The writer and director Peter Bogdanovich has made three of my favourite films of all time (The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon, What’s Up, Doc?) but I don’t think I’ll be adding his latest, She’s Funny That Way, to the list. It’s a screwball comedy of the old school and, although it is slightly intriguing at first, where is all this manic activity going? You get your answer after 96 minutes. The answer is: absolutely nowhere.
Set in New York, it stars the British actress Imogen Poots laying on a Brooklyn accent with several trowels and also a spade. (Oh, how one yearns for just the one trowel.) She plays Izzy Patterson, a ‘call girl’ — never ‘prostitute’ in these instances — and straight off I’m in trouble. Cinema is make-believe, I know, but I can never quite get round what I call ‘the Pretty Woman Problem’. That is, when you are as utterly ravishing as Ms Poots (or Julia Roberts), why have sex with strange men for money, at great personal risk, when you could truck up at any top modelling agency in any city and be posing for Burberry at £100,000 per minute, or whatever it is they pay? (No, not keen on those checks either, but for £100,000 per minute, or whatever it is they pay?) But we’ll be obliging and buy that Ms Poots is a ‘call girl’ who, one evening, is summoned to the hotel room of a theatre director Albert, as played by Owen Wilson, who gives the exact same performance as he gave in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, which may prove what I have suspected for quite a while now: when you cast Owen Wilson you get …Owen Wilson.
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