It's sort of funny to pick up a DVD not expecting much but a chuckle here and there, only to be confronted by a film that preserves the best moments of a shining part of childhood. Really, I didn't expect this film to be this good, thanks to this review here.
This is not a typical British coming-of-age tale. When they're not doing feature films, Jennings and Goldsmith are kept busy making commercials and music videos and the experience has left an indelible mark on Jennings's style. He's the kind of director who takes the phrase "heightened sensation" pretty seriously. Hence, British social realism is left far behind once Will is launched on his new career as a stuntman. It's clear that we're looking on the land of childhood through a magnifying lens, which means the film's production designers have just as much to do with the business of character revelation as its script does. The boys' already turbulent school life, for instance, is further complicated by the arrival of a group of French exchange students led by the ultra chic Didier (Jules Sitruk). This paragon of style soon has his fellow fashion victims in thrall, leading to a subplot that looks as if it has been lifted straight out of a music video.
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It's a sweet and intermittently funny film but all that video work seems to have imbued Jennings with a strong taste for the disconnected narrative.
The script is not so much written as assembled, anecdote by anecdote. As a result, you never quite settle in.
Umm, no, no, no,no. This is a complete misreading of the charms of the film and I should have known better than to trust Sandra Hall who gave it 3 stars. This is actually a much more worthy film than her pithy closing line implies. This is a film for film makers to savor; and I'm kicking myself that I missed this at the cinemas.
What's Good About It
If you were ever a kid that ran around with your dad's camera shooting recreated movie and TV scenes with your friends, then you understand implicitly the problematic of this film. How do you get your friends to do what you want for the film? How do you get your props? Who's going to come up with the story? Where the hell are you going to shoot this? How do you do it outside of school hours in the short hours between end of school and sunset?
All these issues are in fact, implicit in the act of film making. You could go to film school and you're faced with equally vexing logistical problems. You can be working on a low budget film or even a reasonably budgeted film and still face vexing issues of logistics. This film, traces it right back to the school yard where enduring friendships are forged and memories made.
The snippets of Rambo we see are only a catalyst into the world of boys actually having a boys' own adventure with a camera. I mentioned ted Kotcheff, who actually directed Rambo in the last film review I did for Wake In Fright. My guess is that if you asked him about 'Son of Rambow', he would give it 5 stars for being more than an homage, and more of a thesis on the impulse to make films. This is not a film about the cultural impact of Rambo at all. This is a film about film making at its best.
There are many good films about film-making. In fact, you could argue the best films are about film-making because that's what the writers, producers and directors know best in their lives. What makes 'Son of Rambow' more perceptive than all those films is that it doesn't mention the business. There's nothing about the evil studios and agents and money-men. It just talks about the joy of making a film. It's all there.
What's Bad About It
Ask me another day. I'm sure there's something, but I can't think of it today. If you can't like this film for what it is, there's something wrong with you, not the film.
What's Interesting About It
Ostensibly, the film within the film is about the journey of the son of Rambo going to rescue Rambo. What does this mean ina cultural sense? I think it's an attempt to repatriate Rambo as a figure in fiction.Does Rambo (and by extension the 1980s) need rescuing? If the critical responses to 'Rambo', the fourth movie in the franchise is anything to go by, maybe there needs to be a rescue after all. I wasn't a fan of the 1980s as they unfolded. Reagan and George Bush Snr. weren't much joy, and the MTV thing and the weird quirks of fashion were not something that makes me nostalgic. At the time, Rambo movies were the synonym for big, dumb and Propaganda for the misanthropic conservative agenda. Let's be honest, they were laughable even then.
Yet, even allowing for all that derision, there is something in the Rambo movie sagas worth rescuing, and therein lies the interest today.
Here's an article with Syvester Stallone talking about it.
"When I first heard . . . I assumed it was going to be a very broad and stylized joke-a-minute comedy at Rambo's expense," Sylvester Stallone said by e-mail. But he took a look at "Son of Rambow," the playfully rambunctious tale of two boys in 1980s small-town England, and liked what he saw.
"The fact that it was so heartwarming is the result of brilliant filmmaking by its creators," Stallone said.
It's the kind of triumph filmmakers dream of. Having finished "Rambow" just a week before its showing at the Sundance Film Festival last year, writer-director Garth Jennings and producer Nick Goldsmith saw it become the biggest sale of the festival. Then came the long wait for licensing approvals -- though their confidence in their little film never wavered.
"If we were asking to use the clips to show the film in a negative light, we may have had some problems," Goldsmith said, "but [our] film is clearly a celebration of that film. I don't think we ever went in thinking they were going to say no, and from Day One it was all very amicable."
The first thing that strikes you is that this film isn't actually interested in the Rambo persona; it's far more interested in Rambo as an icon around which the kids galvanise their vision into a film. And galvanise they do as only kids can.
It's interesting because once you get to film school, it's suddenly a lot harder to galvanise around a project. It's hard to explain, but I think what happens is that people become so self-reflexive that they refuse to partake in other people's fantasies. Once you're out in the business doing this stuff at any level, you sort of switch off to the childish impulses and you busily try to deliver a 'product' and end up killing the joy within.
So when Rambo erupts on the screen with the sheltered kid watching, it's a tremendous moment of re-discovery for us, where we click that maybe Stallone and Kotcheff had a rocking good time making 'First Blood'; that maybe the reason we keep getting sequels isn't just because it's good repeat business, but because the participants get a kick out of doing that thing that gives them such a buzz.
The film actually opens up a vein of thought that doesn't get discussed a lot in the business proper. But Orson Welles himself mentioned it at one point wherein he said words to the effect that the directing, he ould do for free. He charges his fee based on the waiting around that he has to do inbetween projects. If you understand that point, then there is no mystery to the genius of 'Son Of Rambow'.
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