Cock and Bull Story

[Reno]

Anyway Reno clearly hasn't read or seen French Lieutenant's Woman

I have. It attempted a similar thing as Cock and Bull Story without the comedy and wasn't a terribly good film either. Unlike Cock and Bull and the Spike Jonze films it didn't go as far as Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons playing themselves though. I also read the John Fowles novel and the conceit worked much better on the page.

I mentioned the Spike Jonze films because they were so recent that it seemed strange someone else would do something so similar (dare I say post-modern) so soon after.

I didn't think Cock & Bull was a terrible film, btw, but I felt it coudn't decide what it tried to be apart from being clever and it just wasn't all that clever.

Gillian Anderson was good fun, I wished she'd been in it more. The genuinely weird dream sequence involving her, Coogan and a womb was the best bit of the film.

 

[jms]

jms - have you read the book? It's essentially unfilmable, but is very self-referential in a proto-post-modern way, so the film is supposed to try and reflect this with its structure. I haven't seen it yet, so I maybe I've got it all wrong.

Well be that as it may I still don't think it really works - it relies too much on that idea of it being unfilmable I think and it just gets pretty tedious. Im sure the book is probably good if you enjoy reading stuff from that era - I tried reading Gulliver's travels which was written about twenty years earlier and couldn't get on with it at all. I think the whole film was a bit up its own arse and pretending to be cleverer than it actually was. But I'm probably wrong.