New York, I Love You (2009)
By: Jiang Wen, Mira Nair, Shunji Iwai, Yvan Attal, Brett Ratner, Allen Hughes, Shekhar Kapur, Natalie Portman, Fatih Akin, Joshua Marston, Randy Balsmeyer (directors)
Starring: Bradley Cooper, Hayden Christensen, Andy Garcia, Rachel Bilson, Natalie Portman, Irrfan Khan, Orlando Bloom, Christina Ricci, Maggie Q, Ethan Hawke, Anton Yelchin, James Caan, Olivia Thirlby, Drea de Matteo, Julie Christie, John Hurt, Shia LaBeouf, Ugur Yücel, Carlos Acosta, Shu Qi, Chris Cooper, Robin Wright Penn, Eli Wallach, Cloris Leachman, Blake Lively, Jacinda Barrett, Eva Amurri
An anthology film joining several love stories set in one of the most loved cities of the world, New York.
You know the old adage about too many cooks spoiling the broth? Well, there’s a reason it’s an adage: it’s good advice. Advice that apparently none of the vast collection of people involved in New York, I Love You thought it worth taking. There are eleven—Count them, ELEVEN—separate directors on this portmanteau, and that’s not counting the two whose segments were cut. While the concept of pinning together that many short films into a cohesive whole is intriguing in theory, in reality what you get is a feature-length film with inconsistent quality and zero actual impact.
Some of the segments in New York, I Love You are genuinely charming and worth watching in their own right, and it’s unfortunate that they’ve been so bogged down in the quagmire of this movie. Despite attempts at threading the various characters’ lives together, there is little sense of connectedness and no payoff at the end; even having enjoyed many of the segments, by about an hour into the thing I was ready to be done with it. There is nothing built and therefore nothing achieved, and when I was finished with my viewing, it was difficult to tell whether I ought to like it or not.
New York, I Love You is little more than the sum of its parts. It runs too long for a series of shorts, and lacks the sophistication of 21 Grams, Pulp Fiction, or perhaps more appropriately, Love Actually. Some of the acting in it is quite good, so if you have a particular fondness for one of the featured actors you might consider it worth watching. Just don’t expect the overall experience to be memorable.
Wait, so they try to connect all the shorts? But why?
What I loved most about Paris, Je T’aime was that I spent three or four of the segments looking for something connecting them, realized there wasn’t (except various interpretations of love, obviously) and enjoyed everything on its own.
I wish I knew why, maybe then it wouldn’t be so disappointing. XD
But yeah, most of the segments have overlap (For instance, the dad of the girl Anton takes to prom is also the pharmacist in another segment; Bradley Cooper is perpetually accidentally getting into cabs with other characters already in them; etc), which gave me the impression that they were trying to make the point that we’re all connected. And then utterly failed in making that point.