April 6, 2008
SON OF RAMBOW IN CINEMAS NOW!
AND I’M (BRIEFLY) IN IT!
My friend Garth Jennings’s film Son Of Rambow, which was shot back in late summer 2006, is finally out in the UK so why not go and see it? Garth is part of Hammer & Tongs, an independent production company run by Garth and producer Nick Goldsmith who made their name making wonderful pop vids like this Fatboy Slim one. I pop up in the film for a few minutes as a chemistry teacher who suffers a painful nose injury (my third big screen head trauma in recent years). If you watch the film carefully you’ll see that the staff common room is populated not only by Garth’s friends and family (which you wouldn’t know unless you actually were one of Garth’s friends and family) but by the members of Travis (who wore the same sort of teacher costumes in the Hammer & Tongs video for Driftwood years back) and Nigel Godrich (Nigel has produced albums by Travis as well as Neil ‘Divine Comedy’ Hannon who provided a song for Garth’s directorial debut Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy). Here’s a few pics from our day on set.
There’s been a highly efficient publicity campaign for the film off the back of its success in Sundance last year that’s brought it into the public consciousness extremely effectively with all the good and bad that entails (comparisons to Hot Fuzz and Be Kind Rewind are misleading), but overall the reaction from people who’ve seen it has been amazingly positive. Very heartening considering how long Nick and Garth struggled to raise the finances for it. Here’s hoping it does BOFFO B.O! Good luck Garth & Nick!!
February 8, 2008
SON OF RAMBOW & OLD TOYMOVIE NEWS!
DIY MOVIE FUN & ‘SHINEY’
My friend Garth Jennings’s film Son Of Rambow is due for release in the UK sometime in the next few months. It’s about a couple of schoolboys who become friends while making a Rambo inspired action film in the early 80’s. As far as I can tell it’s got almost nothing in common with Michel Gondry’s forthcoming Be Kind Rewind, except that it features people using video cameras to ape Hollywood movies (which is what everyone does with a video camera at some stage, let’s face it). Anyway that link is enough for a trend to be spotted, hence this nice article in The Guardian today which gratifyingly namechecks me and Joe along the way and even quotes a couple of Joe’s toy movie lines! It makes me wish someone would pay us to make more of these. Of course, we could make them for free and put them on You Tube, but they take a while and we’ve got complicated grown up lives to maintain! If any eccentric millionaires with a penchant for 3 minute toy based remakes of popular films are reading, get in touch.
Here’s one of the toymovies I had more of a hand in, our version of Shine. Joe’s approach to the toymovies he took charge of like Toytanic and Saving Private Lion tended to be more deconstructive and straightforwardly, well, funny. I tended to go for more obscure choices and then just do a kind of weird infantile re-make which, looking back on it was sometimes missing the point. I think maybe Joe tried to tell me as much once or twice but I probably got defensive about it. I’m so much more mature now, as anyone who has heard my Song Wars sulks on our 6 Music show can attest! I still have a soft spot for this one though, despite the miss-spelling of ‘Shiny’ and the fact that the lovely all inclusive You Tube frame (which shows much more than a regular TV would) means that my hands are clearly visible in a lot of the shots.
FUN FACT: When we did Vinyl Justice with Gary Numan for The Adam & Joe Show we handed him a toy keyboard and he picked out the tune for ‘Cars’ on it while we were filming. We never used it in the piece but the audio turns up in this toymovie, so when you hear ‘Cars’ that’s genuine Numanoid fingerwork you’re hearing!!!