Optimum Home Entertainment have announced the UK Region 2 DVD release of Son of Rambow on 11th August 2008 priced at £17.99. Son of Rambow is a cheeky, coming-of-age comedy set in suburban England in 1982, which became the surprise hit and hot ticket of last year’s Sundance Film Festival. The film stars talented young newcomers Will Poulter and Bill Milner as two little boys who embark on a heart-rending and hilarious adventure. 10 year old Will (Bill Milner) has led a very sheltered life. His strict religious and moral upbringing has excluded the adolescent joys of music, TV and movies and excitement is in pretty short supply. Until that is, he finds himself caught up in the extraordinary world of Lee Carter (Will Poulter) - the school terror and maker of bizarre home movies. Also stars Jessica Hynes, Ed Westwick and Eric Sykes.

Features include:

• Anamorphic Widescreen
• English DD2.0 and DD5.1
• Making of featurette (35 mins)
• Commentary with Garth, Nick (Hammer & Tongs) Will and Bill
• Interview with Jessica Hynes / Interview with Will and Bill
• Son of Rambow competition winner
• Garth’s short film “Aron” (9 mins)
• Geography Lesson

Source: dvdtimes.co.uk

We have two images of the DVD cover! View’em in our gallery, links below:

Gossip Girl’s Ed Westwick takes to the silver screen for the wacky British comedy Son of Rambow, which is in theaters now.

The flick set in 1980s England tells the tale of young boys who emulate Rambo.

“Sylvester Stallone saw it in January,” director/writer Garth Jennings says. “It’s great to have his blessing.”

Brit Ed, 20, chats about the film.

How did you relate to your character, who is mean to his brother?
I have an older brother who was mean to me. In later years, he realized I am his little brother and not his enemy so he became more sweet to me.

Whenever you’ve got an older brother and a younger brother, you’ve got the dynamic in the relationship where there’s going to be – not bully — but you treat your brother like – for [the lack of] a better word – s***.

Otherwise, I remember when I was a kid there were so many days when my mom was trying to start the car in the morning. The old ‘80s cars. Fantastic.

Ever see Rambo?
The Stallone one? I did. I don’t think anyone thought there’d be anything like this. When you think about Rambo, you think action-packed blood, guts and gore, and you think ‘how can you incorporate that into a story that’s about two small children in England in the 1980s about their friendship?’

Do you feel like you missed out on being a teen in the 1980s?
No, I don’t think so, because the ‘90s wasn’t so bad. We started having mobile phones and things like that, so we were all right. And Playstations. I don’t think we missed out.

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I’ve just uploaded 2 MQ Movie Stills from “Son of Rambow” into the gallery along with the April 2008 scans of Ed from Nylon Magazine. Credit goes to BlairandChuck.com & meg_dallen of Livejournal.com

I updated the album of Ed on set from March 31^st and added three movie posters from the upcoming movie “Son of Rambow” and one from “100 Feet“!

Imagine my surprise today when I received my May issue of Elle Magazine only to be browsing through ogling the jewelry and latest fashions when I notice Ed at the top right hand of the reviews page. It’s a good review and description about what the movie is about, I suggest reading it.

Maybe it’s me but I was so excited that they featured a photo of Ed from the movie since I have yet to see any.

Gallery Link :
- Elle Magazine Scan

Son Of Rambow (12A)
Damon Smith
31/ 3/2008

95 mins. Comedy/Drama. Bill Milner, Will Poulter, Jessica Stevenson, Neil Dudgeon, Jules Sitruk, Ed Westwick. Director: Garth Jennings. Released: April 4 (UK & Ireland).

FOR those of us who lived through the ’80s (with tattered Polaroids to recall the glaring fashion faux pas), it was the decade of leg warmers and Space Dust popping furiously on the tongue.

“Frankie Say” T-shirts were the political statement of choice, while men emulated the pastel linen suits of Miami Vice’s Crockett and Tubbs.

Children swapped lick-on tattoos and scented erasers, and the Rubik’s Cube became a worldwide phenomenon along with the repulsive Cabbage Patch Kids.

Son Of Rambow is a delightful coming of age story harking back to those days of kitsch attire, even kitscher pop music and Bucks Fizz losing their skirts at Eurovision.

