Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story
Half an hour into this I stopped paying attention to what I thought was a smarty-pants unfunny wanky mess of a movie and instead started thinking up ways to hurt the friend who selected this DVD over the latest American Pie spin-off American Pie V: Titty Tits Tit Tit, which seemed like a much more appropriate selection to appreciate on a lazy New Years Day.
Then it got decent. You see this is not a direct adaptation of the book The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy but rather a film about the making. A very post-modern take on a book that was itself incredibly self-referential before post-modernism had even been coined.
Staring with the film-within-a-film adaptation, it seems to take forever to shift gears and pull back to the fictionalised making of, but when it finally does that’s when things start getting interesting. Not great, mind you, but like most things director Michael Winterbottom does, interesting nevertheless.