BEFORE: Jennifer Aniston carries over from "The Bounty Hunter", and like I said yesterday, it feels like deja vu, because Owen Wilson's back, so is Illeana Douglas, and Kathryn Hahn - the chain's circled back on itself several times over.
Tomorrow on Turner Classic Movies, Herbert Rudley links from "The Seventh Cross" to the day's first film, can you fill in the other links? Answers below.
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 29 on TCM (31 Days of Oscar, Day 29)
6:15 am "Brewster's Millions" (1945) with _____________ linking to:
7:45 am "Gold Diggers of 1933" (1933) with _____________ linking to:
9:30 am "The Champ" (1979) with _____________ linking to:
11:45 am "The Four Musketeers" (1974) with _____________ linking to:
1:45 pm "The Swarm" (1978) with _____________ linking to:
4:00 pm "The Miracle Worker" (1962) with _____________ linking to:
6:00 pm "The Graduate" (1967) with _____________ linking to:
8:00 pm "Tootsie" (1982) with _____________ linking to:
10:15 pm "Oh, God!" (1977) with _____________ linking to:
12:15 am "The Sunshine Boys" (1975) with _____________ linking to:
2:15 am "California Suite" (1978) with _____________ linking to:
4:15 am "Hot Millions" (1968)
All right, more populist material and fewer obscure films! I've seen "The Champ", "The Four Musketeers", "The Graduate", "Tootsie", "Oh, God!", "The Sunshine Boys" and "California Suite". I may have seen "The Miracle Worker", but I can't prove it, I might have seen the remake, as I did with "Brewster's Millions". So I'm counting another 7 out of 12, which gets me to 111 seen out of 337, so I'm back up to 32.9%. Next step, breaking that 33% barrier one last time...
THE PLOT: On the set of a theater directors new project, a love triangle forms between him, his wife, and the call girl-turned-actress cast in the production.
AFTER: I wanted to like this one, I really did, but then the movie did everything it possibly could to make me HATE it, I'm sorry to report. This seemed at first like it would be a fun romp, as a peek behind the scenes of a theater company's production, and the sort of on-again, off-again relationships that one might expect actors and other theater personnel to have. In other words, it's rich territory for a rom-com, especially when things are happening on and off-stage that could reflect or bounce back on each other. The director of this one, Peter Bogdanovich, also directed "Noises Off" back in the day, and while that was a very silly film, it was also complicated at the same time, showing us the same production several times, once from the theater audience's point of view and then again from behind the stage as things threatened to fall apart during a performance.
But as this one started to develop, I quickly realized that wasn't what was going on at all in "She's Funny That Way". Instead it felt like Bogdanovich was doing some kind of tribute to Woody Allen's films, the way that NYC creative people argue when they're in relationships and then try to charm each other when they're not. I'm reminded that a few of these actors have also been in Woody's movies, like Owen Wilson played a writer in "Midnight in Paris" and plays a theater director here - (I'm sure there are other examples, like Debi Mazar was in "Wonder Wheel" and Cybill Shepherd was in "Alice"). My point is, I got a very Woody Allen vibe off of this, and nobody can really do Woody but Woody, anyone who tries is doomed to fall short. You can't just throw a huge cast together and explore all the improbable coincidences between them and come out with "Hannah and Her Sisters" on the other side.
Another Woody connection was "Mighty Aphrodite", which was also about a prostitute trying to rise above through a relationship with a writer. And Mira Sorvino's character had a notorious New Yawk accent in that one, and the same goes for Imogen Poots' character here - only Poots' accent is downright terrible. I know she's a British actress, forcing her to speak with a very phony Brooklyn-like drawl is some kind of movie crime. Some people (like Debi Mazar) were born into it, other people might be able to fake it, but this actress is just NOT one of them. It was so strained that it was painful to listen to - maybe if you don't live in New York this might be the way that you THINK people here talk, but it just isn't. She sounded like Alice Kramden from "The Honeymooners" with her jaw wired shut. Very distracting.
