New on DVD

By Sean Axmaker
Special to MSN Movies

In Britain, Steve Coogan is as busy a TV writer/producer/star as there is. His signature creation, the unctuous, oblivious, ABBA-obsessed TV personality Alan Partridge, has been revived through numerous series and guest spots (soon to be revived once again by Coogan for a live comedy tour), and his most recent series, "Saxondale," is coming soon to BBC America. He's best known to American audiences for his film appearances, from headlining "Around the World in 80 Days" and "24 Hour Party People" to supporting turns in films such as "Night at the Museum" and "Tropic Thunder." He's back in the lead for the indie comedy "Hamlet 2." No, he's not Hamlet, but a failed actor turned high school drama teacher who doesn't let his limited talent stop him from embarking on his theatrical masterwork: a sequel to Shakespeare's "Hamlet," and a musical to boot. He talks about "Hamlet 2," his comedic inspirations (two words: Monty Python), and what he's been watching on DVD.

What's in your DVD player?

I have a kid so I watched "Monsters, Inc.," and I saw "Harold and Maude," the Hal Ashby movie that I showed to a pal the other night. I saw a Henry Fonda film called "The Wrong Man," which is a Hitchcock film, and a movie called "Once," an Irish movie, an independent movie. I've seen it twice now and I'm kind of in love with it.

I take it that a lot of your film watching is on DVD.

Yeah, I do. I have one of those pay-per-view things with like 500 movies you can choose from and I still find myself thinking, "There's nothing here I want to watch."

There aren't a lot of classics on those channels, and you seem to like the classics.

I sometimes like to watch an old movie through the perspective of the present to see the attitudes and perceived values of its time. I like to educate myself with what's been out there. A lot of people, especially people in the industry, are surprisingly ignorant of their film history, which they ought not to be if they're in this industry. It's like doing homework, a very enjoyable homework.

You recorded commentary on the two films you made with Michael Winterbottom, "24 Hour Party People" and "Tristram Shandy." Do you enjoy doing commentary?

Not always, no. Sometimes you can get self-conscious about it. Michael doesn't like doing them at all. In fact, one of the main reasons I did them is that Michael wouldn't do them, so I felt that someone should. But it can be interesting. Both of those movies with Michael Winterbottom were very, very personal to me. It's almost like looking through an old photo album because the films are so visceral to me as a person.

What attracted you to "Hamlet 2"?

What I liked about the script was it didn't seem to be at all hacky. I just felt that whoever had written it had written something that made them laugh, that it was personal. It was odd and unusual and imperfect but quite fresh and different. It was interesting that the studio passed on it earlier because they didn't really know what to do with it, they didn't get it. I often find that those are the kind of movies that appeal to me, ones that have a sort of oddness about them.

Do you think the studios might have been more apt to jump at the project if it had been renamed "Extreme High School Musical"?

Someone else said to me, "This is the perfect antidote to 'High School Musical'. Yeah, "Extreme High School Musical." (Laughs.) That's a very good way of describing it, actually. Bizarrely, it has the same uplifting, feel-good quality at the end, but it goes about it in a very unorthodox way.

Could you roller skate before you started the movie?

No, and I couldn't after the movie.

So were those falls really your falls?

Most of them were genuine falls. I just stopped concentrating and eventually I would just lose control and go flying, because that was the most realistic way to fall. If you try to manufacture it, it's never quite as funny as when you genuinely lose control. I literally suffered for my art.

American kids weaned on Monty Python spent years working over British accents. What's the secret for a Brit to perfect an American accent?

The hardest thing is exercising the muscles in your mouth. There are certain muscles the British have that are very lazy and vice versa with Americans who use certain parts of their mouth to pronounce certain words. So it's practice. The tough thing with doing an accent is you don't want to be thinking about the accent. You want to be thinking about your comic timing and the intention and the performance. No one's going to come along and say, "Well, the performance was terrible and he didn't make me laugh, but his accent was accurate so I'm going to recommend my friends go see it."

You've said that one of your big comedic inspirations was Monty Python. What was it like starring in "Wind in the Willows" with all those guys?

I was 28 years old and it really was like a dream come true. The biggest thrill for me was working with Terry Jones and Eric Idle. All of them were there at one point, except for Graham Chapman [who died in 1989]. When I first met John Cleese, he quoted some of my material from the radio. That was like entering the fifth dimension. I couldn't conceive of it. I got on the phone straight away and said, "John Cleese quoted material from my own show to me." What were the odds of that happening, statistically, in the universe? Almost incalculable.

Sean Axmaker is a film critic for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a DVD columnist for MSN Entertainment and a contributing writer for GreenCine.com, Turner Classic Movies Online, Parallax View and Asian Cult Cinema, among other publications. Find links to all of this and more on his shamelessly self-promoting blog.

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