BEFORE: As stated, this was supposed to be the slot for "The Borrowers", the remake that aired on the BBC in 2011 - but I've come to believe that Ruby Wax, who played the file clerk in the 1997 version, does not appear in the remake, though Wikipedia said that she did, and at the time I made my plans, so did the IMDB, I think. Now of course it was possible that someone in production, while making the 2011 version, really remembered how much she stood out during her 5-minute scene in the previous version, and said, "Well, we've just got to give her a cameo in this version, too." It's been known to happen - think about all those cameos in the "Ghostbusters" remake a couple of years ago.
But I've developed sort of a sixth sense for these things - it slowly dawned on me that there was probably some kind of listing error, someone familiar with Ms. Wax probably read the wrong credits list and thought it was a shame that she wasn't listed for her role, so they added her incorrectly to the wrong version. Simple enough, I've seen it happen, I might have also made similar mistakes in my attempts to update the IMDB, and anyone can edit a Wiki page, that's the whole point. What takes longer is getting the WRONG information taken down once it's been posted. So when I realized that Ruby Wax isn't somehow in both versions of "The Borrowers", what could I do? I didn't want to just forge ahead and break my linking streak, not when my 2020 chain has just gotten started - the simplest solution was to look for a film that shares an actor with both versions.
"Not a problem," I thought, "since so many British actors have worked together over the years, this should be quite easy." But since no films on my crowded watchlist fit the bill (not even "Filth", the film with Jim Broadbent that I removed from the January schedule, delaying it until October maybe) I had to resort to my old method of finding links, the Oracle of Bacon online - and this meant I had to type in pairs of actors, one from each version of "The Borrowers" until I found a connection between two of them that would be, ideally, just one movie. My first focus was on Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry, because I know they worked together on the "Blackadder" shows, and probably some films, too - "Peter's Friends" wasn't eligible because I've already seen it, and that left "Spice World" as a connection, a film they were both in, only it's not a film that I want to watch.
Next try, I paired each actor from the 2011 version with Jim Broadbent, to see if any of them had worked together - two films popped up, one was the 2018 version of "King Lear" with Broadbent and Christopher Eccleston in it, and the other was "Bright Young Things", with Broadbent and Fry. Both decent possibilities, but "King Lear" seems a little heavy for the chain I'm working on, and "Bright Young Things" is an adaptation of an Evelyn Waugh novel about young rich people in London in the 1930's. Ugh, I just don't care about that, so I pressed on.
Finally, I found another connection - and it's a film that I've heard about, it got some buzz after its release in 2005, and it pairs Coogan and Brydon once again, so I think it'll probably be funny. I watched "The Trip" with them in it, and the two sequels, and I enjoy their sense of humor together. So now Mark Williams now carries over from "The Borrowers" and I'll be all set up for Stephen Fry to carry over next time to "The Borrowers", the later version.
THE PLOT: A director and film crew attempt to shoot an adaptation of Laurence Sterne's essentially unfilmable novel, "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman".
AFTER: They used to have these commercials, back in the 1970's and 80's, for Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, which are now a mainstay in the candy aisle, but every candy was new once - and these ads would feature two people walking down different parts of a street, one eating a candy bar and the other eating from a jar of peanut butter (I personally don't know anyone who would walk down the street eating from a jar of peanut butter, but it was a different time, just roll with it...) and they would inevitably meet at the corner and bump into each other, with the chocolate bar landing RIGHT in the jar of peanut butter. "Hey," one person would shout, "you got your chocolate in my peanut butter!" and the other person would yell back, "No, you got your peanut butter on MY chocolate!" But then they'd taste the combination, and realize that the two flavors went well together, and supposedly that's how a new candy was born - I suspect the true origin of the candy was much less interesting.
