A vision of a boring New York inhabited only by artists and sex fiends. How insulting.
“New York, I Love You,” is no doubt a great idea for a movie. It originated from a French movie called “Paris, je-taime,” which obviously is French for ‘Paris, I love you.’ It was a series of short films with different writers and directors all with one thing in common: every story took place in Paris. This movie transfers that idea to New York, that most able of cities. There is perhaps nothing worse in cinema than a great idea that gets treated like shit. Shit ideas treated like shit are, no doubt, also shit but at least you don’t get that tremendous feeling of being ripped off. You knew it was shit, it was shit, you got what you should have thought you would get when you paid the ticket. What’s especially terrible about this movie is that it squanders the chance to transform the great idea into a great movie. It’s a waste, and since the title ‘New York, I Love You,” is now taken and used up and tossed aside who knows when someone else will try the idea again.
The idea to have several short films is supposedly to promote cinematic scope within a movie. For a movie about New York this is somewhat imperative since it is so diverse, multicultural, and enormous. You would never know that by watching this movie. I don’t recall more than a couple of the short films being upbeat at all. Never has New York moved so slow in a movie. The slowest story involves a retired opera singer that checks into an abandoned motel that has a crippled Shia Lebouf as a doorman/butler/whatever. They chitchat about the room, and flowers, and what not in strained accents for about ten minutes. Then Shia inexplicably commits suicide and an old dude walks in and reveals that the entire thing was dream…or not, I couldn’t really tell what was happening. There was a lot of whispering and mumbling. Anyway this story really sucked. What’s ironic is that the late Anthony Mingella, the Oscar winner that this film was also dedicated too, wrote it. Minghella, I have looked up, is not a native New Yorker. He’s not even American. He’s a Brit. And the story he wrote has absolutely nothing to do with New York (no an aside about unseen NYC noise outside the window does not count if no scene in the story takes place outside.) It makes absolutely no sense to dedicate a movie about NYC to a person who is not a New Yorker and wrote the most anti-New York story in the movie. All I can think is that he must have supplied a huge amount of the budget (not that anything in this movie suggests any budget at all.)
There are 8 million people in New York City. The professions of these people differ to an incredible degree. Where else do you have millionaires next to beggars, stock brokers next to park rangers, fashion designers next to construction crews, etc. etc. You would never know that watching this movie. The only people in this NYC, as far as this film is concerned, are struggling artists of some kind. In every single plot save one at least one character is a writer, a painter, a dancer, a composer, a videographer, an actress or something like that. I really cannot stress this enough: struggling artists are not interesting people. There has never been a more overdone idea in the history of cinema than a story about artist’s block. A story about artist’s block inevitably develops out of the narcissism of a writer with no real ideas. They can’t think of interesting to say so they write a story about how they have nothing interesting to say (banal justification of existence included). Blah blah blah, no that’s not original. Use some elbow grease, lazy. The huge shame about these kinds of stories is that the writers couldn’t look outside their little worlds to see that there are interesting people that are outside walking the streets. These interesting people do interesting things with their lives that don’t have anything to do with the entertainment business. Give me a story about politicians, or lawyers, or doctors, or scientists. Yeah I know, a writer would probably have to do some research to make a good movie about those people because what they do is far more complex and important than entertaining. In the end it would require actual work, an idea that most struggling artists abhor. Just take a look at what’s in the MOMA.
If the characters aren’t struggling artists then they are deviants of some kind. The first story is about a pickpocket and a professor who is cheating on his wife with a student. Another is about a guy’s (Ethan Hawke) creative attempt to seduce a woman who turns out to be a prostitute (This story is actually pretty good, doesn’t save the movie though.) Then there are about three other stories where random sex with strangers occurs. Now I know I shouldn’t knock something till I’ve tried it, but I feel there should have been at least one story that tried to be romantic. None of these relationship shorts even matched the average ‘sex and the city’ episode, which I would suggest you watch instead of this movie any day. And what was with everybody in this picture smoking. New York City is not a smoking friendly city. There are probably more laws banning it here than anywhere else. And yet in this movie it is treated as the quintessential New York way to meet people. Well, at least people you can have random sex with. Maybe my non-smoking habit is why I’ve never had that chance.
New York City has so much great stuff in it: Parades every other week, pedestrians taking back the streets from cars, the wind tunnels in Winter, the panoramic Hudson in Spring and Summer, landmarks that sneak up on you, locations you recognize immediately from your favorite movies, a depth of history, a landscape of cityscapes shaped by great people, sports, charity organizations, international intrigue, 2am pizza, theater, culture, nightlife, business, incredible penthouses, and the most polite homeless people in the world. None of that is shown in this movie. I usually never give 1-star review to any movie I’ve seen because I save such notorious designations for movies that are more than just inferior. It is for movies that I know I could have made better myself. In this case, once I get enough money to buy a camera, microphones, and film editing equipment, I will.
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