The Trip to Greece is the fourth and purportedly last instalment in director Michael Winterbottom’s serio-comic travelogues starring Steve Coogan (best known as fictitious, cringe-inducing TV host Alan Partridge) and comic actor and quiz show host Rob Brydon. While adopting a slightly different approach to the three previous films, Trip to Greece won’t disappoint the series’ devotees. As fans of
Read moreThe Trip to Spain is the third in Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon’s comedy/ dramas in which they play slightly altered versions of themselves as they journey through scenic countryside reviewing up-market eateries. This time they’re imbibing the cuisine, landscape and culture of Spain as they drive from to Santander down to Malaga. Once again directed by Michael Winterbottom, this
Read moreThe Trip was one of recent cinema and television’s comic highlights. Beginning as a TV show it featured comedians Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon playing themselves in a semi-fictionalised scenario as they toured England’s Lake District sampling its food and culture. The TV series and its compressed cinema version mixed foodie lifestyle show with the two leads’ wonderfully acerbic but
Read morePhilomena, starring Dame Judy Dench and Steve Coogan is an unashamed tear-jerker but an extremely affecting one. The film, based on an article by British journalist and former political spin-doctor Martin Sixsmith, tells of elderly Irish woman, Philomena Lee’s quest to find the son taken from her 50 years earlier. While a teenager in the early 1960’s, Philomena gave birth
Read moreBefore the magnificent cringe comedy of Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm and Ricky Gervais’ The Office was Steve Coogan’s Knowing Me, Knowing You with Alan Partridge a TV talk show parody in which the eponymous host was as contemptible and hilarious as Larry David or Gervais’ David Brent. The superbly vain, egotistical, spineless and conniving Partridge later appeared in radio
Read moreThe Look of Love, the latest film for British director Michael Winterbottom, is not a biopic of Burt Bacharach or Dusty Springfield although the spirit of romantic 60’s cool they epitomised infuses this film. The Look of Love is like a British answer to The People vs. Larry Flynt as it depicts the career and personal travails of porn king
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