Son of Rambow
Sylvester Stallone has given his endorsement to the British film Son of Rambow [sic], which opens today (Friday) in five theaters in New York and Los Angeles. The film concerns two boys in the 1980s who discover a video of First Blood and go about making their own version of the movie. Stallone told today's Los Angeles Times that when he first heard about Rambow he "assumed it was going to be a very broad and stylized joke-a-minute comedy at Rambo's expense." But he thought otherwise after he saw it. "The fact that it was so heartwarming is the result of brilliant filmmaking by its creators," Stallone said. Nevertheless writer-director Garth Jennings and producer Nick Goldsmith disclosed that it took an extraordinary amount of time to obtain the necessary permission to use clips from the Stallone movie in theirs. They said they used the delay as an opportunity to preview the film at film festivals, where "it wasn't being judged on whether it was doing anything at the box office, it was purely whether we made a film that worked. I can't tell you how satisfying that was," Jennings said. Initial reviews have been positive if not enthusiastic. Manohla Dargis in the New York Times calls it "a likable, lightly sticky valentine to childhood." To Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times, it's "a dewy-eyed, plaintive, unafraid-to-be-adorable exercise in stylish nostalgia." And Claudia Puig in USA Today describes it as "surprisingly charming."
Baby Mama
Former Saturday Night Live players Tina Fey and Amy Poehler go to the movies with Baby Mama in which Fey's character hires Poehler's as a surrogate mother while she tends to her career. Manohla Dargis in the New York Times suggests that the movie is "sitcom functional," but that "it pulls you in with a provocative and, at least in current American movies, unusual mix of female intelligence, awkwardness and chilled-to-the-bone mean." Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times reacts similarly. The movie, she writes, "hardly allows itself any sharp moments at all -- it's much too sweet-natured to be cruel, and much too cheerful to be angry. It probably could have pushed a few more buttons, but Baby Mama aims to please and succeeds." John Anderson in Newsday is not so generous, writing that the movie seems "mild to the point of pabulum, taking a pretty fertile topic -- surrogate motherhood -- and making it inoffensive to anyone." He then quickly adds, "This is not an endorsement." And Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune thinks the entire project may have been calculated by media planners. He writes: "Every moment of this project feels beat-driven, focus-grouped and designed to package Fey as a viable movie star with great pins (as one character takes pains to note) to go with the breasts (ditto). This isn't writing, it's advertising."
