Monday, August 17, 2015

She's Funny That Way (2014) A Film by Peter Bogdanovich


"Peter Bogdanovich's She's Funny That Way, like They All Laughed before it, is set in a hermetic Manhattan where charming extroverts are always just steps away from hailing a taxi, their budgets for doing so seemingly without ceilings, and no more than a few minutes away from any given destination among a small cluster of self-curated urban hangouts. In one comic set piece that plays like an insider callback to an almost identical scene in the prior film, the entire ensemble ends up, serendipitously, in the same upscale bistro for dinner, having all decided on their own to attend after parting from the same Broadway audition. While it's tempting to fixate on the facets of modern Big Apple life that are missing from this decidedly concentrated portrait (racial diversity, cost-of-living stress, the hassles of urban time management, the subway system), it's more fulfilling to look at what is there: a vision of the privileged class as a comically insular world, and its recognition of the idea that the paths taken by the privileged to reach their seemingly perfectly upheld lives haven't necessarily been any less fraught with self-denied compromise and regret than those of less fortunate city dwellers." Full review at Slant.

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