Prismark10 The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy was published in the mid 1750s and can be described as post modern before the term was invented. Its a ramble and regarded as unfilmable.Enter Frank Cotterell Boyce and Michael Winterbottom assisted by Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan who adapt the book as a film within a film of the book.Anyone familiar with the BBC series The Trip also directed by Winterbottom and starring Brydon and Coogan as versions of themselves will be familiar with the set up. The both tease, spar, cajole each other and do impressions.You have scenes relating to the birth of Tristram Shandy and some of its comical and amusing, you have a battle scene with literally tens of people and suddenly the filmmakers manage to get Gillian Anderson on board as Widow Wadnam which leads to an increased budgetAs the film goes on, Coogan's personal life comes under scrutiny with a newspaper hack chasing him about a kiss and tell story, Madchester TV stalwart and music mogul Tony Wilson appears as himself giving a testy interview to Coogan and the Stephen Fry drops by as a know it all.Of course by the latter end the film just fizzles out, as if the actual writer and director ran out of gas and this viewer lost interest. Maybe there was a good reason why the novel was unfilmable.

Tim Kidner I loved the opening scene, a parody and rip off of Peter Greenaway's 'The Draughtsman's Contract' with its jaunty Elizabethan sounding chamber music and the actors walking around the garden early morning, in period style.Whether the viewer knows of, or even cares about the unfilmable novel they're supposed to be filming is of little matter. The 18th century novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentlemen, seems obscure and impossible to follow, at least as it's presented here. That's because Michael Winterbottom's follow up to his brilliant 24 Hour Party People, but which goes in an as opposite direction as possible, neatly follows the film being made.With the current enthusiasm for period drama, with Downton Abbey et al, this is specially pertinent. And with recent TV half-hour comedies, we know that Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon make very comfortable comedic bed- fellows, with impersonating banter and sparring off each other and here, they do just that - and it's great. A whole host of almost every known face in U.K. TV comedy kingdom are somehow dropping in their comments and gags, usually pertinent to the film, some not.As I said, for most, the actual narrative elements of the novel being filmed quickly take a back seat and attempts to associate scenes with those and what they mean just gets hazy and confusing. So, for us mere mortals, we don't care whether Coogan, as actual modern Steve Coogan is a fictionalised version of the original Tristram Shandy and so the domestic scenes become dreary. We don't really need to see babies being put to bed, do we?This was my second viewing, on BBC2 and it was still interesting. As a mockumentary, a semi-serious send up of that so very British Institution, the period drama it works well, as does the loosely-written comedic interludes. Though the critics may cringe and disagree (they liked this film), it's probably too clever for its own good but I'm quite comfortable thinking that I'm enjoying a film that the literary dons do, too.

Martin Bradley A movie about the making of a movie and the movie in question is "Tristram Shandy", the novel they said was unfilmable and which isn't filmed here. It begins like a deconstruction of the novel in filmic terms, part Tony Richardson's "Tom Jones" and part Karel Reisz's version of "The French Lieutenant's Woman" but it soon abandons that approach in favour of a reasonably straightforward account of the film-making process in which the two stars of the film within the film, Steven Coogan and Rob Brydon, play themselves or rather are acting 'characters' called Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon since this is fiction and not a documentary. It is never as funny or as 'post-modern' as it thinks it is and somehow it is the 'Tristram Shandy' sequences which come off best. Still, it is as idiosyncratic as anything Michael Winterbottom has done, self-indulgent and bold at the same time. It will do until someone actually films "Tristram Shandy".

marissas75 "Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story" is adapted from the way-ahead-of-its time novel by Laurence Sterne, who was writing like Charlie Kaufman 200 years before Charlie Kaufman was born. From what I understand, the book is ostensibly Tristram's autobiography, but he keeps rambling off course to discuss other events. In this movie version, the filmmakers add an extra postmodern layer by making a movie about how difficult it is to make a movie of "Tristram Shandy." Oddly enough, the filmmakers actually make a pretty good case for translating this supposedly unfilmable novel to the screen. The first 30 minutes of the movie are a faithful adaptation of "Tristram Shandy"--meaning, it includes the digressions and comic asides that make the novel so distinctive. Steve Coogan plays Tristram narrating the events of his own birth, as well as Tristram's father Walter; Rob Brydon plays Tristram's eccentric Uncle Toby. For an adaptation of a long and difficult 18th-century novel, it's surprisingly snappy and enjoyable.Then things get even more "meta," when the perspective shifts to watching the actors, writers, and aides try to film this version of "Tristram Shandy." Though "A Cock and Bull Story" is always clever and entertaining, I felt it lost something when the behind-the-scenes action started up: it became slower and shaggier. The "real-world" problems facing the characters (film production running overbudget, last-minute rewrites, Steve Coogan's messy love life) are too numerous, and few of them ever get resolved. As a comparison, my favorite making-of-a-movie movie is "Day for Night," which better integrates the film-within-the-film into the storyline, and shows more sympathy for its characters.The characters in "A Cock and Bull Story," however, are caricatures of recognizable movie-industry types, and the actors seem to enjoy playing exaggerated versions of themselves. Coogan and Brydon make a classic comedy double act--Coogan the egotistical, condescending big shot and Brydon the runner-up constantly trying to knock him down a peg. Their improvised riffs are a highlight of the movie.The eccentricities of "Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story" will definitely appeal to people who like "British humor." But the nice thing about the movie is that for every dry, cerebral joke, there's a broad populist joke that involves people getting injured or humiliated--the stuff of low comedy. Best scene is where Coogan gets lowered, head first, into a giant papier-maché womb: it's both a hilarious visual gag that anyone can appreciate, and a more refined joke about the crazy things that happen while making a movie.