A film about a film based on a novel about writing a novel

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.

Amusing and often outright hilarious.

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.