![]() ![]() Carmen notices the same thing and as she leaps to get to Juni, she actually falls downward into Floop’s abyss. When Gregorio notices the floor is falling like a puzzle between them he attempts to jump across it, failing, but soon discovering it is a graphic illusion as he smacks against the hard floor beneath him. The scene where Juni confronts a giant cloud-encompassed Floop particularly stands out as a great piece of visual style.Īnother fun moment is the contrasting of the floor falling out between Gregario and Carmen. All of this gives it an aesthetic with more thought put into than your average kid’s movie setting. Floop kind of wants to take over the world (but is ultimately a good guy?) and has large thumb henchmen while he is manipulated by Minion (no not those little yellow guys!). Spy Kids is pretty weird, it’s probably not as weird throughout as The Fifth Element, but a huge part of the movie’s plot takes place around Floop’s Floogies, a creepy television program with distorted Floogles as the main characters alongside Alan Cumming’s Floop ( Floop is a mad man). Of course Machete unfortunately never makes mention of anything in the Spy Kids world and is itself highly graphic in nature, only adding to the mind-blowing decision to serialize the two stories together. Where it really goes off the track was in a fake trailer that appeared in Grindhouse which showed Trujillo in a film called Machete come 2010 that film was actually released and it was confirmed that it indeed was the same character, brother of Gregario and uncle to Juni and Carmen: Machete Cortez. Machete (played by Danny Trujillo) is an important part of the Spy Kids universe, he plays a Han Solo role in saving the day toward the end and helps to reaffirm the film’s family first message. After the Cortez children have discovered their parents are spies, that their uncle is not their uncle, and the spy organization has tried to steal the third brain from them, they seek refuge from their real uncle–gadget designer Machete. The other Rodriguez styling of note would not really come into play until years later, but perhaps hints at a wider vision of the Spy Kids world that allowed for it to be so successful. The early scenes (which are among the best) showcase Carla Gugino and Antonio Banderas’ budding relationship as rival spies is backed by Latin classical guitar (composed by Rodriguez himself) and feels truly a part of a specific culture. With a specific point of view, the characters are grounded in a reality–a reality outside the normal American spy’s perspective. Rodriguez is of Mexican descent, and the film makes no bones about the characters’ heritage, emphasizing a sense of pride for them (“Remember, you are a Cortez”). This obsession with peculiar off-beat films does pour over into the aesthetic of Spy Kids, but the greatest influence Rodriguez brings is a Latino one. Like Tarantino, Rodriguez is a cinephile whose tastes veer toward the violent, gory, and low brow. Any filmmaker whose tastes are in line with Tarantino, certainly should not be expected to be creating a series of kid’s movies though I should note on record I would be first in line to see a Tarantino children’s flick and might even consider having a child just for the occasion. Perhaps more importantly this spawned a friendship with Quentin Tarantino whose work and styles would become highly intertwined (especially in 2007’s Grindhouse which saw them each releasing a film as part of a double feature in the vein of old B-movies they enjoyed). Rodriguez is a strange choice to direct a kid’s movie, he gained notice creating a short horror film which then allowed him to make El Mariachi–an action film that would spawn two loose sequels (as we will see Rodriguez loves serializing things). The first part of the film that stands as a unique presence in the children’s film/spy hybrid space in which Spy Kids exists, is the true auteur vision director Robert Rodriguez brings to it. I have several theories as to why this could be, which I will get into throughout the piece, along with whether the filmmaking choices work effectively. Whatever was in the critics’ water at screenings in 2001 sure left a positive mark on them upon viewing Spy Kids. What really pushed it over for me was upon researching the film (by research I mean a quick Google search) I soon discovered that the film sits at a dumbfounding 93% on Rotten Tomatoes. I grew up enjoying the Spy Kids movies, their strange aesthetic and cool gadgets certainly made an imprint into my memory, and when I was thinking about doing a rematch for this month it seemed like a prime candidate. ![]()
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