“Our gentleman was approximately fifty years old; his complexion was weathered, his flesh scrawny, his face gaunt, and he was a very early riser and a great lover of the hunt.” What the description lacks in flattery it redeems with comic affection. A few pages later, Cervantes’ Don Quixote (by way of Edith Grossman’s English translation) imagines describing himself, to a love interest, as “never sufficiently praised.” Can you picture Steve Coogan in the role? Gone bonkers from reading too many books, yearning for a campaign of romantic chivalry and publicly displayed valor, Quixote recruits his farmer neighbor Sancho Panza, “a good man…without much in the way of brains,” who, when promised an island, “left his wife and children and agreed to be his neighbor’s squire.” Here, how about Rob Brydon? Assuming you even know who he is.It was Brydon, in 2010’s The Trip, who wryly...
- 8/16/2017
- MUBI
It’s been four years since The Trip To Italy. Now comes IFC’s third film in the series, The Trip To Spain, from director Michael Winterbottom.
After jaunts through northern England and Italy, Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon embark on another deliciously deadpan culinary road trip. This time around, the guys head to Spain to sample the best of the country’s gastronomic offerings in between rounds of their hilariously off-the-cuff banter. Over plates of pintxos and paella, the pair exchange barbs and their patented celebrity impressions, as well as more serious reflections on what it means to settle into middle age. As always, the locales are breathtaking, the cuisine to die for, and the humor delightfully devilish.
The film opens in theaters August 11, 2017.
Steve’s film career includes five films with Michael Winterbottom.
The Trip To Spain is the third in an occasional series that began with 2011’s The Trip,...
After jaunts through northern England and Italy, Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon embark on another deliciously deadpan culinary road trip. This time around, the guys head to Spain to sample the best of the country’s gastronomic offerings in between rounds of their hilariously off-the-cuff banter. Over plates of pintxos and paella, the pair exchange barbs and their patented celebrity impressions, as well as more serious reflections on what it means to settle into middle age. As always, the locales are breathtaking, the cuisine to die for, and the humor delightfully devilish.
The film opens in theaters August 11, 2017.
Steve’s film career includes five films with Michael Winterbottom.
The Trip To Spain is the third in an occasional series that began with 2011’s The Trip,...
- 6/14/2017
- by Michelle Hannett
- WeAreMovieGeeks.com
In 1780, The Gentleman's Magazine published a brief obituary of a Westminster grocer. Shopkeepers did not often attract the honour of notice in the society journals of Georgian London, but this one had, thanks to his wit, warmth and bonhomie, got to know an extraordinary range of writers, artists and politicians. Using more words than 18th-century elegance required, the obituary noted that he would be "immortalised by the epistolary correspondence of Sterne" – Laurence Sterne, the author of Tristram Shandy.
- 6/11/2014
- The Independent - Film
Feature Mark Harrison 5 Jul 2013 - 06:31
This Is The End doesn't have the monopoly on actors playing themselves in movies. Just check this lot out...
Last week saw the UK release of This Is The End, in which members of Judd Apatow's comedy troupe wind up trapped in James Franco's house, post-Rapture. Most of the world's population has been Raptured into the next life, or otherwise fallen into a great big hole in Franco's lawn.
The film is adapted from a 2007 sketch called Jay & Seth Vs The Apocalypse, which featured Jay Baruchel and Seth Rogen squabbling with each other in a living room. Both reprise their roles here, as exaggerated versions of themselves. You know how Rogen is often criticised for playing himself in movies? Well, he literally plays himself in this one, to a certain degree. Elsewhere, Michael Cera plays a drug-addled dickhole, Emma Watson is a...
This Is The End doesn't have the monopoly on actors playing themselves in movies. Just check this lot out...
Last week saw the UK release of This Is The End, in which members of Judd Apatow's comedy troupe wind up trapped in James Franco's house, post-Rapture. Most of the world's population has been Raptured into the next life, or otherwise fallen into a great big hole in Franco's lawn.
The film is adapted from a 2007 sketch called Jay & Seth Vs The Apocalypse, which featured Jay Baruchel and Seth Rogen squabbling with each other in a living room. Both reprise their roles here, as exaggerated versions of themselves. You know how Rogen is often criticised for playing himself in movies? Well, he literally plays himself in this one, to a certain degree. Elsewhere, Michael Cera plays a drug-addled dickhole, Emma Watson is a...
