Film review: NEW YORK, I LOVE YOU

PARIS, JE T'AIME, released in 2006, was a lovely umbrella movie, a varied, colorful love song to the French capital, with segments directed by such diverse helmers as Gurinder Chadha, Wes Craven, the Coen brothers, Alfonso Cuaron, Tom Tykwer, Gus van Sant, Alexander Payne, and Walter Salles; and featuring a varied international cast ranging from Elijah Wood and Natalie Portman to Miranda Richardson, Bob Hoskins, Willem Dafoe, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Steve Buscemi and Gena Rowlands. It had a distinctive cosmopolitan feel, a distinctive indie feel, and a huge variety of genres and tones, which meant uneven quality but never, ever, boredom and complacency.

NEW YORK, I LOVE YOU is a "sequel" that loses all of those qualities. The directors are fewer, and are either obvious, if second-tier or unexperienced, New York choices (Natalie Portman, Mira Nair, Joshua Marston, Brett Ratner) or a mixed bag of independent names (Yvan Attal, Fatih Akin, Shekhar Kapur); and the cast is more deliberately star-studded, boasting hot-at-the-moment names such as Shia LaBoeuf, Natalie Portman, Bradley Cooper, Orlando Bloom, Hayden Christensen, Anton Yelchin, Blake Lively and Rachel Bilson.

One painful thing to say about a film about New York is that it is, well, too white. It's a disgrace that the filmmakers are given the greatest, most cosmopolitan city in the world to film love in, and most of them just come up with middle-class white people smoking outside bars. The short pieces are also too narrowly defined, and where PARIS was full of inventive, random moments (Alexander Payne's ode to a lonely American tourist, Vincenzo Natali's tale of vampires, and so on), all the shorts in NEW YORK are about moment in time chance encounters, or pretend chance encounters, and as a result the film is nothing more than a succession of talky, repetitive vignettes with clumsy twists pasted on, the film school equivalent of a portmanteau movie, but with big name stars in it.

For some reason the producers also thought that making all the stories superficially intersect, as if this was the chill-out, red wine, Richard Curtis version of CRASH, would be a good idea, and so we get half-smart transitions that make New York feel small, boring, and stale, and in most of them the characters are found talking about New York and how great it is, desperately trying to explain to the audience why the film is so cool when it fails so miserably to make its own case.

There are a couple fun moments - there's a funny short opener with Bradley Cooper and Justin Bartha arguing in a cab, and Yvan Attal's segment is hilarious, carried off beautifully by Ethan Hawke and Maggie Q and the one truly brilliant twist present here. Anton Yelchin is a screen-grabbingly likeable presence in Brett Ratner's otherwise rushed segment, and Eli Wallach and Cloris Leachmann do a good job of the obligatory "funny grumpy old people" bit. But that's about it, and halfway through you'll be itching to just pick up, leave the cinema, and carry on with your own, much more exciting, life.

**