Dogs pop up a lot in Homer. We’re all fond of Argos, the loyal, aged hound who awaits Odysseus’s return from slaying lots of people in Troy. Yet more often than not the word dog is used as an insult. Helen of Troy describes herself as dog-faced. A favourite scene in The Odyssey is when Odysseus, finally back home in Ithaca but still fond of slaying, unleashes his fury on the “dogs” who have been paying court to his wife, Penelope.
The Trip to Greece, the fourth and perhaps final instalment in the comic, country-hopping road trip starring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, aims to follow Odysseus’s decade-long journey from what was Troy (in western Turkey, not far from Gallipoli) to Ithaca, off the west coast of Greece. They plan to do it in 10 days.
It opens with the Welshman Brydon doing a Homer quote in which dogs are mentioned. A little oddly, it’s not from The Odyssey but its prequel, The Iliad. It’s about how Achilles, who doesn’t make the sequel, has urned a lot of men into carrion for dogs and birds.
In a sense, though, this fits the improvised, ad-libbed, stream-of-consciousness approach to this agreeable series, written by its stars and directed by Michael Winterbottom. As Brydon says when Coogan catches him out confusing The Odyssey and Virgil’s The Aeneid, ‘‘Shit happens”.
Homer is a bit player here, as is Aristotle, as is Alexander the Great. Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees receives far more air time. He wrote, as viewers of Coogan-Brydon’s generation will know, the title track for the 1978 movie Grease.
The poet Sappho is delicately discussed when the two visit her home island of Lesbos. There’s a cured meats-themed take on the battle of Salamis in the Greco-Persian wars. The battle of Marathon, from the same conflict, is used for a waggish re-enactment of the painful dentist’s chair scene between Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman in the 1976 film Marathon Man.
Manchester-born Coogan, who started out as a voice actor in Spitting Image, and Brydon are great mimics and this satirical simulation has been the highlight of the series, which started in 2010 with The Trip, centred in northern England, then moved to Italy (2014) and Spain (2017). Each first screened as BBC TV series and were then edited into feature films.
Ostensibly Coogan and Brydon are on the trips to write food/travel pieces for The Observer newspaper. The scenery is spectacular. Yet this gastronomic pretext becomes less important as the travelling show goes on. It’s more about two comedians who have a lot in common yet deep down are an odd couple. Coogan, who has won seven BAFTAs and been twice Oscar nominated (as producer and scriptwriter on Philomena from 2013), does not let a day go by without mentioning his fame or without noting Brydon’s job is “light entertainment”.
One of his most-acclaimed movie roles is as Stan Laurel in the 2018 biopic Stan & Ollie, and he and Brydon satirising this movie is a must-see. What if, they imagine, the role of Oliver Hardy had gone to Tom Hardy instead of John C. Reilly. They then perform, over lunch, how Hardy would have played Hardy and it is laugh-out-loud funny.
Yet that odd-couple tension escapes this time around. There are times when Brydon loses his good-natured patience with Coogan and times when Coogan admits he is bored by Brydon. Their competitive instincts take on a sharper edge. It comes to a bittersweet conclusion towards the end. Each man, like Odysseus, is thinking about home, for different reasons. Unlike Odysseus, they have phones, so we are able to eavesdrop on what’s concerning them. When Coogan has to drop his comic, arrogant mask and deal with what has happened back in Manchester, he reminds us, in this movie that blends the fictional and the real, why he has seven BAFTAs.
The Trip To Greece (M)
Available on streaming services including Google Play, Apple TV, YouTube, Microsoft Stream and At Home
DVD release on June 3
★★★½
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Macro sci-fi winner on a micro budget
The unconventional and impressive American sci-fi movie The Vast of Night cost so little to make that it’s not described as low-budget but micro-budget. “It’s entirely self-funded. I own the film,” young Oklahoma-based director Andrew Patterson said in a recent interview.
He is right in more ways than one. His innovative approach to a genre that Hollywood has whipped to Mars and back makes this 90-minute independent movie stand out. You will talk about it afterwards. A bit like the possibility of alien life, it’s hard to rule anything in or out.
Patterson and cinematographer Miguel I. Littin-Menz use long tracking shots, rear-view sequences where faces are not clear, infrequent close-ups and scenes where the screen goes black. This is a movie that doesn’t declare its intentions. It makes viewers come to it, grab it by the lapels and ask what the hell is happening.
The script, by James Montague and Craig W. Sanger, includes rapid-fire idiomatic dialogue and clever nods to the time and place in which it is set: 1950s America. Elvis Presley’s carpet is a collector’s item.
The precise setting is New Mexico, perhaps the most famous state in American UFO history. The town in question has a population of 492 and on this night almost everyone is at the high school basketball game.
Two teens, however, are at their night jobs. Chain-smoking, razzing Everett (Jake Horowitz) is hosting a local radio program and the more naive Fay (Sierra McCormick) is running the town switchboard.
Both young actors are brilliant. Like young people today, Everett and Fay are way ahead of the oldies when it comes to tech. The opening scene where they discuss futuristic predictions made in a science magazine is dryly funny. They can just about believe what we know as GPS. But a telephone with a TV screen on it? Don’t razz my berries!
Fay is working the switchboard when the vast night turns darker, and more vast. Callers are repeatedly cut off. A strange mechanical noise starts coming through the line. Everett picks it up too. Then people report seeing “something in the sky”. Then a man calls the station and calmly explains what he thinks is happening. He says he is ex-military. This long sequence, just his voice down the long-distance line, is superb.
Everett and Fay, tape recorder and flashlight in hand, head out to investigate. Everett mentions spies and the Soviet Union, in a brief reminder that in 1953 aliens were not top of the scare list.
What follows could be Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but it is not. It’s an unpredictable immersion into a world that is familiar yet unfamiliar. To complicate matters even further, it’s possible that it’s all in fact just a Twilight Zone-like TV show.
It marks Patterson as someone to watch. This movie won the audience award at the 2019 Slamdance Festival in Utah, fecund ground for future filmmakers. Christopher Nolan started there, as did Bong Joon-ho, with his debut, Barking Dogs Never Bite. His most recent film, Parasite, certainly did bite at this year’s Oscars.
The Vast of Night (PG)
Amazon Prime
★★★★
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