Image copyright © by Marcus Trahan

Son of Rambow

(2007)

Two young misfit boys set out to make an action-adventure movie in the style of Stallone. The director tries for whimsy, but whimsy is hard. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t, and a lot of it is subjective. It didn’t work for me. See Millions for something very like that, except that it works.

One of the boys is being raised in one of those poisonous cults like the Amish, called the Plymouth Brethren. Apparently they are real; I’d never heard of them, and wish I still hadn’t. Awful, evil people, Amish and Brethren. I always get so steamed when I see these kinds of people, whose whole mission in life is to make damn sure nobody ever has any fun. These “Christians” are also like the Amish in that, if you transgress any of their looney-tunes prohibitions, you are shunned, shut out of your community. I view raising children among wackos like this as child abuse, pure and simple. But we do have freedom of religion, and the alternative, a state religion, is worse—for society, anyway. Not so for those young minds poisoned by these evil people. Who do it all in God’s Name. Fuck them, and the Bibles they rode in on. I spit on their religion, and wish them all a swift journey to Hell. If only it existed …