DVD--New York, I Love You

or: This movie, I should have loved you.

One word to sum it up: Whoa.

Film anthologies. A totally new area to me. I mean, I wasn't sure how well New York, I Love You would work, mainly because it seems like another version of Valentine's Day. And really, do we need another multi plot story about love? I guess all could be forgiven because this a sequel to the critically acclaimed Paris, je t'aime. Or could it?

Pretty self explanatory really: this is a series of short films which are intertwined together, forming a portrait of love in New York city. Well, they all have some story which is based on two people who are experiencing or thinking that they are experiencing a situation which has something to do with love.

Anthologies obviously aren't the best type of film. Sure, you get more for your money, but the stories, as well demonstrated in this movie, lack consistency. There isn't much flow in this movie, which lets it down a whole heap. I know the whole point of it is to be an anthology with all these different short films smashed together, but you can kinda tell that they were chopped up and just dumped in an unorganized pile like one you might find on a teacher's desk. Which is a shame, because some of the stories really worked. Others, well, they just didn't.

One story I enjoyed more than all the others was the story which Shia LaBeouf and Julie Christie were in. I don't know if that was because I have this weakness for stories with physically or mentally deformed people, but I just found it really beautiful. And LaBeouf really made the most of his short time on screen, which is more than can be said about some other actors in this (Orlando Bloom, for one example). Another one I enjoyed was the Olivia Thirlby story, which looked like it was going to be another heart warming story, but then it turned out to be quite funny. These stories practically saved the movie from being the muddled mess that it was, and served as the shining lights in an otherwise strange and dull movie. The short films really should have offered more, but like most love stories, they were all cliched and stereotypical. I still really wanna go to New York, though.


THE VERDICT: A lack of consistency lets this movie down, big time. But it has it's moments, and those moments really shine.

5/10