Just perfect...

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Blistering performances.

Although I admire the intention of this movie, its execution is ruined for me by its very annoying stars and a director who indulges their excesses.Evidently there are people in addition to Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon who think they're adorable, but I don't. Their pretentious banter drives me up the wall, and even when apart each man is irritating, not cute. I forced myself to get past the extremely stupid opening scene, when they dig at each other while being made up for their roles in the Shandy movie, but their personalities dominate this movie to such an extent that I had to quit watching after a while.I made the mistake a year or two ago of renting a movie in which the same two actors play themselves traveling around contemporary England together for some reason that I don't remember and don't want to remember. I don't even want to remember that movie's title. Unfortunately for me, I also didn't remember their names, so I didn't realize until I got the DVD that this movie stars the same two very annoying actors. I'll remember their names this time and avoid any other movies they're in.

Laurence Sterne wrote "The Life And Opinions Of Tristram Shandy", a comic meta-novel, in the mid 1700s. The novel has been described as a "postmodern novel before there was any modernism to be post about", as it is narrated by a bumbling author (Tristram Shandy) who frequently becomes sidetracked whilst writing his own biography. As the novel unfolds, its plot literally disintegrates and digresses into disorder, the author increasingly dwelling upon insignificant details and going off on wild tangents. Packed with jokes, the novel is also perhaps the only autobiography which starts with its hero's birth and ends, hundreds of pages later, only a few moments after he has been born. Think of Sterne as an 18th century version of meta-fictionist Charlie Kaufman.But Sterne's book was not only a deliberate reaction again the linear narratives of the 18th century, but a response to the determinism of Newtonian science. What he did was create a sort of "chaotic dynamical system", one of infinite possibilities, and then ironically counterpointed this with a narrator (a gentleman adventurer called Tristram Shandy) who was single-mindedly obsessed with finding "the initial condition" of his birth. Obsessed with mapping his "causality", in an attempt to find the "reason he is who he is".Of course, instead of finding an answer, Tristram finds himself lost in multiplicity, his narrative sprawling in all directions, investigating every avenue in the futile hope of finding some concrete cause. What the book ultimately finds is only a kind of indeterminism; constant new information, constant new matter. There is no fixed origin that would account for who and what Tristram Shandy is."Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story" is a 2006 comedy by director Michael Winterbottom. The film is structured as a documentary about a film adaptation of Sterne's book, which was itself a book about the writing of a book. And like Sterne's novel, the larger philosophical point of Winterbottom's film is that it is impossible to assert order to chaos, that the director/author/Trisram's failure to master his narrative is itself the plight of humanity, and that we are all the products of a series of highly absurd past events (in Tristram's case, REALLY absurd).The film stars Steven Coogan and Rob Brydon, two comedians largely unknown outside of England and Wales. Coogan contributes the acid humour and Brydon, as always, plays an endearing, lovable nincompoop. The film's plot is lightweight, and its humour very slight, except for a wonderful closing sequence in which Coogan and Brydon impersonate Al Pacino.8/10 – The same story as "Synecdoche, New York", but more light-footed. The film borrows heavily from Truffaut's "Day for Night".

If few of us watching Tristram Shandy were aware that the film was shot on video and not film, this is because the content may have been carefully chosen to help us go on the journey and forget the look of the movie.We associate the film medium with the movies and we tend to suspend our disbelief accordingly. When we see video, (even hi-definition video) we associate the content with documentary.It's all in the grey matter. Video can be as good as film - even better - but it has yet to help us dream the way film does. Successive attempts to do so have lost money, which is why, once a producers have hired actors, caterers, etc, etc then they might as well pay the little extra for the box-office guarantee that film provides.Tristram Shandy, in the tradition of the Russian Ark (2002), combines dramatic content, sumptuous costumes and classical decor with an alternately journalistic style complete with presenter, unsteady hand-held camera and almost a reality TV insight into the film-making world.The trick of using just enough documentary content to woo our subconscious into accepting HD video as a drama medium for the movies got me - hook, line and sinker! In terms of our evolution from film media into a purely digital one, Tristram Shandy is a significant milestone.

