So last week I began reviewing each box as its respective movie is released, rating them in categories of packaging, bounty, the coolest toy, the lamest toy, and the general feeling of swag overkill. Last week, of course, was Iron Man. So let's all hit the gas over the jump for a rundown of this week's toy box: Speed Racer.

A sleek, white case with a helpful carrying handle decorated with the iconic Speed Racer "M" calls to mind the old Hot Wheels cases of yore, and, whaddaya know, there be Hot Wheels inside! But I'm zooming ahead of myself here. Upon opening said case, you're greeted with a diorama of sorts of an Emile Hirsch cut-out next to a Mach 6 cut-out, and, magically, a voice plays as if over a raceway loudspeaker: "All drivers to your cars, please! All drivers to your cars!" Then engines rev, tires squeal, and with a Vrrrrrrrroooooommm! Screeeeeee! Zzvvvrrooooo! we're off to the swaggy races.

More people remember the 1960s Japanese import cartoon "Speed Racer" for its catchy theme song than its stories or characters. The movie adaptation, helmed by "Matrix" superstars the Wachowski brothers, follows the same track with little character development and not much story story.

Instead, the Wachowskis set out to create a eye candy with over-the-top races and a hybrid of "Matrix" martial arts and "Three Stooges" slapstick. This amounts to an exhilarating 30 minutes, James Sanford says, but the movie wears out its welcome as it stretches longer than two hours.

As the long race unfolds, the all-star cast doesn't get to do much. Emile Hirsch ("Into the Wild"), Christina Ricci ("Black Snake Moan") and Matthew Fox ("Lost") are merely stick figures that look good driving cars or piloting helicopters.
What Happens in Vegas

Ashton Kutcher and Cameron Diaz play down-on-their-luck New Yorkers who get hitch during an alcohol-fueled evening in Las Vegas. Before they can get the marriage annulled, they win a $3 million jackpot. They take the problem to a judge, who sentences them to six months of living together.

There’s an interesting debate tucked into the heart of the British comedy “Son of Rambow,” a good argument about what movies kids should see and how old they should be when they see them.

The film is a childs’-eye view of action movies, movie-making and movie magic. It’s about a would-be 12-year-old filmmaker who shows a naive, unworldly classmate “First Blood,” inspiring the more naive boy to want to star in and write “Son of Rambow,” his own guts-and-glory combat film that the boys - and soon all their classmates - do-it-yourself shoot in their corner of 1980s suburban England.

Son of Rambow
(Paramount Vantage; US theatrical: 2 May 2008; UK theatrical: 4 Apr 2008)
 Official SiteGarth Jennings, director of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe” movie, wrote and directed “Rambow.” And his friend and business partner, Nick Goldsmith, produced it. Their movie is a comedy more about a love of movies and a desire to make them than about childhood. But the age-appropriate issue, “movies you’re not supposed to see,” interests them.

It’s longer than kids movies usually are, for one thing, but at the Saturday morning screening, bathroom traffic on the aisle was minimal. For the most part, the kids were INTO it.

Nor does this fantasy about an auto racing family look like any kids movie anyone’s ever seen. It’s in bright, dazzling, candy store colors slurpy reds, gooey greens, banana yellows. It’s unashamedly part cartoon and part video game, with constant undisguised back screen projections upon which are plastered all sorts of flat images that might relate to the backgrounds and, then again, might not.

And its dialogue is part kids cartoon (“My brother’s the best racer in the world!”), part ’30s melodrama and part pop Tom Stoppard. I wouldn’t worry about not having a convenient kid to snag and take to this thing, I’d simply go if you’ve ever liked a movie by Andy and Larry Wachowski, whose film credits include “The Matrix” series and “V for Vendetta.” They are, by any view, among the more delightfully lunatic specimens of Hollywood creativity extant.

Nerdstalgia, it seems, is here to stay.

Playing on rose-colored memories of afternoon and Saturday morning cartoons is a strategy that has worked extremely well for studios - think last year's "Transformers" or "Alvin and the Chipmunks." Both were live-action remakes of childhood favorites and made hundreds of millions at the box office.

So it's no surprise that Hollywood continues to crank out one movie after another based on popular old shows and cartoons. On the heels of "Speed Racer's" arrival, the summer will also see a revamped "Get Smart" starring Steve Carrell. And those longing for a big-screen "A-Team" revival are hoping a plan will come together next year. Shows, cartoons - it doesn't matter; both can translate into movie gold. The "Mission Impossible" movie series has made more than half a billion dollars.

"These things are slam dunks when it comes to marketing because there's a pre-existing audience of people who remember the original shows," says Drew McWeeny, who writes as "Moriarty" on the popular movie site, Ain't It Cool News. "But at this point, we're seeing this 'nerdstalgia' grow out of control."

