“She’s Funny That Way,” Peter Bogdanovich’s first theatrical film in twenty-four years is a screwball comedy that plays like Woody Allen’s interpretation of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” It’s filled with Allen’s farcical mainstays like therapy sessions, young women, obsessed old men, show biz in jokes and even a character described as an ”existential cab driver.” Trouble is, Allen had nothing to do with the script. She may be funny that way, but she’s not funny this way.
Imogen Poots is Izzy Beatty, a Broadway star sitting down for a no-holds barred interview. She tells of reinventing herself, from “muse” to older men—ie: high priced call girl—to star by way of a chance meeting—ie: paid encounter—with married Broadway director Arnold Albertson (Owen Wilson). Arnold is prepping his next show, a new play called A Grecian Evening, by playwright (Will Forte) Joshua Fleet. The show is set to star Arnold’s wife Delta (Kathryn Hahn) and movie star Seth Gilbert (Rhys Ifans) as a couple who, in real life, had a fling years before while co-starring in London’s West End. Add to that cast of characters Fleet’s girlfriend, the edgy Dr. Jane (Jennifer Aniston), a psychologist who describes her patients as “crazy old loons,” then mix-and-match romantic allegiances and you have a celebration—but not celebratory story—of urban neurosis.
The idea of Bogdanovich returning to the big screen with a fleet-footed comedy is a welcome one. He’s tread similar ground before in films like “What’s Up, Doc” and “Noises Off” with interesting results which makes the flatness of “She’s Funny That Way” all the more puzzling.
What should be a soaring story of romantic intrigue and slamming doors is, instead, a mannered movie that feels like second rate Woody Allen. Of the sprawling cast only a handful are given anything to do. Why cast the hilarious Kathryn Hahn and not give her laugh lines? Why cast Cybill Shepherd and give her what can only be described as half-a-cameo? Those who eat up the majority of the screen time try hard to bring the material to life but Poots, normally an engaging performer, is hampered by a grating Noo Yawk accent that makes Fran Drescher sound refined and overwritten interview scenes which look and sound like acting school monologues.
Wilson fares better but Ifans, as a teen heartthrob, is poorly cast. He pulls off the degenerate Lothario schtick well enough but doesn’t pass muster as a superhero movie star.
What could have been a wistful “if you don’t let go of your past it will strangle your future” look at personal reinvention, or an Allenesque farce, or both, turns out to be neither. Despite a laugh or two it falls flat and works mostly as a cameo parade for faces like Richard Lewis, Joanna Lumley and Michael Shannon without ever working up a real head of steam.
At one point in “She’s Funny That Way” Arnold says, “We have a tornado coming up in the elevator and it is about to touch down.” Trouble is, it never touches down.
Even Oscar winners make mistakes. Meryl Streep starred in “She-Devil.” Daniel Day-Lewis camped it up in “Nine” and “All About Steve” was a career nadir for Sandra Bullock. Now its Jennifer Lawrence’s turn to appear in a movie that will one day be best remembered as an entry on IMDB’s Bottom 100 list.
Lawrence plays the title character, the ambitious wife of George Pemberton (Bradley Cooper), a lumber baron struggling to keep his business afloat in depression era North Carolina. A miscarriage drives a wedge between them, a rift exacerbated by financial trouble, betrayal and the arrival in town of a son George fathered by another woman.
“Serena” has all the makings of an epic story. Imagine “There Will be Blood” built on a base of timber instead of oil. Betrayal, jealousy, murder and money swirl around the central characters, but instead of combining to create a compelling narrative the elements collide in a big bang of schlock. From the broad southern accents to the dirt-smeared Rhys Ifans as Serena’s violent lap dog, everything about the movie verges on caricature.
The reteaming of Cooper and Lawrence after their “Silver Linings Playbook” and “American Hustle” success proves that lightening does not strike thrice. The duo had chemistry to burn in their previous pairings but fail to set off sparks here. As George and Serena they are ruthless and selfish, which should be the stuff of interesting characters, but the story throws so many hurdles their way that eventually it becomes one big, boring blur.
Add to that director Susanne Bier’s habit of shooting everything in intense close-up and you have a far too up-close-and-personal look at some of the least captivating characters to come down the pike in some time.
In the big picture “Serena” isn’t an all out disaster, but because of the above-the-title talent involved it is a major disappointment.
A new movie called Anonymous asks a question that has kept academics debating for decades. Was it actually William Shakespeare, of Stratford-upon-Avon, who wrote the plays and poems attributed to him?
The film suggests it was Edward De Vere, Earl of Oxford (Rhys Ifans) who actually put pen to paper.
Then to hide his identity he hired a semi-employed actor named William Shakespeare (Rafe Spall) to act as his literary beard.
There is no evidence to support the movie’s theory but at least one detail is consistent with history — the likeness of Shakespeare. Even though no painting of the Bard was done during his lifetime, the 1632 Martin Droeshout portrait showing the writer with, “a huge head, placed against a starched ruff,” has become the accepted version of his appearance in art and on film.
Shakespeare and his ruffed collar has popped up in everything from The Simpsons’s 2007 videogame to the Bugs Bunny cartoon A Witch’s Tangled Hare.
Playing the Bard as a lusty poet in Shakespeare in Love made Joseph Fiennes a star, but he was far from the first actor considered for the role. Daniel Day-Lewis and Kenneth Branagh both turned it down before Ralph Fienne’s little brother snapped it up.
The movie, about how Shakespeare’s love affair with Viola De Lesseps (Gwyneth Paltrow) helped him overcome writer’s block and pen Romeo and Juliet in her honour, earned 13 Oscar nominations and won seven, including Best Picture and Best Actress for Gwyneth.