The publicity and acclaim for this film circles round the notion that director Michael Winterbottom is filming an 'unfilmable' novel (Sterne's 'Tristram Shandy'), making a witty post-modern exercise in cleverness with in-jokes, references to other films and echoes of other films about the making of films (Fellini's 8 1/2), inane comic banter, etc. But, for me, that that smacks of defensiveness and self-justification, a worry that the way this book has been approached is something that might have sounded good in practise, but doesn't work well in theory because it is too flimsy a way of working, too narrow a view of what the book is about to construct an entire film around. I'll expand: in fact, the first 20 minutes or so make a decent stab of filming the book, switching backwards and forwards in time (breaking the linear narrative structure that most films tend to use in a far more complicated way than the flashbacks you sometimes get), having Steve Coogan (as Tristram) give direct to camera addresses as he narrates the story of his character's life, and with different actors playing the same characters (Coogan, as Tristram, announces that he is also going to play his father, as there is a 'family resemblance' - a nice touch whereby he acknowledges that he is acting but remains 'in character') - certainly not that conventional, but not as irrelevant as the rest of the film, which comes across a bit like an episode of Ricky Gervais' TV series 'Extras' without the sharp social observation and cringe-worthy brilliance. The problems start when, without warning, in a pregnancy scene, we suddenly hear 'Cut' and see the film crew, whereupon we are rushed backstage as Coogan, now playing himself, goes to various meetings, doesn't have sex with his girlfriend, deals with a journalist who knows that he DID have sex with a pole-dancer (this a particularly puzzling incident, treated in a surprisingly casual way), cracks jokes with co-star Rob Brydon, complains about his costume, and so on, ad infinitum. We see Coogan and and Brydon sitting in a viewing theatre, along with various other people involved with the film's making, commenting on the rushes of the film they're making ("that battle looks like it's been filmed with about 10 men") - of course, this is a scene which is actually in the film we're watching - oh how clever and postmodern... - such touches abound. It's all very obvious, and must have sounded good in theory - "we'll echo the dislocation of the book by making a dislocated film", but it really doesn't work in practise. In one scene, Coogan is being interviewed about the film he is making:Tony Wilson: Why "Tristram Shandy"? This is the book that many people said is unfilmable. Steve Coogan: I think that's the attraction. "Tristram Shandy" was a post-modern classic written before there was any modernism to be post about. So it was way ahead of its time and, in fact, for those who haven't heard of it, it was actually listed as number eight on the Observer's top 100 books of all time. Tony Wilson: That was a *chronological* list. The problem with this is that we're not sure how seriously to take it. Is the joke, poking fun at Coogan's lack of knowledge of the project he's at work on, merely there for a laugh? Is Winterbottom making his points through interviewer Wilson's mouth (in which case, wow. Yes we know it's ahead-of-its-time, but is there any intrinsic value in that?) Is it a comment on the way we try to categorise and pigeonhole 'greatness'? Such ambiguity characterises much of the film - nothing wrong with ambiguity, but it helps if it has a discernible purpose (even if that purpose has to be dug out carefully, with an intellectual scalpel). To me, what we have is ultimately the sight and sound (oh! film-related reference! did you notice?) of a smug and self-satisfied director making yet another in-joke to be trendy and post-modern about being trendy and post-modern...This impressions is exacerbated by the glimpses we get of what they're filming (a battle scene, Stephen Fry as Parson Yorrick, Coogan as Tristram suspended in a giant womb), which suggest that it would have been a much more satisfying viewing experience to make 'the film of the book' rather than the faked behind-the-scenes/acted film masquerading as documentary of the making of the film of the book...So, to sum up. The plot summary here on IMDb says this: "interruptions are constant. Scenes are shot, re-shot, and discarded. The purpose of the project is elusive. Fathers and sons; men and women; cocks and bulls. Life is amorphous, too full and too rich to be captured in one narrative." This last sentence is roughly what Stephen Fry says when he suddenly pops up to explain what the novel is 'about'. It's a bizarre moment - almost as if Winterbottom is worried the audience won't 'get' what he's doing, so he's trying to smooth their brows and reassure them that there's a point to all this. But I'm not convinced it needed to be done this way - for me, all the behind-the-scenes ramblings doesn't really get us anywhere. The book was packed with incident and character - this has a fair amount of incident, but few very interesting characters (especially as we know that Coogan and Brydon are playing fairly unsympathetic versions of themselves and are thus 'not really like that'), and if all it's there for is to say, if it can condense the whole book into just the one idea - that life is too full to be captured in one narrative - then I'm not convinced it's worth doing.