Son of Rambow got a $8 millions deal in Sundance & mostly good reviews

Son of Rambow, Hammer & Tongs second movie after H2G2, was shown at the Sundance festival. It got mostly excellent reviews and made big news thanks to a huge $8 million distribution deal with Paramount Vantage. But SoR failed to win any prize at the Sundance competition.

Here are some of the reviews :

For CNN.com, SoR is the second best movie of the Sundance festival : "An irresistibly inventive, slapstick celebration of preteen DIY moviemaking from Hammer & Tongs ("The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"). "Rushmore" meets "The Science of Sleep" in early 1980s middle England."

Firstshowing.net gives 8.5/10 to SoR. "Another film that ramped up its buzz at the festival after the first few screenings, Son of Rambow makes a triumphant debut and lasting impression... This is one of the few I'm very much looking forward to watching again.".

Cinematical : " Son of Rambow feels as real as Will's fantasies of flying dogs and walking planes, but it's also as joyful and inventive and exuberant, as funny and heartfelt as every child's dreams; it's a brilliant celebration of the exuberance and thrill of bad storytelling, of making art, of having dreams."

Variety writes that SoR is a "modestly eccentric entertainment" though "as to be expected from Hammer and Tongs, bright and witty physical and visual touches spill off the screen".

According to Hollywood Reporter, SOR " is pumped up with all the right kids' ingredients: slapstick, fantasy, alienation and severe adult authority figures. But screenwriter and director Garth Jennings has slammed them all together with little cohesion, and further slackened the story with atonal nastiness and gratuitously stick-thin side characters.

Dirk Gently on radio !!!

We have been waiting for months, and now it's official : BBC Radio 4, which has broadcasted all the Hitchhiker's radio series from the first episode in 1978, have commissioned Dirk Maggs and Above The Tittle to make a 18 episodes radio adaptation of the Dirk Gently books. There will be three series (with 6 episodes each) and the broadcasting will begin in next october.

I can't tell you how happy I am. Dirk Maggs has made an incredible work with the last three series of Hitchhiker's and will certainly make some wonderful work with Dirk.

I think that the Dirk Gently series will include the unfinished book "salmon of doubt" as there are three series, and maybe Dirk will write the end of the story, but i'm not sure right now.

An exclusive US DIRK post mortem by Scot Burklin

Scot Burklin played Dirk Gently in the US premiere of DIRK which was staged in Los Angeles last autumn. As you certainly know, the production was a big success. Scot and his friends got a great review from Variety and a "thumbs up" from Arvind Ethan David, one of the authors of this well known stage adaptation of the first Dirk Gently book.

Scot kindly wrote for us a post mortem about this US production where he shares his feelings about the whole adventure.

To read the post mortem, please go in the Dirk section of this website and click on extras.

Douglas Adams related stuff on archive.org

Archive.org is an incredible website where you can get some rare audio, video and text stuff free to download.

Here are some good stuff I found about Douglas :

- Interview. Shockwave Radio Theater November 9, 1993 with guest Douglas Adams

- A TV documentary from 1988 about computer games. Douglas Adams is interviewed about Bureaucracy

Archive.net also features "wayback machine" which allows you to browse through 85 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago. Very handy if you want to find some internet websites which are not online anymore like MJ Simpson's Planet Magrathea,

Son Of Rambow scheduled at Sundance

Hammer & Tongs new movie "Son of Rambow" will be screened at the famous Sundance Festival the 22, 23 and 24 January.

More details on Sundance website here

"A nostalgic trip back to the 1980s, Son of Rambow is an inventive valentine to an era where, for the first time in history, young minds had access to technology that allowed them to create their own stories while paying homage to their larger-than-life heroes from the movies that inspired them.

Will, who isn't allowed to watch TV or go to the movies, expresses himself through his drawings and illustrations until he finds himself caught up in the extraordinary world of Lee Carter, the school terror and crafter of bizarre home movies. Carter exposes Will to a pirated copy of the first Rambo film, First Blood, which blows his mind wide open. Against his family's orders, his imaginative little brain begins to flower in the world of filmmaking. Will and Lee become popular at school through their films, but when a French exchange student, Didier Revol, arrives on the scene, their unique friendship and precious film are pushed to the breaking point.

Garth Jennings and Nick Goldsmith, aka Hammer & Tongs, the creative visionaries behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, utilize a vast array of visual techniques to perfectly capture the moment in time when anything was possible and dreams could be recreated with a home video camera, a few props, and a ton of imagination.— Trevor Groth"