Word: winterbottom
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Director Michael Winterbottom...
...Winterbottom tried to surmount the text’s difficulties by making the adaptation a comical tribute to how tough it is to adapt the novel to screen. The scenes switch between actors reenacting scenes from the book and the same actors interacting “off-screen” with the production staff of the faux-film. Steve Coogan stars as Tristram Shandy himself and as Shandy’s father in the movie within a movie. Off-screen, he plays himself, “Steve Coogan...
Despite the muddled story line, Winterbottom sets up some nice parallels, such as the birth of the film (the film ends with a screening of the film within a film) echoing Tristram’s birth in the novel. But the majority of viewers and Coogan—in a hilarious subplot—have not read the book, making these sort of connections nice in theory, but unhelpful to viewers...
...movie Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story: the book is "a postmodern classic written before there was any modernism to be post about. So it's way ahead of its time." Its spirit can be caught only in a blithe, brazen adaptation of the sort that director Michael Winterbottom and screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce have concocted with the aid of game cast members who apply the scalpel of parody to themselves as well as to the material. To put this in simple English, Cock and Bull begins by dramatizing some events from the novel, then breaks open into...
Everyone takes sporting lumps, from Winterbottom, who (as impersonated by Jeremy Northam) is seen as impervious to his actors' pleas for help, to Gillian Anderson, the X-Files alum who is imported at the last minute to pump up the film's marquee allure. (Someone asks if she's "the one in Baywatch.") But it's Coogan who places every aspect of his personal and professional life on the altar of mockery. Was his one starring role in a big American film (Around the World in 80 Days) an abysmal flop? Put it in the movie. Was he discovered, while...