Make Believe, Not War: Son of Rambow Online
The official website for Son of Rambow, the upcoming comedy from Nick Goldsmith and Garth Jennings (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), is up and running.
This is the one about the kid from the strictly religious community in rural England who is exposed to a pirated copy of Rambo: First Blood and then agrees to help make a sequel to it for an amateur film contest.
Rambow made a splash at Sundance ‘07, but has been held up due to rights issues surrounding use of footage from the Stallone film.
The English have a knack for this kind of inspired, spirited quirkiness that so often falls flat here in the States. Here’s hoping it delivers. I’ll be finding out later this week and I’ll let you know how it goes.
Son of Rambow is set for a limited release on May 2.
Filed under: Miscellaneous
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I’m so excited to see this! I heard a lot about it and then saw the trailer when I caught Rambo a few months ago. I hope this gets shown in Boston sometime. It reminds me of Be Kind, Rewind without the hipster attitude.
I’m really looking forward to this. The Filmspotting guys loved it, and I just love movies about the power of imagination, corny as that sounds.
Also, what I liked about Be Kind Rewind was actually the relative lack of a hipster attitude. Or at leas the lack of an ironic distance for the sake of coolness.
Yeah, I’m hopeful about this one.
Hedwig, I always knew under that cynical shell beat a cornball heart… :)
I am looking forward to this also, snap.
Given my current Rambo obsession…I can’t wait to see this.
I don’t even like Rambo, but there is something about this film that seems fun.
I didn’t like Rambo until I randomly decided to see “Rambo” and now I can’t get enough.
It’s not the kind of thing I typically like at all.
I think there’s something wrong with me…
I doubt there is something wrong with you, I have not seen Rambo ~ maybe there is something wrong with me. but I’m cool with it. Rambo hasn’t opened in SA yet, thankfully. I hope it never does.
It’s time for me to come clean: I’ve never seen ANY of the Rambo movies. I had no interest in them.
But I probably will see this just because the idea is hilarious. I like the inspired, spirited quirkiness that the English have a knack for. :-)
Matthew, I’ve noticed a lot of people I’d never suspect liking the new Rambo, yet I have yet to hear a reasonable explanation.
Feel free to elaborate.
Alison, you can skip them, but if you like action movies at all or even Stallone a little bit, check out First Blood.
I don’t know maybe it just hit me at the right moment. I got a kick out of it just from a campy entertainment standpoint, kind of like “Snakes on a Plane.” You know what you’re going to get going in, and it delivers. That was enough for me.
I think it just hit me at the wrong moment, because, yeah, I sort of knew what to expect, but it pissed me off anyway.
Sometimes I’m a humorless bastard…
First Blood still packs a good wallop. The two ’80s sequels are trash of the worst sort. The ‘08 sequel is not nearly as tasteless, largely because it returns to the more personal side of the character, ala First Blood, but it’s not a good movie in the least.
The trailer for this film was a highlight of seeing the ‘08 Rambo. Such a surreal, jarring experience, that.
The pre-Rambo audience didn’t know what to make of Rambow. They were silent. Loved the Larry the Cable Guy trailer though, so that about sums it all up.
I’m already on record as having an irrational loathing of Rambo. It wasn’t incompetent, but I’m over the whole “violence is fun” thing. I know, I sound about 1000 years old, but whatever.
You don’t sound 1000 years old, Craig.
Every day I keep reading more articles on political blogs that make it perfectly clear that the U.S. will be attacking Iran. They’ve been looking for reasons (and fabricating them naturally) and it’s inevitable at this point. The “violence is fun” thing does absolutely nothing for me.
I know. I sound like a paranoid revolutionary.
I don’t want to open a can of worms, but the current nonsense in Iraq is what made me queasy about Rambo. Don’t get me wrong, Rambo is not a political film…at all…but this idea that violence is ok if you make the bad guy bad enough is depressing to me. I’ve had enough of it.