That's also how people used to treat documentaries and fiction films - they were NOT meant to be combined. Some of the most famous documentaries of all time were staged, however, like that Disney nature documentary about lemmings following each other off of cliffs and dying en masse, because they're stupid pack animals. It turns out they were pushed, and everything we THINK we know about lemmings is very wrong, all because some documentarian wanted to re-create a story he once heard. But again, at the time, lying in a documentary was considered bad form indeed, and that's even before the animal rights activists got involved. But times changed, and somebody eventually realized that documentary and fiction were also "Two great tastes that taste great together." Maybe the watershed film was "This Is Spinal Tap", because you might have enjoyed the film the first time as a documentary and unintentional comedy, but then the second time you probably recognized that the interviewer and alleged filmmaker was Meathead from the sitcom "All in the Family", and one of the rock musicians looked an awful lot like that guy who was on another show, "Laverne & Shirley". So the second time you watched it, you were probably in on the joke, you figured out that everything was staged, but you didn't care, because it was still funny as hell.
Then along came "reality" TV, like "Big Brother", "Survivor", "The Bachelor" and many others - only those events depicted weren't "real" either, because those shows all have writing credits. Why does reality need writers? Plus the act of being filmed is affecting the events themselves, people act differently when they know they're on camera, so really, nothing is really real any more, not on TV or in movies anyway. There are still some documentarians out there who play by strict rules in filming, but then when you think about narration and editing - what gets left in and what gets taken out - you may realize that even the hardcore docs represent someone's particular view of reality, and what you are told may only be real from a certain point of view. (RARE exceptions include "Apollo 11", for example, which had minimal narration and used only archival and news footage.)
I mention all of this to explain the world that "A Cock and Bull Story" entered into in 2005 - and audiences then may not have been ready for it, because the blurring of fiction and reality was still in the larval stages, and not fully formed just yet. What was this, an adaptation of a novel, or a documentary about making the film adaptation of that novel, or was it pure fiction, or something else entirely? The more you learn about this film, the more you can see the blurring of the lines in-between all of those things. Steve Coogan, noted for playing the fictional character Alan Partridge, started playing a fictional version of himself, which he later did in several other movies from the same director. How can an actor play himself on film, and still maintain some kind of privacy about his life? The simple solution is to create details about himself on film that simply aren't true, so he's got, for example, a fictional long-term girlfriend in the film, and then after the shoot he goes back home to his wife, or, more likely, to being a divorced man on the prowl.
Every famous person's personal life is now on Wikipedia, and I'm that guy who checks to see if what's being shown to me in a film like this is accurate - and it's not, for one of several reasons. Not every actor is married to someone willing to appear on camera, or even to have their name in print. Or an actor may just want to keep their personal life personal, and therefore put false information out there. And if the "personal life" part of their Wikipedia profile is absent, that could mean they're very private, or they're gay, or they just choose to fly under the radar for another reason. Coogan in "A Cock and Bull Story" appears with his girlfriend (played by an actress) who has a baby (not really his) and he also flirts with a P.A. on the set (also an actress). Remember, we're only seeing here what somebody WANTS us to see, and even then, only because it's funny. But I can see how, back in 2005, audiences could have easily confused the fictional Steve Coogan with the real one.
Now, as a result of all of this, "A Cock and Bull Story" is part fictional adaptation, and part "behind-the-scenes" footage of the actors making said adaptation - only that's more fiction, and all of the actors are played by actors, the director's played by an actor, all the crew you see are actors, etc. You are NOT seeing the director and other people who made this film, because that's not possible. But again, I can see wherein lies the confusion, because the actors break the fourth wall and talk directly to the audience - only they don't, that's all more planned acting or at least improvisation. Are we clear?
The larger question, for me, concerns whether they're doing this because it's funny to do so, or because they TRIED to make a straight adaptation of the "Tristram Shandy" novel, and found it to be impossible to pull off. Or perhaps they did it, and it just didn't work somehow, with all those comic actors playing it straight, so it devolved into the fiction/non-reality hybrid that I watched today. I'll have to look into it a little further to find out. But once you start to think about WHY we're being shown what we're shown, little bits of genius start to manifest themselves. Why did they give the fictional Steve Coogan an infant son? Ah, because part of the novel is about Tristram being born, and the uncertainty that his father felt in the novel about being part of his son's life, and what it all means in the end. They couldn't depict that directly, so they did it indirectly, with all of Coogan's anxieties and parental neuroses standing in for the ones in the novel.
