I first heard about Son of Ranbow when I attended Sundance 07. A low-budget, independent film that was showing out of competition, it was getting such positive word-of-mouth that every screening was sold out. I assumed the reason it was going down so well is because it took the Mickey out of the Sylvester Stallone character, a suspicion that was confirmed when I learnt that the man behind it was Garth Jennings, the director of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. How tedious, I thought. Yet another supercilious Brit looking down his nose at American mass culture.

In fact, Son of Ranbow is nothing of the kind. It’s a charming coming-of-age story about a young boy who experiences a religious awakening on seeing Rambo for the first time. His mother is a member of the Plymouth Brethren and, as such, has forbidden her son to watch any films at all, let alone violent action thrillers. Consequently, the Sylvester Stallone blockbuster has such a profound effect on him that he and a friend set about trying to remake it with a camcorder. The results, as you would expect, are hilarious, but not in a way that belittles the original film. On the contrary, Garth Jennings’s attitude to the bandana-wearing hero is never less than respectful.

Son of Ranbow struck a deep chord with me -- and not just because I was about the same age as the film’s hero when I first encountered Rambo. It manages to capture the affection that people of my age feel towards mainstream Hollywood films in general. For most of us, the religious awakening occurred on seeing Star Wars, rather than Rambo, but the lasting impact on our taste in movies has been the same. Even today, after a lifetime of disappointments, I am looking forward to this summer’s raft of big budget extravaganzas. Yes, Spider-Man 3 was a crashing bore, but surely Batman 6 -- or, rather, The Dark Knight -- will be worth seeing?

This phenomenon has been written about before, most notably by Tom Shone in a book called Blockbuster: How the Jaws and Jedi Generation Turned Hollywood into a Boom-town. However, as far as I know, Garth Jennings is the first person to document it on celluloid. What makes Son of Rambow so refreshing is that it celebrates a figure who is singled out more often than any other Hollywood icon by those who wish to advertise their superiority to American schlock.

Will our cousins across the Atlantic repay the compliment? When highbrow American critics lament the decline of network television they usually point to American Idol and its various spin-offs. But who knows, perhaps a generation of high school students are being turned on to British culture as a result. In twenty-five years time I look forward to seeing Son of Simon Cowell.