- 7/3/2013
- by ryanlambie
- Den of Geek
The versatile Ang Lee brings Yann Martel's tale of shipwreck and spirituality to the big screen in magnificent fashion
The Taiwan-born Ang Lee rapidly established himself in the 1990s as one of the world's most versatile film-makers, moving on from the trilogy of movies about Chinese families that made his name to Jane Austen's England (Sense and Sensibility) and Richard Nixon's America (The Ice Storm). If he revisits a place or genre it's to tell a very different story – a martial arts movie in medieval China (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) is followed by a spy thriller in wartime Shanghai (Lust, Caution), and a western with a Us civil war background (Ride With the Devil) is succeeded by a western about a gay relationship in present-day Wyoming (Brokeback Mountain).
He adopts different styles to fit his new subjects, and while there are certain recurrent themes, among them the...
The Taiwan-born Ang Lee rapidly established himself in the 1990s as one of the world's most versatile film-makers, moving on from the trilogy of movies about Chinese families that made his name to Jane Austen's England (Sense and Sensibility) and Richard Nixon's America (The Ice Storm). If he revisits a place or genre it's to tell a very different story – a martial arts movie in medieval China (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) is followed by a spy thriller in wartime Shanghai (Lust, Caution), and a western with a Us civil war background (Ride With the Devil) is succeeded by a western about a gay relationship in present-day Wyoming (Brokeback Mountain).
He adopts different styles to fit his new subjects, and while there are certain recurrent themes, among them the...
- 12/23/2012
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
Intrigued by the surrealists' idea of changing a city just by altering the way we look at it, Patrick Keiller turned the camera on London (originally published 31 May 1994)
"Do you know that Zola once lived in Crystal Palace, Rimbaud off Tottenham Court Road?" asks Patrick Keiller , assigning parts of London to dead writers, like a cabbie versed in French Literature. Keiller is the writer/director of a beguiling new film on the capital, called, economically enough, London. Not your bacon rolls and Woodbines fare, his film is rather more concerned with tracing the city's cultural past, especially its French Connection. If this makes the film's brow seem forbiddingly high, don't worry: it soon slips.
This is London seen through the eyes of "an arty Dave Spart", in Keiller's words, a certain Robinson, who drifts through Tesco's distracted by thoughts of Baudelaire. According to the conceit which shapes this film -...
"Do you know that Zola once lived in Crystal Palace, Rimbaud off Tottenham Court Road?" asks Patrick Keiller , assigning parts of London to dead writers, like a cabbie versed in French Literature. Keiller is the writer/director of a beguiling new film on the capital, called, economically enough, London. Not your bacon rolls and Woodbines fare, his film is rather more concerned with tracing the city's cultural past, especially its French Connection. If this makes the film's brow seem forbiddingly high, don't worry: it soon slips.
This is London seen through the eyes of "an arty Dave Spart", in Keiller's words, a certain Robinson, who drifts through Tesco's distracted by thoughts of Baudelaire. According to the conceit which shapes this film -...
- 11/30/2012
- by Robert Yates
- The Guardian - Film News
The real Jennifer Aniston is engaged to be married – so is this finally farewell to Poor Jen, medialand's favourite tragic character
'Time wastes too fast: every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity Life follows my pen..."
Thus complains Tristram Shandy, the eponymous narrator of Laurence Sterne's 18th-century novel, which satirically explores the artifice required to capture a life in writing, how one can only create a narrative through omission and addition ("how much of it he is to cast into a shade – and whereabouts he is to throw his light") and, most of all, the way that real time will always overtake narrative time.
This brings us, obviously, to "Jennifer Aniston". Not Jennifer Aniston the actual person, whose heart's desires and emotional needs are known only to the very few, but the fictional character "Jennifer Aniston", whose every passing thought and sexual encounter is instantly communicated by...
'Time wastes too fast: every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity Life follows my pen..."
Thus complains Tristram Shandy, the eponymous narrator of Laurence Sterne's 18th-century novel, which satirically explores the artifice required to capture a life in writing, how one can only create a narrative through omission and addition ("how much of it he is to cast into a shade – and whereabouts he is to throw his light") and, most of all, the way that real time will always overtake narrative time.
This brings us, obviously, to "Jennifer Aniston". Not Jennifer Aniston the actual person, whose heart's desires and emotional needs are known only to the very few, but the fictional character "Jennifer Aniston", whose every passing thought and sexual encounter is instantly communicated by...
