Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (2006)
Runtime: 1 hr 31 mins
Genre: Comedies
Starring: Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon, Keeley Hawes, Shirley Henderson, Dylan Moran
Screenwriter: Martin Hardy
Producer: Andrew Eaton
Composer: Michael Nyman
DVD Info
Release:
May 16, 2006
Buy It On DVD
Reviews
For those who can appreciate the movie's ironic, self-referential nature, this is a thoroughly engaging, near-brilliant comedy.
If you go into this movie expecting a traditional narrative tale, you may get discouraged. You have to throw away your expectations and sit back and wait to see what happens ... if anything.
A successful mix of literary adaptation, meta-fictional discourse and inside-showbiz comedy. Both funny and clever.
[O]ne of the cleverest deconstructions and modernizations of a work of classic literature cinema has ever achieved...
...Preposterously funny, perpetually inventive, implausibly successful...
Adventurous, ambitious and downright quirky, this will appeal to those who revel in more than a little bite in their humour.
Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story is a hall of mirrors that doesn’t tease the brain (it’s easier to watch than to read about) so much as goose it into submission.
The film is complex and droll--always amusing and often hilarious.
...we see around and behind and underneath the stage, so to speak -- peering into the intertwined lives of the people who are caught up in the maelstrom of an untenable subject for film adaptation.
What Winterbottom has done beautifully is distill Sterne's comic experimentation with the rules and shape of the written narrative and translate it into a lark on filmmaking form and technique.
By all accounts, Sterne’s novel is nutty and ribald and utterly defiant of conventional storytelling techniques … hence this adaptation’s wonderfully meta take.
Solidifies what Project Greenlight taught us; the process that goes into making a movie often ends up being far more entertaining than the finished project.
Rest assured, you don't have to know a thing about the Shandy novel -- let alone having read it -- to have a lot of fun with this Cock and Bull Story.
Despite its source in Sterne, Winterbottom's whimsy bulls it way past modernism and right into postmodern thievery, especially in its slavish quoting of Fellini's 8 1/2.
The film's playful, subversive and selectively self-referential sensibility is equal parts blarney and bluster, and has the endearing quality of a tall tale told tongue in cheek.
Yet here it is, the first -- dare we use the term that's all but been stripped of meaning by journalistic hacks -- masterpiece of 2006.
Never picked up any steam to run with its **** and bull story.
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Around the Network
Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story at IGN
Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story at AskMen

