Rambow

Whenever I sit down to start spilling the contents of my mind onto paper or a computer monitor, I have to be careful. I'm a storyteller at heart. I love stories. I have within me a bottomless well of endless passion for them. But a lot of the stories I want to tell have already been told, and well. This is natural, because when I hear or see a wonderful story wonderfully told, it ignites my passion for storytelling, and long after, I find myself seized with a desire to tell that story myself, or something very like unto it.

So of course, as a child, movies made their mark on me. The stories they told embedded themselves deep into my heart and mind, and I will be influenced by the movies I saw when I was younger more than any I see as an adult. Somehow, and by the very same magic that the film itself represents, Son of Rambow captured that idea perfectly.

Will is a timid dreamer who meets Lee, a child-demon who wreaks havoc on all things "mature" around him. Lee has aspirations to be a filmmaker, and to accomplish his dreams, he has a VHS video-camera. Did I mention they're in the 80's? Well, now I did. When Will ends up at Lee's house, he chances to see First Blood, and he...um...you could say he just sort of explodes. When Lee returns, he finds Will gone. It turns out that Will's comprehensively capable imagination has fashioned him into the son of Rambo, who turns out to be seeking his father's freedom from a terrifying, vicious captor (who turns out to be a creepy looking scarecrow.)

Shortly thereafter, Lee and Will have teamed up to create their film: Son of Rambow. As time goes by, the project accretes additional actors and crew, and becomes a strain on what has become a very meaningful friendship between Lee and Will.

I don't want to say anything else. Every minute of this film is absolutely wonderful. I was so completely, so deeply invested in all of the characters that I couldn't stop my eyes from periodically widening in a futile attempt to take it all in more fully. It was funny (very very funny), gripping, and sentimental in the best possible ways.

Everything about this film was great. I was blown away by the acting of every character, but most of all by Will and Lee--I have never seen better child acting. I believed these kids were real all the way to the end. And I adored them. Seriously, who knew that this kind of performance was possible from that age group? It's a special tribute to the director, who himself must be very well in-touch with his own inner-child.

I was also continually surprised by this film. Within the first fifteen minutes (probably much sooner than that, actually) I had learned not to try and guess what would happen next. Rambow intuitively embodied the unpredictability of the most entertaining children you know. I fell in love with it much the same way I sometimes fall in love with children I meet. In all of its innocent recklessness and unbridled passion for living, Son of Rambow is ultimately a simple but moving story about two friends discovering and then youthfully wielding the magic of filmmaking. How could I not adore this movie?