Rating of
2.5/4
A Quirky Film About NYC?? No Way
Freddie - wrote on 08/16/10
This really is a New York movie. It's random, artsy, it jumps from one thing to the next, it's beautiful, it's dirty, and it leaves you wanting more---but not necessarily in a good way. One of the big things missing from this movie was completeness. There were several different story lines, and while incompleteness was, in a sense, completion for certain subplots the others were just left open. This was not one of those stories about several different strangers whose lives all somehow connect, which was refreshing. The only connection that all of them had was New York City. While there were some characters who were sort of connected, for the most part, this is not really what this movie was trying to do. It was really a sneak peak into the love lives of different people in NYC.
However, since there was no "connect the dots" there were a lot of loose ends. This was clearly intentional, but at certain points it tended to be a little bit annoying. New York, I Love You seemed to be going for that "real life" element. In real life, we don't always know how the story ends for all of the people that we meet. However, in movies, we want to know, we should know (there are obviously exceptions), and it should have been there. It's only cool to leave it to the audience's imagination when ambiguity or alternate realities are the underlying theme of the film.
I suppose what makes the film clever is that each love story was presented by a different filmmaker which is why each story is told so differently, but I can't really decide whether or not this was a great idea. It was a clever and risky idea, but I don't know if it was a great idea.
As for the cast, it was a great cast. This movie was all about the acting which is something I personally love. No actor really got to shine, which is not a good or a bad thing. However, there were certain actors that were surprisingly strong (Shia LeBouf for example) and it would have been nice to see how far they would have gone with character.
All in all, not bad, but not amazing.
