STEVE COOGAN AND ROB BRYDON CLEARLY DO A LOT OF IMPROVISING
THE RIVALRY ISSUE
AND ACTION {BY AL HOFF AND SAM ALLARD} Both Pittsburgh and Cleveland have seen major motion pictures shot on city streets, but which ones are better?
Pittsburgh’s Night of the Living Dead
Cleveland Both Cleveland and Pittsburgh have played prominent roles in major superhero movie franchises. Significant portions of both The Avengers and Captain America: Winter Soldier were shot in Cleveland. Pittsburgh was converted to Gotham for the The Dark Knight Rises. Cleveland, with its verdant landscape and rich architectural diversity, was converted to Stuttgart, Germany, Washington, D.C. and New York City for the films. Pittsburgh was just sort of a droopy dimestore Chicago that everyone preferred in The Dark Knight. Cleveland has bent over backwards for the film industry — you could argue almost too much so, what with the closure of the Shoreway for Winter Soldier — but our city is obviously much nicer and more photogenic: All the best scenes from Dark Knight Rises took place underground.
Pittsburgh There is more to a city’s film scene than simply subbing in for a fake comic-book town. Pittsburgh has movies actually set in Pittsburgh, a character in itself. Like Flashdance: She’s a welder by day, stripper by night, and a ballerina at heart; there is no greater Rust Belt queen. For eggheads, we got Wonder Boys: With great universities come rumpled professors and wine parties. Other brains come serious — Concussion asks how do you tell a football town that the sport is killing its heroes? — or for dinner, in the genre-defining Night of the Living Dead. Striking Distance is a cheesy cop actioner set on — ahem — three rivers. Oh, and Sudden Death, because Pittsburgh has a hockey team.
On a Spanish sojourn: Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan
ON THE ROAD AGAIN {BY AL HOFF}
I
N MICHAEL Winterbottom’s The Trip to
Spain, two British entertainers take a week-long tour of Spain, ostensibly to review a number of quite nice restaurants for publication. For Steve Coogan, it’s a useful tie-in to his latest film about a chef. For Rob Brydon, it’ll be a break from his demanding young children. And for both, it will be a change to catch up — as you may recall, the pair had two similar previous outings: The Trip (2010), in which they hit eateries in the north of England, and The Trip to Italy (2014). (All three films are condensed from the British TV series.) Coogan and Brydon are once again playing semi-fictionalized versions of themselves, and the film adds a splash of plot. Coogan is fretting about the state of his career (his agent has just dumped him), and contemplating a new relationship. Brydon continues to chafe at having to orbit Coogan’s star. Yet despite the loose plot and the scripted assorted factoids about
AHOFF@PGHCITYPAPER.COM
38
PITTSBURGH CITY PAPER
09.06/09.13.2017
Spanish castles and Don Quixote, the two actors clearly do a lot of improvising. Much of their conversation is competitive banter — who can be wittier, drop more obscure facts. And, of course, who can do better celebrity impressions. The two careen
THE TRIP TO SPAIN DIRECTED BY: Michael Winterbottom STARRING: Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan
through John Hurt, Roger Moore and David Bowie, among others, and return to golden oldie Michael Caine, by way of Mick Jagger. And speaking of oldies, only one song gets a work-out in this iteration, the bizarro soft-pop tune “Windmills of Your Mind.” If you’re thinking, “This sounds just like the other two films,” well, it is. Swap in Spanish scenery (very nice), subtract food talk (some fantastic-looking seafood
gets short shrift) and add more musing about being middle-aged, and it’s basically the same pleasant, if utterly predictable, outing. Yet, the gimmick has grown a bit stale, and there is something a bit off about watching a pair of privileged white guys carp about their privilege. Even if the film is winking at this affluenza for comic purposes, it’s still present. And then there’s the ending. It’s only a few seconds, but the last shot of the film is a bum note. While designed to be funny, it relies on religious and racial stereotyping that is not only tone-deaf in 2017, but even less funny after celebrating a pair of wildly privileged and fairly self-absorbed British guys. And it’s doubly odd coming from a director whose films about marginalized communities and immigrants speak of more sensitivity. You may laugh — or you may just have to shrug it off and enjoy the perfectly ordinary end credits as a chaser. A H OF F @ P G HC I T Y PA P E R. C OM