There’s a lot of in-joke love (and in-crowd cameos) in Peter Bogdanovich’s throwback screwball romcom. Sadly the laughs are far fewer. Despite taking its “squirrels to the nuts” cue from Ernst Lubitsch, this plays more like an unmemorable late-period Woody Allen offcut, its parade of cute call-girls and lovable johns all ringing as untrue as Imogen Poots’s New York accent. She plays working-girl-turned-actress Isabella/Izzy, recounting her rags-to-riches story (through Breakfast at Tiffany’s-tinted glasses) to Illeana Douglas’s supposedly cynical reporter.
The story, which pivots around the production of a play farcically imitating life, is all Noises Off nuisance, full of hookers hiding in bathrooms while wives and lovers storm in and out of bedrooms and restaurants. Rhys Ifans enjoys himself immensely as lothario thesp Seth Gilbert while Owen Wilson meanders on autopilot from one (un)lovable mishap to the next. Only Jennifer Aniston really sinks her teeth into it as an unsympathetic shrink who has as little time for her irritating patients and friends (they’re not funny that way after all) as I did.
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