- 8/17/2012
- by Hadley Freeman
- The Guardian - Film News
The Trip is a spiritual successor to director Michael Winterbottom’s 2006's A Cock and Bull Story, an adaptation of the famed Laurence Sterne novel “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.” Winterbottom approached the “unfilmable” novel by giving equal time to co-stars Steve Coogan and Rod Brydon, portraying fictional versions of themselves – Coogan the egotistical womanizer and Brydon scrambling to spar for top dog. Their on-set exploits, a clash of egos between two men uniquely ill-suited to be around one another, must have heralded a recipe for success because four years later, The Trip premiered on BBC 2 as a six episode (thirty minutes each) series. What we got in the States is an edited-down feature film, and who’s to say we’re worse off for it? The Trip is a pleasurable distraction that features emotional beats that feel a bit unearned in the face of so much humorous intellectual sparring.
- 10/25/2011
- by Mark Zhuravsky
- JustPressPlay.net
First, a quick reminder that entries on several films playing here or there have been updated through today: Film Socialisme, Agrarian Utopia, Road to Nowhere and The Tree of Life. Alright, on with the weekend...
"Jj Abrams imitates to flatter with Super 8, an homage to the seminal science fiction films of Steven Spielberg that succumbs to empty nostalgic pandering," argues Nick Schager in Slant. "As with his Star Trek, Abrams's latest puts a modern spin on classical material, though here reinvention isn't the goal so much as slavish duplication embellished with muscular CG effects. It's akin to returning to a cinematic womb of Spielbergian father-son issues, suburban households under extraterrestrial strain, and teen romance, friendship, and maturation via out-of-this-world circumstances. The effect of such a modus operandi is initial coziness quickly giving way to disheartening familiarity, with Abrams's own preoccupations (if he had any to begin with) becoming subsumed beneath the root themes,...
"Jj Abrams imitates to flatter with Super 8, an homage to the seminal science fiction films of Steven Spielberg that succumbs to empty nostalgic pandering," argues Nick Schager in Slant. "As with his Star Trek, Abrams's latest puts a modern spin on classical material, though here reinvention isn't the goal so much as slavish duplication embellished with muscular CG effects. It's akin to returning to a cinematic womb of Spielbergian father-son issues, suburban households under extraterrestrial strain, and teen romance, friendship, and maturation via out-of-this-world circumstances. The effect of such a modus operandi is initial coziness quickly giving way to disheartening familiarity, with Abrams's own preoccupations (if he had any to begin with) becoming subsumed beneath the root themes,...
- 6/12/2011
- MUBI
Director: Michael Winterbottom Starring: Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon's uncanny chemistry was quite evident in Tristam Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, and it only makes sense that director Michael Winterbottom would do his best to milk their personalities in a reprise performance, albeit without the ins and outs and pomp and circumstance of Laurence Sterne's post-modern-before-there-was-modern novel. This time around, Winterbottom keeps the hyphens to a minimum and opts to ground the narrative on a singular and logical plane of existence; well, other than a few dream sequences (one featuring a brilliant cameo by Ben Stiller). Steve (Steve Coogan) is commissioned to go road-tripping across Northern England to critique six fancifully unique restaurants for the Observer. Steve's foodie American girlfriend, Mischa (Margo Stilley), was the original impetus behind Steve pitching this story, but she has recently returned to the U.S. to take a break from their relationship.
- 6/9/2011
- by Don Simpson
- SmellsLikeScreenSpirit
Brian Dillon hails the return of Patrick Keiller's Robinson in a film about the conundrum of the countryside
The opening sentence of Patrick Keiller's new film, voiced with laconic precision and italic irony by Vanessa Redgrave, is calculated to quicken the hearts of admirers of Keiller's enigmatic oeuvre: "When a man named Robinson was released from Edgecote open prison, he made his way to the nearest city and looked for somewhere to haunt." Robinson in Ruins is the third of Keiller's feature-length essay-fictions to deposit his eccentric protagonist among the relics of millennial England, where he functions once more as the comically half-deluded conduit for the director's own brand of visionary scholarship. As a fictional invention, the autodidact aesthete Robinson, whom we only ever encounter via the films' narrators' vexed relations with him, is an absurd sort of wraith, tricked up from reminders of Defoe and Céline, but...
The opening sentence of Patrick Keiller's new film, voiced with laconic precision and italic irony by Vanessa Redgrave, is calculated to quicken the hearts of admirers of Keiller's enigmatic oeuvre: "When a man named Robinson was released from Edgecote open prison, he made his way to the nearest city and looked for somewhere to haunt." Robinson in Ruins is the third of Keiller's feature-length essay-fictions to deposit his eccentric protagonist among the relics of millennial England, where he functions once more as the comically half-deluded conduit for the director's own brand of visionary scholarship. As a fictional invention, the autodidact aesthete Robinson, whom we only ever encounter via the films' narrators' vexed relations with him, is an absurd sort of wraith, tricked up from reminders of Defoe and Céline, but...
