New York, I Love You is a grab bag that never really grabs us.
A compendium of vignettes, 2007’s Paris Je T’Aime was a cinematic love letter to Paris. Oh, it would have benefited from comprising fewer segments of longer duration, but it was nonetheless a winningly entertaining anthology about the City of Light and Love.
New York, I Love You, meant to be a love letter to the Big Apple, is the second in a proposed series of celebrations of major cities (”Cities of Love”) conceived by producer Emmanual Benbihy that’s modeled on its immediate predecessor.
But what rendered Paris Je T’Aime good instead of terrific renders New York, I Love You flat instead of sparkly.
While the former was charming, the latter is mostly annoying, as it tries to be a combination of Paris Je T’aime and Love Actually, with each of the eleven mini-movies a love story of one sort or another.
But this hit-or-miss affair has at least as many misses as hits.
It’s so disjointed, it’s the kind of anthology that has you longing for a developed linear narrative not only early on but throughout. Like the title metropolis, it sometimes seems one crowded, chaotic traffic snarl.
Some of the stories and characters overlap — it seems halfheartedly designed as an interconnected narrative held together by a storyline involving a videographer — but none of the individual entries in the story ensemble has much of a spark, even those with O. Henry-like reversals.
And there’s precious little cumulative impact.
The big, familiar cast — including Shia LeBeouf, Natalie Portman, Ethan Hawke, Robin Wright Penn, Chris Cooper, John Hurt, James Caan, Julie Christie, Andy Garcia, Christina Ricci, Bradley Cooper, Orlando Bloom, Rachel Bilson, Hayden Christensen, Eli Wallach, and Cloris Leachman — keeps the movie watchable. But that’s about all that can be said.
The group of eleven directors — including Allen Hughes, Mira Nair, Shekhar Kapur, Brett Ratner, and Natalie Portman — were each given two days to shoot and one week to edit, and had to focus on a particular neighborhood and edit the finished product to come in at under eight minutes of running time.
Given all that — and the film’s title — perhaps the strangest and most disappointing element to report is that the film lacks a strong sense of place. You eventually realize that most of what transpires could be happening almost anywhere.
This leads one to wonder, if this had been the first installment rather than the second, whether the series now underway (features devoted to Shanghai, Rio, and Jerusalem to come) would have been greenlighted. We certainly exit with a much sketchier sense of New York than what the delightful first entry sent us away with about Paris.
This fairly forgettable omnibus is a collage about connection that doesn’t really connect.
New York, I Love You, I barely even like you.
Bill Wine – Celebrity News Service Movie Critic/ AHN
Related posts:
- Movie Review: Love Happens
- Movie Review: Fame ( ** )
- Movie Review: 9 ( ** )
