Ray Pride

Garth Jennings' "Son of Rambow" takes the same rude clay as Michel Gondry's "Be Kind Rewind" with much more fruitful results. In the case of "Rambow," two English 11-year-olds in the early 1980s get the idea of remaking "Rambo: First Blood" out of the wilds of their imagination. The two boys are marvelous casting coups, from Will Proudfoot (Bill Milner), a member of a puritanical sect, whose first movie experience is a bootleg VHS of the Stallone-starrer he becomes obsessed with, and local bad-boy Lee Carter (Will Poulter), always identified by both names. Will Proudfoot! What a name, especially applied to Milner's small pale bright eyes! This episodic, mildly sentimental tale has drawn comparisons to Wes Anderson and Jeunet-Caro, a more fruitful parallel to this joyful endeavor is "My Life as a Dog": there's genuine heart amid the prankish tomfoolery, and an overt homage to "Midnight Cowboy" is not misplaced. There's Keatonesque comedy framing as well. The kids are beauties. It's terrific when Jennings gets to them becoming "blood brothers" by a pond in a glade and in super-close shots of them we discover suddenly that the cheekbones of both are festooned with freckles. There are so many small, bright surprises it'd be a shame to give them away: this is one of those happy incidents I just like to point in the direction of and mouth the word, "Go!" (The early-1980s New Romantic music homages are giddy and knowing, to give away one bit of the fabric.) Jennings and longtime production partner Nick Goldsmith (who make videos under the Hammer & Tongs label and collaborated on "Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy") are wonderfully aware of the goodness in naughty lads, prehensile geniuses in their splendid bloom. Plus footnotes to their own childhood experiences that glow in on-screen exaggeration.

"Son of Rambow" opens Friday.

(2008-05-06)

Also by Ray Pride

How Do Photographs Mean?
At the end of last week, the New York Times set off a secondary firestorm about "Standard Operating Procedure," Errol Morris' documentary about the photographs taken by soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq that led to the exposure of the continued use of the facility, post-Saddam Hussein, for torture. Morris paid some of his interviewees, but doesn't specify which were given consultation honoraria. Some writers (and several documentary filmmakers I talked to about this) say this is an abdication of the responsibility of a journalist, or of a generally held consensus of what constitutes documentary practice. But some of the arguments are in a different service
(2008-04-29)

Tip of the Week
A shambling yet exceptionally good movie with gorgeous visual interludes befitting the work of co-producer Terrence Malick, Laura Dunn's "The Unforeseen" is an overt agit-doc about irresponsible land-use policies and practice over a couple of decades in a suburb of Austin, Texas
(2008-04-29)

Something Happened
The relatively young Korean director Hong Sang-soo, who studied at the School of the Art Institute, is one of the younger directors whose characters' seemingly diffident or reckless behavior is in fact only an apparition of normalcy or the everyday
(2008-04-22)

Tip of the Week
The debut release from Chicago's newest distribution label, Music Box Films, "Tuya's Marriage" is a brightly colored, genial story of culture clash in the form of a not-quite-ethnographic romantic comedy
(2008-04-22)

Mad Hot Sickroom
(2008-04-15)

Pie Eyed
(2008-04-15)

Tip of the Week
(2008-04-15)

Tip of the Week
(2008-04-08)

Uplifting the Nightingale
(2008-04-08)

Tip of the Week
(2008-04-01)

Sees the Day
(2008-03-25)

Tip of the Week
(2008-03-25)

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