By Peter Gutierrez on September 18, 2008 8:30 PM
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Here's a news bulletin for anyone who works in youth media--if you missed Son of Rambow during its brief theatrical run earlier this year, I urge you to catch it in its DVD incarnation, which was released at the end of August.
While broadly speaking the premise of this 1980s-era comedy is nothing new--misfit school kids team up to produce a work of popular entertainment--and it certainly doesn't feature "new media," Son of Rambow is nonetheless notable on several levels. That's because writer-director Garth Jennings (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) has mined his own experiences as a teen video auteur to produce a work that's not only authentic-feeling down to its core, but also speaks to the vital relationship between being a fan and being a creator that informs so much student work in so many media today. Inspired by the original Stallone vehicle First Blood (1982), two English schoolboys produce (and eventually "market") their own highly unauthorized sequel. Along the way, issues of content appropriation (of story, situation, and character) and the ethics of collaboration itself are touched upon, even if only implicitly. Also interesting is the portrayal of how, in bygone times, student media production was an activity that stood, as if by definition, as antithetical to the K-12 environment; in one key scene a flying dog (don't ask) shatters a schoolhouse window and interrupts a teacher who's busy trimming his nose hair: if there's a more perfect metaphor for academia's self-absorption being shattered by the boldness of student creativity, I'm unaware of it. In other words, let's all be glad that Son of Rambow is a period piece in more ways than one.
