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When you recreate scenes from classic movies in a new film, or use actual clips of those landmark pictures in your project, there's a fine line between taste and excess. Use too many clips, and your film will look like the HBO series Dream On. Borrow too many familiar incidents (unless it's a spoof, like Scary Movie), and people will accuse you of being unoriginal (or, in certain cases, a plagiarist).
If you use the clips and the situations, you get When Brendan Met Trudy, a light romantic comedy from Ireland that spits out film references quicker than Russell Crowe beds famous actresses. From its title (swap "Brendan" with "Harry" and "Trudy" with "Sally") and very first shot of a man laying face down in the gutter (a la Sunset Boulevard), the film plays like an hour-and-a-half homage to the filmmaker's favorite pictures. Like Dream On, it only works a little more than half of the time.
The guy in the gutter is Brendan (Peter McDonald), a film-obsessed Dublin schoolteacher who sings in his church choir and is very unlucky with the ladies. One day, after choir practice, he stops into a pub and meets a peppy, extroverted young lass named Trudy (Flora Montgomery). They begin to date and, after a series of disastrous encounters, they eventually fall for each other and make sweet, sweet love.
Somehow, in between clips of films like The Producers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, swipes at Jean-Claude Van Damme and Emma Thompson, and restructuring of classic scenes originally done by everyone from Jean-Luc Godard to John Woo, Trudy becomes an Irish version of So I Married An Axe Murderer. It turns out that men in Dublin are under siege from a black-clad vixen responsible for a string of brutal castrations. Since Trudy mysteriously sneaks out each night (dressed in black - she's a cat burglar), Brendan thinks he's dating the diabolical dick dicer. Is he right, or is it just a crazy Three's Companyesque coincidence?
Even though most of Trudy is based on a handful of old films, and it offers the basic "boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back" story, it remains surprisingly fresh thanks to the great chemistry between the two extremely likeable leads. The soundtrack includes a great, eclectic bunch of songs (one from Sebadoh, no less), and I can't convey how wonderful it is to see a film set in Dublin where people are clean, have nice jobs and live in nice homes.
Trudy was directed by Kieron J. Walsh and written by Roddy Doyle, who is probably best known as the author of the novel that became "The Barrytown Trilogy" (The Commitments, The Snapper, and The Van). For its closing credits, Trudy offers a hysterical look at what happens to each of its characters. Again, the idea isn't something original, but it is executed in a way that doesn't seem too stale.
1:35 - Not Rated but contains nudity, strong sexual content and adult language
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