SnoopyStyle Steve Coogan and his best friend second-fiddle Rob Brydon are making a film adaptation of Laurence Sterne's novel Tristram Shandy. Steve plays Tristram Shandy as he comments as Tristram. Jennie is his assistant. The filming isn't going very well and they recruit Gillian Anderson for the part of Widow Wadnam.I love Steve Coogan and usually like his collaboration with Rob Brydon. I like the opening scene with the two men bantering. The idea of a film within a film can be loads of fun. Somehow, I can't find the humor in this. Steve Coogan as a fetus should be hilarious but I found it a little disturbing. Steve nails it on the head when he asks why the camera couldn't be turned upside down. The logic inside me thought the uterus could be placed horizontally. This should be funny but maybe I was having a bad day.

trewrtew 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.

DesbUK Like Michael Winterbottom's earlier film 24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE, this is a genre-defying English film that's part adaptation of Laurence Stern's Tristram Shandy and part an on-set comedy about film-making.It stars Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon as Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. In their opening exchange - sitting in the make-up chair, waiting to go on-set - Brydon wonders what colour his teeth are ("Tuscan Sunset, pub ceiling"). They're making a film of Tristram Shandy, though what we see of their adaptation never really gets beyond the title character's birth as it continually digresses into such areas as Tristram's conception, his Uncle Toby's military exploits and how to use the new forceps at Tristram's delivery. Coogan also plays both the narrator Shandy and his own father, Walter.This is part of the film's ingenious and enjoyable approach, designed to bewilder and alienate as many of the audience as it impresses. Also some of the jibes about Coogan's TV alter-ego Alan Partridge may be lost on a non-British audience. There's a terrific supporting cast, including Jeremy Northam as the director, Ian Hart as the film's screenwriter, Dylan Moran as the doctor, Kelly McDonald as Coogan's live-in girlfriend and Gillian Anderson as Gillian Anderson. Here's a film that's clever without being remotely pretentious.

Andrew Steve Coogan, having wowed all with the send-up of Reactionary England that is Alan Partridge, ponders what he will do next.Stephen Fry, channelling the hurt of the Native Americans dug up in the excellent TV show QI, communicates with Partridge via telekinesis. He suggests they show off by making a literary adaptation.This is a joke.Partridge protests at the last paragraph, insisting that "A Cock and Bull Story" is considerably more amusing than it. I smush him. Nonetheless, the film became legion, making lots of people watch.Somewhere, a young man vomits.