The Trip

I think McCracken recommended this flick to me. I can't say that I can recommend it to others, though...Do read on...

It's just so exclusively British that I don't know if anyone without a deep-rooted British background would really care for the nuances and references throughout the film. It's just very anglo-centric to the point where it could be to the film's determent.

The humor is drier than Tutankhamun's corpse. The whole film is pretty much two friends doing Michael Caine impressions and quoting Wordsworth for 90 minutes. Along the way they eat at a half dozen restaurants that look like the kind of food you'd see on a Top Chef finale. One of them will be writing about the food and the trip for a magazine.

If you put a camera in the car and filmed our road trip this weekend as we drove from Detroit to Chicago and back again you'd definitely get some gems in there. But you might have to sit through quite a lot of mediocre content before you got to said gems. That's a shitty analogy of what this film was like. At times I was genuinely laughing out loud. Some scenes were hilarious. But overall, I don't know if I could tell anyone to watch the whole movie just to get to those scenes. You might get bored. I like drier than hell humor so I was okay with it.

However, both actors and Director did Tristram Shandy together and I thought that film pretty much sucked. But Winterbottom also did 9 Songs and that was...interesting... If you get anything from this review it's that you should see Winterbottom and Coogan collaborate together in 24 Hour Party People. THAT was a great film!

Coogan also did a series called Saxondale recently. I watched a few episodes on Netflix. I thought it was okay, but I wasn't hooked so I deleted the series.

Coogan is a cool cat.

See this (even the trailer sucks):

Not this (even through the trailer is good):