CINEMA: Funny Girl

How does a Dorothy Parker biopic manage to be witless?

Dorothy Parker quipped her way into minor celebrity, wrote her way into modest immortality and drank herself into near oblivion. All talk and no action, she is not an ideal subject for a movie. But if you must film this life, you'd better do something more than flatly recount the failed promise and failed romances that made it miserable.

At times Alan Rudolph, the director (and co-writer) of Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, seems to have a larger purpose, which is to challenge the supposed glamour of the bright, bibulous young writers who drew themselves up to the round table...

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