Garth Jennings’ adorable comedy centres on lonely Will Proudfoot (Milner), whose mother Mary (Stevenson) is a member of the strictly religious Plymouth Brethren and forbids him from corruptive influences like film, television and the radio.

Consequently, Will retreats from his classmates into his sketchbook, where he conjures imaginary worlds.

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These are according to IMDB.com!

• USA - May 2, 2008 (LIMITED)

• UK - March 28, 2008

Paramount Vantage acquisition finally set to bow
By ADAM DAWTREY
After a year in legal limbo following its splashy $7.5 million acquisition by Paramount Vantage at Sundance ‘07, “Son of Rambow” is finally ready for release.

Vantage has reached a compromise with StudioCanal in their tug of love over this quirky little British movie by writer/director Garth Jennings.

Vantage has sold certain U.K. rights to StudioCanal’s Optimum Releasing; and the French major has dropped its objections over the pic’s use of material from “Rambo: First Blood,” which it owns as part of the Carolco library.

Optimum, whose topper Will Clarke was after the movie from the start, will now send it out wide in early April. Vantage goes a month later in the U.S. with a platform release. Both hope it could be a leftfield Brit break-out in the vein of “Billy Elliot.”

It was a tough call for Vantage to give up the movie in its home territory — where it stands the greatest chance of success, and where its performance will set the bar for Par’s distribution in the rest of the world.

“Everything we did, we did because we love the movie and we want to get it out as soon as we can,” explains Vantage prexy Nick Meyer.

“We didn’t acquire the movie to hand over a key territory to someone else,” he admits. “But I’ve personally worked with Will Clarke for 10 or 11 years, and we have an inherent trust and rapport with Optimum. We wouldn’t have been comfortable with this otherwise.”

For Jennings and his producer Nick Goldsmith, it’s a positive outcome to a rollercoaster journey, during which they sometimes wondered if their passion project would ever see light of day.

“Son of Rambow” is a coming-of-age comedy set one rural British summer in the early ’80s, about two misfit boys inspired by a pirate video of “Rambo” to shoot their own home movie.

It wasn’t an easy concept to get financed. Jennings and Goldsmith first made their names with inventive pop promos under the moniker Hammer & Tongs, then had a mixed success with their big-budget feature debut “A Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” for Disney.

“Son of Rambow” was a very different proposition — naturalistic and very personal, about kids but aimed at an adult audience, with an unknown cast. No-one in the U.K. would touch it.

“Garth and I were very surprised that no British financiers were willing to back the film, in fact we felt quite disheartened by it,” recalls Goldsmith. “We truly believed that we were making what would be a highly commercial film, but completely British at its heart.”

Hengameh Panahi of French sales outfit Celluloid Dreams rode to the rescue. She bankrolled the $8 million budget, pre-selling Japan, Germany and French TV.

StudioCanal agreed to license the “Rambo” clips, but there were still some intellectual copyright issues unresolved when the movie bowed at Sundance. Celluloid had talks with Optimum for U.K. rights — but insiders say those broke down in acrimony just before the fest.

The Sundance crowd of industry insiders and movie geeks proved to the perfect audience for the movie’s cinematic nostalgia. After a bidding war, Panahi and Frank Wuliger, the L.A.-based agent of Jennings and Goldsmith, brokered the richest sale of the fest to Vantage for all remaining worldwide rights.

StudioCanal promptly lodged a lawsuit. It alleged the movie exceeded its clip deal and infringed upon its intellectual property, and asserted a prior claim on the U.K. rights. After months of wrangling, the judge eventually threw out everything except the distribution issue, which he left Vantage and StudioCanal to settle between themselves.

It was hard for Jennings and Goldsmith to move onto anything else while the fate of “Rambow” hung in the balance. But the positive was that these two American and French titans were fighting over a hard-to-market, small-scale, very British pic because both believed in its potential and were desperate to have it.

Maybe, in the end, the movie has ended up in the best hands for it. Clarke himself was a childhood Rambo fan who grew up to become one of the U.K.’s most admired distributors.

” ‘Son of Rambow’ is sort of Will’s life. The kid in the movie is even called Will,” says Clarke’s sidekick Danny Perkins. “It’s a great film, and we’re desperate to make it work.”

Source: variety.com