In Peter Bogdanovich’s screwball comedy She’s Funny That Way, Owen Wilson plays a hopelessly romantic New York stage director who likes to rescue prostitutes by handing them sackfuls of no-strings cash in order to get their lives back on the straight and narrow.
His latest “project” is a Brooklyn escort called Izzy Finkelstein who uses the money to fulfil her ambition of becoming a successful stage actress – which causes a collection of past acquaintances to emerge from the woodwork, bumping into each other in classic farce fashion at a hotel, an audition and a fancy restaurant over a few days.
She’s Funny That Way sometimes plays like second-string Wood Allen, and it is not Bogdanovich’s best but it has some intermittently smart lines and some gorgeously accomplished performances, especially from Imogen Poots as Izzy, Jennifer Anniston as a neurotic therapist, and Kathryn Hahn as Wilson’s sharp-tongued wife.
Bogdanovich started out with the critical and commercial hat-trick, The Last Picture Show, What’s Up Doc and Paper Moon before undertaking the disastrous adaptation of the Henry James novella, Daisy Miller in 1974, the musical At Long Last Love (in which he got Burt Reynolds and Cybill Shepherd to sing) and Nickelodeon. Although subsequent films like Saint Jack and Mask were popular he never fully recovered as a director, but he became an enormously influential writer, film historian, producer and actor (in The Sopranos).
He will be on The Picture Show at 6pm on Saturday to talk about She’s Funny That Way and his career.
Minions is a bitty, hastily produced and loosely-strung prequel to the two Despicable Me movies in which the little yellow, battery-shaped creatures of the title search down through history – beginning in the Stone Age – for a “master” who will lead them in their international quest for villainy.
After a long lead-in narrated by Geoffrey Rush, three of the minions land in flower-power era New York where they link up with “the world’s first female super villain” Scarlet Overkill and she involves them in a dastardly plan to take over the throne of England.
Minions is literally sketchy and some of the comic ideas feel like cast-offs from the earlier films, but there is some clever voice work from Sandra Bullock, Jon Hamm and Michael Keaton and the sound track is crammed with 60s tunes from The Kinks, The Turtles, Donovan, The Rolling Stones, The Who, and Jimi Hendrix.
Slow West is a lean, polished western set in 1880s Colorado and shot in New Zealand with Michael Fassbender as the classic guardian or mentor figure guiding a young Scottish aristocrat (Kodie Smit McPhee) in search of the woman he believes he loves.
The environment of Scots, Irish, Germans, Swedes and Chinese is – like the boy – coming of age, and Fassbender’s mysteriously motivated gunman, is caught between the two, gruffly articulating the needs of one to the other.
Slow West is a confident feature debut by former Scottish shorts director and musician John Maclean with atmospheric imagery by Irish cinematographer Robbie Ryan.
A restored version of the Carol Reed classic The Third Man goes into the Irish Film Institute and the Light House Cinema in Dublin on Friday. The Third Man, which was made in a divided post WWII Vienna, is a mix of political thriller and gothic mystery, transferring the urban nightmare world of Hollywood film noir to a shadowy European setting.
Joseph Cotton plays an innocent abroad, a writer of pulp westerns who comes to Europe for work at the behest of an old friend – and then finds that the friend is as comprehensively corrupt as the city in which he lives.
The Third Man was cited as the greatest British film ever made in a BFI survey a few years ago. Among its many strengths is a charismatic performance by Orson Welles as one of the screen’s great villains, Harry Lime. Unmissable.