First of all, I must say I think the current movie version of "Ironman" is one of the better screen adaptations of a comic book franchise. I cannot think of a better actor to play Tony Stark than Robert Downey, Jr. Terence Howard, Gwyneth Paltrow and Jeff Bridges all give solid performances and Jon Favreau's direction is top-notch. The story is a little heavy on showing how Tony Stark becomes Iron Man, leaving less time for acts of superhero-ness. But all-in-all, I was highly entertained by this flick and I think anyone worth their geek card must run, not walk, to see this movie.

But is "Ironman" safe for the Geeklets?

Adult Situations: Tony Stark loves his women. There is one scene where Tony climbs in bed with a female reporter, but they roll off the bed and out of frame before anything more suggestive is shown. Another scene has the flight attendants on Tony's private airplane dancing. Although there are moving disco lights and apparently a stripper pole in view, nothing is terribly suggestive.

movie June 13. Then Dark Horse Comics' red-skinned ex-demon Hellboy and DC Comics' classic character Batman get their second go-rounds in their current franchises ("Hellboy II: The Golden Army" will come out July 11, while "The Dark Knight" arrives July 18).
    The influence of comic books can be seen indirectly in other summer movies. For example: The eye-popping colors of "Speed Racer" (May 9), a movie based on a Japanese anime cartoon; the bulbous lettering of the hero's name in the posters for "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" (May 22); the loose adaptation of Mike Millar's comic miniseries "Wanted" (June 27), starring Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman as members of a secret society of assassins;and "Hancock" (July 2), in which Will Smith plays an anti-social superhero in need of a P.R. makeover.
    Why are comic-book stories big now? Kerry Jackson, co-host of X96's "Radio From Hell" and a comics fan, has a theory.

Review: Son of Rambow
Will (Bill Milner) grows up in a religious brethren that forbids television and movies. When he sees a bootleg of First Blood at Carter (Will Poulter)'s house, it inspires his imagination. With Carter obsessed with videos, Will calls himself the son of Rambow (because presumably he doesn't know how to spell the name) and they start making that movie.

That still sounds cool and funny, right? Well, that's only part of it. The tone begins heightened, surreal but logical in the world of what we consider elementary school (in England it's secondary school). Once he sees Rambo, there are glimpses of total fantasy, with visionary effects that are like Tim Burton meets Michel Gondry. It follows the bizarre logic of kids playing, sometimes in character, sometimes in the scene, at their creative whims.

Getting to this point has been slow but forgivable if that's going to be the movie. It's still not. While the kids doing stunts are wild, gloriously imitatable, dangerous gags, it's got all this stuff about neglected kids. Will's go the extreme religious denial of all things modern cult and Carter is left alone with his teenage brother by a mom we never see.
It would be fine if this were just the context for losing themselves in fantasy, but it's the majority of the film if you actually count screen time. It's not anti-religious. It's just showing the importance of having a well rounded life. Nothing can be the ONLY thing in your life, not even God (don't worry, he wants me to say this.) The neglect thing is more obvious, and who really wants to see this traumatized kid go through that, even if his overcompensation can be fun.

Tony Stark, the unlikely hero of the Iron Man comics co-created by Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, Don Heck, and Jack Kirby, is one such creation. A boy-genius inventor and heir to a weapons-manufacturing empire, Stark initially conceives of his crime-fighting alter-ego in an act of life-saving self-preservation, donning a makeshift suit of rocket-powered armor in order to escape from the bad guys who've abducted him during a Stark Industries field test. Nothing if not a product of his foreign-policy moment, Stark first appeared in the March 1963 issue of Marvel's Tales of Suspense, just in time to fight the encroaching Red menace in Southeast Asia. In the 2008 film version of Iron Man, directed by Jon Favreau, Stark finds himself at odds with Afghan insurgents called the Ten Rings who, in a wonderful Taliban-era irony, come armed with a black-market supply of Stark's own war machines.
Where Lee and his collaborators based Stark in part on Howard Hughes, the 21st-century version embodied here by Robert Downey Jr. is more like a defense-industry Mark Cuban or Richard Branson a coiffed and tanned, media-savvy technocrat whose too-cool-for-the-planet attitude says that as long as the market is up and we're kicking Charlie's (or Hadji's) ass, it doesn't much matter how we're doing it. But Stark soon gets his comeuppance in a desert-chic cave where, his shrapnel-riddled heart kept a-ticking by a jerry-rigged electromagnet and a Ten Rings doyen demanding a custom-built smart bomb from Stark's newly deployed "Freedom line," he realizes that maybe WMDs aren't so great after all.

And for now, Speed is in the lead. Mattel has begun its largest movie-related toy launch by releasing 1,500 action figures, race tracks and versions of the TV show's famous Mach 5. Nearly 3,000 items, including blankets, underwear and video games, will arrive in time for the movie May 9. Also vying for kids' attention and parents' wallets:

•Iron Man, out Friday, has 275 toys based on the comic book hero and another 1,475 merchandise promotions.

•The Incredible Hulk, due June 13, will feature about 260 green-hued toys and 1,340 promotional items.

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•The Dark Knight, due July 18, will have 950 toys and another 4,000 merchandising items, plus hundreds of Batman toys and clothes that have been available since Tim Burton revived the franchise in 1989.