![]() ![]() The tired attitudes and tropes that both movies depend on are-when considered from the right angle-revealed to be marks of misdeeds, and the onus is on the viewer to find that angle. There’s no essential difference between the two movies in terms of the core narrative: they’re both horror stories masquerading as screwball comedies. Meanwhile, throughout New York, Arnold keeps running into other women-former sex workers whose dreams he’d similarly financed. But a further skein of coincidences provokes a whirlwind of misunderstandings, arising from connections among Izzy’s therapist, Jane (Jennifer Aniston) the playwright, Josh (Will Forte), who falls in love with Izzy a judge (Austin Pendleton), one of Izzy’s clients, who’s obsessed with her feet and hires a detective (George Morfogen) to follow her and Arnold’s wife, Delta ( Kathryn Hahn), who’s co-starring in the play, as is an actor named Seth (Rhys Ifans), an internationally famous heartthrob. They conceal their acquaintance she nails the audition and gets the part-that of a call girl. The next day, she auditions for a lead role in a play-which, by pure coincidence, is the one he’s directing. After having sex with her, he offers her thirty thousand dollars (cash in a suitcase) to abandon sex work and pursue her stated dream of becoming an actress. Right after checking into his hotel, he calls an escort service and-under a pseudonym-hires a sex worker named Izzy Patterson (Imogen Poots). A theatre and movie director named Arnold Albertson (Owen Wilson) comes to New York to direct a play. The story of both movies is the same-and it reflects outdated attitudes, and also clichéd comedic conventions. “Squirrels to the Nuts,” which will be screened at MOMA through April 5th, is in some ways a vast improvement on “She’s Funny That Way.” In other respects, though, it’s a display of the limits of the cinematic styles of which Bogdanovich was a latter-day master. In 2020, a videotape of Bogdanovich’s own cut of the film, under its first title, turned up on eBay, was purchased by the film scholar James Kenney, a longtime devotee of Bogdanovich’s films, and was prepared for release by Bogdanovich himself. The film was released, in 2014, as “She’s Funny That Way,” but there was no way of knowing the extent of the alterations to the film-until now. The late Peter Bogdanovich’s last dramatic feature was a screwball comedy with the original title “Squirrels to the Nuts.” Its producers mangled it, and, in the hope of making the best of a bad situation, Bogdanovich himself participated in its mangling.
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