SnoReptilePlenty Memorable, crazy movie

Listonixio Fresh and Exciting

Odelecol Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Staci Frederick Blistering performances.

morrison-dylan-fan Ever since me and the rest of my family spent a very rainy summer holiday being entertained for the whole time via some video tapes of a TV show called Knowing Me,Knowing You With Alan Partridge that we picked up from a near by car boot sale,I have always done my best to keep a bit of an eye on what projects Partridge actor Steve Coogan and lead writer Armando Iannucci (now an Oscar nom!) have each been up to,with even the low point in their works(Dr Terrible's House of Horrible,The Armando Iannucci Show)featuring some very good moments.Whilst waiting for this series to arrive in the post (which I had intentionally made sure not to watch on TV) I began to hear that the BBC were going to do a "Man From U.N.C.L.E." and bring out a slashed-down 90 minute version of the series as a film in the US,which made me decide that I would not take any short cuts,but instead go for the full 3 hour,wonderful trip.The plot: After being given a job by a newspaper called The Observer to be their guest food critic for the month,actor Steve Coogan rings up his American girlfriend to ask if she will come along with him on a week long tour of restaurant's in the north of England,Sadly for Coogan,he finds that his girlfriend is doing what he has been attempting to succeed at for the last 10 years:working in America.Desperate to not go alone on this tour of the north,Steve eventually rings up his best friend Rob Brydon, who he gives a nudge until he eventually accepts Coogan's offer.As the pair start to go on their travels,Steve begins to feel that he's lowed himself by accepting The Observer job,due to feeling that whilst Brydon is happy being a "populist" entertainer in the UK, he should instead be focusing on the opportunity that he has been searching after for years,which finally may transform him into an A-List Holloywood "autor" actor:a HBO series.Initially being thrilled to jump for the offer,Coogan begins to have doubts on his current path,when he begins to realise that his best friend has a much better personal life than he has ever had.View on the film/series: When checking up for details of Steve Coogan's third (and Rob Brydon's second) collaboration with director Michael Winterbottom,I began to get a strong suspicion that with the series/film's basic plot of: two men travel to posh café's,eat,drink and chat-the end!,there seemed to be a very strong chance that the latest collaboration between all three would choke on its own self indulgences.Lucky the largely improvised script balances itself on a tightrope between a post-modern,meta comedy and a touching melodrama about ambition and friends.Compared to the rough "acid" look that Winterbottom gave to his tremendous Coogan co-starring film based around the late 70's-late 90's music scene in Manchester (24 Hour Party People),the film/series has a extremely stark,crisp appearance that allows Winterbottom to show all of the natural "faults" with his cast,Along with making the beautiful filming location's look like places that you almost instantly want to get in a car and visit for yourself.If,like me you have experience sleepless nights due to wondering about question's such as:"How would Woody Allen sound if he was Welsh?","What is Richard Gere looking at off-screen?",and of course the main question: "How would it be to take part in a Michael Caine battle rap?" Well,I am pleased to announce that you can now sleep peacefully now, thanks to the stunning dinner conversations that Steve and Rob have over the six episodes being jam-packed with hilariously good impressions that will keep you laughing for the whole 90 mins/3 hours and also features moments that will stay in your head long after the viewing.At around the half-way mark of viewing the series,I began to realise that the main highlight for me was starting to become seeing how much the real and the fake Steve Coogan would blend into each other as Coogan gives what is impressively the strongest performance of his whole career,as Rob Brydon's charming performance of a family man allows Coogan to create a character of himself who seems to have come off the set of HBO's amazing The Larry Sanders Show,thanks to him ripping any protective mask into pieces as the character (and perhaps Coogan's real) flaws get placed on the table for the audience to see in the open,which gives this film/series the chance to end on a perfectly pitched,delicate melancholia note.One bit that I do have to say about the different cuts,is that whilst no big plot twist gets left on the cutting room floor,the 3 hour TV version stands proud as the definitive cut,due to the extra 90 minutes letting a whole lot more punchlines be included and also gives the Coogan Brydon friendship a lot more depth,thanks to the extended running time.

