A whittled-down version of the British television series of the same name, directed by Michael Winterbottom and starring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon playing fictionalized versions of themselves. Coogan takes a writing job from the London Observer to do a restaurant tour in the North of England. At the last minute Coogan's girlfriend decides not to go, so he asks his comedian friend Brydon to go in her place. They basically eat at expensive restaurants and do celebrity impressions to one-up each other and fill the silence (the dueling Michael Caines sequence is very funny). The mostly improvised conversations are always competitive, they just want to make the other person laugh, with an occasional thinly veiled swipe designed to undermine. No serious inquiries are made of the other person's life…the conversation is a series of jokes and insults and remains on the surface (I've had friendships like this, they are simultaneously exhilarating and exhausting). This film seems like it was more fun to make than watch. Though it is still quite satisfying, it could've been more. Maybe my expectations were a little high. The deleted scenes are a hoot, particularly the "Trevor Eve" sequence. They try to perfect the delivery of a BBC announcer by uttering the phrase: "Extreme Measures, with Trevor Eve…Sunday on BBC 1" nearly a hundred times, in a hundred different ways. This keeps going for fifteen minutes (they later visit an Abbey where Coogan states: "This chapel received a papal blessing." To which Brydon says "Papal Blessing, with Trevor Eve…Sunday on BBC 1.") By the twentieth "Trevor Eve" variation, I was laughing to the point of tears. I recommend this, I just wish it had more good natured, Trevor Eve-style idiocy.
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