Powerful

Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

Steve Coogan and his best friend second-fiddle Rob Brydon are making a film adaptation of Laurence Sterne's novel Tristram Shandy. Steve plays Tristram Shandy as he comments as Tristram. Jennie is his assistant. The filming isn't going very well and they recruit Gillian Anderson for the part of Widow Wadnam.I love Steve Coogan and usually like his collaboration with Rob Brydon. I like the opening scene with the two men bantering. The idea of a film within a film can be loads of fun. Somehow, I can't find the humor in this. Steve Coogan as a fetus should be hilarious but I found it a little disturbing. Steve nails it on the head when he asks why the camera couldn't be turned upside down. The logic inside me thought the uterus could be placed horizontally. This should be funny but maybe I was having a bad day.

Laurence Sterne wrote "The Life And Opinions Of Tristram Shandy", a comic meta-novel, in the mid 1700s. The novel has been described as a "postmodern novel before there was any modernism to be post about", as it is narrated by a bumbling author (Tristram Shandy) who frequently becomes sidetracked whilst writing his own biography. As the novel unfolds, its plot literally disintegrates and digresses into disorder, the author increasingly dwelling upon insignificant details and going off on wild tangents. Packed with jokes, the novel is also perhaps the only autobiography which starts with its hero's birth and ends, hundreds of pages later, only a few moments after he has been born. Think of Sterne as an 18th century version of meta-fictionist Charlie Kaufman.But Sterne's book was not only a deliberate reaction again the linear narratives of the 18th century, but a response to the determinism of Newtonian science. What he did was create a sort of "chaotic dynamical system", one of infinite possibilities, and then ironically counterpointed this with a narrator (a gentleman adventurer called Tristram Shandy) who was single-mindedly obsessed with finding "the initial condition" of his birth. Obsessed with mapping his "causality", in an attempt to find the "reason he is who he is".Of course, instead of finding an answer, Tristram finds himself lost in multiplicity, his narrative sprawling in all directions, investigating every avenue in the futile hope of finding some concrete cause. What the book ultimately finds is only a kind of indeterminism; constant new information, constant new matter. There is no fixed origin that would account for who and what Tristram Shandy is."Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story" is a 2006 comedy by director Michael Winterbottom. The film is structured as a documentary about a film adaptation of Sterne's book, which was itself a book about the writing of a book. And like Sterne's novel, the larger philosophical point of Winterbottom's film is that it is impossible to assert order to chaos, that the director/author/Trisram's failure to master his narrative is itself the plight of humanity, and that we are all the products of a series of highly absurd past events (in Tristram's case, REALLY absurd).The film stars Steven Coogan and Rob Brydon, two comedians largely unknown outside of England and Wales. Coogan contributes the acid humour and Brydon, as always, plays an endearing, lovable nincompoop. The film's plot is lightweight, and its humour very slight, except for a wonderful closing sequence in which Coogan and Brydon impersonate Al Pacino.8/10 – The same story as "Synecdoche, New York", but more light-footed. The film borrows heavily from Truffaut's "Day for Night".

If few of us watching Tristram Shandy were aware that the film was shot on video and not film, this is because the content may have been carefully chosen to help us go on the journey and forget the look of the movie.We associate the film medium with the movies and we tend to suspend our disbelief accordingly. When we see video, (even hi-definition video) we associate the content with documentary.It's all in the grey matter. Video can be as good as film - even better - but it has yet to help us dream the way film does. Successive attempts to do so have lost money, which is why, once a producers have hired actors, caterers, etc, etc then they might as well pay the little extra for the box-office guarantee that film provides.Tristram Shandy, in the tradition of the Russian Ark (2002), combines dramatic content, sumptuous costumes and classical decor with an alternately journalistic style complete with presenter, unsteady hand-held camera and almost a reality TV insight into the film-making world.The trick of using just enough documentary content to woo our subconscious into accepting HD video as a drama medium for the movies got me - hook, line and sinker! In terms of our evolution from film media into a purely digital one, Tristram Shandy is a significant milestone.

if you loved oceans 12, you're probably going to love this one. it has the same constant muttering of movie stars, haphazard scenes flung together, god-awful smugness, and random cozey-talks that goes nowhere. which is why i don't like this movie. it actually has a few bright moments, e.g when actual parts of the book is strung up. but they're watered out with too much middle-movie nonsense. as for the "novelty" of being a film about making an impossible book into a movie... thats already been done so much better.its called "adaption". go see that one if you like the idea of this movie, but didn't like oceans 13.