Men back in the 1700's weren't involved in the birthing procedure, and proper gentleman were often ill-informed about it. There's a long sequence in the fictional part of the film where the men debate whether it's better to have a midwife or a physician at hand, meanwhile Mrs. Shandy is in the other room, crying out while suffering from labor pains while the men debate in the next room. Then when the doctor arrives, the men delay him with all kinds of ridiculous pointless conversations while Mrs. Shandy continues to suffer. It's very funny, unless you've given birth, I suspect. And this is contrasted by the fictional Steve Coogan being very modern and advanced in one way (changing his son's diaper, singing him to sleep) but also very backwards (flirting with the PA while his girlfriend is asleep in the other room).
But here's where I feel I sort of had the inside track on understanding this one - I've seen "The Trip", released five years after "Tristram Shandy", and then "The Trip to Italy" and "The Trip to Spain", so I was aware that the real Coogan and Brydon probably weren't being portrayed here, and I've spent enough time on movie shoots (OK, mostly music video shoots, but same thing) to know what they look like and feel like, and though the ones seen here were pretty realistic, you just wouldn't see one on film, not for the movie that you're also watching. The camera can't capture its own shoot, that would be a bit like a barber cutting his own hair. So it's all fake, and nothing is real, and that's OK, as long as it's funny. What they did capture here was the chaos, the disorganization, the creative differences, the in-fighting, the unexpected flirting and the utter madness of being on a film set - and that's when things are going WELL. I'd hate to think what we'd see if people weren't doing their jobs and acting professionally.
Here a film set, and the elements of a novel's plot, are seen as a microcosm for life itself - people are annoyed by each other, especially by the ones they know very well, getting anything done is a constant struggle, and after enough time has passed, entire tasks seem completely pointless and one tends to wonder what it all means in the end. Usually I would be taking a film to task for jumping around non-linearly while presenting a narrative but here (and this is key) the original "Tristram Shandy" novel apparently had a lot of digressions itself, and used a number of unusual graphic devices as a man fails to write his own autobiography, it's the rare case where someone took a lot of liberties while adapting a novel, and yet still managed to nail it, perhaps. Maybe a few too many groin injuries, those were a bit too "lowest common denominator" for me, but I understand that you've got to keep the rubes entertained.
Tristram Shandy was a novel about a fictional character of the 1700's, and tonight I'm off to see a play about a real person of the 1700's, as I scored tickets to "Hamilton" on Broadway. Now, I can't afford to pay the top prices for this show, but my wife's been dying to see this for the last couple of years. So I started entering the daily ticket lottery via their phone app, and I was successful yesterday. It took me about four months to score a pair of tickets - for just $10 each! (A "Hamilton" for a "Hamilton".) I'm being told that I'm really lucky that it didn't take two years. Anyway, she's the SuperFan, and I'll just be along for the ride - but I have to go, since the tickets are in my name... So I'm signing off and heading over to the theater, I can give a report on the show tomorrow. But you're probably already familiar with it.
Also starring Steve Coogan (last seen in "Holmes & Watson"), Rob Brydon (ditto), Kelly Macdonald (ditto), Keeley Hawes (last seen in "The Bank Job"), Shirley Henderson (last heard in "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"), Raymond Waring (last seen in "The Sisters Brothers"), Dylan Moran (last seen in "Notting Hill"), Jeremy Northam (last seen in "The Singing Detective"), Gillian Anderson (last seen in "The Last King of Scotland"), David Walliams (last heard in "Missing Link"), Stephen Fry (ditto), Benedict Wong (last seen in "Sunshine"), Naomie Harris (last seen in "Rampage"), Ian Hart (last seen in "Mary Queen of Scots"), James Fleet (last seen in "Mr. Turner", Elizabeth Berrington (ditto), Roger Allam (last seen in "Mr. Holmes"), Ashley Jensen (last heard in "How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World"), Mark Tandy (last seen in "Goodbye Christopher Robin"), Mary Healey, Claire Keelan (last seen in "Paddington 2"), Mark Hadfield, Jenny Ogilvie, Ronni Ancona (last seen in "The Trip to Italy"), Greg Wise (last seen in "Sense and Sensibility"), Kieran O'Brien, Anthony H. Wilson.
RATING: 6 out of 10 unused drafts of the script
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