New York, I Love You

New York, I Love You - Dirs. Various (2009)


Anthology films are always a mixed bag filled with hits and misses. New York, I Love You is the follow-up to Paris, je t’aime and the second in the “Cities of Love” franchise. Films set in Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro, and Jerusalem are coming.

Paris featured a series of short films set in the City of Lights and directed by a talented assortment of filmmakers such as Alfonso Cuaron (Children of Men), Olivier Assayas (Irma Vep), Gus Van Sant, Wes Craven, and the Coen Brothers. Its successor is comprised of several shorts about romance in the Big Apple. Though the directors aren’t of the same pedigree as Paris, New York has assembled an A-list ensemble of actors. Unlike Paris, New York attempts to connect each story with interstitials of the various characters bumping into each other.

The film begins with a segment by actor/director Jiang Wen (Devils on the Doorstep) with Hayden Christensen as a pickpocket who runs into Rachel Bilson and a more experienced thief in Andy Garcia. Mira Nair directs the next short starring Natalie Portman as a Hasidic Jew negotiating a sale of jewelry with a Hindu man. They bond over their respective relationships and religions. Portman also makes her directorial debut with a later vignette involving a male nanny (Carlos Acosta) and his young charge.

Scarlett Johansson also made her directorial debut with a black & white segment starring Kevin Bacon. Titled “These Vagabond Shoes,” it was cut from the theatrical release, but is available on the DVD.

It says a lot about New York, I Love You when the strongest episode is the one directed by freakin’ Brett Ratner. His segment features Anton Yelchin taking a blind date to the prom. The date (Olivia Thirlby) arrives at the door in a wheelchair. It’s a cute short that doesn’t end quite as you’d expect. Joshua Marston (Maria Full of Grace) helms the second best segment with Eli Wallach and Cloris Leachman as an elderly couple bickering along the streets of NY.

The movie makes its audience feel like a passive viewer floating through the lives of the city’s inhabitants. Unfortunately, these lives are just plain dull. Everything is so innocuous. None of the directors have anything interesting to say about love, relationships, or the city. Except for a scene in Central Park, there’s nothing distinctly New York about the film. It could have been called Toronto, I Love You without much difference.

All the shorts look exactly the same with the sequence by Shekhar Kepur who took over from the late Anthony Minghella. Kepur gives his piece an ethereal quality grounded by the wonderful presence of Julie Christie as a blind opera singer. However, everything is so confoundingly pretentious (or pretentiously confounding, if you prefer) coupled with Shia LaBeouf laughingly playing a crippled bellhop with some indiscernible accent. Mutt Williams as Igor.

New York, I Love You may be a slick and polished affair, but it has all the substance of a bad student film festival.

Rating: *

City Island

City Island - Dir. Raymond De Felitta (2010)


City Island takes its name from a small seaside community that is an offshoot of the Bronx. Overlooking Long Island Sound, City Island is the home to many fishermen and seafood restaurants. Those who live on City Island and were physically born on said island are known as “clam diggers,” while transplants are known as “mussel suckers.”

The film, City Island centers on one such clam digger in Vince Rizzo (Andy Garcia), who still occupies the same house built by his grandfather. Vince is the patriarch to a boisterous Italian-American family, the kind that snaps at each other during their pasta dinner. Though he works as a corrections officer, he grew up admiring Marlon Brando and has always held aspirations of becoming an actor. He hides in the bathroom so nobody knows he smokes and reads, An Actor Prepares. It is only recently that he has enrolled in acting classes held by an embittered instructor (Alan Arkin). Vince befriends a fellow student in Molly Charlesworth (Emily Mortimer) who convinces him to go to his first ever audition.

However, Vince hasn’t told anyone about all this. Proud and prideful, Vince feels just a little ashamed of indulging in something so antithetical of his blue-collar background. He makes up a flimsy excuse about going to a weekly poker game. His wife, Joyce (Julianna Margulies), sees through his ruse, but mistakenly believes he is having an affair. Clandestine acting courses are the least of Vince’s secrets.

On duty, Vince meets a new prisoner named Tony (Steven Strait), who turns out to actually be his illegitimate son from a previous relationship, a fact that the elder Rizzo keeps to himself. Vince takes responsibility for the troubled young man and gets him released into his care. Joyce takes issue with Vince bringing a convict into their home. Combined with her suspicions of adultery, she begins growing closer to the scruffy hunk.

Mr. and Mrs. Rizzo aren’t the only ones keeping secrets from the family. Their daughter, Vivian (played by Garcia’s real-life daughter Dominik Garcia-Lorido), had her scholarship revoked and is now working as a stripper to pay tuition. Son, Vince Jr. (Ezra Miller), has a strange fetish for watching overweight women cook and eat.

City Island is a comedy of errors and something of a restrained farce. Misunderstandings pile on top of misunderstandings until everything comes to a head in the climax. Secrets are spilled and heartfelt confessions are made as the characters embrace. There’s a definite sitcom feel to the plot. It’s doubtful that I need to issue a spoiler warning when I say lessons are learned and all the subplots are tied up with a neat, little bow. The story relies mainly on contrivances and simple coincidence to advance the narrative.

The film is lifted from its conventional trappings by the bucolic setting of City Island and the strong performances of its cast. Andy Garcia gets a rare chance to stretch his comedic muscles as the working class Vince. He gets a chance to lampoon the tough guy roles he’s known for. Julianna Marguiles (who has recently made a full-time return to acting on CBS’s The Good Wife) plays the no-nonsense matriarch and has some great scenes with Garcia. Alan Arkin brings the same curmudgeon charm from Little Miss Sunshine for his brief scenes here. Emily Mortimer adds a sweet-natured layer to her character. Her interactions with Vince convey a genuine friendship with a very subtle level of attraction that remains unrequited.