- 11/20/2010
- by Brian Dillon
- The Guardian - Film News
The comedians play companions in their new TV series, The Trip. But their real-life relationship runs far from smoothly
It is somewhere in the region of lunchtime at the Inn at Whitewell, and from the dining room carries the gentle roar of the feast: spoons brush soup plates, wine glasses kiss, and conversation gathers and swells. Outside, it is a sharp, bright day and here in the Trough of Bowland, the light skims across the bare branches and seems to settle among the hills of the Hodder Valley.
Back indoors, sitting beside the log fire, is the comedian Rob Brydon. He is sipping a glass of red wine and surveying the local newspaper, pausing, occasionally, to bask in the warmth.
Into his post-prandial idyll stalks Steve Coogan; taller, sharper, slightly harried, he sits down heavily and scowls. Brydon, impervious, lowers his newspaper. "I have ordered you a sticky toffee pudding,...
It is somewhere in the region of lunchtime at the Inn at Whitewell, and from the dining room carries the gentle roar of the feast: spoons brush soup plates, wine glasses kiss, and conversation gathers and swells. Outside, it is a sharp, bright day and here in the Trough of Bowland, the light skims across the bare branches and seems to settle among the hills of the Hodder Valley.
Back indoors, sitting beside the log fire, is the comedian Rob Brydon. He is sipping a glass of red wine and surveying the local newspaper, pausing, occasionally, to bask in the warmth.
Into his post-prandial idyll stalks Steve Coogan; taller, sharper, slightly harried, he sits down heavily and scowls. Brydon, impervious, lowers his newspaper. "I have ordered you a sticky toffee pudding,...
- 10/26/2010
- by Laura Barton
- The Guardian - Film News
Comedians are cast as Observer restaurant writers in Michael Winterbottom's TV sitcom probing the world of foodies
Michael Winterbottom, the British film director who made Welcome to Sarajevo and 24 Hour Party People – and was criticised for his controversial 9 Songs and this summer's The Killer Inside Me – has turned to English food for his next project.
The award-winning director is to bring an improvised sitcom to BBC2 in September purporting to tell the story of the working life of the Observer's restaurant critic, played by the comedian Steve Coogan. Called The Trip, the series was filmed in the Lake District, Lancashire and the Yorkshire Dales over four weeks earlier this year. Coogan plays alongside his friend Rob Brydon as "loose versions of themselves" visiting a selection of top restaurants and researching a series of reviews for the Observer.
The actors first appeared together playing themselves in a similar double act in Winterbottom's 2005 film,...
Michael Winterbottom, the British film director who made Welcome to Sarajevo and 24 Hour Party People – and was criticised for his controversial 9 Songs and this summer's The Killer Inside Me – has turned to English food for his next project.
The award-winning director is to bring an improvised sitcom to BBC2 in September purporting to tell the story of the working life of the Observer's restaurant critic, played by the comedian Steve Coogan. Called The Trip, the series was filmed in the Lake District, Lancashire and the Yorkshire Dales over four weeks earlier this year. Coogan plays alongside his friend Rob Brydon as "loose versions of themselves" visiting a selection of top restaurants and researching a series of reviews for the Observer.
The actors first appeared together playing themselves in a similar double act in Winterbottom's 2005 film,...
- 7/24/2010
- by Vanessa Thorpe
- The Guardian - Film News
“If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed.” – Stanley Kubrick
‘Tristram Shandy.’ ’The Lord of the Rings.’ ’Watchmen.’ ’The Stand.’ These films are just a few, a modicum, of a larger whole of films that all have something in common. They are all based on previous works of literature that were believed, at one point or another before the film’s release, to be entirely unfilmable. For various reasons, there were those in the world who believed that the novels, plays, series, and graphic novels that make up the “unfilmable” whole either could not or, in more cases than not, should not be put to film.At least, they believed these could not be put to film in the traditional sense. One thing that you will almost always hear from someone who has just seen a movie based on a book they have previously read is that...
‘Tristram Shandy.’ ’The Lord of the Rings.’ ’Watchmen.’ ’The Stand.’ These films are just a few, a modicum, of a larger whole of films that all have something in common. They are all based on previous works of literature that were believed, at one point or another before the film’s release, to be entirely unfilmable. For various reasons, there were those in the world who believed that the novels, plays, series, and graphic novels that make up the “unfilmable” whole either could not or, in more cases than not, should not be put to film.At least, they believed these could not be put to film in the traditional sense. One thing that you will almost always hear from someone who has just seen a movie based on a book they have previously read is that...
