Michael Winterbottom is of course the featured director in this month’s Director’s Showcase. He obviously enjoys working with Coogan and Brydon as The Trip is their third collaboration. Their first joint project was 2002’s 24 Hour Party People, a raucous rock fuelled tribute to Manchester’s Factory Records which screened last Sunday, and coming up on Sunday 25^th December, is their second film together, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story.

Director Michael Winterbottom’s film The Trip has been playing in cinemas recently. It stars Steve Coogan driving around Northern English counties reviewing restaurants for a magazine piece he’s been hired to write.

Joining Coogan is friend and fellow comedian Rob Brydon; and they spend their time impersonating actors, bickering, and comparing careers. It could have been tedious, but in partnership with their esteemed director Winterbottom they know when they’ve taken a gag as far as it should go, and amazingly they keep us thoroughly entertained with a very simple idea.

Michael Winterbottom is of course the featured director in this month’s Director’s Showcase. He obviously enjoys working with Coogan and Brydon as The Trip is their third collaboration. Their first joint project was 2002’s 24 Hour Party People, a raucous rock fuelled tribute to Manchester’s Factory Records which screened last Sunday, and coming up on Sunday 25^th December, is their second film together, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story.

It chronicles a film director (Jeremy Northam) and his cast, Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon (playing themselves) as they try to make an adaptation of the essentially un-filmable novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne.

It’s a movie about the making of the movie, and Winterbottom has a lot of fun with the dual storylines. We get to see chunks of the film they shoot, an 18^th Century period piece, with Coogan playing Tristram Shandy (and his father Walter Shandy); narrating and re-enacting his life story, complete with a number of winding segues.

The current day behind the scenes material is all shot in typical Winterbottom fly on the wall style, with plenty of show-biz gags, mostly at the expense of Coogan. As we’ve come to expect, Coogan and Brydon bicker beautifully; constantly comparing the size of everything from their roles and noses to the height of their shoes.

We flick from 18^th century period piece to modern day film set at a cracking pace and with smart one-liners flying all over the place. It might sound a touch confusing, but Winterbottom does a remarkable job pulling the elements together.

Audacious, ambitious and quirky, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story is the perfect comical yarn to put your feet up to and enjoy at the end of an overindulgent Christmas Day.  

Enjoy.

Check out the trailer and all screening details HERE.