Movie review: If only 'Rambow's' aim were true

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Son of Rambow: Children's drama. Starring Bill Milner and Volition Poulter. Directed by Garth Jennings. (PG-13. 96 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)

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Because "Son of Rambow" have a warm spirit, because it's a film with children in it, because it states a narrative that's sol specific that it experiences wish a true story, and because it looks like a movie we should like if we're anything resembling sort and nice people, there's a enticement to desire to state something not quite true about it. That is, that it's a good movie.

After all, who desires to live over struggling to remain awake or to remember the incapacitated feeling of sitting in a chair for what looks like a year, only to recognize that just a one-half hr have gone by? Better to speak about the acting (pretty decent) and the exuberant filming and the movie's last few minutes, which are genuinely touching.

Perhaps the truest thing to state about "Son of Rambow" is that, if it haps to hit you right - that is, if you go on to catch its wavelength of tear-and-a-smile flightiness - the film will talk to you. But for that to happen, meeting the film more than halfway is required. It would help, for example, to have got got grown up in the English countryside in the early 1980s or to have some peculiar involvement in the cultural surroundings or in the topic of boyhood. Certainly, there's nothing in the narrative to oblige spectator attention.

"Son of Rambow" is about two boys, immature Volition (Bill Milner) and immature Spike Lee (Will Poulter). Volition is a nice boy, whose female parent belongs to an Amish-like spiritual religious sect known as the Brethren, and Lee, a spot older, is a bully, who have been abandoned by his parents and lives with his unloving aged brother. The two male children get in conflict, at school. Lee, who only cognizes brutality, handles Volition with threat and contempt. But gradually, during the course of study of directing Volition in a short movie he trusts to come in in an recreational competition, Spike Lee come ups to appreciate Will's dedication and resilience.

Movies about the devising of bad recreational movies can be trying to watch, and "Son of Rambow" is no exception. Volition acquires inspired to play the boy of the hero of "First Blood" and invents a secret plan in which the Son of Rambo (or "Rambow," as he spells it) must deliver Rambo Senior from enemy incarceration. That's the amour propre of the short film, and one's enjoyment of the overall film will depend on how much 1 basks watching a child buffoon around while dressed like Rambo. It would assist to wish that a lot. A whole lot.

Poulter's public presentation as Spike Lee helps. As an actor, the immature adult male is composed, confident and already have the aura of the adult male he's going to be. Also of at least mild involvement is the secret plan strain provided by the Brethren, an component so much out of left field that the first premise is that this have to be based on something autobiographical.

Yet nil in "Son of Rambow" is so interesting as to alleviate the endlessness of a narrative whirling in circles. Plenty happens, but small of it progresses the action, until the finale, which is lovely, but would have got been a batch lovelier after 35 minutes, not 90. "Son of Rambow" had the qualification of a very nice after-school special.

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