Wild Tales (***1/2)

With so few venues for shorts, there should be more films like this. The aptly titled Wild Tales is a anthology film that brings together half a dozen stories, otherwise unrelated, that all stem from the brain of Argentinian director Damián Szifron. To be sure, some elements show up in multiple stories — revenge, characters turning smaller problems into larger ones, violent reactions, issues surrounding motor vehicles — but the only thing that truly ties them together is Szifron, whose penchant for creative plot turns and mordant humor makes this a tasty cinematic buffet.

Typical is the brief pre-credit story: A model meets a music professor on a plane, and it turns out they have a common acquaintance…but maybe that’s no coincidence. In a later episode, perhaps the most clever and visually arresting, a minor road rage incident also turns into something more. In each case, Szifron dispenses with lengthy set-ups and puts the viewer right into the story.

The plot twists and humor in each of them takes nothing away from the emotions of the main characters. Even if you wouldn’t go as far as they do to resolve their problems, you’ll identify a little bit with them, or at any rate laugh at them. One actor, Ricardo Darín, has also starred in Nine Queens and The Secret in Their Eyes, two other excellent Argentinian films.

IMDb link

viewed 4/29/15 at Ritz Bourse and posted 4/29/15

New York, I Love You (**1/4)

This is something you don’t see so much but seems to be becoming a little more common. It’s an omnibus film, a compilation of short films built around a theme. Lately there have been a few where the theme is a city, a recent example being Tokyo!, a three-films-in one release. Actually, New York Stories did the same sort of thing back in 1989. But this is closer in conception to Paris Je t'aime; both feature parts crafted by a number of writers and directors, loosely strung together as a feature.

So you get eleven different credited directors, some of whom wrote the segments also. The film is dedicated to the late Anthony Minghella, who wrote a segment featuring Julie Christie and Shia LaBoeuf in which the actress plays a singer. Like many of the segments, there is a twist ending, though for the most part they feel kind of forced. Possibly worst is the opening segment, in which two randomly placed-together strangers turn out to both be brilliant pickpockets, hamming it up to impress a woman. Like the city at its worst, it seems smug and false.

Besides the singer, there are a painter, a photographer, a composer, an actress, and a writer. No one is a banker or a slum dweller or a celebrity (well, maybe the singer is), but a lot of real-life celebrities play the characters. Orlando Bloom is the composer, Ethan Hawke the writer. James Caan plays the father of a wheelchair-bound girl who pays a kid to be her date. Either funny or crude, it will probably divide viewers the most. Natalie Portman appears in a Mira Nair-directed segment in which she plays a Hasidic Jew who’s about to be married, and also directs one about a father getting mistaken for his lighter-skinned daughter’s male nanny.

It’s a cliché, but the film adds up to less than the sum of its parts, with a so-what framing device sort of bringing them together. Except for the last segment, with Eli Wallach and Cloris Leachman as a long-married couple walking in Brighton Beach, the movie doesn’t so much evoke the city as seem to serve as a clearinghouse for some experiments and small ideas by local talent. You can, in fact, make even a ten-minute segment compelling, but nothing here is anything more than mildly diverting.

IMDB link

viewed 10/13/09 at Ritz 5 [PFS screening] and reviewed 10/27/09