime-store novel. The fairly primitive characters in Desperado, after all, only really exist inasmuch is necessary to allow Rodriguez to string-together and stage his elaborate action set-pieces. It hardly matters one wink, however, because the whole movie is so intoxicated by its own style that its verve and kinetic energy...