Reviews

Films

Son of Rambow

Directed by Garth Jennings, starring Bill Milner, Will Poulter, Jules Sitruk, Jessica Stevenson

Word-of-mouth is reportedly building up behind this amiable British film by writer-director Garth Jennings about a couple of moviestruck kids, marooned in the bland 1980s suburbs, who set out to make their own amateur video sequel to Rambo.

The friendly and good-natured support of Sylvester Stallone himself is giving a muscular push to the film's marketing: we've had Bend It Like Beckham; this could be Grunt It Like Sly. There are some laughs, but the film doesn't fully earn our sentimental indulgence, and there is a persistent sort of Britfilm lameness, 2-D characterization and soft-focus comedy.

Bill Milner plays a shy little boy called Will, from a strict religious background, who finds himself terrorized by the school tearaway Lee Carter (Will Poulter) into appearing as the stunt man in the action movie Lee is hoping to submit for the young person's film- making prize sponsored by the BBC children's television program Screen Test (sadly now defunct).

When Will sees the knockoff video of Rambo that Lee has filmed himself at the local cinema, his imagination is electrified, and together the two boys make an uproariously rickety neo-Rambo action-adventure in the woods. But their Rambo-worship uncovers a sad truth: both boys are yearning for absent dads. There are nice period touches, especially the use of the word "Skill!" as a general expression of boy approval. Eric Sykes has a startling cameo as the bewildered old geezer in a retirement home, who, without ever quite realizing it, is drafted in to play Rambo himself.

Son of Rambow is trying for something real: a genuine, affectionate tribute to the innocence and energy of what the kids are creating. Yet the lack of realism lets it down. It might well be a success story - good luck to them - but unlike Sly's fearsome knife, it doesn't have much of an edge.

Funny Games

Directed by Michael Haneke, starring Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, Michael Pitt, Brady Corbet, Devon Gearhart

In a 1938 memo about his American version of the Swedish picture, Intermezzo, David O Selznick wrote: "Now I ask you to bear in mind that one of the principal reasons for buying foreign pictures to remake is that when they are good they save a very large part of the agonies of creative preparation and a large part of the cost as well."

Michael Haneke has followed a similar line in transposing his 1997 movie Funny Games from Austria to America as Funny Games US. Not only is the story the same - two sinister young men menace a well- heeled middle-class couple and their young son at a lakeside holiday home - but it has been remade virtually shot for shot. Only the cast and setting are different. Haneke's declared aim is not make to make money but to bring his message to the large American public for popular Hollywood pictures who don't go to see art-house movies in foreign languages.

Haneke is fascinated by the effects of modern technology and the media on the human psyche, and his purpose here is to take a popular thriller plot and treat it in such an unbearable fashion that we come to question our own enjoyment of such things and the tastes of those who make them. So where you expect a family whose home is occupied by thugs to fight back and exact vengeance - the locus classicus being William Wyler's The Desperate Hours - you get, instead, In Cold Blood, where the householders are brutally murdered and the killers get away.

But the movie fails to achieve its aim, especially when Haneke uses alienation effects like the smirking young psychopaths talking straight to camera. The movie remains just a clever thriller with an uncompromisingly brutal end. The Guardian

(China Daily 04/17/2008 page19)