Only Vince Jr. remains a question mark though it is through no fault of Ezra Miller. As the awkward teenage son, he’s far too broadly drawn to truly be interesting.

City Island was directed by Raymond De Felitta and based off a script he originally wrote back in 2001. The film won the Audience Award at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2009. It’s easy to see why. City Island is a light and breezy comedy about the craziness that comes with family.

Rating: **

Smokin' Aces

Smokin' Aces - Dir. Joe Carnahan (2007)


Is it possible for a movie to have a ton of stuff happening, but have nothing happen at all? Sure, that movie is called Smokin’ Aces, a tangled web of uninteresting plotlines and anarchic filmmaking. The film is like It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World filtered through the eyes of Quentin Tarantino, then filtered again through the lens of Guy Ritchie. Not surprisingly, Joe Carnahan first emerged among the pack of indie filmmakers of the post-Tarantino era. His debut film Blood, Guts, Bullets, and Octane followed in the footsteps of Ritchie’s action/comedy Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. Carnahan gained some instant credibility with the gritty crime drama, Narc, which won over Tom Cruise as a fan. Cruise would help Narc gain a wider release and hired Carnahan to direct Mission: Impossible III. The two had creative differences and Carnahan was later replaced by J.J. Abrams. Looking at Smokin’ Aces, it’s easy to see why Ethan Hunt gave Carnahan the boot.

The focal point of the story (such as it is) is a Vegas magician named Buddy “Aces” Israel (Jeremy Piven). Israel’s shows garner a strong following with the local mobsters and pretty soon he’s playing cops and robbers with the big boys. Things don’t work out and Israel is arrested, but promptly skips bail to hide out in a penthouse in Lake Tahoe. Seeing him as a liability, mob boss Primo Sparazza puts a million dollar bounty on the head of Israel. Soon, contract killers and assassins come out of the woodwork to take on the job. Accepting the job are Georgia Sykes (R&B singer Alicia Keys) and her lover Sharice Watters (Taraji P. Henson), master of disguise Lazlo Soot (Tommy Flanagan), the sadistic Pasqual Acosta (Nestor Carbonell), and the psychotic Tremor Brothers, Darwin (Chris Pine, the new Capt. Kirk), Jeeves (Kevin Durand), and Lester (Maury Sterling).

The FBI wants to get their hands on Israel, seeing him as a star witness to topple organized crime. Deputy Director Stanley Locke (Andy Garcia) puts agents Richard Messner (Ryan Reynolds) and his mentor Donald Carruthers (Ray Liotta) on the case. Not to be counted out are a trio of bail bondsmen Jack Dupree (Ben Affleck), Pete Deeks (Peter Berg), and Hollis Elmore (Martin Henderson) who also want to capture Israel. There are still a few other characters that I left out, but I can barely remember half of them. Thank goodness for my old friend Wikipedia.

The first half hour of the film is practically dedicated to exposition. We are methodically introduced to each character and whatever history they have. None of this backstory is particularly interesting or, at least, isn’t told to us in any sort of interesting way. We’re told the Tremor Brothers are neo-Nazi rednecks, but nothing they do or say is any indication that they are neo-Nazis or rednecks. They just dress oddly and carry around big guns and chainsaws. Carnahan seems to be tossing a bunch of goofy caricatures onto the screen to cover up his lack of writing skills. There’s a wacky kid with ADD who practices martial arts and speaks in gangster slang that shows up, if for no other reason than he’s a wacky kid with ADD who practices martial arts and speaks in gangster slang. The same goes for another scene where Bateman’s character wears women’s underwear. I don’t know who he’s supposed to be or what he’s adding to the story, but he’s wearing a bra and panties, so Ha ha ha.

Muddying up the proceedings even further is a subplot involving the cold case murder of an undercover FBI agent. First, the heavy-handed resolution of this B-story can be seen coming from a mile away. Secondly, it feels like something from a different film. In all honesty, I might have enjoyed the film if Carnahan went straight for the jugular and made this an orgy of carnage, bullets, and bloodshed. I could have been happy to check my brain at the door for a battle royal between hitmen and scumbags. Instead, we get this pseudo-FBI thriller/mystery element thrown in to add even more exposition than needed.

I’m shocked that such a hackneyed script was able to acquire such an amazing cast including an unrecognizable Matthew Fox. I’m even more taken aback that Carnahan does absolutely nothing interesting with any of them. Having far too many characters leaves little room for the them to breathe and develop. Not that Carnahan is very interested in that sort of thing, prefering anarchic mayhem and bad jokes.

I’m a big fan of Piven and not just as Ari Gold. I always thought he stood out in the supporting roles he’s played in films like Grosse Pointe Blank and Old School. As Buddy Israel, Piven isn’t so much a humorous character as a man who degenerates both physically and emotionally. However, I couldn’t help but think he could have done more. Reynolds who can display a great, cheeky humor doesn’t get the chance to do any of that here. Andy Garcia is another of fantastic actor wasted in a nothing part as he just sleepwalks through his role. About the one who’s a little more interesting, as an actor and character, is the debuting Alicia Keys as hitwoman Georgia Sykes. She and Tarija Henson add a tough feminine touch to the otherwise testosterone heavy production. It’s too bad they didn’t get meatier scenes. It also doesn’t hurt that Keys looks great in fishnet stockings and thigh-high leather boots.

Smokin’ Aces is about a decade too late to join up with the other Reservoir Dogs, Lock, Stock knockoffs. The film isn’t nearly as hip and cool as it makes out to be.

Rating: * 1/2