I think its better to play those fantasies out where the bad guy gets what’s coming to him out in the movies than real life.
There is no way you could apply Rambo to a real life situation, the world-view is way too skewed and entrenched in Reagan-era politics, but it’s nice to have a hero who can save the innocent and teach the bad guys a lesson on the silver screen since it doesn’t work that way in real life.
It’s simplistic yes, but I enjoyed it on its own terms, maybe because I was in a goofy mood. Oh well, to each his own. I’m watching it again with the roommate tonight.
Agreed it’s much better to live out violent fantasies in the comfort and safety of a movie theater than in real life.
I was much less disturbed by this than, say, the “Saw” films. To me, “Rambo” knew what it was, while “Saw” entices the viewer into the role of sadist. There is at least some heroic purpose to Rambo’s violence, where in “Saw” the audience becomes the voyeur pulling for the characters to die in increasingly gruesome ways. The audience is on Jigsaw’s side.
I have never been more disturbed by an audience’s reaction to anything than when I saw “Saw” on a college campus.
Interestingly, both the Rambo and Saw franchises became beasts after their first films, in each case of which were different and markedly superior to the sequels. The original Saw had some kind of moral center based on sacrifice for loved ones, even if average college kids don’t get it.
First Blood, though released in 1982, could easily have been in the 1970s. It is, for what it is, morally complex and looks at a veteran in a wounded light.
Neither the original Rambo, First Blood, nor the original Saw, are great, but what they both became as franchises is a bit different from their original incarnations in my opinion.
College kids can be scary, though.
“You don’t sound 1000 years old, Craig.”
Alison, you should have seen the length of Craig’s beard when he woke up after the centuries-long sleep.
I can honestly say that even as a kid I never found the spectacular or gruesome demise of a nasty villain cathartic. I’ve mentioned it before that as an outsider American “entertainments” seem more celebratory compared to many other countries of vigilantism and the violent dispensing of justice to “wrong doers or them that deserve it”. That is hard to take as no more than harmless fantasy when the underlying values are so in keeping with the simplistic justifications for American foreign adventurism during the Bush era.
I think that’s why I liked “The Brave One.” Many accused it of glorifying vigilantism, but I felt the opposite was true. I found it to be very morally complex and ambiguous. I love the fact that it had the guts to ask questions instead of hand feed the audience. Not a great film, but a good one.
Matthew, I’ve not seen The Brave One because of these accusations, so it’s interesting to hear that you found it a thought provoking exploration of vigilantism.
Meh, don’t be fooled. The Brave One is very convinced of its own ambivalence, but in the (extremely offensive) end, it’s really not at all different from the generic vigilante pic, in which the hero is justified in the end. In this case, she’s even endorsed by “the law”.
The ending of Brave One killed it for me. I liked Foster in it a lot and I thought her transformation was compelling and sad, but the behavior of the cop bugged me.
I found most critical reactions to “The Brave One” were caused by knee-jerk reactions to the word ‘vigilante.’
SPOILER ALERT
Like the end of “Gone Baby Gone” (but admittedly not as profound), the fact that she gets away in the end and gets to carry out her revenge without consequence is not an endorsement, but an invitation for us to examine our own beliefs of right and wrong.
END SPOILER
I am against vigilantism in all its forms. You can’t say what she is doing doesn’t take a toll on her. We may be glad she gets her revenge, but what does that say about us? How does that affect us and our worldview? People went into this movie looking for black and white - either pro or anti vigilante justice. And most got what they wanted - a lot of moral nosebleeds. I like it much better as a think piece than any kind of statement.
SPOILER
I agree Matthew that because she’s been transformed into a killer that that’s punishment in itself, but the fact that the cop let her go was horrifying to me…plus the “here, shoot me” business was kind of ridiculous.
Yeah, it’s not a perfect film, but I think it was bashed for the wrong reasons. It’s much better than it’s given credit for.