- 7/20/2009
- by Kirk
- WeAreMovieGeeks.com
As one character in this sharp, playful feature notes, Laurence Sterne's "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman" managed to be postmodern while predating modernism. Long deemed unfilmable, the 18th century novel finds the perfect interpreters in director Michael Winterbottom and actor Steve Coogan, reteaming after 2002's "24 Hour Party People".
"A Cock and Bull Story" has the right wiseass sensibility to approximate the tangents and asides that constitute the original opus as well as its famous visual devices -- rows of asterisks, pages blacked-out or left blank. The film chronicles the making of a film of "Tristram Shandy", with cast and crew encamped at an English country estate, and first-time scripter Martin Hardy nimbly uses the setup to interweave layers of significance in a story about storytelling. A return to form for Winterbottom after the dull sex-and-music experimentation of "9 Songs", this engaging romp, which screens Thursday at AFI Fest, should find a welcoming reception upon limited release in January.
In one of the best episodes in Jim Jarmusch's "Coffee and Cigarettes", Coogan showed that he excels at playing a careerist actor named Steve Coogan, whose gaze flashes with the boredom, impatience and fear of a man constantly checking himself on the status meter. Here, he plays a more ingenuous and never cliched version of a self-absorbed thespian. On top of dealing with the period film's increasingly apparent script problems, Coogan, who has the title role, must fend off the professional jealousy of Rob Brydon (Rob Brydon), in the more colorful part of Tristram's uncle Toby. To the frustration of the costume designer, frantic negotiations ensue over the proper heel height for their respective characters' shoes.
On the evidence of disastrous dailies, the film's director (Jeremy Northam) and screenwriter (Ian Hart) return to the source material to rethink what gets left out of the sprawling saga and what gets added back in -- as in the last-minute addition to the cast of Gillian Anderson as Widow Wadman, Toby's love interest. The flirtation between Coogan and a cinephile production assistant (Naomie Harris) gets serious, even while his girlfriend (Kelly Macdonald) visits the set with their infant son. Storytelling is both necessary and arbitrary, "Tristram Shandy" says, and Winterbottom's film offers a fresh look at the intense insularity of putting on a show.
"A Cock and Bull Story" has the right wiseass sensibility to approximate the tangents and asides that constitute the original opus as well as its famous visual devices -- rows of asterisks, pages blacked-out or left blank. The film chronicles the making of a film of "Tristram Shandy", with cast and crew encamped at an English country estate, and first-time scripter Martin Hardy nimbly uses the setup to interweave layers of significance in a story about storytelling. A return to form for Winterbottom after the dull sex-and-music experimentation of "9 Songs", this engaging romp, which screens Thursday at AFI Fest, should find a welcoming reception upon limited release in January.
In one of the best episodes in Jim Jarmusch's "Coffee and Cigarettes", Coogan showed that he excels at playing a careerist actor named Steve Coogan, whose gaze flashes with the boredom, impatience and fear of a man constantly checking himself on the status meter. Here, he plays a more ingenuous and never cliched version of a self-absorbed thespian. On top of dealing with the period film's increasingly apparent script problems, Coogan, who has the title role, must fend off the professional jealousy of Rob Brydon (Rob Brydon), in the more colorful part of Tristram's uncle Toby. To the frustration of the costume designer, frantic negotiations ensue over the proper heel height for their respective characters' shoes.
On the evidence of disastrous dailies, the film's director (Jeremy Northam) and screenwriter (Ian Hart) return to the source material to rethink what gets left out of the sprawling saga and what gets added back in -- as in the last-minute addition to the cast of Gillian Anderson as Widow Wadman, Toby's love interest. The flirtation between Coogan and a cinephile production assistant (Naomie Harris) gets serious, even while his girlfriend (Kelly Macdonald) visits the set with their infant son. Storytelling is both necessary and arbitrary, "Tristram Shandy" says, and Winterbottom's film offers a fresh look at the intense insularity of putting on a show.
- 11/8/2005
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
IMDb.com, Inc. takes no responsibility for the content or accuracy of the above news articles, Tweets, or blog posts. This content is published for the entertainment of our users only. The news articles, Tweets, and blog posts do not represent IMDb's opinions nor can we guarantee that the reporting therein is completely factual. Please visit the source responsible for the item in question to report any concerns you may have regarding content or accuracy.