{"id":481,"date":"2002-06-17T01:23:16","date_gmt":"2002-06-17T08:23:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2002\/06\/17\/481.html"},"modified":"2002-06-17T01:23:16","modified_gmt":"2002-06-17T08:23:16","slug":"spy-kids","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2002\/06\/17\/spy-kids\/","title":{"rendered":"Spy Kids"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

On the one hand, Robert Rodriguez<\/a> wrote and directed Desperado<\/a>, which I thought was stylish and nicely done. On the other hand, he directed From Dusk Till Dawn<\/a>, which I thought started out like an interesting Tarantino movie and then dissolved into mindless vampire carnage.<\/p>\n

So I wasn't quite sure what to expect from Spy Kids<\/a>, but Nick Lowe (superb film critic for Interzone,<\/cite> who may have supplanted Richard von Busack in the number-one spot on my personal hierarchy of film reviewers) reviewed it fairly favorably a while back, so I figured I'd give it a try. Besides, I tend to figure that any movie featuring Antonio Banderas can't be all<\/em> bad. (Well, except for Two Much.<\/cite>)<\/p>\n

It turned out to be mostly what I expected: fun fluff, enjoyable if you can turn off your brain and relax into the silliness. Which I mostly could. The cartoony bits got a little bit too cartoony for me, but in some ways that added to the silly charm, and kept me from taking the movie too seriously. I mean, we're talking about a movie in which the villain is a cross between Pee-Wee Herman and Willy Wonka; he's a kids'-TV-show host whose theme song starts like this:<\/p>\n

\"It's a cruel, cruel world, all you little boys and girls,
\nAnd some mean, nasty people want to have you for their sup-per. . . .\"<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Some other interesting notes: the villain's assistant, a character by the name of Minion, is played by Tony Shalhoub, who I like a great deal; there are cameos by Cheech Marin and (right at the end) George Clooney; various characters have names that are references to Notorious;<\/cite> Mike Judge (creator of Beavis & Butt-head<\/cite>) and Robert Patrick (villain of Terminator 2<\/cite>) have fairly prominent parts. Some scenes are set in the fictional city of San Diablo, which I thought was a great city name.<\/p>\n

And it's the only movie I can think of that features a Latino super-spy, not to mention his half-Latino kids.<\/p>\n

Overall: surprisingly fun; several very nice moments; not brilliant by any means, but not bad either. I may even see the sequel, due out later this year.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On the one hand, Robert Rodriguez wrote and directed Desperado, which I thought was stylish and nicely done. On the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=481"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}