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How entertaining? ★★☆☆☆
Thought provoking? ★☆☆☆☆ 27 May 2015
This a movie review of SHE'S FUNNY THAT WAY. |
"Even a muse needs a muse," Izzy (Imogen Poots)
THE LAST PICTURE SHOW, launching Jeff Bridges and Cybil Shepherd, is regarded as a classic of cinema. One of the vanguard of counter-culture. Director Peter Bogdanovich should thus not be written off, purely on the basis that if you can make a single notable work surely you have it in you to make another? Thirteen years have elapsed since the 75-year old's last cinematic fiction feature. Was it worth the wait? No.
What Bogdanovich has turned in is a limp, sub-Woody Allen Broadway farce that too seldom elicits a chortle. One can see why the delay in releasing SHE'S FUNNY THAT WAY. Premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2014, a certain other movie about staging a Broadway production dwarfed it… BIRDMAN. While that was curious and inventive, this is the opposite; with the feeling of having your I.Q. yanked from your brain. Owen Wilson, though a likeable performer, keeps appearing in these duds (see also HOW DO YOU KNOW and ARE YOU THERE).
THE LAST PICTURE SHOW, launching Jeff Bridges and Cybil Shepherd, is regarded as a classic of cinema. One of the vanguard of counter-culture. Director Peter Bogdanovich should thus not be written off, purely on the basis that if you can make a single notable work surely you have it in you to make another? Thirteen years have elapsed since the 75-year old's last cinematic fiction feature. Was it worth the wait? No.
What Bogdanovich has turned in is a limp, sub-Woody Allen Broadway farce that too seldom elicits a chortle. One can see why the delay in releasing SHE'S FUNNY THAT WAY. Premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2014, a certain other movie about staging a Broadway production dwarfed it… BIRDMAN. While that was curious and inventive, this is the opposite; with the feeling of having your I.Q. yanked from your brain. Owen Wilson, though a likeable performer, keeps appearing in these duds (see also HOW DO YOU KNOW and ARE YOU THERE).
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Structured around an interview conducted by a sour-faced critic, Judy (Illeana Douglas), of ingénue Izzy (Imogen Poots), we discover over the runtime how the latter came to prominence. Capable an actor as Poots is, her Brooklyn accent sounds as if it has been learnt by watching Mira Sorvino in MIGHTY APHRODITE. Perhaps the unreality is meant to be heightened by the obvious falseness? Creating a lack of believability is not a problem for the film.
Izzy is making a living as a prostitute, going by the name of Glow, while pursuing her ambition of acting. Film/theatre director Arnold (Wilson) is in New York to put on a play written by Joshua (Will Forte). He happily cheats on his wife, actress Delta (Kathryn Hahn), with hookers and then gives them $30,000 to go after their dreams. Needless to say so-called comedy hijinks occur when Izzy arrives at the audition for the play, which also stars Arnold’s spouse.
There is an array of name actors chucked at the screen (Jennifer Aniston, Rhys Ifans, Lucy Punch). They are generally on form at least. Aniston’s Jane, dealing an incongruous foul-mouthed threat to stick scissors up Joshua’s d*ck, gets a rare laugh. However, by the idiotic climax it won’t matter if Hollywood’s elite paraded through the set, the result would remain: Anachronistic buffoonery of the tedious variety.
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