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$Participants walk along Market Street in the annual LGBT Pride Parade to begin in San Francisco on June 30, 2013. Hundreds of thousands turned out to celebrate diversity, the Supreme Court decisions, and the resumption of gay marriages in the state of California. UPI/Terry Schmitt / eyevine\n\nContact eyevine for more information about using this image:\nT: +44 (0) 20 8709 8709\nE: info@eyevine.com\nhttp://www.eyevine.com$ Same-sex marriage is legal nationwide: Jubilant scenes across the US as Obama calls Supreme Court ruling 'a victory for America'
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She's not that funny: English rose Imogen Poots and a humdrum romp

By Brian Viner for Daily Mail

Published: 16:28 EST, 25 June 2015 | Updated: 17:27 EST, 25 June 2015

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She's Funny That Way (12A)

Rating:

The Overnight (15)

Rating:

Two pictures this week evoke a bygone era of film-making, but largely in the regrettable sense that they don’t make ’em quite like they used to.

One is She’s Funny That Way, an attempt by the still-illustrious Peter Bogdanovich to make a screwball comedy of the kind that might once have starred James Stewart, and now stars Owen Wilson.

Wilson plays director Arnold Albertson, who is unfaithful to his wife with a string of call girls, but in every case falls slightly in love with them and offers them $30,000 to get out of the oldest profession and do something more constructive.

Imogen Poots and Owen Wilson are strange bedfellows in She's Funny That Way

The latest ‘escort’ to fall under his spell is incurable romantic Izzy Finkelstein (English rose Imogen Poots, whose Brooklyn vowels betray very occasional Hammersmith roots).

It is her story we learn in flashback, as she sits in an LA lounge, now a movie star, telling a showbiz reporter how she got her big break.

We duly whizz back four years to her hotel-suite assignation with Arnold, during which he tells her that she should go all out to realise her ambition to act.

Next morning, she attends an audition for a play, only to discover the director is none other than Arnold, and that she has to read opposite his wife Delta Simmons (Kathryn Hahn), a celebrated actress making a comeback.

The film also features a stroppy psychiatrist (played by Jennifer Aniston) and Rhys Ifans, as mischief-maker Seth Gilbert

Complicating further this menage-a-trois is the play’s British co-star, Seth Gilbert (Rhys Ifans), who has spotted Izzy emerging from Arnold’s suite, and uses the knowledge to make mischief, as well as to enhance his own chances with Delta, for whom he has held a torch since they appeared on stage in London.

That on its own might be enough plot, but the screenplay — by Bogdanovich and ex-wife Louise Stratten — shoehorns in a lot more, involving a stroppy psychotherapist played by Jennifer Aniston, a judge obsessed with Izzy having used her services as an ‘escort’, and the ageing private-eye he hires to follow her. This turns out to be the father of the playwright, Josh (Will Forte), who is himself irresistibly attracted to Izzy.

So the farce unfolds, with some amusing sequences, enjoyable nods to other films, quite a few longueurs, and some out-and-out irritations, of which Aniston’s unsympathetic therapist is one.

Bogdanovich’s stature is such that he has secured notable cameos, including Cybill Shepherd as Izzy’s former beauty queen mother (Miss Coney Island 1974), a turn from Joanna Lumley (effectively as Patsy in AbFab), and a walk-on by Quentin Tarantino, who treats us to his encyclopaedic knowledge of movies.

A sometimes limp sex romp

It is possible with only moderately well-endowed knowledge of cinematic history to find in The Overnight a direct lineage to Sixties sex comedies, in particular 1969’s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.

And ‘well-endowed’, as it turns out, is the film’s key compound adjective.

Alex (Adam Scott) and Emily (Taylor Schilling), having just moved from Seattle to LA with their young son, are befriended in the park by another father, the irrepressibly ‘Californian’ Kurt (Jason Schwartzman), who invites them over for dinner with him and his French wife Charlotte (Judith Godreche).

The Overnight (starring Adam Scott and Taylor Schilling, above), written and directed by the little-known Patrick Brice, is pretty formulaic

When dinner turns into a sleepover for the couples’ boys, it becomes clear the relationship between the adults will evolve in unorthodox ways.

But when Kurt and Charlotte go skinny-dipping, Alex is reluctant to join in, being acutely self-conscious of the size of his manhood, especially compared with Kurt’s.

The Overnight, written and directed by the little-known Patrick Brice, is pretty formulaic.

It’s sporadically very funny, and engagingly acted throughout, but never quite adds up to the sum of its parts, both private and otherwise.