But I think the biggest movie crime of all here is the very simplistic portrayal of gender politics - all the men are lying, cheating womanizers who can't stay faithful, not even the married ones, and then nearly all of the women are prostitutes or ex-prostitutes. Well, OK, except two, but one of them runs the call-girl agency, and that's nearly the same thing. How did we get to this, in modern times, where a story so neatly sells out BOTH genders? Didn't this line of thinking feel very outdated to anyone else? Look, I can accept it for the single characters, especially the actors, because we all know that actors have to get up on stage (or on a film set), and kiss (at the very least) other people as part of the job - sometimes the emotions are going to follow the actions, I get that. And actors are also vain people to begin with - I know I'm generalizing, but work with me here - and then if they're FAMOUS to boot, there's probably a steady stream of people who know them and are interested in them, that's all fine.
But here's where my problem lies - Arnold, the male lead, Owen Wilson's character, is the married theater director, but as soon as he comes to NYC to start rehearsals on the new play, his first phone call is to order a call girl sent to his hotel room. Already I don't like this guy, we're not getting off on a good note, I think. After dinner, drinks and a roll in the hay, he offers the call girl $30,000 in cash to quit being a prostitute and start a new career. It just so happens that she's interested in acting - boy, if only she knew a theater director who was casting a new play! And if you notice, he offered her a case full of money to quit prostituting herself, only it was done AFTER he slept with her. So what's his motivation? Is he genuinely interested in helping a woman improve herself, or does he have some odd fascination with being her last client? Is this being done to feed his ego, or what? Plus, who the heck does this? He's got no guarantee that she's going to get out of the life, so is this really the best way to help women improve their lives, or could the money be used better somehow, by donating it to charity? On top of all that, I thought we were supposed to be more enlightened about sex workers now, but paying women to get out of that racket seems like rewarding them and stigmatizing them at the same time, and that's not cool.
Anyway, Isabella (or "Glo", her street name) takes the money and decides to become an actress, only to show up at the casting call for THE EXACT SAME PLAY that Arnold is directing - so he has to pretend not to recognize her, and she, well, honestly she seems so dim that she genuinely doesn't recognize him from the night before, which seems a bit odd. She also doesn't think to ask why he's using a different name the next day - maybe she's on to his game, but somehow I don't think so. The play's writer and the other actors convince Arnold to give her the role, which is great, that won't be awkward at all. Essentially, the story here has to bend over backwards to avoid the usual convention of the "casting couch", where an actress had to sleep with the director to get a role. Here she sleeps with him, and gets the role, but those two things aren't connected. Except they ARE, because he gave her the money - so it's not much of an improvement.
By now, Arnold's wife has shown up - she's an actress in the play - and has no idea that she's co-starring with her husband's lover. But her other (male) co-star is HER ex-lover, and the coincidences just keep on cascading over each other. This is the start of a series of overlapping love triangles that strains the boundaries of believability. Every person is romantically involved with at least two other people, it seems. By the time the film gets around to revealing that the detective that the judge hired to follow around the call girl he's obsessed with just happens to be the father of the man who's ALSO in the play and is ALSO the boyfriend of the therapist who's got almost everyone else as her patient, it's so impossibly unbelievable as to nearly be a parody of the whole rom-com genre. There are 7 million people in New York City - the chances of any 10 of them being this interconnected is utterly mathematically impossible. The story is almost painful in its outlandishness.
Meanwhile, wherever Arnold goes, he encounters women who used to be prostitutes - and apparently he's pulled this $30,000 case-of-money thing (which the film improbably calls "throwing squirrels to nuts", for reasons). The problem is, they all want to thank him for helping turn their lives around, and he can't let his wife find out how many hookers he slept with. Ha ha, isn't that funny? Well, no.