Martin Teller What we've really got is two series. One is the comedy of "Steve Coogan" and "Rob Brydon" exchanging barbs and doing impressions and making witty observations. These parts generally occur over the six meals they share, and I really enjoyed them. Some of their banter is hilarious... I had already seen the Michael Caine routine several times on YouTube and yet I still laughed at it. The other film involves the contrast between these people/characters: Steve, trying to bolster his acting career and struggling with a relationship that's starting to crack, and Rob the less successful but content family man. And I really enjoyed this part as well. Rob's calls home to his wife are amusing but also quite touching. Steve's existential midlife crisis is engaging and insightful as well. The two halves of the film do bleed into each other a bit, but I genuinely appreciated the separation between them. Winterbottom knows that it's okay to just let these two guys play off each other with their natural comedic chemistry and not worry about whether or not it's pushing the "plot" forward. The photography is mostly functional, concentrating on the personalities, but quite lovely when capturing all that gorgeous English countryside. While the film isn't as post-modern as the previous collaborations (24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE and TRISTRAM SHANDY, both of which seem to get minor callbacks in the first episode, though it may be merely coincidence) it still maintains an unconventionality.

jonb-29 I simply don't understand it. I've just listened to Coogan for 7hrs on his audio-book "...We need to Talk About Alan". And very, very funny it is too.So if I like that, why do I find this hardening-artery of a TV series so bloody dire? It's true I'm not that keen on impersonations, and especially when they get repeated episode after episode as they do in The Trip. Maybe people who absolutely love impersonations wet themselves watching The Trip? But I doubt it.Is it funny or just tragic? Well it isn't comedy and it's not tragedy. It's just two bloody boring self-absorbed gits sitting around gobbling at each other when they're not shagging/attempting-to-shag anything in a skirt.Coogan needs to take a long, long look in the mirror. Oh wait, he does (and so do we). But it's just not funny and it's not sad, it's just boring and incredibly tedious.There's a reason most TV shows have writers. That's because actors have about 15 minutes of talent when it comes to improvisation and that's exactly what you'll find here in The Trip. Fifteen minutes of entertainment and the rest should be sent to some digital equivalent of the cutting-room floor.It's rubbish. But it could have been brilliant. The Trip owes me a few hours of my life back.

bob the moo One of the things I did enjoy about 2005's Cock & Bull Story was the relationship between Coogan and Brydon in terms of how funny their discussions were but also how informed by their own insecurities and jealousies they were. It wasn't the whole of the film of course but it was a small part of it that worked well and I was definitely interested to see that idea and that relationship explored a bit more in The Trip. Although a shorter film version exists somewhere, in the UK I saw it as the six-part sitcom on BBC2 that gained near universal praise from critics but at the same time seemed to be actively disliked by the majority of the people who casually checked it out on TV one evening. Likewise on the internet forums opinion appears to equally polarised with people thinking it brilliant or dismissing it as self-indulgent tosh. In a way I sort of see where both sides are coming from.On one hand the potential here is to really make a smart and clever post-modern study of "fame" and success using fictionalised versions of these two men, but then on the flip side much of each episode appears to be them having the same sort of conversations driven by impressions delivered mostly by Brydon while Coogan goes increasingly impatient with him. For me both of these things are equally true but they both end up working against each other and the material doesn't even seem to be strong enough or tight enough to be able to deliver on the idea and realise the potential. Of course it is mostly improvised around an idea and this does seem to help the comedy as their messy conversations produces some good laughs, but it means that the bitterness, the awkwardness, the slight air of failure and resentment doesn't even go deeper than specific scenes on which it is painted. What I was looking for was that these aspects would be "in" the characters and always part of them in more of a way that it was – irritation and impatience during a specific conversation is not quite the same as this and it isn't really countered by making sure we end each episode with Coogan silently considering his navel in one way or another.I didn't hate it like some did but I certainly didn't love it like others did either. The potential is there and the two actors certainly seem talented enough but it does feel like they could have done with a much tighter leash in terms of being allowed to improvise and needed clever scripted material and direction to make sure the potential in the idea came through. It is an interesting and sporadically very funny failure though – but it is ultimately a failure as the potential never comes through in real meaning or substance and the comedy is a bit too repetitive after a few episodes to be classic.