On IFC Today...

Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story....

Don't worry. They didn't try to make an unfilmable novel into a film.

The novel has fun with conventions of the novel, and the film just decides to have fun with conventions of film and conventional thinking.

It is more than a little bit The Player revisited. It owes a lot to Mr. Altman.

But it is delightful. There are some great scenes I tried to find on YouTube but could not.

I really loved the scene where Gillian Anderson and Gillian Anderson's agent are on in split screen and she is contracted for work overseas in about seven seconds.

And loved the Fassbinder self-seduction scene.

But I couldn't find those. And I could find this, probably because it is the LCD of humor. But it's still very funny.

Mr. Coogan is pretty great in this.



Oh, here's the Gillian Anderson scene.

Actually, here are all the Gillian Anderson scenes, which the poster says total less than five minutes.

It's a short film.

The film is usually out of breath, short-winded the whole way through, reality presented as bursts of short discursive arguments that really go nowhere. The French word for it would be to papilloner. The French say that when people "butterfly" about. The movie's rather bloglike actually. One art's alwaying influencing another.

The movie's funny questions mirror Tristram Shandy's in that we wonder where things really begin, or if they have a beginning. Can we ever pinpoint the beginning? It's comical. That hankering.