I've got a NITPICK POINT about the fact that Arnold's children are absent from most of the movie. Why are they even part of the story, if they're not going to be around? Why did his wife bring them to New York if they weren't ever going to see their parents, who are busy all day working on the new play, plus having affairs at night (which is why everyone comes to NY?). I guess the kids are staying at their grandparents house? We see SOMEBODY bring the kids to the opening night of the play, but the film doesn't explain this - so apparently I've already thought about this more than the screenwriter or director did.
For that matter, why is Arnold still alone in his room at the Barclay? When his wife came to town, why wouldn't he share that room (or move to one at a different hotel) with his wife and kids? And with his wife in town, why would he call Isabella up and invite her to his room? I know, to set up the madcap bedroom-farce slamming door thing when his wife finds her there - but really? Does he have two hotel rooms at the same time? Because nobody does that. I would IMAGINE that somebody cheating on his wife might want to use a different hotel, but we're in "improbable coincidence" land here, so everyone associated with this play just happens to be in the same hotel, on the same floor. Again, mathematics tell me that this just wouldn't happen, unless it was pre-planned.
It's just too bad that this comedy fired off story bits in every possible direction, and then there was just no follow-up on anything - for example, at one point the dogs of two characters run off together, away from the stage, where all the love triangles have come to their boiling points, all the conflicts are raging and everyone is fighting. But...nobody's going to chase after their beloved dogs? If my pet ran off, I'd probably chase after it, but here nobody could seem to be bothered, I guess they didn't really like their dogs? Or maybe the dogs were desperately trying to get out of this movie, and the actors really couldn't blame them - they probably would have run away too if they could. At another point a taxi driver was driving Arnold and his wife across town and found them so annoying that he just abandoned his cab (which no NYC cab driver would EVER do) and hopped in another cab as a passenger to get away. See what I mean? But there was zero explanation, zero follow-up on what happened next, the characters in the cab just sort of shrug and walk off, they're too dumb to even drive themselves in the cab to where they needed to go...
Also starring Owen Wilson (last seen in "You, Me & Dupree"), Imogen Poots (last seen in "Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping"), Kathryn Hahn (last seen in "Private Life"), Will Forte (last heard in "The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part"), Rhys Ifans (last heard in "Exit Through the Gift Shop"), Austin Pendleton (last heard in "Finding Dory"), George Morfogen, Cybill Shepherd (last seen in "The Heartbreak Kid"), Richard Lewis (last seen in "Sandy Wexler"), Debi Mazar (last seen in "Wonder Wheel"), Illeana Douglas (last seen in "Grace of My Heart"), Jennifer Esposito (last seen in "The Bachelor"), Tovah Feldshuh (last seen in "Happy Accidents"), Joanna Lumley (last seen in "Paddington 2"), John Robinson, Ahna O'Reilly (last seen in "Marshall"), Lucy Punch (last seen in "Stand Up Guys"), Poppy Delevingne (last seen in King Arthur: Legend of the Sword"), John Tormey, Jake Hoffman (last seen in "The Irishman"), Jake Lucas, Sydney Lucas, with cameos from Tatum O'Neal (last seen in "Paper Moon"), Graydon Carter (last seen in "Always at the Carlyle"), Quentin Tarantino (last heard in "The Hateful Eight), Colleen Camp (last seen in "Rumor Has It..."), Michael Shannon (last seen in "Pottersville") and archive footage of Charles Boyer (last seen in "Barefoot in the Park"), Jennifer Jones (last seen in "A Farewell to Arms"), Peter Bogdanovich (last seen in "While We're Young"), Lorraine Bracco (last seen in "Riding in Cars with Boys").
RATING: 4 out of 10 giant menus in an Italian restaurant
ANSWERS: The missing TCM "360 Degrees of Oscar" links are Dennis O'Keefe, Joan Blondell, Faye Dunaway, Richard Chamberlain, Patty Duke, Anne Bancroft, Dustin Hoffman, Teri Garr, George Burns, Walter Matthau, Maggie Smith.
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