24 Hour Party People (Michael Winterbottom, 2002)

Post-punk is my favorite genre of music (one of these days, I must get back to my series of posts on The Fall, possibly my favorite band), and Michael Winterbottom's glibly self-referential, knowingly material work is not only the greatest possible snapshot of that freewheeling mini-era of music in the wake of punk's return to zero, but maybe the single best evocation of a musically defined time period put to film. Hilariously funny, the film's put-upon, sad-sack nature fits its subject well, not only quixotic Factory Records head Tony Wilson but the broader post-punk movement, which infiltrated pop charts with subversively catchy rhythms before becoming simply the new pop, period, intellectual exercises ultimately hoisted on their own petard. There's something grimly amusing about the film being at its brightest when misery purveyors Joy Division start to gain traction and at its lowest when ecstasy hits the clubs, but that's the contradictory, witty way of the film in a nutshell.

Read my full review at Spectrum Culture.

Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story

What a shame it is that the only exposure the average American has to Steve Coogan is in his over-the-top, cartoonish persona as evidenced in Tropic Thunder (where his appearance was mercifully cut brief) and Hamlet 2. Those who have a taste for British comedy, however, know the real Coogan, a comic performer of supreme talent whose Alan Partridge occupies a part of the Holy Trinity of Britcom Characters with Basil Fawlty and David Brent. While his American roles seem to take his gift for Peter Sellers-esque mimickry and expand them too far beyond the realm of believability, back home he can contain his mania enough to wring some damn fine satire out of goofballs.

Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story marks Coogan's second feature with director Michael Winterbottom and writer Frank Cottrell Boyce; his first, 24 Hour Party People, sent up the Manchester music scene with fourth-wall-breaking self-reflexivity. All the more appropriate, then, that they should choose for their second collaboration to adapt The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, a comic faux-autobiography that deviates into digressions and asides more often that it stays on-topic. Fittingly, their adaptation spends more time focusing on the making of the film than it does with anything involving Tristram Shandy.

If you want a capsule review, here's as basic as it gets: take Adaptation and replace the cast with British comic heavyweights. But where Charlie Kaufman used metafiction to probe the anxiety of writer's block, Coogan and co. use their "unfilmable" novel to comment on the vain politics of movie sets and the British film industry in relation to Hollywood. Coogan is set to star in the title role of the period piece, but he enters into a bizarre sort of warfare with co-star Rob Brydon as the constant re-writes shift the majority of screen time to and from each of the leads.

Brydon and Coogan play these office politics fairly straight, but the nature of the film allows them to inject more "actorly" performances into what appear to be fly-on-the-wall moments. Brydon, almost completely unknown in the States, proves an able foil for Coogan's self-absorbed version of himself: where Coogan is trying to parlay his television success into a film career as Shandy, Brydon acts the dope, always nervous to be surrounded by some of England's finest talent even as he demonstrates a subtle understanding of the game an actor must play on-set. In one of the film's funniest recurring gags, Brydon amuses the crew with his impression of Coogan which, to Coogan's mounting frustration, isn't even an impersonation of him but of his Alan Partridge character, the character he's trying to get away from with the film.

For a script that calls for such madcap plot distortion, Tristram Shandy has a remarkable feel for such character moments. Coogan is so wrapped up in the stress of the shoot, his power struggle with Brydon and the added strain of having a baby that he can't indulge in any passion for his wife Jenny (Kelly Macdonald), but he has more than enough libido to woo, um, Jennie (Naomie Harris). Jennie is attractive, yes, but so is Jenny, and Harris plays Jennie as a cineaste several leagues beyond Coogan in an understanding of the craft. She has a Fassbinder obsession, which a clueless Coogan tries to exploit as a connection, and it almost works: shes asks him what his favorite Fassbinder film is, then mentions Schatten Der Engel. "Is that the one with all the sex?" Coogan asks her (as well as the five people in any theater who might understand just how hilarious that line is in the context of Fassbinder's oeuvre). Other characters pop up here and there, fully developed or deliciously warped visions of their real selves, all of whom perpetuate the stereotypes of behind-the-scenes egomania even as they bring their own quirks to the roles.

If the film has any major flaw, it's that it spends so little time with the actual Tristram Shandy aspect of the story. As unfilmable as the novel may have been, the early scenes, wherein Coogan's Shandy narrates his birth -- there's even a production snafu involving placing Coogan inside of a mock womb to make the narration that much more absurd -- and criticizes the child actor who plays his young self (within the film-within-a-film's diegetic world where the kid can hear him). It's a shame that, after spending nearly 20 minutes in Shandy's birth scene, a serious depiction of the agony of childbirth protracted until it morphs into a belly-aching "Simpsons rake gag" piece of brilliance that repeats something so far beyond any possible moment of humor until it suddenly becomes funnier than ever.

I didn't know what to expect from Tristram Shandy before I popped it in my DVD player. Having become so accustomed to Coogan only shining in minor roles, even cameos, as of late, I feared that he might fail as the lead. Have no fear: this is Coogan in top form, with a script that scores at least one laugh per scene and a supporting cast filled with talented stars such as renaissance man and my own personal man crush Stephen Fry to Gillian Anderson, who sparks off uproarious asides as her introduction solves all of the production woes (the British backers suddenly agree to finance everything when an American actress, who had hit a post-X Files dry spell at the time, is added to the cast) as well as driving the fantasies of the cast and crew, all of whom turn out to be big fans of Agent Scully. I don't if I can agree with Stephen Fry's character when he proclaims the whole thing "a cock and bull tale, the finest of its kind I've ever heard," but Tristram Shandy is so stuffed to the gills with in-jokes, metajokes, and just plain surface-level comedy that I'll be coming back for more in the near future.

