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"A Trip to Italy:" for English comedy lovers, only. The two

Posted by tinear (A) on October 16, 2014 at 18:54:23

hilarious British comedians are at it again ("The Trip" first paired them as they assaulted the sensibilities of the Lake District residents). Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, this time, roam through Italy in a Morris convertible, sampling the fare of the finest of restaurants and the plushest of hotels. Not much happens, but the dialogue is side-splitting: the insults--- with nary a vulgar epithet fouling the air--- are acidic, clever, and non-stop. One scene, in which each seeks to upstage the other's Michael Caine impression, had me laughing so hard I really did get a serious pain in the side. I honestly can say I've never laughed so hard, so long.
Again, if English-style comedy, with its witticisms and indirect putdowns, is your cup of gin, do not miss this gem. For those with any education or knowledge of the classics, many of the comments are especially pointed.
From the wonderful NYTimes review:
"The implicit comparisons recur in Italy, where the men visit the towns in which the sexual outlaws Byron and Shelley lived, shortly before their deaths. The comics perform funerary obsequies for the poets and again recite in their own and others’ voices. “The Trip to Italy,” for all its japes, is haunted by mortality, as was its namesake, “Viaggio in Italia” (1954), the Rossellini masterpiece starring George Sanders and Ingrid Bergman as a warring couple dismally on tour. Like them, Coogan and Brydon visit the museum at Pompeii, with its plaster casts of the bodies of the dead. Rossellini showed us a couple who died locked in embrace when Vesuvius exploded, a harsh reflection on the modern couple’s marital anguish. Here, in a blasphemous reduction, Brydon summons his man-in-a-box voice to play a Pompeian lying in a glass case; the two carry on a discreet gay flirtation. It’s not that the end is nigh for these men, but death, for them and for Winterbottom, is always present in life. Over and over on the soundtrack, Winterbottom plays the beginning of “Im Abendrot,” the last of Richard Strauss’s “Four Last Songs,” composed in 1948, a year before he died, at the age of eighty-five. The use of classical music in movies normally makes me wince, but in this film the glorious Strauss farewell fits every time."

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