We enjoyed "24 Hour Party People," but decided to delete this one from our Netflix queue after we watched "The Trip" on streaming (hated it!). Forgot to do that though, and since our next couple of choices turned out to be unavailable…. My wife bailed pretty quickly; the whole mockumentary thing and Steve Coogan's beyond-obnoxious "Steve Coogan" persona were starting to grate a bit-- though, in contrast to "The Trip," the childish rivalry between Coogan and Rob Brydon gets to be kind of funny, in a Shandyish, over-the-the-top sort of way. Then about halfway through, when it seems like you're not going to see any more scenes from the book and that things can't get any more aimless and chaotic, the whole project suddenly comes into focus. A Woody Allen–style bit in which the pig-ignorant Coogan hits on a cute film buff by pretending to be a Fassbinder fan suddenly backfires in an interesting, even affecting, way, and a cleverly set-up sight gag makes Coogan literally shrink to Lilliputian size after Brydon nails a romantic scene with goddessy Gillian Anderson. (I guess what it boils down to is that the film becomes quite entertaining when Coogan starts to get his rear kicked. ) The scenes from "Tristram Shandy" that do make it into the final cut certainly reflect the novel's brilliant and exasperating qualities; good work by Shirley Henderson as a careless nursemaid, Naomie Harris as the film-buff PA and Ian Hart as the much-put-upon screenwriter. The contrast between the pampered, narcissistic actors and the obsessive professionalism of the offscreen talent is especially striking; -I liked the tireless wardrobe mistress and the Aspie battle-scene coordinator who gives every extra an "authentic" 1695 character name (one of them's "Flee-Fornication Jones" or something like that, obviously a Puritan). Summing up: -it may seem like a loser at first, but stay with it

Maybe it's because I came to this after already having seen the TV series, The Trip. In the TV series, of course, much of the kidding between Brydon and Coogan has been enjoyed in a much more distilled form. Here there is the, not uninteresting, business of the making of a film and telling something of the Tristam Shandy story. But there seems too much of Coogan worrying about his height in relation to his old pal and far, far too many babies. Being born and crying, babies everywhere plus the excruciating stuff with Coogan in the womb. I may have enjoyed this more without having seen the TV but it seems to me this is a very brave effort to do something very ambitious with limited resources and the two main guys just itching to get it down to simply something involving the two of them.

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.

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.