Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story

Is Gillian Anderson that one from "Baywatch"?
- One of Steve Coogan's agents in "Tristram Shandy"

Is there such a thing as a sophisticated dick joke? Thankfully, Michael Winterbottom and his co-conspirators on this little oddity think there are several, most of them very, very funny.

Before I go any further, let me say that this is being shown Sunday, April 9, by the Macon Film Guild, a real coup since it is still in theaters in Atlanta.

I swore off the conceit at the center of "Tristram Shandy," the idea of a movie about the making of a movie, five years ago after suffering through the usually reliable David Mamet's horrible "State and Main." I'm glad I finally came back.

What makes "Tristram" work so much better than that ensemble disaster is Steve Coogan, who is all misguided ego played just to, but not over, the top. I would have hated him if I weren't laughing so hard.

The fictional production here is a movie of the novel "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy" by Laurence Sterne, described in the flick as "unfilmable" and "postmodern before there was even any modernism." Jeremy Northam stands in for Winterbottom as the fictional director, and look out for great cameos from Gillian Anderson, Stephen Fry and a host of other British actors I'm not sophisticated enough to identify.

Best of all, though, is the dynamic between Coogan and his "co-lead" in the production, played gamely by Rob Brydon. The interplay between the two of them as it slowly dawns on Coogan that he has the title role but the much smaller part is simply sublime. The best is a running gag about the height of Coogan's heels so he can appear higher in "stature" than Brydon.

If you saw Coogan's vignette with Alfred Molina in Jim Jarmusch's "Coffee and Cigarettes," you know how good he is at playing the jerk. That was just a sample of this blusterous buffet.

As I warned, some of the humor is fairly crude, but it's all ribald rather than blue (I guarantee you'll gasp early on when a young man has a rather unfortunate encounter with a falling window.)

Looking at Winterbottom's filmography on IMDB reveals he likes to move from genre to genre, and I'm ashamed to say the only other of his films I have seen is "24 Hour Party People." Also starring Coogan and, I believe, Brydon, it's an electric look at Manchester's brief moment at the center of the musical universe. I've already rearranged my Netflix queue to see some more of his work.

I'll close with a plea for peace. We at The Telegraph couldn't help but notice, as I'm sure many other people did, that the Capitol Theatre scooped the Film Guild by a couple of weeks in showing "The Squid and the Whale," easily one of my favorite films of 2005.

In the vein of Best Picture winner "Crash," a movie I more than mildly detested, can't we all just get along?

There's more than enough good movies to go around. Peace out.