One of the stranger depictions of Shakespeare on screen came in Jean-Luc Godard’s King Lear.
Called “Godard’s most insane, headache-inducing and inscrutable movie,” by one critic, it features Peter Sellars (not the Pink Panther actor, but an avant guard theatre director) as William Shakespeare Junior the Fifth.
In the movie’s post Chernobyl world, all of the world’s culture has been lost and it’s up to folks like Shaksper Junior to try recreate it. Searching for inspiration he scribbles familiar phrases in his notebook — “Love’s Labors Lost. As you wish. As you wish. As you wish. As you witch. As you which? As you watch. As you watch…” — as he tries to piece together the works of his long lost relative.
Best remembered as the Woody Allen movie you haven’t seen — the comedian plays Mr. Alien in an uncredited cameo — King Lear is a head scratcher, even for the often unfathomable Godard.
Coming from director Roland Emmerich, you might expect “Anonymous” to be a large scale action movie about the end of the world, a prehistoric beast or giant Japanese monster. Instead the German director has left the disaster motifs of his previous work behind and created a large scale period piece about the importance of literature set against a backdrop of intrigue and sexual peccadilloes in seventeenth century England.
With a plot that mixes and matches themes from history and Shakespeare’s plays, “Anonymous” uses the backdrop of the struggle for succession between the Tudors and the Cecils as the Essex rebellion moves against Queen Elizabeth I (Vanessa Redgrave) to set the scene for the debut of Shakespeare’s plays. But were they actually written by Shakespeare? The movie supposes it was Edward De Vere, Earl of Oxford (Rhys Ifans)—the Anonymous of the title—who penned plays attributed to William Shakespeare. He kept to the shadows to save his family the embarassment of havimg a common writer in their midst and because thee plays were openly critical of the Queen’s advisors Cecil and Raleigh.
In a story ripe with mystery the only real question is how this got made at all. Big budget Shakespearean movies don’t get made much anymore, so I guess the next best thing is to make a big budget movie about Shakespeare, and Emmerich, despite his tendency to try and juggle too many story threads at one time does a good job at bringing the elegantly filthy world of Elizabethan Britain. Powdered faces, filthy fingernails and velvet jackets abound and the atmosphere adds much to the story.
This is a sprawling story with many twists and turns. The downside is the film’s sketchy casting. In flashbacks the queen and Edward appear to be the same age, but later after a major twist, are revealed to be sixteen years apart. This kind of lack of attention to detail muddies the waters in the flashbacks, making it difficult to follow the story in the first hour. Soon enough, however, all the players are straightened away and the pleasures of the story take hold.
A liberal mix of fact and fiction–there is no real life evidence that the Earl of Oxford penned the plays–“Anonymous” is a twisted tale about how politics and art intersect, and the written word’s ability to instigate change.
Any movie brazen enough to put the word “amazing” in the title really should go the extra mile to ensure that the movie is, in act, amazing. Otherwise filmmakers run the risk of opening themselves up to reviews that begin like this: “Amazing Spider-Man,” more like “So-So Spider-Man.” There’s nothing that much wrong with the reboot of the Sam Raimi series, but it doesn’t have the oomph I would have expected from a talented director—the ironically named Marc Webb—hitting the reset button.
Like first Raimi film—which was released just ten years ago—“The Amazing Spider-Man” is an origin film. Peter Parker (“The Social Network’s” Andrew Garfield) is a misfit teen who develops superhuman powers after being bitten by a radioactive spider. His spidey-senses tingle when danger is about and, as the song goes, he can “do whatever a spider can.” His new powers put him in the path of his scientist father’s old partner Dr. Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans), an amputee doctor experimenting with cross genetic engineering to find a way to regrow his arm, and into the arms of Gwen Stacey (Emma Stone), the cute daughter of a hardboiled police captain (Denis Leary).
There are differences between Raimi’s take on the story and the new film. He no longer organically shoots webs, they now come out of a mechanical webslinger. There’s a new romantic interest—Gwen replaces Mary-Jane Watson (played by Kirsten Dunst in the older movies) as Parker’s paramour– a new villain—Curt Connors appeared in the other movies as Peter’s professor—who morphs from human to giant lizard determined to infect everyone with lizard juice and J. Jonah Jameson, the Daily Bugle’s Editor-in-Chief is absent.
The biggest change, however, comes in the character. Spider-Man Mach 1, Tobey McGuire, played the webbed wonder’s human counter-part as a sweet, but awkward and bullied loner. Garfield takes a different approach. His Parker is rebellious, angst-ridden who taunts his enemies with wisecracks and gleefully yells, “I’m swingin’ here!” as he zigzags trough the air supported by his newfangled super webs.
It’s an interesting, fresh take on Parker, which Garfield, despite being eleven years older than his character, pulls off with aplomb. He’s made the character his own, balancing Parker’s nervous energy with Spider-Man’s cockiness.
Emma Stone’s Gwen and Martin Sheen and Sally Field as Peter’s Uncle Ben and Aunt May bring some necessary heart to the story, but this is a summer blockbuster, so the emphasis is on the other stuff; nine-foot long lizards and fight scenes, but despite the large scope of the film it seems on a smaller scale than Raimi’s movies. Or at last as small a scale as a movie about a giant reptile and a radioactive superhero can be.
The visionary rethink that Christopher Nolan brought to Batman isn’t here. It does have the best Stan Lee cameo to date, beautiful photography and more humor than the previous films, but coming just five years after the last Raimi film it doesn’t feel as “amazing” as it should.
