Should be asleep by now, but this was worth it...

[frameofmind6]

Just finished watching Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story. I actually remember wanting to see this movie a few years ago, during one of the summers I worked at Blockbuster. Obviously that job gave me plenty of time to peruse movie titles, and this movie happened to be one of the ones on the New Release wall that summer, so I passed by it often. It looked weird, but interesting, so I had it on my list of stuff to rent (we got like five free rentals a week, so I was watching a lot of movies in those days), but I never got around to it. Now I'm sorta glad I didn't -- I think it would have been completely baffling to me at that time, and I certainly would have missed out on all the Alan Partridge references. See, the film stars Steve Coogan (which was what brought it back to my attention recently), and it's sort of a behind-the-scenes story of the filming of a film adaptation of a very strange comic novel from the 18th Century (The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne), with all the actors playing both the film characters and themselves as the actors in the film. Netflix calls it a "mockumentary," but it's not exactly -- there's no acknowledgement of the crew filming what the audience is actually watching, no actual breaking of the fourth wall, though we do dip in and out of the film-within-the-film. But it does have a similar feel to a mockumentary in some ways, in that the actors are playing sort of fictionalized versions of themselves, with references to reality (such as the Alan Partridge stuff, and Around the World in 80 Days, which Coogan filmed just before Tristram Shandy).

Anyway, it was really interesting -- not to mention funny. Weird, but my kind of weird. And I definitely enjoyed it a lot more than I would have if I'd watched it four years ago -- nice how that worked out. I guess procrastination does pay off once in awhile... ;)