Review: New York, I Love You

New York, I Love Your
Dir. Fatih Akin, Yvan Attal, Allen Hughes, Shunji Iwai, Wen Jiang, Joshua Marsden, Mira Nair, Brett Ratner, Randall Balsmeyer, Shekhar Kapur & Natalie Portman
Year: 2010
Aus Rating: MA15+
Running Time: 103mins

One city, ten directors and a cast of familiar faces await audiences of New York, I Love You. This follow-up to Paris je t’aime, a surprise box office hit that saw famous directors craft odes to the city of love, will leave many disappointed. This so-called love letter to the Big Apple is a fizzer that doesn’t even come close to approaching the joie de vivre of its Parisian ancestor.

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I am a New York "tragic", it's true. I have been twice - plan to go again in the next few years, hopefully/maybe - and I love movies to be set in New York. A movie such as The Exploding Girl can be so much better than it has any right to be simply by being set in NYC and allowing me to drown myself in the images and sounds. Barely any of the vignettes in New York, I Love You give that feeling of being surrounded by life like actually being in New York does. My favourite was the Maggie Q/Ethan Hawke sequence, which felt like a "New York Moment" more than, say, Natalie Portman's awful Jewish wedding piece.

One thing I mention in the review is the lack of any queer substance whatsoever. Watching the movie and I felt as if they were going out of their way to feature as many cultures and yet somehow gay people got left out. And in a film about the gay capital of the world (to be token and cliched). I also find it hilarious that the producers cut Scarlett Johansson's piece because it "didn’t jive with the rest of the shorts." I definitely think this film could have used more pieces that played outside of the box like it sounds ScarJo's did. Ah well. C-