The founder of this site once said a very wise thing. Well,
he actually said quite a few very wise things, but here’s one I go over and
over pretty frequently: “There are two things you can’t argue in film:
comedy and eroticism. If something doesn’t make you laugh, no one can tell you
why it’s funny, and it’s difficult to reason someone out of an erection.”
That’s pretty funny in and of itself. Anyway, I’ve always respected Roger
Ebert’s rule of comedy, which he articulated differently in various pieces over
the course of his life, and which I distilled in my own mind as an instruction:
If something’s funny, and you laugh at it a lot, you’ve gotta own it. (If you know me at all, you also know that
I’ve got a laugh that’s kind of hard not to own—when I lose it, it’s pretty
loud. I think Fox Searchlight bought “Napoleon Dynamite” at Sundance partially
in the strength of my reaction to the steak-throwing joke.)
So here’s the breakdown: I laughed like a maniac at the
Michael-Caine-impersonation reprise performed by comic actors Steve Coogan and
Rob Brydon at the front end of “The Trip To Italy,” the followup (to call this
a sequel is kind of special pleading, really) to “The Trip.” The difference, by
the way, being that in the prior film—both are distilled from somewhat longer
television mini-series-es broadcast in Great Britain—the fellows gallivanted
around the British countryside and in this picture they are in, you guessed it,
Italy. To get back to the record, I also laughed like a maniac at the pictures
end, in which Brydon and Coogan discuss various James Bonds in front of an
appreciative audience of actors playing the publicist and teenage son of the
characters played by Brydon and Coogan, who are lightly fictionalized versions
of themselves. And I laughed consistently and appreciatively at many of the
scenes in between, some of which depict the actors singing along to an Alanis
Morrissette CD.
So if you go in for allusive British humor that builds
slowly from dry to uproarious, as executed by two absolute masters of the form,
“The Trip To Italy” will work for you, I believe. I also think the film,
directed, like the prior one, by the astute Michael Winterbottom, is a somewhat
smoother trip than the first. In that one, Coogan, who’s better known
internationally than Brydon, was the focus, and the movie’s plot, such as it
was, was hooked into his work and personal anxieties as he took a break from
his Hollywood career just as it entered a pivotal moment. Here the focus is on
Brydon, who gets a call from Hollywood, and also succumbs to a vacation
flirtation that results in a pretty serious domestic misstep. Because the viewer
is arguably less familiar with Brydon, the fiction is more convincing; we’re
spared the potential distraction of trying to separate and/or combine the
“real” person from the character he’s playing. Which leaves us more focus for
the incredible-looking Italian meals the pair sample (these trips are foodie
fodder for newspaper articles Brydon writes), and the impeccably delivered
banter they exchange. It all looks scrumptious, which makes this movie a
terribly refreshing one with which to close out the summer.
Source: http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-trip-to-italy-2014