In the Loop

Director Armando Iannucci describes In the Loop, a spinoff of his BBC series The Thick of It, as an "anti-West Wing" in that it presents political bustle without the glamor of idealism. I, however, think it shares a closer analogue with another television series, The Office. It's hard not to think of Ricky Gervais' landmark series as hand-held cameras zip through the offices of staffers and less prominent yet still important members of both the British and American governments, and the film's protagonist, Minister of International Development Simon Foster (Tom Hollander), suffers from the same foot-in-mouth disease that perennially hampers David Brent. The thing is, when David Brent fouled up, he didn't aid the start of the Iraq War.


Foster sets off a media storm when he says in an interview that war, specifically the possibility of an upcoming war in Iraq, is "unforeseeable." He immediately reports to Director of Communications Malcolm Turner (Peter Capaldi, one of two characters from the original series to appear), a blisteringly profane Scot who tells Foster he better shape up and "walk the line." So Foster should have said war was foreseeable, then. Well, no, not really. Poor Simon never finds out what he should have said, but Malcolm will make damn sure that Foster says it.

The Prime Minister dispatches Foster to the U.S. to discuss the war with American strategists and to determine what course of action the U.S. will take. When he arrives with his sarcastic but obsequious assistant Toby (Chris Addison, who was actually in The Thick of It but in a different role), Simon finds himself even more out of his depth than usual. Soon, he finds himself stretched and bent to fit the agenda of both Malcolm, who has orders with the PM to work with the State Department, and a group of anti-war officials within the U.S. government, led by Asst. Secretary of State Karen Clarke (Mimi Kennedy) and Maj. Gen. George Miller (James Gandolfini). One of Clarke's aides, Liza (Anna Chlumsky), wrote a report detailing the minimal, vague pros and the substantial cons of an invasion, but when Clarke actually uses it to prove her point Liza begins to fear for her career.

If Iannucci and his team of writers (ported over from the show) aimed to remove the hope and optimism of The West Wing, they filled the cracks with biting, deeply funny cynicism. When Linton Barwick (David Rasche), another assistant secretary of state, receives the notes from Clarke's meeting with the British, he completely rewrites the notes to omit the opposition voiced against the invasion and comes up with an entirely positive new version, fixating on poor Simon's idiot mumbling about "climbing the mountain of victory" as a catchphrase for the invasion. Compared to the free-floating vulgarity of everyone else, Barwick disdains swearing and makes a point never to curse or even raise his voice. Yet the eagerness with which he pursues an invasion without a second thought to the human cost makes him far, far more offensive than Turner. White House officials are revealed to be fresh out of college; Tucker follows a young man to a meeting until he realizes that the boy is not an assistant but an advisor meant to brief him, at which point he flies into a terrific fit. They pluck these kids from college because they can feed these officials agendas without having to worry about opposition from a "kid."

But what makes In the Loop so great isn't necessarily its satire: it's the dialogue. Lines fly as though someone played a Sorkin show on fast-forward. It's a bellyaching, borderline poetic rush of swearing and vitriol and pettiness, all against the backdrop of what was, or should have been, the biggest political decisions of our generation. I know that BBC shows can get away with a few f-bombs after "watershed" (9 p.m.), but there's just no way that a character like Turner could be used to his fullest on government-sponsored television. His insults are such a lyrical jumble of pop culture references and unspeakable vulgarity delivered through a brogue that is nearly incomprehensible when he's pissed off, which is almost every second he's on-screen, that you almost want to close your eyes and sway to the rhythm of their crass music.

The actors, to their credit, don't miss a beat. Tom Hollander is primarily known in America for his role as Mr. Collins in Joe Wright's Pride & Prejudice as well as his sadistic imperialist Beckett in the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels, but he is so effortlessly funny here. In one scene, he's riding to the next war meeting, now just a perfunctory task in the face of an inevitable invasion, and he ponders resignation. Then he manages to convince himself, with only slight supplication from Toby, that not resigning and "getting on with it" would somehow be braver than resigning for his ideals. The other The Thick of It star to make it in the film is Paul Higgins' Jamie MacDonald, who has a similar yet less important job than Malcolm but makes up for it by being even more aggressive, bordering on psychotic. When Liza's memo leaks to the press, he searches for the leak in his office and destroys a fax machine simply to coax the truth out of a terrified staffer.

Even the supporting characters are great. Simon's other aide, Judy, is played by Gina McKee, who has been working under Tucker since before Foster was elected and will stay there after he leaves. She finds herself always scrambling to clean up Simon's mess while being the only person who can withstand Tucker's withering barbs. Steve Coogan also pops up for a great cameo as an outraged constituent who hounds Foster about a crumbling wall while Simon has much bigger issues to muck up.

Iannucci manages to splash some cold water on us at the end, not through proselytizing or obviousness but with a cold reminder that this, or something like it, actually happened. He never tells us why Barwick is so gung-ho for the war, but then we never got a good reason in real life, either. At a certain point we're told that the PM has basically thrown Britain's support behind America before a decision's even been made, so these Ministry underlings must follow party lines and essentially take orders from Americans. A few weeks ago I saw The Hurt Locker, the most honest and gripping cinematic depiction of the Iraq War yet seen, and this in many ways is a foil for that film. Where Bigelow's movie is a front-line portrayal of the war, In the Loop captures the petty, lying suits who put those men and women on the front lines in the first place.